It seemed a pointless question the moment it left his mouth—how did any of this work? Surely the answer was just going to be magic. But Edwin gave an approving nod that reminded Alan of Mr. Voight at the charity school, who would load Alan up with books every week and only wince a little when they came back smudged with ashes or with the pages torn.
“It’s a Holzprobierer. A wood-taster. It’s German-made, so Taverner must have found someone to layer a specific translation-spell over it.” Edwin set it on the desk and the pen wrote WALNUT.
“Here’s your monograph,” said Violet, handing over a small booklet not much larger than Alan’s Roman pamphlets.
“Rowan. Rowan. I don’t think we’ve seen it anywhere in Spinet.” Edwin flipped to the back of the book, and then began to leaf through more slowly.
“Flora Sutton exchanged a lot of letters with the Taverners,” said Violet to Alan. “She specialised in living plants; they specialised in what you could do with the wood. They learned a lot from each other. And Mrs. Sutton organised it and wrote it down.”
“Here,” said Edwin. “Only one entry for rowan wood. A warding against magic. See: all the old tales. Hm. Usually she gives more detail than that.”
“So it’s turned Alan here into a sort of walking ward?” said Violet.
“Beech is a common magical concentrator. This frame is beech.” He touched the wood-taster, then ran the rosary through his fingers. “More magic and less magic. It seems rather pointless to use the two of them together. I’ll have to do some reading.”
A sudden hot sting of sensation struck Alan’s upper arm. He flinched and slapped at it as if a wasp might have snuck into the room.
“Ow,” said Violet mildly. She sucked the tip of her thumb. “It’s not just a ward, if it can turn magic back around on the caster like that.”
“And you keep telling me not to treat people as experimental apparatus,” said Edwin. But he was so obviously itching to give it a go himself that Alan, with a show of long suffering, stretched his arms out palm-forward. Edwin said, “Tell me exactly what it feels like,” and picked up his string. This one was a pale green spell that sent a sensation of icy water flooding over Alan’s body, which came out in immediate goose bumps. He shook himself, feeling unpleasantly like a dog emerging from a winter pond.
“Bloody cold. Is what that feels like.”
“That didn’t rebound on me.” Edwin frowned. “What did you do differently?”
“I’m not doing anything,” said Alan through his teeth. “How is this helping to find hiding places in the house?”
Edwin sighed and looked at Violet. “Let’s try him on something where we know the effect already.”
To Alan’s relief, this involved neither cold nor stinging. They took him to a corridor on the third floor of the house, via a staircase with further elaborate carving adorning its railing. The corridor held three pairs of closed doors along the lengths of its walls and ended in a window.
Violet nodded down the corridor. “What do you see through the window?”
“Sky,” said Alan blankly. “Clouds—wait. Is it…” Something about that window made him queasy, as if it were suspended on a string and swinging slowly towards him and away. The longer he looked at it, the more the corridor seemed indecisive about its own length.
He squinted one eye shut, then the other. He took a few steps down the corridor. The cloud-fractured sky began to take on brownish hues, and the window frame itself blurred.
Three more steps and the window was a ghostly mirage. Beyond it Alan could clearly see several more feet of floorboards, ending in a panelled wall with a framed portrait and a low wooden plinth, atop which stood a curious carved contraption like a globe made of rings. Tucked at the corridor’s end was a side opening to a poky narrow staircase, leading down.
“The picture frame is maple wood, projecting an illusion,” said Edwin. He and Violet strode through the illusion too, though Edwin shut his eyes in order to do so.
Alan dutifully described the way the illusion had fallen apart as he neared it—“But I still didn’t feel anything. What’s it meant to hide? The staircase, or this?” He knelt to look more closely at the ringed globe. It was the size of a football, made of intricate wooden rings all set at angles to one another, marked with notches and small symbols, set on a solid round base. Around the base were engraved lines of writing.
“Both,” said Violet.
She moved a lever and the interlocking rings began to rotate. A simple tune rose into the air, as if somewhere at the centre was an unseen instrument with a hollow voice.
“I like that,” said Alan. A stab of unfairness hit him. If things had been different, would magic have been his birthright, his world? Instead he was a walking ward. Something that couldn’t help but turn magic away. Make it lesser.
Unfairness was part of the world’s fabric. Alan was used to it. It still made him angry every time.
“It’s an orrery,” said Edwin. “The music-box portion was broken, but we had Hettie Carroll around to look at it, and it was only that the gears needed cleaning.”
The melody swelled louder. Violet sang along. Her voice, strong and tuneful, seemed to fill the hollow at the heart of the orrery’s sound. And what she was singing, Alan realised, were the words written around the base.
“—nature burning bright as stars, to pay the dusk its due.”
Through the music came the sound of wood sliding against itself in a smooth groove. Alan stood and looked at the narrow, illusion-hidden staircase, which was now more inviting, somehow. Wider. Better lit.
“Come on,” said Violet, breaking off her song. “Now we know you work, we can start trying you out on things.”
“One canary, ready for service.”
The orrery kept playing behind them as they walked down the staircase. The song had the hummable simplicity of nursery rhymes. Alan would probably wake up tomorrow with it repeating in his skull.
He was tensed for any sort of magical nonsense—nobody ever told the canary what was going to happen in the mine—but the staircase was well behaved. It led down in a spiral, lit along the way by balls of glowing light set in the wall like lamps. After a few turns it unwound itself and they walked along an enclosed corridor that ended in yet another door. This one had no handle.
Violet cradled a spell, which came alive as visible lines of gold string in her hand. She rolled the spell into a brassy ball and then reached out to the door. The spell slid free and became a doorknob, and Violet twisted it and led them into what she called the spinet room.
It was a room of more doors.
It was small, octagonal, and with no windows; only five more knobless doors in addition to the one they’d passed through, all of different-coloured woods. The room was lit by several standing lamps of plain glass giving off the same too-clean glow as the magic in the staircase.