In the centre of the whole stood the spinet. Or so Alan assumed. It looked like a glossy brown piano that had met with an accident of geometry and turned into an off-centre triangle. The open lid gave it the unfortunate silhouette of a coffin. The keys were black, the panel just above them done in a pretty mosaic of paler and darker woods.
Edwin looked with barely contained eagerness from the spinet to Alan, to the doors, and then back to Alan, who swallowed a laugh.
“Go on then. If you don’t tell me everything about the wood, I suppose you’ll explode.”
A pause. Perhaps he’d misstepped. In his household that would barely count as a friendly hello, let alone a proper dig at someone, but Edwin Courcey was … touchy.
But Edwin’s face creased in something that was close to a smile. “You’re right, there’s no point going into detail. This is mostly a way station, in any case. It’s the only way we’ve found down into a double set of bedrooms that we’re having trouble with. But all of the woods here do have a magical property.” He pointed at one of the doors, a beautiful reddish shade. “That one’s jarrah. It’s so hard and durable they use it for paving roads, but it also sustains the effect of a spell.” He pointed out the other doors briefly: the one they’d walked through was mahogany, and the others were cedar, fir, ebony, and Brazilian rosewood.
“And that one?” Alan nodded at the dull brown door on the other side of the room, which Edwin hadn’t bothered to introduce.
“The spinet? It’s mostly cherry, but the sounding board is spruce—”
“No, the seventh door.”
“There isn’t a seventh door,” said Violet, but Edwin’s face was already transforming. This time his hand got all the way to grabbing Alan’s arm before he remembered his manners and snatched it back.
“You can see another one?”
Alan gazed steadily at the door. It didn’t waver or shift like the illusion had. It was inarguably there. And inarguably a door. “Yes?”
Edwin stared just as hard. His head twitched in surprise. “I had it for a moment. Violet?”
Violet pulled out the stool before the spinet and sat. She trailed her fingers down the span of the keys without pressing down. “That’s it,” she said, to nobody in particular, and then looked right at the same place. She winced. “Oh. Yes. It’s like trying to look at a light that’s too bright, but I’ve got it now I know it’s there.”
“Keep the house calm. I’m going to try to stabilise it.”
Out came his string. Edwin tried two or three quick spells, none of which made much difference to Violet’s squinting or his own frustrated head-jerks. Finally he built a slow, complicated pattern of string that pushed blue light around his hands like eddying water. He walked carefully towards the troublesome door and Alan went too, curious to see what he’d do.
They were within two yards of it when deep dread began to collect in Alan’s body. He remembered Violet at the first breakfast saying it’s not safe work, and now he believed it. Only the acute awareness that he needed to remain useful to these magicians stopped him from bolting right back through the mahogany door. But Edwin had stopped as well.
“And there’s a warding on it,” Edwin said acerbically. “Wonderful.”
He took a deep breath and blew across his cradle, and the blue magic danced out like mist under a wind, spreading over the door and then vanishing.
The door looked no different to Alan. The dread was still there. But Edwin made a sound of satisfaction and his gaze sharpened. “I’ll need to look at the charts, but I’d swear there isn’t space behind there,” he said. “A door to nowhere.”
“That’s where I’d hide things,” agreed Violet. She left the spinet and came up next to Alan, then grimaced as the dread-feeling—the warding—clearly got her as well.
First Edwin and then Violet tried some more spells to see if they could get rid of the warding. Alan retreated to sit at the spinet and let them do it.
“This is getting us nowhere. Give Alan the wax thing,” said Violet after a while. “Knowing the wood always helps, and he might have a chance of getting close.”
“Holzprobierer,” muttered Edwin, but he pulled it from his pocket and handed it over to Alan without hesitation. He also had the charmed pen and a small notebook. “All you need is to get the wax in contact with the wood. I don’t know how you’re doing whatever you do, but … visualisation helps most magic. Try to picture a shield in front of you, perhaps? Something to keep the wrongness at bay.”
A shield. Alan’s free hand made a fist as he approached the door.
He’d pushed through bad feelings before. Gnawing, exhausting worry. Hunger that wore away at him like the story about the bird sharpening its beak on a mountaintop. Today alone he had healthy doses of fear, anger, and guilt all on the boil, bubbling away beneath the curiosity.
He could live through this too. It was only a feeling. Only magic playing a trick.
Thinking of a shield doubled the effort it took to keep moving in the direction of the door, like trying to walk into a gale with an umbrella held out in front. Alan gritted his teeth and managed another meagre foot. Push, push.
The eddying blue of Edwin’s spell came into his mind, and the green ice-water spell from earlier. Water in gutters built up behind a blockage, but you could release it in trickles and rob it of its force.
Feeling an absolute fool, Alan closed the imaginary umbrella. He stopped imagining a blunt protective surface and instead let things—flow. The wrongness surged closer, trying to drive him back, but Alan refused to be forced into anything. He was stubborn and a thief and he would go where he wasn’t wanted.
He took two staggering steps forward, arm outstretched, and the Holzprobierer touched wood.
Edwin might have said something. Alan couldn’t make out the words. A surge of energy came down his arm and he couldn’t direct it, couldn’t manage the flow, couldn’t do anything. His skull screamed pressure like a painfully overstuffed cushion. His next breath was a terrible warning that there wasn’t enough room in him for air as well.
He fell back hard onto the ground, whacking his elbow against the floorboards. His hand fizzed. His vision was dim and dull. Jesus Christ, his head hurt.
The blue-clad blur of Violet reached him first and touched his shoulder. Some of the pressure lessened at once, with a sense of blissful relief, as if she were siphoning it off.
She gasped and snatched her hand back. Alan wanted to grab for her again, siphon off more, but couldn’t persuade his limbs to cooperate.
“What is it?” said Edwin.
“I don’t know. He’s giving off something. It’s like magic, but I can’t use it.”
Alan could breathe and see now. He was not surprised when Edwin approached with a set frown and reached out a determined hand to Alan’s cheek. Edwin Courcey would probably emerge from an exploding building with the desire to see if he could make it happen again.
Sure enough: another gasp. Edwin’s fingers shook with effort, and he held it longer than Violet, then he too withdrew.
“How do you feel?” he asked Alan.