Clare ducked her gaze, shy, but knew she was right. “You can’t use sex without acting on him, and that won’t work. So don’t act on him. Act on everything around him. A dozen tiny decisions a day can make a man fall.”
Gerald was their leader because he could see the future. Well, almost. He could see paths, likely directions of events that fell one way instead of another. He used this knowledge and the talents of those he recruited to steer the course of history. Major liked the chess metaphor, but Gerald worked on the canvas of epic battles, of history itself. He scowled at Clare like she was speaking nonsense.
“Tiny decisions. Like whether he wears a red or blue tie? Like whether he forgets to brush his teeth? You mean to change the world by this?”
Major, who knew her so well, who knew her thoughts before she did, smiled his hunting smile. “How is the man’s heart?”
“Yes. Exactly,” she said.
“It’ll take time,” Major explained to a still frowning Gerald. “The actions will have to be lined up just so.”
“All right,” he said, because Major had proven himself. His voice held a weight that Clare’s didn’t. “But I want contingencies.”
“Let the others make contingencies,” Major said, and that made them all scowl.
Gerald left Clare and Major to work together, which was how she liked it best.
She’d never worked so hard on a plan. She searched for opportunities, studied all the ways they might encourage the target to harm himself. She found many ways, as it happened. The task left Clare drained, but happy, because it was working. Gerald would see. He’d be pleased. He’d start to listen to her, and she wouldn’t need Major to speak for her.
“I don’t mind speaking for you,” Major said when she confided in him. “It’s habit that makes him look right through you like he does. It’s hard to get around that. He has to be the leader, the protector. He needs someone to be the weakest, and so doesn’t see you. And the others only see what he sees.”
“Why don’t you?”
He shrugged. “I like to see things differently.”
“Maybe there’s a spell we could work to change him.”
He smiled at that. The spells didn’t work on them, because they were outside the whole system. Their spells put them outside. Gerald said they could change the world by living outside it like this. Clare kept thinking of it as gambling, and she never had liked games.
They worked: the target chose the greasiest, unhealthiest meals, always ate dessert, and took a coach everywhere—there always seemed to be one conveniently at hand. Some days, he forgot his medication, the little pills that kept his heart steady—the bottle was not in its place and he couldn’t be bothered to look for it. Nothing to notice from day to day. But one night, in bed with his wife—no lurid affair necessary—their RLP candidate’s weak heart gave out. A physician was summoned quickly enough, but to no avail. And that, Clare observed, was how one brought down a man with sex.
Gerald called it true. The man’s death threw the election into chaos, and his beloved Populist Tradition Party was able to hold its seats in the Council.
Clare glowed with pride because her theory had worked. A dozen little changes, so indirect as to be unnoticeable. The perfect expression of their abilities.
But Gerald scowled. “It’s not very impressive, in the main,” he said and walked away.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Clare whispered.
“He’s angry he didn’t think of it himself,” Major said.
“So it wasn’t fireworks. I thought that was the point.”
“I think you damaged his sensibilities,” he said, and dropped a kind kiss on her forehead.
She had been a normal, everyday girl, though prone to daydreaming, according to her governess. She was brought up in proper drawing rooms, learning how to embroider, supervise servants, and orchestrate dinner parties. Often, though, she had to be reminded of her duties, of the fact that she would one day marry a fine gentleman, perhaps in the army or in government, and be the envy of society ladies everywhere. Otherwise she might sit in the large wingback armchair all day long, staring at the light coming in through the window, or at sparks in the fireplace, or at the tongue of flame dancing on the wick of the nearest lamp. “What can you possibly be thinking about?” her governess would ask. She’d learned to say, “Nothing.” When she was young, she’d said things like, “I’m wondering, what if fire were alive? What if it traveled, and is all flame part of the same flame? Is a flame like a river, traveling and changing every moment?” This had alarmed the adults around her.