A Breath of Frost (37 page)

And he had enough to worry about with keeping Emma from the Order and the Order from Emma, never mind his five wild sisters. Emma couldn’t have killed those girls. He knew it in his bones. But that wasn’t nearly good enough for the Order or the magisters. They’d had fits over the name of Lovegrove and yet he still couldn’t find anyone with any relevant details. The return of the Greymalkin family certainly wasn’t encouraging them to be more forthcoming. And if the Order ever realized the Greymalkin had showed any interest at all in Emma,
she’d be bound and her spirit-deer trapped in a bottle before she could blink.

He’d seen what happened to witches when their familiars were bound. Her mother was proof enough of the danger.

The hell he was going to let that happen to Emma.

He would be banished. They couldn’t bind him, not like the others. But he’d sworn to serve the Order above all else and the magisters would punish him severely if they discovered his weakness. He was risking bringing dishonor on his family, on his forefathers who had served for centuries.

All for her.

They’d think him bewitched. There was no denying she was somehow connected to the murders. He’d seen how she was dragged to the victims and only magic could accomplish that. So for all their sakes they had to figure it out—and soon. He knew the Order and for all their sterling qualities, they were traditional to the point of blindness. They held to the sins of the fathers, and they didn’t forgive. If the Sisters ever broke their pattern, the Order would be irrevocably lost about how to stop them.

Cormac hurried down the gangplank to the dark blue hull. The white scrollwork glowed and the bottled eyes watched his every step, finally glancing away when they recognized him. The colorful blown glass witch balls clinked together overhead like icicles. He didn’t go toward the ladder to the magister’s hall where Emma had been dragged. The meetings were held in the captain’s quarters on deck. A wind-witch winked at him as he passed, the wind-knots at her belt and in her hair floating in a
breeze that never seemed to abandon her completely. He winked back. He might be distracted, but pretty girls should never be ignored.

“Cormac.” Ian, a fellow Keeper, was leaning against the wall just inside the door. “Thought you’d forgotten about us, mate.”

“Sisters,” he replied. “Mine, that is.”

The cabin was polished oak from ceiling to floor and every piece of furniture in between. Iron nails gleamed, as much to secure the tables and chairs to the floor in a storm as for the metal’s magical qualities. The iron wheel was painted on the ceiling, surrounded by stars. Rum bottles filled with salt sat in every corner. The sideboard was covered with platters of cheese, dark bread, currant tarts, meat pies, and fresh strawberries next to decanters of wine. Silver urns filled with tea and coffee, with spouts shaped into open-mouthed gargoyles, hulked on either end.

On the main table was a large painted map of London. Cormac had a similar one hidden inside his coat pocket. He’d have to memorize the Order’s additions to keep his up to date. He wasn’t as inflexible as they were, and perfectly willing to accept the help of girls, Madcaps, and witches without a penny or a pedigree.

There were a dozen Keepers scattered around Lord Mabon, the current head of the Order. Directly beneath him in power was Daphne’s father, the First Legate. “Doesn’t his daughter fancy you?” Ian asked nodding to him.

“All the girls fancy Cormac,” Oliver Blake interrupted amiably. “Damn your eyes.”

Cormac just shrugged. He knew better than to say that he found Daphne boring. In fact, he was finding every girl he met who wasn’t Emma, boring. He’d never live it down if word got out. Never mind his friends, his sisters would be merciless. “Any news?” he asked.

Ian shook his head. “They still can’t figure out what the Sisters are keeping the stolen magic for. It’s making them downright vulgar.”

“Ho, Cormac.” Virgil smiled snidely. “Taking up with a Lovegrove now. She seems just your type. Like her mother, she’s too crazy to care that you haven’t got an ounce of magic.”

Cormac wasn’t even aware of moving. Anger propelled him and suddenly Oliver was holding him back and Virgil was wiping blood off his nose. His own cravat was loose and he was breathing roughly, fists clenched. Virgil took a swing in retaliation but Cormac moved aside, still vibrating with adrenaline. The simple evasion infuriated Virgil more than the punch had.

“She’s got bad blood, just like you,” he spat.

This time it took both Ian and Oliver to hold Cormac back. The other Keepers turned to them, disapprovingly. Magic slammed the door shut and flung Virgil and Cormac apart.

“I thought you were men, not little boys,” one of the older Keepers snapped. “You should have outgrown this childish behavior by now.”

“And we have more serious problems,” Daphne’s father added sternly. Cormac and Virgil bowed to him in mute apology.

“Cross me again and I’ll call you out, whatever the rules say
about it,” Cormac promised Virgil silkily, smiling a mad kind of smile. Keepers were forbidden from dueling each other on the ship and while out on any official business of the Order. Virgil stomped off to the other side of the cabin. The ship rolled soothingly beneath their feet. “I’m pretty sure I’m going to have to punch him again,” Cormac said. At least Virgil would assume Cormac had reacted to the accusation of having bad blood, instead of the slight on Emma’s name, which was the real reason his temper had snapped.

“I’d bet on it,” Ian agreed.

“We’ve had good progress in reclaiming and reanimating the gargoyles,” Lord Mabon was saying. “The gates are trickier. We’ve closed five of them so far. They appear at random and only stay open until the next sunrise or sunset.” A scribe took notes at his left elbow, the scratch of his quill somnolent and steady. “We are, however, no closer to determining
why
the Sisters are back and to what purpose they are killing.”

“For the pleasure of it?” someone suggested. “Do they need another reason?”

“For this many murders, and of young witches in particular, there is most definitely another reason,” the First Legate said. “They are stooping to stealing the life force of rats and birds and people already dying. They clearly want to recorporealize and quickly.” He sounded frustrated. Cormac realized how afraid he must be for his own daughter. “We’ve been through the Greymalkin family tree exhaustively and we can find no record of a son born to the line since the Revolution in France. They cut off that one’s head and then the Sisters were banished
to the Underworld. Whoever this new descendant is, he’s fiendishly clever. But none of our soothsayers can locate him.”

“We’ve bound the tombs and the witch bottles of the old Greymalkin witches we already know about,” Lord Mabon explained. “But we can’t know how many were buried secretly. As you know, they say the cellar of the Greymalkin House is built with the bones of their dead.” He pushed his wine glass away in disgust.

“And though we’re doing the best we can, it’s not good enough. Not nearly good enough.”

The next evening
Emma went back home when her father was out at his club. It gave her the opportunity to rifle through his desk and sort through boxes. She told Jenkins she needed to pack extra items for school. He complimented her on her curtsy, having no idea she was learning to fry ghouls with lightning and duck boiled beets.

She searched everywhere, trying to find hidden journals or mentions of any scandal involving a man named Ewan. All to no avail. She found boring speeches her father was writing for Parliament, household accounts, and a list of sheep-shearers to be hired for the country estate, but nothing remotely magical, and nothing about an antlered man.

On her way back to the academy, she ran through everything she knew, which admittedly wasn’t much. She hadn’t been able to decipher her mother’s rhymes, and though the
Witch’s
Debrett’s
listed every witch’s familiar along with their title, there were simply too many bears and serpents, and no lions at all. She felt as though there was something important hovering just out of reach. Something important that she already knew but didn’t
know
she knew. It nagged at her like a splinter.

Gold is good, silver’s better. The lion stalks the maiden fair, when the bear leaves his lair. But where the hunter goes, only the serpent knows
.

It sounded like a country song one might hear at a fair. She’d read enough books in the school library to understand that gold represented the sun and silver the moon, but it didn’t explain her mother’s rhyme. Oak trees were dedicated to Thor the thunder god and Brigid the Irish goddess of poetry; they were also sacred to the druids. Emma was fairly certain her mother wasn’t a druid. Did druids even exist anymore? She tried to recall if any of the doors in the Berkshire house were made of oak.

Ten minutes later, as the carriage drew near a clogged road full of other carriages waiting for guests at a ball, Emma was no nearer to figuring anything out. And she had a headache for her troubles.

Although, come to think of it, the tree in her dream was an oak. And she’d already noticed that it looked like the one painted on her mother’s bedroom wall. To which her mother had added a red bird just like her bound familiar.

Surely that meant something.

But if her mother had hidden her bottle in one of the thousands of oak trees in Windsor Forest alone, never mind Britain, it was hopeless.

The carriage tilted dangerously, wheels creaking. Emma had to brace herself on the wall as the lantern swung, black smoke staining the curtains. She could hear the coachman shouting to the horses and then the wind was too loud to hear anything else. It rocked the carriage back and forth, whirling inside and pulling at her. The tassels on the cushions whipped her legs.

When the coachman stopped, she stumbled outside. The wind went with her and the sudden gust knocked him right off his seat. He sprawled on the sidewalk, his greatcoat flapping like wings. He was hidden in the shadows, other drivers had no reason to look back this way. The wind clung to Emma alone. It was still a calm spring evening around the house with the music and candlelight and girls in pretty dresses.

The coachman was breathing normally, though he was unconscious. Try as she might, she could not reach him. The wind was determined to shove her down the alley, to where a rickety ladder waited.

“Moira?” she called up, squinting through the whirling dust. “Is that you?” She didn’t know anyone else who might be on the roof of a Mayfair town house.

Moira immediately looked over the edge. Her face was so pale she looked like the moon on the horizon of the ledge. “Emma?”

“Yes, are you hurt? Ow.” The wind had tripped her and she cracked her elbow and the inside of her ankle on the ladder.

“It’s not safe!” she said frantically. “Get back!”

The night air clearly had other plans. A wooden crate used to deliver bottles skidded across the ground, slamming into the wall beside Emma. It splintered into pieces.

When she put her foot on the lowest rung, the storm calmed down.

The inside of her mouth felt gritty with dirt and her hair was tangled around her antlers. Muttering, she climbed the ladder, casting another concerned glance at the coachman. He hadn’t moved but he didn’t look hurt, even from this vantage point. Moira however, looked dreadful. She waved her hands desperately. “Stay down there!”

Emma only climbed faster, finally pulling herself over the side. Moira crouched by the body of a girl with reddish-blond hair. A small mouse-familiar raced in circles, flaring red. “Strawberry,” she said dully.

Emma exhaled slowly. “What happened? Let me fetch a doctor.”

“It’s too late for that,” Moira said as Strawberry’s eyes rolled back in her head. “She didn’t want to be alone,” she added, tears running down her cheeks and into her mouth. “I couldn’t save her.”

“Who did this?” Emma asked. “All the way up here?”

“I only saw her running away but it was definitely a girl,” she replied, stroking Strawberry’s forehead. Blood dripped onto the shingles. “Shh, shh. You’re all right, ’Berry.”

“A girl?” Emma murmured as she took her cloak off and bunched it under Strawberry’s head.

Strawberry’s breaths trembled pitifully. “Not your fine cloak, miss. I’m all over with blood.”

“I’m going to find who did this to you,” Moira promised fiercely. “Do you hear me, Strawberry?”

“Never mind,” she replied. “I’ll be a spirit soon and maybe I’ll finally be able to protect
you
, instead of you always protecting me.”

“I couldn’t protect you from this,” Moira said, still stroking her bloodstained hair. “I’m so sorry.” Bruises rose on Strawberry’s neck. Her wrist was bent backward and there were burns on her collarbone. They looked old. Moira frowned. “What are these burns from? I haven’t seen them since you left your mother’s house.” She glanced at Emma. “That was five years ago.”

Strawberry coughed, crying out in pain. She was so thin her bones looked like glass under her pale skin. “I don’t—”

She broke off, falling into unconsciousness. Moira sobbed, dropping her forehead down to touch Strawberry’s. Her long black hair shielded them from Emma.