Ilsa smiled to hide her growing nerves. “Other than that I can’t complain. There’s an awful lot of leisure time when you’re rich and no one trusts you to help run the place. Aelius is teaching me chess. And I play cards with the wolves some nights and batter all of them.”
Alitz’s eyes narrowed in question, whatever game she’d been playing forgotten. “And you think it wise to befriend the militia?”
Ilsa frowned. “What d’you mean?”
“Three of them perished in the last attack on this house. Ten altogether in the raids, and four in other altercations in recent months. That is the role the faction rulers have given them. It’s unwise to find value in the expendable, Miss Ravenswood.”
Ilsa choked on a mouthful of tea. “Expendable?”
Alitz was raising her cup to her lips, but she put it back down. “If I sound callous, understand that that’s not my intention. I have lived in this city my whole life, and you, a matter of weeks. Wolves will die. Whitechapel stewards will die. Disagreements and skirmishes are in abundance, so bitterness and bloodlust are as well. They fuel one another and dauntless men and women run headlong into the fire.”
As much as Ilsa didn’t want to hear her go on, the fact she had managed to distract Alitz had brought with it a welcome reprieve. And knowing the Whisperer, there were plenty more opinions where that came from. Ilsa only had to ask the right questions.
“I s’pose some of them wolves and stewards die fighting each other, don’t they? What with us sharing a border.”
“His Honour would have otherwise if he could make it so. He believes being border fellows brings with it the responsibility of good citizenship, not opportunities for war.” She had fallen into the disapproving tone she usually reserved for Ilsa. “But, unfortunately, you are correct, Miss Ravenswood. Stewards and wolves die on our border every year.” She brought her teacup nearly to her lips, frowned into it, and continued, compelled to talk on. “I remember one particularly vile incident some years ago. A Changeling woman was crossing into Whitechapel, fleeing her husband, who had beaten her. Not for the first time, from what I understand. So the stewards denied him entry. They protected her, as one should under such circumstances.”
Ilsa nodded warily, but Alitz didn’t see. Her eyes were clouded over.
“He grew enraged. The wolves involved themselves, futilely. They failed to subdue him, so when he became a bear and charged the guard point… one of the stewards shot him dead.” Alitz blinked and turned her newly sharpened gaze on Ilsa. “Do you think that’s reasonable, Miss Ravenswood?”
Ilsa hesitated, but it was clear Alitz expected her to answer. “If it was the steward’s life or the Changeling’s… then yes, I s’pose. I think so.”
“Hmm.” Alitz was silent a beat, her lips pursed. “The wolves did not. Evidently, they considered the steward to have drawn first, and they attacked. Do you think that’s reasonable, Miss Ravenswood?”
“They’re s’posed to defend Changelings,” said Ilsa uncertainly. “P’raps they thought—”
“While defending themselves against the wolves,” Alitz went on, “no one thought to defend themselves against the dead man’s wife. She slaughtered the steward who shot him, while his comrades were looking the other way.”
Ilsa gripped her saucer in both hands. Alitz asked her no more questions. Her features were tense, but after a long moment of silence, she turned to Ilsa with accusatory, narrowed eyes. She had noticed they’d stopped the exercise.
“As I said, a veritable inferno of bad blood. But enough of this talk. I prefer a brandy in hand when discussing such things. Tell me, what success in the search for your brother?”
Ilsa was glad Alitz was trying to manipulate her thoughts rather than read them, but she still clamped down hard on any memories of the search; Lila’s riddle, the diagram she had found in Gedeon’s room. She was keeping these things from most of the Zoo because she couldn’t decide whom to trust. She would keep them from outsiders as a matter of course.
“I ain’t had all that much success,” said Ilsa, though the lie was painful and Alitz’s narrowed gaze said she didn’t believe it anyway. “I’m still trying to understand what made him leave in the first place.”
“Discontent, perhaps?”
Ilsa could suddenly see her brother with stark clarity. It was night. He was alone in the library, slumped forward in a chair by the fire, face lost in troubled thought. A sound disturbed him, and he turned to face her, wiping clean his expression.
“Concentrate, Miss Ravenswood.”
Ilsa’s eyes snapped to Alitz’s. She had been aware, distantly, that the Whisperer was still putting images in her head, but stopping her had become unimportant. Ilsa was fully back in the drawing room, teacup in hand, and she wanted the daydream back. Alitz must have read this on her face or in her mind, because she pursed her lips and scowled.
“You would rather not focus on the present, as I have taught you,” said Alitz acerbically. “Very well. Why don’t you tell me about your life in the Otherworld instead?”
“I was a magician’s assistant,” said Ilsa. “Like on the stage. Guess you don’t have that here.”
“Theatre?”
“Stage magic.” She thought of Fyfe’s awe when she had magicked her handkerchief into her hand. Then she thought of the diagram that had been hidden up her other sleeve – and wrenched herself immediately back to the present. She shot a glance at Alitz, taking a long sip of her tea to hide her anxiousness.
“Well, we have exhibitionists,” said Alitz primly.
There was Gedeon again in her mind’s eye, younger than his portrait; fifteen, perhaps. Ilsa looked down on him from the balcony over the entrance hall, where he was sizing up a familiar black jungle
