All the while, she dreamed of cauldrons and spellwork and archaic libraries of leather-bound tomes and her own name, printed in the papers, beside some grand magical discovery. That could never be her fate, she’d had to remind herself. For only alumni of the Royal Institute of Alliaster were granted licence to use magic, and these were the sons of duchesses or the daughters of dignitaries. If one had to ask, ‘How much?’ they could not afford it.
Now, she passed the white-marble façade of Hemmington’s department store, felted hats and fine jewellery on display in the lamplit window. A pair of cherry-coloured brogues caught her eye and she paused before the glass.
‘Be serious, Eustace,’ came the pompous voice of a man chatting away to his friend as they passed Dot. ‘Salamander’s wares are far superior to that ghastly shopfront on Mieunetti Road.’
Dot glanced at them. The dandies, each dressed in a decadent suit, were followed by footmen carrying boxes of goods just purchased from the department store.
‘They don’t even sell silk, for Saints’ sake, whereas Hemmington’s here offers it by theroll. One simply cannot compare.’
That, she thought as she pulled herself away from the window display, was the kind of person who could afford a licence to use magic.
And what of those caught using magicwithouta licence?
Dot passed a woman sleeping beside a rubbish bin. Where her hands should have been was only air.
As dictated by the Prohibition, one offence would lose the Magician their left hand; two, their right; three, their eyes; four, their life.
Thus, Dot had relegated herself to an existence spent ignoring the memory of sorcerie at her fingertips. She would be a clerk. Perhaps, a teacher. That was her lot.
That was until she heard about Theodora’s Tea Shop.
‘Atea shopof all things,’ a professor had whispered to her colleague. It had been three years earlier and Dot had been sat in an obscure nook of the university library. ‘Run by a witch who goes by the name of Theodora. If you can find her, then to hell with the Prohibition. You’ll have the same magic as any of the dandies.’
Before she knew it, Dot was straining to catch the details. Who was Theodora? Where was the establishment?
‘Packet spells,’ the professor had whispered. ‘The shop is located in Alliaster, of course, on the corner of—’
But she had noticed Dot then through the stacks. The professor straightened up, glared at her, escorted her friend away and never again returned.
Dot had to pause every thirty minutes or so to catch her breath as she walked. Her head swelled. She sipped tonic. She glared at the tram as it sailed past. Finally, after perhaps two hours, she found the first establishment on her list.
The Alsions Bistro and Tea House was a moody restaurant with dark wallpaper and a menu that featured beef cheek and duck liver. A great line snaked out the door. She placed herself in it and, an hour later, she was sat at a wobbly table in the back corner beside the kitchen. The waiter would not let her order only a glass of ginger ale, so she begrudgingly requested the cheapest item on the menu, which cost three times her tram fare the previous day. The waiter raised his eyebrows but said nothing, and came back at last with a single, sad-looking mollusc on a plate.
Dot picked at it for as long as she could, eyes darting desperately about for secret doors or the exchange of envelopes. She stayed until the waiter returned to her table for the fourth time and finally asked her to leave.
Dot’s fixation with Theodora had begun as a hobby. It was all she thought about during her idle hours in bed, pinned down by fatigue as she played records and listened to the relentless roar of the ocean. She read academic journals on Article 13 and trailed her fingers along the maps of Alliaster that she’d bought from the corner shop.
Any customer at the Divers’ Café who had come from the city was met with Dot’s careful questions. She never mentioned magic, of course. Yet, Dot slowly collected clues and, just after she turned twenty-one, she met the carpet seller wandering down the main street who had said: ‘Ah, I know the shop you are after. I have a photograph, only. It will cost you thirty silvers.’
This was the price of two university textbooks. The price of the Walcotts’ fortnightly food budget, and then some. The price of eight or nine gramophone records from the specialty shop in the next town over.
Dot paid it.
And she stuck the photograph on her wall beside the illustration of Saint Penelope’s Cathedral that Emily had given her. When Celia had asked after it, Dot had replied, ‘Just a pretty picture of a tea shop. I doubt I’ll ever visit.’
Here she was two years later in Alliaster with her dwindling purse of silver and a list of every restaurant and café in the entire city that could possibly be the shop she searched for.
By her second week, Dot could not remember if it was Tea on Tetanum Square or Greyson’s Diner that had the green chairs out the front, nor could she recall whether Café el Cremio or Mister Magpie served roasted green tea. It didn’t much matter. She ordered the cheapest thing on the menu at each venue: black coffee, or espresso, or dull Turlish milk tea, sometimes a slice of bread if shehad to, or tomato soup. She stayed as long as she could, watching the staff, straining to see into the kitchens until, at long last, she was ushered out.
Three on the list had closed: Mandra’s Café, Peel and Pesto, and Hoot Dear Ashtepo’s. Dot visited these locations anyway and peered in at the windows, desperate to glimpse any indication of magic.
She returned to her room, each day, exhausted. Her hostel did not have showers. The communal lavatory, which was infested with wolf spiders, had only a dismal line of old basins, and so every evening she went down the street to the Marigold Bath House. Dot slipped into the hot water, surrounded by bodies of innumerable diversity: narrow, wide, burned, pockmarked, stretch-marked, scarred from babies born, with coarse hair and drooping skin and softness that was so vulnerable it almost repulsed her. Some women chatted; some laughed. All scrubbed their flesh at the sides of the bath and then slipped into the water together.
Dot pawed at her aching muscles. The lights were too bright. The soaps, too scented. She was exhausted and irritable and, as she waded through the warm water and listened to the chatter of women that excluded her, she began to feel quite lonely.
Another week passed. Now, she slept fourteen hours per night. Another flurry of blisters burst, another box of bandages bought, yet she was no closer to finding the tea shop.
She found herself walking all the way back to Hoot Dear Ashtepo’s. Four hours, it was, from the hostel. It had such an odd name: who was Ashtepo? Who requested them to ‘hoot’?
