Free Seven for a Secret by Elizabeth Bear Page A

Urheimat ?”
    “Too many,” Abby Irene said. “They must have such
a school in every country in Europe. It would be very…Prussian…to standardize. Sebastien, we cannot allow the Prussians these soldiers. As long as Russia holds out there’s a chance.” It was bitter for her to speak supportively of England’s old enemy, but a measure of her determination that she did so.
    She continued, “If they have come to subscribe to the Prussian ideology—” She shrugged, but he could see it hurt her—her own expedience, and the cruelty of it. “Find me one. One we can make our own. You cannot save them, but perhaps we can use them.”
    “I think,” Sebastien said, “I can find one or two who have not. I’ll go tonight.”
    “Without an invitation?” She glared at him through her glasses. “How do you think to enter?”
    “It’s an old house,” he said, noncommittal. “And I am an old fiend. I’ve been in London before. Let us not forget! Your are talking to Amédée Gosselin.”
    He hoped to make her laugh with his flourishes, but instead the hard squeeze of her hand on his arm arrested the dance. “Sebastien—”
    She wanted to ask who had lived there, and when, and under what circumstances he had been invited in. The impli-
cations followed after, the realization that once intromitted, the devil could not be easily denied. Sebastien watched the tracks of thoughts chase one another across her face, shadowy and sharp, until she reined them back. Instead, she said, “An old house. How old?”
    “When it was built, it stood in the countryside, surrounded by gracious lawns and manicured gardens. It’s outlasted fire and plague,” Sebastien said. His lips quirked. “And the Great Beer Flood of 1814.”
    “The Sorcerer’s Fire?” Abby Irene asked. “It never got that far. There wasn’t any city there at that time.”
    The Sorcerer’s Fire was not so named so because sorcerers had begun it, but because the antecedents of Abby Irene’s former colleagues—the Enchancery, at that time still tentatively and formally identified as the New Royal College of Sorcery—had been the only force in London capable of diverting the fire. That any of the hunched old medieval buildings of Central London—the coaching inns, churches, and slump-shouldered mushroom-cap houses huddled ear by ear, leaning heavily across narrow streets—still stood was due entirely to the courage of those grave men of history. Sebastien still remembered the horror and wonder that had swept the continent in its wake, and how quickly the kings of Sweden, Spain, and Portugal—among others—had rallied to follow the Germans and English in institutionalizing court magic and the training of sorcerers.
    “And don’t think you’re going to distract me into history lessons,” Abby Irene continued. “Do you think for an instant there won’t be wards?”
    He smiled and spun her, careful not to whirl too fast. “I don’t think for an instant there will be wards that you can’t bypass, my heart.”
    “It won’t work,” she said. “You will not persuade them.”
    “So you propose what? That I go in like a monster, and festoon the gate spikes with their heads?”
    “No,” she said. “Remember what I told you about the magic?” She reached into the collar of her gown, between her breasts, and pulled free a tiny chamois bag. She slipped the ribbon over her head and slid it into the breast pocket of Sebastien’s coat, her crabbed old fingers lingering. “The one you choose. Give her this to drink in water. If she accepts the draught, that will serve us as consent.”
    “Spells of mesmerism, Abby Irene? That’s quite unethical.”
    She closed her eyes, pressed a papery cheek to his shoulder. She whispered, “Time of war.”

    Hours dripped by, but even after a hot, necessary bath and a coat of stinking herbal liniment that stuck her flannel nightgown to her body, Ruth still felt the heart searing her belly. Cold-fire waves