Chapter 40 – Morning Tea

Florence stood at the window with a cup of tea and watched the morning arrive.

It came slowly, the way mornings did in Dunwick—filtered through coal smoke and cloud cover until the light that reached the street was thin and grey and noncommittal, as if the sun itself wasn’t entirely sure it wanted to be here. The rooftops of Baker Street emerged from the murk in stages: first the chimney pots, then the slate tiles, then the iron railings of the balconies below, each one beaded with the condensation of a city that sweated even in its sleep. In the distance, beyond the clutter of residential eaves, the spires of the Cathedral of the Eternal Lord caught whatever genuine sunlight existed above the haze, throwing it back in faint, golden needles that looked clean and impossibly far away.

Florence took a sip. The tea was strong, bordering on punitive—Mrs. Gable brewed her morning pot with the conviction that flavour was a form of discipline—but it was hot, and the mug was warm in her hands, and the heat felt good against the chill that crept through the window glass.

Two days. She had been in Dunwick for two days.

It felt longer. It felt like a month, or a year, or the kind of elastic, dreamlike time that belonged to fevers and fairy tales. She had came on a carriage with a crumpled acceptance letter and a head full of plans, and in the forty-eight hours since, the world had seen fit to…

She took another sip. Longer this time. She let the tannin sit on her tongue and focused on the bitterness.

Best not to think about it.

The good parts, then. She had met Alice—sharp, prickly, wonderful Alice, who spoke like a duchess and lied about turnip farming and had burned through the ropes in a bandit’s shack to save both their lives. She had made it to the University. She had been registered, stamped, and officially declared a mage of the Empire, which still felt like a clerical error someone would correct at any moment. And Thomas had taken her on a tour of the city that had been, for a few golden hours, everything she had imagined Dunwick would be.

The steak and kidney pie on Mulberry Lane. The Dunwick Tram rattling over the iron bridge while Thomas pointed out landmarks with the barely contained pride of a man showing off his firstborn. The Cathedral, vast and cool and smelling of old stone, where she had lit a candle for their parents and Thomas had stood behind her with his hand on her shoulder and said nothing, because he had always known when nothing was the right thing to say.

Good parts. She held them in her mind like stones in a pocket—smooth, solid, something to grip when the current pulled.

Then the evening had come, and the current had pulled very hard indeed.

Florence set the mug on the windowsill and pressed her palm flat against the cold glass. Her reflection stared back, translucent and ghostly against the Dunwick skyline. She looked… fine. Better than fine. She had been thrown from a carriage by an explosion, dragged through a forest in the rain, and spent the previous evening kneeling in the wreckage of a bombed restaurant with her hands buried in a stranger’s ruined leg—and there was not a mark on her. Not a bruise, not a scratch, not so much as a scuff. Her knees should have been raw from the rubble. Her palms should have been torn to ribbons from the glass. They weren’t. The skin was smooth and unbroken, as though the last two days had happened to someone else and Florence had merely watched..

The magic, probably. She flexed her fingers against the glass. Blood magic heals. The clerk at the Registry said sanguimancers were natural at hemorrhages. Maybe it works on yourself, too.

It was a guess. Florence was aware that she was guessing at roughly ninety percent of everything related to her own abilities, and that the remaining ten percent was closer to blind hope. But the alternative was thinking too hard about what she could do and why, and that path led to the memory of a man’s shoulder bursting open like a waterskin and the sound it had made, and she was not walking that path this morning. Not with her tea.

She hoped Thomas was faring half as well.

The thought tightened something in her chest. He had been limping badly when the constabulary wagons arrived at the Swan, his left ankle swollen to the size of a grapefruit beneath his boot. She had tried to help—had pressed her hands to the joint and felt something shift inside the tissue, a warmth that moved like a current, and the swelling had receded enough for him to stand. But the ligament was still torn. She had felt that too, somehow. A frayed thing, deep in the joint, that her magic could ease but not mend. He needed rest. He needed a surgeon. He needed a week off his feet at minimum.

The Department of Arcane Affairs had sent a carriage for him at dawn.

Florence’s grip tightened on the mug.

He could barely walk. He could barely stand. They saw his ankle. They saw him limping. And they sent a carriage anyway, because there was paperwork to file and witnesses to interview and the great machine of Imperial law enforcement did not pause for one man’s torn ligament, even if that man had bled for it.

A sharp, brittle crack split the silence.

Florence looked down. A fracture had run through the ceramic handle of the mug, base to lip, clean and diagonal. Tea was seeping through, a thin trickle of brown running down her wrist and dripping onto the sill.

She set it down very carefully, her heart hammering.

That was Mrs. Gable’s cup.

She stared at the fractured handle, then at her hand. Her fingers didn’t hurt. She hadn’t squeezed particularly hard—or she hadn’t thought she had. The ceramic was cheap, admittedly. But it had been intact when she picked it up, and now it wasn’t, and the only variable between those two states was her grip.

The magic again, she told herself, and wiped the tea from her wrist with her sleeve. I’ll buy her a new one.

She tucked the broken mug behind the curtain where it couldn’t be seen and decided to worry about it later.

Across the room, a shape stirred beneath a mountain of quilts.

Florence had come in late the previous night. Well past midnight, the constabulary wagons still loading the wounded when she’d finally left the wreckage. She had climbed the stairs to the attic on legs that felt borrowed, expecting to find the room empty, or Alice reading by candlelight, or Alice absent entirely.

What she had found was Alice face-down on the bed, fully clothed, boots on, dead to the world in the specific, boneless way of a body that had been pushed past every reasonable limit and had simply stopped accepting commands.

Florence had stood in the doorway and looked at her.

She had looked at the boots, caked with plaster dust and something darker. She had looked at the satchel on the floor beside the bed, bulging with shapes she couldn’t identify. She had looked at Alice’s hair, matted on one side, and the soot on her bare arms, and the general state of a girl who had clearly been through something that went well beyond a quiet evening.

And she had looked at the dress.

It was black. Fine-woven, fitted close through the bodice. Not the travelling coat and skirt Alice had been wearing when they parted ways outside the admissions hall that afternoon. This was something else entirely. Something new. The kind of garment that belonged in an evening wardrobe or a very expensive shop window.

The kind of garment that had been underneath the tablecloth cloak, in the ruins of the Swan. Florence had watched her brother tackle the masked figure into a pile of overturned furniture, had seen them roll through the wreckage in a tangle of limbs and splintered wood, and when Thomas had grabbed for the hem and the white linen had torn free in his fist, the dark dress beneath had been unmistakable. High-collared. Fitted at the waist. The same silhouette now lying crumpled on Alice’s bed, smelling of smoke and plaster dust.

Florence had stood in the doorway for a long time.

She probably has a reason. The thought had arrived with the quiet, stubborn certainty of something Florence needed to believe. She always has a reason. And Thomas did grab her first. He lunged. She was helping. She’d just saved those people.

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But she hit him. She hit him in the jaw and she stomped on his ankle and she took his gun, and he’s my brother, and she knows he’s my brother, and she did it anyway.

But she probably has a reason.

Florence had crossed the room, pulled the spare blanket from the linen cupboard, and draped it over Alice’s sleeping form. She had unlaced Alice’s boots, because leaving them on seemed wrong, and set them neatly at the foot of the bed. Then she had changed into her nightgown, climbed into her own bed, and lain there in the dark, staring at the sloped ceiling, until sleep came and took the questions with it.

Now, in the morning light, the questions were exactly where she had left them.

She chose, once again, to leave them there.

A horrible, guttural groan emerged from the mound of quilts.

Florence crossed the room.

Mrs. Gable had mentioned that Alice was bleeding from the lip when she came in. Florence had expected to find bruises this morning, swelling, the visible aftermath of whatever the previous night had contained. But Alice’s face, half-buried in the pillow, looked clean. Pale, yes. Flushed with an unhealthy heat that pinkened her cheeks and sheened her forehead with perspiration. But the skin was unbroken. No split lip. No bruising anywhere Florence could see—and she had heard the fight, even from behind the table. The crack of fist on bone, the crash of bodies through furniture, the sounds of someone being hit hard and often. There should have been a mark. There should have been several.

There was nothing. She looked like a girl with a bad fever and not much else.

“Florence?”

The voice was a croak. Alice’s eyes had opened—barely, the lids peeling apart with the reluctant, gummed quality of someone who had been unconscious rather than asleep. Her pupils contracted against the daylight, and the reaction was instantaneous.

“Gaaah—”

She threw an arm over her face, recoiling from the window’s pale wash of light as if Florence had aimed a lantern at her. She rolled sideways, burying her face in the pillow, and the groan that followed was theatrical in its misery.

“Good morning,” Florence said.