He stopped abruptly, snapping her out of her reverie.
“I’ll be made to pay when they find out we spoke, and I would have been hung, drawn, and quartered if you had flown out of here and disappeared again,” he said, hands in his pockets, something of that riling superiority back in his features. Ilsa wondered if he’d caught her looking.
“You was never going to let me leave.”
“You were never going to try. You say perhaps you’re not Ilsa Ravenswood.” He tilted his chin in the direction of something over Ilsa’s shoulder, and she turned around. It was the portrait of Alpha Lyander and Thorne Nyberg. They were back on the spot where they had met. “I saw you looking at them. You knew who they were.”
He was right. Without understanding why, she had recognised them instantly. It was their eyes; the shape of his and the colour of hers. Puzzle pieces that only fit together when Ilsa was added.
They were her parents.
“You already knew you belong here,” the boy said.
You belong here. She felt those words hit her like a physical thing. A satisfying hurt. She knew she would remember hearing them again later when her mind and her heart caught up.
“So you were brought up in an orphanage.” There was sympathy there this time, the subtle softening of his typically biting words. Ilsa nodded vaguely. “If it means a thing, your life – blessed or otherwise – is a remarkable stroke of fortune.” He looked up at the portrait. “An hour later and you would have died with her.” He turned to the window and gazed up at the stars, scowling like they had done him a grave insult. “Someone else might call it a miracle,” he said ponderously. He shook his head and straightened. “The lieutenants will want to tell you everything in the morning. You should go back to bed.”
And then he melted back into the shadows. It was only when Ilsa was alone that she realised she had never asked his name.
7
When Ilsa returned to bed, she did not believe she would ever find sleep. Her mind turned with thoughts of her birth, her exile, an orphanage in a grand old house. Self-pity weighted her down, and perhaps it dragged her under, as some hours later Ilsa woke a second time.
The fish market came rushing back. The quadrangle at Westminster Abbey, and the uncanny fountain that concealed a staircase to another world. The stranger in the black hood. Giant wolves.
And the shape of a boy in the darkness. Or was it a panther? Her slumbering mind had sent her phantoms bearing stories of her parents and her past before. But when she woke, the stories dissipated like smoke, broken apart by their own lies. Now, with golden morning light limning the drapes, her midnight discoveries seemed just as implausible and fantastic.
Only, there had been truth in them. Facts she recognised. Puzzle pieces that fit.
God granted me this house, child, and He’ll have thanks for His grace…
Lord Walcott’s former housekeeper was Miss Mitcham, the matron of the orphanage that used to be his home. The woman who had filled her childhood with torments she wished to forget. He had trusted her enough to leave her care of Ilsa, and kept her close enough that she had inherited his house and belongings. It stood to reason he had also made her privy to his magic. That was how Miss Mitcham had known what Ilsa was before Ilsa knew herself. Why she had been so intent on curing her.
And now Ilsa knew that everything she remembered suffering was only half of what Miss Mitcham had done to her. The matron had believed it her God-given task to rid Ilsa of her magic, her evil – and she had believed it so desperately, she had lied to keep her. She had faked Ilsa’s death to the people who would have seen her safe.
Helpless anger seized her and she gritted her teeth against the threat of tears. Ilsa often tried to tell herself that the matron of her old orphanage couldn’t hurt her any more. She was grown up. She was braver. And now, she was in an entirely different world.
But it wasn’t true. Miss Mitcham hurt her every day. She had left a pernicious fear in Ilsa as surely as she’d left physical scars, and Ilsa could escape neither, no matter how well she hid them. She had been afraid of her magic her whole life. She had kept her true self from everyone but Bill Blume. She had woken in the night biting her pillow to keep from screaming in remembered pain.
There was hate and cruelty, and then there was Miss Mitcham, who could have wiped her hands of Ilsa and instead chose to steal what little her orphaned ward had left.
Ilsa buried her face in the pillow and found it wet. She hadn’t held back her tears after all.
“Don’t be alarmed.”
Ilsa shrieked, and was on her feet before the cry faded. As her eyes swept the curtained chamber for the source of the voice, her fingers felt along the end table behind her and closed on something hard and heavy. She raised it above her head as across the room, a delicate female hand pulled back one of the drapes and the girl was illuminated.
She was beautiful – probably the most beautiful girl Ilsa had ever seen, and Ilsa worked in showbusiness. She was not much older than Ilsa, with smooth, alabaster skin and straight, raven hair tumbling freely down her back. She could have been made of porcelain, or marble; not just because of the delicacy of her features, but because of the way she held herself – with perfect posture and stillness. She looked dispassionately between Ilsa and the thing
