‘You’ll forgive her, won’t you?’ said Lio, pointing upward to Theodora’s attic. ‘You will let her treat you terribly and then you’ll forgive her because you want so badly to be liked you’ll take thescrapsof decent treatment and lord them as love.’ He laughed. ‘You have already forgiven me. Your arm is bleeding at this very moment because I broke the wardsagain.’
‘It wasn’t your fault.’
‘It was!’ he shouted. ‘Because I was an idiot! Because I was weak! You sit here comforting me like a lapdog desperate for a pat.’
‘Please,’ breathed Dot.
‘No,’ said Lio, ‘it’s better you hear the truth. Someone should have bloody well offered that tomewhen I needed it. Why, Dot, are you so obsessed with chasing after the affection of people who do not like you?’
Anger surged from Dot’s abdomen and down her arms, both afflicted and unafflicted. In tumbled the warm rage of magic.
‘I will be damned,’ shouted Lio, coming to her, ‘if I am subjected to the discomfort of your presence for a second longer.’ Dot felt the pool of bubbling fury within her and she reached for it. ‘Just grow up, Dot! You need to—’
A blast of hot air shot out of her right hand and sent Lio soaring across the courtyard and into the gnarled hydrangeas.
Dot was left on the porch, panting. She’d pictured the expulsion rune as she’d done it, and now she braced herself for the pain of new scales growing. She watched Lio pull himself up, dust off his trousers, and disappear into a portal.
She stomped up to her room as quickly as her body would allow her. Dot took the carpet bag off the hook. She took her blouses and skirts and cloche hat and stuffed them in. She collected the phials of tonic and the ambergris that was dwindling to crumbs. Her maps. Her spell books – damn Theodora, she was keeping them.
Dot packed up the last of her belongings and looked about the room: the crack in the wall, the old desk. Heavy tears fell onto the floor. They were the only thing of hers she left behind. She forced her tired body across the landing and down the stairs. She exited out of the tea shop door and onto Wren Court, carpet bag in hand, cloche hat on her head, and did not look back.
CHAPTERTHIRTY-TWO
Lio dug up Opal’s grave. He drove the stolen shovel into the Caelin Forest soil, the sound punctuating the autumn air with thuds and scrapes and severed roots. Around him plumed the scent of pine. The letter from Opal was crumpled in the dirt.
How ridiculous Sympathetic magic was. To imbue objects based on their unquantifiable meaning was an art both fiddly and imprecise, and it was nothing like the exactitudes of casting portals. Only non-magical objects, though there were exceptions. Only objects that had been touched physically by the caster, though there were exceptions.It’s like spelling,Theodora had once said to him.It doesn’t always make sense. You just have to learn it.
But Lio had tried to learn it just as he had tried, late in the evening in those first weeks in the tea shop, to use the letter to locate Opal; he had followed the Sympathy spell round and round like a fool, assuming that his work had been faulty. Had Opal been upstairs, laughing, jogging about as if dangling yarn for a cat?
Lio, at last, collapsed against the bracken.
The grave was indeed empty.
Oh, he was an idiot.
The caw of ravens sounded above.
She’d named her pet after him.
‘Eliot,’ Opal had told him ten years earlier as they lay together in the summer shallows of the lilypond, ‘is a far lovelier name than Liutprand.’
And what had he said to her?
‘I do not care what name you find lovely, so long as it is mine.’
Rupert had disliked Dot from the first. He’d disliked her outdated haircut and her second-hand blouses and her stern face and ridiculous habit of always biting her fingernails. He disliked her because Theodora had decided to apprentice her in magic and had given to her the room that had been his when his mother was nasty or drunk or didn’t want to look at him.
But, as he had watched Dot trudge away from the tea shop, he had felt keenly the young woman’s utter abandonment of him. She disappeared as he watched through the living room window, her body awkward and slow as she tugged the carpet bag onto her shoulder, and he was more hurt than he would ever care to admit that the young woman had not even paused to glance back.
Now, Rupert placed another bowl of salt beside Belchamber. Theodora had left. She had called out to Rupert before she had taken the portal. The house that Rupert had always loved so dearly now felt cold. Too big. Too quiet. Rupert sat beside the spirit in his attic bed, watching his small body tremor. The boy felt the bitter cud of hatred choke him. Theodora had been cruelly manipulated. This was the fault not of his mistress but, entirely, of Opal Weyer.
Rupert’s hands shook as he remembered Opal’s warped, cruel face. How much it reminded him of his mother. He cried for a while up in the attic until, in the corner, he spotted that accursed bread knife. He took it and climbed down from the attic and stowed theblade beneath his bed. He practised his magic and failed at it. He took a bath. He busied himself with the dusting of the living room, radio switched on and warbling about the weather.
He cooked leek soup and found himself, at some point, in an armchair in the dark of the abandoned Raven’s Attic. In that room, he had hardly been a welder’s son. He’d hardly been the boy who had abandoned his little brother. He’d hardly been the sad creature screamed at by his mother until Dot gave half her arm to stop it.
In the Raven’s Attic, he had been special.
And all of that had been ruined. Dot was on her way home, where she would die before the winter was over. Theodora would soon be Salamander’s conduit. Belchamber had not yet healed. And Lio – Lio had left him, too.
