Dora chewed at her lip thoughtfully.
I could find a normal mirror, she thought. Elias did say that perhaps I could manage, even without the spells.
This seemed like a perfectly reasonable alternative somehow—and so Dora slipped out of her borrowed room and went off in search of a mirror.
She found one not far from her room, mounted upon one of the walls in the hallway. It was a burnished brass plate, rather than a silver-backed mirror, but the reflection was clear enough to do. Dora focussed upon it and knitted her brow, trying to imagine Elias as she had last seen him—soaked and bedraggled and looking awfully miserable.
The strange, detached state of mind was easy to come by. But the image of Elias remained stubbornly stuck in Dora’s head, unwilling to come out. She frowned, and tried to focus on it harder—this time, Dora felt a distinct pressure against her mind, as though she were trying to press into molasses. The pressure became harder, and somehow more ominous, the more that she leaned into the effort. Bother, Dora thought. Elias has protections, I’d forgotten. It was the mirror he gave me that could bypass them—
“What are you doing, you twit?” Elias’ voice hissed behind her, and Dora startled free of her trance. She saw him in the reflection of the brass mirror, standing just behind her in a loose cambric shirt and trousers. His hair was even more mussed than usual, and his eyes seemed raw and tired, but he was somehow more real than he had ever been before—
His hand closed on her shoulder, warm and very present, and Dora realised that he was quite real.
She turned around with a pleased, even smile. “I was trying to scry you,” she said. “But here you are.”
Elias pressed his fingers to his forehead. “You might have hurt yourself,” he told her. “You’re lucky I felt someone trying to barge through my wards. I had no way of knowing who it was, but I thought that there must only be one person foolish enough to try.”
Dora smiled at him again. For some reason, the expression came much easier to her at the moment. It had something to do with his hand on her shoulder, she thought, or maybe the fact that he seemed closer to his normal self than he had been before.
“Are you much better?” she asked him.
Elias laughed softly—but it was the sort of tired laugh that suggested he had given up a fight. “We are both in the hallway, barely dressed better than our night clothes,” he told her. “Naturally, you would like to have a heart-to-heart just now.”
Dora’s smile broadened. “Naturally,” she said. “I am remembering now how strange that is. But I was worried. I hope you will indulge me somehow.”
Elias sighed. “I will,” he said. “That is the worst of it.” He dropped his hand from her shoulder. “Stay here. I will go and find something to solve all of these silly, modest rules.”
He disappeared down the hallway again, and Dora waited patiently. When Elias soon returned, he brought with him one of the lanterns from downstairs, which now gave off a watery, unearthly sort of blue light.
Dora gave the lantern a fascinated look. “What have you done to it?” she asked.
“I have thrown together the most hurried, slapdash spell of my career,” Elias informed her dryly. “But it is something akin to one that I have used before. As long as the candle is still lit and we stay within the light, we will be difficult to notice. Not impossible, mind you, but... we will be considered relatively unimportant and uninteresting.”
Dora nodded, fixated on the dancing flame inside. “I am sure that it must have better uses than avoiding nosy servants,” she said. “But how novel!” Dora offered out her arm to Elias as though they were standing in a ballroom, fully-dressed, instead of in a strange hallway, looking far less than proper. Elias took her proffered arm, carrying the lantern in his other hand as they paced down the hallway.
“Are you much better?” Dora asked again, very quietly.
“I am better,” Elias murmured. Shame and embarrassment coloured the words. “I have eaten. I have spoken with Albert. I have even gotten some modicum of real sleep. Now that I am more steady, I am frankly shocked to have been let back inside this house, let alone offered to stay the night.”
Dora frowned at that, as they started wandering down the stairs. “You must give Albert and his family more credit,” she said. “He loves you, and he must know how badly you have been driving yourself. He feels some measure of the same things—it is part of why you have remained friends.”
“You could not have parroted him better if you had been in the room with him when I apologised,” Elias observed dryly. He hesitated then. “Albert... has often suggested that I should take more pause, and feel less guilty for it. I have tried to listen to him this time. I am beginning to realise that I am no good for anyone this way. I am more apt to solve things when I am rested. I am more apt to rest if I am not alone with my thoughts.”
Dora nodded. “I suspect that Mr Lowe has had occasion to take his own advice,” she said. “I wondered at first how he could possibly go home at the end of the day and go to balls or dinners with his family. But he is not as haggard as you are, and he has kept his calm in the face of some very awful, bloody things each day.” She paused. “Vanessa has kept me from losing myself, I think—though I cannot compare my difficulties to those that you and Mr Lowe have faced. And on those rare occasions when I have not had Vanessa, I have gone outside at night to look up at the stars. Or... I did
