“No,” she said, her voice hoarse, even as she noticed he was tying a hobble knot. “Don’t you dare—”
“I promise I’m not going to hurt you. But I fear you might try to take flight. Quite literally.” There was a flash of humour in his eyes as he tied the other end of the cord to his belt, stashed the strange lamp in his coat pocket and took the wheelbarrow. Then he was walking swiftly back towards the river with his captive stumbling after him, and Ilsa saw her moment.
She had joined the theatre business with a dire, crippling fear of having her wrists bound. Like being confined, it was something a younger, weaker Ilsa had been too familiar with. But there was no room for such squeamishness in her line of work, and besides, no magician’s assistant Ilsa knew had anything to fear from a hobble knot. Within three seconds, Ilsa had slipped her bonds and was running, not daring to look back.
She didn’t get far. The stranger – Fowler – was before her again as though he had been blown into her path by a gale.
“Well, that was unexpected,” he said. He might have found her at the theatre, but he clearly hadn’t watched the show.
Ilsa turned on her heel, but she hadn’t got five yards before he was on her again, an iron arm around her waist, her arms pinned to her sides. She opened her mouth to scream, but terror had robbed her voice of any strength: the noise she made was pitiful.
“Listen,” he said in a reasonable tone; still, Ilsa struggled. “They told me you might not understand, so I am prepared to explain as best I can, but now is not the time. All you need to know is this: your friend is dead because they mistook her for you.” As he spoke, he bound her a second time, but he’d learned from his mistake, and Ilsa’s vision swam as she watched him tie a knot no magician would bother learning. “Their comrades already know a mistake has been made, and I can guarantee they’re headed here right now. I’ve found you on behalf of people who care whether you live or die, and lucky for you, tonight is a rescue, not an assassination.”
Martha was dead because of her? “I don’t believe you.”
“No. I don’t suppose you do.”
He gave a sharp tug on the rope, perhaps to demonstrate the knot’s robustness, or maybe to remind her he had the other end, and then resumed his business.
They stopped at the river, by a gap between two moored fishing boats. Her captor guided her to sit against a nearby mooring post, and Ilsa didn’t resist. She knew other tricks, after all, and while he was busy weighting the bodies with bricks, she went to shrink her hands. They refused to move.
Something else then. She thought up the form of a cat, but her body remained stubbornly Jeanie’s. She couldn’t even become herself.
Ilsa’s panic rose, but it was the echo of an old panic; an old situation, in which her magic didn’t come when she called it. She was back in the attic at the orphanage. The walls were closing in and her shackled hands were shaking; she could feel the promise of full control dancing at the edge of her consciousness, but couldn’t grasp it. When her magic took her, a separation happened, the shifting feeling would hit her like an explosion and then she was something else. But it never saved her; she couldn’t maintain it. Once, when she was seven, she had become a bird and made it onto the roof, then shifted back into her human body by mistake. It was snowing. She was naked.
But the day she escaped – that day she had cracked the code. For shifting wasn’t something that happened in the mind; thinking would not complete the process. She wasn’t supposed to think about the feeling; her body already knew what to do. A power inside her – a power she recognised from every accidental shift; that she could always hear but had never truly listened to – told her something she had known deep down all along; that her body was her own creation, not the tool but the material, and she could be whatever she wanted to be. The feeling overtook her, and for the first time she was an animal – a blackbird – by choice. To stay an animal, she just needed to remember what she already knew.
There by the docks, Ilsa didn’t know it any more. Her focus was correct – she could feel the sensation rising in her body – but the power inside her wasn’t answering. Her magic was gone. A panicked noise escaped her, and Fowler looked over.
“I’m sorry,” he said, taking in her horror and the twisting, writhing efforts of her hands. “You won’t be able to shift with those bonds on you.”
Ilsa kept pulling on the cords that held her wrists. They were just leather; securely wound but fairly soft and pliable, and ordinary-looking. But the loss of her magic was in these bonds and not in her. Regardless of the source of her helplessness, whatever this man did next, she wouldn’t be able to stop it.
Having weighted the bodies, he kicked them into the water as Ilsa tried to make sense of what he’d said. Somebody had sent him. The attackers had targeted her, or so it seemed. Martha was dead.
Martha was dead.
A sob escaped her. “They thought Martha was me?”
“So it seems. Your friend could easily be a Ravenswood.”
A Ravenswood? “I… I don’t understand.”
“You often walk this way together?” he asked. Ilsa shook her head. “But you do, without her?”
“Yes.” This was her usual route home, but if Martha hadn’t come to the theatre that night, Ilsa wouldn’t have seen her until morning.
“Then that’s how the mistake was made. Oracles aren’t easily fooled, but with a little spontaneity one
