Chapter 8

Eight

"A sorcerer must be the master of logic and reason. It does not become a gentleman to be enamored of the seemingly whimsical nature of magic when it is a force to be feared first, understood second, and romanticized not at all." — Sorcery in the Age of Reason.

Augustus woke surrounded by the warm, fluffy cloud of a blanket and feminine scents. He cracked an eye, trying to remember what happened the previous evening.

Two angry cat eyes were staring at him from a footstool.

"Morning, asshole," Athanasius hissed.

"What the fuck are you doing here?" Augustus grumbled, burying deeper into the soft blanket.

"I live here. Don’t you dare go back to sleep while I’m talking to you."

Augustus opened his eyes fully, and a flood of information poured over him like cold water. He was in an unfamiliar lounge room, half-naked, and couldn’t figure out how he’d gotten there.

"I’m–I’m in Mara’s apartment? Where is she? Oh shit…did we…did I?" he fumbled.

Athanasius’s glare was scathing. "If you’d managed to get that far with her, don’t you think you’d be upstairs and not here…all alone…in the friend zone?"

Augustus heaved a sigh of relief. "Good point. What happened to my clothes?" Someone had hung his coat, and he found his shirt under the chair he was sitting on.

"Jesus, is this blood?" Augustus held up his shirt. Memories were slowly creeping back—a misty alleyway, Mara’s boxing skills, too much Madeira wine.

Augustus touched his lips. Had he kissed her? They felt like they had been kissed. He remembered being hit and poked his busted cheek. Only it was no longer split. The cut had gone, so had the one on his eyebrow. He was tired, but he didn’t have a hangover.

"This was my blood," he said slowly, looking at his shirt again. "What did Mara do to me?"

"I told you. She did nothing to you, so get that hopeful look off your face."

"I need to talk to her." Augustus got up and pulled on his soiled shirt. It was better than greeting her half-naked.

"Mara is still in bed. I suggest you go home and leave her to sleep it off. You weren’t the only one who drank too much last night."

Augustus drained a glass of water and refilled it.

"You’re right. Can you tell her I said thank you for helping me last night and that I’ll come and see her soon?" He needed to get home, shower, and think over the previous evening. The last thing he wanted to do was make a bigger ass of himself. He touched his lips again…wondering.

"If she asks after you, I will tell her. She probably won’t care," Athanasius sniffed.

Augustus pulled on his still damp coat and ruined scarf. "Thanks, puss. For what it’s worth, I understand why you are so protective of her. She’s…special."

"Too special for the likes of you."

"Undoubtedly," Augustus agreed before patting him on the head. He paused by the statue of Saint Anea with her crows. He lit a taper with a snap of his fingers.

"Nice to finally meet you, gorgeous," he said and was through the door before he could notice the saint preen at the complement.

Augustus was in an unnaturally good mood when he reached his house on Albert Street. He inspected his face in the bathroom mirror. There was no sign of the fistfight from the previous evening.

"Yarrow isn’t that fucking good," he said. He reached for his toothbrush and froze. His forearm was bare, healed flesh. The claw marks left by the leopard were gone.

"No fucking way," he gasped. He pulled off his clothes and twisted around. He’d been hurt from trying to reach Emmaline in the east wing. He’d received a cluster of burns over his left shoulder, but now there was no sign of them. Augustus gripped the sink, his stomach roiling.

"Oh my little saint, what have you done to me?"

Grief wasn’t her only gift, but how could he tell her? Mara had said the women in her family had been able to do other miracles, and Saint Anea had been able to perform all of them.

He needed to know more about miracles, saints, and those damn curses Mara was sure that she had. She was helping him with Melbourne’s magic and his own horrible heartache.

Augustus believed in repaying kindness, and he was racking up a sizable debt to Mara Corvo. If it had been anyone else, the debt would have ground against him like salt in a wound, but knowing it was to Mara, it didn’t bother him half as much as it should.

Augustus touched his lips again. Had he kissed her? She might not have taken that well. He had definitely thought about kissing her—that was undeniable—but he’d hate it if they had, and he couldn’t remember it.

Maybe she kissed you? No. Augustus dismissed it at once. She had been very clear that she thought he was an idiot, and he could hardly blame her after his failed attempt at rescuing her.

Watching Mara in a brawl had been a violent kind of magic. She didn’t need his help, not in that way. She didn’t need him to mediate some magical disputes or deal with the effects of Melbourne’s magical flux.

Augustus cycled through the last six weeks, trying to find something he could offer as a repayment. She could have whatever books she wanted. She just had to come and take them. Then his mind turned back to curses.

"That’s it," he said to the tiles of his shower. "I’m going to break the Corvo curse so Mara will be remembered."

That pronouncement was optimistic of Augustus because, as it has already been established, he had no fucking idea how to understand, much less manipulate, the wild magic that surrounded Mara and the teashop.

Without the burden of two of the three great failures of his life weighing him down, Augustus was at least willing to attempt the impossible.

Augustus cleared a space on his overflowing desk, and for the first time in far too many years, he was focussed on something other than the hole in Melbourne’s magic.

After some rummaging, he found a new journal and wrote down all his observations of Mara’s miracles. If she’d known how accurate and precise his observations were, it would have caused considerable embarrassment.

Augustus was no trick peddling, street corner sorcerer. He was one of the highest performing sorcerers to graduate from the Academy. If he hadn’t gotten tangled in the events of 1892, he would’ve probably had a long and illustrious career, developed countless new theories, and made sizeable contributions to the profession. That’s not to say he’d been idle.

If Augustus had been bothered to share any of the studies he’d done on the structure of the magical energy with his peers back in England, he would’ve found out that he’d made more leaps in the field than anyone had since ley lines were first discovered. But he had been too busy for such things.

Augustus had been approaching the problem in the classical, analytical way he’d been taught, which is why Mara’s suggestion that the magic was trying to heal the hole had made him at first incredulous and then upset that he hadn’t thought of it first.

Her theory that he was a conduit to it, and healing him would thus heal the hole, was also proving true, and that forced Augustus (with all of his excellent education) to admit he didn’t know shit about shit.

What he did know was that it was finally getting fixed, and that freed him up to study miracle energy.

Augustus made coffee and breakfast downstairs, wondering when the hangover would kick in and wanting to be prepared for it. He ended up burning his bacon and eggs because he’d had an idea halfway through, had gone upstairs to write it down, and had forgotten about breakfast cooking until he’d smelled smoke.

Annoyed and distracted, he’d turned the stove off and unceremoniously tossed the smoking skillet out of the back door and onto the rain-soaked grass. He made toast instead and went back upstairs, the incident already forgotten.

He wrote lists and theories on pieces of paper, scrunched them up, and dropped them on the floor. Every now and again, he’d retrieve one, smooth it out, read it, and either scrunch it up again or paste it into his journal for further thought.

Augustus went through the bookshelves in the study, rejecting most after a cursory flick through the pages. Once he was done with those, he started on the bookshelves that lined his hallways. He put one or two aside, thinking that Mara might enjoy them.

For a man studying Mara herself, Augustus tried not to think of her too much and distract himself further. In his journal, he referred to her only as ’The Saint’ when noting observations and theories down.

Some people would consider this a cold and dehumanizing way to approach a magical mystery, but those people were not on the cusp of an infatuation with one and trying to ignore that fact with all of their might.

When Augustus still hadn’t produced any information on saints or wild magic, he decided he needed to visit the Old Library.

When he decided to immigrate to Australia in 1891, he thought it would only be a temporary move, and he’d be back in England within five years.

The library at the Vance family estate was far too extensive to take with him, but the thought of not having access to it when he needed it was so irritating that he’d come up with a simple solution. He created an illegal portal.

If he’d gone with a traditional portal, the Academy would’ve sensed a wormhole being created, tracked the magical energy to him, and shut the whole thing down.

Luckily, Augustus wasn’t always one for tradition. He narrowed down all the portal theory, stripped away all the complicated bells and whistles and arrows of time nonsense, and created a simple door instead.

This was, of course, the door with the golden sigils that had caught Mara’s attention on her first visit. If she’d given in to her instincts to open it, she wouldn’t have found any unquestionable secrets but a library in England.

A sorcerer’s library is a strange and wonderful place. They are revered with the sanctity of churches but are about as clean and ordered as a bacchanalian orgy.

Augustus was an exception to the rule because he never stayed there long enough to make a mess, and it was the only room in the Vance estate that was regularly maintained by the family he’d hired to look after the property. Judith kept everything running, and he only had to pay her.

They lived on the bottom floors of the manor. The other two levels had been covered in sheets, or in the case of the east wing, boarded up and left to rot.

Augustus hadn’t been home in a while. As he touched the golden sigils and stepped through the door, he knew why. He couldn’t stay as long as he wanted because he felt the dreaded responsibility to fix Melbourne’s magic.

Now that he knew a part of him was tied up in it, being unable to leave Melbourne for longer than a few hours made more sense.

The Old Library had also always reminded him too much of Emmaline, who had spent countless hours in there with him. Because the pain of the fire had been lanced by Mara, he breathed a sigh of relief as he looked around at the massive fireplace and the twisting shelves of books that reached the top of the twenty-foot ceiling.

By the time Augustus had gathered a pile of promising books and returned to Melbourne, the sun had gone down, and there was a flaming arrow stuck in the wall of his study. Augustus let out a long, pained sigh as he read the single line of ogham that was scorched into the rowan wood shaft.

"Fucking Druids," he muttered before pulling it out of the wall, disabling the fire spell on it, and tossing it back out of the window it had shattered on its way in.

Augustus was distracted, so he didn’t notice or care as the arrow buried itself into the ground and spouted into a rowan sapling.