“He may have suspected,” she said. “Poor man.” Her eyes glistened prettily. “He had many enemies, I’m afraid. It was inevitable in his line of work. But we must put all that behind us. Come, let us go to the carriage.” She cast a slightly disapproving glance at Baldbeak. “Your raven may ride on the roof.”
A spark of hope in the swirling smoke of my thoughts.
“Are you going to help me find my mother?”
“Of course, my dear. I have been looking for her for twenty years, and I’m certainly not going to stop now. Having you is a wonderful gift, and I feel sure that together we will be able to find her now—and her book.” Her lips curved. “We are going to have such a marvelous time.”
PART
TWO
Before the young woman came to the Tower, she was a girl growing up in a grand house that smelled of furniture polish, candle wax, and magic.
She and her sister knew they would be mages one day, like their father, and when they learned their letters from their governess, they pretended they were reciting spells, chasing each other around the school room and terrorizing the poor woman, who only wanted to teach them the alphabet.
When the girl had her eighth birthday, her father brought her into his study. She clutched a baby tooth in her fist that she had lost earlier that day, biting into a green apple. A bright moment of pain, a little blood, and then the tooth, sticking up like an ivory tombstone from the smooth flesh of the fruit. She had taken the tooth to her mother first, who had cried over it—but instead of putting it in the little velvet box where shekept all her daughters’ baby teeth, she had folded it into a little handkerchief and told the girl to take it down to her father: to hold it carefully and, above all, not to lose it.
The girl did not know why this tooth was so significant, but she clutched it so tightly in her hand that her fingernails left little red half-moons on her palm. She padded into the library, where her father worked late into the night, and he pushed back his chair and put her on his lap—a rare privilege. This close, his beard tickled the top of her head, and she could smell cigars and ink on his fine linen shirt.
“Let me tell you about magic,” he said, and she settled herself against him. His thighs were bony and uncomfortable, but she was aware of the great honor it was to sit with him, here, in his sanctum, and so she did not wriggle or complain.
“Ability exists in many,” he said, “but few have the strength and knowledge to actually practice. The power comes from two things: sacrifice, and study.”
She nodded. He had said this many a time before.
“Sacrifice: the renewable parts of the human body, burned or broken as they are used. Teeth. Fingernails, like your sister. And hair. But this sacrifice is useless without study and scholarship. Spells are complicated things, and unwieldy—long, and full of odd details. Sounds that have to be pronounced precisely. A practitioner with sufficient strength and the ability to draw from their body without exhausting it. A book built to contain and channel such a spell. And you cannot cast spells indefinitely. For example, even though mage’s bodies renew at a much faster rate, there are only so many teeth someone can lose at one time.”
She felt about her mouth with her tongue, running across the ridges and valleys of her own teeth—imagining nothing there but bloody sockets.
“Teeth are probably the hardest. Nails and hair are more plentiful and grow faster. And they are less painful to lose. You have lost all your baby teeth now, have you not?”
She nodded. She held out her hand, opening it to reveal the handkerchief and the blood-streaked little prize within. He touched it gently.
“You remember when your first ever baby tooth fell out, don’t you? You were frightened. You thought it meant you were breaking apart.”
“It hurt.”
“All real power does, at first. But see”—he turned it in his fingers so that it shone pearly in the light—“this is a gift. A piece of your body. And it still remembers you.”
He set the tooth on the desk. There was a small spill of ink on the smooth wood. He dipped his finger in the little puddle and drew a circle. He wiped his finger clean with his handkerchief, then drew a volume from the shelf beside him and, flipping to a well-thumbed page, began to read. As the girl watched, the tooth shivered, turned in place like a slow spinning top, and then started to roll clumsily about the desk, following the path of ink.
“It’s alive!” she cried.
“No,” said her father. “Just … obedient.” He watched as the tooth trundled around and around the little circle, senseless and dogged. “This is your essence at work, child. But the spell is mine.”
“But,” said the little girl, furrowing her brow, “you said we must use our own bodies for magic. Our own pain.”
Her father smiled, proud and faintly cruel. “That is what the Temple teaches. And it is true—for the weak. But the strongest mages learn tosteal. You can take the body of another and use its sacrifice in place of your own. If you are clever. If you are careful.”
He spoke one more word, and the little tooth exploded into sparkling dust, giving off a strong smell of burned hair. The little girl almost yelped in surprise, but kept herself still and silent with a great effort, knowing it would please her father.
“Good, good,” he said. “Now that you have left childish things behind, you are ready.”
He stood, gently removing her from his lap, and strode over to one of the bookshelves. He ran his hand along the row of spines, selected one volume, and pulled it out partway. There was a click, a creak, and a section of the shelf swung free. Inside was the secret room that she had always longed to see.
“Teeth, nails, hair. And then there isbonemagic,” he said.
He walked inside, not waiting to see if she would follow, but of course she did. It was a library in miniature, with its own shelves lining the walls, and its own desk. He selected one of the books—a thick tome bound in leather, with gold tooling on the cover. The gold had tarnished, and the paper was singed and crumbling at the edges, stained with ash.
