19

19

I was giving a lecture in Advanced Summoning Spells when the news came.

I had started lecturing only that year, the last year of my PhD. It was always a struggle—there were very few women on the teaching staff, and though I had considerably tamed my Lancashire accent in recent years, I still had students complaining that I could be neither heard nor understood. They were snobs, like most of the Families, yet I couldn't help fearing they had a point. Teaching didn't come naturally to me. I had gone through school addicted to learning, through Camford entranced by magic—I didn't know how to make my subject sound interesting to bored young people who didn't want to hear about it. This, combined with the fact that it was a bright spring morning and I was outlining a particularly fiddly and complicated piece of magical theory, meant I was sensitive to the restlessness of the class and more than a little worried I was going to lose them. So when I felt a ripple of interest coming from the back of the hall, a whisper spreading like wind through grass, I knew it didn't have anything to do with me.

I didn't see any point in ignoring the disturbance; if I did, it would only get worse. I put down my papers, looked at them over the rim of my glasses, and let my voice tighten with disapproval. It was a trick I'd learned from Lady Winter, a long time ago. "I'm sorry, is there something you'd like to share with the class?"

As it happened, this wasn't very effective, as there was exactly that.

"It's the German lock," a boy at the back spoke up. He had come in late, a copy of the Practitioner in his hand, and his face was flushed with excitement. "The one that seals off the borders to faerie country. It's been broken."

My heart skipped as the murmur across the classroom escalated to a roar. I didn't know why I felt suddenly sick—except that it was worrying news, of course, and anything to do with faeries was an unearthing of everything I had spent almost eight years trying to bury. The locks. They were all that stood between our world and faerie country, all that held the world to the Accord. One broken was not a disaster in itself—the entire point of the Accord was that all three would need to be smashed for the doors to be able to open again. And yet…

"Does this mean another war?" someone asked in the front row, and I snapped back to myself.

"No, of course not. The war wasn't Family business—it was between the governments of the world." Just over a decade since the war had ended, and already these students could barely remember it. I felt impossibly old, a relic of a lost generation. "I'm sure the Board won't be happy that the Germans broke their lock, but that's why there are three to start with. Even if they wanted to, they hardly have the power to declare war on Germany."

"It wasn't the Germans who broke it, though." Someone at the back was still reading. "It was an Englishwoman. Lord Beresford's wife, it says. He had access to the lock, as a cultural attaché. She murdered him, and she broke the lock. Now nobody can find her."

It was at that point that I knew exactly what I had been fearing, without letting myself think it. My head spun; I had to grip the sides of the lectern for support.

Lord Beresford's wife. Lady Beresford. I still had trouble keeping the Families straight in my head, but that one I would never forget.

Lady Beresford was Hero.

I hadn't even heard about Hero's marriage from Hero herself. After Eddie and I left her at the railway station, I never heard a word from her all the rest of that shattered summer. I heard nothing from Alden either, and I told myself that suited me fine, since I had no desire to write to him. Hero, though, I wrote to several times—and received no reply. I asked her if she was safe, then I begged her to forgive me. I understood her anger. She had warned me that there were to be no more secrets. I may not have known that circles wouldn't work so certainly as Alden had, but I had suspected. She had agreed to the experiment only because I said it would be safe, and I had lied. Now our project had come to an end—there would be no proposal to the Faculty, no way to stop her father from pulling her from Camford. I had betrayed her trust, and I knew it. Clearly, she knew it too. I returned to Camford that September not knowing if I would find her there.

When I knocked on her door, it was answered by another young woman: Gretchen Ingalls-Fletcher, a dark-haired scholar in the final year of her degree. I knew her to say hello to, and she had been friendly enough in return, but she wasn't in our classes, and Hero had always been vaguely scathing of both her commitment to her studies (limited) and her choice in footwear (ostentatious). Her face, which had been puzzled and suspicious, relaxed when I asked after my friend.

"Oh, you don't know," she said. "Hero isn't coming back to school. She's getting married next month."

"What?" Whatever my face had shown when Matthew had told me about his engagement, it was now showing it twice as hard. "She wouldn't! To whom?"

"Um… I can't remember his name. Someone in the government, quite rich, a lot older than her." An understandable trace of satisfaction crept into her voice. Gretchen hadn't liked Hero, possibly because Hero kept looking at her shoes. "Her father's pleased, from what I hear. They announced it in the paper this week. I suppose you don't get the Practitioner where you live…"

We didn't, of course. But I got it at Camford, and I saw, two months later, the photo in the society pages of Hero's marriage to Lord Beresford. She looked radiant, naturally—a tall, veiled figure draped in gauze, arm in arm with a short, middle-aged man with a walrus moustache. Lord Beresford was, according to the Practitioner , a widower and a foreign diplomat in Europe with a tidy property in Bournemouth and an upcoming post in Berlin; Hero was only described as the daughter of the honourable Mr. Horatio Hartley. I wrote to her once more, this time congratulating her on her marriage, and finally received a letter in return. It was gracious, formal, and utterly impersonal. Only the postscript had any trace of our old warmth.

Don't blame yourself for what happened , she said. It wasn't your fault, and in the end it worked out well. I don't suppose we'll see each other again. Good luck with your studies, darling, and I really do wish you all the best.

I knew she had to speak in veiled terms, in case the letter was read. But the drawing of a clear line— we do not speak of this again —broke my heart more soundly and surely than it had ever been broken before or since. That line cut off our entire friendship and left it floundering and dying on the other side. By the time I received it, Eddie had left Camford and gone home, never to return. Alden and I hadn't spoken since Ashfield. Now I had lost Hero, and it was all my fault.

The wedding had been the toast of the season, or perhaps the scandal. Rumours had flown as to why a beautiful, intelligent, headstrong young woman had given up the university she had fought to attend in order to marry an uninteresting middle-aged Board member when there were far richer suitors available. Then the months passed, no mysteriously premature baby had arrived, no blackmail plot emerged, and everyone lost interest. There was an underlying feeling that Hero and the Hartleys had somehow got what they deserved, though it was unclear what crime they had committed and why Lord Beresford was a fitting sentence.

I tried not to think about Hero—or, by then, Eddie or Alden. I wanted Ashfield firmly behind me, with all its loveliness and heartbreak and terrible, crushing guilt. Certainly I had more than enough to occupy my thoughts. My results in my first year had been good, but the time spent on friendship and faerie doors had taken a subtle toll on the final exams. The following year, I was ill a good deal and had to come back in the summer term to make up for lost papers. I didn't mind—the extra work gave me something to do and a place to be at a time when I would otherwise have sunk down into memories of the golden summer the year before. By third year, my scholarship was in jeopardy, and I needed every minute of every day to save it.

I spent all my free hours in the Camford Library once more—not our room this time, and certainly not on the roof. I found my own corner, an alcove overlooking the atrium, where I could see the students come and go and nobody ever looked up to see me. The only person who knew I was there was Grimoire, and he would move past me with barely a nod, pausing only to quietly deposit a book on my table that I hadn't known I needed. There were no more friendships, no spiralling late-night conversations, definitely no excursions across the Oxbridge to chase imps in the night. Every fibre of thought was spun into essays and practical tests and independent research, and if those studies were a little dull now that my sole focus was trying to give Camford what it wanted, at least nobody was going to get hurt this time. I had broken enough rules, pushed the bounds of magic far enough. Two men were dead.

I earned my Merlin Scholarship, against all odds. I earned my master's in the magical arts. I started a PhD, focusing on summoning spells of the late eighteenth century. Theoretical magic, a fresh take in a well-explored field. I was now shrewd enough to know that Camford would not grant a scholarship to a scholar who wasn't Family to study practical spellcraft, however high her marks had become, and certainly not to attempt anything revolutionary. There was no way my blood could be strong enough—and if it was, they wouldn't trust it. My success was measured by how well I could assimilate myself into Camford despite my shortcomings. I couldn't afford to challenge it, and after Ashfield I didn't want to. I wanted to belong to this old world of dusty tomes and ancient stone. I especially wanted nothing more to do with faeries.

I started to believe that the summer at Ashfield and everything that had come before it had been a dream. It had been such a different time, when the long dark nightmare of the Great War was still a fresh scar on our minds. It had been a new, bright world, a world that had been smashed apart and that so many were determined to put back in a different shape. Now the pieces had fallen to earth, and already many had settled into old familiar grooves. Camford had done exactly what it had hoped to do and survived the social upheaval intact. My students today barely remembered what the generation before them was trying to forget. It was easy to consign that summer and even my friends to the same forgetfulness.

But now one of the three locks had been broken, and it had been Hero who had broken it. I couldn't ignore, anymore, what that meant. It meant that the voice I had been trying to silence for eight years had been right, and we were all in terrible trouble.

Camford, unsurprisingly, was not on the telephone. The nature of the door meant it didn't receive letters or telegrams either; even to send a raven meant smuggling the poor bird into Oxford under your coat. The lack of communication was irritating, but it was surprising how infrequently it mattered. Camford really was its own little world. Sometimes I went weeks without leaving its grounds and never even noticed.

Today, though, Camford was very much interested in the outside world, and I was at a disadvantage, having had a lecture to finish before I could get free. By the time I stepped through the door, both the Oxford and Cambridge phones were being used by students and staff talking in low, serious voices. I had to go out into the streets and find a public telephone box in Cambridge to make my call to the Boardroom.

"May I speak to the minister for magical enforcement, please?" I said, when I finally got a voice at the end of the crackling line.

The woman sounded flustered, and I could only imagine the chaos pressing in at her back. This was probably the worst day they'd had since the war ended. "He's very busy, I'm afraid. I can check with him. Who should I say is calling?"

"Tell him it's Clover Hill." I paused, hesitating. "Tell him I can call on him in person if it's easier."

Telephones, after all, were hardly amenable to private conversation. Half the Board would be listening in impatiently on this line right now.

"I doubt it will be." I couldn't tell if that was meant to be helpful or condescending, and it didn't matter. I'd learned long ago that I wasn't going to get far in the magical world if I stumbled over every perceived slight. "Hold, please."

I held.

When she came back, the woman's voice was faintly surprised. "He says he'd be happy to meet you this evening, if you'd like to call at his apartment around six o'clock. Would that be convenient?"

It would be a long drive from Oxford, where my car was parked, and it would mean missing an afternoon tutorial. I didn't hesitate. I doubted my students would be very interested in discussing magical history today anyway.

"Tell Mr. Lennox-Fontaine I'll be there," I said.

I hadn't seen Alden in six years. It had been at graduation, a drizzly grey afternoon lining up in the Great Hall to have our bachelors of magic conferred. We still hadn't really spoken since Ashfield, but what had begun as mutual burning resentment had mellowed into cool civility. He had kept things from us; while I hadn't quite forgiven him for that, neither could I wholly blame him when I had willingly taken the risk and Matthew's curse had been broken as a result. On his part, I knew he hadn't forgiven me for closing the gate and leaving Thomas on the other side. I don't think he ever quite believed I would have done the same had Matthew been at stake. And yet he had never turned the school against me, as he could have done, and he treated me with courtesy when we met in public. I hoped he had come to understand that I had done what I had to do.

I watched him walk across the stage that day, golden and glowing; he would have watched me too, neat and serious in my green dress and hired robes. (I had learned to dress myself by then, but I will never have Hero's style.) We exchanged brief congratulations at the reception afterwards, tentative, as though we barely knew each other. I had been surprised to hear he wasn't coming back for postgraduate study, and even more so to hear that his father had a job lined up for him on the Board of Magical Regulation.

"And… you want to work there?" I asked.

He shrugged. "There's nothing else I'd rather do. I might as well make my father happy for a change."

I understood the veiled reprimand. Alden had never cared about research for the sake of it. His only ambition had been to save Thomas, and I had thwarted it.

"It's interesting, isn't it?" he said, and he genuinely did sound interested, rather than bitter. "Of all of us, you're the one who got everything you wanted in the end. You didn't even have to give up Camford."

My hands curled into fists of my own accord; I forced myself to draw a breath and release it. He had no idea what I had given up, and I couldn't expect him to, since I had never told him.

Alden had done well in government, to nobody's surprise. He was clever and charming, as he had warned me once, and that, along with his wealth and his Family name, had taken him where he needed to go. In the last Board shuffle he had come out as minister for magical enforcement, a position only a few tantalising steps below the first minister. There were rumours that he would be taking those few steps very soon. I wasn't interested in politics—especially magical politics, which as far as I could see meant nothing at all outside the Families—and I saw it all as a tremendous waste of potential. Research was where he had flourished, and he could have done great things rather than legislated them. There was no doubt he was an important person, though, as such things were reckoned, and a successful one. Exactly the sort of person to one day inherit Ashfield—although, from what I heard, he was scarcely ever there now.

The penthouse flat in Mayfair that I came to that evening was about as different from Ashfield as it was possible to be while still boasting the same wealth and status. It was the flip side of the gold coin: sparse and stainless and shining, where Ashfield was steeped in tradition, all polished metal and white marble and glass. It certainly wasn't as welcoming. I rode the gleaming elevator to the top with folded arms, afraid that everything I looked at would spontaneously smudge.

To my surprise, Alden answered the door himself.

"Clover." Even guarded as it was, his voice—warm, light, a verbal patch of sunlight—was just how I remembered it. I hadn't known what kind of welcome to expect, and this was better than I had anticipated. "Come in. How are you?"

He had aged well but visibly—more visibly than I had imagined. His marble face had sharpened and thinned, an impression aided by the crisp cut of his suit and the more severe slicked-down part of his curls. Their gold was threaded through with the occasional streak of premature silver now, and there were fine lines at the corners of his mouth and eyes like flaws in porcelain. He could have passed for a good deal older than the twenty-seven I knew he was. He was still, regrettably, achingly beautiful. I was no longer an eighteen-year-old girl awed by glamour and class, but I had to take a moment to remind myself of this for the first time in a while.

"I'm well, thank you," I answered him automatically, as if talking to some friendly stranger—or, perhaps, to the minister for magical enforcement. "How are you?"

"Oh, fine." His mouth twisted in the familiar self-deprecating smile, and my heart gave a treacherous little jump to attention. "Busy. It's the election next month, you know. And of course there's this business with Hero, which I assume is the reason you've come to see me."

I smiled back ruefully, against my will. "It is."

"You'd better come inside."

The sitting room looked larger than the entire flat had any right to be—a wide expanse of white and gold, with a circular staircase curving up to a second floor. Alden gestured for me to sit on a long green velvet couch and sat down himself in the armchair opposite. The lightness left his manner as he did so. I saw the extra years settle on him, or perhaps it was the extra responsibility. Perhaps it was just the first chance he'd had to sit down all day.

"I can't tell you much more than the papers reported, I'm afraid," he said, without further preamble. "You'll have heard about Lord Beresford."

I didn't mince words either. "They're saying Hero murdered him and broke the Berlin lock. How? What happened?"

"They found his body in his study, at their apartment in Berlin. We don't know how she did it, not yet. A curse of some kind."

"It can't be true. Hero wouldn't murder anyone. Self-defence, possibly…"

I could see that—Hero straight-backed and cool, pointing a pistol at a highwayman on the road at night. Or defence of someone else, that too made sense. Hero would tear the sky down for the few people she truly loved. She wasn't a murderer.

"Perhaps it was self-defence," Alden reminded me. "Perhaps her husband caught her in his study, and she had no choice. Or perhaps the murder was committed by someone else entirely—an accomplice, or somebody threatening her. We won't know until we find her. Whatever else may be in doubt, she did break the German lock afterwards. Her husband's ring opened the door, and she was seen leaving the building. Nobody's seen her since. The assumption is that she's headed to Paris, then London."

"To break the other two locks."

"She won't get that far. Every mage in Europe is after her now. There are armies waiting at both sites."

"What are the orders? To kill her?"

"If we have to." He pinched the bridge of his nose. "I don't want it to happen either, Clover. You know that, don't you?"

"Of course I do! That's why—" I hesitated. "Can I speak freely?"

"Why do you think I haven't offered you tea? I gave all the servants the evening off when I knew you were coming. Hold on, though." He muttered something under his breath, and his right ring finger and left little finger joined together. A very neat silencing charm; I noted the faint echo as the air around us closed. I thought of the one he had cast around us that morning under the tree by the stables, all those years ago. "There. Just in case anyone's listening at keyholes, literally or metaphorically. Go on. I suspect I know what you're about to say."

"This is our project at Ashfield again," I said. "Isn't it? Hero is breaking the seals because she wants to open a faerie door."

"I don't know. Truly."

"If you had to guess."

"I would guess the same as you do," he conceded. "If Hero has refined the double-door method, then she can bargain for anything she wants, as long as she can open a door. The trouble is, faerie country truly is sealed, since you closed the Ashfield door. If she wanted to deal, she would first have to break those seals open."

There was just a hint of recrimination in his voice, the first since I had come in. I ignored it. "But why? Hero was never interested in faerie magic, in a practical sense. She thought it was too dangerous, and what happened at Ashfield proved her right. What would possess her to take a risk like that again?"

"I don't know," he repeated. "I could suggest a few things, but I'd be speculating. Hero made it very clear that she held me responsible for that night at Ashfield and wanted nothing more to do with me. I haven't spoken to her since before she was married."

Married to Lord Beresford. One of the very few men in England who had access to the Berlin lock. Had she been planning this, even then? Or had she pieced it together later, as the opportunities arose? Was this a plan years in the making, or a desperate flight?

I couldn't even speculate. I knew nothing about what Hero's life had become in the years since we were undergraduates and the world, broken as it was, was all before us to make new.

"We need to tell them," I said into the silence that followed. "I don't mean we need to make it public—as few as possible is fine. But the Board, the first minister, the Faculty, anyone who needs to know. We need to tell them what we did at Ashfield."

He didn't pretend to be surprised. He must have known when I had called what I had come to say. "Would it really help? Whatever Hero is trying to do, it's unlikely she'll succeed in breaking all three locks. Not with the forces of the magical world against her."

"She obviously thinks she can. And what if she does manage it? What if the double door fails and that dryad comes through again? Hero won't be able to hold it back, especially not on her own. She'll be killed, or enchanted, and then it will be loose in the world. We can't take that risk."

"Everyone knows about Amiens already. Everyone knows the dangers of a faerie incursion. If the dryad breaks through, knowing that we nearly let it through once before will scarcely help."

"We're scholars, Alden. It's not our job to keep back information that might be important."

"You may be a scholar," he said dryly. "I'm a politician. We keep back information all the time."

I refused to smile. "I can tell the Faculty, if you like, and they'll pass the information on to the Board. But I think it would be quicker and simpler if it came from you, the minister for magical enforcement. Soon to be more, I'm told, after the election."

"It's too soon to say," he said absently, on reflex. "The votes will be very close. Certainly not if I tell them I opened a faerie door when I was eighteen and two Family members died as a result."

"Is that really what matters to you?"

"No." He looked at me properly, perhaps for the first time since I arrived. "Of course not. You know me better than that."

I did. Alden had never cared about position in Camford; I couldn't imagine he cared about it now. The trouble was, I no longer knew what he cared about instead.

"You can blame me, if you'd rather." The thought of my academic career, my little rooms in Chancery Hall, my family, all crossed my mind in a painful wash like acid. I blinked them away. I had been thinking of those the entire road down. This was more important. "Tell them I did it."

"You would really let them think that?" It was difficult to read his face. "You know they'd come down harder on you than on me—though God knows they'd be hard enough on us both if this went to the courts. And there may be consequences for your brother."

"I'll deal with those, if they happen." Sam Wells was still working for the Board, albeit in a capacity that was little more than a clerk. He would do everything he could to protect Matthew, I felt sure. They still hadn't spoken since the war, but Sam asked after him all the time.

Alden appeared to come to a decision. "Very well. We'll tell them."

I blinked. Somehow, I realised, I had never expected him to agree.

"Really?"

"Really. Don't tell anyone yourself, not yet. I'll speak to the first minister in confidence tonight. For what it's worth, I think he'll keep both our names out of it. Nobody wants a scandal this close to elections, and all that rubbish."

I didn't like the political gloss that cast on matters, but I had to admit to a flicker of relief. I had spent years getting to where I was and carving out a life for myself there. I was willing to throw it away, truly; that didn't mean I was eager.

"Thank you. It's the right thing to do, Alden." I felt compelled to keep convincing him, even though he had made up his mind. "It isn't just the danger to the world, you know. We need to stop her before she gets into serious trouble. This is Hero, for God's sake."

Something shifted in my mind all at once. I'd been focused, since I'd heard the news, on the problem at hand, the dangers and the hard, necessary steps we needed to take to make sure what we had done all those years ago would cause no further harm. Now the thought of Hero Hartley broke through, the Hero I had known and loved all those years ago. Hero at Corbett's luncheon the first time we had met, white and gold in a sea of grey. On the library roof, braced like an explorer against the sky, her long hair spilling down her back. Curled up on the rug by my bed, reading Rebecca West by lamplight and laughing her generous laugh at what had happened in class that morning. At Ashfield, stretched out on the grass on those impossibly hot afternoons as the sky went on forever. My heart ached as though it were trying to snap in two.

"I wish she'd told me what she was planning," I said, without knowing I was going to. "I wish she'd told me anything, ever."

"So do I." Alden's voice was softer than it had been. "But it isn't your fault."

"Isn't it?" I'd had a long drive to think about that too. "We just left each other alone after that night. I know we were all angry and bitter, but we were friends. We should have tried to make amends. Instead we all went our separate ways, we barely looked at one another after we came back to Camford, like first-years after a regrettable one-night stand, and I can't help but wonder if we—well, if I at least knew something like this would happen and was trying not to see."

"You would never do that," Alden said firmly. "You always looked at things directly. It was one of the things I admired about you. If anyone's to blame, it's me. I've known Hero my entire life. I was the one who should have seen if there was something awry. But as you said: We all went our separate ways afterwards. I haven't seen Hero for years—nor Eddie, for that matter."

"No. I heard he was living up in Scotland, a few years back…"

"He still is." Alden sat back. "In a cottage his family own. I called on him once, after graduation. He's happy enough. Eddie never really did like the world—or Camford. You're not planning to make him a part of this, are you?"

I shook my head. "No. It wouldn't be fair. He didn't do anything except try to help us—help me , if that's the way you want to play it."

"Even if I did, they'd never believe it," he said, with a ghost of his old smile. "The door is at Ashfield. It may be closed for good now, but there's enough of it left to read. If anyone goes near it, they'll see it was opened long before you even knew magic existed. We're in this together, Clover Hill."

The teasing familiarity of my full name steadied something unexpectedly. Everything felt real, for the first time since the news about Hero had broken, perhaps for the first time since Ashfield, and it was world-ending and disastrous but reassuring too. We had been pretending for years that none of it mattered. Now we knew it did.

The sky was darkening by the time I left. Alden offered to walk me down to my car, which was parked outside on the road. He offered to take me somewhere for dinner too, but I told him I had to drive back to Oxford. As surreal as it seemed, I was giving a lecture the next morning, and I still had notes to go over if I wasn't going to be arrested.

"I read your paper last month on summoning charms," he said. "It was excellent, as always. You're no longer working on faerie curses?"

"It didn't seem the path to a great career, when nobody would publish it," I said dryly. I was taken aback that he had known about it, much less read it. "Besides, I started to research those to help Matthew. He's been doing very well lately."

"I'm glad to hear it. He married, didn't he?"

"Yes. He and Jemima. They have a little girl now—Rose. Holly and Mary are both married now too. Iris is at university in Manchester, training to be a doctor, and Little John's working on the farm."

"Good." He said it absently. He never met my family, after all. "That summer was the best time of my life," Alden said, out of nowhere.

I found a laugh, though my throat had tightened. "You were sleepwalking most nights. We all thought you were losing your mind."

"Oh, I was. But I was used to those nights at Ashfield. I didn't mind them that year, because for the first time it seemed it might be over soon. And when the nights faded and the sun came up, there were the three of you. You know, after my brother, you three are the only people I've ever loved."

"Yes." I could have said more. I didn't have to. He understood.

"Telephone me from Oxford tomorrow morning," he said, before I got in my car. "I'll have news for you. I'll handle this, I promise."

It was the last time I believed him about anything.