‘Six then.’ The monk’s smile was tight. ‘Even a small amount will help many. You have had the fortune of a full breakfast every day since you were small, yes?’
‘Well,’ said Dot, ‘I suppose . . . I mean, of course. Yes. I’m sorry. Maybe I can donate.’
Dot reached for her purse.
‘He’s told you lies, you know.’
A gaunt young woman had interrupted. Her hands were in her pockets, the harsh lamplight illuminating the hollows of her eyes and cheeks as if she were a corpse, animated. Her mouth quirked at Dot as she walked past.
‘Salamander does not steal children,’ said the stranger, ‘and that man is not a monk.’
A moment of absolute stillness transpired.
Then, the false monk ripped the bracelet from Dot’s wrist. It broke, scattering beads all over the step. He fled, his yellow braid writhing as he disappeared into the crowd. Dot stared after him for a long moment, one wrist stinging from his touch, the other from the graze upon the concrete not five minutes earlier.
Her eyes prickled again, and Dot turned her face away from the cathedral. She couldn’t bear for that stone giant to see her, pathetic, surrounded by the debris of her naivety. Clearly, she was not oneof these bright and shiny young women of the city. Instead, she was a tawdry thing of dull grey wool and stockings bought on sale and haircuts in the kitchen. Simply, a tatty girl from the seaside.
Dot made up her mind to leave the square and walk to the cheap hostel she had found in the newspaper. She glanced back to thank the gaunt young woman, but found no one.
CHAPTERFOUR
With her shirtsleeves rolled and hair knotted, Dot leaned out of the hostel window and watched the city at night. Behind her lay her maps, annotated neatly, and a scatter of papers, stained with tonic, drying against the dirty floor. She had purchased a roll of twine from the corner shop below (thirty-one coppers) and had strung it between the curtain rod and the hook on the back of the door. Her blouses now hung upon it, handwashed in the communal bathroom. The bandages and antiseptic for her wrist had been more expensive: two silvers, seventeen coppers altogether. The cost of a ticket to Saint Penelope’s Cathedral.
Dot rested her chin on her hands. Her shoulders ached from the carpet bag and her head throbbed and she felt dirty in this cupboard-sized space with mould at the eaves and stray hairs along the skirting boards. Yet, as she stared outside at the dark, distant chimneys, the soot-stained windows and weathervanes, and listened to the warble of motor cars and dance-hall music, a glimmer of excitement ignited within her.
She was finally in Alliaster.
She spotted a cat snoozing on a balcony across the way, its tail twitching among the potted tomato plants and geraniums. Somewhere, a radio sat near a windowsill, casting a crackling, feminine voice into the air.
I’d take an oyster as a ring,
For you, my dove, my darling thing,
I’d dance until the ocean sings
of love in Alliaster.
She rubbed her eyes and reached for the stained map of the city, but as she did, something jittered against her fingertips. Dot screamed and jumped upon the bed, catching a glimpse of a black beetle skittering across her papers and out through the gap beneath her door.
Dot packed up her maps and piled her belongings carefully on the end of the bed. She double checked the door lock. Then, without bothering to change, she lay on top of the rough bedding, curled inward and closed her eyes. In her mind, the curtains to her own private theatre lifted, and in her imagined cabaret, she pictured herself a hero. There she was, saving a drowning girl from the sea. There she was, dressed in ivory silk. There she was, at long last, the apprentice of the witch, Theodora.
In the morning, she set out across the city. For all her imaginings, Dot had never expected the assault of the city’s smells: the acrid tang of urine as she passed a pub, the plumes of tobacco blown at her, or the sweat of the beggars with their brass bells and cardboard signs.
She passed a flower shop and a woman in a boxy dress, whose mushroom-coloured collie sniffed at the buckets of bluebells. In the distance, a crow let out a deep gurgling laugh. The city wheeled past, the post boxes and doorways and zelkova trees wobbling a little as she grew faint from the exertion.
Dot had been four when the Prohibition began. She remembered, vaguely, the protests, the newspapers, the spirits disappearing from their seaside town, and her father’s words as he walked with heralong the pier: ‘It’s for the best, Dorothy. The only people who should use magic are the ones who can use it safely.’
He had said it as if scolding her, and so she did not argue or ask questions, although she remembered wanting to.
Magic could not be cast by just anyone. One had to have the proclivity and, if they did, then they had to have the training. In this lay the great tragedy of their country – one that Dot dwelled on often. For Calléum had a long and proud history of magic, destroyed for the many by the hubris of the few.
This hubris – a scandal with a daemon two decades earlier – had caused the change in the constitution, which had begun the war against the United Allies, which caused the Mass Exodus of spirits from their land, which heralded Calléum’s defeat and later their occupation and, lastly, relegated Ellard Custre IV to the position of a ceremonial king, and despite the passing years and the working people who protested and the foreign Magicians who snubbed their city and the spirits who had begrudgingly trickled back in, despite the winners of the war, themselves, proudly using magic, the Prohibition in Calléum remained written into the very constitution:
PROHIBITION ON THE USE OF MAGIC
Article 13. No mortal human may participate in Spellcraft of any kind unless the individual is granted licence to do so by the Royal Institute of Alliaster. Spirits are prohibited from causing harm or assistance to the nation’s mortal populace through the use of Magics; Spirits who have done so will be stripped of their Magic through the procedure of ‘daemotion’ and thus relegated to the category of ‘daemon’.
She’d always wanted to meet a daemon. There had only been five or so recorded cases, as Dot had learned at her dowdy little university in the town next to Seafarthing. That was why she had undertaken the politics degree. She yearned to understand all ofit – Article 13, daemotion, the Mass Exodus of spirits – and so she took up work in the Divers’ Café and paid her own tuition of 1442 silvers per year.
