“Misdirection is half the magic, Ilsa my darling.”
Ilsa smiled. “I know a thing or two about that.”
“I don’t doubt it for a minute.”
They walked on. Cassia and Aelius led her around the first and second floors while Aelius rhapsodised about the architecture and interior design – eighty of the very best builders had raised the Zoo in one hundred and twenty days; the stained-glass dome above the entrance foyer was an addition made sixty years previously; wallpaper in thirty-two custom designs had been commissioned from a famous decorator in a country Ilsa was certain did not exist in the Otherworld – but these weren’t the sort of details she had secretly been hoping for.
“Begging your pardon, sir.”
“Aelius, please. I won’t abide sir and I certainly won’t abide Mr Hoverly. That was my father, the less said of him the better.” He winked and flashed his perfect teeth.
“Aelius, then. My mother.” She paused at the feeling of those words coming from her lips. Her mother. “This is where she grew up, ain’t it?”
“Not just your mother. Six generations of your family have lived here. The Ravenswoods have held Camden from this house for one hundred and thirty years.”
Ilsa bit the inside of her cheek as she hesitated over her next question. “What was she like?”
Aelius’s unstoppable grin softened. Cassia walked on ahead as if to give them some space. “Formidable,” said Aelius reverently. “Don’t misunderstand me, she wasn’t a leader to instil fear. She didn’t need it. Lyander was a woman who knew how to get her way and make her victim think it was their brilliant idea. She was a manipulator.” He paused and glanced at her, as if fearing the word was too sharp. But Ilsa liked it. A manipulator could be kind, but she couldn’t be trodden on. She liked thinking of her mother that way.
“Go on,” she said.
“She was a quiet woman. She spoke less than any leader of people I’ve ever known,” he said, and broke into a grin. “And I knew and bartered with them all in my independence. But I remember more of Lyander’s words than anyone’s. She made them count, you see.”
“And my father? Did you know him, too?”
“Know him? I inherited my role from him.”
“He was a spy?”
Aelius put a hand to his chest in a pantomime impression of offence. “He was a merchant of secrets, my darling. One of the finest I have ever known. He had all the talent in the world and not a care for it. That was why your mother recruited me. Thorne wished only to raise a family and play the devoted husband. And chess. The man was a deviously wicked chess player. He taught your mother and they wiled away many an evening in battles of strategy and wit.”
They reached the main staircase. Beyond it, the corridor ended in a set of double doors even grander than the ones to Hester’s chambers. Ilsa nodded towards them. “That another bedroom?”
“That,” he said, fondling his cane and looking to Cassia, “is the largest chamber.”
Aelius made no move towards it. Cassia did not even look.
“Well, can I see it?” said Ilsa. “I bet it’s really grand, ain’t it?”
Ilsa wasn’t oblivious. As Aelius led the way to the room, she could read his reluctance. Cassia was the more unwilling. She hung back in the corridor as the others stepped inside.
It was, as Ilsa predicted, awfully grand.
They entered into a sitting room, where tall windows threw morning light over ornate furniture, and danced off the crystal chandelier overhead. An elaborate mantelpiece carved from dark wood dominated one side of the room, and flecks of gold in the Persian rug caught the light and sparkled like jewels. Ilsa was tempted to crouch down and find out if it was real – who was she to say rich people didn’t weave real gold into their rugs, then walk over them like it was nothing?
Through a door was a study, with shelves of leather-bound, gold-embossed books ranged across one wall and a grand desk before the window – the kind at which a banker might count his fortune – and beyond that the bedchamber. A stately four-poster bed, carved with panels depicting all kinds of animals, filled the centre of the room, and forest green drapes and wallpaper transformed the space into some lush, wild jungle.
Ilsa inhaled the scent of furniture polish and the fresh gardenias that had been placed in half a dozen spots, and listened to the strange quiet that permeated the chambers. Aelius said nothing as she ran her hands over the fine fabric of the couch and the cool marble of a console; offered no history, pointed out nothing of interest. The rooms felt unlived in – cold from disuse, with a stillness in the air – and yet they were kept like some phantom occupant might have need of them at any moment. A quarter-full decanter of something stood dormant atop a liquor cabinet. The papers on the desk were undisturbed. And a chessboard – the pieces in the disarray of a game half played – rested on a card table by the window. It didn’t take a genius to work it out: her parents had lived here. Had it been kept a shrine all these years?
If there was anything left of them in the suite, Ilsa didn’t know how to recognise it. It was nothing but a reminder that her chances to know them had run out long ago. She let out a shuddering sigh and swept past Aelius.
“Where next?”
Aelius followed swiftly and closed the door behind them, and they made for the stairs.
As they descended into the grand, marbled entrance hall, a small black fox approached, as if it had been lying in wait for them. As it trotted towards them, it shifted into a young man in a dark suit, wearing a red militia armband around one
