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“Intimidate him!” I exclaimed.

“Well, you’ve been ordering him about since you got here,” Yannick said. “Havelock pretends to be aloof. But at the core, I think he hasn’t changed much since he was a boy.”

“And what was he then?”

Yannick shrugged. “Quiet. He was always reading, Valérie said. He didn’t make friends easily.”

“Valérie?” I exclaimed. “You’ve met her?”

“Once, in the early days of my apprenticeship,” Yannick said. “In New York. Havelock would send me down there periodically to run errands and keep up the pretence he still lived there. Havelock has always had enemies, even before the world nearly ended, and a need to throw them off the scent. Valérie found me in one of his old haunts—she wanted me to convince him to speak to her again.”

“Really?” I was surprised. “She didn’t threaten you? How polite.”

“Their relationship has—deteriorated over the years,” he said. “But I’m not sure Havelock was closer to anyone than Valérie in his youth. I’m not sure he had anyone except her. Their mother died when they were young; their father was barely present. Havelock was sickly as a child and Valérie took care of him. She came into her power much younger than Havelock did, which is unusual in twins.”

“Twins!” But the truth of it was so obvious that I wondered why I hadn’t guessed it before. Valérie and Havelock looked remarkably alike—the sharpness of their features, their colouring, even the timbre of their voices.

The thought made me uncomfortable. I hadn’t known I was superstitious about twins, but it was difficult not to be superstitious about magical twins. I wondered if Havelock and Valérie could read each other’s minds, or shared some sort of supernatural connection—and yet, if they did, it didn’t seem to have aided Valérie in tracking him down.

“From what I can tell,” Yannick said, “Valérie was fiercely protective of her brother. But as her power grew, along with her following, she had less time for him. If you ask me, I think jealousy played a part—it was clear from the day Havelock discovered he was a magician that his power was greater than hers. She began hunting for Vortigern’s book not long after I took up with Havelock, and eventually grew convinced he had it and was keeping it from her out of possessiveness or spite. Now they’re—this.”

Yannick paused, frowning. “I don’t think Havelock has ever learned to see Valérie as a rival, let alone an enemy. It’s his greatest weakness.”

I pondered this. There was an unsettling symmetry between Valérie and myself: I had been both mother and sister to Élise when we were orphaned shortly after my sixteenth birthday. How bitter, how fundamentally incongruous it would have been to be anything other than the dearest of friends now.

“What else did Valérie tell you?” I said.

“Not much. Havelock spent his childhood obsessed with stories about magic and adventures in other worlds. He didn’t realize he was a magician until he was seventeen, which is unheard of. But then, often it’s the case that the stronger the magician, the later they come into their power.”

I pondered this image of Havelock in his youth, alone in his bedroom, glasses sliding down his nose as he pored over his novels. On the one hand, I couldn’t picture it; on the other, I couldn’t imagine him any other way. “What happened?”

Yannick frowned. “What you might expect if you suddenly granted a child like that a monumental amount of magic,” he said. “He got carried away.”

By the end of the week, Yannick and I had organized most of the second floor. We had yet to find any Artefacts from Walker Clem’s collection, save an enchanted portrait that hid any doors in the wall it was placed on, but we did unearth a swarm of silverfish beneath a mountain of crates against the rear wall. Horribly, the little beasts had somehow absorbed the bioluminescence spell Havelock had inflicted on the spiders, and they scattered like an army of twitchy fireflies.

I let Yannick use the pen Havelock had given me—he had an ease with it that I lacked, and never jumped when it came to life and began speeding across the page as if an impatient ghost had got hold of it.

And yet, when Yannick left to bring back lunch, I took up the pen again and used it to identify the spell in a medieval broom made from birch twigs, which turned out to be—quite logically—a spell for freshening a room. I’d found that most older spells were of a utilitarian nature and accorded with the Artefacts that bound them, whereas modern magicians tended towards unnecessary whimsy, like putting a spell for concealment in a gaudy floral parasol. I gave the floor of the basement a few sweeps, muttering the simplest of commands I’d learned from Yannick: the smell of must and cobwebs was replaced with lemon, and a breeze so pure it could have been summoned from an alpine meadow lifted the hair from my face. Once I realized what I’d done, I nearly dropped the broom.

I then used the pen to identify the spell in a gramophone (which compelled the listener to answer questions truthfully) and a stamp from the 1910s (which would deliver the letter to its recipient via teleportation). I was so absorbed in what I was doing, and in watching the looping writing emerge from my pen, that I didn’t hear Yannick return. I handed the pen back to him immediately, though I couldn’t ignore the pang of disappointment.

It’s only because it’s useful, I told myself. Yes, magic could be interesting. Beautiful, even. But that didn’t negate its harms, and what use was beauty, anyhow, if it brought nothing of good into the world?

I looked around with relief. The crate Yannick was investigating held the last uncatalogued Artefacts on the second floor. It had been more of a jumble than the first, and yet it had taken us less time to catalogue each Artefact as we grew more efficient. It was now a near mirror image of the first floor, minus the worktable, with three neat rows of shelving.

Élise had to leave in the afternoon to help Gabriel with something, so I came upstairs to mind the shelter while Yannick got started on the third floor. To my delight, our visitors had only increased, and while many came simply to marvel at our supposedly enchanted cats, we saw two adoptions that day. The lucky cats were Nuit, a black cat with batlike ears, and little Lynx.

I felt a little twinge of regret, because I had always seen Lynx as Laurent’s cat. And yet, I reminded myself philosophically, he couldn’t expect Lynx to wait around for him forever.

By the time I had closed the shop and finished the evening checklist—feeding the cats, administering medications, cleaning cages, and so on—I was close to collapsing with weariness. I lit a fire in the oven and pulled the armchair close, sinking into the cushions with a groan of relief. Yannick had left and I was alone in the quiet shelter, most of the cats having settled down to sleep off their supper. Flakes from another snow squall pecked at the windows like the beaks of tiny birds.

“What do you think?” I murmured to the other armchair. “Have I made a dreadful mistake, making this bargain with Havelock Renard?”

The armchair sat in quiet contemplation. Banshee quickly staked a claim to my lap, lolling on her back and stretching her paws towards the fire. His Majesty skulked in the darkness against the far wall—patrolling for mice, I assumed. He liked to leave their bloody corpses lined up by my bed at night so that I could be cheered by the spectacle of his hunting prowess immediately upon awakening. I had not been treated to such a sight in some time, though, as all mice seemed to flee a place as soon as His Majesty turned up, which was perhaps why he bullied the other cats so—it was, at least in part, a product of boredom. I called to him, but he seemed absorbed in his business and vanished into some crevice.

Ambulance awoke and began his customary caterwauling. I was aware that I would not know a moment’s peace until I let him out of his cage, and so I settled him on my lap, while Banshee took the other armchair.

Poor Ambulance had been adopted twice now, and twice returned to the shelter. Unfortunately, in addition to his lamentable vocal cords, the cat had the personality of a raccoon. He had proven himself a menace to both of the households who had taken him in, getting into the garbage no matter how many obstacles were placed in his way, clambering up curtains, and knocking over any item that wasn’t at least twice his weight, particularly if it was easily broken.