Spellmaker

Bacchus didn’t wait for the boy to finish. He swung open the post office door and rushed into the rain, not bothering to enchant it away.

Bacchus burst into the stonemasonry shop just over an hour later, his hair dripping from the ride. Emmeline squeaked and dropped the broom she was carrying, then turned toward him with a hand over her heart.

“Oh, Master Kelsey!” she exclaimed. “You scared me . . .” She watched him shut the door behind him. “Elsie isn’t with you?”

The question strummed a chord of fear within him. “You sent the telegram?”

She nodded. “She left”—she glanced to the clock on the wall—“coming on five hours ago, now.”

Bacchus pulled the tie from his hair and shook it out. “Did she say where she was going?”

“She told Ogden she was doing something with the Duke of Kent.” Emmeline’s voice grew quieter.

Mr. Ogden strode in just then, his expression tight. “You haven’t seen her.”

“No. We were to meet at Hyde Park. I waited two hours. I wrote her before sending the telegram.”

“Oh,” Emmeline chimed in, “with that magic pencil?” She picked up the broom and hurried out of the room, taking it with her. A moment later, she returned. “She didn’t take it with her. Your message is on her bedside table.”

Bacchus worked his hands. “Did she seem upset? Did she take anything with her as though planning for a longer trip?”

Emmeline and Mr. Ogden exchanged a glance before the latter answered him. “No, just her reticule.”

That chord of fear began to sing, spreading cold prickles across Bacchus’s skin.

Mr. Ogden said, “I’ll send Emmeline to check locally. This isn’t like her. And with Merton . . .”

He didn’t finish the thought, only left to grab his coat.

The first thing Elsie observed was the stone beneath her—the coldness of it against her cheek and its hardness beneath her shoulder and hip. The second thing she noticed was the darkness, save for a single enchanted light in the middle of a low stone ceiling. The third was the awful taste in the back of her mouth, followed by the dryness of her tongue and rawness of her sinuses.

She pushed herself up, head pounding. For a brief moment, she thought she was still in prison and everything else had been an oddly detailed dream. But as she blinked and gained her bearings, swallowing to moisten her throat, she realized her surroundings were completely new to her.

It looked like a cellar, all dark stone walls, about fifteen feet across and ten feet wide. When she stood on shaky legs, the ceiling pressed against the top of her head. No windows.

“Hello?” she asked, and the stone swallowed her voice. She peered at the small, bright light in the center of the room. The ground beneath it was packed dirt, but closer to the walls it turned to stone. In the back of her thoughts, she noted she probably wouldn’t be able to dig herself out.

Which was when she realized she was trapped.

“Hello?” Panic grazed her voice. She walked to one corner, her legs weak, then to another, where she found a small loaf of bread and a bottle of water. She stared at them, memories from her incarceration pushing to the front of her mind. Then she crossed the room again, looking about more carefully this time, and found a cellar door in the ceiling.

Standing on her toes, Elsie pushed on it, gingerly at first and then as hard as she could. She heard heavy chains rattle from the other side. She slammed her fists into it once, twice, three times. It still wouldn’t budge.

“Help!” she screamed, cupping her hands around her mouth. “Someone, anyone!”

Was it night already? No light seeped around the edges of the door. She screamed at the door again and again.

“Help!”

“I’m trapped! Someone help me!”

“Please, anyone!”

She screamed until her throat grew raw and her voice choked. Coughing, she crossed the small space to the bottle of water, sniffing it before raising the cool liquid to her lips. Before she took a single sip, the faintest buzz prickled her ears. She paused, straining to hear it. It was barely there . . . incredibly well hidden. So much so that she had to turn the bottle over in her hands, ear pressed to the glass, to find the spiritual spell attached to it.

She didn’t recognize it. It was so tightly wound, so small . . . What was it for? Something to make her feel full, or maybe hungry? Something to calm her?

She pressed her hand to the spell and suddenly felt fatigued despite her forced rest. Her eyes drooped . . .

Wrenching her hand away, Elsie ground her teeth. Really, Merton? A spell against a spellbreaker? But it had almost worked. She considered taking the spell off, but perhaps it would be better if her captors thought she hadn’t noticed it. After all, she hadn’t noticed Ogden’s spell for years. Let them think they had the upper hand.

Tentative, Elsie took a sip of water, but the liquid itself wasn’t enchanted, only the bottle—right at the base of the neck where she was most likely to grab it. Gripping the bottle’s bottom instead, she drank half of its contents.