Luckily, the portal at Orlee di Mer was empty when they arrived. Sophie watched as Cameron sucked the finger he cut to trigger the portal back on the island. She took a couple of breaths. Portals, it seemed, no longer made her physically ill, but her stomach still felt a little uncertain after the transit.
“We should keep going,” Cameron said quietly. “This next one will be the hardest. Madame de Montesse said this was south. Lumia is almost halfway up the country.”
Lumia was one of the few places in Illvya that Anglion children were taught the location of. “I know. But if we both power the portal, we can do it.”
Cameron studied her. “You haven’t triggered a portal before, have you?”
“No. But it’s not difficult, is it? I mean, the magic is built into the portal itself, so I don’t have to make it work, just trigger it, yes?”
“No, not difficult. But it feels different when you trigger the portal than when you’re just being transported.”
“Different.”
“Less . . . pleasant.”
“Now you tell me.” She pulled a face. “Well, it’s not like we have any choice.” Honoria’s dagger was plenty sharp, so at least the cutting her finger part wouldn’t be too painful. “I’m ready when you are.”
The transfer to Lumia was, as Cameron had suggested, unpleasant, and Sophie stepped out of the portal dizzy and shaking. She almost collided with two women standing in the portal space before Cameron caught her arm, murmuring apologies in Illvyan. Something about his wife and illness.
The older of the two women looked sympathetic and clucked her tongue at Sophie, who managed a polite bob of acknowledgment but kept her mouth firmly shut. Chloe had said that being Anglion wouldn’t cause trouble, that Anglions weren’t hated here as Illvyans were at home, but she didn’t want to put that to the test just yet.
The younger woman—whose hair was streaked red and black and piled up on her head in loose curls topped by a small red hat that echoed the stripes in her red-and-black cloak—said something to Cameron, something about tea and . . . a store perhaps? For which he thanked them and gestured toward the portal, stepping aside to let them get to their destination.
Sure enough, it was the younger of the two who removed her glove, produced a pin to prick her finger, then offered an arm to the older woman before she touched the portal stone and the two of them blurred and vanished.
“Do you think she was a free witch?” Sophie asked, fascinated. Her stomach had settled, curiosity chasing the last of the queasiness away.
“Perhaps we can worry about that once we get where we’re going,” Cameron said.
“Is this Lumia?”
Cameron pointed to the symbol over the wheel of portal symbols. “If Madame de Montesse told us the truth, then yes.” He pulled Chloe’s paper from his pocket, studied it and then the portal wheel. “That’s the one we want.” He pointed at the maybe-bird, maybe-flame symbol in the middle of the lower-right quadrant of the portal.
“Do you think we should go to where she suggested?” Sophie asked.
“I think her logic was sound,” Cameron said. “And we’ve trusted her this far.”
“Are you going to tell me?”
“We’ll be there soon enough.”
This portal hop was just that, a hop. So brief it didn’t even make her feel ill.
“Don’t talk unless you have to,” Cameron said as they walked toward the door in the portal chamber. “And if you do, try to stick to please and thank you and queria ma hom mari.”
“What does that mean?”
“Ask my husband,” he said with a grin, and opened the door.
It was dark outside, but that didn’t mean the streets were quiet.
Quite the opposite, in fact.
There were people everywhere. Brightly dressed, the clothes more fitted and embellished than in Anglion. A carriage clattered past them, and it took Sophie a moment to register that it wasn’t pulled by horses. Or at least not flesh-and-blood horses. Instead, the creatures looked like horses made out of clockwork or metal.
She clamped her teeth down over the question that sprang to her lips and held on to Cameron’s arm as he led her into the streets.
They walked for nearly a quarter hour, or so she thought. She was so overwhelmed by the odd sights and crowds and sounds and the strange smell of the place—an odd oily scent that hung in the air over all the other city smells—that she wasn’t sure of the time at all.
Eventually, they turned in to a street that seemed to be taken up by one huge building, built from dark stone, set back from the street a little way and guarded by a tall fence of wrought metal. A brass plate on the fence read L’ACADEME DI SAGES. She was beginning to feel exhausted. So exhausted that her Illvyan failed her completely.
“What is this place?” she asked Cameron softly.
“They call it Maison Corbie,” he said. “We’d say the Rookery. Come on. We should get off the street.”
The gate in the fence opened to his hand—wherever they were, the occupants didn’t see a need for locks, apparently—and they walked up the straight path to the front door. A knocker sat squarely in the middle of the door, fashioned in the likeness of a crow’s head. Cameron reached out and used it.
The sound seemed to echo through the night. Sophie moved a little closer to Cameron.
“We’ll be all right,” he said softly as the door swung open.
The creature that stood in the doorway was nearly as tall as Cameron. Man shaped but not human. It wore black pants and a sleeveless black tunic. But the clothing did nothing to change the fact that it wasn’t human. The skin bared by the tunic was mottled gray and black. Threads of something she would have sworn was silver moved over the skin. Its face was the same colors, the eyes deep pools of black in the bald head.