A Power Unbound

Book 3: The Last Binding

by Freya Marske

Genres: Historical Fantasy; LGBT Gay

Synopsis

A Power Unbound is the final entry in Freya Marske’s beloved, award-winning Last Binding trilogy, the queer historical fantasy series that began with A Marvellous Light.

"A breathtaking romp of a plot, prose as sparkling and luxuriant as a diamond sautoir, and at the heart of it all a sense of wondrous possibility."—The New York Times on A Restless Truth

"Stunning—the writing is lush, the world-building is fascinating, and the romance is searing hot. I am completely obsessed with this story of unrepentantly dangerous people falling in love with one another."—Cat Sebastian, author of The Queer Principles of Kit Webb

A Most Anticipated Book for Paste and BookPage

Secrets! Magic! Enemies to. . .something more?

Jack Alston, Lord Hawthorn, would love a nice, safe, comfortable life. After the death of his twin sister, he thought he was done with magic for good. But with the threat of a dangerous ritual hanging over every magician in Britain, he’s drawn reluctantly back into that world.

Now Jack is living in a bizarre puzzle-box of a magical London townhouse, helping an unlikely group of friends track down the final piece of the Last Contract before their enemies can do the same. And to make matters worse, they need the help of writer and thief Alan Ross.

Cagey and argumentative, Alan is only in this for the money. The aristocratic Lord Hawthorn, with all his unearned power, is everything that Alan hates. And unfortunately, Alan happens to be everything that Jack wants in one gorgeous, infuriating package.

When a plot to seize unimaginable power comes to a head at Cheetham Hall—Jack’s ancestral family estate, a land so old and bound in oaths that it’s grown a personality as prickly as its owner—Jack, Alan and their allies will become entangled in a night of champagne, secrets, and bloody sacrifice . . . and the foundations of magic in Britain will be torn up by the roots before the end.

A Macmillan Audio production from Tor.com.

Release date: November 7, 2023

Publisher: Tor Publishing Group

Print pages: 368

Sample

1

CHEETHAM HALL, 1893

Elsie Alston’s running feet hit the grass like pale secrets. During daylight hours she could usually be persuaded to wear shoes, but the day was fading and Elsie had unfastened everything of herself that could be unfastened. Shoes, stockings. Corset strings. The locks of her dark hair, which fell to the small of her back and bounced as she ran. She enjoyed the sensation of it tugging against her scalp, and Cheetham Hall enjoyed her enjoyment where it sang through the soles of her feet.

“I’ll leave you behind,” Elsie called, “see if I don’t.”

“Oh, will you now?”

Jack’s footfalls were stronger, firmer. Not to mention: more shod. He’d followed his sister into the world, and he’d been following her ever since.

Now he stopped dead in the last line of beech trees before the grove opened out to the slope of lawn. The distance between the twins widened, then faltered, as Elsie slowed. She looked over her shoulder. Her brother grinned, teeth white as the tree trunks in the purpling light, and threw cradlespeak: negation, with a private illusion-clause tweak that meant you’re bluffing. He didn’t believe she’d ever leave him behind, no matter what she threatened.

Elsie laughed and cradled a lash of a spell to trip Jack to the ground. The grass caught him soft and held him fond as he cursed, laughed in answer, and pushed back to his feet. And then they were running again, strides nearly matched with the length of their eighteen-year-old legs, up towards the Lady’s Oak. The Hall’s awareness spooled out to follow, hooked burrlike into the magic that surged within its young heirs.

Of the generations of magicians who had called Cheetham Hall home, there had never been anyone like Jack and Elsie Alston.

Their parents, the Earl and Countess of Cheetham, had been properly raised in the oldest traditions. The twins were only a few hours old when they were carried around the Hall and shown to every mirror in every room. Then taken outside into the grey brightness of a winter morning and introduced to the bees. Some of their own blood, pricked from tender heels, went into the soil at once. Not many families would have bothered. The Hall was glad.

This is Elsie Leonora Mary Alston, and she is first of our line.

This is John Frederick Charles Alston, and he will inherit you, one day.

Years passed and no further heirs were forthcoming, but Cheetham Hall and the Alstons were more than content with those they had. The twins were indulged in wildness. They spent their early years roaming and claiming their land, seldom leaving its boundaries. Riding, walking, clambering up trees, swimming in the lake.

Jack was trained in the use of his gifts and taught most of it to Elsie, if only to have someone to share with, play with. When he went away to school, as boys did, Elsie stayed rooted.

Elsie Alston had magic to bring down the wind. She had everything her brother had passed on to her—and more than that, an instinct for wielding the power that dwelled beneath her often-bare feet. She was a girl of dusk and dawn and everything in between.

And tonight she was alight with mischief. Her parents were away in London and her twin was home between terms before Oxford dragged him away again, and they had a secret.

The Lady’s Oak crowned a low hill. Older and taller than anything else on the grounds, it muttered creaks in blustery autumns when it threw acorns to be faithfully gathered by under-gardeners. Now, in summer, it stickied the air and spread its towering leaves beneath the sun.

From the hillcrest gnarled with the oak’s roots, Cheetham Hall’s lands stretched out in every direction. To the south, the Hall itself and the formal gardens were hidden by the birch grove. To the west, human eyes might catch the top of the distant gatehouse, its blocky corners and regular arch standing stark against the dusk-stained sky.

The two men tucked within the shade of the tree didn’t seem interested in Cheetham’s views. They leaned against the oak’s lowest branch—as thick as a normal tree all on its own, it bent at the waist and came down moss-furred to touch the ground before curving up again—and conferred until the noise of Elsie’s arrival had their attention.

“Cousin,” said Elsie primly, and dropped a curtsey. Dirt clung between her toes. “Uncle John."

Both men nodded welcome to her and to Jack, who arrived panting in Elsie’s wake. “Uncle,” he said. “George. Lovely night for it.”

“Lord Hawthorn,” said George.

Only Elsie recognised the way their cousin George Bastoke spoke the title: with so much respect it was a kind of mockery. The Hall hummed its ready sympathy to her annoyance but did nothing else. These men had guest-right: not part of the household, but family nonetheless. George in particular was rich in the gifts of the dawn, his magic orderly and strong within him, with a brassy-cold and sweetly ravenous edge that the Hall did not trust.

The Alston twins sat on the looping branch. It was a favoured spot for slow summer afternoons bickering in the shade. Of all the places on the estate, this one was the most theirs.

“Now will you say what this experiment is?” said Elsie. “If you’d told us more, we could have practiced.”

“I don’t want you two practicing this where someone with more skill can’t step in if it goes wrong,” said their uncle John. His body beneath the dark overcoat was held stiff, as if fighting a pain somewhere. “There’s a good chance it will be dangerous.”

The twins exchanged a glance of pleasure. Broken bones, countless sprained ankles, and at least one scar on Elsie that not even the best potions could fade were all testament to the fact that danger had never stopped them before. Being careful, the Alstons had agreed almost as soon as they could speak, was for dullards.

“So that’s why we’re doing this when Mother and Father are off to town,” said Jack. “Do you think they’d disapprove?”

“Almost certainly.” John smiled. “I’d have your mother in my ear for months. But I think the two of you are old enough to make your own decisions, don’t you agree? And if it works, it can be a grand surprise when they return.”

“If what works?” Elsie bounced on the branch.

“Transfer.” George, a few years older than the twins, had nearly his father’s height and more ease to his carriage. He spoke as if words were stepping-stones leading him across a brook: steady, deliberate, refusing to be rushed. “We think we’ve found a way for a magician to draw on another’s magic and wield it as their own.”

“That’s impossible,” said Jack. “Everyone knows that. Can’t be done.”

“What if it could?” said George.

Jack, marginally more prone to forethought than his sister, listened hardest to the explanation that followed. Their uncle already knew that the twins had a knack for simultaneous spellwork. He’d asked them, on previous visits, to demonstrate how they could wield their individual magics towards a single end, until it was almost as if a single pair of hands were doing the cradling and a single will directing it.

Almost.

They were doing this on the grounds of Cheetham Hall because, like most magicians with blood-oath binding them to a particular place, the Alstons found magic easiest there. The Hall stirred uneasily when George used a spell to split the finger-skin of each twin in turn, adding a clause against clotting so that their blood flowed to mingle in a small copper bowl. But there was no threat. The twins gave their blood willingly to the spell—and Alston blood spilled

 in ritual in this place was normal, natural.

Elsie flicked her fingers and a light grew, tinted the blue of robins’ eggs, just above the bowl, which George had set on the ground a yard from her white toes. Jack’s light was the colour of apricots. It brushed against his sister’s as if to tease.

“Now,” said John. “Try to make it one light. One spell. Think of the lights as being your magic, and see how closely you can mingle them. From what I can determine, you must make an oath on it.”

The oath that bound Elsie and Jack to this land had been made on their behalf, by their parents. Neither of them had ever tethered their magic with words. They obligingly echoed their uncle: “As our blood is the same, so let our power be one and the same.”

The two lights wavered, then began to merge, to occupy the same space above the bowl of blood.

Elsie made a face. “Jack, your magic tickles. It’s all bristly.”

“Yours tastes like bad milk.”

They bumped shoulders, briefly much younger and sillier children; their first instinct, as always, to make a game of it. Their magic thickened and darkened and began to take up more space. Soon it was a glowing mist nearly the height and arm span of a man, its colours mingling as if stirred with a spoon.

“Is it working?” John asked sharply.

“I don’t know,” said Jack. “Elsie?”

The light, as if in answer, pulsed. And then pulsed again. The orange-pink and the blue set up a rhythm, one shade threatening to swamp the other entirely—and then the other, at the last moment, becoming overwhelming in turn, like a war of tides on the shore. Like a heartbeat.

And it was a heartbeat. The Hall felt the moment when Jack and Elsie’s own pulses fell into harmony, two young hearts contracting as one. Colour drained from the mist until only the glow remained, near-white, bright as a star.

John’s face lit up with hunger. “At last.”

“Is it…?” said George.

The twins, hands outstretched, were still engaged in making faces at each other. The light put out an occasional tendril to wrap around Elsie’s bare forearm or Jack’s shirtsleeve, but otherwise it seemed to have reached an equilibrium.

“They haven’t the maturity to tell,” said John. He cradled a new sharpness, which he applied to the side of his own finger, and knelt awkwardly, one stiff knee at a time. He shook off George’s hand when his son offered assistance. The bowl of blood was inky in the dying daylight, reflecting Jack and Elsie’s spell with a deep scarlet undertone.

John’s blood made new ripples when it dripped into the bowl.

He reached out, moved through a cradle, and spoke, harsh and fast—“By the echo of my blood in the blood of these magicians, I call this power to me, to me, to me—”

And pulled.

The magic writhed at once. Bolts of miniature lightning flashed through the mist; all four magicians flinched their eyes shut. John still had his hands out, fingers clawed with desperation, unmoving even when the smell of burned flesh spilled into the air and every nail on his hands split down the middle with a black line and a curl of smoke. He made a guttural sound and bent at the waist.

“Father—” said George,

but he was drowned out when Elsie screamed.

A red hue now curled awfully up from the bowl of blood and saturated the light of the twins’ magic. The cloud of it shook and boiled and shook some more.

Cheetham Hall recoiled. Its own wordless horror grabbed at the roots of its trees and the stone of its walls. Blood they had given, oaths of commingling they had given, but its heirs had not consented to this. Not this agonising, violating drag on their magic, as if by lips clamped greedily on the end of a tobacco pipe.

With a sudden wrench the magic tore itself in half and vanished back into the skins of the magicians who made it. Still red. Still raw, and wrong, and shredding them from the inside.

Jack toppled from the branch to the ground. His back arched and he let out a cry of pain.

Elsie lifted her head at the sound. She too slipped down from the branch and grasped for her brother’s wrist. Now she pulled, and the twisted sharp-edged magic came at her call. All of it. It fled through the contact and scraped itself wholly into the vast potential that was Elsie Alston, the strongest magician that England had seen in centuries.

The Hall threw Danger! unspoken, the warning crashing through the land and reverberating between its walls. But the master and mistress were nowhere where they might feel it. The only people whose blood sang to this soil were right here. One gasping, bereft and dizzy with his gift ripped away from his control; the other burning, eyes bright coals of pain as she said, “Help me.”

She wasn’t speaking to her relatives. She spoke to the Hall, and it answered her.

It didn’t want to; it knew the harm she was doing to herself. But her will was inexorable. Between them, the girl and the land built a fence at her skin, to keep the awful roil of magic from escaping and doing any further damage to Jack.

George swore fervently under his breath. “Father,” he said. “What now?”

John teetered, on his feet now, staring down at the twins. The bowl had tipped sideways in Jack’s initial writhing. Fresher blood flowed from Elsie’s nose, thickened her cough, and brightened her lips as she tried to take hold of the soil for strength. Her eyes had lost focus. Still, the blue of them burned for another few seconds before she crumpled in a dead faint.

Danger! shrieked Cheetham Hall, and Jack gave a jerk.

“No,” John mumbled. “No, no. We were so close. It was going to work—it should have worked—”

“We can’t leave them like this,” said George. And, after a moment, calmly, “You’re more practiced with secret-binds than I am, sir.”

Jack, now shaking his sister’s shoulder and rasping her name, tried to strike out when George took hold of his arms. But he was still weak and dizzy, and George was strong enough to pin him even with no magic at all. John built the bind precisely, drenched in power, even with his spell-burned fingers.

You will speak of tonight to no one.

The red light of the bind slid from the cradle and between Jack’s uselessly tightened lips.

Jack didn’t cry out again as the bind seared itself like a cattle brand onto his tongue. His face formed

a dark grimace.

He nearly erupted out of George’s grip with a hoarse cry, however, when John knelt down to slither a matching secret-bind into Elsie’s bloodstained mouth. She didn’t wake.

Deep beneath the foundations of Cheetham Hall itself, tangled with the solid roots of the oldest trees, the ley line was a river swollen with poison rain. It spat the danger down its own channels, reaching in futile hope, but there was no one to feel. No one to witness.

In another year’s time the danger would overboil its banks entirely, lashing out in response to fresh tragedy—or rather, to the inevitable endpoint of the tragedy set in motion today. But that was yet to come.

Jack was released. He glared in hatred at his uncle and cousin.

“I—I re—” he gasped, but the bind was too fresh, and his meaning too close to what it was designed to suppress. The Hall couldn’t revoke guest-right on its own.

It didn’t need to. George took his father’s arm and helped him to hurry away, across the grounds, towards the boundary road where their man waited with the carriage. He cast only one glance over his shoulder as they went.

“Elsie,” Jack said, scrambling to pull her into his lap. “Elsie,” as her breathing shallowed and her pulse, already rapid, became a whisper. The Hall could feel her slipping. Jack reached frantically for his magic and bent at the waist to retch when he found only the jagged edges of where it had been. “Take whatever you need from me,” he snarled. “Save her. Do it.”

The Hall tried. This, too, it hadn’t done for centuries. It found the hooks of its own power, the land’s power, buried deep inside its heir; and it pulled. And pulled again.

This magic was not meant for fine work on human bodies, beyond worm-chewing them gratefully to enrich the soil. It had never tried to mend. But it held Elsie Alston steady. Held her living. And Jack Alston sat beneath the Lady’s Oak with his arms a cage of agony around his sister, his mouth swollen with secrets, and endured.

Away past the birch grove, all of Cheetham Hall’s front windows shattered at once.

Finally, the alarm was raised. People spilled from the Hall like ants from a nest, exchanging cries, growing rapidly aware of those who were missing.

Those who were found, before long, bloodlessly pale and shivering in sleep, curled into each other like dead leaves: but alive, alive, for now.

 

2

SPINET HOUSE, 1909

Jack awoke in the small hours of the morning with his tongue hot in his mouth, a savage twist of a dream fading from his mind, and music in his ears.

The dream was nothing new. The music meant that someone was trying to break into Spinet House. Again.

He muttered a curse and threw back the covers. The music was growing steadily louder—not that it could be described as music, really. It was a single note, unbroken, as if played by a bow drawn ceaselessly back and forth across the world’s largest violin.

Jack tapped the brass guidekeeper on the nightstand without thinking, then slapped the wood with annoyance. He almost never had slips like that. He hadn’t for years. He’d shed the mannerisms of his past, all those actions that came unthinkingly to magicians. He’d burned them out of himself. It had taken time and bloody-minded effort.

And then three months ago an unmagical girl had accosted him on a ship, inserted herself inconveniently into his life, and forced him back into magical society and magical conspiracy. Back into contact with his family and his past.

The point was: Jack Alston had no magic, and Spinet House owed him no allegiance. The guidelight didn’t move according to his unspoken will. It stayed where it was, a softly wavering yellow light like a long-wicked candle. Jack donned slippers and dressing gown, took the pistol from the nightstand, checked it, and slipped it into the gown pocket. His right calf cramped in sharp protest. He stretched and shook it until only a dull ache remained.

His walking stick leaned against the wall by the door, waiting for him, and not because of the pain in his leg. That pain was unpredictable. This—the attempted incursion into Spinet House by anonymous enemies—was, depressingly, less so. They’d all begun keeping weapons to hand.

Only as Jack opened the door and crossed the threshold of the room did his guidelight detach from its keeper and come to hover above his shoulder. The corridor was empty, but he could hear approaching footsteps. His grip on the stick loosened when the stairs disgorged Maud and Violet into view.

“Violet,” called Jack. “Where should we be?”

“Oh, for—shush, Hawthorn, I almost had it!” Violet called back. Jack walked down the hall to join them. Both girls were clad in dressing gowns with their hair plaited back for sleep. Their guidelights illuminated the smooth yellow of Violet’s tresses and the longer, thicker, more mussed brown of Maud’s.

“Ground floor.” Violet held a tuning fork in her hand. “It’s low enough that—oh, Dorothy, there you are. What do you think?”

Spinet House’s senior parlour maid, hurrying toward them down the corridor leading to the servants’ stair, sang in a choir on her evenings off. Aside from Violet, she had the best ear in the house.

“Kitchen entrance, miss,” she said.

Violet struck the fork on her own forearm, held it to her ear, and nodded. “That was my guess. Shall we?”

Maud, being Maud, went to lead the way. She held a small pearl-handled revolver. In a world full of magicians laying siege to their abode and trying to steal something from them, Maud had pointed out, unmagical people could do worse than to carry unmagical weapons.

Her brother Robin had bought her the gun. Jack had taught her to use it.

Now Jack blocked Maud with his stick and raised his eyebrows.

“Hawthorn, really,” said Maud.

“I have your word, and I will make it an oath if you don’t behave,” said Jack.

“He will too,” said Violet. “Stay in the middle, darling, or I’ll have Dorothy shut you in a cupboard.”

“Traitor,” said Maud, with a peek of dimple, but she fell behind Jack and let him lead the cautious way down.

The ache in Jack’s leg was no more than a soft throb by now, though it seemed to pulse along with the persistent note in his ears. It flared tightly when the stairs, with no warning, tilted beneath their feet and turned from flat, carpeted wood to an

outright slope. Jack swallowed an unpleasant leap of acid in his throat as Maud—and her pistol—collided with his back. Maud gave a muffed squawk.

“Grab hold!” said Violet.

The entire party took grim hold of the banister with their free hands. Jack concentrated on not slipping any farther down what was now something like a fairground slide, and also bracing himself for any of the women behind him to lose their balance and create an unfortunate human landslide. The soles of his bloody house slippers weren’t exactly designed for grip.

“Violet,” he said through his teeth.

“The poor thing’s skittish. Little wonder. Give me a moment.”

Jack risked a glance back over his shoulder. Violet had her free hand on a wood panel of the wall and her forehead on her hand. She might have been singing, or whispering. Jack couldn’t hear above the music, which was starting to feel unpleasantly as though it were emanating from the centre of Jack’s own skull.

Slowly, the floor beneath their feet tilted back into stairs. Jack got them moving and down to the ground floor before Spinet House’s capricious carpentry could interfere further.

The kitchen was at the back of the house. The floor creaked musically as they made their way through the largest dining room, through the butler’s pantry, and down a short service corridor to the top of two flagstone steps. The dark expanse of the kitchen was still warmed by the ashes of the main cooking fire, which was still used despite the large modern stoves that lined one wall of the kitchen. Hints of moonlight sang off the copper of hanging saucepans.

Jack lifted a hand and paused before stepping down through the doorway. Hair prickled along his arms. The external kitchen door appeared to be closed, and the high windows showed nothing but the dark of night. He should have left his guidelight behind. Nothing to announce your entrance and ruin a reconnoitre like a gleam of yellow light.

Was that a hint of movement in the shadows? And—

Jack jerked back into the shelter of the passageway, treading on someone’s foot. A supple line of red light lashed across the room, bright enough to carve aftereffects in his sight and leave him blinking. It snapped to nothing against the doorframe.

“Violet, shield!” he said sharply.

The golden shimmer appeared like a fishing net flung forward over the whole party. A rather ragged net, unfortunately. Violet was at her best with illusion magic; she was still struggling to improve in other areas. Jack had no way to cram his own dusty education wholesale into her head, and most magic was a hell of a lot more complicated to teach and learn than firing a gun. Jack steeled himself to ignore the darting gaps in the spell. Nothing to be done. You worked with the arsenal you had.

He was about to retrieve his own pistol when a gangly figure darted into full view, both hands raised. Jack leapt down the steps and lashed out with his stick, aiming at one of those hands before it could begin a cradle, and landed a glancing blow.

A youthful yelp emerged. Familiar. Jack hesitated, pulling his second blow—which would have

smashed a kneecap—even before the figure said, “Wait! My lord!”

“Oliver,” Jack barked. “What are you doing?”

“Oliver?” said Violet, behind him. The shield blinked out.

Maud and Violet and Dorothy came down into the kitchen. The insistent musical note decreased considerably in volume, presumably because Spinet’s mistress had arrived at the site of trouble.

Jack’s valet, now rubbing his wrist, looked shamefaced. “Mrs. Smith said she’d leave me a morsel of something, my lord. For when I got hungry in the night.”

When, not if. Freddy Oliver was seventeen and not done growing, and Violet’s food bill had probably doubled when he and Jack came to stay in Spinet House.

“Where’s your guidelight?”

“Snuffed it, when I heard—”

A rattle came as the kitchen door shook against its hinges. Leftover sparks of magic flared nervously in Oliver’s hands as if someone had blown a glow from dying embers. So this wasn’t a false alarm created by Oliver’s midnight hunger pangs, then.

“Someone’s trying to break in!”

“Thank you, Oliver. A formidable grasp of the obvious.”

“Pack up your temper, Hawthorn, this is hardly the time. The warding’s holding for now,” said Violet. “I can try something if it falls, but…”

“Good. Do that. Maud, Oliver.” Jack jerked his head and pushed his way back into the house. The other two followed him at a run up the servants’ stairs. Apologies tumbled from the boy’s mouth, and Jack shushed him with a wave.

“You’re lucky I didn’t break your fingers. Or shoot you. And you’ll owe Miss Debenham a new guidelight. What in the damned—does this stair go from ground to attic without pause?” The staircase had thankfully remained stairs, but they’d passed two boxed-in landings that should have led out into the house itself. “I want a window overlooking the kitchen entrance.”

“The house must still be skittish,” said Maud. “I suppose we can’t exactly complain that James Taverner was a fiend for security spells, all things considered.”

“These stairs respond best to staff, miss,” said Oliver. He cradled a light spell and let it brighten as he returned to the previous landing, where he rapped his knuckles politely on the wall. After a moment, a panel slid aside, and Oliver beckoned them into a sparsely furnished sitting room.

At Jack’s direction, Oliver cast a curtain-spell that would muffle sound as well as hide them from view, and they cracked open first physical curtains and then the window. Jack peered out and down.

A thinly veiled gibbous moon illuminated the scene below. Two figures, both with their faces obscured by the fog-masks that George’s conspirators seemed to favour. One stood a few feet from the kitchen door, methodically sending bolt after pale bolt of magic against it.

The other man was tucked in against the wall of the house, a spell hovering uncast between his hands. Protection and backup. Neither of them seemed to be making any effort to experiment, or do anything fiddly to unravel the warding, even though they must have realised how sophisticated it was. Blunt power only.

Jack described the scene, mostly to prevent Maud from shoving her own head out.

“Oliver, can you manage a location-fix clause on a fire spell? Or anything that will distract them? Hell, itching would do. You want it to arise in a specific spot, not come in a line from your hands. You’ll need to define the precise distance.”

Oliver gulped. Even at the best of times the boy looked like a cricket stump

wobbling in the aftermath of a ball, and his reddish hair had gone hedgelike in the excitement. “Never tried one, my lord.”

“But you know—yes, that’s the clause.” Not quite, but Oliver was strong enough that he could afford some sloppiness in his cradles. “Give it a try, see if you can scare them off. But keeping the curtain up comes first. Miss Blyth can get off a few shots as long as they can’t see her.”

Maud nodded, looking just as excited. Jack felt old and tired. Giving combat orders to young people while heavy with fatigue was like reaching for a guidekeeper: another habit he’d fallen easily back into. He didn’t like it any more than the other.

“If—” Oliver started, but was interrupted by a redoubling of Spinet House’s alarm note.

No. Now it was two notes, an uneven chord.

Jack cursed. “Signal if they break through the door,” he said, and left them to it.

He hadn’t a complete tin ear. The new, prominent note was higher than the first. He found his way to the main staircase and heard footfalls ascending at a run. Violet looked angry and out of breath.

“So,” she panted. “The kitchen’s a diversion, do you think?”

Jack nodded. Violet pointed upwards and Jack let her lead the way. His leg had begun to hurt again. The second note softened to match the first when Violet stopped outside a room on the uppermost floor before the attic level. She hesitated with her fingertips on the door, which had neither lock nor handle.

“We haven’t fully puzzled this one out yet,” she admitted. “It’s one of the queerer ones.”

Many of Spinet’s queerer rooms were those hosting secret passageways to elsewhere in the house, so this didn’t make Jack feel any better about the prospect of a break-in. He had an unpleasant vision of fog-masked attackers creeping out of the wall in the sitting room where Maud and Oliver had all their attention on the window.

Jack leaned his stick against the wall and drew his gun instead. “Stay out of sight until we know what’s happening.”

Violet didn’t argue. Unlike Maud, she didn’t need to be browbeaten into letting Jack take the lead when they were in danger. Jack didn’t know if it was her history of taking direction on the stage or simply a matter of personality.

She said, “Don’t go too far into the room if you can help it. And—move like a knight.”

Before she could explain further, there was a click as the door catch released. Jack shoved it open and stepped through, gun raised in the other hand.

The room was small. It had no wallpaper, no rugs, not even any cushions or upholstery on the chair at the writing desk. It was all wood. The floor was an unsettling chessboard of dark and light, the same pattern running up the walls all the way to the ceiling. The floor, however, was decorated with shards of broken glass from the main window, and they winked in the light of a small lantern set down near the frame.

A man stood among those shards. He had whirled around when the door opened; his clothes were dark, and a fog-mask obscured his face. There was a soft crunch and skitter as his movement shifted glass underfoot.

“Hands—” Jack started

to say, but then his muscles went rigid—he couldn’t even twitch a finger against the trigger—and he almost toppled over. Damn. Easy enough for an intruder to anchor an immobility charm in front of the doorframe, wasn’t it?

“Where’s the cup and the knife? We know you have ’em both. Where are they?”

It wasn’t Morris’s voice. Jack had been half expecting his cousin’s loyal agent to be the one dirtying his hands with his work. A bland, tense city accent. Perhaps somewhere south of the river. Jack also couldn’t speak at the moment to answer the bloody question, so the masked man wasn’t as bright as Morris.

The crackle of a spell washed over Jack. A negation. Violet.

All his muscles relaxed at once. Unfortunately, this meant that he both stumbled a little and dropped the gun.

Jack cursed and bent for it. The masked man dived for the nearest thing resembling cover, which was a tall standing wardrobe. He wrenched the door open as if to use it as a shield, and Jack straightened with the gun in hand, and—

Afterwards, he struggled to remember exactly what he’d seen. Violet would say that the intruder climbed into the wardrobe. To Jack’s eyes, it looked as though something had snagged the man’s sleeve and pulled him in, like a piece of factory machinery. And what happened after that—the way the wardrobe seemed abruptly half its own height, then seemed to become a standing cabinet with elegant gaps and drawers, then back to a wardrobe again—happened so fast, in a dim room, that it could have been one of those bizarre visions the mind threw out when it was trudging up the shorelines of sleep.

The sound was distinct, at least. A bloodcurdling shout, cut off even more alarmingly by a wet noise. And then silence.

Real silence. That musical chord was gone as well.

Violet and Jack looked at each other. Dawn had begun to trickle in through the window. Violet looked bloodless in the soft grey light.

“I’m not touching it after that,” said Jack. “You’re the mistress here, not me.”

Violet swallowed hard and eased her way across the room, following an uneven pattern on the floor. Forward, across—ah. Moving like a knight.

“Maud worked this one out,” she said. She paused again in front of the wardrobe and settled her shoulders, visibly pulling on a persona, then yanked the door open.

And slammed it shut again almost as fast.

“Oh, no. No thank you. Oh fuck buggery hell.” New York shoved into Violet’s vowels when she was being unladylike. She put the back of her hand to her mouth and retched, twice. Jack began calculating a knight-path in case she outright swooned, but Violet straightened with a determined and paper-white expression.

“That can be dealt with later,” Jack said. “Let’s check on the kitchen.”

It didn’t sound as though the man—or what remained of him—was in danger of going anywhere. Nor was the glass on the floor. Jack would send some of the stronger-stomached servants to clean up later.

The kitchen was no longer under siege, and Maud and Oliver had made their way there. Oliver was worriedly clutching a tin of biscuits. Dorothy had vanished, but a kitchen maid was busy scooping coal into the largest stove. Given the hour of the day, the house’s guests were crowding out what would very shortly be a working kitchen. Jack announced that they were moving into one of the

parlours, where at least arses could be parked on comfortable chairs.

“Bring the biscuits,” he added to Oliver.

“They didn’t like being shot at,” said Maud to Jack once they’d relocated. “Or having a fire set at their feet. They took off in short order.”

Jack nodded to Oliver, who turned pink at the implied praise.

“What happened upstairs?” Maud asked.

“Someone got in. The house … dealt with it.” Violet went to sit next to Maud, who responded to some invisible signal and wrapped an arm around Violet’s waist. Violet dropped a kiss on her hair.

“He must have come down from the roof, to access that window,” said Jack. “You’ll have to strengthen the wards up there, Violet.”

Violet stifled a yawn. Everyone’s guidelights blinked out as the hall clock began to chime six o’clock. The sky was properly lightening now. Jack might be able to snatch a few more hours in bed.

The last strike of the clock melded into yet more music, though at least this time it was a melody instead of a held note. It announced that someone or someones recognised as friendly by the house wards had entered through the Bayswater tunnel.

“Early for a visit,” said Violet. “I hope nothing’s gone wrong on their end.”

“Oliver, bring them through here and then go and dress,” said Jack, giving up on the prospect of sleep. “I’ll be up to wash shortly.”

Soon afterwards, Oliver ushered three people into the parlour. Or rather, he scurried in the wake of Sir Robin Blyth, who was moving with urgent strides towards his sister, and managed to actually do some ushering on behalf of Edwin Courcey and—Jack blinked—Adelaide Morrissey. All three were in full evening wear, including a cloak over a deep red gown and white gloves on Adelaide, and they had the tight-eyed, radiant dishevelment of people who hadn’t touched their beds.

“Don’t you look splendid, Addy,” said Maud. “Oh, it was the Home Office ball, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, and one of the undersecretaries hosted a truly lethal party-after-the-party,” said Adelaide. “When Robin dragged us away there were people asleep in the ornamental fountain.”

“I had a vision. One of the urgent ones. You’re unhurt? All of you?” Robin peered with concern at Maud, who said hastily, “Yes, yes.”

“I see our assistance is unnecessary after all,” said Edwin. He looked particularly pinched. The idea of Edwin Courcey, of all people, attending an all-night social affair that left guests draped over fountainry was bizarre.

Jack settled himself further into his armchair. “You may inspect us for holes, though there might be complaints were I to disrobe. Or perhaps you wish to see if memory holds up.”

He let his gaze catch on Edwin’s. The man’s jaw set and annoyed colour filled his cheeks, but the only motion of his eyes was pointedly down to Jack’s bad leg and up again. An interesting showing of claws. This particular mouse of a magician had changed since taking up with Robin Blyth. He was becoming more fun to tease.

“Shut up, Hawthorn, there are ladies present,” said Robin without much rancour.

“His lordship is more than welcome to make a spectacle of himself. I doubt anyone here is interested enough to comment.” Adelaide’s dark brown eyes did a good line in a skeweringly superior stare. There was a giggle from Maud.

Violet let out a sigh and stretched her arms above her head. “Well,” she said, “I’d better tell Mrs. Smith there’ll be six for breakfast.”

---

“Only one battle wound this morning, Hawthorn,” said Violet, when Jack arrived in the breakfast room. “Oliver’s improving.”

The nick on Jack’s jaw itched all over again. He forced himself not to touch it and went to investigate the food instead. Violet’s cook had never met a vegetable she couldn’t over-boil, ...