Chapter 1

FEbrUARY 4TH 1927 IN TRELLECH, WALES

G riffin wheeled himself into his office. "Mind getting the door?"

"Never." Antimony followed him in. She was in full formal Guard uniform, down to the cravat and perfectly shined shoes. With the skirt, because the Honourable Magister Rollings had been presiding, and he had decidedly outdated opinions about women wearing trousers. Griffin was in a suit, a formal charcoal grey, perfectly fitted, because he couldn't afford to be sloppy about any of those details. Both of them picked their fights and put the effort in where it mattered. It was one reason he and Antimony had become allies over the past seven years.

Griffin flicked the kettle on and checked there were leaves waiting in the pot. He'd set it up this morning, and he'd expected to get a cup long since. The morning court had run long, though, and there'd been a need for two different consults before the afternoon sessions. His lunch had been half a sandwich and a cup of tea from the court offices. Tending the kettle done, Griffin turned his wheelchair neatly, parking it out of the way against the wall. He touched the brake charm on the side of the chair.

It left him close enough to the desk to use it for balance, taking suitably cautious steps until he was in his desk chair. The way the rest of the day had gone, he had half-wondered if his feet were going to dump him on the floor. Antimony turned away from the door to take the chair across the desk from him, and Griffin brought up the warding with a quick gesture. His wards sprang up like eager hounds, ready to do their work.

"It's not your imagination," Griffin said.

"I wanted it to be." Antimony grimaced, then shrugged out of her jacket and loosened the top button of her blouse. After a moment's consideration, she entirely removed the cravat, tucking it into the pocket of the jacket. "His Honour will be gone by the time we're done. He wants to get up north." Rollings was an avid outdoorsman, it was Friday, quod erat demonstrandum.

"We both have our devotion to the truth of the thing." Griffin said it as gently as he could, in large part because he was still grappling with the implications of what Antimony had pointed out on Wednesday as they were finishing in the inheritance court. She'd brought it up hesitantly, as if she weren't sure if her senses were playing tricks on her.

She hadn't given him anything to go on, just one quiet question. Would he pay attention on Friday to how the charms were responding?

One of the other things he appreciated about Antimony is that she didn't avoid asking him questions. She'd put the thing to him and let him decide how to deal with it. That was more rare in his life than he wanted, especially his professional life.

Now, he made his same bow to unbiased information. "How about we both write it down, make a copy, and pass it over?" Griffin had been making notes in his own particular shorthand all day, in between his other duties. He nudged the drawer beside him open, pulled out a couple of spare sheets of paper, and handed them over. Antimony took out a fountain pen and began translating her own notes out of her shorthand into something he could read.

It made him chuckle, and she glanced up, grinned briefly, and went back to it. Just at about the point the kettle sang, they'd finished their notes, dotting their Is and crossing their Ts. She got up to pour the tea, to spare him fussing with it, and brought the pot back to sit on the edge of his desk. Silently, Griffin handed one sheet of paper over to her, keeping the duplicate for his own records. They'd both be starting a proper project file from this. He knew that much already.

She passed her page over, covered both sides in tight but readable letters. Griffin scanned it, then looked up to meet her eyes. "Same things. The magic's sluggish, but unevenly so, which is almost worse. And we had just done the reconditioning, what, last November? I'd have to check the dates." To be fair to him, it had been just before things had got truly hectic in the first half of December. Antimony had been well into that too, so after a moment he said, "It was right before that mess with Nico Lind. I remember thinking it was good we'd done the reconditioning early. Only now I'm wondering."

That had been an entire bit of chaos, and not the usual run of the demands of the courts. Though in the end, the actual judicial magics had been straightforward. Lind and his co-conspirators hadn't had the strength of magic on their own to fight the truth charms, and their attempts at evasion had only gone so far.

"I was wondering the same thing. That it had felt good to be ahead of it, only that's not long at all. Four months. Not even four. I think the jet's fading. Or whatever one calls a very black gemstone when it's no longer as much of a muchness as it used to be."

It made Griffin snort, despite the seriousness of the problem. "Do we think it's just the inheritance hall?"

"It's a tad hard to tell without an inheritance case elsewhere. Could you fit up the main hall for one?" Antimony reached for the small notebook she carried. "We don't have another inheritance case for a fortnight, do we?"

"No, but they'll want the main hall set for the investitures next month. That's not enough time to reset between." Griffin had a number of gifts. Thankfully keeping track of that kind of thing came easily to him. "Blast. Have you been in the other courtrooms at all, or should I ask around delicately?"

Antimony pursed her lips. She then shifted to pour the tea, dropping a single sugar lump in his and giving it a stir before handing it over. "I think we both should. Different people will talk to us. Though we should coordinate, we don't both want to be asking the same set."

"Quite." Griffin sorted through the web of contacts in his head. "You do the Guard, obviously. In confidence, avoid anyone who might gossip for right now."

She snorted, agreeably. "Come on, I've been doing this longer than you have." That was true. She'd earned her Captain's rank a couple of years before he finished his apprenticeship, so he couldn't even argue it was a technicality due to the War.

"Do you remember when the last time we reconditioned before November was?" There were major reconditioning rites about every twenty-six years, and more minor ones.

"1924," Antimony said. Right, he'd missed the previous minor. Two of the senior administrators had thrown a fit about him doing the work. They had sent him on a wild goose chase for unnecessary duplicates of records in Somerset House in London, which had occupied him for three solid weeks. He'd done what they'd asked, but he'd filed it as one more mark in the tally of people being unreasonably obstructive for their own reasons.

Somerset House had been the usual tedious need for the forearm crutches, though at least the staff there did all the tracking down of records and making copies. But London wasn't made for easy wheelchair use, despite the number of veterans - and others - needing them. Not that Trellech was a lot better, but at least Trellech sometimes made the effort, and he knew which places were easy to manage. Magic did help at least a bit of the infrastructure.

Silently, Antimony pulled out a list of dates from her notebook and handed it over. It went back to 1880. Roughly every seven and a quarter years, or rather at least that. It was sometimes less if there was a particularly useful transit or alignment to work with. He noted, particularly, that they'd had to do a short-term fix in 1919.

Griffin chewed on his lips, thinking about it. "I wasn't back here yet in 1919, but I read the notes. The theory was that reconditioning when Saturn was in Libra, in exaltation, was supposed to fix that, right?"

"It did. For a while." Antimony leaned forward. "I haven't cracked out the ephemeris and all the documentation. Besides, that's your job. But in 1919, Lockland argued that we just needed something that would hold until 1921. Only, we reconditioned again in 1924 - to take advantage of that Libra alignment one more time." Saturn moved back and forth in the sky, and sometimes comparatively slowly.

"And so we've got the next major in 1929, two years from now, but we need something to hold until then. Or rather, to make sure we can handle cases until then and that the major working will actually hold. After that, there's a long stretch where we won't have good alignments for any of that." Griffin was as skilled at the particular chronological and locational magics relevant to the Halls of Justice as anyone on the planet. Also, he was exceptionally modest and generally avoided pointing that out to people unnecessarily. People kept making it relevant, however, by arguing when they didn't know their precedent.

"And it's only February of 1927. 1924's certainly should have lasted much longer. Into the new decade. Even if we'd do it again in Capricorn, because we're not idiots." Griffin laid it out, mostly so they both knew it had been said. They had to make the best of the chronological moments that they could, for that sort of magic. The planets did not stand on human convenience.

"You'd think." Antimony leaned back, rubbing the bridge of her nose. "All right. How do we go about this?"

"We are still at you asking the Guard. Any of the ones who are thoughtful about the inheritance implications, in particular. Edgarton. Donovan. I don't need to make you the list." Griffin was making his own in his head, of course. "I'll make some inquiries here, and see about the other courts. I have reason to sit in at least three of them in the next week. I'll see what I gather from that. And who knows, it might give me another line of inquiry."

"I do love that you're a solicitor first, sometimes. Figuring out how to get at the fundamental question and what's needed to move forward. Very restful to give you your head and let you work rather than have to orchestrate it myself." She cupped her hands around her mug. "How's the rest of it? It's been, what, a month since we caught up?"

"You've been busy," Griffin pointed out. There'd been her daughter's wedding and a handful of other events. The wedding had been a larger affair, near two hundred guests, many of whom Griffin knew. He'd barely talked to Antimony all day. It might have made him a touch wistful - that wasn't a life he knew - but he'd enjoyed himself. "Mum and Dad are enjoying retirement. If things settle down here, I was thinking of taking a week or two and visiting. Perhaps over the equinox hiatus."

"Is that enjoying, or enjoying complaining about not having enough to do?" Antimony said, grinning. "Not that either of us know anything about that."

"Oh, Dad's still rotating through the same six arguments about why he shouldn't have handed the department store over to anyone else. Mum keeps managing him into other projects. He's been taking up woodwork." Griffin gestured at the chair. "I begged a favour, asked Seth to get him started, and it's actually turned out well. He's finished three side tables and a set of shelves so far, so if you need any smaller furniture, let me know. I'm trying to talk him into a better drinks cabinet, with doors that aren't annoying to manage. Something that slides."

"Huh. That would be handy, actually. And possibly take some of the locking charms a bit better. There's an interesting puzzle for someone." Then she heard a noise, and rummaged in her shoulder bag, pulling out her journal, which was chiming insistently. She flipped through a few pages of it for the current message. "Pardon. They're shorthanded tonight, and I need to go maintain some order in the chaos."

"Good luck." Griffin meant it, sincerely. "And we'll talk in, what, a week, about what information we have."

"A week. Send me a note, or I'll forget to schedule it." With that, Antimony was up, though she remembered to shift her cup to the tray for the cleaners to get later that evening.

Griffin opened the warding for her, leaving it that way. There was no reason he couldn't head home, and several reasons he should. Mrs Ellis, the housekeeper he shared with the main house on the lot, would have left him something easy to stick in the oven and heat. He had several books he'd been meaning to read, and an evening on the couch sounded comfortable.