The Magicians and Mrs. Quent (20 page)

The cab maneuvered through the labyrinth of narrow lanes. Around a corner the fountain came into view, its marble etched and gray, and Béanore in her chariot with a bronze crown and a cape of pigeons, all just as Ivy remembered it. The cab stopped, and Ivy was ushered out.

Despite her need for haste, she could not help lingering a moment at the fountain. As a girl Ivy had loved stories of Queen Béanore, and her father had often indulged her with tales of the oldest days of Altania. Béanore was the daughter of the king of one of Altania’s southern realms. This was over sixteen centuries ago, when the island had not a single monarch as it did today but rather a collection of thains and petty kings who ruled and fought over twenty little chiefdoms.

When the armies of Tharos sailed across the sea and attacked, Béanore’s father was one of the first to fall in battle. The other realms would have succumbed quickly to the Tharosian legions commanded by the young emperor Veradian. However, Béanore fashioned a bow from a willow switch and with a single shot was able to inflict a great wound upon Veradian. Then she called the other chieftains to unite with her to drive the Tharosians back, and against the common enemy they set aside their squabbling. They swore allegiance to Béanore, and so the first monarch to rule all of Altania was not a king but rather a queen, and under her banner—with its silver branch and golden leaves—they drove the Tharosians back across the sea.

Veradian never returned to Altania himself; the wound from the arrow had weakened him, and after a few years he died. But in time his son sailed across the sea with more ships, and while Béanore held them back for many years, in the end the forces of Tharos were too much. She was captured and forced to abdicate her crown, relinquishing it to Veradian’s son. However, before she could be dragged in chains back to Tharos, she escaped, riding into the deep green forest that covered most of the island in that time. She was never seen again.

Some said Béanore was the last true Altanian monarch, for all of the island’s rulers after that time were descended of the line of Tharos, or more lately of the Mabingorian houses out of the north. And in all the centuries since, Altania had been ruled only once more by a queen.

A man walked past Ivy and gave her a look. His clothes were as drab as the pigeons. His eyes were weathered like the stone of the monument. She became aware that there were others like him lingering about the fountain in small groups. Despite the afternoon swelter, a chill came upon her. She gripped the packet of lace, then moved down the street—not too quickly, yet quickly enough.

I
VY RECOGNIZED THE house the moment she laid eyes upon it.

Indeed, so familiar did its shape seem to her that she wondered how she could have had difficulty picturing it. The ruddy stone, the tall windows, the peaks of the gables, even the gargoyles grimacing from the cornices—she remembered everything as she saw it.

The house was farther from the fountain than she had thought; she could only suppose her father had carried her part of the way that day long ago, or else they had driven and she had forgotten it. She had begun to despair as she walked by countless unfamiliar houses and shops, past nameless closes and ancient little graveyards.

Then the street bent a little, and there it was, set in its own yard and bordered by an iron fence. The other houses pressed in close, but with that fence, and the aloofness granted by the yard, and its reddish stone so unlike the gray of the buildings all around, the house gave the impression that it had been there long before the rest.

By the time Ivy reached the gate, her heart was pounding, but she could not claim it was from exertion. She glanced over her shoulder. The street was growing more crowded as people started to rouse from their afternoon torpor and ventured out to take advantage of the last hours of the long lumenal. However, no one looked at her as they went about their business.

Assured she was not an object of attention, Ivy moved to the gate. There was a heavy lock, but this was no surprise. She drew a key from her pocket, which she had taken from one of the drawers of the secretary in the parlor. While her mother had never told her what the key was for, Ivy had long known it was the key to the house on Durrow Street. It was overlarge and heavy. She put it to the lock.

Before she could turn the key, the gate swung open. It had been shut but in no way latched.

Ivy frowned. How strange that the gate was not locked! Had it been so all these years? She withdrew the key, and as she did she noticed several marks around the keyhole. They looked like scratches in the iron, or rather like scorch marks, being silvery and radiating out from the lock in sharp lines. Perhaps at some point thieves had shot the lock with a gun in order to break in and rob the house.

Except that could not be, for the lock wasn’t broken. She turned the key and was able to lock the mechanism easily, then unlock it again. She withdrew the key and touched one of the scorch marks. A bit of the silver residue stained her finger.

A thrill passed through her. There was another explanation she could imagine. The gate
had
been locked, but it had been opened without breaking it and without the benefit of a key. Logic left but a single alternative. It was magick that had opened the gate. And that meant…

“They’ve been here,” she said, taking the key from the lock.

Now her excitement became dread. If the magicians had been here, perhaps they already had what they wanted!

She willed herself to be calm. Reason dictated that if they had already gained the thing, then they would not have come to the door at Whitward Street that night. Which meant that, whatever they sought, it must still be here. Ivy hurried up the walk.

The house was larger than their dwelling on Whitward Street. The front part alone was broader and just as tall, and there were a pair of wings off either side. Nothing grew in the yard save thistles and a few hawthorn trees that clung with little resolve to shriveled leaves. A pair of stone lions reclined to either side of the door, baring their teeth in mossy yawns. Ivy remembered that she used to talk to them and had even given them names, though what they were she could not remember. She reached out to stroke a stony mane.

Ivy snatched her hand back. A feeling that she was being watched came over her, but of course it was nonsense. The iron fence was coiled thick with tendrils of her namesake, screening her from the street. As for the house, no one could be watching her from
that
direction. The windows were all shuttered and barred.

She approached the front door. It was carved from a massive slab of oak and bound by iron. It might have done for a door in an old fortress on a hill, a thing to keep barbarians at bay. As a girl she had barely been able to push it open on her own. She took out the key and set it to the lock.

It didn’t fit.

Ivy could only stare. This was something she had not foreseen. However, after several failed attempts, there could be no doubt. The key was too large and not shaped right, and no direction she turned it made a difference. It would not fit in the lock. All these years she had assumed this was the key to both the gate and door at Durrow Street, but she had only been half right. And where the key to the house might be, she hadn’t the faintest idea.

Ivy pushed on the door, but unlike the gate it did not open. She tried the handle, but it, too, resisted her will. No one had passed this way.

They had tried, however. Ivy examined the iron plate; a circle of silver marks was arrayed around the lock. The lines were finer, fainter, as if this metal had been less easily scored than that of the gate. Her disappointment was tempered: she could not get in, but neither could
they
. And the key to the door had to be in her father’s possession. She had only to find it. Hope was thwarted, yes, but far from lost.

There was nothing more she could do here. While her visit to Durrow Street had not given her the result she had hoped for, Ivy could not say it had been useless, for she had seen evidence that confirmed her theory: the magicians had sought something here.

“And I will discover what it is,” she told the lions. She patted their muzzles, then headed back into the yard.

Slowly but surely the sun was making its way westward toward a bank of gathering thunderheads. However, she took a few minutes to walk around the house to make a survey of the rest of the yard and also to be sure none of the bars over any of the windows had been prized loose.

Nothing had been disturbed, as far as she could see, and as she finished her circuit she let out a sigh. There was something affecting about the silent house, about the shabby gardens and the twisted little trees. It was forlorn, but there was a sort of peace about it as well. Though the city lay just beyond the ivy-twined fence, for all she could hear it might as well have been miles away and this place a house on a far-off moor in the country.

Ivy had never been out of the city in all her life, and the fancy was so captivating that she let herself half-believe it for a moment. She plucked a twig from a stunted chestnut, twirling it in her hand as she shut her eyes. She listened to the murmur of the leaves and pictured herself in the country near some little patch of wood—not a copse of New Forest, tall and evergreen, but an ancient stand of twisted trees: a remnant of primeval forest, like the deep woods into which Queen Béanore had vanished a long age ago.

Somewhere pigeons warbled, breaking the power of the spell. Ivy let the twig drop from her fingers and opened her eyes.

A man stood in the gate.

Such was her astonishment that she could not move. That she should run occurred to her, yet that action—indeed, any action—was beyond her. A paralysis had seized her.

The man wore black—that it was a man she did not doubt, for he was tall, if unusually slender—and her heart fluttered as she wondered if it was one of
them,
if they had known she would come here and had watched for her. Only he did not wear a cape as they had. His attire was strange: a collection of frills and ruffles and ribbons, of gored sleeves and pantaloons and a broad-brimmed hat. She had seen drawings of men in such garb in books of plays. It was like a dandy’s attire from another century, or like a harlequin’s costume. Only black, all black, from head to toe—even his face, which was covered by a black mask. It was a smooth and lacquered thing, neither laughing nor smiling, devoid of any expression or feeling. A death mask.

Who are you?
she tried to call out. However, he made a slight motion with a black-gloved hand, and the words cleaved to her tongue.

Still, Ivy could not move. She could only follow with her gaze as he entered the yard, as he walked among the trees with a capering step and up to the front door of the house. He patted the lions. They stretched and licked his fingers with gray tongues.

Ivy felt herself swooning, only she did not collapse; she was a rod planted in the ground. A shadow fell upon the yard as the clouds thickened overhead. The man reached toward the door, then withdrew his hand. He turned, and now the mask was wrought in a black grin.

“The way must not be opened,” he said.

At least, she believed he said this. For she could not see his lips move behind the mask, and she was not certain she
heard
the words so much as she felt them impinge upon her mind, like something read in a book.

Why?
she wanted to ask him. But her mouth would not open.

He moved from the door and descended the steps.

“They have forgotten,” he said, drawing near. “Or they choose not to remember.” He snapped a bit of branch from a hawthorn and twirled it in his hand, just as she had done. “In their arrogance and their desire they will try to open it. You must not let them.”

Who will try to open it?
she strained to ask, and could not.

All the same he answered her. “They call themselves the Vigilant Order of the Silver Eye. They have been watching you. One day they will come, and when they do—”

He hissed and dropped the twig. A red drop fell from his hand; a thorn had bitten him through the glove. In that instant, Ivy found her tongue.

“What will they do?” she cried. “Who are you? And why should I listen to you?”

He curled his fingers into a fist. “You should listen to me,” he said in a low voice, “because that is what your father did.”

The mouth of the mask was shaped in a grimace now.

Ivy tried to ask him how he knew her father, when they had spoken, and what had been said, but at that moment a clap of thunder sounded and a wind sprang up. Dust and dried leaves filled the air, and she was forced to turn her back to the gale. At last the wind subsided. She turned back and blinked to clear her eyes.

There was no one else in the yard. The iron gate swung on its hinges, then creaked to a halt. The lions grinned at her, things of motionless stone.