Sorcery of the Stony Heart Read online

  Not that anyone might see such treasures by peering through keyhole or window. No, each entrance and egress to Swaine’s rooms hummed with spells to denude the scene of any hint of magic. Under suspicion by various agents of His Majesty who’d be more than happy to jail him for the commission of magic—or at the very least hound him from London by assailing his reputation, turning even his acquaintance into a social liability—his work remained as secret as he could manage.

  Yet from the street below could occasionally be heard the bay of a hound. Curious whispers. A strange, tolling bell. Sighing winds. Faint music of unknown origin. These were but some of the sounds that troubled the haberdasher whose shop stood beneath Swaine’s room; the man strove to never work past sunset.

  Were such artifacts of concentrated effort not beyond the artistry of the most accomplished smith? Was there a craftsman, painter, or watchmaker in all of London whose industry rivaled the pure spectacle of Swaine’s research?

  And yet for all that, his greatest strides, his most unimagined leaps in intuition, often came when Swaine paused, staring into the fire in the grate, hand resting on the page he’d taken to task. Gears and springs of implication, connection, and insight exploded and reassembled. Those moments silent but for the snap and huff of a common fire, the ticking of Swaine’s pocket watch.

  It was in just such a moment, Hill’s Spelles of Elemental Transferrence cracked open on the desk before him, when a tenuous knock on the door dislodged Swaine’s concentration. As the knock repeated, he felt the fragile edifice of a looming breakthrough collapse back into a heap of guesswork. He frowned and flipped open the lid of his watch. Half past two, on the mark.

  Another knock.

  “Yes, yes,” Swaine called out. “No need to audition for role of drummer boy, that’s quite enough.”

  He strode through to the front room, his thoughts about Hill trailing behind him, cobwebs refusing to release their grip on his attention. With a muttered incantation, he passed his hand over the glyph he’d embedded into the inside panel of the door. After a moment, a faint outline of shifting blue light appeared two inches away from the door: corporal, man-sized, and with enough angles and twitches to assure him that Phineas Hozier stood alone on the other side of the door. Swaine spoke the word of cessation, and the strange outline dissipated like glowing embers that floated to the floor and winked out. He flung open the door.

  “Mr. Hozier, how punctual.” Had he emphasized the P in punctual with a hint of aggression? Perhaps he had. Forcing his frown from his face, he waved Hozier inside. Equanimity was a challenge at all times, more so when his thoughts were interrupted—yet he reminded himself that he had agreed to the terms, and the manner in which Hill had already stirred his thoughts was more than worth whatever nonsense Hozier had in mind.

  The man’s eyes flitted from bookstack to bookstack. “If I didn’t know better, I’d worry that your magic has summoned my work to haunt my steps. Everywhere I seem to be, p-p-piles of books.”

  “A curious use of magic that would be,” Swaine said. Still, his thoughts ran down a combination of spells that might effect that very result. The possibility certainly existed, even as the rationale for doing so was suspect.

  Had he not loved the unseen arts with such ferocity, a mind so inclined might otherwise be a bane.

  As Hozier appeared content to continue staring around the front room while shaking off rain from his jacket, Swaine cleared his throat.

  Hozier snapped his head around. “Yes, a curious use. I was jesting, of course.”

  “I see.”

  “And I suppose we must prepare me for my r-r-rendezvous with destiny.”

  Swaine sniffed back a snide comment. He crossed into the next room, motioning for Hozier to remain standing, and retrieved half a dozen ingredients from the workbench he’d fashioned out of an old chest and a vertical door taken from its hinges. “Destiny is a weighty word, Mr. Hozier,” he called back into the other room as he selected the proper bottles.

  “Love is a weighty matter,” Hozier called back.

  “One upon which you’re prepared to add a thumb to the scales? You’re quite sure?”

  “Couldn’t be more sure, sir. I knew it from the moment I set eyes on her.”

  Swaine wondered about the young woman’s eyes settling on Hozier—and if that moment had lingered in her mind for more than the time it took to look away.

  Still, the conjuration he had in mind was mild and relegated solely to affecting Hozier. Swaine found such tawdry uses of magic in the general category of heart-binding, implacable infatuation, or beholden lust—spells designed to beguile the senses of the object d’amour—to be offensive. If one has no morals or qualms, why not save time and trouble and simply knock the person over the head and kidnap them, an equally abhorrent solution to unrequited love?

  On the other hand, if Hozier himself was afflicted with an unasked for and undeserved set of challenges that might make him a less-than-desirable suitor—well, who was to say that behind his stammer, not to mention beneath his obvious social deficits, there didn’t lie a faithful and true heart?

  As for Swaine, his best advice—to shun such nonsense altogether—was always received with a look suggesting that he’d failed to grasp the simplest rules of life itself. He hardly bothered any longer.

  “Here we are, Mr. Hozier.” He cleared a space on a table and put down the ingredients. “All we need to render you as confident and charming as possible.”

  Hozier’s fingers danced against the leg of his breeches. “Will I feel the effects?”

  “Of course you will. Not to worry, however. A slight tingling is the most often noted phenomenon. Usually the face and neck.”

  Working quickly, Swaine mixed the sawdust from the heartwood of black poplar tree with ground rose quartz in a brass flask. After a minute of stirring, he whispered a phrase over it in the traditional Old English. The mixture crackled, sparks dancing across the surface.

  Hozier’s eyes widened. “Does this have a name, Mr. Swaine?”

  The actual name of the potion was ‘Malscrung þæs Bearg,’ or ‘Charm the Pig.’ Swaine raised an eyebrow. “The traditional name roughly translates to ‘Lantern of the Heart,’ designed as it is to allow the true strength and…charm, I suppose…of the heart to shine forth unimpeded by the reticence or, shall we say, shyness of the wearer. An accelerant to your natural charisma.”

  “I see, I see,” Hozier said. “Like rum, only I won’t vomit.”

  “Yes, well, let’s hope not.” Swaine measured out a dozen seeds of dried tansy from a stained bottle, the earthy scent filling his nose. Once stirred into the mixture, he retrieved a dried lark’s feather from a fourth bottle and used the quill end to etch the alchemical symbol for the heart into the claylike surface of the potion while repeating the incantation. “Wonderful. Step closer, if you would.”

  Hozier glanced at him, his lips thin, then nodded and stood next to him. Swaine slid a fine pair of tweezers from his waistcoat pocket. “Lean down.”

  Hozier did.

  Swaine plucked a hair from the man’s head. “There we are.”

  Running a hand over the spot where the hair had come from, Hozier grimaced and straightened. “Good thing it didn’t call for a tooth. Or a finger.”

  “Fingers can be potent ingredients, to be sure, Mr. Hozier. Be thankful you’re not in need of such magic—and not just for the sacrifice of a digit, believe me.”

  Swaine worked the hair into the paste and held the brass flask over the nearest candle flame with a pair of iron tongs. He watched as the mixture bubbled and further liquefied. As it did, tiny licks of the flame sputtered upward.

  “Now,” he said, “once this has cooled, it merely awaits activation.”

  “And that entails what?”

  “Quite simple. Using the opposite side of the lark’s feather, face north, and in a clockwise order dab a touch of the mixture—enough to leave a clear mark, not enough to clump—on the following spot
s: the inside of each elbow, the underside of each wrist, between your big and adjacent toes, a handspan below your navel, the most prominent bone in your neck, the crown of your head, your sacrum, and ending just above your heart. To the left of your sternum. Your left.”

  Swaine waved the tongs to cool the mixture and then readied a small bottle. “The magic will last for somewhat less than four hours. There’s enough for, possibly, three applications. Bear in mind that each subsequent instance will be correspondingly less powerful due to the principle of Causative Retrenchment of Burnsian Energies. By a factor of three, to be specific. Also, best to apply it within the hour before you expect to need it. To maximize potency.”

  “Causative…” Hozier’s brow furrowed. “Surely you’ll be joining me, Mr. Swaine? I’ll never remember all that.”

  “You remember the location of hundreds of books in the library, do you not?”

  “There’s a system.”

  “I can write it down for you, if you wish. A system.”

  “But I would feel much safer with you—initiating the magic, sir.”

  “I’ve already initiated it.”

  “What if I make a mistake?”

  “You won’t. It’s trivial.”

  “I’d really feel much more c-c-confident if you could at least be there while I did it.”

  Swaine wondered how Hozier ever accomplished anything in life with such a paltry supply of confidence to draw from. One cardinal direction to locate and face, eleven spots to mark—what could be more simple? Then again, the man was an assistant to an assistant librarian, had worn the same pair of breeches and shirt each time Swaine had spoken with him, and apparently lived under the stairs in the house of his cousin, a baker with six children on Fan’s Alley. Perhaps he’d never actually accomplished anything—and there he was, dreaming that a woman might be drawn to such a man.

  For most people, Swaine supposed, dreams were no more than ghosts from a future that would, in all likelihood, never come to pass. Immaterial, yet haunting just the same.

  “Fine,” Swaine said. “When do you need it?”

  “Why—today, sir.” Hozier nodded. “And I thought you might accompany me. To the theatre. Catherine is an actress. Playing Cordelia in King Lear. At the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. Wonderful, sir. I’ve seen it seven times this month. Nearly ran out of money.”

  An actress? Swaine wondered if he’d picked a strong enough magic. “Tell me you’ve spoken with this Catherine, Hozier.”

  The fellow nodded so vigorously that Swaine thought for a moment he was having a fit of some kind. “Marvelous, marvelous woman. Eyes like windows into a world I’d give anything to see. I thought them sad, at first—but they miss nothing. The eyes of an artist. A smile like spring after winter. Hair that tumbles across her shoulders like a precious mane.”

  “Yes, I can see you’ve had your fill of Shakespeare,” Swaine said. “And you’ve spoken with her?”

  “I have, sir. The finest minutes of my life. I p-p-praised her p-p-performance. Gracious, she was. And kind. Asked me my name. My p-p-profession. Amazing, sir. She laughed at a-a jest I made.”

  Anything was possible, Swaine conceded. Fine, he would accompany Hozier to the theatre—in fact, it might well be productive, inasmuch that the impasse he’d reached with Hill cried out for mental redirection. And like any good blacksmith, Swaine knew when to strike the steel—and when to let it cool when the fires have grown too dull or too hot.

  4

  Art Demands

  Swaine knew artistry when he saw it, for art demands. He knew that as well as anyone. Nothing could be simpler than doing nothing more than what is expected—most of the world did so and rarely went more than a day without a meal or a night’s rest, proving again and again that the mind needn’t be anything other than soft and flabby. Nurturing a trade or a craft to a basic level of proficiency required more effort, though in truth not much more than a degree of attention encased in years of repetition. Mastering such a calling was another feat altogether, for it took elevation beyond the mere facts—a unification of purpose and effort, an awareness of the subtle interplay between the laws of the materials and the nature of the human mind, and a willingness to endure the sacrifice required develop such instincts. But true artistry was of a different order.

  Perhaps it required a seed of genius—though where unwavering will ended and genius began was often a mystery. To subsume all else in the service of reaching a summit untrodden by others. To gather in the unseen essence of humanity and meld it with an object, an effort, an insight. To lift up civilization, all of it thereafter, even a single inch—well, the membership fee to that society was steep, and when one was familiar with the demands extracted to create art at that level, one recognized and appreciated it fully when encountered elsewhere. Whenever such flames reached upward to the heavens, the sure sign of a mind, a soul, blazing in the pursuit of a calling, Swaine recognized a kindred spirit, a burning, radiant soul. In such instances, some essential nutrient was replenished, fortifying him to face the demands of his own art.

  So it was that as he sat on the green cloth-covered bench in the pit before the stage, next to the ceaseless ticks and twitches of Phineas Hozier, Swaine found himself captivated by the whirlwind of Lear—not merely the raging howls cried out into the storm that is mortality, but also by the kinship he felt with the playwright himself, for surely Shakespeare knew the price to be paid to scale such peaks of achievement. The thousands of hours spent so focused that hunger, thirst, sleep all passed by unnoticed. The arrival of dawn, unexpected. The tedium of all but the work itself.

  “Should my mouth be this dry?” Hozier whispered to him. They’d applied the magicked balm to him just before the short walk to Drury Lane—and a ridiculous affair that had been, Hozier pleading to go, to stop, to wait, all the while apologizing for being mortally ticklish.

  “Did you drink enough water?” Swaine said.

  “From the spell, I mean.”

  “Nothing to do with it.”

  “The cold spots?”

  “Ignore them.”

  As the enactor of the magic, Swaine was himself immune to the effects. To his fellow theatergoers, however, Hozier wouldn’t appear either bland or afflicted. Instead, a subtle richness to the way the light draped him drew the eye. His features, ordinarily somewhat off-putting, as though the Lord had combined a collection of leftover components—the chin from a babe, the nose from a seven-foot grandfather from Arabia, the brows of a Spaniard, the lips of a humorless headmistress, the eyeballs of a herd animal—would strike the eye as harmonious and lively. His movements would track as graceful, his bearing of leonine confidence. Even his voice, which normally had the grainy texture of an infant who’d squalled for too long, acquired a sonorous intimacy, as though he were relaying a private secret for the listener alone.

  Sadly, it remained unchanged for Swaine as Hozier muttered and questioned whether imaginary side effects of the potion weren’t spiraling out of control from one minute to the next.

  As the play reached its denouement, Swaine had to admit that Hozier had been right about two things: the actress Catherine had a talent that outstripped the rest of the company, and only a potent helping of the unseen arts offered the slightest chance that she would manifest the smallest spark of affection for him.

  And even that might be too much to ask of the art.

  Still, Swaine had done what he could, and as he stood and raised his hands in applause as the company took to the boards and bowed at the foot of the stage—Hozier flapping his arms beside Swaine, hitting him accidently with his elbow—he felt a renewed desire to return to his work, inspired by the high art he’d witnessed.

  Hozier grabbed his arm above the elbow. “You’re sure this is working?”

  “Of course I am.” Swaine relieved his arm of Hozier’s fingers. “You haven’t noticed the glances you’ve received?”

  “Glances?”

  “Women and gentlemen alike. All trying
to work out who you are, convinced that you’re someone important they should know. Perhaps if you’d been less talkative.”

  The crowd flowed into the aisles. Hozier looked around and saw that Swaine wasn’t lying. “I usually ignore the stares.”

  “I told you.”

  “And Catherine will—see me this way?”

  “As I explained. Now if you’ll excuse me, Mr. Hozier. Thank you for bringing me along.”

  “B-but you must meet Catherine.”

  “I shall leave her in your temporarily capable hands, sir. And remember—you have approximately seventy minutes remaining before the effect wears off. Use them thoughtfully.”

  Swaine turned to go and found himself facing Cordelia, returned to life. The actress was shorter than she seemed on stage but no less striking for that. A lock of fair hair crossed above eyes the color of honey while the stage makeup enhanced the lines of her cheekbones and full lips. She glanced into Swaine’s eyes for but a moment—long enough for him to appreciate how poor Hozier might give up all pretense at dignity for the chance to stare into those eyes for longer stretches—then looked past him, raising a delicate hand.

  “Phineas,” she said. “I thought that was you.”

  Hozier smiled.

  And said nothing.

  While the magic may have made it appear that he was full of self-possession, Swaine realized that the man’s mind had frozen up, whatever words he’d readied now locked behind his lips. Could it have been that no woman had ever addressed him with such a tone of joy in her voice? Was he then stunned, a prisoner handed the key to the cell for the first time, a castaway glimpsing sails finally heading to shore?

  “Our good Mr. Hozier insisted I witness your performance, Madam Nunn,” Swaine said. “For all the praise he bestowed on you, I see now that he was understating your gifts.”

  She smiled, not taking her gaze from Hozier. “You’re much too kind, Phineas.”

  “Another wonderful performance, Catherine,” Hozier said.

  No hint of the trembling of his voice reached her ears, judging by the way her bosom swelled at his words. Seeing that Hozier—or, rather, the magic that made Hozier as un-Hozier-like as feasible—fully possessed the actress’s attention, Swaine slipped off through the crowd, silently wishing the old boy luck. As he paused while the theatergoers filed through one of the side doors, a hand landed on his back.