The name of whatever gutted marine creature Rupert was about to request was lost to the market air. The boy was staring into the crowd, his face drained of colour. He turned to Dot and hissed, ‘We need to leave.’
‘We can’t,’ said Dot. ‘We have to finish the list.’
‘Please—’
‘No,’ said Dot, ‘whatever it is, I’m sureyou’refine.’
And as she spat this, she heard the sharp edge of Willard’s voice escape her lips. Her hand flew to her mouth. She was about to apologise when a nasty shout cut through the throng of shoppers and market stall workers and startled them both.
‘Oi!’
A fierce Leithian woman, with red hair and freckles, in a cheap wool hat and a thin shawl was fighting through the crowd to get to Rupert. Her face was drawn and furious and when she at last pushed through into the empty space before the fishmonger’s, she reached across and smacked Rupert with her purse.
‘Mum,’ said the boy.
‘Where in hell’s name have you been?’ hissed Mrs Armstrong at her son. The fishmonger busied himself with a bowl of anchovies. ‘It’s been two weeks since you’ve been home!’
‘Please don’t.’
‘Don’t?’ Mrs Armstrong glared at Dot. ‘Who’s this slut? How are you paying for her?’
‘Please,’ whispered Rupert. ‘Not here.’
‘Not here?’ scoffed Mrs Armstrong, and then she began in earnest. The woman, who could not have been yet forty, yelled at her son until she was red in the face. While passersby stared or stifled laughs, Mrs Armstrong berated Rupert for his selfishness, hisgreed, his messy room and dirty socks and absolute abandonment of her. She shrieked about his little brother, Finn, who had no one to teach him arithmetic, and his father, who had been skimping on his liver medicine to save the silvers and about herself, too, having to sew and darn until her fingers blistered, all to keep a roof over their heads because her good-for-nothing son was off gadding. All the while, Dot, heart racing, was utterly unable to move.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Rupert over and over, ‘I didn’t mean to, I just—’
Mrs Armstrong slapped him hard across the face.
Dot’s paralysis broke.
In a rush of understanding, Dot saw everything she had hitherto missed. The bruises. The nights he’d turned up at the tea shop late and slept on the sofa. His desperation to learn magic. Dot watched the boy hunch his shoulders, drawing his body smaller and smaller, like a whirlpool collapsing into nothing – exactly like she did.
‘You’re a piece of work,’ spat Mrs Armstrong. ‘Lookat me. What a waste you turned out to be. What, are you too good for us? Left us at last because you’re embarrassed?’
Rupert’s mother reached out to slap him again, but Dot stepped forward and swept the boy behind her. ‘You’ve no right to treat him that way.’
‘Don’t bother,’ whispered Rupert.
The defeat in his voice broke her a little more.
‘I’veno right?’ Mrs Armstrong laughed. Off she went, mocking Dot, flinging insults at Rupert. Cold fury bubbled in Dot’s belly. It lanced down her arms and hands, pulsing in her fingertips. The markets around her fell away until all there was in the world was her anger. Somewhere, faraway, she saw from the corner of her eye Theodora running for them. Rupert tugged at her arm.
‘What has hepossiblydone to justify this?’ cried Dot. The stalls around them spun. Blots of darkness appeared in her vision. Dot went on, louder. ‘Of course Rupert doesn’t want to go home, if thisis how you treat him!’ Waves of cold shot through her veins. ‘At least he’s nothing like you. A grown woman, bellowing like a baby. You, Mrs Armstrong, should be embarrassed, you nasty woman.’
Rupert’s mother lunged for Dot.
And just as the woman grabbed at Dot’s blouse, Dot’s magic exploded. Ice shot from her afflicted hand, blasting Mrs Armstrong away and into the crowd. The floor froze and the surrounding fish and produce were, at once, encased in ice.
‘Dorothy!’ shouted Theodora, at last flying to her side.
Dot began to scream. Her left hand burned with cold. She clutched it to her belly, doubling over. Theodora seized her and Rupert and tugged them into a portal. They fell through the whirling darkness and landed in the tea shop’s courtyard, their produce spraying all over the pavers.
‘Belchamber!’ shouted Theodora up at the house. ‘Bring all of Dorothy’s tonic!’
‘What’s happening?’ gasped Rupert.
Theodora seized Dot’s arm. ‘Her affliction is growing.’
