‘I beg your pardon?’
‘You asked to become my apprentice.’
‘I – I did.’
‘I’m telling you that you can be my apprentice.’
Dot opened and closed her mouth several times. ‘You changed your mind.’
‘Indeed,’ said Theodora, ‘which is fortunate for you but a touch inconvenient for me if I’m being honest, because you need to learn to use your magic properly and I am hardly the best person to teach you. However, when you’re a little more rested, we will begin. You can pick up some work in the tea shop and I’ll pay you a wage and you, in return, can help me with my own myriad problems.’
‘Like what?’ asked Dot.
‘Banishing Acanthi from my city,’ said Theodora. ‘And, more importantly, banishing Lio from my house.’
CHAPTERTEN
It was Lio’s fourth night sleeping in the cramped room at the end of the hall, and still he had not found Theodora again. He had, however, found the rotting apple left beneath the kitchen sink, had glared at the constellations of mould left to bloom across the bathroom tiles, and had met, to his horror, the family of mice who had eaten through the wainscoting and left droppings across the floorboards. The house was revolting. Yet what choice had he but to stay?
After the witch had plucked him and the strange, blonde girl from the Lourdes, Theodora had made her feelings quite clear. Lio had been collapsed and coughing up river water in the courtyard when she had stood over him and said, ‘If you utter a single word to Belchamber, to Rupert, to that girl, to anyone at all about my life before I took up this name, I will drag you back to the river and drown you myself.’
Lio had wanted to be snide or clever in his retort, but as he was lying beside the parched hydrangeas all he managed was, ‘These need watering.’
‘How did Acanthi find you?’
She was so different to the girl he had known – her hair shorter, her countenance calmer. She held herself almost too proudly, arms crossed, back arched, staring down at him as if she were, in fact,really an empress of a city-wide syndicate as he had heard whispered. Somewhere beneath it all was an echo of the girl from the forest; the one who had been scared of beetles and who always sneezed a little too loudly.
‘Your portals should have lost them.’
‘Is that a buried compliment?’ asked Lio.
He watched Theodora’s mouth twitch and that subtle movement of annoyance prompted so much nostalgia in him that he was momentarily catapulted back in time. They had once taken a test on portal crafting. It had been the only time he’d ever beaten her.
‘How long have they been following you?’
‘Since I arrived in the city,’ lied Lio.
‘They have a Sympathetic link to you?’
Lio almost betrayed himself by reaching for his inner pocket. That was where the letter sat, presumably soggy and staining the fabric with ink.
‘No.’
‘They clearly have some way to find you, and until I banish them from Alliaster, this tea shop may be the only place on the continent where you are safe from them.’
‘Do you not have wards out in the city?’ asked Lio. ‘Can you not recalibrate them to include me?’
‘How very Lioof you, expecting the world to reinvent itself at your leisure.’
‘I simply mean—’
‘The city’s wards are too diluted to protectyoufrom Acanthi,’ said Theodora. ‘Not if they have some significant link to you. I won’t cast you out, but I won’t be responsible for your death, Liutprand. Stay if you want, or don’t.’
Before he could open his mouth again, Theodora was gone and a tin-coloured spirit hovered in her place. The spirit showed Lio up the stairs to the room at the end of the third-storey hall wherea small bed had been made up on a rollaway mattress. It was a storage room, stuffed with broken objects, cauldrons, quills and chairs. Lio joined them. He shut the door behind himself and let out a ragged breath, so relieved and surprised at his sudden safety that he had quite forgotten to thank the spirit. Lio dwelled on this somewhat – he considered himself a gentleman – until an hour later when he heaved himself out of the bathtub and, gazing around the filthy space of grimy brass and soap scum against the clawfoot nooks, he realised he had nothing with which to dry himself. Naked, cold and tired, he opened the door a fraction and called down the hall, ‘Excuse me, Belchamber?’
The spirit materialised.
‘Where are the towels?’
