Page 94 of The Trick of It

Madame Ivanova shook her head, her ear tilted slightly to the side like she could hear them just now. “No. No, I’ve been using mine every night and had to make another. It is more of a … hmmm … like a cheesecloth or a sieve. It reduces the noise.”

Merlin looked across the room at Rhys when she’d said that, raising his eyebrows in acknowledgement.

She had answered the question he had posed on the night they’d done the carvings. They had an answer, after all.

“He asked me if they scare away all spirits,” he told Seph a little later, “or just the malevolent ones. I suppose that was sort of an answer.”

“I can’t imagine a soul who’s stuck here not turning to mischief,” she said to him, rummaging through her dresses to find the right one for a seance. “No matter how good they were in life.”

“Wear the red and black,” he suggested. “Samhain colors.”

She scoffed. “Who’s to say Samhain colors aren’t powdery, pale rainbow colors? Blue and yellow and pink?”

Rhys blinked at her and then jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the window, where an assortment of brown, orange, red, and gold leaves currently blanketed the ground outside.

She frowned. “Fine,” she said. “Point made.”

“Autumnal?” she said, once the dress was on.

“Leaning hibernal,” he confirmed, grinning at the sight she made. “Anyone dead you’re hoping to hear from tonight?”

“Just William Shakespeare,” she said airily, “so he can shame you for your disinterest.”

“That’s fine,” he returned. “We can have a chat about unjustly killing off your best character. At least he took out bloody Tybalt too.”

“Yes,” she said sarcastically. “At least there’s that. What about you? Any ghosts you wish to contend with?”

“A few,” he said, raising his eyebrows. “But I think she’s already got my uncle’s calling card, to be honest with you. She said something dead eerie to me the night at the priory.”

“Your uncle?” Seph said, pausing with her hair half twisted to meet his eye in the mirror. “The one who died in Aust?”

He nodded, wincing. “Maybe he’s upset I left him there in a pauper’s grave.”

“As opposed to what?” she said, hair still held in one hand while the pins were suspended in the other. “Dragging him out to the riverbank at the grand age of ten and building a marble crypt?”

He paused, holding a finger up as he tried to think of a rebuttal, then dropped his hand to his side, frowning.

“Fine,” he mimicked, doing his best impersonation of her voice and accent. “Point made.”

It made her give him a little, twisting smile in reflection and then finish pinning that golden mane in place, twisted and tamed for the sake of polite society. “Besides, even if your uncle is in her ear, tonight is bound to have many visitors. And we’ve got extras for the audience besides.”

“Oh, that is true,” he acknowledged. “Half of your provider chain from the Twittens is coming tonight.”

“More than half,” Seph said. “We’ve created a proper party here tonight, for All Hallows’.”

“And Merlin’s last supper,” Rhys added. “Or so he’d have us believe.”

They descended into a harvest feast, the ballroom separated into a small performance section for Madame Ivanova’s seance, and a long series of tables piled and spilling with the bounty of the season. It smelled like cinnamon and cranberries and turkey and delicious woodsmoke. There was fish and chicken and bacon, piles of little pies and turnovers and twists and cakes.

Enough for everyone who had come two or three times over.

Everyone and their changeling twin, Rhys thought to himself, pleased with the idea. He hoped the staff had remembered saucers of cream.

“Look at all these jack-o’-lanterns!” Seph marveled. “There must be fifty!”

Rhys nodded, running a hand along the small of her back and peering over her shoulder to investigate the things she was adding to her plate. Not nearly enough sugar, in his opinion. “I think people have made more than one, especially if theirs started going gooey. I saw the kitchen maid with a new crate of maips not a week ago.”

“Oh,” said Seph. “I haven’t even been remembering to light mine. Once I’m in the bedroom, I forget the poor little fellow right outside the door. Rhys!”