A Witch Alone (The Winter Witch Trilogy #3) (3 page)

Don’t go in!
every bone in my body screamed. I stood, with my hand on the reinforced steel door, and the man at the desk looked at me quizzically. I desperately wanted to turn and flee. But instead I found myself taking a step forward. Back into the heart of the Ealdwitan.

Inside, the atmosphere closed around me like a thick blanket. I felt the layers of charm and countercharm, magic and deception, settle like a physical weight upon my shoulders.

‘Good morning.’ The man at the desk gave something that was probably supposed to be a smile, if you gave him the benefit of the doubt. ‘Can I help you?’

‘Um … thanks. I’m here to see my grandmother, Elizabeth Rokewood.’

‘Of course.’ He barely thawed an inch. Must be one of the rival factions. There were five Chairs and, from what I’d heard from my grandmother, no more than two were generally on speaking terms with each other. Their camps followed suit.

I signed in at the book on the table. The office behind him was shadowy, but I could just make out rows of shelves, each stacked with dozens upon dozens of similar leatherbound tomes, and a thought struck me.

‘Do you keep these sign-in ledgers? Old ones, I mean.’

‘Of course.’ He gave me a hard stare.

‘What’s in them?’

‘A list of all the visitors each day and an account of any noteworthy occurrences and meetings.’

‘And can … um … can people see them?’

‘Certainly not.’ His stare deepened into a frankly suspicious glare. ‘Why do you want to know?’

‘No reason.’ My heart was thudding. Just as I was wondering what to say next, I heard a voice I recognized and turned to see my grandmother walking briskly down the long, carpeted corridor, dictating to her secretary as she went.

‘… in light of this a security reassessment is essential, underlined, comma, including the withdrawal and reissue of all current passes and security clearances stop. New paragraph— Anna! … No, Miss Vane, of course that wasn’t part of the memo. We’ll resume later.’

I felt her thin, jewel-laden hand close on my shoulder as she kissed me lightly, once on each cheek, and I inhaled the scent of her bitter perfume.

‘Hello, darling. I’m afraid I’m going to be rather busy today. It’s fortunate you suggested meeting here, as I would have had to come in anyway.’

‘What’s happened?’ I asked. She grimaced, her skin stretched tight over the bones of her face, and we began to walk down the corridor towards her office, the velvet
shushing
beneath our feet.

‘A long story. Security issues, combined with some recent worrying events. We’re having an emergency meeting about it today and I would like you to attend.’

‘Me?’ I gulped. ‘But—’

‘Anna, I realize this is throwing you in at the deep end. I didn’t want to introduce you to the Chairs like this. But just now everything is in flux. The Chairs are panicked; I think this could be the moment.’

‘The moment?’

She looked up and down the corridor and then drew me inside her office and shut the door.

‘For holding Thaddeus Corax to account.’

Thaddeus Corax – who had ordered the attack on Winter; who had sent his servants to terrorize me and my friends; who, according to my grandmother, was to blame for everything that had happened in Winter one year ago. She’d promised me that we would confront him one day and prevent him treating anyone else the same way. But now? So soon?

Elizabeth must have read the doubts flickering across my face, for she spoke decisively.

‘Thaddeus has been destabilized more than anyone by these events, Anna. If we have any chance of damaging his authority, it is now.’

‘So what … You want me to talk about – about last year?’

‘No, at least not at the moment. I taxed him a few months ago with his actions in Winter. His stance is unwavering and his account unchanged; according to him, he sent a party of people to investigate you and to try to persuade you to stop practising magic unguardedly. They became carried away and operatives on the ground exceeded their responsibilities, entirely unbeknown to him. It’s very hard to prove either way.’

‘Then – why? Why do you need me?’

‘Because, Anna, you are the last of the Rokewoods.’ Her dark eyes were unfathomable. ‘And I am old. Because Corax is holding on to his mortality with a tenaciousness that frightens me, using methods I cannot bear to think of. And because when I am gone – and if Corax has his way that may be sooner rather than later – the Chair will fall to you.’

‘No!’ I took a step back, crashed into an ornate coffee table. ‘No! I don’t want it. I don’t
want
it!’

‘You
must
seize it. Or Corax will install one of his camp and all will be lost.’

I shook my head, imagining myself entombed in this underground maze for ever, chained to a Chair I didn’t want, enslaved to a duty I never sought. I imagined the weight now on my grandmother’s shoulder’s settling on mine.

‘You are a Rokewood.’ My grandmother’s voice was harsh.

‘I’m not, I’m a Winterson.’

‘You are a Rokewood – and Anna, whether you choose to believe it or not, there are greater evils than Thaddeus Corax out there.’ My grandmother’s voice was grim. ‘Right now, the Ealdwitan, imperfect though we may be, is what stands between your friends and that evil.’

My heart thudded in my chest. But there was no way back. There never had been, not since I first opened the pages of the Grimoire. I could only press on, blindly.

The chamber was domed, with a vaulted roof studded with ornate bosses. It was late afternoon by my watch, but there were no windows in the hall and by the shadows in the rafters it might have been midnight. The witchlights in the sconces around the walls flickered softly, casting an uneven light on the stone walls and the carved backs of the five imposing chairs arranged in a circle at the centre of the room. Four of them were already occupied; these people must be the famous Chairs, representatives of the most important witch clans in Britain.

Around them, at their backs, were ranged their followers, clustered into little camps on the high, tiered benches. I was seated behind the empty chair, with my grandmother’s secretary, Miss Vane, and a number of others whose faces I didn’t know.

‘Who are the people in the middle?’ I whispered, under cover of the general rustling as people settled themselves, spread papers, took out pens and plumped cushions.

‘The lady sitting opposite us, the young one, she’s Margot Throgmorton,’ Miss Vane whispered back. ‘She’s deputizing for her husband, Edward Throgmorton, who’s very elderly and too ill to attend at present. If he dies, no one knows what will happen. Margot will try to seize the chair, I’m sure, and she will probably have support from Erasmus Knyvet – they’re said to be lovers.’

I looked down at the beautiful, vivacious face of the woman Miss Vane had indicated and I wasn’t surprised at the rumours. She couldn’t have been a day over forty, even allowing for a witch’s habit of smoothing away wrinkles. As I watched her, I noticed something coiling sinuously around the legs of her chair – an animal too large to be a cat. A flash of red and I recognized it: a fox. Margot Throgmorton’s hand crept down and scratched the creature behind the ears, and it writhed with pleasure before vanishing in the shadows under her seat.

‘Knyvet is the man next to her,’ Miss Vane continued. ‘He’s very proper, very traditional. His wife –’ she nodded subtly towards a very pregnant woman high on the benches at the back, ‘– is due in May with his eighth child.’

Eighth? I looked from the grey, drawn face of the woman opposite, down to the thin foxlike visage of Knyvet. He was leaning in, speaking confidentially to Margot Throgmorton, every line of their bodies exuding mutual amusement.

‘Next in the circle is Charles Catesby,’ she nodded down at a leonine man, with a grizzled mane of hair and a blond beard streaked with white. ‘He’s an old friend of your grandparents.’

‘And the last man?’ I asked, my throat dry. Miss Vane shot me a look.

‘Yes. The last man is Thaddeus Corax.’

I looked down through the dimness of the chamber at the back of his head. He was small, wizened, impossibly old. I’d hated him, feared him, for so long. And now here he was.

As I stared, he turned, as if he could feel the intensity of my gaze. Two hooded eyes swept the chamber and I glimpsed yellowed teeth, a beaklike nose, a face so graven with lines he looked carved from stone. Then he ducked his head with a curious bobbing motion and turned back to the circle.

Last to be seated was my grandmother, and I watched as she moved to take her place, a strange suffocating feeling in my chest. It felt like … affection. Love, even. But that was impossible, surely. How could you love someone as hard, as indomitable as my grandmother?

Perhaps it was because she looked – strangely – frail. She was old. Sixty, even seventy perhaps. And there wasn’t an ounce of spare flesh on her bones. Her wrists were skin and sinew, her rings hung heavy on her thin fingers. Her still-black hair was scraped into an immaculate chignon so heavy it seemed impossible that her neck could support it. She’d been a hard mother, I knew that. Hard on her daughter. And she’d be hard on me too, if I let her. But now, seeing her bow her neck beneath the weight of all this authority and malevolence, I could see she’d been harder still on herself.

‘The meeting will come to order,’ Thaddeus Corax said in a harsh, croaking voice which rang through the chamber – and silence fell.

‘Now, as you know,’ he continued, ‘we are here to discuss the attack on our shores which took place last night.’

‘Attack?’ I whispered to Miss Vane.

‘The fog,’ she whispered back. ‘Shh.’

‘We believe the fog was a test mechanism,’ Corax was continuing, ‘a precursor, if you will, for a future attack which might cause more damage. As far as we can tell, the fog itself did no harm. But its very presence is of the utmost concern – it should not have been able to penetrate these shores. A thousand years of spell and counterspell ought to have repelled it. These spells, for whatever reason, failed.’

‘And what reason can my fellow Chairs suggest?’ It was Knyvet who spoke, his voice smooth as oil.

‘Treachery!’ boomed Charles Catesby, his voice echoing around the rafters and making the spectators jump. ‘Treachery! Betrayal! A spy within the camp.’

‘Hold, hold, Chair Catesby.’ Corax raised a hand. ‘We do not yet have proof of this. But it is true that the fog seems to have concentrated on every weak spot in our defence – and that is extremely worrying. It is almost as if the sender had access to privileged information on those defences and was able to fashion and direct a weapon to penetrate them.’

‘Almost?’ Margot Throgmorton’s sultry voice purred across the chamber. ‘Why “almost”, Chair Corax? I understood from the briefing that it’s not merely a question of last night’s fog. It seems that papers have gone missing, confidential spells have been breached, messages have been intercepted and never reached their recipient. I am –’ she lowered her eyelashes, ‘– only a deputy, but it seems as clear as day to me. Yet you don’t believe in the existence of this spy?’

‘Forgive me …’ For the first time Corax seemed to grope for words. He raised his eyes, looking around the chamber as if in bewilderment. ‘Forgive me, madam, if I find it hard to believe in the treachery of one so close to this circle that they know the secrets of power. Forgive me, for being an old man, trusting in my friends.’

Trusting? I nearly let my breath hiss through my teeth. Thaddeus Corax looked as if he’d never trusted anyone, man, woman or child, since the day he was born.

I could see my grandmother was struggling with the same concept. Her mouth was pressed into a thin, bloodless line and her ringed hands were locked in her lap so tightly that the knuckles shone white.

‘It would have to be a very strong motive, Chair Corax.’ She spoke for the first time, her voice grim. ‘A very strong motive indeed. For someone at the centre of so much power, to risk so much, to gain – what? Safety, from a challenger perhaps?’

Her eyes bored into his, but he did not flinch.

‘Or help, to topple an adversary perhaps, Chair Rokewood?’ His reply was cold. ‘There are many possibilities.’

‘Friends, friends …’ Knyvet’s voice was smooth, insinuating. ‘We must not quarrel among ourselves. United we stand, divided we fall – is that not how the saying goes?’

‘Indeed, dear friend.’ Corax put his hand in Knyvet’s and his graven face creased into something I suspected was meant for a smile. But my grandmother didn’t smile and when Corax held out his free hand, she didn’t return the gesture.

‘Our house is already divided,’ she said coldly. ‘The only question is where this invisible fissure lies. Friends or not, we have been betrayed; there is a crack in our very foundations which will split us in two. And until we know where that crack lies, how can we protect ourselves?’

‘What do you propose then, Chair Rokewood?’ Margot Throgmorton’s voice was less sultry now, and there was impatience in her tone. ‘Instead of prophesying doom, perhaps you could tell us what course of action you advise?’

‘Lock down,’ my grandmother said shortly. There was an immediate hubbub around the chamber, but her voice rose, ringing above the chorus of disapproval and consternation. ‘We revoke every pass. We cancel every security clearance. We reissue them one by one, on a strictly need-to-know basis. And we watch to see when the leaks recommence.’

‘This is absurd,’ Knyvet said impatiently. ‘Chair Rokewood, you would have us waste time quarrelling among ourselves instead of looking to the true enemy.’

‘And who is the true enemy, Chair Knyvet?’ my grandmother demanded.

A hushed silence fell over the chamber. I had the impression that everyone was waiting – waiting for a hammer to fall.

But before Knyvet could answer, an enormous explosion shook the chamber.

The witchlights in their sconces guttered suddenly, dwindling to threads, as if a terrible blow had been struck at the source of their power, and for a moment I heard a thunderous rush of water around us, as if the rivers were pressing very close, straining to break their chains and reclaim their powers. The chamber was a dark, flickering cavern filled with screams and whimpers.