“Have you?”
“Oh, aye, especially for London. At least from all I’ve heard.”
“And Miss Seymour…volunteered?”
“Said the work would do her good, my lord, though she’s not trained to it exactly.”
“Well.” He put aside the mental image of Mina in a maid’s uniform and turned his attention to the reason that the others had left: danger, even if not the kind they were thinking of. The dark of the moon approached, and while Stephen had made a little progress, he suspected Ward would only double his efforts because of it. “As it turns out, I’ll have some work for her to do myself. Tell her I’ll see her in the library in a quarter of an hour.”
“She’s there already, my lord.”
Some corner of the house or the library itself had produced a ladder, one that went high enough for a reasonably tall woman like Mina to reach the top of the bookshelf. When Stephen entered the library, that was exactly what she was doing: cradling three books in one arm, reaching for another with her free hand, and making an amused little “hmm” sound at something she saw up there.
Until he remembered to be a gentleman, Stephen noticed her ankles and the backs of her legs, and reflected on just how much of a view the angle would permit.
“What might you be doing, exactly?” he asked, once propriety reasserted itself.
Mina looked over her shoulder, keeping her place steadily on the ladder. “Cataloguing your library.”
“And why?”
“Because it wants cataloguing.” She collected the last book and started down the ladder. Stephen put out his hands to steady her, just in case, and told himself not to hope for an accident. “Unless you have a system you didn’t tell me about. A very original system. One that puts Austen next to Common Diseases of the Cow.”
“Well—no.”
Mina reached the bottom of the ladder unaided and put the armload of books down carefully on top of one of the towers. “Right, then. I’ll do it the normal way: fiction by name, nonfiction by subject. You pay double if I get eaten by spiders.”
“Spiders? I’d thought they’d dusted this room when I took up residence.”
“The room, yes. Between the books”—Mina removed a handkerchief from her pocket and wiped gray dust from her fingers—“no. Not that I can blame them. Not like most people use the place, especially the high shelves, so no need to chance the roaring hordes of arachnids.”
Stephen blinked. “Spiders don’t roar.”
“Ha. I suppose they don’t write threatening notes in the dust, either. By the way, I found this.”
A gesture toward the desk indicated a small book bound in dark blue leather with an unmarked spine. Stephen picked it up and flicked through a few pages. Handwriting covered them, not printing: a crabbed hand he didn’t recognize.
“Someone’s diary, I’d think,” he said. “Not my father’s—perhaps one of his relations’. Perhaps not. The ink’s not too faded. It can’t be more than a few hundred years old.”
“Almost hot off the presses, then,” said Mina. She looked from the book to Stephen, then asked, with a certain careful diffidence in her voice, “Do you mind if I have a look? There might be something helpful in it. You never know.”
“If you’d like,” Stephen said immediately. “I doubt you’ll find much, but whoever wrote it is long past caring for secrets, I should think,” he added, which made himself feel a little better about his first response.
Neither his father nor his uncles would have been fool enough to write down the secret vulnerabilities of the MacAlasdair blood, assuming there were any. They also would have told Stephen beforehand, and as far as he knew, the keys to his destruction were the same as for any man, only applied in greater quantities.
Certainly he hadn’t much time for deciphering the hand of whoever had written the journal—and wasn’t that what secretaries were for, in any case?
“If you come across anything,” he said, “let me know, of course. Don’t type it up just then, though.”
“I’ll try to restrain myself. Journals aside, what’re you here for? Austen or the cows?”
“Neither, fascinating as they might be. I’ve actually come to request your help in something rather unusual.”
“Well, that will certainly be a change.”
“What I mean to say is—it’s magic. Which you’ve not done before, unless I’m wrong.”
“You’re not wrong.” Mina tilted her head, frowning. “Which makes me wonder what use you think I’ll be. Doesn’t that sort of thing need training, or—or being a dragon?”
“It’s safer if everyone’s trained, aye. But I could guide you through the rite, and a spell’s stronger for having more than one person in it. It gets power from…echoing, you might say.”
When she was curious, Mina’s face was a study in wide eyes and slightly pursed lips. “What sort of spell?”
“Protection. I’ve some wards up on the house already, of course, but they could be stronger. Especially now.”
“All right,” she said without hesitating. “What do we do?”
The first order of business was to find a corner of the library with enough bare floor. They needed a circle about five feet in diameter, which they finally achieved by moving a good many chairs and a small writing desk.
“Although you shouldn’t be doing any of this,” Mina said again, as Stephen lifted another chair.
“Of course I should. I’m not entirely an invalid, am I?”
“Yes you are.” Mina shoved the desk to its final place against the wall. “You were coughing up blood last night and you slept until noon today. Do you get much more invalid than that?”
“A time or two,” Stephen said. “And you’re half my size—”
“Hardly.”
“—and a woman. I shouldn’t be letting you move great heavy chairs about.”
“You can try and stop me if you like,” said Mina, and suddenly looked down at the armchair she was pushing.
It was another of those moments where Stephen could read her mind without magic. At least, he thought it held a vague approximation of the images in his: the two of them, locked in a moment of wrestling, their bodies straining against each other. It didn’t help that Mina was flushed and breathing quickly from the work, nor that tendrils of her hair were curling loosely against her neck.
She laughed, only a little bit too high, only slightly breathless. “But I warn you, I pull hair. Ask any of the girls on my street.”
“I should have known,” said Stephen, and applied completely unnecessary vigor to the final chair.
Then came candles, easily acquired from the kitchen, and the small silver cup that Stephen took out of a locked drawer. When he unwrapped it from its covering of green silk, Mina whistled.
“What’s this, then, the Holy Grail?”
“I shouldn’t think so,” said Stephen. “I saw it being made, and I’m nowhere near so old as all that.”
He had been very young at the time. It was one of his first memories: the glowing heat of the forge, the shine of fire from the half-made bowl, and his sister Judith’s eyes reflected in it, her hands almost as steady as his uncle’s. He’d known enough not to touch anything, and that had been about the limit of it.
“We have older ones,” he said, “elsewhere. But even metal wears after enough time. And then there were so many of us, and we took to wandering—it was better to have more than a few such objects.”