Page 7 of The Trick of It

Willa had wanted to put his quick hands and fast reflexes to work in a thousand different ways. She’d let him apprentice with a Swiss clockmaker for half a year, when he’d been twelve. When he’d been fourteen, she’d sent him to the surgical theater down in Barrel End. Once, in a pique of madness, she’d brought in a military man who had taught him how to build and disarm traps, triggers, and all manner of locks.

She had regretted that last one.

In the end, Rhys had found his calling before he’d ever entered Starling’s Rest. He just hadn’t realized it right away.

It was those showmen on the beach who had lit the fuse on Brighton’s magic for him, when he had still been a hungry child vagabond. It had been the flash and spectacle of the illusionists who’d made things vanish or appear, who’d guessed things they could not have possibly known, who’d delighted and astounded in equal measure.

He was, perhaps, the least respectable of the Starling brood, peddling illusions and trickery for coin, but Rhys thought that was all right.

He always had been the least respectable one, anyhow.

And he liked it.

The only concern had been letting the baroness down, once he’d decided on it. But if Willa had been disappointed with Rhys’s ultimate fate, she had never said so. She’d even traveled once or twice to attend his performances afield.

In fact, when they’d been deep in the throes of adolescence, she’d taken them to Edinburgh for Christmas one year, just so Rhys could perform with a gathering of illusionists at the top of the city’s famed hill. He had been thirteen or so by then.

It had been extraordinary.

She had done right by him. Always.

She had made sure he could read, write, and speak proper Welsh. She’d bought him books on his home country and even found historical records of the name Caradoc, though Rhys suspected his name was borrowed, not inherited from medieval giants.

She had been his mother in every sense but name.

But she’d died.

Or at least, that was what the law said.

In truth, Willa Selwyn had vanished. Rhys often vanished too, so he didn’t consider that bit alarming, but apparently, if you stayed gone for seven full years, it meant you were dead.

He’d taken note of that.

Everyone dies, in the end.

After breakfast, he’d taken his parcel and his book back to the boys’ wing, whistling to himself something that was not quite a tune. He’d closed the door. He sat on his bed. And he touched his name on the brown paper, written in bold, black ink.

Perhaps he’d forgotten something back in Cardiff over the winter and the inn had forwarded it on?

Perhaps he’d won something in a raffle from that pub he’d lived in near Kildare? They were always raffling things.

Part of him wanted to keep it sealed so it could continue to be many possibilities forever.

But impulse was louder than desire, and before he’d even decided to do it, the string was popped and the wax seal broken.

Inside was a thick card stock cut into a rectangle and a thick, second envelope, also sealed.

He frowned.

The card stock had a rough sketch on it, done in charcoal pencil. A sketch of a timepiece, a pocket watch, open to show twelve o’clock. The latticing on the top of the thing was very familiar to him. It was twined in metal around the letter ‘S.’

For Selwyn.

In calligraphy, on the front, bold script read: Midnight.

He blinked a few times, his mind reeling, and wrinkled up his nose as he turned the thing over in his hand.

The back also had text. Also in calligraphy.