Catherine Fisher - Obsidian Mirror

Jake moved out stealthily after him. Here was a chance to get him alone. Outside. Make him answer.

Beyond the door was a flight of stone steps. Venn was already down them, brushing through the wintry wastes of an herb garden, the frost-blackened twigs snapping as he passed. Sharp scents of last summer’s lavender came to Jake as he slipped along the path. At the end was an iron gate; Venn opened it and it clanged behind him.

Reaching it, Jake saw Venn enter the Wood.

He closed the gate, but the clank made him look down, and he saw that the whole thing was hung with metal objects. Rusty bells and crosses, knives, even broken shears clattered against each other like some bizarre charm bracelet. He stared at them, noting the iron strip hammered down across the threshold.

What was Venn keeping out?

He ran to the edge of the Wood and crept in. It was dank and chilly. Venn was far ahead; Jake slunk after him, wishing he’d brought a coat. The track led down between gnarled bare oaks, their heaped leaves slabbed with frozen puddles. He stepped on one; it wheezed and cracked.

Venn looked back.

Jake froze, deep in shadow, praying the low sun would be in the man’s eyes. After a moment Venn turned and walked on. Jake followed more warily. Now he didn’t want to catch up. He wanted to see where Venn was going.

What if his father was being held prisoner somewhere in the Wood? If Venn was heading there now?

The path led deep into green gloom. Soon it was no more than a narrow trail, soft with humps and hollows. He slowed, eyes and ears alert. The Wood darkened around him. It had become a thicket of thorns and brambles, impassible; above him the canopy of branches a closed lacework against the sky. Great roots sprawled across the track; he could hear only his own breath and the soft trickle of water in some hidden ditch to his left. His foot splashed a muddy spring.

Breathless, he stopped. Venn was too far ahead to see.

Suddenly panicky, he turned. To his astonishment there was no way back. Branches clustered behind him; he took a step toward them. Brambles blocked his way. He reached out and pushed them, and they snagged at his hand.

This hadn’t been here before.

Was he even facing the right way?

Strange disorientation came over him; he had no idea which way was forward or back, in or out, north or south, as if the Wood had wriggled and twisted. Even the air was as dank and smoky as a November night, though it had been a sunny morning outside.

“What’s going on?” he whispered. “Where is this?”

“This is the Wintercombe, mortal. And you’re inside it.”

Jake turned, fast. A boy of his own age was leaning against a tree trunk. He wore a lichen-green tailcoat and his skin was as pale as ivory.

“What did you call me?” Jake demanded.

The boy smiled a bitter smile. “You heard. I called you mortal. ”

8

He was as cold as far Iceland,

His heart a frozen splinter

He was as dangerous as the dark

on the deepest night of winter.

Ballad of Lord Winter and Lady Summer

All my life I have been an inquirer after strange and singular knowledge.

I was orphaned early; my father, Charles Harcourt Symmes, being killed in an uprising in India. I was left a child alone with his fortune—wealth gained from the slavery of men and women in his factories and mines; their squalid lives in his cholera-ridden slums. What can you do to rid money of such dark origins? As soon as I came of age I sold everything and had the houses torn down, but perhaps my doom was already fixed. My life already cursed.

Certainly my career at Oxford was not a success. I was a lonely, bookish student. I had the money to fill my rooms with arcane volumes and pursue research into subjects that would have shocked my professors. I attended no parties, did no punting on the river. I worked steadily and gained my degree, but made no friends, and after I had left, I doubt many in the ancient town ever knew I had been there.

I bought a large house in London and began my pursuit of dreadful secrets. The truth is, I lived two lives. By day I was a member of polite society. I attended meetings of scientific academies, was to all appearances a young amateur gentleman about town. My interests were in the new wonders, the experiments of Galvani, the mysteries of Mesmer. I was calm, quiet, popular with the ladies. I was known as a collector of phonographs and chronographs and all the modern paraphernalia of science. My only eccentricity was believing the earth might be hollow.

But by night!

By night I was a tortured soul.

It is true that my mother died in an asylum for the insane. I never knew her, but perhaps I inherited her corrupted blood. How else can I explain how I, like the man in Mr. Stevenson’s excellent story, have such a dark shadow inside me.

The city made me evil. Something about the lurid twilights of London, the slow lighting of gas lamps down the Strand, worked the change in me. As soon as darkness fell I would put on a long cloak and leave the house, walking till the early hours. I roamed the teeming streets of the poorer districts, flitted down the dank, unspeakable alleys of Soho, explored the warrens of filth that were Wapping and Whitechapel.

I desired secrets. Magic. The occult arts of darkness. I desired to enter the deepest depravities of the soul, down ways too terrible for science and too unholy for religion. Above all I desired power—over men and women and beasts. A power only I, of all the world, would possess.

Sarah looked up. A door had opened somewhere in the house. Frozen, she heard Wharton’s steady tread squeak past the door of the study. She waited awhile, but there was no other sound. She leaned farther into the narrowing sliver of cold sunlight. This was it. This was where it had begun.

I dare not write much of this, lest you think me mad. I made expeditions to the corpse-yards of London, so heaped with the dead that the ground oozed with their reek. I explored deep crypts, assisted in dissecting the bodies of gallows-hung murderers. I joined weird sects and strange covens. I allowed vampiric women to feed on me. And all the time I sought my own secret source of power, and found only cheats and charlatans and depraved souls.

Until I met the scarred man.

It was an obvious question, but Jake had to ask it. “If I’m a mortal, what are you?”

The boy straightened. A flicker of amusement crossed his pale face. “That’s my business. I’m curious about you. I watched you all come to the Dwelling last night, first the girl, then you and the big man. Venn doesn’t let strangers in, so who are you?”

Jake said, “The girl? Last night?”

The boy shrugged. “In your world, last night. I saw her hunted by a wolf. A wolf of frost and snow. So, why do you follow Venn into the Wood? He must have warned you.”

Jake said shortly, “Maybe that’s my business.” He wanted to hurry back, get away with the surprising knowledge that Sarah was a stranger here too, but the boy stepped in front of him. “You can’t. There’s no way back without my help.”

Eye to eye, they measured each other. Then the boy said, “Gideon.”

“Jake Wilde.”

Gideon’s green eyes widened in sharp understanding. “So you’re the son!”

In the twilit forest, the moon was a silver fingernail through the branches. Jake’s hands gripped to fists. “You know about my father?”

“Only what I’ve heard. They don’t tell me anything. She and Venn, they keep the secrets.” Elegant, he flipped his coattails and sat on a fallen branch. His hands, Jake saw, were as brown and lichen-stained as the bark of the trees.