“Well, no. They can channel magic in a limited number of ways. Through objects and substances, with words, or through their bodies – corporeal magic, they call it – but not the way you and I can.” Fyfe laughed an awkward laugh. “Or you, at least. I’m, ah, not a very capable shifter.”
“That why you’re so interested in…” what had he called it?
“Transference? I suppose, yes. And no.” He threw himself into an armchair and swung his legs over the side. When he continued, it was with a seriousness that seemed uncharacteristic. “The implications are so much more important. If I can replicate the way the other factions use magic, there’s no end to the ways Changelings could defend themselves.”
Ilsa felt the weight she was carrying press heavier on her shoulders. “You mean against the Fortunatae.” Fyfe’s head snapped up and he eyed her curiously. “Cassia told me ’bout them. ’Bout what the Sage did to my family.”
“To my family too.” Fyfe slumped deeper in his chair, and was silent a long while before he added, “Hester was there. In the cellar where the Fortunatae found them.” Ilsa drew in a breath. Cassia had mentioned Hester’s father, but not Hester. It hadn’t occurred to her that the woman had seen first-hand the things Cassia described. “She was fifteen. Gedeon was two. She saw her father and her whole family die, one by one, to protect the place they were hiding, knowing Gedeon might cry at any moment and give them away. She lost everything, and then she was alpha, and she had to pick the whole of Camden back up and beat back the Fortunatae and the Sage. At fifteen! People used to tell me all about what Hester had done but it never hit me, not until I was her age. A week before my fifteenth birthday I was drawing up a design for rigged billiard balls so I could win a stupid tournament against Aelius and Cassia and Gedeon.”
Fyfe buried his face in the crook of his elbow. “And now Hester can’t shift or walk and it’s my fault.”
Ilsa made several incoherent sounds of protest before she settled on a response. “How could it be your fault?”
“The last time the rebels attacked, they came straight for my laboratory. She was helping me defend all this,” he said, gesturing around him. “Some of my technology is decades ahead of what anyone else in London has achieved. Things our enemies would be attacking us for every day if they knew they existed. But it wasn’t that. She could have had the wolves guard my lab if that was all it was. She had to be here herself because she knew I couldn’t bear to let them tear it apart.”
Ilsa pictured the woman she had met the day before, with her sardonic glare and hostile demeanour. Then she thought of the fish market and the fear that had held her in place as those Oracles took hold of Martha. Hester was spiteful, but she had saved Gedeon’s life as her own was destroyed, and then risked herself again for her own brother. It was better to be spiteful, thought Ilsa, with a stab in the gut, than a coward. She had nothing to judge Hester for.
“That ain’t your fault, Fyfe. You din’t hurt nobody. Them rebels did that all by themselves. ’Sides, I’d have done the same as Hester if it was me.” Fyfe looked up in surprise. She gestured at the lab. “P’raps you’ll save all of Camden with what’s in here. Show me the rest.”
Fyfe’s cheeks pinked, and Ilsa was relieved to coax that smile back to his face. He obligingly followed Ilsa around the laboratory and explained some of his myriad inventions; a clock that told the positions of the stars; a locking mechanism designed to open only at the owner’s touch. There was a canteen that stored liquids at a fraction of their former volume. Fyfe demonstrated it by pouring nearly a gallon of water into the ordinary-looking, hand-held canteen.
“The weight of the canteen stays the same,” he said, grinning at the way Ilsa stared, open-mouthed, as he emptied it again in a seemingly endless stream. “And it keeps coffee perfectly hot! Should any desert wanderers prefer coffee to water.”
Ilsa was also awed by an array of brightly coloured pellets that, Fyfe explained, released a smoke that inhibited the breather’s magic for a limited duration.
“I call them dampeners. Hester calls them science weapons.” He rolled his eyes in affectionate amusement. “Their effect is very short-term, and I’m still working on several varieties, but I’ve perfected these three. The yellow are for Sorcerers, the magenta are for Psi, and the dark blue are for Whisperers.”
Fyfe’s most recent invention was something he called a pocket forge. It was a complicated cylinder, one or two inches in diameter to fit in the palm of the hand, and made of dull metal. At one end was a cap with a switch on one side and a tip like a gas light. Fyfe held the pocket forge at arm’s length and pointed the end away from them both. When he pressed the switch a fierce, violet flame roared from the tip, making Ilsa jump. Even Fyfe flinched.
“Watch,” said Fyfe over the rumble of the flame, and he jabbed the pocket forge at a point on the desk before them. For a moment, nothing happened. Then the point where the flame had touched the wood caved in on itself, dropping charred wood to the floor below and leaving a gaping hole the exact diameter of the flame. As Fyfe switched off the device, Ilsa bent close to the desk. There were two dozen such holes, each above a pale mound of something that used to be wood.
“You melted it!” said Ilsa, awed.
“The pocket forge will melt anything,” said Fyfe gleefully. “It will even melt through enchanted materials, spelled to be indestructible.”
No wonder Fyfe held
