His eyes snapped back into focus, wide with alarm, just as what seemed like pounds of soot cascaded into the hearth with a soft thump. A black cloud billowed up into the room. Ben leapt back, a picture of disaster forming in his mind—the entire pub coated in soot, the hours of cleaning, Mrs. Linney’s fury—but before he could speak, there was a sudden sense of suction, pulling at his skin and hair for a second as air rushed by him, and the dusty cloud curled back on itself.
Ben stared, astonished, as the soot shrank in little eddies under the pressure of an invisible wind, heaping up as a black mound in the fireplace. Jonah’s eyes were wide, face still with concentration. His mouth moved without sound, hands making a gentle sweeping gesture, pushing the dust back.
Ben twisted frantically around, convinced that Mrs. Linney would be just over his shoulder. She wasn’t, thank God. He grabbed for a chair and sat heavily.
Jonah was still a moment longer, until the soot was all piled in the hearth and the air almost dustless, then turned to him. “Are you all right?”
“No.” Ben ducked his head against the sudden dizziness. “You’re a magician. Christ almighty. You can do magic.”
“Um…yes? You knew that. We walked on air, remember?”
“But…” Ben groped for words. “I didn’t know you could do this.”
“I can do lots of things.” Jonah looked puzzled. “I can move things around and apply force to things and so on. It’s quite convenient.”
“Dustsheets are convenient,” Ben said. “You put them around the chimney and they trap the soot. That’s convenience. This is magic, and you use it to do household tasks?” He had a sudden flash of memory, a small domestic disaster averted by what had at the time seemed a startling feat, Jonah holding a collapsing shelf up by a finger. “Is that how you held that shelf up, when it came off the wall?”
“Well, yes. All the china would have smashed, so I—what? What’s wrong with that?”
“You were using magic at home,” Ben said. “Around me. And I never saw you do it, and I never knew. How?”
“Because you didn’t expect it?” There was a wary look in Jonah’s eyes, the expression of a child who knew he was in trouble and wasn’t sure why.
“Because you hid something you did every day, in our home. You were lying to me with every breath you took.”
“But I had to.” Jonah sounded slightly panicky. “How could I have told you that?”
“How could you not? How could you— In our home, Jonah.” Ben groped for words, unable to convey the depths of the shock. He had come to terms with Jonah’s hidden life, but as a thing that had been outside them, quite separate to their charmed existence together. The idea that Jonah had been quietly, secretively using his powers all the time, with Ben blithely unaware, made him feel sick and disoriented.
An awful thought dawned. “Did you—did you ever do that thing, with your voice, to make me believe you?”
“Fluence? No! God, no, I swear to you. Never. I only tried once, in the carriage. I wouldn’t.”
“What else haven’t you told me? What else can you do?”
“I don’t know!” Jonah yelped. “I don’t understand why this is any different to me windwalking—”
“Sssh!” Ben hissed. Footsteps sounded in the passage, past the door, moved away again. They stared at each other, locked in mutual incomprehension.
“Fine,” Ben said at last. “If that’s all you have to say about treating me like a fool for months—”
“Ben—”
“—then we’d better start work. You do understand you can’t let anyone see you do things like that?”
“I am aware of it, yes,” Jonah said, voice tight.
Ben grabbed his wrist. “I mean it. People talk in places like this. For all I know they’d burn you at the stake.” He paused, horrified not so much by his own words as by Jonah’s shrug of agreement: Obviously. Ben made himself go on. “But also, if they talk about a magician with a white streak in his hair, suppose word reaches London? The justiciary?”
“Yes, but nobody’s seen me, have they? For heaven’s sake, I am used to this. Oh, listen—” Jonah reached for him. Ben jerked his hand away, a flinch of pure instinct, because he hadn’t forgotten Jonah’s hissing words to the policemen on the bridge. Listen to me…
Jonah’s mouth opened in raw shock. “I was not going to fluence you,” he said, low and outraged. “I never have. Don’t start treating me like a monster. I’ve had that all my life. I don’t want it from you too.”
Ben felt a stab of shame. That wasn’t fair. It was surely Jonah in the wrong here. “So stop doing things like—” He gestured at the hearth.
“I can’t.” Jonah spoke through his teeth. “I am what I am. I can’t be anything else. I can’t be like everyone else, because I’m not.”
“Well, I am,” Ben said. “I’m ordinary, and you’re—” Extraordinary. Astonishing. Able to walk on the wind and shape men’s thoughts and control the air around him, and he had hidden all that power and strength away to live in the cottage with Ben.
Hidden it, or Ben had been, again, wilfully blind to the glaring truth.
That wasn’t something he could think of now. He held on to his anger, rather than face Jonah’s frustrated misery, or his own complicity.