‘I—’
Black baubles burst in her vision.
‘Archie,’ said Martha, crossing the room, ‘you’ve upset her.’
‘I—’
Martha reached for her daughter but, as she did, Dot slid from the wall and collided with the floor.
When Dot awoke, she was in her bed and the moon was high. Her faculties were foggy and it took her a moment to remember: the trawler, the argument, the panic crashing upon her like great tidal waves. Distantly, she heard the rumble of the ocean. Dot glanced at the clock. It was just past midnight.
Fatigue weighed on every fibre of her. It was almost impossible to roll over – almost impossible to reach for her tonic. She did it anyway, wincing, forcing her aching arm through the air until she clasped the phial. She drank a mouthful and relished the burn.
The doctors had never formally diagnosed her. One had said it was neurasthenia. Another had told her she had Bellastor’s disease. Another had said it was entirely imaginary.
There would be no trip to the South Pole with Archie. Dot realised now that she had been quite stupid to even consider it given the odd animosity between her father and grandfather. It was a peripheral thing, existing in the subtext of clipped sentences. Perhaps it was something to do with her grandmother’s death; perhaps they were simply too different. If something wereto happen to her while on Archie’s ship, her father would never forgive him.
The tonic warmed Dot’s belly. Some of the heaviness lifted, and she looked around her childhood room. She drew back the curtain and peeked at the oil-black river flowing into the ocean. The silhouette of a lonely water bird pecked at the sandy bank. This was Dot’s home. She loved her family. She belonged here. Shewasgrateful.
But she could not stand another moment in this cottage.
Dot padded out of the room, down the hall and into the kitchen. The fire glowed within its hearth. With some difficulty, she filled a copper kettle and heaved it over the embers. The paper-wrapped package of ambergris left by her grandfather was still sitting on the counter. She took it, and all the little phials of tonic from thecupboard beside the sink, and the packets of leftover ingredients: lavender, chantarelle, crushed cockles, garlic. They would all be needed when she brewed her next batch. When the kettle had heated, she brought it into her room and poured it into the basin that sat on her bureau. Dot washed herself quickly, shivering between wipes of the cotton cloth in the dim lamplight. Once she was done, she pulled on her trousers, a shirt and her wool coat, feeling damp and sickly.
Dot tugged the carpet bag out from beneath her bed. She folded the last of her practical clothing: felted skirts, darned stockings, modest blouses and woollen jumpers, all grey and brown and beige. Into the bag they went. Dot wedged in the package from Archie and the spare ingredients and the phials of tonic, methodically checking that the stoppers were in place. In went her journal. Her toothbrush. Her headache tablets and hand cream and every single item she could possibly need. She had dreamed of this moment ever since she had first purchased the blurry photograph from the carpet seller. She now plucked that image from the wall and stared at it for one longing moment.
It was her only evidence of the existence of the tea shop.
Dot placed the photograph carefully in her journal. Then, she made her bed and straightened her things and fluffed her pillows and looked around at the shabbiness that had raised her. She would be back. After all, she was cut from the cloth of this grey little town where it snowed half the year, where the bellow of the ocean was audible from every room in every cottage. She was a thing of sand and sea foam and summers spent catching crickets in the river grass.
Dot closed her bedroom door. She tiptoed past Celia’s room and the room that had once been Willard’s. She drew her fingers along the walls that had watched her carry in pinecones to paint for the winter festival and a baby seagull she had saved from the neighbour’s cat.
This was not a family where people ran away. This, she knew, was a betrayal.
Dot turned to the entry table, holding the letter she had scribbled on her twenty-third birthday a few months prior. She had written and rewritten that same letter every few weeks for the past several years. Each time she had burned her goodbyes and congratulated herself for abstaining from this ridiculous daydream. For who would travel all the way to the city of Alliaster in search of a place and person that couldn’t possibly exist?
Yet, as Dot scrubbed tea cups in the Divers’ Café sink day after day, her thoughts had always returned to the photograph that the carpet seller had promised was indeedofthattea shop.
Dot set her letter down on the table.
The first train would be due just before dawn in the next town over, and it would be a very long walk for her. She opened the door to a night sky boundless and scattered with stars.
Dorothy Louise Walcott stood in the doorway.
Something within her pleaded for her to go back inside and to burn this letter like all the others, but then she heard the rush of the waves and remembered that day, so many years prior, drowning, suspended in the liminality between life and violent nothing. A voice had spoken to her in the dark: deep, feminine, ethereal and echoing.
Dot shivered. She stepped outside and closed the door behind her.
That day when she was fourteen, she had felt the crackle in her fingertips, a feeling so innate it was more like a memory than a discovery. A mistake had been made; a bargain struck; the sound of Emily’s screams still pierced her nightmares, but the result of all of it?
Dot had woken on the sand of the beach quite certain she had the proclivity for magic. Now she set off into the world, seeking, at long last, the woman who could teach her how to use it.
CHAPTERTWO
Lio should never have returned to Caelin Forest. That had become clear the moment he stepped out from the portal, felt the crunch of bracken and dead brambles beneath his brogues and saw, at long last, the tombstone of the only woman he had ever loved and, immediately after, the three crones who haunted her grave. The nightmare tableau engulfed him – the almost forgotten smell of pine and wet earth, the bell-like call of the birds, the steepled canvas tents and the faces of those three witches aged as if with chisels and sandpaper in the intervening years since he had seen them last. Now, with sickening familiarity did the remembrance flood back.
‘Lio?’
Catherine Weyer’s voice was a trough of cold water that drenched him. Robert Liutprand Lashkari stumbled backward, cast a portal and then dove inside, his heart thundering in his chest as he soared through the whirling darkness, darting with grace through a black sea of distant starbursts and sundered spells.
