I scattered a few notebooks on the round wrought-iron table and stared at them, pen in hand and cup of tea growing cold. I made a list of factors, random elements to the story that I could not piece together yet. I recorded all I could remember of Wake, and every fraction of memory I had gleaned from the office. I made a timeline of events, with gaps and questionsand possibilities. And I made a list of my options on a small paper, kept from the breeze by a spoon.
All the while, the river flowed by. On the far side lay Old Harrow and a great clocktower, its façade and clockface decorated in the windblown, wave-washed style of Old Harrow and its former Entwined rulers. There, dancing women in gold and pastels and drapes of gossamer were captured behind elaborate clock hands, glinting in the sunlight.
A quarter past the hour sounded with one sweet note. The water rushed beneath, grey-blue beyond a white stone balustrade. This was the nicest part of the river, with the industrial docks and their smoke and unappealing barges far out of sight. Here, instead of dockworkers and fishmongers, fine ladies twirled their parasols, and men sat under shoe-shiners’ umbrellas. Nurses from the tall, graceful homes up by the palace—the palace where the Grand General refused to reside, preferring a town house among his subjects—guided pink-cheeked children by the hand.
Here, today, it was hard to imagine bombings and hangings. Here, life waltzed determinedly on.
It was as I contemplated this foolishness, eyes focused on the middle-distance over the river, that I saw Madge.
The world retreated until all I could see was my eldest sister. She strode along the riverside on the arm of an older, grey-haired gentleman with a vicious-looking walking stick. The man wore a short collar, his bare throat exposed to the light. That was shocking, both on the level of fashion and common sense, but it was Madge’s throat that captured me.
Above the Guild medallion that both she and her companion wore, Madge’s fine Golden threads twined in the daylight. They framed her strong, square-jawed face and entwined her neck, exposed to the stares of the crowd. She made no attempt to hide them from the light, wearing no collar and only a silken scarf, low on the collarbone, in a cursory salute to modesty.
Madge. Madge was here. I had not seen her since my engagement, before Lewis and Pretoria had helped me escape the Guild. She looked older, her cheeks a little thinner, her lips a little tighter, her waist a little broader. But her eyes, theywere the very same—the chill, haunting blue of my deadly, indomitable eldest sister.
I was not the only one who had marked her. The crowd parted like water around a rock. Madge watched them go, her gaze roaming face to face from beneath the brim of her grey, feathered cartwheel hat.
People turned away. No one in their right mind wanted a mage with golden threads to remember their face. Then she might paint them, stealing a memory, an emotion, a piece of themselves, as unwilling payment.
This, naturally, was a distortion of the truth, propagated by the Lusterless’s—humans with no threads or magic, as termed by the Guild—general fear and ignorance of Entwined powers. In truth, Madgecouldsteal memory and emotion, locking it into uncannily lifelike portraits, but only if her subject was physically present as she painted.
Some exposed themselves to her power willingly, secreting away their pain and sorrows and regrets into portraits of unparalleled beauty and poignancy. Others, like those bound to a chair at the Guild’s command to have a specific memory or tendency erased, might not be so enthused.
My nerves, already overtaxed, jangled. I dropped my chin so the brim of my hat shielded my face and watched the hem of Madge’s forest-green walking suit pass out of sight. Only then did I raise my head a fraction, reach for my pen and scrawl on my list of random, uncategorical factors:
Madge is in Harrow.
A Note to the Reader:
An Account of Multiple Abductions
The Guild came for my sisters and I many times. Due to my mother’s occupation, we were frequently abroad, and this served my mother’s goal of evading the Guild Inquisitors quite well. Therefore, I was six years old by the time an Inquisitor managed to cross our path for long enough to steal Madge.
We were on the temperate, windy coast of Oanse at that time. My mother was smoothing a rocky agreement of some dull nature between Oanse and the Guild, and her then husband, a distractable Copper with no interest in the offspring of his wife’s previous unions, allowed the Guild right into our rented seaside manor while she was away at court.
I remember the moment well. The three of us were engaged in domestic training under our governess. Pretoria and I were embroidering. Madge was drawing, as usual, in the light of a glassless window, the salt breeze stirring the ends of her tight blonde ringlets. Our governess was, ostensibly, preparing our next lesson (in actuality, she was flirting with a local shepherdess over the edge of the balcony).
A door slammed off in the house. Pretoria pricked her finger in startlement and, cursing, threw her embroidery on the floor. I glanced from it to her in horror—I enjoyed embroidery, in all honesty, and was quite taken with my own pattern of flowers and birds in flight.
The parlor door opened. A woman stood there in a travelling gown of reddish tweed, tightly buttoned and fitted like a glove. There was a medallion at her throat, and a briefcase in her hand.
I sensed immediately what she was. It was in the way Pretoria’s eyes shot to the balcony as if she intended to escape, and the slow way Madge rose from her stool, folding her hands before her skirts in acquiescence.
Between the Inquisitor’s high, laced boots and my silk slippers, Pretoria’s embroidery lay discarded on the floor.Help me, it read in careless stitches.
(I wish I could laugh at that particular aspect of the memory, but even these many years removed, I cannot.)
At four years my senior, Madge was already two years past the age when Guild parents were required to submit their Entwined progeny. Pretoria was several months short of that ominous birthday which would make her a candidate, and was spared only by that technicality.
Before my mother returned, Madge was gone, bundled into a coach and off on a ship. The way my mother wailed when she learned the truth—it is scarred into my mind. It was a shattering, a breaking. A tearing of the soul. She immediately orchestrated our transfer and left her negligent husband behind.
They came for Pretoria at the appropriate time, three months later. My mother was present, in a lofty, sprawling apartment in Castenfal, on the Continent. She saw the Inquisitor in the dining room, while a maid bundled Pretoria and I out the back door and took us for a walk. This walk ended at a cable car, which deposited us at a mountain chalet for several weeks until my mother could risk retrieving us. Bribes paid, excuses made, she had bought us another season. Another scattering of precious months.
I was not there the day my mother’s scheming finally failed and Pretoria was whisked away. I returned from a walk with one of the maids to find her sitting listless on the floor beside Pretoria’s bed, the veins about her eyes burst from strain and tears, and chunks of her hair scattered across the floor.
I had thrown myself into her lap and cried the tears sheno longer could. She simply held me, another third of her soul broken upon the floor. Her grip was loose, gentle. She did not speak.
By the time the Guild came for me, my mother had begun to come unhinged. I saw it in the increase of her flirtations. I saw it in how constantly she rejected her latest assigned husband, refusing to beget any more children for the Guild to steal. She drank too much, laughed too loud, and began to send me away for longer periods of time, as if she had already lost me.
