Spellmaker

He had almost reached it when his mind suddenly felt fuzzy, his thoughts dripping like wet paint. He couldn’t think straight . . . He was so tired . . .

“Blast you,” he muttered, leaning hard against the wall, sliding to the floor.

And then, against his will, he slept.

Elsie leaned against the cold wall of the cellar. The chill had seeped into all of her, down to her bones, despite the fact that it was summer and she had a decent blanket. Even prison had been warmer than this. She didn’t shiver, just felt frigid through every inch of skin and muscle. Even her teeth were cold.

Every now and then she got up and walked the perimeter of the space—at least she had the option to do that. In jail, she hadn’t. Then again, she’d at least had some idea of what might happen in jail. Here, she hadn’t a clue.

She’d woken to a new loaf of bread and some cheese. Their mere existence shocked her. No one had come in last night. She hadn’t slept . . . not really. She’d tried to, after a time. But food and water couldn’t just spell themselves into a room. She was sure of that. And surely no physical aspector could open a hole in the wall willy-nilly, slide the food through it, and seal it up again. Or at least it sounded like a terrible amount of effort.

She’d missed something. Something important.

Her tailbone was sore, but she didn’t move. She was tired but not sleepy, weak but not hungry. She listened to her breathing, thinking half-formed thoughts that slid away before they had any real meaning.

That was, until one pressed on her.

She felt something.

A sensation, hard to describe, but she’d felt it before. In the kitchen, with Irene. And with Bacchus and the duke. Spellbreakers identified physical spells by sight, but she’d sensed all those spells without ever glimpsing the runes.

Closing her eyes, Elsie tried to focus on the sensation. It felt like an itch on bone, too deep to scratch. It wasn’t terribly close—not in this room—and for some reason she got an earthy taste in the back of her mouth. A temporal spell? It made sense. There was probably a wine cellar, or a cellar used for actual food nearby. A temporal spell would keep it from wasting. It was . . . above her and behind, she thought.

Interesting. Had Irene ever sensed spells this way? Elsie would have to ask when . . . if . . . she saw the woman again.

She dwelled on the temporal spell a little longer before trying to push out her awareness. She imagined herself as one of the Tibetan monks she’d read about, meditating, seeking enlightenment. The room around her was silent, still, cool. Not even a rat to interrupt her.

There was a distant whisper of a spell, higher up, near the door. A physical spell. Was that . . . a sound-dampening spell? So no one could hear her scream? She shuddered and sensed another farther away, a feather brush across her mind. She couldn’t quite tell what it was. A color-changing one, perhaps. Something to keep mortar hard or corkboard soft? Actually . . . it felt like two of them, close together.

Physical and temporal. Not opus spells—judging by Merton’s projection, she’d contacted Elsie from some distance, so this couldn’t be her residence. It would have been foolish for her to bring an enemy to her hideaway anyway.

Perhaps this was the enslaved physical aspector’s home, but spells were expensive. If he had multiple classes of spells, he was probably rich. Granted, all master aspectors were well-off, so it wasn’t surprising that he should be.

Elsie suspected she would find more spells if she were to escape her prison. Opulent ones, excessive ones. Perhaps there was a great manor overhead, stretches of green speckled with gardens. That’s how it looked in her mind, at least.

Her head began to throb, and her wrists itched as though she’d been spellbreaking. Elsie opened her eyes, and the faraway sensations of spells slowly receded.

So she crossed the room, sat down, and tried again.

Bacchus woke to a spell in his brain at a quarter to six, his shoulder stiff from lying on the floor. But any hard words he had for Mr. Ogden were quashed when he said, “Emmeline has the horse ready.”

As promised, they were on the road by six, the dawn only a whisper of promise on the horizon.

When Bacchus entered the London Physical Atheneum this time, it was Mr. Ogden who got the looks. Bacchus was an increasingly familiar presence, whereas Mr. Ogden was a nobody—as far as anyone could tell.

They’d gone over the names of everyone in the assembly, as well as their descriptions, though Bacchus was fuzzy on a few of them. Only Master Hill was not a suspect. The plan they’d formed was simple, and completely dependent upon the rational aspector’s abilities.