“Miss Harwood.” Lord Cosgrave cleared his throat as he passed me a lantern. “If you wouldn’tmind…”
“Of course.” My smile tightened. The other men avoided myeyes.
I knew them all, of course. I’d been the only woman in a group of men more times than I could count in my adult life, until all lingering discomfort—at least on my part—had worn away entirely. There was a time when every magician in the country had known my name after I’d first fought my way into their ranks, aided by the power of my own family name and by Jonathan and Amy’s staunch support. The newspapers, naturally, had found it all hilarious:The lady who thought she was amagician.
But if Jonathan could bear the caricatures they’d done of us—the Harwood Horrors; siblings born to the wrong sexes?—so could I. And I’d won the grudging respect of my peers, by theend.
So they all knew exactly how I’d fallen four monthsearlier.
It took every ounce of my strength to stand still now, with my chin held high and a cool expression stitched onto my face, as Lord Cosgrave moved in a slow circle around me, chanting the spell of protection from theelements.
It was only what he would have done for Jonathan, I reminded myself—and Jonathan had lived all his life without the ability to work magic. Not every man could do spellwork, of course, even in our elite cohort, just as I couldn’t possibly have been the first woman to be born with that natural ability. I was only the first to be bold enough, brash enough and—most of all—lucky enough, in our modern era, to finally break free of the roles we’d all been assigned centuries earlier, and win a public space for myself that others mightfollow.
But Jonathan wasdifferent.
I would never know the full truth of how my brother’s school years had gone—although I had my suspicions—but I knew exactly how he interacted with the other men of our cohort now. If it were Jonathan standing here in my place, they would all have been laughing as the spell was cast for his protection, and he’d have been making the most jovial remarks of all as the four of them grinned at each other in utterly complicit masculineconviviality.
Now, the soft hiss of the snow was the only sound outside the tightly-closed-up house apart from Lord Cosgrave’s monotonous chanting. My jaw tightened as he mispronounced the second word in a row, but I restrained myself, with an effort, from correcting him. As he finally completed the circle, the spell clicked shut, and a warm, dry circle formed aroundme.
…Almost dry, anyway. There was a sliver of a leak just behind my neck. Icy water trickled down myhood.
I could have told him exactly how to re-cast the spell with more clarity and precision, to avoid any such leaks in thefuture.
Five months earlier, I could have shown himmyself.
Now, I nodded stiffly and held up the lantern, straining to be off. “Has a tracking spell already been set onthis?”
“Ah…” Lord Cosgrave’s eyebrows beetled downwards. “We don’t have Miss Fennell’s exact direction,so—”
“Not for her, for thehouse,” I said. “If I should get turned around in thesnow.”
He blinked, and I could actuallyseehim remembering: unlike the rest of them, I couldn’t cast my own way home. “Oh. Right-o,” he said, andcoughed.
It would have helped by an infinite amount if any of the men around me had only sniggered or had the decency to look even slightly contemptuous of myweakness.
The pity that the three of them oozed instead, as they unanimously averted their eyes from my figure, was thick enough to incite justifiable homicide. My fingers tightened around my lantern. At least Wrexham wasn’t among them, I told myself. The idea of letting him cast laughably simple magicforme while I stood uselessly by and didnothing…
The spell clicked into place, sending a tingling thrill through my skin where it touched the handle of thelantern.
There.
I strode forward into the whirling snow before I could lose my self-controlentirely.
2
Thick white snowflakes swirledaround me, bouncing off my spellcast bubble of protection and forming a shifting veil between me and mycompanions.
Now that Lord Cosgrave was no longer being confronted with the appalling social awkwardness of my presence, his instructions rang out with the natural confidence of any magician in his own territory. “We’ll need to spread out, gentlemen, to cover as much area as possible. The toll station is three miles to the north, and Miss Fennell’s party should have set off in the right direction, but the land’s rough enough that the ladies could have taken a wrong turn nearly anywhere in this weather. All the fairy passageways should be safely locked up from their end at this time of year, thank Christ, but that won’t save our guests from rabbit holes and sprained ankles—or from thecold.
“And this isn’t only family we’re worrying about now. M’wife has great aspirations for her cousin—we may be speaking of a future member of the Boudiccate, if all goes well! The chit’s full to bursting with political potential, apparently. So we’d better not lose her in a simple snowstorm, if we don’t want to lose all of our funding in the next round of governmentvotes.
“Grant, strike northwest, would you? There’s a good man. Quentin, northeast. And Miss Harwood…” He cleared his throat, his expression mercifully obscured by the veil of falling snow between us. “If you wouldn’t mind, it’s probably best…that is, as you’ve only a magnetic compass to rely on in yoursearch…”
“Of course,” I said tightly. “I’ll walk directly north.”The safest route…and also by far the leastlikely.
I would only discover the perfectly-politically-minded Miss Fennell if she hadn’t taken a single misstep along theway.
Cosgrave’s exhale of relief was only just audible over the whooshing of the winter wind between us. “Good-o. If you do come across Miss Fennell and her friends, you know, you needn’t worry about trying to alert the rest of us. Just come directly home at once. Best thing for all of you, don’t youthink?”
