Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

artwork by idliketobeatree

There was something on the moors. Or so said the farmers in the fields, who told their wives, who told their friends at market and spread the rumour through the lower town like a proliferant fungus. There was something approaching in the distance, they said. A shadow, a shade; a slouching, stalking beast. So vast it was visible from leagues away. 

For the first couple of days as the rumour took hold, panicked whispers had spread of a monster, a hungry beast. A great slinking tiger, coming to crush the petty humans of their little town between its teeth like squeaking mice.

And then it drew closer, its edges consolidating in the fog, a rumour made flesh; and whispers spread of an altogether different monster on the prowl.

The Wizard King’s reputation preceded him wherever he went, wherever the roaming form of his impossible moving castle carried him. The most feared sorcerer in the twin kingdoms, second only to that life-leeching horror, the Witch of the Wastes. His was a reputation drenched in blood and carnality, in licentious desires and grisly ends. A reputation of dangerous beauty, intoxicating charm; of a smile sharp when it grinned into the bright young faces of hapless townspeople, and sharper still when it sank into their chests to taste their beating hearts.

A chilling little story, to be sure, and a concerning one to have slunk its way to their doorstep, but Edwin wasn’t overly worried about it. 

After all, the Wizard King only ate the hearts of the pretty ones.

He was Edwin Payne of Payne & Sons Bespoke Tailoring; he was always and only of Payne & Sons. Such was his station in life, a role he himself was tailor-made for. A role he fit like a drab but finely-crafted glove. 

Edwin lived, as he always had done, in the small, fit-for-purpose apartment above the shop where he'd been born and raised, learning his alterations alongside his alphabet. He worked, as he always would do, in the selfsame shop, five days a week – seven, if there was work still to complete, and the prospect of another planless weekend loomed too large over his head. He lived and breathed his work for, in truth, he had little else; he talked to the suits and gloves and fine silk ties he stitched for he had no one else to talk to. Not since his younger stepsister, Crystal, had gone away on apprenticeship. And especially not since his father passed and his stepmother, content with Edwin’s work in the shop, had left it in his care to fly away and begin again. Last he heard, she’d taken up with some artist or other, halfway across the country. 

More fool her, in Edwin’s privately held opinion; art was subjective and fickle, but people would always be needing well-made clothes. Even Edwin, dour and unsociable as he was, believed in keeping up appearances – what little he possessed of them. His own clothes, though of a quality commensurate with those he made and sold, were drab things. He lived a life in greys and browns, perhaps a plain and simple blue if he was feeling bold. He lived a life in whatever would keep him perceived as little more than a fastidiously professional shadow in the back of the shop, solidifying only where advice or measurement was required. He lived quietly, conscientiously, and he did what he’d always been fashioned to do; which was to fashion the suits of those people cut from a more daring cloth than he.

He wrinkled his nose in the mirror at the garishly jarring sight before him, and shook his head. “Absolutely not…”

The jacket he shrugged out of was a lavish thing, indeed. With the May Day festival incoming, Market Chipping’s most ostentatious event of the calendar year, Payne & Sons’ more unusual and gregarious items were flying off the rack. But against Edwin’s stern expression and colourless demeanour, the vibrant and expensive purple velvet looked like it was trying to swallow him whole. The same could be said of the emerald green three-piece, and even the relatively plain-toned wool overcoat with the gold military-inspired epaulettes (all the rage at the moment, things between the twin kingdoms being as they were). Finely crafted pieces, all, pieces he’d personally worked his fingers to the bone to construct; and each and every one destined for greater things, greater people.

Edwin donned his own jacket, settling it with a shrug like a ruffle of dowdy grey feathers, and shared a brisk nod with the dreary thing in the mirror. Much better.

He’d grown used to the quiet in the shop since everyone else had flown the nest. Not even the small rotating cast of assistant seamsters and seamstresses helping to keep operations afloat during the busy times were particularly chatty. Not with Edwin, at least; though he often heard them gabbing away with one another, once he’d sat stationary long enough to have melted into the shadows of his own preferred sewing nook. Not that it bothered him overmuch. Quiet was familiar. He’d grown accustomed to filling it with his own voice, his soft, one-sided conversations with the fruits of his labours.

But it was a Sunday, a half day at the end of a riotously busy week, after the last assistant had vacated the shop and the silence settled heavy on Edwin’s shoulders like a foot of snow, when he decided that this quiet was too quiet.

“Right. Enough putting it off,” he muttered to himself – or perhaps to the purple jacket, draped invitingly on a mannequin that was carrying it off altogether better than he himself had managed. “You’ve been shirking your familial duties all too long.”

And, buttoning his sensible jacket over his soft underbelly like armour, he braced himself and stepped out of the safe and steady stillness of his shop.

Town was always quite insufferable in the run-up to a celebration, all loud and hectic and packed to the gills with obnoxious tourists. It was the same celebration that had kept the shop flush with work and Edwin's fingers busy with sewing, so he had no room to hold a grudge – though that didn’t mean he could not make room, if he put his mind to it.

Edwin wove his way through the colourful throng with the drably harried confidence of a battered city pigeon amongst peacocks. There were more packs of loud, brash young men in military uniforms than usual, and he kept a wary distance. He ducked under improbably large ladies’ hats and dodged skirts and canes with a hopscotcher’s quickstep, rolling his eyes at the occasional purse, fan or pram that was rude enough to impede him. A benefit of being plain as a pikestaff was he could, generally, go about his business unbothered. This boon hit a point of diminishing returns once he became so invisible that people started to smack into him like a glass door. And newcomers in town were especially bad for it, too preoccupied with the sights above their heads to pay attention to their feet. After his usual, efficient beeline across the diagonal of the square took him thrice as long as was standard, he was relieved to duck into the lesser-used backstreets for the last leg. 

Or he was, until he realised with a dull thud of his weary heart that someone else—multiple someones, in fact—had had the same idea.

“Bloody hell, is that you, Payne?” sneered Simon Mould, propped insouciantly against the wall, the narrow bottleneck of the ginnel blocked by him, his hangers-on, and their cloud of noxious cigar fumes. Edwin did not recognise this particular collection of brown-nosing sidekicks, but Simon seemed to go through them at an extraordinary rate; he was too odious a personality for many to endure for long.

Edwin wrinkled his nose and avoided eye contact, marching on with all the limited self-assurance he could muster. “Good morning, Simon. Gentlemen,” was his clipped, polite response. Perhaps, with so many potential witnesses, they could exchange terse pleasantries and that would be that. But cronies number one and two swiftly blocked the path ahead; and number three cut off his retreat. Well. So much for that hope.

He clenched his jaw, keeping his eyes on a point past Simon’s ear. “My sister is expecting me,” he said, measured.

“The step-sister? Surprised you keep in touch – not your problem now she’s out from under your roof, eh? And over at… the bakery, wasn’t it? Think you’re going the wrong way, old chap. Oh, of course, how silly of me,” he corrected himself with an oily smile. “Absconded from that respectable little apprenticeship, didn’t she? Took up under the butcher, of all people. No sort of job for a lady, is it? Not that she ever was one, from what I’ve heard.”

Edwin’s jaw ticked. “I’ve no idea what you’ve heard, Simon, but you should—”

“Should what, Payne?”

Simon leaned in closer, managing despite his underwhelming stature to loom; and crony number three was practically breathing down Edwin’s neck. Edwin, reluctantly, bit his tongue.

“You should… take rumours with a grain of salt,” he suggested delicately. “They spread all sorts of spurious gossip down at the markets. Why, only yesterday the haberdasher told me the Witch of the Wastes is on the prowl. In Market Chipping. Utter rubbish. Idle minds seeking idle—” he noted, with dismay, that several of Simon's flunkies had taken a dangerous step closer, and his voice trailed off feebly. “Amusements…” 

Simon sneered, took a slow drag on his cigar, and exhaled the pungent smoke in Edwin’s face, making him cough. “I see five years and a promotion hasn't been enough to make you grow a backbone, old boy.”

Edwin, feeling rather like a washed-up worm on the cobblestones, opened his mouth for another attempted excuse; perhaps, if he could only be blessedly boring enough to lose their interest—

But another voice sounded first. A voice from behind – a calm, condescending purr of a voice, right beside Edwin's ear.

“Sweetheart. So this is where you've been hiding.”

An arm wrapped, with galling overfamiliarity, around Edwin’s waist, and he snapped his head around to see if Simon’s third lackey had quite lost his mind. But what he saw wasn’t the slicked-down brunet style of the toadying lad, but an entirely different head of far blonder hair, long and loose and arranged in a manner some might consider artfully tousled. Edwin dropped his gaze to take in the face beneath and found a fine profile, straight-nosed and strong-browed. Late twenties at the very least, older even than Edwin himself, but really remarkably handsome despite it. Although the overall effect of his face was somewhat dwarfed by the ostentatiously hulking fur coat slung about his shoulders like a brace of freshly felled foxes. Tawny in colouring like the stranger himself, it seemed to fill him out beyond his stature, a claiming of space, a demand for attention; rather like the glimmer of gold and jewels at his throat, his ears, at the hand that clutched Edwin so impertinently. His mind-boggling array of rings dazzled almost blindingly against the drab backdrop of Edwin’s grey jacket. 

Then the stranger flicked his gaze from Simon to Edwin, and Edwin gasped. His eyes. He’d never seen anything like them…

With a smile as bright as it was razor-sharp, the stranger jerked his head towards Simon. “This guy bothering you, babe?”

Edwin was, momentarily, speechless. “Ah.”

“I say, my good man,” said Simon, annoyance colouring his civil tone. “We were in the middle of—”

“Oh, shut up,” the stranger sighed, as his other hand sprang up like a snake before him and grabbed the air. His rings clicked as he drew his fingers together in a gold-studded fist; and Simon fell, immediately, silent. As if the very words had been snatched from his throat. 

“Good boy,” the gold-studded man purred, shaking his fist a little as if he had dice in his palm and was preparing to roll them. “You can have this back when you’ve learned to quit barking at the other pups, ‘kay?”

Simon opened his mouth to retort – and out came a bug-eyed, undignified whimper. A similar chorus of pathetic sounds erupted from his hapless lackeys.

Edwin clapped a hand over his mouth to stop his startled laugh escaping.

“See? You’re improving!” the stranger praised. “Go on, boys; fetch!”

He jerked his hand towards his own shoulder and ‘threw’, fingers opening, empty palm laid bare as he sent whatever strange, voice-stealing magic he’d been holding bouncing away along the ginnel behind them. Edwin’s own eyes nearly popped out of his head as he watched the young men, without word or hesitation, drop to all fours and clatter noisily after it, jostling each other rudely in the narrow space until they skidded around the corner and out of sight – getting under the feet of a cluster of bewildered tourists and causing a ruckus as they went.

The stranger chuckled, a sound as rich and sumptuous as his attire, and squeezed Edwin’s waist with his impertinently perched hand. “Ah. I needed that. Now. The butcher shop, right?”

“How did—”

“Couldn’t help overhearing. That’s great, I was out of bacon, anyway. Walk with me.”

He took advantage of Edwin’s stunned silence to reaffirm his hold on his waist and steer him along, strolling him down the alley as if they were a pair of perambulating paramours in the park.

“Nice friends you’ve got there,” the stranger drawled. “Are they always that charming, or is that a special for the season?”

“They’re—” Edwin stopped himself before he could say ‘not my friends’. It was true, but if he said it then this impertinent—and unfortunately very handsome—man might ask him about his real friends, and Edwin felt far too off-kilter for the stressful business of making up a believable chum or two on the spot. Bullies or no, sadly, Simon and his interchangeable pack were the closest thing to peers Edwin could lay claim to. “...a handful. But, nothing I cannot manage myself, so there was really no need—”

The stranger snorted. “Please. They were playing cat and mouse. And you only play that game when you know you’re not the mouse.”

Edwin bristled. “Now, see here—”

“Get much fungus round here?”

What a baffling non-sequitur. Irksome man. “I—well, the lee of the hill is somewhat prone to damp—”

His breath hitched when a warm, strong hand gently took his chin, and turned it. “I’m thinking more like that.”

Edwin blinked at the strange little outburst of fungus on the brick wall his gaze had been directed to, spreading between the cracks in the old mortar. Something prominent and defined, something blaring from the plain red brick in a riot of acid yellow and fleshy, off-white the colour of old bone. Something, Edwin noted with horror, which seemed to be growing before his very eyes. “That’s… unusual.” He heard a heavy footstep behind them and tried to turn his head, but the stranger’s hand stilled him.

“Figured you’d say that.” Sighing, he at last released Edwin’s waist, but kept his arm banded across it to tuck his hand under Edwin’s elbow, instead. “Walk fast. And don’t look back.”

Edwin, of course, looked back at once – and almost shrieked. “What is that?!”

“Don’t even worry about it.”

The ‘it’ that Edwin wasn’t to worry about was two or three roughly man-sized beings; although the size marked the end of any resemblance to any man Edwin knew of. Cadaverous, bloated bundles of misshapen mycelium, lurching after Edwin and his new escort atop bowing, leglike stems. Well, two of them were lurching. The third appeared to still be in the process of dragging its twisted roots from between the crack in the cobbles it had seemingly sprung up from. A large, swollen polyp in its bulbous shoulder region burst abruptly into a cloud of rancid-smelling, cottony spores, and Edwin faced quickly forward and bit his tongue on the urge to gag.

The stranger hummed innocently. “See? Nothing to worry about.” He gripped Edwin’s elbow. “Maybe a liiittle faster.”

Edwin, for once, didn’t argue. He walked as fast as his long legs could take him, his shorter companion keeping pace with ease. His breath quickened at every glimpse of sickly beige and toxic yellow that poked from the bricks and cobbles, that oozed oil-thick and slimy from the moss-clogged guttering. This particular alley already had a squeezing quality, narrowing every few metres or so, and by the time it was nearly brushing their shoulders Edwin was breathing very, very fast, eyes darting wildly between fresh outcroppings of noxious fungus as they sprang up just in time to trail sickeningly across his sleeve.

It was when he saw four more monstrous shapes bulge and bubble into life ahead of them that his panic truly set in. “It’s a dead end!”

The stranger chuckled. He shored up his hold on Edwin’s elbow, and took Edwin's opposing hand for good measure; a brazen, self-possessed grip, as if he was about to sweep him up in a relaxed promenade. “Who ever said the only way out is through? Hold on.”

And then he coiled and he sprang, and Edwin yelped as the leap carried the both of them quickly, effortlessly, impossibly over the rooftops.

artwork by idliketobeatree

Edwin felt his heart drop through his feet with a sickening lurch, then smack back against his ribs like a slingshot. He also felt, distantly, the grapple of a mycelial hand at his ankle, but he was carried quickly out of reach of its gnarled, rubbery fingers. It was rather hard to focus on the brief, unpleasant sensation when it felt like he’d left his entire skeleton about fifty feet behind him

“What on earth—!” he exclaimed, clinging to the only thing within reach – which just so happened to be the stranger’s bracing hand under his.

“Don’t panic,” came the stranger’s cool, steady voice in his ear; loud and clear, despite being nary a whisper over the rushing wind. “Just walk with me.”

“Walk?!” Their momentum was slowing, their upward trajectory halting, and he felt gravity beginning to reassert itself, sinking an insistent hook into his chest. His stomach dropped, certain that this was the pinnacle of their arc – and the only way to go was down. 

The stranger squeezed his hand, his elbow, tucked his arm tightly around Edwin’s waist. “Just walk,” he said, a smile in his voice. “C’mon. You got long legs. Use ‘em.”

Preposterously, the man began to walk; and Edwin fell, with a sort of dizzy resignation, into step. 

His feet met nothing and yet they advanced, rooftops rolling by like flagstones beneath their shoes. A laugh of disbelief bubbled in Edwin’s throat as his stranger, with a spring in his step, braced a foot upon a passing chimney stack and pushed off from it to cover more ground—air—on their next stride. His little flourish set the clay chimney pot wobbling and he flashed Edwin an utterly unrepentant grin.

“They really ought to get that fixed,” he remarked. 

Edwin shook his head, wide-eyed, as he watched the world go by. Soon enough their strides had carried them beyond the tightly packed suburban sprawl of the housing district and into the next square, a smaller plaza than that which he’d already traversed and smaller still from up high, clustered with the colourful canvas awnings of the market stalls. People crowded it in their hundreds, the vendors, the residents, the tourists in all their bright colours and finery. From up above, the wide hats and skirts of the ladies rendered them almost perfectly circular, bouncing back and forth with their purses and fans and prams like extravagant ping pong balls between the slim silhouettes of their husbands and chaperones. Edwin would surely have been thwapped by half a dozen canes and parasols by now at ground level; but instead he strolled merrily on, unimpeded, approaching the squat old structure of the Tongue & Tail butcher’s shop straight-on as the crow flies.

The arm around his waist squeezed impertinently, a tousled blonde head bumping into his shoulder. “Smooth action, kiddo,” its owner purred, his bejewelled thumb rubbing the back of Edwin’s hand. “Figured you’d be a natural.”

Edwin’s heart thumped; he pointedly ignored it. “It’s only walking,” he sniffed.

His stranger laughed, bright and brash. “I think your stop’s coming up.”

Sure enough, the balcony of the old building was drawing near, practically under their noses. His stranger extended his arms, twirling Edwin away from himself in a dancerly sweep and depositing him effortlessly, guiding him to a weightless descent. Edwin’s feet touched down so lightly he was scarcely aware he’d landed until he flexed his foot and found the resistance of solid wood boards beneath it. 

His swaggering saviour followed suit in short order – although he chose to alight on the weathered railing instead, balanced on the balls of his feet, so inhumanly lightweight as to not elicit the merest creak from the splintered old wood. He released Edwin’s hands and crouched, elbows on knees. A fae and puckish creature of sunny mischief, he brought his face down to just above Edwin’s level and tipped it sideways, sending his tousled golden hair cascading about his impish features. His eyes were closed, fair lashes fluttering as he took a deep, exaggerated inhale of the less-than-fragrant butcher shop air.

“Great choice for a day out. Mmm. Can really smell the viscera.” The words were teasing; the tone far from disapproving.

“I’m visiting—someone,” said Edwin, defensive – and realising halfway through the sentence that he ought to be careful about the information he offered up. Whoever this man was, he had a sharp smile and a nose for blood in the water. Edwin narrowed his eyes. “Later, that is. I'm seeing them later. They require a grocery or two, so I'm shopping. I seem to recall you mentioning something about buying bacon. Before we were attacked, that is. By the horrifying mushroom monsters.” He crossed his arms and raised his eyebrows. “That were after us. For reasons unknown…?”

“Trying to cut back on the red meat, actually,” he answered Edwin's first prod, smoothly skimming over the second. “For now, at least.” 

His eyes flickered open and landed, hooded and not a little salacious, upon Edwin’s face. “But hey. Any excuse to pick you up, handsome.”

Edwin’s breath caught. He knew he’d seen something unusual, in the brief moments the stranger had glanced at him head-on, but he’d fooled himself into thinking it a trick of the light. No such luck. Plain as the nose on his face, there they were: yellow eyes, bright and bold, inhumanly piercing. Whiteless, fathomless, and bisected by dark, slitted pupils, reflecting Edwin’s terrified face back at him like black mirrors.

Edwin knew of only one wizard who boasted that particular feature.

He lurched back, aghast; and the Wizard King watched him like a cat eyeing a canary. A smile stretched his petal-pink lips, slow, indulgent, knowing – flashing a glimpse of a sharp and perfect white incisor. 

“I’ll draw those hunks of slime off someplace,” he said, standing up straight and dusting off his ostentatious furs. “But cool your heels here a while before you step out again, alright?”

Edwin nodded, tongue-tied.

The Wizard King winked. “Atta boy.”

And then he flung his arms dramatically out to the sides, arched his chest to the sky and fell, backwards, a cascade of golden hair and furs and metals, plummeting over the railing and out of sight, bright and trailing like a meteor shower.

Despite his misgivings Edwin gasped and lurched forward, hands clasping the railing, leaning as far as he safely could to scan the sky and ground below, the masses of uninterrupted revelry. In all the acres and acres of riotous colour spread out before him, not once did he find the flash of daring, impetuous yellow he was looking for.

“I'm sorry, back up; you got a lift here from the fucking Wizard King?”

“It was not a lift, Crystal, it—hm. Well, no, I suppose in the very literal sense it was.”

Crystal stared at him like he'd lost his mind, quite understandably, and he took the opportunity to assess her in return. She looked well. He had been worried, when she abandoned her respectable post at the bakery to take up under the town's most… unorthodox butcher, but he had to concede that the job seemed to be treating her well. She looked bright eyed, strong, with a confident glow. Underneath all the blood, that is. She did, against all the odds, turn it into rather a fetching fashion statement.

“Oh my… you’re not kidding,” she said, in some sort of horrified awe. “How are you being so chill about this? You just got scooped up by a killer sorcerer, and you’re acting like it was a walk in the park.”

“Well, it was at least preferable to the alternative,” he said, shuddering. Being accosted by that presumptuous fellow had turned out to be a far more pleasant experience than being accosted by those hyenas from his old school – they seldom left any marks, preferring to needle Edwin in the verbal sense, but with the high spirits of the festivities in full swing, one could never be too sure when a moment’s playful roughhousing might get out of hand. And that was to say nothing of the almost-as-unpleasant mushroom creatures that followed. Although it was a suspicious coincidence, those monstrosities turning up at around the same time that the wizard did… “Hm. All told, I’m rather fortunate he appeared when he did. I think…” 

“Fortunate? I’ll fucking say.” Crystal sat down heavily on the crate beside him. The backroom storage of a butchery was far from the most comfortable place to carry out a conversation, but that was where the balcony window Edwin had meekly tapped on to be granted entry resided. At least it had not been the pantry. “Edwin, you’re lucky you got out of there with your heart in one piece. He eats them. Everybody knows it.”

She was right, of course. Everybody knew it. Tales of roaming wizards were varied and often nebulous things; rumours bred rumours which mutated from place to place, the mysterious figures taking on a living legend status and a new mythos in every marketplace, no two tales of their misdeeds exactly the same. Travellers from across the twin kingdoms often passed through Market Chipping on their way through or from the Wastes, alighted in Edwin's shop and gabbed away about this and that as he set about them with a tape measure. The version of, for example, the Witch of Wastes, which rolled from the plummy tongue of a merchant from the posher end of Veuleroy, bore little resemblance to the one delivered in hushed tones by a superstitious fisherman from the distant coasts of Koningstraum.

But for all the variations upon the Wizard King’s tale, all the different local embellishments it garnered, there was but one consistency in his characterisation: he had a type. A taste for a certain sort of prey. He liked them young, he liked them fresh – and above all, he liked them beautiful. It was said that he could never resist a pretty young heart; that he’d pop it out of the chest as surely as a chocolate from a box.

But he’d resisted Edwin’s sure enough.

Crystal stared at him. “Tell me you’re not having a fucking crisis about not being eaten.”

“I am not having a crisis,” he said snippily. He was not. So what did it matter if his drab little heart was tough as old boots and difficult to chew? He was in his twenties, now, it was really only to be expected. He wasn't getting any younger.

“You’re having something. Fuck,” she muttered, rubbing her forehead. “You need to get out of that fucking shop, I’m so serious.”

He sniffed, folding his hands in his lap. “I am perfectly content, thank you.”

“Bullshit.”

“You seem to have grown more foul-mouthed since last I saw you.” He rallied his best tone of elder sibling disapproval for the comment; which she, in her tried and true younger sibling fashion, ignored.

“Jenny doesn’t check herself. Anyway, enough of the big brother schtick. So what if I work at a butcher shop and I swear the house down? So what if I’m the world’s biggest disappointment? Seriously—” she threw up her hands— “who’s even around to be disappointed anymore?”

He opened his mouth, then closed it, no argument left to him. 

She sighed, reaching out. Her hand stopped short of taking his, settling for a brief, brisk brush of the knuckles. They were not, nor had they ever been, a touchy-feely sort of family. “I got out,” she said, quietly. “I found something that fits. You don’t have to fill the shoes they left for you.”

He let the weight of his head pull his gaze to his staid and sensible soles. “I am… not sure what else would suit me.”

Edwin slammed the door behind the last customer of the day, a woman in a yellow dress laden with parcels and packages. May Day was one of the biggest days of the year for every shop in the valley, bringing in travellers from miles around, their pockets heavy with money to spend. But this was the first year that Edwin had had to handle the customer-facing side all on his own, without his stepmother to dazzle them or any of the shop girls to help. It had been a hard year, everyone tightening their belts, so many people convinced war was coming, no question about it, what with the missing prince. Edwin, privately, thought some prince having wandered off was an absurd thing for the twin kingdoms to be bumping chests over. But regardless of the whys and hows of it, the purse strings had tightened, and Edwin couldn’t afford to keep the extra help.

He could hear distant music, carried on the breeze from the band playing in the market square, punctuated by whoops and cheers and laughter and the shrieks and bangs of fireworks – the unmistakable sounds of merry-making. But he was alone, at last. The shelves and rails around him were bare, the mannequins stripped of the fine clothes he’d stayed up late to finish, working long into the night. There was relief, a sudden lifting of the ever-present millstone around his neck, but no satisfaction. Things would be quieter, for a while, but the late nights and the bleary eyes and the sore fingers would be back soon enough as midsummer crept closer, like the moving castle in the hills.

Still. He’d earned his bed, he thought – for tonight, at least. He was dead on his feet, and tomorrow’s problems were tomorrow’s problems. As he swept the floor, he thought about warming himself some milk to take up to his narrow little bed in the attic above the shop. Was it worth it, he wondered, or would he be asleep before he could drink more than a mouthful?

He would do it, he decided. It would be just the thing to send him off for a restful night, after the strange day he’d had. He was just setting the copper pan down on the stove in the little kitchen behind the shop when the bell above the door chimed, and he stopped dead, itchy all over with irritation. The shop was closed, the windows dark, the door locked – or so he’d thought, at least. May Day revellers, no doubt. With a cross little huff, he set down the milk and made his way back out and into the shop.

A woman in a magnificent cloak with an enormous fur collar was examining a jacket in drab grey twill – one of the only things left in the shop that hadn’t been sold in the May Day rush. It was beautifully made, but it was small and dull and quiet, and not a single customer had given it so much as a second glance. Edwin felt a pang of embarrassed sympathy every time he looked at it.

“I’m terribly sorry,” he said, in a voice that clanged with insincerity, “But we are closed. You’ll have to come back tomorrow.”

The woman straightened up. Her hair was fair, and she carried a heavy iron cane in one hand and a pipe in the other. There was something about her, something uneasy and strangely familiar, that bothered Edwin like a toothache.

“Is this it?” she said. She made a great show of looking around the empty shop, and laughed. It wasn’t a nice laugh. Edwin’s annoyance congealed into dislike. She sauntered unhurriedly over to a neatly-tailored but staid brown dress that had been passed over for flashier things again and again. She tugged on one of the sleeves, then let it go and wiped her hand on her own sumptuous cloak. She glanced back over at Edwin. “Sweetie. This is embarrassing.”

“Embarrassing?” Edwin spluttered. He was quite accustomed to being ignored, but he drew the line at being condescended to. And in his own shop, no less!

“Mm. They told me you were good, so I thought I’d, you know, come for a little sniff around my competition.”

“Competition?” said Edwin, blankly. “I think you have me confused with someone else. I don’t… are you a tailor too?”

She seemed to find that terribly funny. She threw her head back and laughed again. “God, no, can you imagine? Ew.”

Edwin was feeling increasingly at sea, but he knew when he was being insulted. He drew himself up. This place, this business – he’d never loved it the way his father had and he never would, but it was his, and he’d kept it alive with his own two hands. “Well,” he said, with all the steel he could muster. “What we have to offer here clearly isn’t to Madam’s taste. Though they might appear plain to the untrained eye, perhaps our wares are a trifle… sophisticated for some. I think you ought to take your leave.”

The strange woman didn’t seem at all ruffled by his rudeness. She raised her pipe to her mouth and took a long drag, exhaling a plume of sulphurous, yellow-tinged smoke. “You don’t get it, do you?” she said. “You poor, stupid little mouse. I’m the goddamn Witch of the Wastes.”

The floor moved queasily under Edwin’s feet. The Witch of the Wastes! These witches and wizards were nothing but trouble, and he wanted nothing more to do with any of them. He swallowed. “Be—be that as it may,” he said, shakily. “I’m afraid we are closed, Madam, so if you’d like to…”

“Oh, I don’t think so.” Instead of turning towards the door, she started towards Edwin. Her iron cane thumped on the floor with each step. He wanted to run—he thought, hysterically, of the milk he’d left by the stove—but he found, to his horror, that he couldn’t move his feet. The Witch of the Wastes stalked closer. “Now,” she murmured. She held the pipe between her teeth and grabbed him by the jaw, forcing him to face her. Her voice had dropped low, shedding its strange, girlish affectation. “Here’s what’s going to happen: you’re going to stay out of my way, you meddling little shit, or next time I won’t be so nice.” She let go of his jaw and took the pipe out of her mouth again, and blew the smoke directly into his face.

The smell assaulted his senses. His eyes watered and he coughed and hacked as it crawled up his nose and down his throat. He gasped for air, starbursts and dark spots popping behind his eyes. He couldn’t breathe—

And then, just when he could feel himself swaying like a tree about to fall, the smoke began to clear. He sucked in a greedy, rasping breath, his lungs burning, his eyes streaming, his throat stripped raw. He braced one hand on the wall and stood there, doubled over and wheezing, until the room stopped spinning. What in heaven’s name was in that pipe?

When he straightened up, she was watching him. “Oh, now,” she cooed. “Look at you. Oh, it’s just perfect. I wouldn’t change a thing, even if I could.” She walked a slow circle around him, putting Edwin in mind of a cat playing with its food. She leaned in to whisper conspiratorially in his ear. “You know what? I think it suits you.”

“What have you done to me?” Edwin croaked. His voice sounded strange, presumably from the smoke.

She laughed again – god, that horrible laugh, it scraped against whatever Edwin’s soul was made of like nails on a blackboard. “Moi? Nothing, babycakes. Your outside just matches your inside now, isn’t that nice? Very… chic. I am so glad we had this little heart to heart.” She turned to leave, then stopped abruptly in the doorway. “Shoot! I almost forgot, can you believe that? This is our little secret, okay?”

She banged the end of her cane once, twice against the floor, and, just for a moment, Edwin had the strangest feeling that there was something in his mouth, stilling his tongue. But it was gone almost as soon as it had arrived, and he opened and closed his mouth experimentally, raising one hand to his jaw.

“Kisses,” she said. “Mwah, mwah. Tell that old tomcat he can run but he can’t hide.”

And, with a swish of her cloak and another bright chime of the bell over the door, she disappeared into the night.

Edwin stumbled over to the door on shaky legs and locked it again. Everything sounded strangely muffled, as if he’d stood too close to the May Day fireworks, and he was stiff and sore all over, his heart galloping wildly in his chest. He stood there and wondered what, exactly, one was supposed to do after surviving the Witch of the Wastes. 

After a long moment of contemplation, he stumped back into the kitchen, thinking of his bed and that cup of warm milk. What else was there to do?

He poured it carefully into a pan and set it on the stove. He’d certainly sleep well, after all this excitement. Two strange things occurred to him then, one after the other: firstly, that he’d be the talk of the town, for the first time in his life, and secondly, that that was a ridiculous notion – after all, who would ever believe him? He shook his head, profoundly glad that there was no one there for him to embarrass himself in front of—and then stopped dead when he caught a glimpse of his reflection in one of the polished copper pans hanging up on the wall.

The face that looked back at him was lined and spotted with age, the hair gone iron-grey, the eyes watery.

And it was, unmistakably, his own.

The following morning was bright and breezy, and Edwin arrived at it quite changed. He’d spent the night before pacing holes in the floor of the shop and his rooms upstairs, numb with shock. Every time he saw himself reflected—in the pretty silver mirror in the bathroom, in the surface of the water in the sink, in the full-length mirror in his workroom and the more flattering one for customers downstairs in the shop—it was a freshly horrible surprise. When he leaned in close, there could be no doubting that it was him. There were the familiar, heavy eyebrows, the grey-green eyes, the disapproving mouth, the nose he broke as a child that had been slightly crooked ever since. When he raised his lined, liver-spotted hands to pull and stretch at his face, he could feel the new valleys and furrows in his skin. This, then, was what the Witch of the Wastes had meant when she’d said that his outside matched his inside. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, and was gripped instead by a peculiar feeling that his whole body was nothing more than a phantom limb.

Going to bed had seemed preposterous, and eventually the golden fingers of dawn began to creep in through the windows. He’d been sleepwalking through the motions of any other morning, and he was just about to unlock the shop for the day when he stopped abruptly. What was he doing? What did it matter, if the shop didn’t open on time like every other day? What did it matter if the shop didn’t open at all? 

You don’t have to fill the shoes they left for you, murmured Crystal’s voice in the back of his head, and he almost dropped his keys. Crystal. She’d told him to stay away from witches and wizards, and, much though it pained him, it seemed like she’d been right. What in the world would she say, when she saw him? And how was he supposed to explain what had become of him? He thought about writing her a letter and almost immediately dismissed the idea. Dear Crystal, through an amusing series of misunderstandings I appear to have fallen foul of the Witch of the Wastes, and now I’m cursed – terribly careless of me, I know! Not to worry, though, I have it all in hand. Ridiculous. She’d be here before he could blink, beating down the door, and he swallowed painfully as it occurred to him that he couldn’t bear to see the look on her face.

No, he decided. That wouldn’t do at all. He was going to get this whole magical mess sorted out, and then maybe one day he’d tell her about it.

Maybe.

So, instead of opening the shop, he packed up some bread and cheese, and an apple, then put on his stoutest boots and slipped out through the back door. He paused in the doorway, struck by the curious certainty that it would be sometime before he came home. There was something rather exciting about that.

The morning after May Day was always quiet, as people slept off their sore heads, and the streets were empty as Edwin struck out for the hills. He didn’t know quite where he was going, only that there was nobody around here—the town where he’d lived his whole life, whose every corner was as familiar to him as his own heartbeat—who could help him now.

As he left the town behind him, Edwin’s spirits began to lift. He liked a walk of a spring day, especially in May, when March and April had blown through and left the scudding clouds and skipping lambs and clusters of white woolly hawthorn flowers all copying each other in the sunshine. Indeed, he used to make this trip quite regularly, climbing to the top of the smallest hill that overlooked the town and whiling away the hours with a book. 

He’d never ventured further, however. Beyond that friendly hill was another range of hills, steeper and more treacherous underfoot, and beyond that, the forests and the Wastes; that wide and treacherous swathe of craggy, untamed land that not even the competitive rival kings saw fit to fight over, and where witches ran rampant in the wilderness. Edwin would never have dreamed of embarking on such an odyssey, let alone on foot, let alone by himself (see, for previous reference: witches.) And yet, here he was, toiling up the Tor, with nothing but the knapsack on his back. 

Oh, it was hard going. It would have been hard going if he’d still had his old body, but now he had his old body, he creaked against the wind like a rusted hinge. The wind picked up the higher Edwin climbed, the picturebook meadows turning to thorny scrub underneath his sensible boots. If anything, it was worse on the other side of the peak, where the sun didn’t reach and the wind acquired a knife-like quality. The third time Edwin skidded on some loose scree and nearly fell, he stopped and sat himself on a large rock, huddling inside the neck of his jacket like a disconsolate tortoise.

“Ridiculous,” he muttered. “Absolute nonsense. What on Earth was I thinking? That I’d just sally forth, best foot forward, break the curse and return home triumphant? I couldn’t do that in my normal state of affairs, let alone like—“

He cut himself off, swallowing around the lump in his throat. A chilly little wind wrapped itself around Edwin’s ankles. He sniffed, and sniffed again, before squaring his shoulders and scowling at the hillside below.

“Ridiculous,” he said again. “This is clearly going to take more thought than simply setting off.”

His feet crunched in the gravel as he stood up. Edwin looked down at his boots and back up again.

“One thing is for certain,” he said to the empty landscape. “If I am to go any further, I will need a walking stick.”

The hillside, completely devoid of greenery but from some squat shrubby gorse bushes, offered nothing useful. Edwin sighed through his nose at the landscape, and then sighed again just for the ornery pleasure of it, and stood up, taking careful, measured steps sideways down the hill.

He’d taken perhaps twenty steps before he saw it: just off the path, a long, weatherbeaten stick, topped by a heap of discarded fabric, tossed into a gorse bush. 

“Really!” Edwin said crossly. “People are dreadful. Fancy leaving all that rubbish out here to spoil the view! Someone ought to tidy it up.”

‘Someone’ meant Edwin, because ‘someone’ always meant Edwin. He stooped, groaning when his back complained, and grasped the stick, leaning back with all his meagre weight to try and lever it from the bush.

“Damn,” he gasped when splintery wood bit into his hands. “Damn and blast.”

The wind tugged playfully at the fabric stuck in the bush, setting it fluttering. It looked almost alive. Edwin scowled again. It was refreshing, to be able to look on the outside as annoyed as he felt on the inside. 

“This is silly,” Edwin snapped. “Will you come on?”

He added a stomp of his foot to the Will, and clearly made some difference, because the stick suddenly jerked and slid free, tumbling out of Edwin’s hands and onto the ground with a sound of ripping fabric. 

“Thank you,” Edwin said briskly. The stick was far too long to be a proper walking stick, but it would give him some much-needed stability. He bent down to pick it up—and then reeled backwards and almost fell when the heap of rubbish sprang to life.

Edwin squinted, dubiously, at the shabby thing teetering before him. The scarecrow had been dressed in a coat and trousers, so black and tattered they were almost feathered in appearance, and a threadbare and hole-riddled striped jumper in muted autumnal colours. The clothes were so understuffed it was enough to wonder if they’d just been draped over the pole with no attempt at padding whatsoever, but the ragged straw ends poking out between its long sleeves and dangling gloves hinted at a token attempt. 

The poor skinny fellow was topped with a bright orange head hollowed out of a ripe pumpkin and carved with a face – although not by any great artisan. Edwin could well visualise the moment the carver put down the knife, having realised that he'd made the eyes so absurdly large as to leave little room for any other features.

“Hm. I can hardly blame him. I've always hated pumpkin carving.” Edwin shuddered in horror at the thought of sticky, stringy pumpkin innards trailing from his fingers. “And pumpkins in general. Although I commend you on your freshness, young man. You are rather out of season, you know.”

The scarecrow gave no response to the backhanded praise. Edwin sniffed.

“Well. That's gratitude for you.”

He briefly eyed up the scarecrow’s crossed poles, wondering if he might be able to fashion some sort of cane after all. But they both looked rather too thick for him to snap with his bare hands in his condition; and besides, it did feel a bit distasteful to disembowel a perfectly good scarecrow. Especially one with the wide, trusting eyes of a tottering calf. Eyes so wide and trusting it seemed to undermine the scarecrow's very reason for being; why, even as Edwin watched, a wild crow swooped down to land upon its shoulder and peck idly at the bugs that must be crawling in its coat. Sighing, Edwin gave it up as a bad job, and bid the spindly fellow farewell before setting off once more on his way.

He had walked exactly ten paces before he became aware of a strange, wooden-sounding thwacking sound coming from behind him. He turned his head and found the scarecrow, standing exactly as close behind him as it had been when he’d last looked, swaying dizzily in the wind.

He frowned at it. “Now I know I’m walking slowly, but surely not that slowly.” 

On trembling ankles he turned, faced the scarecrow, and took a tentative step backwards; and the scarecrow took a short hop forward in turn.

It occurred to Edwin, distantly, that he should probably be alarmed. But it had already been a very, very long day.

“Right. So you’re alive, then, are you?” he asked, wearily.

Its pumpkin head did a sort of loose, back-and-forth waggle on its pole. A nod.

“Hm. Well, be that as it may, it is quite impolite to follow people around,” Edwin sniffed, waving the thing away like he was shooing off a pigeon. “So I would suggest you find your field, or wherever it is you’ve come from. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a very long walk still ahead of me.”

He turned briskly on his heel, and forged on; and noted with some relief that the hollow, stumpy hopping sound began to move in the opposite direction.

It was not to last. The sound of the hopping menace found him again not half an hour later and Edwin turned, red-faced and breathless, to give it what for. 

His tirade dried on the tip of his tongue at the sight of what the scarecrow had brought him. Hooked over one ragged sleeve and wobbling, dangerously close to falling off on every hop, was a cane. It fell from the scarecrow’s arm and stuck in the ground at Edwin’s feet like a dart in a board.

He squinted at the scarecrow. “Did you… steal this from somewhere?”

The scarecrow, predictably, did not answer. Edwin sighed, and took up the cane.

“Well. I suppose what’s done is done. I just hope no little old ladies were mugged in your criminal endeavours.”

It was, unfortunately, an excellent cane. Just the right height and comfortable to hold. Already Edwin felt the relief in his aching old muscles of getting to sink some weight into it. He tapped his fingers upon the head and eyed the scarecrow, thoughtfully. It was certainly a strange thing, but it did not seem malicious. Quite the opposite, in fact.

“I suppose you will have come across a witch or wizard in your time, won’t you?” Edwin mused. “Being a magic scarecrow.”

A pause, and then another wobbly nod. Edwin returned it tersely.

“Hm. Very well. If you really wish to help, you may go and seek out a handy magician for me. I have need of one. Though not the Witch of the Wastes, if you don’t mind. I do not much care for her. Now. Off you pop, there’s a good… pumpkin.”

It hesitated a moment, and though it was absurd to ascribe emotions to a gourd on a stick, Edwin fancied it looked rather sullen about its orders. But it hopped to it eventually, spinning about on its pole and bouncing away into the Wastes.

Edwin briefly considered waiting for it. But he had no idea how long it would be; and the only thing worse than feeling like he wasn’t getting anywhere was knowing he wasn’t. Grimly, he took up his new cane, and carried on into the darkening hills. 

Though spring had arrived, the light still faded fast; before Edwin knew it, dusk had come and gone and he was standing in the midst of deepening blue shadows. All the old fairytales and fanciful stories he’d forgotten as a child came rushing back to him. Trolls lurking under bridges. Witches in gingerbread houses. Things with long claws and sharp teeth that ate travellers foolish enough to be out after dark.

“What nonsense,” Edwin said out loud, tightening his grip on his shivers. “Witches don’t live in gingerbread houses; it would be awfully sticky. And there hasn’t been a troll in these parts in over two hundred years. The biggest worry you have is a loose bit of gravel or a sudden burst of rain.”

As if it heard him, the wind picked up, snaking chilly fingers down inside his collar. 

“Blast,” he said, clutching his coat tighter around him. “There’s no use for it. I’m going to have to find—“

He stopped, turning his ear to the wind. True, his hearing wasn’t what it was, but he could have sworn he heard a—

Clank-wheeze. Clank-wheeze. Clank-wheeze. 

“What on Earth?” Edwin strained his ears further. It didn’t sound like any airship or automobile he’d heard before. And it was getting closer.

Clank-wheeze. Clank-WHEEZE. CLANK-WHEEZE. CLANK—

The first thing he saw was the tip-top of a towering mast, bobbing up from behind a nearby peak like a periscope, wreathed in billowing smoke. And that, as it happened, was the least of it. The rest of the thing followed in short order; though it didn’t so much crest the hillside as slink around the side. The weight of its body shifted between four jointed legs, forward into a bow on its great leonine forepaws (clank) and then backward into a crouch on its spindly, birdlike hindlegs (wheeze). It was a deafening racket in amongst the rough, purring creak of straining wood from what appeared to be a hodgepodge of masts and platforms and weathered, brightly-painted beach cabins clinging to its back like barnacles. Between the long shape of the rusted structure balanced on top of the legs and the way it appeared to slink over the ground, albeit noisily, it put Edwin in mind of a cat. A very lumpy, ramshackle cat.

And it was huge. It loomed in front of Edwin like a rolling storm of metal and timber and ropes and gears, a scrapyard monstrosity. Edwin was so poleaxed by fear and surprise that it didn’t occur to him to move away. So there he stayed, gaping, until he was but a speck under its hulking form and the creation sank to its haunches with a thunderously loud thunk in front of him, and a sound like a giant’s shovel cleaving the earth. Two enormous, mismatched brass portholes of eyes seemed to stare at him like he was a fascinating bug as it propped itself up on its chunky forelegs, lifting its ‘chest’ to reveal in the bulky, bellyish hull of its body—

A door. A simple door, with chipped purple paint and a tarnished brass knob, and a small porch light glimmering invitingly beside it.

The scarecrow bobbed triumphantly into position next to him. They stared at the machine together.

“Well,” Edwin said at last. “This was more than I was expecting. Where on Earth did you find it?”

The scarecrow twirled in a vague circle, pointing with its gloved hands across to the opposite valley. Edwin hmmphed through his nose.

“I suppose I had better apologise to whomever has been rerouted this evening.” He eyed the construction’s giant, geared paws; the two timber turrets like pricked ears at the top of its head; the long, articulated, tail-like appendage at its rear, tipped with an enormous iron anchor (now half-buried in the ground), and he froze as a number of clues fell into place. “This is the Wizard King’s castle,” he said, slowly and accusingly.

The scarecrow bobbed in place, apparently unperturbed. Edwin supposed it didn’t have a heart for the Wizard King to eat. 

And it wasn’t as though Edwin held any charms for the notorious wizard anymore, was it? The sky above was a deep indigo, patches of threatening slate at the horizon where rain clouds were gathering. Edwin didn’t want to be out on the open hillside if the storm decided to strike.

He squared his shoulders, stuck out his chin and marched towards the door. 

“Thank you, scarecrow,” he called behind him. “You’ve done very well.”

The scarecrow showed no signs of clearing off, but there was not much else Edwin could do for a sentient squash on a stick. He wouldn’t even be able to manoeuvre it through the bloody door.

The room beyond the door looked more like a mad scientist’s laboratory than the grand entrance hall Edwin had expected. It was far, far smaller than expected, for one thing. In the warm, dim light of the dying fire in the hearth, he could make out the flasks and tubes and jars crowded precariously on every surface and the bundles of dried herbs hanging from the low beams up above. Here and there, the light caught strange, spider-like devices and instruments that must have done things Edwin couldn’t even begin to guess at. He took a cautious step inside, then another. Something crunched unpleasantly under the sole of his boot. There were books and candlesticks and pieces of chalk strewn about, and bowls with strange residue caked inside them, and the black and white tiles on the floor bore the evidence of a thousand colourful spills and splatters. The tools of the Wizard King’s wicked magic, no doubt. Edwin ran his fingertips along the edge of a great wooden table, scorched and scarred and pitted by many years of misadventure, and they came away furred with dust.

Edwin sniffed. “What a mess,” he muttered.

Nevertheless, it was warm, and the night outside was cold and dark. He picked his way over to the chair in front of the hearth. He could sleep here tonight, he thought, then with any luck, he’d be able to slip away before morning and no one would ever know he’d been there at all. Someone had left a basket of logs by the side of the hearth, so he picked one up and added it to the embers of the fire before settling down in the chair. The day’s adventures had all caught up with him at once, and he could barely keep his eyes open. He watched drowsily as the fire crackled and caught at the log. The warmth was slowly soothing away the ache in his old bones. With his eyes half-closed like this, he fancied he could see a face in the flames. As he drifted, he mapped out the bright eyes, the long nose, the laughing mouth, a peculiar little glint that could have been an earring…

“Oi,” said the face in the fire, and Edwin almost fell out of his chair. He looked around, but there was no one else in sight, which surely meant—

“Are you… are you talking to me?” Edwin whispered.

There was a snap and a crackle of amusement from the fire. “Nah, I’m talking to the other silver fox who just blew in. What happened to you? Hell of a spell you’re under.”

If Edwin had been half asleep before, he was wide awake now. He leant forward in his chair. “You can see that I’m under a spell?” he said.

“And it’s a doozy.” The face in the fire tipped from one side to the other, studying him. Edwin could have sworn it was smiling. “Got on the wrong side of old Esther Finch, did you?”

“Who?”

“Witch of the Wastes. Used to be in and out of here all the time, stepping out with the boss. Know that handiwork anywhere. Right vindictive bint – loves to lob an aging spell around.” One of those eyes, coal-black and twinkling with mirth, disappeared briefly in what Edwin could only presume was a wink. “Shame. Bet you were even fitter before.”

The fire twinkled at Edwin, who was struck utterly dumb with outrage.

Not for long, though.

“I beg your pardon,” he spluttered. “You’re terribly forward, for a…”

“A fire demon, ta very much.” The fire blazed up brighter for a moment, little tongues of flame in strange, prismatic colours darting away up the chimney. “Name’s—well. You can call me Charles. Everyone else does.”

“Edwin,” said Edwin. He felt so wrong-footed he’d as good as forgotten what had so offended him just now. A fire demon, indeed! “Listen,” he said. “Do you think you could break my spell?”

“‘Course I could,” said the face in the fire, bracingly. “If you break mine first, that is. My bargain with the Wizard King. Keeps me trapped here in the castle. I want to get out, see the world! Fair’s fair, eh?”

Edwin’s heart sank. He was a tailor, for heaven’s sake, not a wizard. But then he remembered the look on the Witch’s face as she’d left his shop, and abruptly he was so angry he couldn’t speak for a moment. “Fine,” he said. “We have an accord. I shall break your spell. Just tell me what to do.”

Charles turned a mournful blue. “Ain’t that easy, I’m afraid. I can’t tell anyone the terms of my spell, same as you can’t tell anyone about yours.”

“What nonsense,” said Edwin, briskly. “I think you’ll find—”

But when he tried to describe what had happened that night, he found his tongue pushed down hard against the bottom of his mouth as if by invisible fingers. That blasted witch! I shall have the better of her if it’s the last thing I do, Edwin thought to himself. He pushed the knuckles of his knobbly old hands together, hard.

Charles was watching him knowingly from the hearth. “Don’t look so down in the dumps about it, eh?” he said. “There’ll be clues. You seem like a clever bloke. Hang around here for a while and you’ll work it out in no time.”

Edwin felt rather strongly that he’d been tricked, but he didn’t have the first idea what he was going to do about it. And in any case, he really was terribly tired. “Perhaps,” he murmured. He settled deeper into the chair, which creaked. “I think I’ve had quite enough excitement for one day now, though. I should like to go to sleep before I can experience any more.”

And, so saying, he did.

Chapter Text

The sound of a gong ringing boastfully loudly shook Edwin awake from dreams of walking on air.

“Sfzh?” he said blearily, opening his eyes.

He squinted immediately; daylight streamed through the grubby window onto Edwin’s face. For a dizzy, frightening moment, Edwin couldn’t remember where he was.

“You don’t half snore, mate,” said a smug, crackling voice from the hearth, and the events of the day before came rushing back. The witch! The curse! The climb up this forsaken hill—no wonder Edwin ached all over—the castle! And in the grate, a fire demon.

Edwin opened his mouth and was about to give a very sour remonstration on appropriate morning greetings when the gong rang again. Both he and Charles winced.

“Keep your hair on,” Charles muttered. “Porthaven door. Oi! Niko!”

Charles’ voice rose to a bellow on the last word. There was a thud overhead, and the sound of bare feet running over bare floorboards.

“...oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no—”

The running feet came down the stairs in a noisy shower of scattered clutter, and Edwin slammed his eyes shut, feigning sleep once more.

“—oh no, oh no, oh no, oh.” The feet and the frantic muttering stopped abruptly by Edwin’s shoulder. There was a silence full of interest, and Edwin felt himself turning red. “Who’s that?”

“Cleaning service. Says the master hired him. Come on, Niko, Porthaven door.”

“Augh,” Niko said, and the feet retreated.

There was a glittering, swishing sound of fabric and a rush of air as the front door opened.

“Yes?”

“An urgent message for the Wizard Jenkins!” The voice had the self-importance and puffed chest of a mating woodcock. “His Majesty requests his attendance at the palace at his earliest convenience!”

Precisely whose convenience, Edwin noted drily, was left carefully unspecified.

“Master King is out,” Niko said primly – and, Edwin noted, gruffly, as if in impersonation of some sort of old codger. Cracking open an eye, Edwin could see a cloaked figure silhouetted in the doorway. “I will give this to him when he returns.”

“It is of vital importance that the Wizard Jenkins receives it!”

“Yes. I know.” Niko’s voice sounded a little strained around the edges. “Good day.”

“Good—”

The door shut before the man could finish. There was a krrrring sound, like a clock being wound, then the silence that had fallen took on a heavy, velvet quality.

“You can’t keep hiding in his void whenever you get skittish,” Charles said reproachfully. Through his slitted eyes, Edwin could see him rest two tentacle elbows on a charred log.

Niko sighed and pulled off the cloak, blurring like water on a windowpane as whatever illusion it bore vanished. When she spoke again, it was in the lighter tone which had followed her down the stairs. “That’s the third one this week. Soon they’re going to figure out that I’m bluffing, and then everyone will be so mad.”

She turned and stomped back up to Charles and the hearth. Without a magic cloak, Niko was a tall, slender girl, perhaps a little younger than Crystal. Dark eyes blinked solemnly at Edwin from under a heavy, unfortunate, fringe.

“Did Master King really hire a cleaner?” she whispered.

“So says Granddad, here,” Charles said with a shrug that spat sparks up into the chimney. “Guess we’ll find out when the boss returns, eh?”

Niko looked unconvinced. “Doesn’t he look kind of old to be a cleaner?”

Edwin was quite used to being talked about as though he wasn’t there. Everyone did it, from his stepmother to the girls in the shop to the other tailors’ apprentices at the trade school. It was annoying when he was merely being talked over. Worse was when his gossipers hadn’t realised he was in the room with them, as though they’d just looked through him. Worst of all was when they realised their mistake and the conversation faded into sheepish silence.

Abruptly, Edwin decided he wasn’t having it anymore. He was too old to put up with being whispered about by idle whippersnappers!

“Certainly not,” he snapped, opening his eyes and sitting up. It was deeply satisfying when Niko yelped and Charles flamed upwards with a ‘bleedin’ hell!’ “I’m not in the grave yet, am I? Though the state of this place would inspire the dead to rise and pick up a broom!”

“I’m sorry!” Niko said, clasping her hands to her chest. “I’m sure you’re not as old as you look!”

“Nailed it,” muttered Charles under his breath. Edwin ignored him.

“As a matter of fact, I am,” he said haughtily. “I am venerably, incalculably old, and I can still do a better job of cleaning than you, apparently! What is it you do here?”

“I’m Master King’s apprentice,” Niko said, pleating her fingers together nervously. “I’m Niko. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude.”

Edwin was gracious enough to accept an apology. “Yes, well,” he said, very ungraciously. “Perhaps you might consider lifting a duster once or twice between your apprenticeship duties.”

Niko nodded vigorously. “I do try, I promise. It’s just…”

She trailed off and the three of them peered round the gloomy kitchen in silence, punctuated only by crackling as Charles shifted in the grate.

“Yes,” Edwin said heavily. “I can see.”

Most embarrassingly, his stomach chose that moment to give a loud rumble. Edwin was, he abruptly realised, absolutely starving. He hadn’t eaten since his ploughman’s picnic on the hillside the day before!

The Edwin he’d been that morning, the little mouse who lived above the tailor’s shop and couldn’t say boo to a goose would have been far too shy to even think about asking for a morsel to eat. Edwin was a different beast now.

“I’m paid in bed and board,” he announced. “Is there anything to eat in this place or is dirt the only thing you keep in your cupboards?”

“Oh! Yes!” Niko’s shoulders dropped in clear relief, and she scurried to the mountain of debris Edwin was only fairly certain was the kitchen table. “I went to see—I mean, I went to the butcher yesterday. Oh, but we can't—um, I think I saw some bread here a couple of days ago?”

“Let me see,” Edwin said, getting to his feet with a groan. Every joint felt like a squeaky wheel, every muscle a bag of sand. The young didn’t know what they were wasting. Unhooking his stick from the back of the chair, he hobbled over to where Niko stood.

With the morning light streaming in through the dirty windows, Edwin could see a basket of eggs on the table, and when he gingerly lifted the edge of a mysterious brown paper package, he found bacon and sausages. There was even a loaf of bread that was only slightly stale. All the ingredients in place for a hearty cooked breakfast, for those prepared to do the cooking. Really! He’d often heard old people complaining about the state of the youth, but he hadn’t realised things were quite so serious. He hefted a blackened frying pan down from a hook on the wall, and advanced towards the hearth.

“Right,” he said. “A medium heat, if you please. I shan’t have burnt bacon or overcooked eggs.”

Charles blazed up high and bright. “Whoa, whoa, whoa! You can’t be doing that, mate, I’m a fire demon.” He shook himself, releasing a shower of sparks. There was a crackle and a blast of intense heat and light, and when Edwin opened his eyes again, the face in the fire was gone. In its place was a boy, sitting amongst the smouldering logs with one knee bent and the other long, skinny leg dangling over the edge of the hearth. He was lit from within by a restless, flickering golden light, and his outline danced and wavered. When he raised his hand to prop his sharp chin on it, little flames danced at the ends of his long fingers. There were more flames threaded through his dark curls, Edwin noticed—tiny ones, like candle flames—and a little sparkle where Edwin had thought he could see an earring before.

“Yes,” Edwin said. It was very strange, he thought. Not two days earlier, he would have been awed, perhaps even scared. Now, all he wanted was his breakfast. It had been a long time since that bread and cheese yesterday. “So you said. But I’m hungry. Head down, please, this shan’t take long.”

artwork by idliketobeatree

Charles folded his arms as fire licked up them, flames blossoming from his shoulders. He leaned out of the hearth towards Edwin, who could feel the heat rolling off him. “Nah, nah, I don’t make breakfast,” he said, and then he winked one soot-smudged, coal-black eye. “Not for just anyone, anyway. What’ll you give me if I do?”

Edwin was cursed, and he was old, and he was hungry, and he ached all over from sleeping in that stiff wooden chair all night, and he was in no mood to play games. “Give you?” he repeated.

“Yeah. You know, like a deal.” Charles’ big, winning smile widened, and he waggled his eyebrows. Edwin didn’t care for that one bit. There was a pinkish cast to his flames, if Edwin wasn’t very much mistaken.

Edwin glanced behind him at Niko, who was studying the spellbook that had been left open on the table and was doing a very poor job indeed of pretending she wasn’t listening. Edwin leant in close. “We already have a deal,” he whispered. He could smell woodsmoke. “But if you would like to make another one, here’s what I propose: you let me cook, and I won’t tell your wizard that you’re trying to escape. How does that sound?”

There was another indignant flurry of sparks. “Oi, there’s no need for all that! Alright, alright, alright.” Rather sulkily, Charles tucked his knees up to his chest and wrapped his arms around them, flames breaking out all over him as he shrank back down to just a face. “I don’t know, you try to do something nice for someone,” he muttered, as Edwin raised the frying pan and settled it atop the logs. “Ow—ow, watch it! I’ll burn your bloody eyebrows off.”

“You are more than welcome to try, once we’ve finished eating,” said Edwin. He broke four eggs into the pan.

Two bright eyes appeared in the flames, just underneath the pan’s edge, like something peering out from underneath a rock. “You gonna eat those?”

“The eggs? Yes, I was rather hoping to.”

“Not the eggs, the shells.” The eyes took on a pleading expression. “Can I have ‘em?”

“The shells?”

“They’re nice! Crunchy. Please?” A mouth opened, just below the eyes. Carefully, Edwin dropped the eggshells into the waiting maw, which devoured them with noisy enjoyment.

Edwin was just tipping the eggs onto the two cleanest plates that Niko had been able to find (not at all up to Edwin’s standards; he could see he had his work cut out for him) when the door made that krrrring sound again, and Niko’s head snapped up.

Charles rolled his eyes. “Oh, here comes trouble,” he said, as the door swung open and a dishevelled figure stumbled over the threshold. “Alright, Tom? Look what the—”

The figure stepped out of the shadows. “If you don’t want a bucket of water thrown over you, you won’t finish that sentence,” he said.

It was the Wizard King.

But he, too, was much changed since they’d first met two days earlier. His artfully tousled hair was flat on one side and sticking up in all directions on the other. He was pale, with an unwholesome sheen of sweat on his skin and dark, bruise-like shadows under his eyes. His shirt (not the one he’d been wearing on May Day, Edwin was fairly sure) was buttoned all askew, and Edwin’s fingers itched to fix it.

“Master Thomas!” cried Niko, abandoning her plate of eggs and hurrying over to shut the door behind him. “You haven’t been home since May Day, we were worried something had happened to you!”

“Speak for yourself,” muttered Charles. “He’s fine, he smells like he’s been sleeping on the floor of a brewery. Always land on your feet, don’t you, Tom?”

The Wizard King—Thomas? Tom?—shrugged off his magnificent tawny coat. It was looking distinctly bedraggled. “Niko, my little turtledove. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to worry you, I just lost track of time. Charles, you backstabbing wretch, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate the look of disappointment on your fiery little face whenever I come home having failed to die facedown in a gutter. Really keeps me humble.”

“Oh, does it? I hadn’t noticed,” said Charles.

The Wizard King’s curious, gilded eyes, every bit as strange as Edwin remembered, alighted on Edwin.

“Now, humour me a minute,” said the Wizard King to the room at large. “Can everyone else see him, or did I hit the absinthe harder than I thought last night?”

It was about that moment that Edwin realised Charles’ little ‘Thomas-hired-him’ cover story was going to fall apart very swiftly indeed with the Thomas in question in the room. Or it would if Edwin didn’t play his cards right.

“Yeah, we can see him – it’s Edwin!” Niko piped up.

“Yeah,” said Charles. “Here to clean this place up, in’t he? Look at the state of it.”

“Hm.” The Wizard King sauntered over to the hearth. He bent down, examining the frying pan. “Look at you, making breakfast. You went down easy for this one, huh, Charles?”

Charles blazed up, sending sparks flying. “Glass houses, mate. Look at the state of your knees.”

“Expanding my horizons, darling. Green isn’t your colour.” The Wizard King straightened up and turned away, but not before brushing the dirt from his knees. He took a long, assessing look at Edwin. “Do I know you? You seem… familiar.”

Edwin, who had been feeling safely cocooned in the disguise of the Witch’s curse, was abruptly certain that the Wizard King recognised him as the boy he’d rescued from Simon and his cronies on May Day.

Thankfully, with a smidgen of cunning, that recognition might just be turned to his advantage.

“Of course you do – you did hire me, young man,” he said, with confidence he didn’t feel.

A sandy brow ticked upwards. “Did I?”

“Yes,” Edwin sniffed, as haughtily as he could manage. “Although you were in rather a state at the time, if memory serves.”

“Well, memory’s not serving me,” drawled the wizard, unblinking. “I don’t remember that conversation at all.”

Hopefully, the sweat on Edwin’s brow would be attributed to the fire demon’s heat. “Well, think harder,” he said, riffling hastily through the pockets of his own recollections. Details, details—what had Thomas been wearing under that ludicrous coat? “You had a dark blue shirt on. At least I think it was a shirt. Some approximation of one. You might think about leaving a touch more to the imagination.”

“...Hm. My mistake. Edwin, you can call me Thomas.” The Wizard King took his hand and kissed it. Edwin was so surprised that all he could think was that Charles had been right: he did smell like a tavern. Up close, Thomas was unshaven and his eyes were bloodshot, but those old gold irises were remarkable. His voice was different, too, all hoarse and scratched, not the smooth, self-assured purr Edwin remembered. Just when Edwin was beginning to think there had been some sort of mistake—surely this couldn’t be the wizard that had the whole valley making doubly sure their doors were locked at night and warning their prettiest sons and daughters to be wary of charming strangers—when he smiled, and for the first time that morning, he looked like the man Edwin had met two days ago. That tell-tale sparkle appeared like the sun from behind a cloud. “So,” he said. “You’ve come to mend my wicked ways, huh?”

“That’s right,” said Edwin, who wasn’t altogether sure that the wizard was fooled; but he knew when he was being thrown a lifeline, and he seized upon it eagerly. Where else, after all, was he likely to find someone who could break his curse? “In return for bed and board,” he added, firmly.

Thomas winced. He suddenly looked rather green. “Whatever you want,” he said, so quickly that Edwin began to wonder whether he should have asked for actual payment as well. “Just—keep it down, alright? I’m a little… fragile, today. And on that note, I’m going to bed, where I will probably die. Friends, enemies, janitors – good day.”

He disappeared upstairs, leaving a rather stunned silence in his wake. Edwin looked down at his plate. The eggs had gone quite cold.

“Well,” said Charles. “That could’ve gone worse. Oi, you gonna eat those?”

And that, it rather seemed, was that. Honestly. If Edwin had known he could just walk in wherever he liked and declare himself hired, he might have thought about a change of careers long ago.

He was, admittedly, daunted by the idea of having a whole castle to clean by himself. Castles, surely, must hire dozens if not hundreds of staff to maintain. But an afternoon of snooping (“I am not snooping, Charles; it is important I familiarise myself with what needs doing!”) revealed the so-called castle to be anything but. It would be more accurate to describe it as a scrapyard stapled to a cottage. There was the main room, the heart and hearth of the home, some sort of kitchen-cum-living room situation, so cluttered with miscellaneous magical debris as to bear little resemblance to either. Branching off that near the front door was an alcove wherein lay the kitchen sink, cabinets, and a short stretch of counter, and towards the back of the room a broom cupboard and water closet. Then upstairs two bedrooms and, the pièce de résistance, another bathroom; this one large, perpetually steamy and dominated by a colossal clawfoot tub stained a number of improbable hues. His arms ached at the mere notion of all the scrubbing he would have to do to get it looking respectable.

Stranger than the fact of the castle’s oddly humble interior was the impossible nature of its front door. Edwin watched, shrewdly, as Niko answered another call of “Kingsbury door!” by turning a little four-coloured dial above the architrave to the red side, and opening it onto a street of lavish buildings and a steady stream of shiny motorcars.

“How in the world does that work?” he demanded, once Niko was done fending off a man very insistent on seeing a Wizard Pendragon, whoever that was. He peered out of the small front window at the bustling street, at the towering spires of the King’s castle in the distance. Kingsbury was even more lavish and gleaming than it looked on the postcards. It was Veuleroy’s royal city, and though it resided within the same kingdom borders as Edwin himself, it had always seemed so impossibly far away that it might as well have been on the moon. He examined the door closely, looking for signs of trickery. “I came through this door from the Wastes not a day ago!” he said, accusingly. “Near Market Chipping!”

“It opens in a load of places, it’s really cool,” Niko whispered, turning the dial to green and opening the door, sure enough, to a sunny, pleasant afternoon in the hills north of Market Chipping. “But we’re not supposed to mess around with it,” she said seriously, shutting it so fast she nearly caught Edwin’s nose in it.

Not to be cowed by youngsters, Edwin waited until she had skipped away to turn the dial to blue, and open the door again. The sight that greeted him this time was that of an overcast seaside town, full of shabby but colourful house facades, smells of salt and brine, the squalling of seagulls. This, then, must be Porthaven. He had heard of it; it was on the other side of the kingdom border, well past the Wastes, on Koningstraum’s southern coast. There could be no mistaking this vision for trickery. Veuleroy, after all, was completely landlocked – and the accents of a nearby chattering mother and child bore the terse Koningstraum cadence he often heard on passing travellers.

More curious than his sudden transportation to a town half a world away was the sight awaiting on the doorstep; that of his new employer—who was supposed to be in bed—squatting there, still a bit green about the gills, scratching behind the ears of a scruffy but sleek little black cat.

“Did you shimmy down the drainpipe?” Edwin asked, bewildered and wrong-footed.

Thomas squinted up at him. “I get around. Leaving so soon? Either you work fast or you know a lost cause when you see it.”

Edwin took in the sight of several more scraggy cats happily munching on scraps strewn about the door, and sniffed. “You ought not to feed strays. They’ll keep coming back, making a nuisance of themselves.”

The wizard stood up, with a grunt of effort. “They’re invited.” he said, brushing past Edwin back into the castle with a wink. “Unlike some strays I know.”

He slouched back up the stairs, imperiously demanding Charles make some hot water en route. Edwin shared a measuring look with the black cat; who yawned in his face and hopped off the step to join its chums.

Huffing, Edwin stepped back inside and shut the door. His hand hovered over the dial, ready to turn it to the last colour; the black side.

“And I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Thomas’ bored voice floated down from aloft.

Contrariness all but demanded Edwin turn the dial as planned.

Caution won out, though, and he turned it back to green instead, back to the Wastes. A proper door really ought to wait for you where you last saw it.

Edwin learned a great many things over the next week or so. He listened best when his hands were busy – it was just like being back in the shop, sewing while the customers talked to each other and to his stepmother and to the shop girls. There were all sorts of interesting little morsels a nosy old man could pick up, especially if he made a bit of a show of being thoroughly absorbed in scrubbing the greasy soot from the windows or sweeping up the little drifts of unsavoury debris that had accumulated underneath all the furniture. Happily, the castle was in an even worse state than he’d realised on that first night, which suited him perfectly.

Each morning, he woke with the sun, gave Charles another log, and chose an aspect of the mess to attack that day, all before Niko and Thomas came downstairs for breakfast. Niko always appeared first – Thomas didn’t usually show his face much before lunchtime, and sometimes not until after lunch on the occasions when he’d been out late the night before. He refused to be tempted, tricked or bullied into telling Edwin where he went when he left the castle, especially when he visited whatever was on the other side of the black door. When Edwin had asked him outright, he’d laughed.

“Quite some eyes on you, huh? You ought to be spying for the King, one more week and you’ll have my mother’s maiden name and my inside leg measurement. Where have you put the spellbook I left on the table yesterday? It’s for Niko, there’s something in there I want her to try.”

“I haven’t put it anywhere,” Edwin lied. He’d moved it when he was nosing around, but that had been a few days ago, and he couldn’t remember what he’d done with it. He squeezed past Thomas to get to the door, pushed it open and emptied his mop bucket into the gutter outside, forcing Thomas to leap out of the way with a cry of horror, lest the dirty water splatter his fine clothes. “You really have let things get into a terrible mess, young man,” he said, piously. “Of course you can’t find anything around here!”

Thomas had just sparkled at him unrepentantly as he slipped out of his great tawny fur coat and tossed it in a heap over the back of a chair. “One of these days I’m gonna wake up and find you’ve tidied me away into a broom closet,” he said, over his shoulder, as he floated out through the door and slammed it shut behind him.

Edwin lugged the bucket over to the stained porcelain sink and began to refill it. Why a man would take off his coat to leave the house…! Probably the better to show off the scandalously low cut of his neckline. “Out courting, if I’m not mistaken,” he told the mop, with a disapproving sniff, as he dunked it into the bucket and set to work again. “A fine way for a wizard to waste his time.”

It was, in fact, very difficult to catch Thomas doing any magic at all. He slept late and spent hours upon hours in the bathroom every day before emerging in extravagant clouds of fragrant steam, then went out in his best clothes without telling anyone where he was going. He often didn’t come back until Niko was upstairs in her room, Edwin was asleep in the truckle bed under the stairs and Charles was smouldering gently in the hearth, occasionally releasing little flurries of sparks as he dreamed. At first, Edwin had thought that Thomas was going out on important wizardly business, but his doubts were growing by the day.

“He’s the most powerful wizard in the kingdoms,” Niko told him, earnestly. “He’s never taken on an apprentice before, it’s a real honour.”

“Hm,” said Edwin. Niko, at least, spent her days poring over the books Thomas left out for her, carefully weighing out ingredients and drawing complicated, wiggly symbols on the floor with chalk, her tongue poking out of her mouth in concentration. These efforts often resulted in great clouds of colourful smoke that made them all cough something terrible, or tremendous flashes of light and noisy explosions. Edwin didn’t know whether these things were good signs or not, but he still thought it was all terribly impressive – at least Niko was putting her back into the sorts of things Edwin felt a wizard ought to be doing. Even Charles, idle as he seemed to be smoldering away in his hearth, was always busy making hot water and minding the doors and generally making an effort.

It had seemed so obvious that Thomas was out courting that Edwin simply hadn’t considered that he might have other, even less noble reasons for the strange hours he kept – not, that is, until the day when he witnessed them first hand.

“I won’t be back until late,” said Thomas, carelessly, over his shoulder, as he breezed past Edwin in the kitchen. “Don’t wait up.” He reached for the door handle, but before he could lay a finger on it, the bell rang.

“Porthaven door,” said Charles, indistinctly, around a mouthful of dry twigs. Edwin had found a long-abandoned bird’s nest in the chimney earlier, and had been slowly feeding it to him.

Thomas snatched his hand away like it had been burned. “Niko,” he said. “Could you be a doll and get that for me? I’ve just realised I… left my coat upstairs.”

Edwin, who was balanced precariously on a chair in order to get the cobwebs out of the corners of the ceiling, looked around at Thomas. “Did you?” he said. “Then what’s that monstrosity you’re wearing?”

“My… other coat. It has different… magical affinities, attuned to—you know what, I wouldn’t expect you to understand,” said Thomas, with something of his usual haughtiness, as he turned and beat a hasty retreat back up the stairs.

Niko pushed aside the long scroll of paper on which she’d been practicing the strange runes that made Edwin’s head hurt when he looked at them. She threw the disguise cloak around herself, activating its magical properties—the impressive illusion of a white-bearded old man—and went to answer the door. Edwin turned back to his cobwebs, but he was listening hard.

“Hello,” said Niko. She looked convincing enough, but she hadn’t quite managed to get the voice right yet, and the mismatched effect was rather odd. “How may I help you?”

“Good day!” said a plummy, self-satisfied sort of voice. “Is the Wizard Jenkins at home? I have an important message for him. It’s from His Majesty, the King.”

Niko hesitated, then said, “No,” in an unconvincing rush. “He’s… out. Somewhere.”

“Oh.” The messenger sounded disappointed. “Are you quite sure?”

“Yes,” said Niko, this time with more confidence. “He’s definitely not here. But if you give me the message I’ll be sure to give it to him.”

The messenger then spent several minutes impressing upon Niko just how urgent the message was, and refused to leave until Niko said, loudly, “Thank you! Goodbye, now!” and shut the door in his face.

Edwin turned around to see Niko slumped against the door as though someone was trying to push it open from the other side. “I hate having to lie to them,” she said, unhappily. “They never believe me.” The disguise cloak was slipping off her shoulder, and her face wobbled strangely between the old man’s and the young girl’s. She shrugged it off, becoming herself again.

“Well,” said Edwin, stepping down off the chair. The ceiling had never been so thoroughly swept for cobwebs. “I think it’s a perfect disgrace, a wizard making his apprentice lie for him.”

“And, of course, you are the authority on what a wizard should and shouldn’t do,” said Thomas, reappearing on the stairs now that the messenger had gone. He had not, Edwin couldn’t help but notice, changed his coat. “Thank you, Niko. I can’t tell you how nice it is to have a friend in this house full of vipers.”

“I’m supposed to give you this,” Niko said. She thrust the envelope into Thomas’ hands as if it was something poisonous she was eager not to be holding anymore.

“Thank you.” Thomas took it, but didn’t open it. He wandered over to the hearth. “This one looks important,” he murmured. “Sure would be shame if my hand were to slip, huh?”

And he dropped it, quite deliberately, into the fire.

“Oi!” Charles protested. He sneezed, sending a flurry of sparks up the chimney. “That bloody tickles, I keep telling you paper gets up my nose—” he sneezed again, harder this time, and Thomas hurriedly brushed a glowing ember off his sleeve before it could set the whole coat ablaze.

Edwin watched the letter curl and blacken as it burned, the unbroken wax seal bubbling. “Didn’t you want to know what it said?” he asked.

Thomas turned away from the hearth. “Not that it’s any business of yours,” he said, archly, “but it’s the same as all the others I’ve been taking pains to avoid, for reasons of my own.”

“That’s quite a way for a wizard to behave,” Edwin muttered.

Thomas whipped around. “Excuse me?” he said sweetly. “I’m sure I must have misheard that, because it sounded like more unsolicited advice from the unqualified about how to be a wizard.”

“I said,” Edwin repeated, more loudly, “that’s quite a way for a wizard to behave.” It was terribly freeing, not worrying about being thought rude. “You can’t even open your own letters! And to think, you’re the Wizard King that’s got the whole valley scared half to death! You’re nothing but a… a…”

“No, go on,” said Thomas. “I was enjoying that, you were really hitting your stride.”

“A popinjay,” Edwin finished, lamely.

Thomas tossed his hair and made for the door again. “Better a popinjay than a harpy,” he said. He gave Edwin a twinkling smile, but there was something cold and frosted-over about it. “I’m going out, since I’m obviously not wanted here. And, despite what some people seem to think, I have important business.”

He turned the dial to red, wrenched the door open, and stopped dead.

On the doorstep was another velvet-clad messenger – this one in the colours of the other kingdom Thomas had just carelessly dropped them into.

“Gosh,” said the messenger. “That’s awfully clever, I hadn’t even rung the bell yet. You must be the Wizard Pendragon!”

“Ah, piss,” said Thomas.

The messenger drew himself up to his full height and puffed out his chest. “A letter from Their Majesty, the King,” he announced, and handed it to Thomas with a flourish. There was an undignified scuffle, during which Thomas tried and failed to avoid taking it.

“Well,” prompted the messenger. “Aren’t you going to open it?”

Thomas sighed. “Let me guess: King Grump over Koningstraum way still hasn’t found his missing prince—very careless, by the way, who loses a prince?—so he’s going to take us all to war over it, and our king is insulted enough by the kidnapping allegations that they're gonna call his bluff, but they can’t win a war without wizards, so it’s time to yank on my leash and bring me to heel. Is that about right?”

The messenger blinked, and then laughed, uncomfortably. “Very funny!” he said. “Very funny indeed! I think we’ll be needing all the good humour we can find, in the days to come.”

Thomas held the letter by one corner, as if he was worried it might explode. “I suppose I can’t be a conscientious objector?”

“I rather think Madame Night would object to that, sir. Not very conscientiously. Three warlocks found to be dodging conscription notices were jailed last week.”

“Hm.” Thomas rubbed his wrist, as if he was feeling a set of invisible handcuffs. “Well, thanks. I’d like to say it’s been a pleasure, but I’d be lying. Bye, now.”

He shut the door on the messenger, and walked slowly back over to the hearth, like there were shackles around his ankles. All the laughter and the sparkle had gone out of him. “I was wondering which of 'em would bag me first,” he muttered. “Still. We led them a merry dance, huh?”

Charles blazed up into a boy-shaped thing again, sitting cross-legged amongst the burning logs and looking uncharacteristically solemn. “Danced their feet right off, mate,” he said, and he gave Thomas a little smile of commiseration. “Reckon it’s the end of the night now, though.”

“I’m going out,” Thomas announced some hours later. He seemed, for the moment at least, to have bounced right back from his sombre spell. He was magnificently dressed and hysterically bejewelled, and bathed in so much perfume that passing too close to him was like being shoved hard by an unseen pair of hands. “I trust you all to miss me terribly while I’m gone.”

“Oh, yes? And when might we expect you to grace us with your presence again?” said Edwin, pausing in his work to lean on his broom.

Thomas winked. “Wouldn’t you like to know?” he said. He threw the door open with a flourish, then closed it again behind him with a bang.

Peace descended once more. Charles curled up sleepily among the logs, snoring little crackling snores and occasionally exhaling little flurries of sparks, and Edwin returned to his sweeping.

He gave it fifteen minutes, carefully measured out by the vaguely disquieting owl-faced clock on the wall with its swinging pinecone-shaped pendulum. Fifteen minutes was, in his estimation, plenty of time for Thomas to realise that he’d forgotten his gloves, or that actually he’d changed his mind and wanted to wear his other cape instead. When Edwin was tolerably confident that Thomas would be gone for some time, he cleared his throat and propped his broom against the wall.

“Well,” he said to the room at large. “Everything down here is shipshape for now. I rather thought I’d tackle the rooms upstairs.”

Charles roused himself with a yawn and a stretching of flames up the chimney. “Oh, yeah?” he says. “Right after his nibs has buggered off again? Wouldn’t be snooping, now, would you?”

Edwin drew himself up. “Perish the thought,” he said. “I take my duties extremely seriously, I’ll have you know. Although—if Thomas were to return at an… inopportune moment…”

Charles crackled with amusement. “Go on,” he says. “I’ll shout if I hear the door.”

“Thank you,” said Edwin, with all the dignity he could muster. He gathered a duster and a rag and started up the stairs.

His delight in his clever little plan carried him all the way up to Thomas’ bedroom, whereupon he found the door firmly locked. He rattled it in its frame, but it didn’t move an inch.

“Oh—bother,” he said. He had been counting on being able to get inside and have a thorough look for some evidence of Charles’ contract. Well. He would have to find another way.

Instead, he made his way down the hallway to Niko’s room. He might as well, he thought, since he had dragged his aching bones all the way up there.

Just then, the sound of running feet came from behind him, and when he looked around, Niko was hurtling down the hall towards him with a distinctly panicked look. She darted around Edwin and flattened herself to the door.

“Um,” she said.

Edwin brandished his duster. “Niko, I cannot very well clean your room from out here.”

If anything, her eyes grew even wider. “I know, I know, but—could you try?”

Edwin raised an eyebrow. “If you have something in there that you don’t wish me to see…”

“No!” she said, very loudly. She shot an agonised glance over her shoulder at the door behind her, as though she was worried something might try to burst through. “Definitely not! But, um. Maybe don’t look under the mattress?”

“I shall return tomorrow,” said Edwin, with dignity, “and when I do, I expect all contraband to be thoroughly hidden.”

Niko nodded four or five times, quick and eager. “Yes. Thank you, Edwin!”

With that, she opened the door wide enough for her to slip through and not an inch wider, and disappeared inside.

Edwin went back downstairs.

“Thwarted twice over,” he announced. “Blasted wizards.”

Charles sparkled at him from the hearth. “They’re tricky, wizards,” he says. “You’ll have to get up earlier in the morning than that to catch ‘em out.”

“I already get up earlier than anyone else around here,” Edwin grumbled. “Very well, then, I suppose I ought to get those sheets dry.”

The day before, he had complained to Thomas about the difficulty of getting bed linens dry. There was no room in Porthaven or Kingsbury, anything hung up inside was liable to end up smelling like smoke and splattered with mysterious wizardly substances, and the real castle was roaming the Wastes. Thomas had left a jar of something out on the table and told Edwin to use it when he needed it – it was filled with great crunchy flakes of something that looked like salt and the handwritten label on the jar said, simply, DRY!!!

Edwin unscrewed the lid and sprinkled a pinch of whatever was in the jar onto a wet patch of the table where he’d rested the washing tub earlier. There was an alarming whistling noise, and then a great gout of smoke and a powerful smell of burning dust. Coughing hard, Edwin said, “Perhaps—perhaps not.”

“Bloody hell,” said Charles, who had been watching. “Not one of Tom’s best, eh? Not to worry, there’s a sunny little spot on the edge of the Wastes. Give us a tick to shift the castle.”

There was a peculiar rumbling, and Edwin realised that, for the first time, he could actually feel the castle moving. He went back up to the little landing halfway up the stairs, his aching knees forgotten, and threw open the little mullioned window there. When he stuck his head out, the greyish scree of the Wastes was rushing by below, and when he looked up, the ragged, colourless clouds were streaking across the sky overhead. As silly as it sounded, he realised then that he’d rather taken the fact of it being a moving castle as read, without ever stopping to think about what that meant. Quite to his surprise, he found himself laughing with pure delight. A moving castle. How wonderful. If the drab little mouse from the tailor’s shop could see him now!

He closed the window and leant out over the banister. “Charles! Is that really you moving the castle?”

“Who else would it be?” Charles shouted back, sounding rather strained. “D’you see Tom doing any heavy lifting around here?”

“Remarkable!” said Edwin. He could feel the grin on his own face. It fitted him strangely, like a daringly-cut new suit, but he rather liked the way it looked on him. “Quite remarkable, Charles.”

Charles blazed up high, his flames shot through with rosy pink.

The place where Charles stopped the castle a little while later was a green hillside sugared with bright flowers, the grass rippling like water in the breeze. Edwin, who had been watching from the window, got to his feet when he felt the castle judder to a halt and retrieved the tub of damp sheets.

“Sterling work, Charles,” he said, as he passed him on his way to the door.

“Yeah, yeah,” said Charles, but he was still burning pink.

Edwin threw open the door, and recoiled with a hastily-stifled shriek when he saw the scarecrow’s wide-eyed pumpkin face goggling at him in the doorway.

“Goodness,” he said, pressing one hand to his hammering heart. “You oughtn’t to scare an old man like that, you could have finished me off. Hm. Persistent, aren't you? Well, since you’re here, you can jolly well help. Here, take the end of this line.”

The scarecrow seemed to wilt a bit in a reluctant manner, but did not protest. With its help, this would be done in a jiffy. Sending it hopping out across the hillside with twine looped around its spindly torso, Edwin strung the washing line between it and one of the castle's idling legs, and began to hang up the damp sheets to the gentle chorus of the breeze and the grasshoppers and the occasional caw of Pumpkin’s inquisitive crow friends.

“You’ll be dry in no time, won’t you?” he said, as the sheets snapped and fluttered in the breeze. “And you’ll smell wonderful, with all these flowers around.”

He was so pleased with himself that he dragged his chair outside and dozed in the sun until it dipped behind the hills and the shadows turned long and strange. By the time he’d gathered the sheets in again, they were crisp and dry, and they smelled like fresh air and wildflowers, and Edwin couldn’t help but feel strangely… content.

All told, Edwin thought he was adjusting to his new life circumstances rather well, bizarre though they undoubtedly were. But that was the thing about being old; one just sort of got on with things. After all, he only had so much life left to waste on dilly dallying.

Thinking about his potentially drastically foreshortened life span gave him something akin to seasickness, so he immersed himself in his work. Every day he made considerable progress towards getting the castle all ship shaped. To very little in the way of appreciation from the master of the house, of course, who ever since that debacle with the royal summons had taken to mercurial bouts of moping around like a sullen teenager, or else stomping out the front door all hours in a cloud of perfume and discontent. Even Charles, a generally more polite and amiable soul than the wizard, seemed bemused by Edwin's insistence on actually doing the job for which he'd been hired.

Frankly, the only person who seemed to appreciate his efforts was Niko. Though she had been skittish around him at first, mousy and withdrawn, she had soon become more animated. She was an inquisitive young thing, always leaning over him, asking what he was doing – occasionally having to be shooed back to her own spellwork when she was getting too distracted by Edwin's rug cleaning process. She had a rather endearing tendency to clap whenever Edwin put the finishing flourish on a task; as well as a look of wincing guilt when she, regretfully, had to sully his freshly-mopped floor with more messy magic spells. For her, he decided, he would gladly re-buff that stretch of floor until the wood no longer matched.

Getting used to his new home and the people sharing it was one thing; getting used to his new body was another entirely. He ached, now. Many was the day he'd had to put off a task he had planned because his knees simply were not up to it. He felt a certain camaraderie with the squeaky hinges he'd been oiling, wishing he could soothe his own rusty joints so easily. His old—young—body had been nothing special, but he profoundly missed the ease it offered. To think he'd spent every day of his life with his long, strong legs cooped up under a sewing table! Youth truly was wasted on the young. He should have appreciated his functional knees, his painless back – his long, peaceful nights of sleep, uninterrupted by quick dashes to the water closet.

It was on his return from one such dash, shuffling sleepily back towards his humble cubby hole beneath the stairs, that he just so happened to spy the door dial clicking to red, and a familiar cloaked figure hurrying inside.

“Niko?”

She froze, arm extended, basket halfway to the tabletop – an enormous pair of rivet-studded boots dangling from her other wrist by the knotted laces.

Edwin raised his eyebrows and crossed his arms. “Burning the midnight oil, are we?”

She set down the basket—it appeared to be full of wax paper packages—and flipped her hood back, hitting him with the full force of her doe eyes. “Hiiiiiii, Edwin. I. We needed, um … sausages.”

“Sausages.”

“And bacon.”

“I see. And this was an emergency of such magnitude you just had to dash out at—” he spared a glance for the owl-faced clock, squinting past the half a dozen twiddly extra hands whose purposes he had not yet divined— “two in the morning?”

“Please don’t tell Master Thomas,” she pleaded, clasping her hands in front of her chest. “Please?”

Edwin sincerely doubted that Master Thomas would lift a finger even if it turned out his apprentice was frequenting dogfights, gambling rings or opium dens on a nightly basis, so it was quite easy to promise: “I shan’t breathe a word. But I would be interested to know what it is I’m not telling him.”

“I…” There was a nervousness, her feet fidgeting and her eyes darting to the stairs. But she had a bitten lip that spoke of a secret dying to be told. “I’m… kind of seeing somebody?”

Goodness; every wizard in the house was at it. “In the middle of the night?” he teased. “Scandalous.”

She blushed furiously and attempted to melt into her cloak.

Edwin chuckled. “But that’s none of my business.” He resumed his wincing shuffle towards his cosy nook. “Although if I know anything about that gallivanting master of yours, I don’t imagine he’ll mind.”

Thomas would probably be proud if he knew his apprentice was out at all hours breaking hearts. Perhaps he’d even take a real interest in her education at last.

He got comfortable—or as comfortable as he could—in his truckle bed as Niko padded stealthily to the stairs on sock feet with those heavy boots clasped in her hand. Not her usual footwear of choice by a long shot, but Edwin was too tired to prod. She hesitated at the foot of the staircase, hand hovering over the newly-polished banister, and gave him a look of gratitude so earnest he wanted to squirm away from it.

“Thanks, Edwin,” she whispered. “You’re really nice.”

He snorted. “Well. I have never been accused of that before.” He tugged his covers up under his neck. “...Goodnight, Niko.”

“Night night!”

He waited until her footsteps were just above him to add as an aside: “I do hope you and your paramour are being careful.”

Her soft, mortified “Nooooooooo…” followed her up the stairs and away, disappearing with the quiet click of her bedroom door.

Edwin cackled gently to himself.

“Causin’ mischief, again?” came Charles’ sleepy mumble from the hearth.

“Wouldn't dream of it,” Edwin sniffed, closing his eyes. “There’s plenty of it going around already.”

Thomas staggered in through the front door, bone-tired and wincing as his body painfully reshaped itself. The floor was covered in splintery divots where his claws had dug into the wood.

“What time do you call this?” Charles piped up, not even giving him a second to scuff out the evidence with a swipe of his heel and a lick of magic.

Thomas rolled his eyes and threw his coat over the back of a chair. The house smelled strangely and sweetly of beeswax instead of forgotten socks. That was going to take some getting used to.

“You keep pushing it, changing and whatnot, you’ll get stuck like that, and then you’ll be screwed,” Charles said from his grate. He was burnt down to a flicker, hiding underneath a charred log.

“It’s what they’d have me doing if I reported to the King like a good little soldier. Either of them,” said Thomas, walking past the coal scuttle and picking up a lump of coal as big as his fist to set it in the grate. “Maybe I’m getting ahead of the competition.”

After a second, Charles flowed out, tentacles of flame wrapping around the coal with a sigh. “Or maybe you’re a self-important knob who wants to prove you’re the best at everything.”

Thomas gave him an unfriendly sneer of a grin. “Nice, real nice. Really warming the cockles of my chilly little heart.”

Charles swiped up some coal dust on his glowing finger. “What I’m best at, innit?” he said, licking the dust off like pastry sugar.

“I’m not doing it to show off.”

Charles gave him a look.

“...I’m not just showing off. I have things to do. Easier with wings.”

“You’re not still faffing with that, are you?” Charles groaned. “You’re not gonna be able to patch it back together with sticky tape, mate. Anyway, who’s even gonna know it’s there?”

“If this war gets off the ground, whoever wins it is gonna be out for all that they can steal. Expand their borders. Anyone stumbles through it, they’ll have a… field day…”

Thomas’ attention had been caught elsewhere. Asleep in the truckle-bed under the stairs was the busybody cleaner (the truckle-bed hadn’t existed a few days ago. Thomas’ house was an enabling pile of garbage.) Thomas tiptoed across the room and crouched in front of the bed as low as his complaining knees would let him, studying.

Edwin looked different. For one thing, he appeared to be in his early twenties, and not his seventies. The high forehead and the proud nose were the same, sloping down to a rather lovely mouth, open on a breathy snore. His eyelashes swept over his cheekbones as his eyes fluttered through some dream or other. Even in sleep, there was a furrow between his eyebrows. As young and serious as he’d looked when Thomas first clapped eyes on him on May Day. And still so goddamn familiar…

Behind Thomas, Charles chuckled. “Not bad, is he?”

Thomas straightened up, allowing himself one last look at his uninvited guest. “Charles! Have you been peeping at our janitor?”

Charles was in human form, perched on the grate. One long leg dangled almost to the floor. He shrugged. “Hardly peeping when he’s right there, is it?”

“Still,” Thomas said. “It’s bad manners.”

Charles smiled at him, tilting his head to the side so his earring winked in his own reflected glow. “He ain’t as pretty as me.”

Thomas turned to start up the stairs. “No one’s as pretty as you.” He paused halfway up, considering. “Well. Except me, of course.”

Charles snorted. “Nice one, Tom. Went almost twenty seconds without being a conceited wanker just then. New record, that.”

Chuckling, Thomas took the next step – but Charles' voice stopped him short.

“You can't flirt your way out of having this conversation forever, mate.”

His foot hovered, a barely perceptible falter, then came down. “You wanna talk about it?” he said, coolly. “You know where to find me.”

He rounded the bend in the staircase and left Charles, seething, in the grate.

Chapter Text

It was a perfectly peaceful, pleasant early evening in the castle; and Thomas was still asleep. Edwin made no move to rouse him. 

Without Thomas fluttering about and causing mischief, all was quiet. Niko sat happily engrossed in her studies (which were refreshingly non-explosive on this occasion) and Edwin enjoyed the calming repetition of peeling spuds for supper, offering up the coiling skins for Charles to eat while he burbled a quiet stream of friendly chatter and soothing crackling. They hadn't even had a loud customer or a royal guard to field in quite some time. Even when the roar of the overworked hot water pipes heralded Thomas’ awakening, it felt tranquil. Harmonious.

Naturally, the great wizard himself could not allow it to stay that way for long.

Edwin flinched inwards like a salted snail at the piercing wail which shattered the easy quiet, and sprang upright on complaining knees. The unholy sound had Charles choking on his potato peelings and Niko dropping her carefully concocted ball of magical something-or-other on the floor with an anticlimactic splat. All eyes turned to the sound of a frenzied body stampeding towards the staircase – and turned away just as quickly when said body appeared irate, dripping, and naked as the day it was born at the top of the stairs.

“Oh, for goodness’ sake, put some clothes on!” Edwin snapped, covering his eyes—and his rather unfortunate blush—with a weathered hand.

Thomas’ belligerent stomp down the stairs was rather undermined by the damp squelch of his footsteps. “You’ve gone too far, you interfering old fussbudget!” The end of the banister creaked as he swung himself around it and the damp footsteps drew ominously closer.

“Bloody hell, put it away, Tom,” Charles grumbled; his flames tinged pink in the corner of Edwin’s eye.

“I told you to keep your meddling paws off of the potions in the bathroom, and look!” His voice and footsteps came to a halt mere inches from Edwin’s front with a decisive final splat. “Look what you’ve done to my hair!”

Edwin lowered his hand, keeping his eyes very carefully above the waist, and blinked owlishly at the so-called-abomination on Thomas’ head. “...Yes. Very nice.”

“Nice? Nice?!” Thomas seized two tight handfuls of the lustrous, handsome auburn waves cascading oh-so-artfully from his flustered head and pulled as if he wished to rip it out by the roots. “It’s hideous!”

“I think it’s cute!” Niko chimed in from the ruins of her spellcasting circle – peeking between the fingers of the polite but ineffective modesty hand she had tucked over her eyes. 

Thomas snorted unkindly. “Thank you, Niko. That’s exactly what I’m going for. Quick, write that down; a great sorcerer should always strive to be cute.”

“Oi!” Charles barked, voice a crackling snap of anger. “Leave off!”

“Yes, that was uncalled for,” said Edwin, coldly. Even in his moments of utmost unpleasantness, Thomas could usually be trusted with Niko’s feelings at the very least. “You’re making a scene.” 

Thomas gave a bitter laugh. “Oh, sure, gang up on me. Kick me while I’m down. Go for it, hey; I’m an easy target.”

Edwin could feel a headache coming on. “What in the world are you blathering on about now?” he said.

He watched, agog, as the wretched wizard collapsed into the chair Edwin had just vacated. There was something rather aesthetically compelling about it, something of the master oil painter’s muse; the lamenting beauty and his riotous chestnut locks, surrounded by warm fiery tones and inexplicable baskets of half-peeled potatoes. Nude but for the look of anguish on his elegantly devastated face.

“Why do I bother?” he despaired, tragically woebegone, sagging further and further in Edwin’s chair. Hands in hair, back bowed, bare backside all but ready to slide off the edge of the cushion if he slumped any lower. “I mean, why even try, right? Why go to the trouble? Not like any of you even care.”

“About your beauty regime? No, not especially,” said Edwin, dry as an old twig. 

Thomas groaned, wounded. “Guess I’ll just report to the king tomorrow, then, huh? They can shave it off in a fucking soldier’s buzz and I can go die on a battlefield someplace, ugly and alone. Sound good?”

“Master!” Niko cried.

“Bloody drama queen…” Charles muttered.

“Or, you can take a little trip up the stairs and dye your damned hair back again if you hate it so much.” Edwin put his hands on his hips, unimpressed. “Your choice; it’s no skin off my nose either way.”

Thomas threw an arm over his eyes dramatically. “You don’t care!” he moaned. “I’m ugly and indentured and you don’t care!”

“Simply untrue on all counts,” said Edwin through gritted teeth. “You’ve certainly managed to dodge all responsibilities thus far. And I sincerely doubt you—” 

He stopped himself, before he could say something horribly flattering like ‘I sincerely doubt you’ve ever been a mite less than beautiful a day in your blasted life’ and stoke Thomas’ ego to truly impossible heights. But it was, sadly, true. Even now, the supposedly ‘botched’ colour of Thomas’ hair was mutating further, away from the reddish hues and into something ink-black that would have made Edwin look pale and washed out, but on Thomas looked deep and expensive like crushed velvet or polished jet. Honestly, the nerve of the man! “Hmph. Oh, just—just pack it in.”

He put a firm hand to Thomas’ shoulder – and recoiled when something slick, viscous and revolting touched his palm. He watched, horrorstruck, as Thomas’ acres and acres of bare skin began to… secrete something. A clear, gooey, purple-ish something, covering him in a thin, slimy film. Thomas simply continued to languish, unmoved, as the gel dripped down the chair legs and a low, ominous rumbling began to pulsate in Edwin’s ears, seemingly roaring from deep within the castle itself.

“What—what is he doing?” Edwin rasped, taking a wobbling step backwards over uneven, throbbing floorboards; gasping when the shade of a clawed, demonic hand seemed to scrabble through the cracks in an aborted grab at his ankle. “What is that?!”

“Tom,” said Charles slowly, shrinking back in his grate away from a lashing, shadowy tail as it flickered over the edge of the hearth. “Tom, bloody give over, will you? Fuck!”

artwork by idliketobeatree

Niko crowded up against Edwin’s side, clutching at his elbow. “He’s summoning the spirits of darkness,” she whispered, deadly serious. “I’ve only ever seen him do this once…”

“And why did he do it last time?”

“I think a boy dumped him…”

Edwin laughed, bitterly. “Of course.” He crossed his arms and scowled at his maddening, oozing wart of a landlord. “Is this all it takes, then, hm? Is this the limit? A failed fling, a bad hair day? That is your threshold for utter despair, is it?”

“Oh, shit…” Charles mumbled, dimming his glow.

“That is the last straw that breaks your poor, overburdened back?” Edwin continued, on the warpath. He sneered at Thomas’ slimy, woeful form with distaste. At the revolting ooze as it soaked into Edwin’s chair, his blanket, his painstakingly cleaned floorboards, undoing all his hard work on a self-indulgent strop. He snatched up the basket of half peeled potatoes before they could meet the same fate. “How awful! How dreadful! How inhumane, that you might have to suffer the indignity of not getting your bloody way for once in your life!”

A shadowy hand made a bid for Edwin’s ankle. He stamped it out like a troublesome cockroach, causing it to shake out its fingers and retreat between the boards. 

“Grow up,” he snapped, hugging his basket of potatoes to his chest, his eyes stinging with the threat of frustrated tears. “You’ve no idea, have you? Of how charmed—literally charmed!—a life you lead! Of how many people you have picking up your ridiculous coattails, cleaning up your messes! You don’t know and you don’t care because unlike some of us, you wouldn’t know a real problem if it bit you on the backside!”

And so saying, he turned on his heel and fled to the front door – lest he undermine his own point by crying over spilt slime.

The doorstep of a magic castle was hardly a conventional location for potato peeling; but the view was quite lovely, even in the drizzling rain.

Edwin sat and watched in glum serenity as lamps began to light up across the distant rooftops of Market Chipping, their glow bleeding in blurry trails through the misty curtain of rain. His own shirt had taken a bit of a drenching, too, until the scarecrow had hopped along.

“At least one magical young man in these moors has manners,” he grumbled, sending a shred of potato peel flying to the grass; where it was investigated and summarily discarded by one of Pumpkin’s ever-present crow companions, hopping amiably about in the cover provided by the scarecrow’s umbrella. Edwin didn’t look too closely at the umbrella, or the unsettling flatness of the empty glove that held it aloft. “You ought to get in there – have a word with that wretched wizard about respecting his elders.”

Pumpkin, in true Pumpkin fashion, said nothing.

Edwin harrumphed, and picked up another potato. “He needs to get out more,” he sniffed. “And not just for his courting, no—all that ever does is feed his ego. All of these silly swooning sweethearts have spoiled him rotten, and of course Niko is too professional to tell her so-called Master how utterly ridiculous he is. He is far too used to getting his way. Even from Charles! Well, at least Charles argues. But he always gives in, in the end.” He frowned. “I rather doubt he has any choice…”

There was a clue there, he was sure of it. Some hint towards the terms of that pesky spell Charles was under. But Edwin, so very new to this world of spells and magic, couldn’t make head nor tail of it. 

He scoffed. “Oh, honestly. I’m far too old for all this fuss and bother. But Charles is still my best chance of being rid of this curse, so I suppose I’ve no choice but to bother with the fuss. And to try not to wring that frittering dandy’s neck while I’m about it.”

Pumpkin ruffled his straw in a gesture Edwin chose to interpret as sympathetic agreement.

Edwin nodded, briskly, setting another freshly peeled spud aside. He felt calmer, at least; sometimes it was nice to simply voice an issue without the threat of unsolicited feedback. And he’d managed to rationalise, somewhat, Thomas’ behaviour in his own mind, even if he had not excused it. “I can hardly expect proper socialisation skills from him, can I? Wouldn’t know how to socialise with someone he isn’t trying to charm. Lives with his employees, more or less. Above his place of work which, by the way, he seems to have little to no interest in actually doing, and…” 

He trailed off, and frowned harder. “Hmph. Well. Pots and kettles, I suppose…”

Behind him there was a click of a latch, a creak of old hinges, and honey-warm light spilled over his lapful of potatoes.

“Edwin!” Niko rushed out, eyes wide and face harried. “Edwin, we, uhhhhhhh… have a situation!”

He sighed, setting aside his peeling knife. “When do we not?”

Edwin was pleased to find that the monstrous shadows, at least, had given up their little song and dance. The situation at hand was that Thomas, the great lump, had slumped forward – and was now spilling his continuing oozing secretions directly onto Charles’ nice dry hearth.

“Edwin, mate!” Charles’ blob-like form was balanced on the last dry log in a sea of slime like a stranded man bobbing on a sinking canoe. “Bit of a hand over here, yeah?”

Watching Thomas in his slouchy, slimy glory, Edwin waited patiently for his ire to return. But alas, it did no such thing. Bobbing sedately on his own calm ocean of begrudging acceptance and—heaven help him—fondness, all Edwin could do at the sight of him was put his hands upon his hips, and sigh.

“Well. It seems he’s not going to scrape himself off my chair.” Edwin peeled off his cardigan—Niko had given it to him and he was adamant that no sludge would sully its fibres—and rolled up his sleeves. “Niko. Grab an arm.”

Slime, Edwin had decided, was now banned from any and all magical processes within the castle. It was texturally revolting, it stained, and it made the already difficult task of hauling a naked man up the stairs all the worse for rendering him slippery as an eel. It had taken Edwin and Niko both wedging themselves under Thomas’ armpits to lug him up to the bathroom and dunk him in the tub. 

Edwin had not thus far found the opportunity in life to get involved with naked men and their dubious fluids; and after the Slime Debacle, as it would henceforth be known, he had to wonder if he was really missing out on much.

After leaving the languishing wizard in Niko’s care, he’d spent the better part of the night and morning ejecting the remaining slime puddles from the castle bucket by bucket, drying off Charles’ hearth, and scrubbing doggedly at the purplish stains. There was still, if one squinted, a bit of a marbled sheen on the floorboards, painting a snail trail up the stairs. But the formally lodged complaints of his knee joints had escalated to picket lines and protests, and the warmth of Charles’ flames beckoned.

Edwin was just settling down in his chair—he didn’t know when he’d started thinking of it as his chair—by the hearth, in readiness for a brief afternoon nap, when a bout of coughing sounded from upstairs. Edwin tugged the quilt closer around his shoulders and let out a contented little sigh.

There was another hacking cough, deep and painful-sounding.

Edwin ignored it.

It was warm in the kitchen, with Charles blazing merrily in the hearth and the quilt wrapped around him. Edwin closed his eyes and stretched his legs out, allowing the heat to melt his aches and pains away like butter in a hot pan. He could smell beeswax and whitewash and woodsmoke, all clean, homely smells. It was rather lovely, he thought, proudly. Especially now that—

Yet another cough, louder and more pointed.

“He’s not gonna stop,” said Charles, resignedly. “You might as well go up there and see what he wants.”

Edwin cracked one eye open. “I don’t see why I should,” he said. “He brought this upon himself.”

“No arguments from me.” Charles fidgeted, the logs in the grate bumping over each other and sending sparks dancing. “I’m just saying, we won’t get a minute’s peace until someone—”

The rest of his sentence was lost in a coughing jag so operatic that it shook loose a shower of plaster dust from the ceiling.

Edwin groaned, and threw off the quilt. “Oh, very well. I’m going, I’m going.” He got up, and stumped up the stairs to Thomas’ bedroom with ill grace. He slammed the door open without troubling to knock first. “Can I help you,” he said with asperity.

It was about that moment that it occurred to Edwin that he was finally, for the first time, getting a glimpse of the great wizard's room; with an invitation, no less. He cast a weather eye over it for any helpfully displayed clues or contracts or piles of chewed-up hearts, etcetera, but the place was so stuffed with strange-looking trinkets that it took Edwin a moment to even spot Thomas amid all the noise. Every last inch of the room was crowded with things that twinkled and gleamed, crystals and feathers everywhere and bright swathes of fabric draped over everything. Even the floor seemed to be covered by several overlapping rugs. In the middle of such a riot of colour and light, Thomas himself (when Edwin located him) looked grey-faced and drab where he lay propped up against a veritable mountain of pillows, frail and small in the middle of an absurdly large bed, blankets tugged up to his chin.

“Oh,” he said, tremulously. “Hello.” He coughed a bit. “I was getting lonesome, all by myself up here. Thank you for coming to visit me.”

“You’re making an appalling racket, you know. I came to see if you were bloody dead yet.”

Thomas sniffed wetly. “Not yet,” he said. “But I’m sure it won’t be long now.”

“You’d think no one had ever had a cold before,” Edwin said. He hadn’t forgotten the purple slime, and he wasn’t inclined to be sympathetic. The bloody menace had brought this on himself. “What do you want?”

“Some tea,” Thomas said. “With honey. Ask Charles for some hot water.”

“Very well. If I fetch you some tea, will you stop making that infernal noise?”

Thomas coughed again, pitifully. “I’ll try,” he said.

Edwin went back downstairs and made Thomas a cup of tea, grumpily blobbing honey into it from the jar on the table. He took it back up with him and thrust it into Thomas’ hands. Up close, he really did look terrible – his magnificent hair, newly black, was lank and greasy, his strange coin-like eyes were red-rimmed and he looked grey and lifeless. Maybe it wasn’t all a sham.

“Here,” Edwin said.

“Thank you.” Thomas wrapped his hands around the cup and inhaled. “I’ll have to enjoy it. It might be one of the last I ever have.”

Edwin, who had, of late, been trying not to think about his own drastically foreshortened life, abruptly stopped feeling bad for him. “Oh, for goodness’ sake,” he snapped. “It’s a cold. You’re not dying.”

“Not yet,” said Thomas, dolefully. He looked terribly noble and tragic. “But the King is on my tail. I’m very good, obviously, but even I can’t avoid conscription on two fronts while I hold that tricky Witch of the Wastes off with my other hand. Not forever, anyway. I can feel the hands tightening around my throat.”

“Quite the predicament,” said Edwin.

Thomas sighed. “I just can’t say no. Too much heart, that’s what’s wrong with me.” For some reason, that seemed to strike him as funny. He took a thoughtful sip of his tea. “I need to get the King off my back, give myself a little room to breathe.”

Edwin felt himself thaw by a degree or two. It was a fine mess, that much was certain, and there could be no question that Thomas was the sole architect of his own misery, but Edwin knew what it was to feel like you were being divided into smaller and smaller pieces until one day there was nothing of you left. He sat down on the edge of Thomas’ bed. “What are you going to do?” he asked.

Thomas shrugged. “I don’t know. I suppose the King might leave me alone if he thinks I’m just a liability – flighty, you know? Untrustworthy. Cowardly.”

“I see you’ve made a good start, then,” said Edwin.

“Ooh, ouch.” Thomas made a great show of clutching his heart. “But obviously I can’t go and see him, that’d be playing right into his hands. He’d have me locked up in the royal workshop making war machines faster than you could blink.” He paused, delicately. “Although—I suppose, if… someone else were to go on my behalf…”

Edwin stood up so fast he heard something in the mattress go sproing. “Absolutely not,” he said. He was unspeakably cross that Thomas had made such a lazy, transparent attempt to get Edwin to do his dirty work for him, and crosser still that it had almost worked. “You made this mess. Why don’t you clean it up, for once?”

So saying, he slammed the door behind him and left Thomas to his tea and his tissues.

On his way downstairs, he met Niko on the landing, looking furtive. “Excuse me,” she muttered, slipping past him down the stairs. She had almost vanished round the corner before Edwin realised what she was carrying.

“Niko!” he called after her. Her head popped around the doorframe. “Where are you going with that net?”

Niko chewed her bottom lip, eyes flicking to Thomas’ bedroom upstairs. In her right hand she clutched a fishing net so enormous it could have been used to catch mermaids. 

“Unless you are planning to sabotage his dressing gown collection, I don’t think His Highness will stir himself out of bed,” Edwin assured her, his irritation giving a little unkind flick of its tail. “You might as well tell me what you’re up to.”

Niko sighed and beckoned him down into the kitchen. “Master King has been working on a spell,” she said once they were over the threshold. “He won’t tell me what it is exactly, but I know it’s important. And it’s not working.”

“I’m waiting to see how this story ends with you creeping out of the house with a fishing net,” Edwin said, though the answer was becoming quite clear: for all his faults and foibles (and there were many; Edwin had a list) Niko was fond of Thomas. If there was something that needed doing while Thomas was indisposed, his loyal apprentice would step up to the plate. 

“I stole his notes,” Niko confessed, her eyes darting to the ceiling as though her master would somehow be able to hear their conversation through two floors and at least four pillows. 

“Oi oi,” came a voice from the hearth. “Niko, you little rascal. What’s the plan? I say we nick his spells and wands and whatnot, ditch old Whiskers and take to the road. Make our own fortune, what d’you say?”

It was, Edwin could admit, a tempting proposition. From upstairs, there was a sneeze that shook the rafters.

Niko glared at Charles. “You should be nicer to him, you know. He’s just trying to help!”

Charles yawned, showing a long tongue of blue flame. “Always is, Thomas. Usually himself. Go on, then, what’s he got you doing?”

Niko ignored him and turned big, beseeching eyes on Edwin. “I need a fallen star – he's got pages and pages about them, it must be the last thing he needs! My scrying stones say there’s gonna be a shower of them over in the marsh outside of Porthaven tonight and I thought I’d see if I could catch one because Thomas can’t go, and then he’d have it when he needs it. Maybe he'll get better faster if he knows he has everything he needs at last!”

“I see.”

“You know,” Niko’s eyes became, if possible, even more huge and beseeching. “You could come with me, if you want. It’s really pretty this time of year, and you could spot me while I jump for stars!”

“Standing about in the cold and dark at my age? Absolutely not!” Edwin said, but he could already feel his resistance crumbling in the face of Niko’s pleading expression. “You will have to fetch me a very warm coat.”

Niko squeaked and threw her arms around him in a brief, tight hug before abandoning her net to find him a coat and scarf.

Edwin had to admit it wasn’t a wholly miserable experience. Niko once again produced the strange, enormous boots—a pair of Thomas’ ‘seven-league’ boots, she explained, found collecting dust at the bottom of the broom cupboard—and with one boot each between them and a step in the right direction, in no time at all Porthaven had dwindled to nothing but a constellation of lights in the distance. The great, flat sweep of the marsh was the darkest, quietest place Edwin had ever been. He would have bristled at being called a city lad, but even in the valleys around his home, there was always the trail left behind by an airship, or the sound of carriage wheels the next road over. Here, Edwin strained his ears until they squeaked but all he could hear was the wind murmuring to the long grass.

There was a fair amount of standing about politely while Niko checked her compass, then her watch, and her compass again, staring anxiously at the sky as though it might simply vanish – which, now that Edwin lived in a house with a wizard, he had to admit was possible, if not entirely likely.

Just as he was beginning to wish he’d brought along a flask of tea and perhaps a deck chair, Niko shrieked, pointing at the sky. “It’s coming!”

There was the faintest lightening on the horizon; a tinge of opal clouding the spangled black night. Niko dropped everything but the net and adopted a stance Edwin considered rather unladylike, her face screwed up with determination.

Zing! A streak of burning white light shot past to land three feet away. Edwin yelped and stumbled back, squeezing his eyes shut against the after-image. He half-expected the field to be ablaze when he opened them, but the falling star had left no impression other than a faint smell of scorched grass and a wisp of gently rising steam.

“Here! Hold this!” Niko panted, tumbling across to him and shoving a jar into his hands. “We’ll need it when I—oh!”

Zing! Edwin smiled, watching Niko leap over tussocks and molehills, her fishing net waving like a standard. She reached a star just a second too late. 

“They’re so fast,” she said crossly, staring down at the grass. “How are you supposed to catch one when they just—zoom like that?”

Edwin gave his feet a brisk stamp. “If everyone could catch a star, nobody would want one.” Then, when Niko looked doleful, he sighed. “I say we try a tactical approach. Two pairs of hands are better than one, even without a fishing net.”

Zing! Niko beamed at him. “You go over there, and get ready to catch!”

Edwin tossed a log from the basket onto the burnt-down embers of the fire. “Wake up,” he said.

“Ow, ow,” grumbled Charles, voice muzzy with sleep. One eye opened in amongst the soft, crumbled ashes. “Whaddayouwant?”

“Hot milk, please,” said Edwin. “I’m making cocoa.”

A mouth opened in an improbably wide yawn underneath the eye. “Nah. I’m going back to sleep. G’night.”

Edwin tutted pointedly. “For shame,” he said, with a shake of his head. “You won’t even do Niko one little favour?”

“Hold on, hold on, I didn’t say that, did I?” Charles yawned again, and the flames in the hearth wrapped themselves slowly and sleepily around the log. “Go on, then, get the pan before I change my mind.”

“Thank you,” said Edwin, with dignity.

“Didn’t manage to bag yourself a falling star, then?” said Charles, as Niko slumped into a chair by the fire and Edwin busied himself with the pan and the glass bottle of milk and two bright copper mugs.

“No,” she said, in a tiny, dejected voice.

“Good,” said Charles, bracingly. “It’s for the best, believe you me. In fact—oi, careful with that!”

“Oh, pipe down,” Edwin said, as he settled the pan over the fire. 

“Serves me right for being accommodating,” said Charles. His voice echoed strangely in the pan. “Trust me, Niko, you’re better off out of all that.”

Niko sighed. “I guess,” she said, but she didn’t sound entirely convinced.

Charles’ face appeared underneath the pan. It was hard to be sure, when he was just a vague face in the flames, but he looked sympathetic. “Penny for your thoughts, love?” he said.

“I don’t think I’m very good at being a wizard,” said Niko, propping her chin on her hands, so quietly Edwin had to strain to hear her. Was he imagining things, or was her lip trembling ever so slightly? “I think… I think Thomas is going to kick me out.”

For a moment, Edwin was too dumbstruck to speak. He thought about Thomas saying ‘keep your feet dry, froggy’ and ruffling Niko’s hair on that rainy Sunday last week, about his many other nicknames for her—turtledove, kitten, little fish—and about the fierce pride on his face when she’d burned a hole clean through one of the floorboards with a fire spell last week. About the fondness radiating from him as he carried her upstairs to bed after she fell asleep at the kitchen table, facedown in a book.

“What absolute nonsense,” Edwin said, firmly, pressing a copper mug of hot cocoa into her hands. “Niko, you are an excellent, highly dedicated student and Thomas is lucky to have you. And, moreover, he’s well aware of just how lucky he is.”

Niko looked up at him as she wrapped her hands around the mug. “Do you think so?”

“I’m certain of it. You may say what you like about that man, but he’s not a complete fool.”

“Debatable, if you ask me,” said Charles. “But Edwin’s right. You should’ve seen Thomas at your age, he could barely light a candle without a match.”

Edwin sat down next to Niko. The warmth of the fire and the mug in his hands was lovely; he could feel the chill of the night melting away. He felt as though he was being painted all over with molten gold. “Would you like to hear a secret?” he said.

Niko nodded. Niko, Edwin knew, loved secrets.

He bumped his mug gently against hers. “I think you’re already twice the wizard Thomas is,” he whispered.

Niko laughed a hiccuping little laugh. “Nooooo,” she said, but she was smiling.

“In fact,” Edwin went on, in a low, confiding sort of voice, leaning in towards her, “I must confess, I find myself quite confounded as to how Thomas has managed to construct such a fearsome reputation.”

Niko suddenly looked sheepish. “Um,” she said.

Edwin raised his eyebrows. “Niko, is there something you wish to tell me?”

“Some of those rumours were actually me,” she admitted, taking a demure little sip of her hot cocoa. “I mean, the whole heart-eating thing was his idea, and people started saying all kinds of things, and I just… helped them along a little, here and there. Thomas wanted a reputation. He told me the weirder and more off-putting, the better.”

“Well!” said Edwin. He had heard some of those rumours; to think young Niko could have instigated any number of them! Evidently, the girl had a… vivid imagination. “That’s as may be, but why? I simply don’t understand why anyone would want the world to think such awful things about them.”

Niko shrugged. “He likes to be left alone, he says it’s good for people to think he’s dangerous. It sort of worked, for a while. But I guess the kings are getting desperate…”

“But… surely it can’t be helping him in his courting endeavours.”

“I think he kind of likes the challenge,” said Niko, with a giggle. Her smile had turned mischievous. “And lots of people like a bad boy.”

“Goodness,” said Edwin, sitting back in his chair.

Just then, footsteps sounded on the stairs, and Thomas himself appeared. He was wrapped in a huge, extravagantly fluffy towel and wreathed in fragrant steam. “Charles,” he said, sulkily, with a pathetic little sniffle. “The water’s gone cold. I was halfway through washing my hair.”

“Niko wanted hot cocoa,” mumbled Charles. He was curled up amongst the logs, dozing gently. “Give me a minute, I’ll warm it up again.”

“Oh.” This seemed to take the wind out of Thomas’ sails. “Well. If it was for Niko, I suppose I’ll let it go, just this once.”

Edwin gave Niko a look that said, See?

Thomas turned to drip his way back up the stairs, then paused. “No one ever offers me hot cocoa,” he said, to the room at large. Before Edwin could open his mouth to reply, Thomas was gone, vanishing back into the bathroom with a pointed, hacking cough and a slammed door.

There was a moment’s silence, and then Edwin caught Niko’s eye, and they both began to laugh.

The next few days saw a marked change in Thomas. He still left the castle for hours at a time, but he did so respectably dressed and only moderately scented and bejewelled. He barely complained about his cold at all, and he’d become almost… pleasant.

“He’s up to something,” said Edwin, one morning, once Thomas had wished them both a good day and departed for wherever it was that he went. “I don’t like it.”

Charles chewed thoughtfully on an unwanted crust of burnt toast. “D’you reckon?”

“Absolutely.” Edwin finished putting the last of the breakfast things away and took out a bucket of rags and a bar of soap. “This will all be about my refusing to go and see the King on his behalf, you mark my words.”

“Mmph,” said Charles indistinctly around his blackened toast crust. “Or maybe he’s just… I dunno, worried.”

“Ha.” Edwin began grating soap into the bucket. “He’s moping. He almost succeeded in getting me to do his dirty work for him, and I won’t. He can jolly well do it himself.”

At this moment, Edwin realised that he’d got so carried away that he’d grated a lot more soap into the bucket than he actually needed. Oh well. The skirting boards would simply be quite astonishingly clean.

“You tell ‘im,” said Charles. He tossed the last morsel of burnt toast into the air and caught it in his mouth.

“Hmph,” said Edwin. He got slowly and creakily to his knees so he could reach the skirting board – but not, he thought, as slowly and creakily as last week. Either all this exercise was doing him good or he was getting used to his new limitations, a thought which made him hotly furious. He began scrubbing at the years of accumulated grime, which helped. He liked having something useful to do with his hands.

“Mind you,” said Charles, a little while later. “Can’t really blame ‘im, can you?”

Edwin sat back on his heels, ignoring the hearty protestations of his knees. “I beg your pardon,” he said. “I rather think I can and I will, actually. He’s a vain, self-serving, contrary—”

“Oh, yeah, that’s all true,” said Charles, dismissively. “No, I mean the stuff about the King. The war. Don’t seem fair to me that he should have to fight when he doesn’t want to.”

Edwin was quiet for a moment. Truth be told, it wasn’t something he’d thought about much. He knew Thomas was an inveterate slitherer-outer. It had hardly seemed to matter just what he was slithering out of.

“Well,” he said. “Sometimes we must all do things we’d rather not, mustn’t we?”

Edwin sat with his eyes narrowed, deliberating.

“Come on,” said Charles. He was boy-shaped in the hearth, his skinny legs hanging over the edge, facing Edwin as he sat in his usual chair and the rain pattered softly against the window. “Ain’t got all day, have we?”

“Very well.” Edwin plucked a card from the fan that Charles was holding out to him, and turned it over. “Oh—blast. I’ve got the old maid. You know, I don’t care for this game.”

Charles laughed, crackling with joy. “You didn’t seem to mind so much when you were winning.”

“I shan’t dignify that with an answer,” said Edwin. “Especially when I saw you eat the ace of hearts earlier when you thought I wasn’t looking.” He rearranged his own cards and offered them to Charles, face-down. Charles took one, whooped triumphantly, and slapped down the six of spades and the six of clubs, leaving scorched, sooty fingerprints on the cards. Edwin reached for one of Charles’ cards, but before he could take it, the doorbell rang.

“Porthaven,” said Charles. “You don’t have to answer it, they’ll come back if it’s important.”

“Ha,” said Edwin darkly. “Let it never be said that I’m not brave enough to answer my own front door.” He got to his feet, noting as he did that the ever-present aches and pains seemed to have dimmed somewhat, melted away by the warmth of Charles’ nearness. He crossed to the door, turned the knob to the Porthaven side and opened it. On the doorstep stood a slip of a girl, perhaps twenty five—older than him, Edwin realised, with a strange swoop of vertigo, or older than he had been, at least—with a worried expression and lots of red hair that was valiantly trying to escape its bun.

“Hello,” she said, and promptly burst into tears.

“I—oh, please don’t…” said Edwin, alarmed. “Won’t you come in out of the rain? There must be something we can do for you.”

The girl sniffled, but she stepped inside and allowed Edwin to close the door behind her.

Edwin led her over to the kitchen table and pulled out a chair for her. He glanced around, and seized one of Thomas’ silk handkerchiefs (mercifully clean) from the sideboard. “Here,” he said. “Now. What seems to be the problem?”

It took several minutes and rather a lot more tears, but Edwin eventually managed to coax some answers out of her: she was at her wits’ end with a suitor who wouldn’t leave her alone. It wasn’t until she looked up at him with big, hopeful eyes and said, “I don’t have much to pay you with, but you must have a spell, or a curse, or… or something that can help me,” that Edwin realised that she thought he was the wizard, and it was altogether too late to explain that the Wizard King was off gallivanting, as usual, and his apprentice wasn’t home either.

Well, he thought, there was nothing for it. He nodded, seriously, and he wrote some things down for good measure, acutely aware of Charles watching him from the hearth.

“I have just the thing,” he lied, and cast about for something likely-looking in the clutter that had started to breed in the corners again like mushrooms after rain. After a moment, his eyes alit on a small glass jar of something shimmery and lavender-coloured that he was almost sure was what Thomas had had smudged around his eyes yesterday. He tipped a small amount out into a square of paper, hoping it was nothing expensive or dangerous, and carried it over to the hearth. He set it down in front of Charles, who had become just a face in the flames again and looked as though he was trying not to laugh.

“Not a word,” Edwin muttered. He waved his hands vaguely over the powder, but forwent any mystic chanting in favour of hissing, “Keep him far, far away! In fact, make it so that he can’t even find her, no matter how long or how hard he looks!”

Charles flared up obligingly, blazing with streaks of blue and green, filling the kitchen with the sort of peacock colours that Thomas often wore. Thank you, Edwin mouthed, and Charles winked, the spark of his earring flashing bright.

Edwin folded the paper up and gave it back to the girl. “Here you are,” he said, with a brave stab at Thomas’ ironclad confidence. “You won’t have any more trouble from him!”

She thanked him profusely as he gently chivvied her back out of the door, refusing as he did so to take so much as a penny in payment and thinking, guiltily, that she would probably get what she’d paid for. At least she might find an actual wizard in residence when she inevitably returned to complain in two days’ time.

“Oi oi,” said Charles, as soon as Edwin closed the door. He was a boy again, cross-legged, grinning broadly. “You charming devil, you. You must’ve had the girls lining up around the block.”

“Very funny.”

“No?” Charles batted his sooty eyelashes, and sparks flew. “The boys, then.”

“I—” Edwin hesitated. “No. Not the boys, either.”

Charles made a disbelieving noise. “Handsome, gallant fella like you?” he said. “Nah. Maybe you just weren’t looking. Come on, let’s finish the game, eh?”

Edwin picked up his cards again, feeling hot all over. Perhaps he needed to move his chair a little further back from the hearth, but it was so lovely to bask in Charles’ presence. They played on for a little while, Charles managing to dodge the lone unpaired queen no matter where Edwin hid it in his hand, until Edwin happened to look up just in time to see Charles stuffing two cards into his mouth at once.

“I think that’s enough Old Maid for now, don’t you?” he said, raising an eyebrow. “You’ve eaten so much of the deck, we may as well not bother.”

Charles grinned unrepentantly. “Sore loser,” he said, but he didn’t object when Edwin gathered what remained of the cards and put them back in their box. Instead, Edwin picked up a book that he’d liberated from a pile of rubbish that had been thrown out last week – an odd thing with a glossy cover quite unlike anything he’d seen before. It was a book of children’s stories, all of them about witches and wizards and monsters, and all of them brand new to Edwin, who had made great friends of the books he’d read as a whippersnapper, falling asleep with them cradled in his small hands.

He opened it, and Charles shuffled closer to the edge of the hearth. “What’ve you got there?” he asked, leaning out as far as he could for a better look.

Edwin held it up so he could see the cover. “This one. Have you read it?”

“Nah. Not a big reader, me.” Charles held up his hands and wiggled his fingers, little flames bobbing and dancing at the end of each one. “I always burn the pages. Bet I’d like the stories, though.”

Edwin hesitated. “I could… read it to you, if you’d like.”

“Oh, would you?” Charles beamed and propped his elbows on his knees, his chin in his hands. “Aces. Go on, then.”

“Very well,” said Edwin, who hadn’t expected such enthusiasm. “Once upon a time…”

It was some time later—the rain still falling and Charles burnt down to softly glowing embers in the hearth—that the door slammed open. Edwin looked up from the story he’d just finished, one about a wolf in the woods, to see Thomas standing in the doorway, absolutely soaking wet.

“Well, well, well,” he said. He closed the door and threw off his sodden fur coat. It landed on the table with a wet splat. “Storytime, huh? Isn’t this cozy?”

“Alright, boss?” said Charles, sleepily. “Don’t get too close, you look like you might drip on me.”

Thomas sighed a sigh that sounded like he’d dredged it up from the very bottom of his soul. “That’s gratitude for you. Is nobody even going to ask where I’ve been?”

“I’m sure you’re going to tell us anyway,” said Edwin, closing the book. Thomas’ hair was plastered to his skull, and the kohl smudged around his eyes had smeared and run halfway down his cheeks. He looked so pitiful that Edwin felt himself thaw somewhat. “Come and sit down,” he said. “You’ll catch your death like that. I’ll give Charles another log.”

“Thank you.” Thomas pulled up a chair while Edwin got to his feet, picked up a log from the basket and tossed it into the heart of the fire, watching Charles wrap his arms around it as it began to burn. “That’s more like it. God. This is like coming home and finding someone in bed with my wife.”

He did not, Edwin noticed, specify who was who in that analogy. Edwin wasn’t altogether sure how he felt about that. “Well, then,” he said. “Why don’t you tell us what you’ve been up to?”

“Gifts!” said Thomas, grandly. He handed Edwin a brown paper parcel. It was only slightly damp; he must have been carrying it under his coat. “Go on, open it.”

“Aha,” said Edwin, tearing the paper. “The new dusters I asked you for! Thank you, I wasn’t sure if you’d remember. I’ve been meaning to get up to the top floor and tackle those beams—”

The words died in his throat as something that definitely wasn’t dusters slithered out into his lap. It was a jacket. He held it up to the light, admiring the daringly slim cut, the elegant shape of the lapels, the gleam of the buttons. The fabric was black—no, midnight blue, and it was wool, but softer and finer than anything Edwin had seen in all his years as a tailor. “This is…”

“Cervelt,” said Thomas, carelessly, but the way he was leaning forward in his seat gave him away.

“Cervelt? But this must have cost…” Edwin began calculating prices per yard of fabric and gave up when he started to feel faint. “Thomas, how did—”

“Someone owed me a favour,” said Thomas with a lazy, dismissive wave of his hand. “I thought that would be your colour. Look inside.”

Gently, Edwin flipped the jacket open. The lining was silk, the same sunlit pink as the sky at dawn. He touched it, carefully, with two fingers, like it was some sort of rare creature.

“These old things aren’t doing a thing for you, dashing though you are,” said Thomas, airily, tugging at the sleeve of Edwin’s shirt. Edwin looked up, expecting to see laughter in his eyes, but there was none. “I can’t have you putting me to shame, after all. I have a reputation to uphold.”

Edwin upended the parcel and found that it also contained a crisp, creamy white shirt and a pair of smoky-grey trousers. He looked up at Thomas, his eyes narrowing with abrupt suspicion. “What have you done? What are you preemptively apologising for?”

Thomas’ eyes went wide and guileless and he pressed one hand to his chest. “Done?” he said. “Nothing at all. What, do I need a reason to treat you? It’s a gift, Edwin.”

“Well,” he said. “Thank you.” It felt hopelessly inadequate. “Thomas, they’re beautiful.”

They were, but it wasn’t just that – they were Edwin’s. Edwin’s colours, but turned rich and lovely, not Thomas’ own brightly-coloured plumage. Thomas had been looking at him, and thinking about him, and thinking about what he’d like. It was such a startlingly thoughtful gesture that Edwin found himself quite lost for words.

Thomas beamed, and for a moment, he was the brightest thing in the room. “Ugh,” he said. “Please, don’t make a scene about it.”

But he looked as pleased as Edwin had ever seen him.

While Edwin turned the jacket over in his hands, admiring the stitching—it really was beautiful work, it must have come from the finest tailor in Kingsbury—Thomas got to his feet, still wet from the rain outside. He crossed to the shelves and took down the little glass jar labelled DRY!!! that contained strange white crystals that looked like salt but smelled like clean sheets, then reached in and took a pinch between his fingers. He deposited it on his other hand, then licked it up with a flash of white teeth and pink tongue. Edwin watched as he shuddered all over, then shook himself like an animal, leaving a perfect ring of water on the floor around him, and when he went still again, he was as dry as if he’d never been outside. The dark stuff around his eyes was still smeared down his cheeks, but his hair had settled back into its usual riotously tousled waves, and the overall effect was, though it pained Edwin to admit it, rather debonair.

“Showoff,” said Charles.

“You always know just what a girl wants to hear,” rejoined Thomas, serenely, sitting back down next to Edwin and somehow managing to stretch out languidly in the straight-backed wooden chair. “Go on, then. Try it on for me.”

Edwin stood up and reverently draped the jacket around his shoulders. It felt ridiculous, a jacket that must have cost half of what his little shop made in a year on top of his patched, bleach-stained shirt. It fitted him beautifully, cradling his body almost lovingly, kissing his shoulders, his waist, the bones in his wrists.

“Bloody hell, mate,” said Charles, in a hushed, awed voice. He wolf-whistled.

“Stop that,” Edwin said, severely. “I look like I’m dressing for my own funeral.” He turned this way and that, admiring his reflection in the mirror on the wall. It was a strange old thing, its silver frame set at intervals with brightly-coloured crystals. Edwin didn’t like to look at himself in it, hated the sight of the worn-out, washed up old man that the Witch of the Wastes had made him, but just then, somehow, he felt like he… belonged.

Thomas clapped his hands together. “There’s our knight in shining armour,” he said. The force of his smile felt rather like being flattened by a moving train. He got up too and came to stand behind Edwin, tugging at the jacket until it sat just right. “There,” he said, softly, his eyes meeting Edwin’s in the mirror. “Look at you.”

Edwin’s mouth suddenly felt dry. You are being played, he told himself. He’d expected this. What he hadn’t expected was that he would know it for what it was when it happened and that he’d fall for it anyway. But he could feel himself falling even as he stood there, with Thomas’ warm hands on his shoulders, and Thomas’ strange, lovely golden eyes on him, and Charles watching him from the hearth with an expression that no book could have helped Edwin decipher. No drab little thing from a tailor’s shop expects to be looked at like that by wizards and fire demons. A man could burn, Edwin thought, if he wasn’t careful. If he forgot who he was.

He met Thomas’ eyes in the mirror. “I love it,” he said. “But I’m still not going to the palace for you, you know.”

Chapter Text

“Oh, do shut up,” Edwin grumbled.

“Haven’t said anything, have I?” said Charles, with the barely suppressed crackle of laughter in his tone.

“Oh, ignore him – I always do,” said Thomas. “You sure you don’t want me to find you some nicer shoes?”

“My shoes are perfectly respectable, thank you.” It was true that Edwin’s boots, though well-made, had a work-weary look to them these days. But wrapped up in the rest of his new clothes from Thomas, feeling taller, feeling visible, he found himself in need of a literal foothold in something staid and sensible to keep him grounded. Besides, he wasn’t taking fashion advice from a man who’d spent the last three days padding miserably around the castle in slippers and a pyjama shirt unbuttoned to the navel. “My walking stick, if you please.”

Niko hastened to collect the stick from his chair and bring it over, pressing it into his hand with a little squeeze. “Good luck!”

“Thank you, Niko.”

“Sure you know where you’re going?” asked Thomas. He still looked rather a sorry sight, pink-nosed and bundled in sheets from his bed, trailing them across the floor like the train of a wedding gown. His little jaunt out in the rain to fetch Edwin’s new clothes hadn’t done his cold any favours.

Edwin bristled. “I may be old, but I am not senile. Besides, I am sure if I do get lost, the rather unmissable palace spires looming over the neighbourhood shall give me a clue. Now, the letter please, Thomas.”

He took the folded royal summons and tucked it into the inner breast pocket of his wonderful new jacket, along with the identity papers Thomas had forged by some dishonest magical means. The papers that bore Edwin’s face under the moniker Edwin Michael Pendragon, aged sixty-eight. It had actually been seventy-nine, when Edwin first spied Thomas working on it. But the wizard had taken a long, hard look at Edwin that morning and tweaked it with a wave of his fingers. “Right. I had best be off; I have no idea of the penalty for tardiness to a scheduled meeting with the king of the nation, but I suspect gallows may be involved.”

“If they throw you in the dungeon, I’ll get you out,” said Niko, with determination. “I’ll find the by-laws somewhere; I have excellent reading comprehension.”

Edwin smiled. “I have no doubt. But I wouldn’t wish to burden you by putting my life in your hands, so perhaps let us endeavour to avoid the dungeons for now.”

He nodded and set off, briskly, for the front door, as a chorus of good lucks and farewells erupted from Niko and Charles at his back. His hand was on the door handle when Thomas stopped it, appearing at Edwin’s back, crowding him in a cocoon of bundled blankets and his usual head-spinning aura of perfume.

“One more thing,” Thomas murmured, his voice tickling Edwin’s ear as his hands cupped Edwin’s wrist. They pressed in a moment, warm, so warm Edwin considered checking his forehead for a temperature once more, before releasing and leaving in their place a single thick band of gold, hugging Edwin’s wrist. Embellished, ostentatiously, with a golden cat’s head with ruby eyes.

Edwin inspected it and raised his eyebrow. “I am not certain it matches the ensemble.”

“Just a little something to help keep you safe out there,” said Thomas. His hand trailed Edwin’s arm up to the elbow as he stepped back. “May come in handy.”

Edwin rolled his eyes. Tiresomely cryptic man. “Well. Thank you. I think.”

“Don’t mention it. Oh, and Edwin?”

“Oh, what now?”

Thomas stared at him, amber eyes unblinking, and he smiled. Not a sparkle, not even a smirk; simply a smile. “Thanks,” he said, softly.

Then he opened the door, ushered Edwin gently out of it, and closed it behind him before Edwin had quite found his words or his feet in the situation. One of Thomas’ raggedy cats—the large ginger bruiser that seemed to be a ringleader amongst the Kingsbury stray contingent—spared Edwin a glance, but returned swiftly to licking its paws on the shady stoop.

Edwin sniffed, and steadied his grip on his cane. “Well. We can’t all of us dilly dally on doorsteps all day.”

He set out, resolute, through the lush and bustling streets of Kingsbury.

Lavish was not strong enough a word for Veuleroy’s capital city – or at least this particular part of it, the close network of streets which ringed the palace itself. Evidently, a great deal of money and man hours went into maintaining this bit. Edwin supposed it was important to keep up appearances. There was a freshness to the building facades and the foliage that Edwin hadn’t seen in years around the increasingly brow-beaten neighbourhood of Market Chipping; they had got on alright there, certainly, kept it tidy, kept it respectable. But theirs was a place of passing trade and travellers, a town-sized stepping stone on a thousand paths. The wear and tear was difficult to avoid, and with all these mutterings of war on the horizon people had more pressing things on their mind. Not so in these parts, it would seem. Every potted plant was lush and well-attended, every storefront cheerful and brightly stocked, and Edwin even spied one or two window cleaners hard at work, teetering on towering ladders to bring the highest windows to a sun-catching shine. Were it not for the rather repetitive recruitment posters pasted at regular intervals like clockwork, you’d never know anything was amiss in the kingdom. Edwin bustled along cobbles worn smooth and shiny from centuries of footfall, following the map he had traced and retraced in his mind’s eye to weave through the residential blocks, the high street, and onwards into the wide-sweeping footprint of the palace itself.

When he made it to the plaza, he was rather proud that he only allowed it to stagger him momentarily. The sky-sweeping spires alone were a marvel to behold. But Edwin had not come to goggle at the architecture. He steeled himself, and began to trek across the wide, walled court, which was easily as long a walk as the several blocks he had traversed to get to it. The trek soon wore the shine off the impressive architecture. What a nuisance, all this pomp and grandeur! He was already beginning to tire, and he hadn’t even reached the daunting set of stone steps before the castle gate.

He was just telling his aching feet, firmly, that they had survived far worse than this while trekking the Wastes, when he became aware of a curious… sucking sound. A rapid succession of them, in fact, coming up from behind him on the right. He glanced over his shoulder and flinched in horror at the sight that awaited him; it was another of those hideous mushroom creatures, lurching along at pace, the bulbous appendage that possibly constituted a head bobbing with its suckering steps across the flagstones.

“Oh, not you again,” Edwin groaned. It occurred to him that his response might be a bit lacking in appropriate levels of terror, but honestly. “Go away! I’m busy!”

“Well,” came a crooning, chillingly familiar voice from behind the mushroom man. “I see you’re still as rude as you are wrinkled, grampa.”

Edwin faltered in his stride, and as the monster drew level and passed him he realised that not only was it bundled, absurdly, into some sort of butler’s tailcoat, but it was also carrying something, its spongy, shapeless fingers wrapped around two thick wooden poles. The other end of the poles were being held by another mushroom creature in a similar state of attempted formal dress, and borne aloft by the poles was some sort of litter. It had a natural rawness to it quite unlike any mode of transport he’d seen about the city this afternoon, woven of sticks and twine and fabric and paper; in fact, one had to wonder if the wood had been woven into shape or had simply grown that way. Edwin’s stomach turned at the sight of more fungus growing over it, smaller and more traditionally mushroom-shaped than the monstrous footmen but unmistakably… wriggling.

Then the side door of the box swung open, revealing its sole occupant in a cloud of pipe smoke; the Witch of the Wastes.

“I mean, really, would it kill you to say ‘hello’?” she said, with a smile as noxious and cloying as the fungus.

Edwin had expected to be frightened if he ever saw her again, knowing now what she was capable of. Instead only a bitter, seething resentment bubbled in his chest, which he funnelled into a dismissive and haughty sniff. “I have nothing to say to you, witch.”

“Me-ow,” she laughed. “Kitten’s got claws, huh? I guess I don’t need to ask if you’ve been hanging around with that pretty little fleabag. He can be so mean, sometimes.”

artwork by idliketobeatree

“What are you talking about?” said Edwin, as he strode on with all the hauteur he could muster. “I quite fail to see what cats have to do with—”

And he stopped dead as his mind tripped over itself. Tomcat, she’d said, the night they met in Edwin’s shop. That pretty little fleabag. There was only one recent acquaintance of Edwin’s who merited such a name. He wheeled around to face her and took two steps towards the open door of the litter.

“Do you mean to tell me,” he said, as evenly as he could manage, “that all… this—” he broke off to gesture at his prematurely aged self— “is about Thomas?”

Esther raised a dark pencilled eyebrow and smiled a smile that was all snap, like a mousetrap. “First name terms, huh?” she said. “Isn’t that… sweet.”

“Thomas?” Despite his best efforts, Edwin’s voice shot up, and several genteel passersby turned to look. Humiliatingly, he could feel his ears turning pink. “All because, what, you think he and I are engaged in some sort of… some sort of sordid liaison? I’ve never heard such nonsense in my life. Our relationship is… strictly professional.”

“Oh, honey.” Esther made a mock-sympathetic face. “That’s what they all say.”

Edwin was suddenly acutely aware of the gold band around his wrist and the beautiful new clothes he was wearing. He was struck by the sudden urge to defend Thomas, despite having said the same and worse himself. But he resisted. Clearly, she wished to provoke a reaction from him, and he simply would not give her the satisfaction. “I’ve no idea who you think I am, madam,” he said, raising his voice for the benefit of any eavesdroppers. “But I fear you’ve mistaken me for someone else. I am but an unassuming old man, here on behalf of my son.”

“Your son? Ew.” She crossed her legs, gesturing vaguely with her pipe. “That’s the kinda roleplay you squirrels really oughta keep to the bedroom, know what I’m saying?”

He regarded her, coolly, out of the corner of his eye. How odd, the difference a few forced extra decades made. His face felt warm at the insinuation but he was collected, considering. He raked a judgmental eyeball over her, head to toe, found a weak spot and took aim. “Jealous?”

The thin stem of her clay pipe cracked under the force of her grip. She papered over the matching cracks in her expression with a toothsome smile like an ancient horror dredged up from the depths. “Of you? Oh, sweetheart, you’ll have to wake up far, far earlier than that if you want me to be jealous of a pathetic little mouse like you. After all,” her waving hand swept over Edwin’s neatly-combed hair, impeccably-tied scarf and wonderful jacket to land on his old sensible boots, which really did look shabby in comparison to the rest of his outfit. “We both know that what’s on the inside is just as plain as the outside.”

Edwin waited with interest to see if the old wave of stung, hurt fury would rise in him again, and wasn’t entirely surprised when it did not. “Hum,” he said blandly, adjusting his grip on his walking stick and offering the Witch the same sort of pleasant smile he used on the most foolish patrons of the tailor’s shop. “Well, if you’ll excuse me, I have an audience with the King.”

He set off towards the enormous staircase, his smile widening when a screech of “So do I!” followed him.

The stairs to the castle had seemed enormous from the far side of the courtyard. Standing in front of them, they were a mountain: each stair was hewn from blocks of flecked green marble a foot high, polished to a dangerous, slippery shine. At the top, somewhere among the clouds, Edwin could see a set of huge mahogany doors, glinting with inlaid gold in the morning sunlight.

Edwin swallowed, steadied himself and nodded at the guard in the gleaming bronze breastplate. “I’m here to see Their Majesty the King,” he said.

Receiving a nod almost as regal as one he’d expect from the monarch in question, Edwin squared his shoulders and set off up the stairs to his destination.

“Oof,” he said with feeling as he hauled himself up the first five steps. “Palace staff must develop – quite the set of lungs, climbing this lot every day. How do they – bring in furniture?”

He’d not gone much further when a shriek of alarm from the ground made him spin around. His shoes slipped on the smooth marble, and for a horrible second, he struggled for balance, his walking stick windmilling frantically in the air. Righting himself, breathing hard, he looked down at the ground and the source of the trouble.

Predictably, it wasn’t hard to find.

“Walk? Up all of those stairs? Why, sweetheart, that’s positively medieval, I can’t possibly!” Esther Finch was standing in an irate wreath of pipe-smoke. Her litter lay discarded a few feet away, the horrible, bloated footmen now just puddles of clothes on the marble. A man with a broom had come to sweep them away as though they were rubbish.

The guard at the foot of the stairs shrugged as though it was all the same to him, which it probably was. “Madame Night has ordered that no unauthorised magic be used past the palace wards, madam.”

“Augh,” Esther blew a stream of muddy smoke out of both nostrils. “God. She always was tedious.” Tucking away her pipe, she squinted up at Edwin, twenty feet above. “I suppose you’re loving this, you little twerp.”

Edwin shrugged. Lying was a vulgar habit.

The Witch of the Wastes spat a gooey glob of tobacco spit onto the flagstones and jerked a thumb towards her litter. “You boys better not lose the keys, or none of you will be getting a tip.”

Hiking up her robes indecorously high and showing a pair of stockings that were more hole than fabric, Esther started up the steps after Edwin, who turned and restarted his climb. Of course, he knew that it wasn’t a race up to the palace to greet the King; he just had absolutely no intention of arriving there in second place.

Edwin had felt himself growing stronger lately, no doubt thanks to vigorous calisthenic exercise in the form of cleaning up after a dreadfully lazy wizard, but these stairs were sorely testing his newfound musculature. Halfway to the top, he stopped for a break, leaning heavily on his cane and very grateful that no one was within earshot to hear him wheezing for breath. Glancing down, he noticed that Esther had barely managed two dozen steps, and was relying on her own cane far more than Edwin.

That was smoking for you, Edwin thought disapprovingly. Revolting occupation.

“Come on!” he called down. “You’re at least twenty years younger than me! You should be bounding up these stairs!”

Esther, doll-sized below him, paused with her hands braced on her knees. She squinted up at him and said something inaudible but doubtless impolite. Edwin shook his head, turned his face into the breeze and started climbing again.

By the time he reached the top, his lungs were going like a bellows and there was a steady trickle of sweat dampening the back of his nice shirt. He sincerely hoped there was going to be an opportunity for him to neaten himself up - or perhaps that was the point, he considered darkly, panting into the crisp morning air. To present petitioners to the King at their most dishevelled, to make them feel common and insignificant.

Just the thought made him draw himself up straighter, blowing his nose on his handkerchief and tucking it back into his pocket with a sniff. If the King wanted to make a fool of their subjects, then they ought to find better victims than a wizard’s associate and the most feared witch this side of the Eastern Ocean.

“Will you come on?” he shouted impatiently down to Esther, who was toiling up the last third of the staircase. “We are ambassadors of the magic-using community and I will not have you making a poor show of us all by being late!”

There was a very faint wheeze of invective below him. Edwin pursed his lips. “You would do far better to work on climbing and not waste your breath insulting me. I shall leave you to it.”

He stuck his nose into the air and marched off in the direction of the great doors. Nevertheless, he wasn’t quite brave enough to go up to the liveried footman and announce his presence. Now the dawn had broken and the sun was fully up, the royal palace was a glittering behemoth: the bright morning sunshine blazed off the marble walls and right into Edwin’s eyes. It was impossible to look at the great, golden doors without squinting – or, perhaps, without the aid of smoked eyeglasses. Edwin knew, he knew that this was all deliberate; it was meant to be massive and opulent and awe-inspiring, to inspire awe in the common people, like him. To make them feel small. Edwin was aware of that fact, but was ashamed to admit that, perhaps, it worked, just a bit. He did feel small, and that made him cross.

He needed some of Esther’s brass to get him through the door. Or failing that, her appallingly bad manners.

Right on cue, the witch’s iron cane struck the top step. Edwin watched as Esther herself oozed after it, gulping in great lungfuls of air at quite a distressing volume. The climb had not been kind to her: sweat had melted her eye-paint and rouge down her face; her stockings had laddered impossibly further; and one of the heels on those ridiculously impractical boots had come away, lending her a list like a drunken parrot.

“I’m sure there will be a powder room where you can compose yourself,” Edwin said briskly, taking her arm and marching them both towards the footman.

“Can it, grampa,” Esther wheezed, then peered up through her haystack of a hairstyle at the footman. “We’re here to see the king, so why don’t you go and let them know we’ve arrived, hmm?”

She attempted to take a puff from her pipe but the effect was rather spoiled by the pipe having gone out.

Edwin detected in the footman’s bland expression the faintest hint of a wrinkled nose, but the man merely bowed and set to pulling open the heavy door.

Both Edwin and the Witch of the Wastes sighed as a long breath of cool air streamed out of the building inside.

“If you’ll wait here,” the footman said, waving them into the entrance hall, “someone will arrive to direct you shortly.”

“Very kind,” Edwin said as graciously as possible over Esther cursing as she tried and failed to relight her pipe.

“I’m afraid there is no smoking allowed,” was the footman’s last admonishment.

Esther rolled her eyes and made a great show of emptying the bowl of her pipe into a potted plant.

The great door shut behind them with a disconcertingly loud boom that echoed through the room. It was startlingly bare for an entrance hall; apart from the hangings and the portraits on the wall, there was no furniture at all save—

“A chair!” Esther drove her skinny elbow deep into Edwin’s ribs and made for the single armchair with astonishing speed. Collapsing into it with a gusty sigh, she smirked at him. “You snooze, you lose, darling.”

Edwin sniffed. “Charming,” and took himself for a walk around the room instead, pausing to examine each cracked and faded portrait, or brush his nose over the fresh spring flowers arranged in blandly pretty vases.

It was very clean and very quiet, and that nagged at the back of Edwin’s mind: what was this room used for? He had expected a bustling hive of activity behind such an imposing entrance. Where were the trappings of idle monarchy? Where were the footmen and the maidservants? Where were the clerks? There was a rose garden visible through the mullioned windows; where were the gardeners? Edwin had never been in domestic service, but he had enough experience of running a household to know that a royal residence of this size should be heaving with people. But it wasn’t.

As soon as Edwin noticed something was wrong, he couldn’t stop noticing it. The wrongness pressed in on him like a fur muffler. The air felt thick and sticky; Edwin watched the progress of a single dust mote through a sunbeam, forced vertically down to earth as though it were weighted.

Edwin frowned, peering closer. “I say,” he called, turning towards Esther in her chair—and gasped.

The witch was slumped, unmoving, in the chair. Her mouth hung open, a fixed expression of horror on her face. Three cloaked and hooded figures, not solid but made of light, prowled round her in a ceaseless circle.

“Esther!” cried Edwin, taking two stumbling steps forward and cursing himself. How many months had he spent living with a wizard not to recognise the presence of magic in the air?

He stopped himself when the air around him suddenly squeezed like a fist. Esther went rigid in her seat, her arms and legs sticking out at odd angles. Her face held that same look of horror. The unearthly figures continued to circle, faster and faster. An ominous droning sound rose in the air. Just as suddenly, the air relaxed, the figures vanished, and Esther’s body went limp. Edwin sank to his knees, gasping for breath. There was the feeling of something leaching away, like water through cloth. Edwin patted himself down frantically, but the feeling didn’t seem to be coming from him.

With an awful foreboding, he stood up and stumbled towards Esther, still in the chair.

Before he could reach her, he felt a light touch on his arm.

“Mr Pendragon?” A footman had appeared. “The king requests your forgiveness but they are indisposed. They have directed their Head Sorcerer, Madame Night, to hear your petition instead.”

Edwin was still gaping at Esther Finch. “What did you do to her?”

“I assure you, she will not be harmed,” said the footman, which was not at all reassuring. The way his hand slid under Edwin’s elbow to escort him through to Madame Night’s chamber was even less so. But what was Edwin to do about it? He was, after all, just an old man; a foolish old man who had agreed to far, far more than he bargained for.

With one last backward glance at Esther Finch, still unmoving in the chair, Edwin allowed himself to be led away.

Edwin, who had spent half his life ducking under door frames and bumping his head on low beams, had never felt so small.

The room he’d been led into by the footman was cavernous. The vaulted ceiling soared overhead, and the other end of the long chamber was so distant it might as well have been another country. He’d tried to work out how many times over the old tailor’s shop could have fitted inside it, and then gave up when he realised that it was only making him more nervous. When he cleared his throat, it echoed.

Madame Night sat before him in an ornate chair that was pretending not to be a throne and doing a poor job of it. She was not a tall woman, but her chair sat atop a small dais, which meant he had to look up to meet her eyes. “So,” she said. She didn’t speak loudly, but Edwin knew a voice that expected to be listened to when he heard one. “You are the wizard Pendragon’s father.”

“Er—yes,” said Edwin, fighting the sudden urge to apologise. “I thought my audience would be with the King. If it’s all the same to you, I really would rather speak directly with them.”

Madame Night smiled. It was remarkable – Edwin had never seen anyone smile with such palpable chill before. “Yes,” she said. “Unfortunately, their majesty is far too busy to scold every delinquent sorcerer in the kingdom in person. And, since Thomas was my apprentice, the regrettable matter of his truancy falls within my jurisdiction.”

Thomas’ truancy. Yes. That was why Edwin was here. He pulled himself together, reaching deep, deep down for courage he hadn’t known he possessed. “Of course,” he said. “In fact, that is what I’ve come to talk to you about.”

Madame Night raised one immaculate, arched eyebrow. “Oh yes?”

“Yes.” Edwin took a deep, steadying breath. “In fact, since he was your apprentice, perhaps you are the very person I ought to be speaking to after all. You are, of course, familiar with his… ways.”

She narrowed her eyes in a manner that suggested she was, indeed, well-acquainted. “I fail to see what his eccentricities have to do with his failure to report for duty, Mr. Pendragon.”

“Well, he’s—he’s a coward, for one thing,” said Edwin. “Always trying to wriggle out of some obligation or another, even if it’s something he was going to do anyway. It’s sheer contrariness. He would be worse than useless on the front lines. And vain! He’s terribly vain.” Edwin was getting into his stride now. This was easy. He could insult Thomas six different ways before breakfast. “You ought to see the tantrums he throws when there isn’t enough hot water to wash his hair. You’d think the only thing that mattered to him was being handsome! Selfish, too, and inconsiderate, and… he would be a terrible drain on morale, under straitened circumstances. You simply cannot rely on him. It pains me to say this, Madame Night, but I rather think your army would be better off without him.”

Madame Night sat back in her chair and pursed her lips. She was quiet for a long moment, studying him thoughtfully. “Is that so?” she said, eventually.

“Yes.”

“Mm. Mr. Pendragon, may I be candid with you?”

“By all means.”

“Thomas was the most promising apprentice I ever had,” she said. “Terrifically powerful, and hungry to learn – to a fault, sometimes. I was forever holding him back from attempting magic he wasn’t ready for yet. Oh, how we fought. He believed that I wanted him hobbled, kept small, his power limited, when all I wanted was for him not to squander his potential through over-ambition.”

This didn’t sound like the Thomas Edwin knew. Terrifically powerful? All of the really impressive magic Edwin had seen him do was actually Charles’ doing. And as for ambition… well, his most dearly-cherished ambition was to be left alone to take long baths and flirt shamelessly with anyone who would have him, which did not seem to Edwin like the sort of ambition that would have impressed Madame Night. Still, Madame Night had known Thomas a lot longer than Edwin had, and Edwin was trying to pass himself off as Thomas’ father, after all, so he nodded, and said, gravely but noncommittally, “Hm.”

Madame Night sighed. “I had such hopes for that boy,” she said, “as, I’m sure, did you, Mr. Pendragon. But ever since he sold his soul to that demon, he’s become… unpredictable. A dangerous loose cannon, if I may speak freely.”

Edwin’s ears pricked up. A demon? It sounded ever so lofty when Madame Night put it like that, selling one’s soul for some undisclosed gain—sounded like the sort of trouble one would have to go looking for—but they did happen to have a demon in residence, after all. And of course, there was that business with the Witch of the Wastes; it sounded like Thomas had been quite a different character when Madame Night had known him. Could she possibly know the terms of whatever bargain he had struck with Charles? He was so very tempted to prod, but surely Thomas would not have told her anything he would not have told his so-called father. Once again hamstrung by his own cover story. “Yes,” said Edwin, biting down on his frustration. “The demon, of course.”

“A sorry state of affairs indeed,” said Madame Night. “Mr. Pendragon, it brings me no joy at all to have to do this, but you may tell your son that if he does not report to me within the week and pledge his magic to the King’s service, I shall be forced to confiscate it.”

“Confiscate it?” Edwin repeated. It didn’t sound to him like that should have been possible, but he wasn’t about to call Madame Night’s bluff. “That seems rather… extreme,” he said, cautiously. “Is there not some sort of compromise that we might—”

Madame Night picked up a little golden bell from the spindly-legged table next to her and rang it. She gave Edwin a thin, sharp little smile. “I can tell you don’t think I could do it,” she said. “Permit me a small… demonstration.”

The door at the far end of the chamber swung open on silent, well-oiled hinges, and one of the identical footmen appeared, pushing a wheeled chair in front of him. Edwin’s eyesight, which had been rather better these last few weeks, seemed to be failing him again – where there should have been a person in the chair, all he could see was a bundle of rags, all wrapped up in…

In a fur coat, much like the one Esther had been wearing when Edwin had last seen her, slumped in that chair.

As the footman drew closer, Edwin felt an icy fist close around his heart. Not even an hour ago, the Witch of the Wastes had been sneering at soldiers, blonde and imposing and just as hale and horrible as ever. But the weight of years seemed to have collapsed on her all at once – her shining hair was a wispy white cloud around her head, her face criss-crossed with lines like paths on a map, and when she reached out to point accusingly at Madame Night, her hand was a gnarled, twisted claw.

“You,” she croaked, in a thin, weak voice, but before she could get another word out, she was consumed by a fit of hacking coughs that wracked her small, frail body.

Edwin stared at her, dumbstruck and horrified. It wasn’t that different to what she’d done to him, not really. She’d laughed, he remembered, as if stealing those years from him was the best joke she’d ever heard. He should have been glad to see her brought low like this, but he wasn’t. All he felt was pity.

He looked back up at Madame Night. There was the barest hint of a satisfied little smile on her impassive face.

“There now,” she said. “I trust that this little demonstration will serve to reassure you that I’m perfectly serious.”

Edwin was suddenly so angry he could barely speak. “You—there was no call for that,” he said. “You had no right! You had no quarrel with her! What was it for? She was no friend of mine, either, mind you, but look what you’ve done to her, and all to prove a point! To try to scare me!” He stood up taller, the anger washing his aches and pains away, smoothing the aged crackle from his voice. To think she could conceive of committing such a hideous violation against Thomas – who cared for Niko, who loved beautiful things, whose grievous treason was merely wishing to live as he pleased. “You thought that you could use her to bully me and Thomas into compliance. Well, Madame Night, I’m afraid I have terrible news for you: you cannot. Not now, not ever. I shan’t allow you anywhere near him.”

Madame Night’s smile widened like a trapdoor underfoot. “Well, well, well,” she said. She did not raise her voice, which made Edwin abruptly aware of just how loud his own had become. “How touching. Falling in love with him doesn’t make him any less of a monster, it just makes you a fool. Do you really think you’re the first wide-eyed, lovestruck little puppy Thomas has sent to do his dirty work for him?”

It was strange. Edwin might’ve expected someone would see through his ruse, and he might’ve expected something like this to occur in turn; he knew she was looking for a weak point, a seam to dig her nails into. Somehow, though, knowing those things didn’t stop the knife blade of it slipping between his ribs.

Madame Night sniffed. “A pity. I took you for someone I could negotiate with.”

The shock of it was paralysing. Before, all Edwin had been able to think about was how badly he’d wished Thomas was there; now he was devoutly thankful that he hadn’t come. “I—” Edwin began, not knowing what he was about to say, but she held up a hand and he stopped short.

“A word to the wise, dear,” said Madame Night. “If you’re going to pose as his father, you might want to try for at least something of a family resemblance. Now, if that still hasn’t concentrated your mind, perhaps—”

Far behind Edwin, a door slammed open. Edwin’s head whipped around, and Madame Night made an impatient noise.

“Madame Night!”

A big, barrel-chested man strode towards them in a bright red coat bedecked with medals and gold braid, his face mostly hidden behind a majestically bushy moustache.

“General. What a pleasant surprise.” It was difficult to imagine anyone sounding less pleasantly surprised than Madame Night did just then. “How may I help you?”

Edwin glanced back and forth between them. His aches and pains were feeling better, but that door was a long way away. Still, perhaps if he took advantage of her distraction and ran as fast as his legs could carry him…

“New battle plans,” said the General gruffly. “I have a revolutionary new strategy, it’s going to blow them out of the water. Ha!” The guffaw was so loud that Edwin jumped, and even Madame Night flinched. “I need you to get your wizards together right away and set ‘em to work on these.” He gestured emphatically with a sheaf of papers.

Madame Night cocked her head to one side. “New plans,” she said.

“That’s right. My best yet, I think you’ll find.”

“Mm. And how, pray tell, do they differ from the plans you handed me half an hour ago?”

The General’s expression froze. “Ah, fuck,” he said. His voice was suddenly a lot less big and a lot less booming, and distinctly… familiar. “Well, plan B it is!”

In a single movement, he ripped off his false moustache and grabbed Edwin by the arm. He winked.

“Hey, handsome. Sorry I’m late.”

Edwin’s knees were so weak with relief he could barely hold himself up. He had never been so glad to see anyone in his life. “About bloody time,” he hissed. “Where have you been, you useless layabout?”

“You sweet talker,” said Thomas, and Edwin could feel the reluctant grin unfolding on his face. Thomas looked up at Madame Night. His features were melting back into their usual configuration as the illusion dissolved. “Madame Night, we’re leaving,” he announced. “You’ll have to get your toy soldiers elsewhere.”

He turned to leave, still holding on tightly to Edwin, but before he could take a couple of steps, Madame Night made a gesture like she was throwing a fistful of sand, and a glowing circle blazed to life around their feet.

“A magic circle?” said Thomas, incredulously, as Edwin tried to step outside it and found, to his horror, that he could not. “That’s a dirty fucking trick, Madame Night.”

“You should know, dear.” Her face was coolly impassive. “It brings me no joy to do this, believe you me.”

Edwin didn’t believe her, and he was just opening his mouth to tell her so when he realised – there was something wrong with Thomas. The bright red jacket was straining at the seams, rippling as if living things were squirming to get out under the fabric. As Edwin watched, a cold pit of dread opening in his stomach, the fabric split open as Thomas began to explode monstrously out of his own skin. His outline bulged and billowed inhumanly, coarse dark fur and feathers bursting through. He towered over Edwin now, a head taller, then two, then three, and twice as broad.

“My, my,” said Madame Night coolly. She was watching him with detached interest. “It’s far worse than I thought. You have let yourself deteriorate, haven’t you?”

The hand on Edwin’s arm turned grey and scaly, and great hooked talons burst from the ends of Thomas’ fingers. His face was changing, too, that familiar, laughing mouth warping and stretching to become a cruel, hooked beak. The eyes, though – those curious tawny eyes were still Thomas, solid gold all the way to the bottom.

“I wonder—” Madame Night’s voice was as dry as dust, as sharp as a twist of the knife. “—how much longer until you can’t get back?”

Thomas opened his mouth—his beak—but instead of words, there was nothing but an awful, metallic shriek that rattled Edwin’s bones. He staggered, clutching his ears. He had to do something, he thought, wildly, but what? He wasn’t like Thomas, or Madame Night. He didn’t know how to do spells or draw magic circles.

“Thomas!” he barked, blind with panic, a desperate, last-ditch attempt. Madame Night was raising her hand, closing her fist as if she was grabbing a rope, ready to pull. Edwin thought of Thomas’ wonderful, wild magic, yanked out of him like a bad tooth. It was awful. “You stop that right now. I won’t have it, do you hear me?”

Thomas blinked, and time stood still. And then, impossibly, miraculously, the monstrous transformation began to unravel. The wicked talons retracted, the fur and feathers shrank away, and Thomas’ body returned slowly and painfully to its usual size and shape – although there would be no salvaging that jacket.

His hand, mercifully human-shaped once more, spared a squeeze for Edwin’s arm. He wasted no more time than that.

“Go, go!” cried Thomas. He gripped Edwin tight and, with a grunt of exertion, plunged through the magic circle. With Madame Night’s cry of thwarted fury on their heels like a thrown spear, they hurtled back towards the door at the far end of the long chamber, bursting through it with a bang at speed far greater than Edwin would’ve thought possible. Edwin didn’t dare look back, but he thought he could hear the thump of great wings beating.

“Thomas,” gasped Edwin, “I—”

“There’s no time!” Thomas shouted, as they shot down the hallway like a stone from a slingshot. “It’s me they want, I’ll throw them off the scent. You take her and go back to the castle.”

It was only then that Edwin realised that Thomas had grabbed the handle of the wheeled chair that held the erstwhile Witch of the Wastes with his other hand, and was pushing it along as he half-ran, half-carried them both.

“I—yes, alright, but how?”

“The bracelet. Call out to Charles, he’ll show you the way home!”

The bracelet! Truth be told, Edwin had quite forgotten about it. It felt like a week or more had passed since Thomas had given it to him earlier that very same day. Call out to Charles? What was that supposed to mean? He didn’t know, but he could hear shouting and footsteps closing in on them. They were out of time. He held his hand up, the bracelet bouncing with each step. Charles, he thought, desperately, Charles, if you can hear me – bring us home.

As if the bracelet had just been waiting for that very signal, a wire-thin beam of ruby red light shot from the cat’s ruby eye. It pointed squarely towards the ostentatious, gilt-framed mirror at the end of the hallway.

“Thomas, that’s a mirror!” Edwin shouted, his feet windmilling under him as he tried to slow down. It was twenty feet away—ten—five— “It’ll break, we can’t—!”

“Attaboy,” said Thomas, and before Edwin could protest, Thomas planted one hand between his shoulders and pushed—

Edwin screwed his eyes shut, anticipating the crash of breaking glass and the white-hot lines of pain as the shards sliced him to ribbons, but there was nothing but a muffled, liquid quiet and a stomach-turning feeling of falling in a direction that his body was telling him insistently was not down. He hung there for a moment, suspended weightless and disoriented, still refusing to open his eyes, and then he was falling again. It was only a short drop, and when he landed, he bounced.

“Oof,” he said, as all of the air was driven out of his lungs at once. He lay there for a moment, gasping for breath, and then, when he felt up to it, he cracked one eye open.

He was in Thomas’ bedroom. There was no mistaking it – the enormous, round bed, piled high with throws and blankets in every colour and texture imaginable, the floor covered with a patchwork of lush rugs, every surface crowded with books and trinkets that sparkled and flashed. Edwin could see it all reflected in the huge mirror that had been affixed to the ceiling above the bed: the room, his own pale figure starfished on the bed, and beside him, the Witch of the Wastes, now a wheezing bundle of rags and bones beside him – her chair toppled and spinning its wheels on the floor some feet away.

Deciding not to dwell on Thomas’ reasons for putting the mirror there, of all places, Edwin rolled off the bed and got to his feet. The castle was quiet, but his heart was still beating a tattoo against his ribs. “Niko?” he called. “Charles?”

There came a distant shriek, and then the sound of running footsteps, and then, a moment later, Niko burst into the room and threw her arms around Edwin with such force he almost toppled over.

“Oh, you’re alright!” she wailed. “We were so worried, you should have been back ages ago, and then Charles got all big and bright and scary and he said something was wrong! He sounded crazy, you should have heard it, but I knew you were in trouble, and—oh. Who’s this?”

She had spotted the bundled-up figure of the Witch of the Wastes over Edwin’s shoulder.

“That,” said Edwin, “is a long story. Would you help me get her downstairs, please? I need to speak to Charles.”

While Niko helped the Witch up and led her limping out onto the landing, chatting nineteen to the dozen all the while, Edwin took the stairs down to the kitchen two at a time and skidded to a halt in front of the hearth. Charles was boy-shaped, leaning as far out into the kitchen as he could.

“Charles,” Edwin said. “Where is he? Is he going to be alright?”

Charles bit his lip. “I don’t know,” he said. Edwin waited for the joke, the barb, but it never came. “You might as well settle down and wait. You’ll be the first to know if I hear anything.”

Midnight, declared the owl-faced clock in sombre tones of thundering stone. Midnight, and Edwin was ushered into wakefulness not by its sonorous chimes, but by a withered wooden creak as the castle heaved around him; straining like a great weight had settled upon it.

He sat up, slowly, blankets pooling in soft waves at his waist. Eyes flickering first, on instinct, to Charles. Even fast asleep in the grate the demon's homely glow burned on, incandescently tireless, painting the haphazard kitchen in hues of olive oil gold. Picking out, delicately, the details as they filed back into Edwin's mind, recent events reasserting themselves. The golden bracelet winking up at him from his wrist, Niko dozing fretfully at the kitchen table with her head on her arms; the Witch of the Wastes, slumbering on Edwin's truckle bed, relegating him to the chair by the hearth.

Footprints, tar black and seeping, trailing across the floor.

Edwin leaned in close, inspecting. Each print was long, long as his forearm, and raised from the boards by the thickness and binding viscosity of the slick black gel which comprised it. And they painted a path, step by deliberate, three-toed step, to the staircase.

“He's gone too far this time…”

Edwin glanced towards the hearth, to Charles’ worried face peering out of it. “I thought you were asleep,” he said, with an evenness of voice he did not feel.

Charles’ eyes found him across the room, coal black and ringing abyssal with hollow dread. “He's gone too far,” he repeated.

Edwin steadied himself, and took up Niko’s diminishing candle in its holder from the table.

Each stair sighed its discontent as he ascended, creaking under even the most unobtrusive tread of bare feet on the boards. Each whisper and groan echoed in the castle's hollow heart chambers, rhythmic and rattling above the bloody rush of his own rapid breath. Heart in his throat, he climbed and climbed, ten steps, twenty, thirty, onwards and upwards and upwards and onwards. Over and over again reaching the turn that signalled the landing – and over and over finding only more stairs waiting on the other side.

He must have climbed miles and miles before finally reaching the summit – rounding that corner and finding at last not more stairs but a door. The door, His door. Burnished brass fittings and warding sigils; and four deep, savage slashes, spaced evenly in a brutal diagonal gouge across the antique oak.

The doorknob was warm in his hand, and yielded without complaint – unlike the hinges, which wailed his intrusion to the skies. He pressed on, undeterred, shouldering the heavy door aside and revealing, sliver by oppressive sliver, the sepulchral grotto beyond.

The groaning of the castle's wooden walls held nothing on the raw, rough-hewn arteries of the inner sanctum. Under the wind whistling through from deep within the warren, underneath all the assorted noises of Thomas’ domain—the ticking timepieces, the spilling sand, the workings of clockwork mechanisms too numerous to name and too complex to understand—he could hear the walls breathing. Every miscellaneous trinket and treasure sunken, soundly, in knots and whorls of living wood, flexing about him like a muscle; like a throat.

Edwin, quite sure that only to retreat would be unthinkable, breathed in the castle air and the last faint traces of Charles’ familiar woodsmoke, and embarked down the yawning gullet.

The wood creaked, but not in the manner of the complaining stairs; more in the manner of that which was still growing, impossibly fast, warping and straining underfoot. Edwin navigated gingerly past the obstacles of twisted, in-growing roots and embedded ephemera. A slight shudder took him as his ankle grazed the protruding ceramic fingers of a broken doll, its glass eye glinting menacingly in the halo of his candlelight. It didn't seem quite so unpleasant moments later, when his foot brushed something else; something warmer than the porcelain, dry and porous to the touch. Bone.

He kept his gaze fixed forward and pressed on, even as the passage narrowed, as the throb and flex of the living walls grew louder. Even as the toys and keepsakes gave way, gradually, to tight knots of broken, clustered bone, sunk into the sides of the tunnel like angry splinters. Even as his steps began to rattle with the hollow cascade of tumbling skulls at his feet. He caught only glimpses of the shapes in the flicker of his light; birds and rodents, mostly, beaks and snouts. The odd larger specimen like a fox, or a badger. None human. Not yet. Not that he could see.

When the passage had grown so narrow, and so choked with bones that even Edwin felt it like a sympathetic pang in his own throat, only then did it widen once more. Abruptly, upwards and downwards and side to side, a sharp drop into a yawning cavern.

Edwin hovered at the precipice, shivering in his thin nightclothes as the wind picked up, howling past his ears from the dark expanse. A clamour closed in around his head; the wailing gale, the groaning wood, the rattle of a thousand dry, withered bones clanging like windchimes, chattering like teeth. Around his ears, only noise; and before his eyes, only black.

And then, within that blackness, movement. A rustle, a sigh. Hand shaking, Edwin extended his candle forth, and the flicker of its light caught upon the edges of feathers – or was it fur? Lots of it. Something so dark as to disappear into the void. Something vast, heaving with the deep, haggard breaths of laboured life. Looming over him, impossibly massive.

Something that shifted, and groaned, and bent towards him. Bending down, almost folding, his light catching the barest edges of the steep hunch of its form.

And then, light. A flash of it, so bright and perfect Edwin fought the urge to cover his eyes. And another, close beside it. Perfect discs of white and green, floating before him in the shadowy mass. It was not a new light, he realised, but a reflection of his own. His candle glow catching the glassy forms in the gloom; two enormous, fathomless eyes, like a cat, like an owl. Like a beast.

The staring discs twitched, sharply, as if rotating around a single point. Then another sound joined the fray, a voice, a familiar, sardonic drawl – bulging at the seams with a monstrous echo.

“Poking your nose where it doesn’t belong again, I see.”

It set the bones chattering anew, set Edwin’s teeth on edge. It was a warped, distorted shadow of the voice he’d come to know and almost tolerate. “Thomas,” he breathed, lifting his candle, angling for a better look. “Oh, you fool—what have you done to yourself, now…?”

“Haven’t you learned your lesson yet, little mouse.” The discs, the eyes, twitched again, then flipped, a perfect rotation; staring at him upside down with that ethereal reflective glow. “About skulking around dark alleys all on your own?”

“I’m not alone,” he said. “I have you here with me.”

The eyes spun back into place with a rasping chuckle. “Well. Now, who’s the fool?”

“Thomas, you’ve gone too far,” said Edwin, hands clutching at a knot of tangled ribs and femurs in the wall for balance as he leaned in. “Charles is worried sick. You must tell me how to break the spell that binds you—you must let me help you.”

“Help me? You can’t even help yourself.” There was a mighty rustle, as of feathers bracing for flight, and the wind picked up. It rushed past Edwin’s ears, his candle flame lurched dangerously. “You can’t even break your own spell. Honestly, are you even trying?”

Edwin ground his teeth and leaned further, insistent. “You mustn’t run away from this. Not this.”

“It’s too late.”

“It is never too late!” Edwin cried. The wick guttered and died, and he tossed the holder aside in frustration, extending his hand into the blackened void instead. Somehow he could still see it, the outline of it at least. It flickered back and forth, hypnotic, like a child’s thaumatrope. From smooth to wrinkled, from extended to arthritically curled. Old to young to seeking to shrinking, around and around. “Do you understand me, it is never too late!”

The very cavern seemed to tremble with the force of the wind, the downdraft of mighty wings. Without the candlelight there were no eyes, no reflection, not the faintest hint of feathers or fur but Edwin reached anyway, desperate to find something.

“I care too much for you to stand idly by and see you destroy yourself!” He leaned further, further, a skitter of small bones tumbling from the precipice as his bare toes crept over the edge, disappearing with a hollow, echoing finality into the pit. “Thomas!”

“You’re too late.”

Edwin heard it as if it was spoken right beside his ear, as if from a chin tucked into his shoulder. It was different, this time. No echo, no monstrous distortion. Just Thomas, his voice, but without a touch of humour, of hope, of that bright spark that Edwin loved and loathed in equal measure. He heard it as he felt, impossibly, the phantom squeeze of a soft, perfumed palm against his own reaching, grasping hand.

And then the wind swirled, the wings beat, and in a maelstrom of broken bone, the cavern was empty; echoing with Edwin’s last desperate scream.

“THOMAS!”

Edwin awoke with a start from strange, jumbled dreams that clung stickily to him as he tried to shake his head clear. He’d fallen asleep in his chair and he sat there for a moment, back aching, trying fruitlessly to chase down the sense of the dreams, and then, when he finally accepted that it had gone, he groaned and began the unpleasant process of levering himself upright.

It was a glorious morning. The sun streamed lavishly in through the windows, kissing the oiled surface of the table and the well-scrubbed flagstones. Inexplicably, Edwin found himself looking for footprints on the floor, but there were none.

There was too much to do to go looking for phantom footprints. Edwin hefted a log out of the basket and tossed it to Charles, who had burned down to nothing but a heap of softly glowing embers, then, while he waited for Charles to wake up, he went and dressed himself in the soft trousers and one of the fine new shirts Thomas had given him, and then busied himself with the morning’s tasks. Far better to keep moving and keep his mind off it than to allow the anxiety to choke him. He set the table for breakfast, and filled the kettle with water, and retrieved a small pile of letters from the doorstep, putting anything with a royal seal on it aside to be fed to Charles posthaste. It was, in other words, a perfectly ordinary morning – apart from one thing.

As he was retrieving eggs from the basket on the table, there came a crackling yawn from behind him.

“Mornin’,” said Charles. Edwin glanced back over his shoulder to see the flames stretch up towards the ceiling, and when they died back down again, Charles was a boy, curled up in the hearth.

“Charles,” said Edwin, abandoning all semblance of pleasantries. “Did Thomas make it back last night?”

“Oh, yeah,” said Charles, around another yawn. “Came sneaking in through the back window like a teenager in the middle of the night, wouldn’t tell me where he’d been hiding out.”

Edwin hummed his disapproval to mask the really very sincere and embarrassing relief he felt. “Have you seen him yet this morning? I’ve half a mind to march up there and drag him out of bed myself.”

“We’ll see ‘im when we see ‘im. Why are you so keen all of a sudden? Two days ago you told him to get out from under your feet or you’d break his legs and make sure he couldn’t leave his room until you’d finished the dusting.”

“Not my finest hour,” Edwin conceded. “But is he—alright?” He didn’t know why he was so worried. He wasn’t worried. Merely… curious, and unable to shake the peculiar feeling that something was wrong.

Charles sat up and shrugged his narrow shoulders, one leg hanging over the raised edge of the hearth. “Probably. No reason to think he wouldn’t be. He’s tougher than he lets on – and Madame Night’s wizards ain’t a patch on ‘im.”

It was as sincere a compliment as Charles had ever spoken of the man, the sort of thing he'd surely rather die than say where Thomas might hear. That alone was ample evidence to the truth of it. “Yes,” said Edwin. “I’m sure you’re right.” Lost in thought, he picked up the loaf of bread, still wrapped in waxed cloth, and the knife.

Footsteps sounded on the staircase and Edwin looked up sharply, but it wasn’t Thomas – instead, Niko shuffled down the stairs, still yawning, her long sleeves pulled down over her hands. Edwin wished her a good morning and returned his attention to the matter of breakfast, taking the long-handled frying pan down from its hook on the wall and unwrapping the bacon. He set the bacon in the pan and left Niko to watch it while he went about the dangerous business of rousing the Witch of the Wastes from her dozing in Edwin's nook, which she'd rudely claimed for herself the night before – and which Edwin, being a begrudging gentleman, had been too polite and exhausted to contest. By the time he’d settled her grumbling in a chair nice and close to the hearth with a quilt around her shoulders, the kitchen was filled with a marvellous sizzle and the smell of breakfast.

Niko had just finished her second plate of bacon and eggs when Thomas sauntered downstairs, as handsome and as hale as ever. He wore a flowing, open-necked shirt, his dark hair swept artfully off his face, the jewels on his fingers and in his ears and at his neck flashing almost as bright as his luminous yellow eyes in the sunshine. “Good morning, friends, enemies, colleagues and… witches,” he said, to the room at large. He seemed to be in good humour, at least. Though when he skirted too close to the chair where Esther was now ensconced, she reached for the pendant he wore around his neck with a claw-like hand, and he looked alarmed and gave her a rather wider berth.

“I see you’ve decided to grace us with your presence,” said Edwin. “What happened last night? I’m glad you were able to get away.”

Thomas winked. “All in a day’s work, darling.”

“Don’t call me darling.” Edwin covered the overwhelming relief that had welled up in him at the sight of Thomas with a pointed look up at the owl-faced clock on the wall. “And before lunch, too. Although you’ve missed breakfast, I’m afraid. To what do we owe the pleasure?”

“It is a pleasure, isn’t it?” said Thomas, with a wink in Edwin’s direction. “And since you ask, sweetheart—” (“Don’t call me sweetheart,” said Edwin, half-heartedly) “—we’re moving.”

“Moving?” said Edwin.

“Oh no, why?” said Niko.

“Bloody—never mind why, what about how?” said Charles. He’d become a face in the flames again with only minimal bullying from Edwin when it was time to cook, but now he shrank down until he was barely visible in the merrily burning logs. “Tom, I don’t know what harebrained nonsense you’re cooking up…”

“Oh, loosen up, it’ll be fine. I’m almost certain.” Thomas took a piece of chalk from the little box where Edwin had been gathering all the broken sticks of it he kept finding strewn about the place. It was an occupational hazard of living with wizards, he’d learnt. “It’s for the greater good, my little chickadees. Mine, specifically, but all of yours by extension.” He smiled up at Edwin. Bejewelled and bathed in light, he was so bright it was hard to look directly at him. Once again, knowing that he was being charmed, and worse, knowing that it was working, made Edwin want to kick him. “Things are getting a little hot for me here. We’ll keep the door in Porthaven, for now, and the outside of the castle is still roaming around the Wastes—”

“Yeah,” said Charles, “no thanks to you—”

“But the Kingsbury door is compromised, and the inside of the castle is vulnerable. I’m putting the Wizard Pendragon out to pasture and taking us someplace safer.”

“I dunno, mate.” Charles wrapped two skinny tongues of flame tightly around the log Edwin had tossed into the hearth. “That’s a pretty big spell. It’ll need a lot of welly.”

Thomas looked at Edwin, and flashed him a conspiratorial smile. Edwin had the distinct feeling that he was somehow in on a joke he didn’t actually understand. “Where’s your spark?” said Thomas. “Between all of us, I figure we can handle it.”

While Edwin cleared away the breakfast things and the Witch watched on with interest (and uncharacteristic quiet, but perhaps the magic extraction had been more of a shock than she let on) from her chair by the fire, Thomas and Niko began to work their way around the castle, making strange chalk and charcoal markings in the corners of each room and calling measurements to one another.

“My nice clean walls,” said Edwin, dismayed. “Thomas, I only whitewashed those two weeks ago!”

Thomas sparkled at him. “Oh, don’t worry, my little cottontail—” (“Absolutely not,” said Edwin, repressively) “—you’ll have them back soon enough.”

“I shall hold you to that,” said Edwin, who was already daydreaming about handing Thomas a bucket of whitewash and a brush and telling him to get to it.

Finally, when the walls were crawling with marks like so many strange insects, Thomas clapped his hands together. “Lift off,” he said, inexplicably. “Charles, are you ready?”

The two thin arms of flame wrapped themselves tighter around the log. “Are you sure this is gonna work?”

“Positive. Almost. Come on, it’s not like you to be so… faint of heart.”

“Yeah, and whose bloody fault is that?”

“Drama queen,” muttered Thomas, which Edwin felt was a truly dazzling case of the pot calling the kettle black. Edwin was still contemplating this when Thomas leant in towards him, raising one finger to his own cheek. “Kiss for luck?” he said.

Absent-mindedly, Edwin touched his mouth to Thomas’ cheekbone.

“Thank you, darling,” said Thomas, and breezed away again.

“Thank you? I—” it was at that moment that what he’d just done hit him like a pie to the face. He brought his fingers up his own mouth in disbelief. What on earth?

Thomas didn’t appear to have noticed. He fetched the frying pan from where Edwin had left it out to dry by the sink and approached the hearth. “Your ride’s here,” he said.

Charles made an unhappy noise and wrapped himself so tightly around what was left of the log that it began to burn blue here and there, crumbling under the pressure. “Mate, I don’t like this.”

“I know, I know, life’s a bitch. Come on, your carriage awaits.” He feinted menacingly with the pan in Charles’ direction.

“Alright, alright! Just… be careful, yeah?”

“I’ve been told I have very gentle hands. You’ll hardly feel a thing, I promise.” With that, Thomas stuck the pan into the fireplace and scooped out the log that Charles was still holding onto for dear life.

“Careful, careful!” yelped Charles, as Thomas lifted the pan and Charles with it. “Gentle hands my arse, I—watch it, you twat, you nearly dropped me!”

“Well, you’re not exactly making this easy,” Thomas said, through gritted teeth. He stepped into the chalk circle he’d drawn on the floor earlier, taking care not to smudge it. The outer edge of the circle was decorated with strange, pointy little runes, like spikes on the back of some strange, sleeping beast. “Okay. Show me what you’ve got.”

“Oh, alright, then,” said Charles. “Cover your eyes, then, everyone.”

Edwin threw his hands up over his face just in time, and even that didn’t quite stop the furious light bleeding in around the edges of his vision. There was a strong smell of burning, and Edwin’s eardrums flexed and popped as he felt the curious sensation of the world being rapidly rearranged around him. When the light began to subside, he risked opening his eyes. The sight that greeted him made him feel faintly seasick: the walls warped and bulged, straining at the corners, and doors and windows crawled sideways to make room for new ones. There was a sudden rattling – he looked around and, with a startled cry, leapt out of the way just in time to avoid being run down by the Welsh dresser where they kept the plates. It appeared to be trying to get out of the way of a brand new staircase. Thomas stood in the centre of the chaos with an unusual look of fierce concentration on his face, his hair and his clothes rippling strangely, as if tossed about by a strong wind that only he could feel. In the frying pan, Charles had blazed up so high that his flames almost reached the ceiling, shot through with prismatic colours. He was laughing. Edwin was so caught up in watching both of them that he jumped when he felt something bump into him, and shuffled hurriedly out of the way of the umbrella stand Niko had put by the door after the second time Edwin got drenched fetching things for dinner from the market in Porthaven.

Soon, the clanking and the rattling began to go quiet, and the furniture stopped moving, and the doors and windows settled comfortably into brand new stretches of wall as if they’d been there all along.

“Wow,” said Niko. Her hands were clasped together under her chin and her eyes were shining.

“Pedestrian,” said the Witch. Edwin didn’t know when she’d found the time to light her pipe, but she was puffing on it now, blowing blue rings of smoke that glowed in the morning sunshine.

Charles shrank back down until Edwin could have held him in two cupped hands. He blinked up at Thomas. “Nice one, mate,” he said.

Thomas inclined his head. “Likewise, old friend.”

The sight of them being nice to each other was, somehow, quite the strangest thing Edwin had seen so far that day.

Thomas took Charles back over to the hearth and carefully tipped him out again. “Here,” he said, taking a new log from the basket and presenting it to Charles along with a coveted pinecone – Charles’ favourite, because they were crunchy and they burned beautifully. “Didn’t I tell you it’d be fine, you big baby?”

Charles yawned, and bit the top off the pinecone. “Oh yeah?” he said. “Let’s see you do it on your own next time if it’s so easy. You’re s’posed to be a wizard, are your bloody arms painted on?”

Ah, thought Edwin. Normal service had obviously been resumed. Well, it had been nice while it lasted.

Thomas put down the frying pan and looked up at Edwin and Niko. “Come on,” he said. He fired a smile at Edwin like an arrow – the point aimed squarely at Edwin’s heart. “Let me show you around.”

Edwin trailed, dazed, after Thomas, as he walked through the castle opening doors to brand new rooms. Niko’s bedroom was twice the size, new walls lined with empty bookshelves, and had sprouted its own little pink-tiled bathroom with a heart-shaped porcelain bathtub that made Niko clap her hands with delight and throw her arms around Thomas’ neck. Unless Edwin was mistaken, the corridors felt wider, the windows bigger, the whole place clean and airy and welcoming. It was the most profoundly disorienting thing Edwin had ever experienced.

“I want to show you something,” said Thomas. He grabbed Edwin by the hand and towed him back downstairs. He was grinning, so beautiful it was difficult to look at him. He tipped Edwin a wink, and Edwin couldn’t even roll his eyes. “Saved the best for last.”

He led Edwin across the kitchen – the sun was still pouring in through the windows and filling the room with gold. The ceiling felt higher, Edwin thought. The bones of it were still visible, if you knew where to look, but it was a far cry from the dingy room Edwin had first stumbled into what felt like a lifetime ago. Where the curtain that hid Edwin’s rollaway bed had hung before there was a door, solid wood that looked as if it had been there for years and a shining brass handle.

Thomas gave him a courtly bow that positively groaned under the weight of a dozen twirly little flourishes. “After you,” he said.

Edwin opened the door, not sure what to expect. Something enormous, something flashy and over-the-top like Thomas. Perhaps it would have—palm trees, or mirrors on every wall, or a huge four-poster bed with extravagant silk drapes, piled high with furs.

But it didn’t. There was a bed – not a four-poster, just a bed, with a soft, sensible quilt, and a little nightstand and a rug to keep his feet off the cold floor in the mornings. There was a bookshelf, and a sewing table, and a handsome wardrobe in the corner. There was a bunch of flowers in a vase on the dresser, which, for some reason, made Edwin’s throat feel tight.

“Well?” said Thomas, quietly. “Do you like it?”

“It’s—perfect,” said Edwin. He sounded strange and choked. “Thank you, Thomas. Very… considerate of you.”

“You hate it,” said Thomas. He clapped his hand over his eyes. “Oh, I should have known, I should have gone for the marble floor and the velvet curtains after all and this furniture is all wrong, it should have been gold—”

“You are absurd,” Edwin informed him, starting to laugh as he tugged Thomas’ hand away from his face. Thomas’ smile—never gone for long—reappeared like the sun from behind the clouds. “I would have loathed that, as well you know.” He hesitated. “Thomas, I wanted—”

Something hunted and caught passed across Thomas’ face, but it was gone so fast Edwin wasn’t sure he hadn’t imagined it. “Oh,” said Thomas, loudly. “I haven’t shown you the courtyard yet, what was I thinking? Come on, you have to see this!”

He took Edwin’s hand again, and pulled him away; walls of charm and chatter higher than the castle’s own rusted battlements.

Edwin wasn't sure how he pulled it off, but between his touring and boasting and waving new amenities under Edwin's nose like distracting cat toys, Thomas managed to give him the slip. Vexing man.

“He’ll be back,” said Niko cheerfully, cross-legged on the floor, not looking up from her latest spellbook. Edwin hoped they might see out at least a week with this shiny new floor before anyone burned a hole in it, but he wasn’t going to hold his breath.

“Hmph,” was his response. But he could hardly sit around waiting all day with his nose in the air – he’d get dreadfully bored, not to mention stiff-necked. So instead he occupied himself looking at the one new addition Thomas had neglected to expound upon: the front door. Or rather, the dial beside it – where instead of the Kingsbury red quarter, there now was a panel painted sunny, buttercup yellow. Edwin clicked the dial across to the new colour, and opened the door onto the street.

It was a sunny day outside, wherever it was, bright and dazzling. He had to adjust his eyes to the glare of it before the details began to coalesce themselves. Cobbled streets, striped canvas overhangs. Here and there, a stretch of bunting no one had bothered to take down. Edwin knew this place. Why, this street was but a hop, skip and a jump from the centre of town, the grand square, the winding housing districts, the Tongue & Tail.

“Market Chipping,” he breathed, stepping out onto the stoop to look west. If he followed this road for a block or two, he would come up against the empty shell of Payne & Sons Bespoke Tailoring. Would it still be empty? Or would a new business have moved into the husk like a hermit crab? It hit him like a bump on the head that he was not altogether sure just how long he had been gone. He had half a mind to walk that way and find out.

“Market Chipping?!” Niko echoed, excitedly wiggling through the doorway beside him. Her face lit up. “That means we’re close to—!” She caught Edwin’s curious eye, and pressed her palms together. “The… Market Chipping Library. It’s my fourth favourite public building. I’m gonna go out!”

“‘Out’?” he said, eyebrow lifting. “Out where?”

“We need some stuff,” she said, waving a slip of paper past his eyes so quickly he couldn’t say for sure whether there was or wasn’t a shopping list on it. But she dutifully collected a basket nonetheless, slinging her pink spring jacket over her arm and trotting off down the street with a bright wave backwards. “Back soon, promise, okay bye!”

Edwin waved after her, bemused. “Well. Someone’s pleased.” He steepled his fingers. “Market Chipping. Of all places…”

If he didn’t know better, he might accuse Thomas of being sentimental, choosing the town where they, technically, first met.

Of course, that would require Thomas to know who he was.

“You gonna go explore a bit too, then?” called Charles from the hearth – sounding to Edwin's ear a little wistful.

Edwin bit his lip. It was tempting. To find out the fate of the shop, to see his old haunts with his new, old eyes. To go to the butcher shop, see Crystal, tell her he was sorry for disappearing but he’d had to find some way to break his curse and…

He pressed his weathered fists together, knuckle to densely-lined knuckle.

“Perhaps later,” he said, stepping back into the safety of the castle.

Naturally, Thomas stayed out until the small hours. Probably in the hopes Edwin would give up and slope off to bed, allowing him the opportunity to slink in unmolested.

Fat chance. Damn that wretched wizard and his slippery ways – Edwin was going to get a proper conversation out of him if it was the last thing he did.

Still, it was very late when he finally reappeared. Even Charles, usually fairly grateful for the company even at antisocial times, was barely keeping his eyes open. He was sitting, ‘fully-formed’ so to speak, towards the front of the hearth; legs crossed, elbows on knees, heavy head propped on his hands. His eyelids fluttered and flickered. He was no longer responding verbally to the story Edwin was reading him to pass the time, although he made all the appropriate facial gestures so he couldn’t have been too far gone.

“‘Silence fell upon the drawing room, so absolute as one could hear the drop of a pin,’” Edwin read, licking his thumb and turning the page. “And the lady of the manor said, in a sombre tone—’”

Neither of them found out what the lady of the manor said, as that was when the front door flew open so fast it near bounced off its hinges.

“Go Grey Wake Whalers! Go Grey Wake Whalers!” Thomas hooted, with baboonish zeal. He caught sight of Edwin and giggled, pressing a finger to his lips. “Oops! Charles,” he stage-whispered. “Edwin’s here! We gotta be quiet! Go Grey Wake Whaleeeeers…”

Edwin had seen Thomas sporting some unusual outfits to say the least, but this was a strange one even by his standards. From the waist down, his usual sort of fare – breeches, tights, slightly heeled shoes with frippery little bows. From the waist up, not a stitch. Just jewellery and a considerable amount of blue and red body paint of some description, finger-painted across his chest and shoulders and in streaks across his cheeks. Edwin wondered who’d had the dubious honour of bedecking him in those colours, and then sternly steered all thoughts away from fingers tracing Thomas’ form to focus on the matter at hand.

“Look what the cat dragged in,” Edwin sniffed, marking his place in the book with one of Niko’s hair ribbons, donated for such a purpose. “And what have you been doing that has you barging in and making a racket at four in the morning?”

“Pretty obvious, innit,” Charles snorted. “Better not come over here, mate. Reckon you’re a bit flammable.”

“Just ‘cause you two don’t know how to have fun,” said Thomas, petulantly slamming the door and stumbling over towards the gramophone. “Ugh, it’s too quiet in here!”

“Quite common for four in the morning,” said Edwin, disapprovingly. “Niko is upstairs trying to get some actual sleep, I’ll have you know. Like a respectable young wizard who wakes with the sun still under the yardarm.”

Thomas puts his finger to his lips again. “Okay, okaaaaay. I’ll keep the volume down.”

“Where’ve you been off getting paggered, then?” asked Charles, now wide awake and with his legs dangling out over the edge of the hearth, a big, glowing grin on his face. He didn’t care for Thomas’ flights of fancy any more than Edwin did, but it did so cheer him up to watch the great wizard make a fool of himself.

“Juuuust a lil’ reunion.” Thomas made a noise of triumph when he managed to clumsily wrangle a record into playing – though at Edwin’s disapproving glare he lowered the volume of the upbeat jazz tune to a gentle, crackling murmur. “With a few people who thought little ol’ Tom wouldn’t amount to anything. Sure showed them, huh?”

“Debatable,” said Edwin, watching with some horror as Thomas advanced on him with beckoning gestures and a concerning amount of hip-swaying. “Oh, absolutely not—!”

Thomas took him by the waist and swept him out of his chair before he could stage further protest. “C’moooon, dance with me, handsome!” he grinned, utterly shameless. “Seen the way you move. God, you are just so… oddly graceful. Ever take ballet?”

Edwin’s hackles rose, as was standard whenever Thomas paid him a compliment. He rarely did so without ulterior motives, after all. But a look in Thomas’ eyes showed them to be hazy, hooded, pupils dilated and pleasantly addled, and he had to concede that perhaps, on this occasion, Thomas actually wasn’t in the right mind for conniving.

Grudgingly accepting his fate—and the fact that his heart was racing in double-time to the song—Edwin steadied his hands on Thomas’ chest, wincing at the paint that rubbed off on them. “I simply have good posture. Something both of you could stand to improve.”

“Be easier if I had a spine, mate,” Charles chuckled as he leaned back on his hands to watch.

Edwin’s brow twitched. “Well, well. Something you two have in common.”

“Me-ow!” Thomas laughed, feet knocking into Edwin’s as they drunkenly swayed. “Still mad about that tiiiiiiny little favour?”

“I’d hardly describe a royal visitation and a close encounter with a stint in the dungeons as—Thomas, Thomas don’t you dare!”

But it was too late, and Edwin squawked in indignation as Thomas slid his heel back, lunged forward and dipped him, his arm a warm, steady band around Edwin’s waist.

Thomas grinned down at him, hair a mess, cheeks flushed beneath the smudged paint. He was breathing in short, shallow pants as he tipped Edwin a lazy wink. “Not bad for an inver-inverbrat-inverti—”

“Invertebrate?” Edwin supplied – a touch more out of breath than he’d like.

Thomas laughed, hauling Edwin to his feet and inexpertly twirling him. “Half a bottle back I would’ve—hic!—totally nailed it.”

“Pack it in, you daft sod,” Charles chimed in from the hearth, crackling with amusement. “You’re slobberin’ all over ‘im.”

“Not hearing any complaints,” said Thomas, attempting to use Edwin’s arm to twirl himself next. An ill-fated attempt which pried their hands apart and sent Thomas toppling to the floor before the fireplace, between Charles’ dangling feet, doubled up in laughter.

Charles leaned forward, head poking over the edge of the hearth to look at Thomas upside down, grin glinting. “Wanker,” he said, with fizzling affection.

Thomas giggled as he slowly righted himself, rolling onto his knees, bracing a hand on the fire-warmed brick to steady himself. He looked up at Charles from between his spread knees. From his vantage point Edwin could only see the back of his head, messy as if fingers had dragged through it, level with Charles’ hips; but he didn’t need to see Thomas’ face to recognise the spark of mischief in his voice.

“Wow. Blast from the past,” he drawled. “Remember the last time we found ourselves in this position, old friend?”

“Yeah. You were rat-arsed then, too,” said Charles, crossing his flickering arms.

“Pfft. You were drunk,” Thomas countered, sulkily.

“Yeah! I was! We both were!” Charles flicked a self-conscious glance at Edwin, and a flickering shrug. “Few drops of whiskey in the fire. Got a bit tipsy, didn’t I?”

Thomas’ hand lifted, cupping Charles’ knee, and for a moment it was as if it was there. As if the fire that formed him had body, had weight and flesh under Thomas’ hand, lighting his palm in gold with not a burn in sight. “You didn’t seem to mind,” he purred.

All of the sudden Edwin felt like he was intruding on… something. He felt it, and yet for the life of him he could not tear his eyes away.

Thomas’ head rolled lazily on his neck, just enough to regard Edwin over his shoulder with one sultry golden eye. “Maybe next time we’ll save you a seat, handsome,” he said.

“Tom,” Charles barked – glowing tickled pink from head to chest.

“What?” Thomas shrugged insouciantly. “No harm in offering.”

Charles, in his mortification, began melting back into his half-shape, until he was but a sheepish, smouldering glow in the grate. Edwin’s face felt like it was burning twice as hot.

“Right. Enough terrorising Charles for tonight, I think,” he said, briskly attempting to reassert some sanity. “Off to bed with you. And mark my words, we will be having a conversation tomorrow, once you’ve scraped yourself off the floor.”

“Mmm, floor, good idea,” Thomas sighed, rolling onto his side to curl up like a paint-streaked, drunken cat before the fire.

“Thomas, you cannot possibly sleep—oh, for goodness’ sake.” Edwin sighed and, once again, removed his cardigan. Why Thomas had such a propensity for needing to be carted around while covered in unsavoury substances, he would never understand. “Right. Come on. Up you get.”

If Edwin never had to haul Thomas’ half-conscious body up the stairs again, it would be too soon. He was far too old for this nonsense. Although he must have been getting used to his limits now, learning how to compensate; even without Niko’s aid, this time was easier than the Slime Debacle. He deposited his armful of drunken Thomas—who, horror of horrors, had begun to sing in his ear—on his ridiculous bed, and graciously furnished him with a large glass of water and a bucket beside the bed.

“Right. That’s you sorted out. Do try not to choke on your own vomit,” Edwin bid him, pleasantly.

Thomas’ hand, warm and sweat-dampened, clutched at Edwin’s wrist, bracelets and bangles merrily tinkling on his own. “Edwin, wait.”

Edwin raised an eyebrow at Thomas. At his face pink and smushed half into the pillows, his eyes fogged and blinking with feline lethargy up at Edwin.

“You wanna…” Thomas frowned, and shook his head. “Nothing. G’night.”

Edwin frowned, slipping his wrist from Thomas’ hold. His fingers momentarily caught Thomas’, and squeezed. “Goodnight, Thomas.”

He slipped away, closing the heavy oak door on Thomas’ big, beseeching eyes. Thinking again, for just a second, about claw slashes in the wood, the feeling of something horribly amiss. The strange sense of catching glimpses of alternate realities, just a half-step out from his own; a breathing castle, black tar footprints, a maw choked with bones. Thomas, monstrous, telling him to go.

Thomas, unguarded, asking him to stay.