She framed his face with her warm hands. Pressed her forehead to his. “I love you, Gerald Dunwoody, and I am not afraid.”
“Damn,” he muttered, torn between delight and dismay. “Sir Alec will go right round the bend. And your uncle!”
A small shrug. “Probably. But I say we jump off that bridge tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow,” he said, and kissed her, too briefly, making the word a promise.
Four hundred and twenty-three steps below them, the crowd roared and cheered as fireworks streaked the night sky all the glowing colours of dawn. Melissande was down there. Rightly or wrongly, she mattered more than the rest. If he failed here, her death would belong to him forever. The ensuing Splotze-Borovnik conflict would be his too, countless deaths, rivers of spilled blood, a continent plunged into chaos.
So don’t fail.
Something malevolent shuddered through the ether. A putrid flower, unfurling, its petals stinking of decay. Another roar from the crowd, this time pocked with alarm. There were wizards among the thousands watching, and witches. They knew.
With an effort Gerald stood, and Bibbie stood with him. Walked beside him to the edge of the platform so he could see the tethered pontoons and the fireworks and the people he had to save.
“I don’t know who or what I am any more, Bibbie,” he whispered. “I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m making this up as I go.”
She laced her fingers with his, cool and slim. An anchor. A lifeline. “It’s all right, Gerald. I won’t let you get lost.”
And that was her promise. Believing it, he made his leap of faith into the dark.
The tainted thaumaturgics in the fireworks were rank and riddled with decay, dreamed to life by a twisted soul. He felt his changed potentia quail at the touch of them, changed not so much, it seemed, as he feared. He rode the roil of dark magics through the ether like a kestrel in a storm, feeling the whip and wash toss him, feeling his soul fight to stay free. Here there was no distance, he was a mere hairsbreadth from the terrible incants. Reach out his hand and he could touch them. Reach out his mind and see them crushed.
Provided they didn’t crush him first.
Don’t let go, Bibbie. Don’t leave me here alone.
He fought to remember all he knew of thaumaturgics. The lessons Reg had taught him. The things he’d learned on his own. What he’d discovered by accident in the attics at Chatterley Crescent, arguing mad experiments with Monk. And of course the grimoire magics that he’d given himself.
Every incant created contains the seed of its own destruction. For every syllable there is a silence. For every take there must be give.
He was standing on a viewing platform, high above Grande Splotze. Stretch up with his fingers and he’d touch the sky, catch a falling star, make the moon his toy. He could feel the ground below him and the emptiness of air. Behind his closed eyelids he saw traceries of fire.
And fire is ravenous. Fire feeds until it’s dead.
All the wicked, wicked magic. Before its gluttonous feast was over half the world or more would be consumed. Abandoning himself to instinct, to his remade and terrible potentia, he planted his own seed within the heart of every tainted incant. Showed it silence. Gave it death.
The incants screamed with their dying, died cruel, died hard. He struggled not to die with them but they were tearing him apart. Tearing quickly. Or was it slowly? He’d lost all sense of time.
The last incant perished. In its dying wake, a different, kinder silence. And then he heard, from far away, someone call his name, weeping.
“Gerald… Gerald… it’s over. Come back. Please, please, come back.”
Was he leaving? He didn’t want to. He had a reason to stay. Blood tasted like salt and iron. It was warm, and stank of life. He could feel somebody’s fingers, tightly interlaced with his. Someone’s tears fell on his cold face, warm as blood on snow.
Bibbie.
Gerald opened his eyes. He was sprawled on his back, the tower’s platform hard against his flesh and bones. But his head had a fine pillow, beautiful, wonderful Bibbie Markham’s lap, and she was stroking his hair with her cool, slim fingers, brokenly saying his name again and again. As he smiled up at her, not leaving, not dying, the crowd far below them roared its approval… and in the starry night sky above them untainted fireworks danced with joy.
A princess should carry smelling salts upon her person at all times.
It was one of the oddest admonitions she’d ever encountered, growing up, but as she bent over a stricken Lord Babcock, Melissande found herself grateful to the governess who’d left Dashforth’s Precepts for Young Royalty in the nursery’s library.
Lord Babcock, pale and clammy, slumped in a chair at the back of the viewing platform, breathing in shallow groans. He wasn’t alone in his discomfort. Aframbigi’s Foreign Minister, and Jandria’s, were also suffering pangs of some kind. Just not badly enough to require smelling salts-or so they claimed.
She wafted the foul salts under Lord Babcock’s nose one more time, to be on the safe side. As he snorted and spluttered, a fresh roar of appreciation from the crowd and much clapping from her fellow wedding guests and their minions on the other platform tipped her face skywards, but it was too late. The astonishing burst of fireworks was no more than a swiftly fading memory of blue and green.
The fireworks.
She felt her stomach jitter. There’d been a moment, just a moment, when she could have sworn she saw something creepily wrong in the brilliant, fiery lights bursting overhead. But then the moment passed, the fireworks continued beautifully brilliant, nothing creepy about them at all, and she’d thought, I really must learn to curb my imagination.
That was when someone said, “Oh dear, Lord Babcock’s not feeling too well.”
And naturally she’d gone to help, because that’s what one did. It was the reason one carried smelling salts at all times.
Satisfied that Babcock was coming around with no harm done, Melissande put the stopper back in the bottle of salts and returned it to her reticule. A pity she couldn’t put her suspicions away just as neatly.
I’ll swear this isn’t another case of finger food gone wrong. Something dreadful was about to happen with the fireworks, I know it. Something thaumaturgically catastrophic. But then… it didn’t.
Because of Gerald and Bibbie, she’d stake her life on that. And she’d bet it was the near-thaumaturgic disaster that had skittled Lord Babcock and the other two. Chances were that all three men, given who they were and where they came from, had finely tuned etheretic sensitivities.
On the other hand, Norbert of Harenstein hadn’t noticed a thing. She wasn’t sure what to make of that.
Another glorious burst of light and colour. More cheering. More clapping. The fireworks were reaching their breathtaking crescendo, boom boom boom, bloom and burst, a battering of beauty. Shaky with relief, Melissande smiled.
Well done, Radley Blayling. Unless of course you’re part of the plot, in which case, shame on you.
With another spluttering snort, Lord Babcock collected himself out of his slump. Bending again, she patted his arm. “Feeling better, Your Lordship? Oh, I am pleased.”
“What happened?” Babcock muttered, hand pressed to his head. “What the devil’s going on?”
Well, my lord, if it turns out I’m right that’s for me to know and Sir Ralph Markham to tell. Eventually. If he feels so inclined. Which he probably won’t.
“I’m not sure, Lord Babcock,” she said kindly, because the poor man did look seedy. “A little too much cherry liqueur, perhaps.”
His gaze sharpened, turning inwards. “Yes. Yes. Most likely. Thank you, Your Highness.”
Government ministers, no matter how exalted, did not dismiss royalty. Except when they did. Ah, the Ottish. Unoffended, because really, what would be the point, Melissande made her way through the well-bred cheering back to Hartwig’s side.