The Threads of Magic Read online

  Sibelius rubbed his eyes. He really was very tired.

  “Coming with me will be less risky than remaining here and waiting for the Cardinal to draw your entrails. Which he almost certainly will, when you present him with nothing.”

  “You’re right,” said Sibelius sarcastically. “I might as well seek the protection of a nocturnal bird. Or I could save time and jump out of the window.”

  “I think you are being unnecessarily pessimistic,” said the owl. “Although, true, given that you are being guarded by assassins, this window is our only means of egress.”

  Sibelius shook his head. No doubt his mind was tricking him into ending it all. His mind was probably right. The Cardinal wanted results by lunchtime and it was almost dawn already. He didn’t have a hope. He was so tired he didn’t care any more what happened to him.

  He laughed mirthlessly. “All right then, owl. I’ll come with you.” He stepped towards the window.

  “Excellent. But don’t forget the will!”

  Sibelius grabbed the parchments from the table and stuffed them into his pocket. “Now what?”

  “Climb onto the sill. This might be a little tricky, so don’t fall off.”

  “I thought falling off was the point?” The owl didn’t respond so he shrugged and climbed clumsily onto the broad stone ledge. The owl hopped to the side to give him space. The night sky was cloudless, and the stars twinkled white and clear in the distance. There was a faint glimmer of dawn in the eastern sky. It occurred to Sibelius that these would be the last stars he ever saw. For a moment he felt a stab of sorrow.

  “I hope it doesn’t hurt too much,” he said.

  “You might feel a bit of a sting, but only for a short time,” said the owl. “Just be quiet for a while, while I get prepared.”

  Sibelius shut his eyes and nodded. He felt completely passive and resigned. Any moment now the hard stone ground beneath would come rushing up towards him and then there would be … what?

  He wondered confusedly whether he would get into heaven. He had always tried to do the right thing, even when he knew underneath that what people said was the right thing was actually the wrong thing. If he were God, would he let himself in?

  He thought he probably wouldn’t.

  He tried to remember a prayer, any prayer, but his mind had gone blank.

  “Ready?” said the owl. It didn’t wait for an answer.

  “Ow!” said Sibelius.

  The owl was correct. It stung. Quite a lot.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  RIGHT NOW, PIP HATED CLOVIS WITH EVERY FIBRE IN his being. That arrogant, spiteful little worm deserved nothing better than a good kick in the shins. Although, of course, being dead, he didn’t have any shins.

  Since the moment Pip had touched the Heart he had sensed Clovis’s presence, but now, when Pip most needed to speak to him, the Prince had gone silent. He couldn’t feel him anywhere.

  Oni was frowning, staring at the table and plucking her lip. “Maybe he’s just hiding, Pip,” she said. “Maybe he’s scared.”

  “He should be.”

  “Well, think about it. Maybe he didn’t mean to take El.”

  “He did mean it. He wanted to take you, too.”

  “But maybe it was like, you know, when you lose your temper and do something awful, but then afterwards you’re sorry.”

  “Why would he be sorry?”

  “I don’t know. But when he was killed, he was just a little boy. And, you know, he was lonely. I could feel it when I touched the Heart. He was a lonely, frightened little boy.”

  “Like I care.”

  Oni looked up. “Do you want to get El back?”

  Pip didn’t answer. Of course he did.

  “Well, then. Stop being angry, and think. I know it’s hard for you, Pip, because you’re not very clever, but we got to think.”

  Pip opened his mouth to object to the insult, but ended up saying nothing. He didn’t have the heart to fight with Oni.

  Where had Clovis gone?

  Inside his head, maybe, where he was before. But hiding. Pip closed his eyes.

  All right, Clovis, he said. I’m not angry any more.

  He waited, but nobody answered.

  We need to talk. Are you there? I promise I’m not angry.

  He waited again, watching the pendulum on Missus Orphint’s wall clock swing back and forth. One, two, three, four, five. No answer. This wasn’t going to work.

  You are angry, said Clovis. I can feel it.

  Pip took a breath, trying to suppress his mounting rage. Can you blame me? You hurt my sister. She never did you any harm. She never did anyone any harm. And look what you done. It’s not fair.

  She didn’t like me. Clovis sounded sulky. Why should I care?

  If you want to be friends with me, you should care. You hurt El, you hurt me. You hurt me really bad, Clovis.

  Silence. But this silence felt different. It had a tinge of surprise, as if Clovis had encountered a novel thought.

  Princes don’t have friends, he said, after a while. Princes can’t afford the weakness of sentimental bonds. He sounded as if he were quoting a lesson learned by rote.

  Who says? said Pip. Everybody needs a friend. Anyway, you’re not even a prince any more. You’re just dead. Sort of.

  That was a mistake. Pip felt a lash of hurt, and Clovis vanished.

  Hey, Clovis. Come back. Pip waited. I’m sorry, he said. I just want to talk.

  Nothing.

  He opened his eyes and jumped. Oni was closer than he had realized, staring straight into his face.

  “I can hear Clovis,” she said, her eyes wide. “I couldn’t before, but now I can hear him too.”

  “He’s gone again,” said Pip.

  “Yes, but he’s probably listening.”

  Pip hunched his shoulders. “This is weird,” he said. “I don’t like it.”

  “Let’s try again.”

  Oni shut her eyes. Pip noticed how her long eyelashes rested on her cheeks, how the candlelight threw warm shadows on her skin.

  This time Clovis spoke first. I don’t like being dead, he said. It’s cold here.

  Pip couldn’t think of what to say. For the first time since El had vanished, he felt a tiny stab of compassion.

  I miss the taste of food, said Clovis. I’m not hungry, but I miss it all the same. Sometimes I try to remember what plums taste like … and roast goose. Roast goose was one of my favourites.

  Oni’s voice, a whisper. “Are you all alone?”

  Yes.

  “That must make you sad,” she said.

  A silence. Yes.

  “Can you imagine how sad Pip is now that El is gone? Now he’s all alone, too.”

  A pause. He can talk to me, said Clovis. I’ll be his friend instead.

  “It doesn’t work like that,” said Oni. “You can’t just replace one person with another. Every friend is special, like no other person in the whole world. And you can have more than one friend.”

  I’ll order him. He’ll have to be my friend.

  Pip felt his anger rising again. This was hopeless. “You can’t order people to be your friend. That’s not what friends do.”

  Then how can you be sure that they’ll stay your friend?

  For a moment Pip felt a sense of disbelief: was he really trying to teach a dead prince about friendship?

  Yes. Yes, he was.

  “They just do,” he said. “If you’re proper friends.”

  “When you’re friends, you trust each other,” said Oni. “Everyone makes mistakes. You learn to forgive mistakes. But you never order friends around. Never. You never punish them. You learn to trust each other. You keep your word.”

  Another pause.

  “Friendship takes time,” she said. Oni’s voice was as soft and sweet as honey. “And sometimes it doesn’t work. But when it does work, it’s the best thing in the world. El is my friend. My best friend. And I miss her. I miss her really badly.”

 
This time there was a long silence. Pip held his breath.

  If I bring her back, will we be friends?

  Suddenly, heartbreakingly, there was an emotion in Clovis’s voice that Pip hadn’t heard before.

  Hope.

  “We can try,” said Oni.

  “Yes,” said Pip. “We can try.”

  Chapter Thirty-four

  SIBELIUS HAD GIVEN UP ON REALITY. WAS THIS REALLY a hallucination? Maybe, he thought dazedly, he was actually dead, and had entered some kind of afterlife that none of the books talked about.

  He was standing in a yellow-and-green striped tent. He had no recollection of how he had got there. He didn’t remember anything after the blinding pain, which had felt exactly as bad as if he had been stung all over by wasps. At least that had passed now, but he still felt extremely shaky.

  The owl seemed to have disappeared, but a tall woman with a gentle, bland face and greying hair was holding his elbow. Another woman, so bent with age that she barely reached his breastbone, was standing right in front of him, inspecting him intently. As he was a shy man, he blushed to the roots of his hair and looked away, only to find that the tent was full of other people seated around a table where they had clearly been eating breakfast. All of them were staring at him. His gaze fell to his feet, where he kept it fixed on his buckles.

  Those silver buckles, he thought, had brought him much more trouble than they could possibly be worth.

  “Greetings, Sibelius d’Artan,” said the crone in front of him. “My name is Missus Clay. If you wish to be sick, there is a bucket to your left.”

  Sibelius was very nauseous, but even feeling as bad as he did, the thought of throwing up in front of all these people filled him with embarrassment. He pressed his lips tightly together and shook his head.

  “Sadly, transmogrification is a little discombobulating to the internal organs,” said a tall, grey-haired woman who was holding his elbow. Sibelius noted, with an increasing sense of unreality, that she sounded exactly like the owl. “We’ve never been able to get rid of it. And I was in a hurry. Well, if you’re not going to be sick, you might as well sit down. But keep that bucket handy.”

  When Sibelius didn’t move, she gently led him to the table in the centre of the tent and pressed him into a chair. A fair-haired boy with his hair pulled back in a ponytail was sitting opposite. He looked unsettlingly familiar. Distracted, Sibelius tried to place his face.

  “It’s nice to see you, Sibelius,” said the boy, smiling a little tremulously. Sibelius realized with a start that it wasn’t a boy at all. It was Princess Georgette, dressed up as a commoner. What was she doing here?

  “I suppose I’ve gone mad,” he said. He drew out a handkerchief and mopped his brow. “It was only a matter of time…”

  “The will, if you please,” said Missus Clay.

  Sibelius looked around the table. “I suppose you’re all witches?”

  The grey-haired woman nodded. “Yes,” she said. “That’s right. And we want the will.”

  “I can tell you that there’s not a skerrick of witch magic anywhere in that parchment.” Sibelius laughed with a note of hysteria. “I’ve looked and looked and looked.”

  “We’ll be the judges of that, thank you,” said the woman. “My name is Missus Orphint, by the way. You’ve met Missus Clay, chief witch of the Witches’ Council. And these are the senior members.” She gestured around the table. “Aside from Princess Georgette, of course.”

  Sibelius blinked. He had definitely gone mad. He thought he might as well accept it. It was, in any case, better here than sitting in his dusty chamber on the fifth floor of the Office for Witchcraft Extermination thinking about disembowelment.

  He smiled weakly. “How very lovely to meet you,” he said.

  “It won’t be lovely, if you didn’t bring the will,” said a pretty, dark-haired woman to his right.

  “Hush, Amiable,” hissed a golden-haired man next to her. “Be nice. The poor man’s in shock.”

  “You want the Last Will and Testament of Mistress Prunelissima Arabella Pledge, spinster and seamstress of Omiker Lane of the Chokally Quarter? Or maybe I should just quote it to you. I know it all by heart.” Sibelius drew the will out of his pocket and threw it onto the table. “You can have it, with my blessings.”

  Suddenly nobody was looking at Sibelius. Everyone’s gaze was fixed on the shabby parchment. For a few moments, nobody moved a muscle.

  “Do you think it really is the spell?” said Georgette doubtfully. “It just looks like an ordinary will.”

  “What would you know?” said Amiable.

  Georgette cast her a look of dislike. “I know what official documents look like, if that’s what you mean,” she said.

  Missus Clay shuffled forwards. She picked up the will and held it in front of her with the tips of her fingers. When she let go, the parchment hung in the air, as if it had been pinned to an invisible board. She leaned forward and breathed on it.

  Sibelius heard a bar of music, violin music he thought, played on an old, out-of-tune violin by a very bad musician. And then he heard a voice. A woman’s voice, that held traces of strength but was also worn and scratchy. He looked around, trying to see who it was, but it was no one in the room. It was coming from the parchment.

  Sibelius’s jaw dropped open. He had never even considered that the spell might be audible.

  “I, Prunelissima Arabella Pledge, witch of Clarel, speaking in the Year of the Oak Apple, on the sixth day of the Month of Rejoicing, here make confession on my deathbed. I have done a dark thing, in a time of terrible darkness. I speak before you in humility and sorrow, both for what I have done and for what is to come. I cannot undo what I have done, forgive me. But I beg you to heal the wound, and to close this evil, the evil that came before me and the evil that I have unwittingly created.”

  The unseen witch paused. There was a stirring around the table, as if everyone drew breath at the same time.

  “Firstly, it is imperative that the Heart is never taken from the casket that keeps it insulated from outside influences.”

  “That’s torn it,” said Amiable. The others turned and hushed her.

  “Secondly, it is crucial that the Stone Heart is not touched by a living soul. I cannot tell what would happen to any unfortunate who enters the sphere of its influence. Thirdly, and most important of all, it must be kept from the Spectres.”

  Old Missus Pledge paused again, struggling for breath.

  “I sought to find a way to destroy the Spectres for ever. But alas, I failed. By abstracting the Heart from the Infant Vessel, I created a new kind of Rupture. And now I know that if the Stone Heart fell into the hands of a Spectre, it could instead multiply their power to an unimaginable extent.”

  “I knew it!” said Missus Orphint under her breath.

  The old witch coughed. “It’s too late to destroy this evil artefact. Destroying the object would only release the spell into the diurnal world. The Ruptures that resulted could tear apart the whole of reality. So this evil thing must, at all costs, be kept safe and secret.”

  Her voice was fading, but her urgency grew. Everyone leaned closer, trying to hear every word.

  “The Stone Heart must never be permitted to land in the clutches of the Spectres. I ask you, my siblings, to exert yourselves in all the ways you know to keep the future safe from these dread possibilities. I beg your forgiveness again for my terrible failure. May the powers of eternal love have mercy upon my soul.”

  The scratchy violin chords sounded again, and the sheet of parchment slowly peeled itself out of the air and fluttered to the ground.

  Everyone at the table, including Georgette and Sibelius, stared at each other in horror.

  It left the witches no hope at all of destroying the Spectres, and precious little of surviving if the Cardinal or Oswald found the Heart. The only solution now was to find the casket that Old Missus Pledge had made to imprison it. The casket that Pip had sold to Olibrandis, and that ha
d almost certainly been taken by the assassin who murdered him.

  “Damn,” said Amiable.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  ALLOWING HIMSELF TO BE TAKEN BY THE RUPTURE was the bravest thing that Pip had ever done.

  Now it was right in front of him, he felt nakedly frightened. The hole was almost as big as he was. It was like looking into a green, glowing cave that stretched into depths he couldn’t see. The walls rippled as if they were made of thick vapour, moving in hypnotic spirals and waves. He could feel a terrible gravity pulling him closer and closer, and every single bit of him shouted that he should run away. It was too strange, too uncanny. It didn’t belong in Missus Orphint’s cosy kitchen.

  “If I go in,” he said out loud, “will you bring me back?”

  I think so, said Clovis.

  “What do you mean, you think so?”

  You dare to question me? The arrogance was back in Clovis’s voice. Me? A prince of the realm?

  “I don’t think you should go,” said Oni quickly. She was pressed against the wall, as far away as she could get, her eyes wide with fear. “I think it’s a trap.”

  Pip set his jaw. It probably was a trap. But it was the only chance of getting El back.

  “I want you to promise me. I want to be able to trust you.”

  “On your word as a prince,” added Oni.

  The Rupture became agitated, the rolls of vapour churning rapidly. It’s insulting for such as you to make demands of me, said Clovis.

  “It’s no good,” said Oni. “He’ll just betray us.”

  Pip shook off her hand. “Clovis, if you don’t bring me and El back I will never be your friend. I’ll hate you for ever and ever. I don’t care what you do. You can hurt me as much as you like, it won’t make any difference. You’ll be all alone and you’ll deserve it.”

  He took a deep breath. “That’s my promise,” he said. “And me, I keep my promises.”

  He moved forward and put his hand into the Rupture. It was slightly cool, but otherwise he felt nothing except an increasingly insistent tug. This close, he could hear a faint, high humming. His heart was beating so hard it felt as if it were jumping in his throat, trying to throttle him.