Spellbreaker

She should have lied after all, but he’d been so serious, so dour, she’d suspected he would somehow know. Would the Cowls be angry when they saw the heat spell intact? Was Mr. Kelsey lying about the security measure? Elsie felt like she was drowning in a pool and desperately trying to find purchase on slick porcelain walls.

It’s just for a little while. She’d balance it somehow. The Cowls might not ask for another favor for months, for all she knew. Ogden was often busy and was lenient with her schedule—she’d earned it, after so many years of good service. Kent wasn’t far. She could manage it for a week or two. Surely that would be enough work to repay her perceived debt, and Mr. Kelsey would let her go.

He couldn’t be too terrible if he’d given her the option to flee.

A bell rang in the kitchen, startling both Elsie and Emmeline. Ogden didn’t often use the bellpull, only when he was very busy or needed to make a good impression on a visitor in his sitting room. Elsie and Emmeline exchanged a glance before Elsie said, “I’ll take it.”

Emmeline nodded her thanks. Picking up her maroon skirt, Elsie hurried up the stairs to the sitting room. The door was cracked open, and they had no visitors, so she didn’t bother knocking.

“Mr. Ogden?” she asked, but she needn’t have. Ogden sat on a stool by the unlit fireplace, a fine-tipped brush in his hand. He’d worked Latin letters down his arm in blue ink.

He was learning a new spell.

“My drops, Elsie, if you would,” he said over his shoulder.

Elsie hurried from the sitting room to Ogden’s room. It was simply furnished and smelled very much like man—shaving cream, plaster, spice. It was just as well that Elsie had answered the bell. Emmeline didn’t know where Ogden kept his drops. She’d been employed at the stonemasonry shop for almost two years, but information so valuable could be entrusted only to so many.

Crouching, Elsie felt under Ogden’s side table for a small key hidden there, then took it to the squat cupboard near the locked window. It fit into a small door on the side, and Elsie withdrew a small leather bag from within, the drops clanking against one another. She worked the bag open as she returned to the sitting room.

Inside were seven drops, each worth more than its weight in gold. Although roughly the size of shillings, they were imperfectly round—a strange, beautiful amalgamation of quartz, rose water, and gold. They were translucent, rounded but not smooth, and glinted in the sunlight. Drops were the currency the universe—or perhaps God—required for spells. They didn’t require magic to create, an aspector could make his own, but the measurements were so precise and the process so expensive it was simpler just to exchange coin for them at the nearest atheneum. A lot of coin. The more advanced the spell, the higher the price. Drops were one of many reasons an impoverished person could rarely raise his fortune through magic.

Of course, it cost no money to break a spell, only to learn one.

“I need seven,” Ogden said when Elsie slipped into the room.

“Just enough.” Elsie turned the drops into her hand and stood behind Ogden, waiting for him to finish his work. The words of the spell, always in Latin, needed to be written precisely down his arm, and Elsie didn’t wish to disturb him. If the spell took—if Ogden’s innate talent was enough—the words would absorb into his skin, making the spell a part of him. A page in his future opus. The drops would vanish as well. Some said they became part of the body, generating power for magic. Others claimed they reabsorbed into the universe, or plunked into God’s own coffers. Wherever they went, they could not be used a second time. Drops were one of magic’s most compelling mysteries, perhaps rivaled only by the spells themselves. Who had penned the first spell was as shrouded in enigma as who had penned the last. None of the authors were known, and spells across all four disciplines were set. Many had studied the language and style of spellmaking enchantments in an effort to expound upon them, or create one anew, and not one had ever been successful. The magic was as set in stone as the Commandments themselves.

Ogden’s handwriting was in blue ink, for physical aspecting. Red was used for rational, yellow for spiritual, and green for temporal. Why, she didn’t know. That was just the way God had made it.

She settled down on the nearby settee, the drops warming in her hands. Her eyes fell to a folded newspaper beside her—Ogden’s morning read. She opened the thin paper, her eyes instantly falling to the main headline.

Viscount Aspector Struck by Lightning on Clear Day.

Its subheading read:

Opus Not Recovered.