The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door

by H.G. Parry

Genres: Historical Fantasy; Occult & Supernatural; Alternative History sci-fi

Synopsis

From the author of The Magician's Daughter comes The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door, a mythic, magical tale full of secret scholarship, faerie curses, and the deadliest spells of all—the ones that friends cast on each other. 

All they needed to break the world was a door, and someone to open it. 
 
1921. Years after a rogue faerie broke free on the battlefields of WWI, killing hundreds and threatening to expose the magical world, the study of faerie magic is forbidden and the doors to faerie country are sealed. But for those who survived, their wounds cannot be fixed by bandages and bedrest. A magical curse requires a magical solution.

Clover is determined to find a way to save her brother, Matthew—one of the few survivors of the faerie attack. At Camford, England’s premier magical academy, she’s nobody, just a scholarship witch with no lineage and no connections. But when she catches the eye of golden boy Alden Lennox-Fontaine and his friends, doors that had been previously closed to her are flung open, and she finds herself enmeshed in the glittering and seductive world of the country’s magical aristocrats.

The summer she spends in Alden’s orbit leaves a fateful mark: months of joyous friendship and mutual study come crashing down when experiments go awry, and old secrets are unearthed. Years later, when the faerie seals break again, Clover knows it’s because of what they did. And she knows that she must seek the help of people she once called friends—and now doesn’t quite know what to call—if there’s any hope of saving the world as they know it.

Release date: October 22, 2024

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 384

Sample

In the end, it was four words that changed the course of our lives and the history of the world. Perhaps it wasn’t really so surprising. They were, after all, the most important words in any language.

“What are you reading?”

At first I didn’t think the words were addressed to me. To begin with, in those days people didn’t speak to me without reason. In the week since I had come to Camford, I could count on one hand the number of conversations I’d had with the other students; if I counted only those unprompted by myself, I was down to one finger. That had been on the first day, when somebody had asked who I was. After that, everyone knew, and there had been no more questions. They all pretended not to understand my accent anyway.

For another thing, I was tucked away in a corner of the library where nobody ever came, in the depths of one of the oldest stack rooms, where the shafts of sunlight were clogged with dust and the air had the sweet, stale smell of old paper. The library was the heart of Camford, a great sprawling structure so labyrinthine it was rumoured to be larger inside than out. Some of the students preferred to steer clear of it entirely, not only for the usual reasons students avoided libraries but because they claimed that if the library took a dislike to you it would swallow you up and you would never be seen again. But I never felt the library disliked me—on the contrary, it was the only place among the crooked towers of Camford where I felt instantly embraced. It gave me the books I’d yearned to read since I had first learned of the magical world, and it did so readily, as if they were nothing. It hid me from unfriendly eyes, and admittedly from friendly ones as well. I could hear only the occasional murmur of student voices in the corridors, and I had been confident none would come near.

Most important of all, the voice that had asked the question belonged to Alden Lennox-Fontaine.

Back then, I knew very little of the aristocratic magical Families whose sons inhabited Camford. They blurred into an endless parade of pale faces and well-cut grey suits, smooth accents and smooth haircuts, motorcars and cigarettes and showy spells. I used to tell myself I didn’t care about them, when really of course they didn’t care about me. Still, I couldn’t help knowing, against my will, about Alden. He was the golden child of our year: heir to some vast estate up in Yorkshire, blue-eyed and blond-curled, well-dressed and well-shaped and effortlessly charming. I couldn’t even pretend he wasn’t clever, because he was. I would hear him behind me before class started, halfway up the stadium seating: laughing with his friends, quick and disarming, the kind of verbal thrust-and-parry the magical Families seemed trained in from infancy. And yet once the lecture began, he would stop laughing and listen; if he spoke at all, it was to ask sensible questions, all trace of irony bled from his voice. A deft, supple intellect, unafraid to want to learn from his teachers yet too full of wit and mischief to be teased by his peers. I had never expected to see him up close, much less to speak to him.

But here he was, so close I could see each strand of artistically tousled golden hair, and he had in fact, despite all logical reasons to the contrary, spoken to me.

He must have thought I hadn’t heard him, because he repeated his question again, in exactly the same tone, with exactly the same important words. “What are you reading?”

I found my voice at last. “A book,” I said. These were important words too, but in context they were a little lacking in specificity.

Alden laughed his easy laugh. “I didn’t think you were reading a map. What book?”

If my cheeks hadn’t flushed already, they certainly had now. “Cornelius Agrippa.”

“Interesting,” he said. “You must have gone quite deep into the library for that.”

I couldn’t tell if he was teasing, so I chose not to reply. I looked at him and waited for him to move away.

Instead, he looked back readily. I couldn’t help noticing, as if it were important, that his eyes had little amber flecks in them.

“I’ve seen you in here before,” he said after a while. I wondered if he was telling the truth: Certainly he had been in the library at the same time as me, but he never had any reason to notice my existence. “What’s your name?”

I wished, not for the first time, that I had a name I didn’t have to steel myself before declaring. My father had chosen it, liking plant names for girls in general and thinking it would bring me luck. I loved my father, from whom I had inherited my mousy hair and my talent for drawing (my stubbornness came from my mother, according to him). He had died in the Spanish flu outbreak two years ago, and I missed him more than I could say. But honestly.

“Clover,” I said. “Clover Hill.”

His mouth quirked, as I had feared. “The scholarship witch. I should have guessed.”

“What does that mean?” I asked before I could stop myself. “You should have guessed?”

“What do you think it means?”

“It could mean a lot of things.” My voice was tight. Tears had pricked my eyes, unexpected and mortifying. I wouldn’t normally be so sensitive. The truth was I had been sitting at the desk aching with homesickness. It didn’t help that Alden’s vast estate was really not so very far from my Lancashire farm. His public school upbringing had smoothed away most traces of an accent, but the vowels held just enough touches of the north to reach my heart. “It could mean that my clothes aren’t fashionable enough for me to come from money. It could mean that the work I’m studying is obviously outdated, and that indicates I’m not Family. It could mean that I’m in a library on a Sunday afternoon, and that means I need to study to keep my place here.”

“You give far too much credit to my powers of observation,” Alden said. “I just meant that you looked clever. I don’t even know why I thought that. Probably it was the glasses.”

I took them off, and managed to wipe my eyes discreetly in the process.

“As I thought,” Alden said with a satisfied nod. “Positively thick-headed now. I’d have taken you for a duchess.”

I smiled, shamefaced. God, what was wrong with me? I’d been lonely for days and pretending not to be; I’d been aching for the sound of a friendly voice or a kind word. And the moment someone had stopped to give me one, I’d bitten his head off.

“I’m sorry.”

“Not at all. I should apologise. I was being thoughtless.” He slid his long limbs into the seat opposite me. I felt his proximity like heat on my skin; suddenly, it became a little harder to breathe. It wasn’t purely attraction—though he was undeniably attractive. It was the world he represented. Wealth, breeding, and glamour radiated from him. He was like a burning sun. In my experience, you sneak looks at the sun, careful not to get blinded; you don’t expect the sun to look back at you. You certainly don’t expect it to pull up a chair, reach across the table, and take up your book with long white fingers. “I won’t apologise, of course. I was raised badly, and it’s far too late to reform now. Still, I’ll certainly concede that I should. I’m Alden Lennox-Fontaine.”

“I know,” I said, and wondered if I should have admitted it. It might have been better to pretend I had no idea who he was. Then again, that might have made me look unsophisticated. The Families tended to know one another.

He smiled, as though he saw full well both halves of my mind. “What do you think of Agrippa?”

It could have been polite conversation. But Alden Lennox-Fontaine had no need to be polite to me. More importantly, I recognised in his face a gleam of real interest, not in me, but in what I was studying. It set me at ease. I couldn’t talk about myself; I could certainly talk about Agrippa.

“His theories are terribly old-fashioned,” I said. “I know that. They’re inaccurate too, which is worse. I think he might be on to something with his binding rituals, though.”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I think exactly the same.”

“You’ve read Agrippa?” I flushed again, realising how that sounded.

He laughed. “We do learn to read at public school, you know. We don’t leave all the intellectual activity to those far from the madding crowd.”

“I didn’t mean that. I just meant—as I said, he’s terribly old-fashioned. I know he isn’t taught anymore. I only know him because I was taught out of a lot of books that were—well, out-of-date. I grew up in a small village in Lancashire. Even when I found out magic existed, there wasn’t a lot of new scholarship.”

“He’s not on the curriculum,” he conceded. “But old houses, like small villages in Lancashire, tend to accumulate old books. I read Agrippa when I was fifteen. Until I met you five minutes ago, I was the only person I knew who had. I came to the same conclusion you just did.”

“What conclusion?”

“That he might be on to something with his binding rituals. Now, I’ve just said that you look very intelligent, and I’m sure you are, but I at fifteen was a relative clod. And yet we both saw that there was something worth pursuing in Agrippa. Why, then, do you think there hasn’t been any work on it?”

“Nobody works on faerie magic anymore.” My heart was beating fast, and I didn’t quite know why. “It’s illegal.”

“Perhaps. Still, it’s interesting, isn’t it?” He checked his watch before I could answer and made a face. “I knew it. I have to go to a luncheon. Whenever I start an interesting conversation, I have to go to a luncheon. It’s an eternal curse.”

I had never been to a luncheon—not a real one, the kind he was talking about. I hadn’t thought I wanted to. But I wanted to keep talking to him about Agrippa, so I felt a pang of disappointment.

“Perhaps that curse is Agrippa’s influence from beyond the grave.” It was my best attempt at Camford student banter. “And that’s why nobody’s followed his work.”

“Hm. But you clearly had no distractions until I came and provided them. The luncheon curse has no power over you. Unless you’d like to join me, of course. Or would that make me the curse?”

I blinked. “I’m sorry?”

“You’re welcome to join us, if you’re not busy.” He sounded casual. Surely he could not be. Surely he knew that scholarship students, particularly the only one from an unmagical family, did not attend the same parties as Alden Lennox-Fontaine. “It’s just a few of us—a tiresome crowd, for the most part, but one or two good sorts. Hero will be there, if you’re worried about being in a room with too many men.”

“Hero Hartley?” I asked, trying to match his careless tone. There were few female scholars at Camford, even by the low standards set by Oxford and Cambridge. Of the three hundred undergraduates, only ten were women, and in our entire year there were only two: myself and Hero. I had tried to get up the courage to introduce myself to her more than once that first week, only to lose my nerve and slip away before there was any chance of us being introduced. I had seen her in lectures, always at Alden’s side. The two of them were cut of the same cloth: moneyed, powerful, impossibly elegant, with an intellect that cut like a whip.

“Do you know her? I’ll introduce you. We grew up together, more or less. Our houses are the only human habitations for miles where we live, so it was the two of us every summer. Oh, and Eddie Gaskell, of course. The Gaskells’ land is a few miles north. Eddie might be at the luncheon too, actually, if Hero can persuade him to leave his room.” He stood and stretched. “God, I’m still stiff from last night. I wonder what I did. Do say you’ll come. I’d much rather keep talking about Agrippa than get drunk on Corbett’s mediocre wine at two in the afternoon, although of course we could do both.”

“I’d love to come,” I said, before either of us could change our minds. I was finding it hard to breathe, as if the air was suddenly thin or I was very high in the sky. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me. You’re doing me a favour, and probably Hero and Eddie too.”

I didn’t, at that point, recognise the gleam in his eye as dangerous. It was the echo of the gleam in my own, and I hadn’t yet learned that mine was dangerous too.

That was how it started, the four of us. We never meant any harm.

If it hadn’t been for the Great War, I would never have gone to Camford University of Magical Scholarship. I would never have known it existed.

I was eleven when my brother went away to war. It was the October of 1914, the autumn after what everyone later called the last golden summer. It was an oversimplification, like most things, but I do remember those months as unusually perfect: the fields of our farm yellowed and dry under an endless blue sky, the ground already warm under my bare feet when I collected the eggs in the morning. Then all too soon the weather was cooling, the call for soldiers was ringing in the streets, and Mum was adamant that Matthew stay exactly where he was.

“Help me talk to her, will you, Clove?” he said, one evening in the barn. We were pitching hay from the loft; he kept his eyes on his work, and I couldn’t see his face. “Please. She listens to you.”

That was true back then, as much as Mum listened to anyone. Young as I was, I was the eldest daughter, and I was considered the brightest at our small village school. Recently, the schoolmistress had told my father she believed that in a few short years I could train as a teacher at a residential college. To my mother, who could barely read, that gave my opinions a grudging weight they shouldn’t have had.

“You don’t need her permission.” The truth was, I didn’t want him to go either. “She can’t stop you.”

“If she says I’m needed here,” he said, “I won’t go. You know that. But the war will be over in a few months. The farm will do fine without me until then. It might be the only chance I get to see the world. Besides, I should be out there. Everyone my age is going.”

They were, I knew that. Officially, Matthew was still too young, not quite seventeen, but many lads even younger lied about their age and signed up. I also knew the shame that would settle on him if he didn’t go with them—not just private shame, although that would poison him more surely, but public ridicule. The country was swept up in a wave of patriotism, and Pendle Hill was being carried away in the flood. I had already seen several young women in town handing out white feathers to any man who looked of combat-ready age, their eyes burning with silent resentment. Last Sunday the vicar had preached the honour of serving one’s country, and the usually dozing church had erupted into applause.

I had been caught in the surge of those words too. If I had been a boy and older, I would have gone with Matthew myself, gladly. I longed for new experiences just as he did, and in those days I had read far too many adventure stories to doubt the glory of battle. The trouble was, I couldn’t go, not even as a nurse. And all I could think of was my brother in some foreign field, alone.

“Do you really want to leave us?” I asked, and hated myself for sounding like a child.

“’Course not.” He stopped and looked at me properly for the first time. “You know I don’t. But I can’t be here while it’s going on. I just can’t.”

That, in the end, was what got me. Because however much I hated the thought of him going, the thought of what staying here would do to him was worse. I couldn’t bear watching him every day of the war, and then beyond it, wishing he was somewhere else, watching regret eat at him until he came to hate himself and us for keeping him here.

I loved all my siblings, but Matthew was mine. It was how the six of us divided up: Matthew and I, the two eldest; Marigold and Holly, the middle girls; Iris and Little John, the babies. The five years between us, the fact that I was closer in age to the middle girls than to him, never seemed to make a difference. Nor did the fact he was confident and fit and eternally optimistic where I was quiet and bookish and sceptical. We shared an older-sibling responsibility for our family, coupled with a burning curiosity about the world away from the farm, and we had muddled through both together since I was old enough to walk. Neither of us said this in as many words—I doubt we could have. It was just there between us, an unbreakable thread woven of work and laughter and childhood adventures and serious late-night conversations in the hayloft. In some strange way, it was really my permission he needed to go, just as I had needed his when I had confided to him, the year before, that I wanted to leave home at sixteen and train to be a teacher.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll talk to her.”

Matthew caught the train to London in October, a month before my twelfth birthday, and we didn’t see him for over four years.

Letters came often at first, sometimes spattered with dirt, sometimes scored through with the censor’s black lines, always cheerful, filled with allusions to alien places so exciting that I burned with envy and feared for his safety in one confused rush. We would write back telling him all our news, assuring him that we were fine without him, longing for him to come home soon.

Others came home, broken and scarred and hollow-eyed with fatigue, as the war stretched on long past the few months we had been promised, and the stories of horror began to trickle back with them. Matthew never did. Three times he was granted leave, and all three times he was too far away to make it to us. Twice he was hospitalised, first with pneumonia and then with a minor leg wound, and both times he was patched up and sent back up the line. The gaps between his letters widened, and the letters, when they came, soon said almost nothing at all. That hurt me a little, and frightened me a lot more. Matthew and I had always shared everything.

And then in August 1918, in what was to be the very last push of the war, we received a telegram telling us that he had been seriously wounded in action in Amiens. It was hard to know what to feel: relief, first and foremost, that the telegram had said wounded and not dead; terror that he may yet die; a wrench of the stomach to think of my elder brother, daring and mischievous and invulnerable, lying in pain in a filthy field hospital somewhere I couldn’t even picture clearly in my head. France. All I knew about it were the bald facts I had learned in geography, and most of those would have been torn up by war long ago.

The next few months were long, anxious stretches of holding our breaths, punctuated by occasional gasps of air. One breath: a letter from Matthew, three weeks after the telegram, a short scrawled promise that he was alive and doing much better. We knew nothing more—whether he had been sent back to his unit or was coming home or had died the very next day. Another breath, or a sob of relief: The war was finally over, and there was to be no more fighting. There was dancing in the streets, and tears, and celebration mixed with terrible grief. But the soldiers wouldn’t be home for weeks, we were told, even months, and however many letters I wrote, we could learn no news of my brother. One day he had been well enough to write, and that was all we had to cling to.

That winter the Spanish flu came in a greater wave than before, and it reached our house. For a time it seemed we might lose my little brother and sister as well. They were spared, in the end. It took my father. He died just before Christmas, never knowing what had become of his eldest son.

It wasn’t until January 1919 that we heard a knock at the door. Standing on our doorstep was a small man, fair-haired, with horn-rimmed glasses and a round, anxious face that cleared at the sight of my mother.

“Ah! Mrs. Hill?” His voice was soft, with a Queen’s English accent that had formed far from a muddy Lancashire sheep farm. “Please forgive the intrusion. My name is Samson Truelove Wells—I served with your son. May I have a word?”

It was there, seated around our heavy kitchen table nursing tea in chipped cups, that we heard for the first time about the magical world that lurked in the corners of our own—the world of mages and scholars, of hedgewitches and spellbooks and old Families. We learned, at the same time, that Matthew hadn’t been struck by a bullet or a shell, but by a faerie curse.

“It should never have happened,” Mr. Wells said. Beneath his glasses and refined accent, he couldn’t have been more than in his early twenties—Matthew’s age. But I was sixteen, I hadn’t seen Matthew in years, and that seemed old to me. “Magic is a carefully kept secret and always has been. That was made very clear at the start of this war, and for that reason we were all strongly discouraged from signing up. Any mage who wanted to take to the battlefield, on either side, had to swear to never use magic in public, even at the cost of his own life. Nobody, though, was prepared for those battlefields. Most young men don’t have it in them to die rather than break a promise to an authority that doesn’t care. Things slipped out. And on that day, at Amiens, somebody opened a faerie door. That’s difficult magic under the best of circumstances, and it went very wrong. The faerie broke free, and it killed men on both sides. Matthew was one of those hit by its curse. Thank God, I got to him in time.”

“Are you his superior officer?” my mother asked cautiously. I think she still hadn’t taken in the full measure of what he was saying. She was only wondering why a young man who was so clearly a gentleman cared if her son lived or died.

“Oh no.” Mr. Wells understood the question perfectly. “I was a private—I enlisted three years ago. I could have bought a commission, I suppose, but I didn’t want to lead. Being what I was, too, I thought it better to keep my head down. Your son and I came through the Somme together. He had been out there longer, even though he was a year younger than I was, and he looked after me, always. And so, when I could, I looked after him. Fortunately, I did an assignment on faerie curses at Camford in my first year, before I signed up. I performed the counter-curse before it reached his heart, inexpertly I’m afraid, but he’s safe, and he’ll be coming home to you as soon as he’s permitted. First, though, I need to warn you—to tell you. To explain to you about our world.”

If we’d been in London or even Manchester, among the well-read and well-informed, we might have heard whispers of it before. Magic, it seemed, had been practiced for centuries. It was a closely guarded secret, passed down through families yet forbidden to outsiders. Even so, history was full of moments when things had leaked out, odd miracles and happenstances and glimmers of spellcraft. There had never been more than in the last four years: platoons disappearing into midair, birds summoning help for injured men, nurses who could heal when all hope seemed impossible, deaths that couldn’t be explained. The Great War had torn everything apart; it stood to reason it would tear those veils of secrecy too. As Mr. Wells had said, battlefields were no place for half-hearted promises, and trenches left little room to hide. Perhaps, too, this war had been better documented than those before it, with photographs and shaky camera footage bringing unthought-of images home. Nothing damning, but enough to spook the Families. And the incident at Amiens had more than spooked them. It had been an unprecedented disaster, and they were adamant that it should never happen again.

We barely grasped most of this at the time. It was all startling and impossible coming from Mr. Wells’s lips—the magical Families, the rules, the secrecy. What I grabbed at and held to, as a drowning person might clutch at a branch, was that Matthew was coming home, and all things considered, he was safe. I had been the eldest child in the house through four years of war and all that had come with it, and I hadn’t done that without holding firm to the belief that as long as we were alive there was nothing that couldn’t be fixed. Matthew was alive, and that was what mattered. I heard everything Mr. Wells said about the curse, and it didn’t faze me. He was going to be all right. I was going to make sure of it.

He wasn’t all right. I could see that as soon as he stepped off the train.

It had been six months since he had been hurt, and he had spent them under lock and key in the care of the Families in France, half patient, half prisoner. I don’t know if it was that or the years of war that had come before it that had whittled him so thin and pale, that had chiselled new lines at the corners of his eyes and between his brows, that had taken the light from his eyes and from his smile even as both kindled at the sight of us. Either way, it shocked me, and the shock never quite faded. When it was my turn to embrace him, I clung to him, his uniform coarse against my cheek, and felt the weakness in his left arm as he held me. The younger children hung back, shy and a little awed. Even Holly and Mary barely remembered him now, and John and Iris had been babies when he left.

“All right?” he asked as we parted, and his voice at least hadn’t changed. “Jesus, Clover, you’re nearly as tall as I am. When did that happen?”

“You tell me,” I said, and hoped my own voice sounded as steady. “You’re the one who shrank.”

He laughed, but I wished I hadn’t said it.

We saw the damage soon enough that evening. He still needed a hand to shrug off his jacket and shirt in those days, and beneath it we could see the wound the curse had left. I understood then why the Families had been worried—it looked like nothing that could have been inflicted by man or machine. The entire shoulder was withered and cracked and hard like the grey-white bark of a tree. It started just below the collar bone and crept out in dark fingers across his chest and down his arm and up toward his throat. I knew with sickening certainty that it had been reaching, in true fairy-tale fashion, for his heart.

“Does it hurt?” Iris asked, wide-eyed. I didn’t have to.

“A bit,” he conceded. “It’s getting better. It’s nothing,” he added firmly, seeing Mum’s face. “I’m lucky to be alive to feel anything at all.”

He meant it, I know. But it was difficult to remember that, as the days turned into months and it never did get better. With our father so recently dead and our mother fully occupied with children and housework, the bulk of the farming fell squarely on him. And the farm was struggling worse than ever in the wake of years of war and sickness. I tried to help all I could, but he made this difficult by insisting that I go back to school. I had quietly not returned after that horrible Christmas, telling myself the farm and my family needed me, trying not to feel as though my future was being ripped away and nobody noticed or cared. Matthew noticed, and he wouldn’t have it.

“You’re going to go to train as a teacher,” he said when I protested. “I didn’t fight a bloody war to come home and watch you wither away here.”

So I went back to school. I told myself that Matthew wanted it, that I needed to be learning again, that being a teacher would help my family, and all those things were true. It was also true, though, that with my father dead and my brother half a stranger and home so grey and miserable, I longed to leave more than ever. I hated feeling it, I was wretchedly guilty every time I did, and yet I needed there to be more to life than this. There was a shortage of teachers after the war, as there was of so much else, and my chances of being accepted into a training college looked hopeful as long as I worked hard.

I studied every spare second I could. I learned geometry and poetry and the kings and queens of England; after school, for an hour, the schoolmistress gave me extra lessons in Latin and ancient Greek. Then I came home in time to help my mother make supper, and watched my brother grow more frustrated every time he came in. I learned to tell the good days when his shoulder was a dull ache he could ignore, the bad days when every unexpected movement made him wince before he could hide it, the very worst days when he could barely move it at all, and I hated having to learn it more than any lesson school had ever given me. I hated watching pain and worry wear away at him, drip by drip, like water on stone. I hated watching him be brave, knowing he’d already had so much practice at it.

The worst part, though, was the midnights.

The midnights were what Mr. Wells had come to warn us about in person—what we needed to understand and Matthew couldn’t explain except as second-hand information. On certain nights of the year, the nights of the old pagan festivals when faerie magic was at its strongest and mages would traditionally work their spells, Matthew would lose his mind.

“In the most literal sense of the word,” Mr. Wells explained, his round blue eyes serious behind their spectacles. “He won’t be himself anymore. It will last from sundown to sunup, give or take, so you’ll need to be ready. During that time, he must be bound—with silver, preferably, though never underestimate a good, sound rope. He’ll talk to you, implore you, threaten you, try everything in his power to convince