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"Why do you say that?"
Mara pointed at the stag in the painting. "You have one on the ring you wear too."
She had noticed the square signet ring he wore when she had passed him his tea. Set in onyx was a stag head and three stars set in silver.
"It's my family crest," Augustus explained and joined her by the painting. "This is my ancestral home. My sister painted it."
"Do you miss it?" she couldn't help but ask. If she had a castle in a forest, she wouldn't spend her time living in Melbourne.
"Only occasionally. This is actually what I wanted to show you."
Augustus unrolled a map of Melbourne that looked like it had been printed in the late 1800s. He traced a line over it with his finger, and a soft, undulating glow rose out of it. In the center of the haze of light was a gaping hole.
"What is it?" Mara asked, leaning over it.
Augustus put on a pair of black square-framed glasses that somehow took the fierce sorcerer from his face and made him even more attractive. Mara quickly looked back at the map.
"This is magical energy, like ley lines but of pure magic. They move through the seasons, as does the hole in it. It should look like this," he explained, placing another map beside it and performing the same magic. This time the light was smooth and still and glowing brightly.
"How did the hole get to be there?" Mara said, her fingers tingling with the sensation of his magic as she ran her fingers through the light.
"That story will take a lot of tea," Augustus replied. "For the purpose of this conversation, I will tell you that the hole was made because that section of magic was stolen. I managed to stop the rest of it from collapsing, except the hole makes magic in Melbourne…unpredictable. I've been trying to find a way to close it since 1892."
The chaotic mess around them was starting to make sense. It was like a mad scientist's lab of experimentation and observation.
"This is very interesting, but what does it have to do with me?" Mara said, knowing he was holding more than a story back.
Augustus unrolled yet another map and traced a symbol onto it. Pulsing light spread out over it, the hole in the lines now hovering over Little Collins Street.
"Ever since you performed the miracle on me last month, the hole in the magic has begun to follow the location of your teashop. Wherever you move, it moves."
"You said that the shop's been moving whereveryouare," Mara argued.
"It has. It's like something has happened, and now we are chasing each other all over the city."
Mara looked back at the map. "That doesn't make any sense. I don't use magic, not in the same way that you do. I don't know you; you don't want a miracle, and yet you keep turning up…"
An idea itched at the back of her mind as she turned the problem over in her head. Having spent most of her life alone, Mara was more comfortable in her head than she was in the outside world.
She traced the glowing light before circling the gap over her store, and the idea pushed its way forward.
"You haven't been able to find me since I established myself in Melbourne, and maybe the gap couldn't either because my miracles don't draw on its magic," she said slowly. "The shop appears to people who want a miracle. What if Melbourne does too?"
Augustus stared at her, then at the maps, then at her again. "You think it's sentient?"
"You should know that better than me. You've been studying it for a hundred and twenty-eight years."
Mara took a mouthful of the scotch in her glass. It was woodsy spice and smoke on her tongue, and she drank more.
Augustus's frown deepened. "The hole only started moving about regularly in the last eighty years, which aligns from when you and your mother moved here. If your theory is correct, it could've been searching for you."
"Even if it is, I don't know how I can help. I can't make magic a cup of tea."
"After my last visit, I noticed that the circumference of the hole seemed smaller. I thought I'd made a mistake, so I re-did all of my calculations. But it is definitely smaller."
Mara drank more scotch as Augustus glared at the map, and she understood what was making him so agitated. "Saints save me, you're tied to it, aren't you? Did you steal the magic?"
"No! I stopped the person who did as I said. I stopped the whole goddamn thing from unraveling. I hadn't considered even for a moment that I had somehow become connected to it," he groaned.
