Reserved for the Cat

He would have to think about that. There was this much; the girl had a talking cat, and she had witnessed magic, real magic. No one who understood that magic actually existed could ever look at the world in the same way again. She needed to be around people who had seen the sorts of things that she had seen, knew the sorts of things she knew. That just might be enough to hold her.

Add to that, a nice flat of her very own, the accoutrements of a star performer . . . even if she was only the star of one music hall in Blackpool. For some, that might be enough, and Nina did not strike him as being greedy.

He needed to put his mind to it. He knew what Jonathon needed, and soon enough Jonathon himself would come to realize this too. Now he had to figure out just what it was that Nina needed.

Watching these two work together, he could see that he could set any number of shows based around them . . . they didn’t have to be fairy tales either, or at least not ones with working magic in them. Already an idea was forming in his mind . . . there were all those popular operettas based around minor royalty from tiny little European monarchies that no one had ever heard of running away to pretend to be peasants and falling in love . . . The person in question was generally a prince, but what if it was a princess? A princess who just wants to dance on the stage? Who runs away because she’s about to be married off to some other minor prince she has never even met, gets a job with a musical theater, falls in love with the stage magician . . . Yes, and when her parents come to collect her, the stage magician reveals himself as the prince she was supposed to marry, who also ran away because he couldn’t bear to be shackled to some girl he had never met . . .

Yes, that would be an excellent plot for their second production. It wouldn’t do to get too bound to fairy tales. Variety, that was the way to go.

Now he just needed to deduce what would keep Nina happy and contented.

The genuine Nina knew the signs. People were starting to eye the mysterious Russian with a bit less awe and a bit more suspicion. This was taking longer than she had thought it would.

Sabotaging the theater had not worked. It was impossible to get at the girl directly. None of the men that flocked to her dressing room came up to the mark for causing scandal.

Well, she needed to find a place to live, a place where there would be room enough to work some real magic, and where no one would be looking askance at the comings and goings into the night.

A few moments with the concierge elicited regrets that she was leaving and the name of a reliable agent. Within half a day, the agent had found and taken her to view three suitable flats. She rented the first one, which came furnished. More importantly, it was on the ground floor, and had a separate servants’ entrance which was not overlooked by any of the other flats in the building. She could come and go whenever she liked without being seen. It also included the cellar, which meant her Elemental slaves could come and go without needing recourse to any outside entrances.

She wrote the impresario in Germany, canceling her appearances, and sent payment to him for the cancellations without a qualm. This was war, now, and she was not going to lose.

13

NINA had made a major mistake when she first arrived in Blackpool, and now she knew it.

She had assumed that her imposter was just an ordinary, greedy little human being. Now she knew better. The girl had a protector, an Elemental Master, a Fire-Master to be precise. She still didn’t know which of the men around the girl was the magician. Humans were infernally good at hiding their powers, if one was bent on hiding them, and most of the clever ones would never come out in the open if they could help it. If a mage was of her own element, she would certainly sense him in the powers when he actually worked magic, but if he was not of her element, he could be conjuring away at removing mountains and she would never know it if he was shielded.

And if he was shielded all the time, she’d not be able to tell him from an ordinary sort of human.

She had made a grave mistake, choosing to attack the building as she had. She had used creatures of her own element—the rats were of earth, of course—to be the carriers of disaster, but it had been his element, fire, which would have been the actual cause. Some of these blasted humans were on good terms with their Elemental creatures, good enough terms that the benighted things acted as watchdogs, and that must have been the case here. There was absolutely no doubt what had put out the fires. Salamanders, dozens of them. And that could only mark the work of a Master.

All right. This meant that she couldn’t go after the girl directly. She would have to be very careful how she did it indirectly. That meant working entirely in her own Element.