And she did.
Outside, the streets were full of carts and people and voices, the morning cluttered with movement, but without the many layered threads of magic, there was a flatness to it. Was this how her world looked to everyone else? It was so … quiet, and while it was certainly unnerving, to see only the material, mundane world, Tes also felt a strange relief. Like a cold hand on a fevered cheek.
She looked back, reading the sign over the tavern door.
“The Five Points,” she murmured to herself, committing the High Royal words to memory.
And then she set off down the street.
II
A few heads turned at the sight of the girl in a too-long tunic and tight britches, a mane of wild curls and a slight hitch in her step, talking to herself under her breath in a foreign tongue.
But of course, Tes wasn’t talking to herself.
She was talking to Vares. Not that anyone else could see the dead owl tucked inside the pocket of her coat.
“I’m not stalling,” she muttered. “I just need a plan.”
She stopped on a street corner. Looked up and down the road.
What a strange city.
The buildings were a mix of wood and brick and stone, mismatched, a mixture of new and old. They ranged from narrow houses squeezed in like sandwich meat between hefty chunks of bread, to vaulting structures with pointed peaks. She wondered how they did it, built all this without a drop of magic. If they really had to fell every tree, lift and set every stone.
It was impressive.
But it was also dirty. Every time she breathed, she caught a foul taste, like food gone off, and smoke belched into the sky, sending up clouds as black as coal.
She walked along the riverbank. In daylight, it turned out, the water wasn’t black, or blue, but grey. The pale grey of puddles in the street, of soot and storm clouds. It made her shiver, to see the Isle stripped of color, a source reduced to a simple stream. She walked on until she reached a bridge, stopped to orient herself again.
“Yes,” she told the owl. “I know where I’m going.”
That wasn’t strictly true. But she had a hunch.
It wasn’t just that she’d heard of the other cities called London. The river, though it lacked its crimson glow, seemed to occupy the same space, and though the buildings and bridges were all different, the city had the same rough shape. As if the same bones were there, just inside a different body. So, as Tes walked, she drew a map in her head, not of this city, but her own, grateful that she’d spent the last few years learning the ins and outs of the capital.
When she’d gone through the door, Tes had and hadn’t moved through space. A different world, yes, but the same physical place. She thought it was a decent bet, then, that walking a step in one world would carry her a step in the other.
“If Calin survived,” she went on, “I’m betting Bex did, too.”
Which was why she was now putting a healthy distance between herself and the shop ruins and the shal—or at least, where she guessed they were—before going back into her London.
“No, I can’t stay here,” she muttered, as if Vares had been the one to offer the option. She shuddered even as she said it. Nice as it was to rest her eyes a little while, the thought of a life in a place like this, a world without magic, was enough to turn her stomach. No, she had to go back. Even if it was dangerous. Even if they were looking for her.
The world—her own world—was a big place. She had run once.
She could run again.
Tes paused and closed her eyes, drew the map in her head one last time to be sure she was in roughly the right spot. Then she knelt, and set the little wooden box on the ground. She glanced around, saw a pair of women strolling by, lost in chatter, a vendor setting up a cart, an old man on a bench, reading a paper, but none of them had noticed her.
Tes turned her attention back to the box, and whispered, “Erro.”
For a second, nothing happened, and she was scared the lack of magic in this world would somehow keep the box from working, that the spell would have nothing to grab on to and she would be stuck here in this powerless world. And in that second, she realized how badly she wanted to go home.
Then the second passed, and the spell sprang to life, the box unfolding and the door rising up, carving itself against the empty air in a single burning thread of light.
The old man looked up from his paper, and she wondered what he would think, when she was gone. If he’d convince himself it was magic. Or convince himself it wasn’t.
Strange world, she thought again, as the space inside the doorway darkened, the curtain rippling as one London was replaced by another, and Tes flung herself through.
In her mind, the door had led to an alley across from the docks. But her mind must have been off by half a dozen strides, because instead of stepping into the street, she walked straight into a kitchen. Which might not have been so bad, if the kitchen had been empty.
But it wasn’t.
A woman stood at the stove making breakfast, and Tes had just enough time to notice the tendrils of magic in the flame beneath her pan before the woman turned, and shrieked, and flung out her hand. Tes saw the gust of wind the instant before it slammed her back, through the conjured door and onto the damp cobblestone street she’d left seconds before.
Tes gasped, pain rippling through her side. She pressed her hand against the stitches, hoping they hadn’t torn.
“Ferro,” she hissed, and the door collapsed. Tes sat up, noticed the old man staring, wide-eyed, his paper forgotten, as she took up the doormaker. Counted off a handful of paces, and tried again.
This time, she waited for the door to resolve, waited until the world beyond took on a blurry kind of shape, enough to at least be certain that it would not dump her into someone else’s house.
Then Tes looked at the man, and flicked her fingers in a wave, before she disappeared, taking the door and the magic with her.
RED LONDON
It was blinding, at first, the sudden return of so much light.
The vibrant, overlapping patterns of the world, dizzying and dazzling at once. But even as Tes fought to steady her gaze, she felt a flush of visceral relief. Home. She never thought the word could encompass an entire world, but there it was.
And then, on its heels, the reminder of why she’d left. And where she had to go.
The docks.
The owl twitched in her coat pocket, pecked at her ribs.
“I don’t want to leave London,” she muttered, and it was true. She’d been in the city three years, and in that time, she had made a place for herself in the shal, a home in Haskin’s shop.
“And then you tore it down,” she said bitterly, even though she knew she didn’t have a choice. It was just rock and timber. Houses, like lives, could be rebuilt. But only if you were still alive to do the building.
Tes joined the bustle of morning crowds and market stalls, the doormaker bundled under one arm as if it were a loaf of bread. Nero had told her once to never act like you’re running from something, or people will notice, and wonder what. So she resisted the urge to glance around, to scan the faces, search for trouble, or quicken her pace. Even as she crossed the crowded road and descended the wide stone steps to the London docks.
Her steps slowed at the sight of all those ships.
Some big, some small, trading vessels and members of the royal fleet, merchant skiffs and a Faroan strider, and a handful of boats that flew no flag. She had grown up in a port city, and whenever she felt trapped, she’d sit and watch the ships coming and going, and know there was a way out.
She’d taken it once. And here she was again.