Page 10 of The Unweaver

“Well, Moriarty’s still dead.”

Mother’s mouth—the best barometer for her mood—thinned. Tomes of disapproval were written in each line of her pursed lips.

The uneasiness dogging Cora since the tunnels shot through her in a cold fire. Restless nights, punctuated by dreams of faceless Chronomancers, hadn’t improved her nerves. Each day, the rattle of death grew louder and closer, like the tolling of a death knell inside the cage of her bones. That thrumming undercurrent of anticipation persisted even when she was alone.It had to be the premonition of her own death, gnawing away at her and taking on a life of its own.

Mother waited in scolding silence.

“Didn’t you get my note from Owens? Moriarty was quite dead when we arrived, you see—”

Owens, dressed in unrelieved black, appeared with a tea tray. His pinched face held a permanent sneer, particularly when he looked down his beak of a nose at Cora. He set the tray on the table and left with an imperious sniff.

From a silver dish, Mother forked the small heart of a magpie and popped it into her mouth like candy. She poured a cup of tea and set it on its matching saucer in front of Cora. Magpies were painted on the porcelain, their white and iridescent black plumage frozen in graceful flight.

Mother moved the sugar bowl away when Cora reached for it. “You’ll ruin your figure, dear.” She dropped two cubes into her own cup. “Especially at your age.”

With immense effort, Cora absorbed the barb without comment. The doughy woman had long been a critic of her body. Sipping the unsweetened tea, she tried not to let it grate on her.

“And do stop slouching, pet. You’ll only wrinkle that old dress more. Do none of the dozen girls in your little flat own an iron?”

Onlytenother girls live there, thank you very much.Swallowing the retort, Cora smoothed out her dress, the black cotton long faded to gray. Even Teddy owned more dresses than her, and far more fashionable ones.

“Well, dear?” Mother slid the twenty pounds Cora was owed onto the table, just out of reach. Eyeing Cora over her teacup, she raised her penciled brows, as if awaiting for a child to explain the mistake she already knew they’d made.

It was the same expression of anticipatory disappointment she’d worn the day they met over thirteen years ago.

* * *

London, 1906.

Cora had awoken in a strange place. Mind sluggish and throat raw, there was a throbbing pressure against her skull and a stinging numbness in her limbs. The astringent smell of bleach cut over the stench of sweat and sick.

Her eyes, heavy and caked with filth, opened to a searing shaft of light. She winced, and her surroundings solidified in abysmal detail. A crowded hospital ward, crammed with narrow beds full of groaning, writhing bodies. The animal stink of suffering and overflowing bedpans made her gag. Over the beds and down the hallways, death hovered.

No, not again.She jerked upright. There were bandages over her wrists and handcuffs over the bandages. Tall and spindly as a reed at sixteen, her feet dangled off the bed she was strapped to.

“Oh, good. You’re finally awake, my pet.”

Sitting beside her bed was a gray-haired woman in a hideous jumper. She set aside her knitting and rested a hand on her shackled arm, smiling that expectant smile.

“Call me Mother,” she insisted as she deftly picked the handcuffs open with a hat pin. “Oh dear, what a pitifulpredicamentyou’ve gotten yourself into. I paid the nurse a tidy sum for your death certificate, but we had best call you something else, lest anyone note your hasty departure. Let’s call you Cora.”

Thus reborn, she rubbed her bandaged wrists. The scars that marked the beginning and ending of Cora Walcott throbbed in pain.

She tried to bolt when the woman snuck her out of the hospital. But the old bird was quick. Her nails bit into Cora’s arm like talons, drawing blood. “Why, your manners are most appalling, dear.”

Chagrinned, she followedMotherinto a chauffeured car. Cora had never been in a car before. It was like a roaring engine of death on wheels, ferrying her from one cage to the next. Her filthy clothes stained the leather seat.

As London blurred past the tinted windows, Mother told her a fairytale of magic. Of mages hiding in plain sight that could weave and unweave threads of magic that were unseen but sensed.

Each mage affinity sounded more impossible than the last. Fire and water mages. Shadow and light mages. Mind mages, like Memnomancers and dream-puppeteering Oneiromancers.

In astonished silence, Cora marveled at the fairytale. The terrible things she couldn’t always control weren’t abominations, butmagic. Not born of demonic possession, but a manifestation of something deep in her marrow, in her very spirit.

Magic was real, Mother said, and Cora had it. She was a mage of the gravest affinity—a Necromancer, capable of unweaving the threads of life and inducing a little death. A death that could become much bigger, Mother explained, if Cora behaved with the decorum of a proper young lady and stopped fidgeting.

Necromancer. Cora tested the word on her tongue. Unfamiliar and familiar at the same time. The truth sank into her gently and dripped inside her bones. She wasn’t an abomination, as the nuns and Felix and countless others had spat at her, but a mage. And she was not alone.

All she could think about was how much she wanted to tell Teddy. They had been separated years ago at the orphanage, but not a day passed when he didn’t feature in her thoughts. She sensed his presence in London like music from another room, synchronized with her heartbeat. Theirs was a bond that couldn’t be severed by time or distance.

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