A/N: This is intended as a Pride and Prejudice and Zombies-style take on Jane Eyre, but with the revival of English magic as depicted in the novel Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell as the backdrop. As such, it will follow canon closely, with one or two major divergences.
Chapter One
Changeling
Gateshead House, November, 1806
There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. Aside from the bitterly cold wintry day, the ceaseless rain that streaked the windowpanes, Mrs Reed had heard tell of the disappearance of a second young woman from the village, and as everyone knew fairy abductions came in threes, she could not conceive of allowing her darlings outside lest they be stolen away to the Other Lands. So instead she gathered Eliza, John and Georgiana about her in the drawing room, the girls dressed in red silk dresses to protect them from enchantment. Even John she had induced to wear a scarlet scarf about his neck, although he kept complaining that it itched, hooking one finger beneath it to drag it away from his skin until his mother chided him gently and tucked it back with care.
Her husband Mr Reed had been a theoretical magician, a direct descendent, it is said, of Dr Martin Pale himself, but Mrs Reed was from London, where the only magicians were of the yellow-curtained, vagabonding kind, and she had an instinctive suspicion of magic of any kind, and in particular of fairies.
Perhaps if I had not been so small and slight, my features so pinched and mean – in short if I had not reminded her so much of my father's half-fairy-origins – then she might have been able to love me more. As it was, it was made clear that I was not welcome so I slipped into the breakfast room where I could be sure of finding a book to read. And one book in particular.
Taking the volume I sought from the bookshelf, I climbed into the window seat and drew the curtain shut. The curtain was of moreen, study and stiff and red, so that I was protected on both sides. Outside all was rain and mist and shadow and the whispering of the rain against the glass. On a day like this, and in a house like this, it might be easy to think that Mrs Reed was right, and the barrier between our world and the Other Lands fragile and easily breeched. And although I had never thought myself afraid of fairies – indeed there were times when I would have been grateful to be snatched away to the Other Lands as long as it meant I should not have to see John Reed again – today I was thankful for the red curtain, and for the protection it offered from their magic.
In this quiet seclusion I ran my hands in reverence over the book, Thomas Lanchester's The Language of Birds. It had belonged to my father, and was all I had left of him, an ancient volume of yellowing pages bound in soft red leather. I turned to the frontispiece and to the engraving of the Raven King, striding across a solitary moor with a raven in flight against the white sky. I shivered as I always did, and the rain's whispering seemed to deepen, taking on another tone. There were echoes in it, a falling and rising sound that sounded almost like speech, and I thought that if I closed my eyes and listened, it might tell me how to slip out through the glass of the window and become part of the rain itself, a thing of mist and cloud and air, of river and beck and ocean.
It was the sort of magic that Thomas Lanchester spoke of, something wild and untamed. The sort of magic that was gone from England, that had not been seen since the age of the Argentine magicians, and it tugged gently at my heart as I turned the pages of my book – of my father's book – in contemplation. Many of its passages I knew by heart, and I did not have to read them to feel the thrill of their power; the imprint of those words already lay upon my heart, upon my soul. I already knew them to be true.
Instead I studied the pictures, searching for meaning in the ancient engravings: a circle of stones on a heath, each one crooked and leaning like an old forgotten gravestone; the moon hanging low in the sky above an ancient forest; a boat run aground on a shoal of sand; a room in a crumbling castle, where the ground was littered with bones; and worst of all a shrike impaling a small lizard upon the spine of a hawthorn tree. I shivered, thinking of the fairy tales Bessie would tell us when she happened to be in good humour, tales like John Uskglass and the Cumbrian Charcoal-Burner, and while she spoke their spell would weave around us, and for a moment we would all three be transported to a world where the Raven King still ruled in the North and where magic was not gone from England.
It was the same spell that wrapped around me now, fashioned from the sound of the rain and the faint smell of dust on the curtain and the feel of the pages of the book beneath my fingers, but like all spells it had to end, and this one ended when the breakfast door opened.
"Madam Mope," cried John Reed. He paused at the sight of the room apparently empty. "Where the dickens is she?"
I closed my eyes, praying he would not think to look behind the curtain. The window had fogged up with my breath and the air around me clung close. The rain seemed to take on a curious rhythmic beat, echoing the pounding of my heart against my ribs.
He will not find me, I wished, and the rain echoed this thought against the window. I pressed my hands laid flat against the book, against the words written centuries ago. He will not find me.
And if it had been John Reed alone my little spell might have worked, but I heard Eliza say, "She is in the window-seat, to be sure, Jack."
The rain and my heart together seemed to stop. I closed my eyes, and gently shut the book, before slipping out from behind the curtain. "What do you want?" I asked.
He sank down in an armchair. "Say, 'What do you want, Master Reed?'" he replied. "I want you to come here." He gestured to a spot before him.
I obeyed, creeping forwards, while he tugged at the red scarf around his neck and sneered at me. He had inherited his mother's instinctive fear of fairies, and hating this sought to make me as afraid of him as he was of me. In this he had succeeded, for there was nothing I could do to him, while when he was not at school he was at his leisure to torment and bully me from morning to night. The servants would not interfere, and although he had both struck and insulted me in his mother's presence, she believed that I was the untrustworthy one. I had fairy-blood in my veins, which meant that I was cruel and capricious, a changeling in her home, to be feared and despised. To have me under her roof was to risk the household, because fairies could never be trusted.
I curled my fingers as I approached his chair, keeping my head down. I thought of the feel of the paper beneath my hands, of the savage magic within the pages of Thomas Lanchester's book and all he had written on the Other Lands and the Raven King. I wished with all my heart that I could could do magic, that I could punish this boy who tormented me. I wished I could bring the stones of the house thundering down on his head, or that I could task the river to bear him away to the sea. And perhaps he guessed something of what I was thinking because he struck me without warning, slapping me with a backhand so hard I almost fell.
"What were you doing behind the curtain?" he demanded.
"I was reading."
"Show the book."
I obeyed. Within the little alcove, my gaze moved to the window. It seemed almost as if something was written there in the intricate labyrinths the raindrops formed upon the glass. Beyond in the garden all was mist, and here the book was waiting for me. Soft red leather and within the world of ancient magic, of English magic. I picked it up and returned.
He took it from me, handling it roughly and sparing it little more than a cursory glance.
"You have no business to take our books," he said.
It is my book, I thought. It is my father's book. But I swallowed back my anger, while John Reed continued to abuse me.
"You are a thief," he said, "Like all fairies. You cannot be trusted with honest people's property. You ought to beg and not to live here with gentlemen's children like us, and eat the same meals we do, and wear clothes at our mama's expense, and steal our books–"
"It is my book."
He flushed red. "It's not your book, you little rat. It's mine. All the books in this house are mine. Everything in this house belongs to me, or will do in a few years." He paused, gripping the book tight. My gaze darted towards it, to how he was gripping it with no care for how precious it was, how priceless. And it was priceless; The Language of Birds was a book of magic, written by a practising magician, and there were no more practising magicians left in England. No new books of magic had been written in England for centuries, only books about magic, which were not the same thing at all.
A sly little look crossed John Reed's face when he saw my glance at the book. "Go and stand by the door," he ordered. "Out of the way of the mirror and the windows."
And again, I obeyed, at first not realising what his intentions were until the moment he stood and drew back his arm to fling the book hard at me. I cried out in alarm and horror as it hit me and I stumbled, striking my head against the door frame. My vision blurred, first from the pain,and then from tears. I stared at the book, resting on the floor, and a strange kind of helpless rage surged through me.
Inside my heart something twisted.
I tasted the rain in my mouth, heard it whispering in my ear, and that rage began to gather, tightening into a hard knot of power in my chest. At John's tread behind me, I spun, saw a flash of startled fear in his eyes. I do not know what it was that he saw in my my face to make him so frightened, but he flinched away from me. A surging sensation tore through my body, and the sound of the rain drumming on the windows intensified, and it felt as if the blood running through my veins had become the rain itself and all its magic and power was mine to do with as I wished.
"What are you doing?" he demanded, a high edge of fear to his voice.
"I am doing magic."
"You... you can't, you little liar! You rat!"
I reached out, snatched the scarf from around his neck. He cried out in shock, jerking away, then stared at it in my hand, the little red scarf, his only protection from enchantment. I was breathing hard, filled with the power and magic of the rain. I don't know what happened then, but something must have, for he gave a high terrified scream, and fell backwards, crying out for his mother while I advanced, his scarf clutched tight in my hand. His terrified eyes fixed upon the sight of it in my hand as I curled my fist about it, and he began to scream–
I do not know what I would have done next. My body seemed hardly my own, the magic that enveloped me was borrowed, and I was wild with terror and hatred and fury. Had I meant to hurt him, or only to frighten him? I would never find out. His sisters had run for their mother, who now burst through the door, with Bessie and Miss Abbot close behind.
Mrs Reed's eyes widened in terror at the sight of her precious boy on the floor at the feet of the little changeling girl she feared and hated, and at the red scarf clutched in the hand of that little changeling girl. She saw only what she had long expected to see. At the expression in her eyes, the power of the rain deserted me, draining away in an instant. I sagged in fright, the scarf dropping from my hand.
As John scrambled to his feet and circled away from me, his fat cheeks scarlet, Mrs Reed bent to pick up the book. "She was trying to do fairy-magic, Mama," he said. "She tried to curse me." She stared at the book, her face very pale, and then she lifted her gaze to mine.
"Take her away to the red room," she said, her voice and hollow. "And lock her in."
I fought and struggled all the way. Each time I tried to calm myself, I saw the book – my book – on the floor, felt the sting on my forehead where it had struck me, and I felt an echo of that strange inhuman wildness which had overtaken me.
I had done magic. I had done magic. It could not be true; no magic had been done in England for three hundred years, but I had called upon the rain and it had answered. And even if I could not feel it now, it had left its mark on me. For the first time, wild and struggling against Bessie and Abbot as they dragged me to the red room, I saw myself as others must have seen me: as something unnatural. As something more than and less than human.
"For shame!" Abbot said. "I always said no good would come of having a creature with fairy-blood in the house! For shame, Miss Eyre, to curse a young gentleman, your benefactress's son! Your master."
"Master?" I gasped. "How is he my master? Am I a servant?"
"No," she snapped. "You are less than a servant, for you do nothing for your keep."
They dragged me into the Red Room and thrust me upon the Ottoman by the the fireplace. "There," she said. "Sit down, and think over your wickedness."
At once I tried to stand up and they thrust me back down, and threatened to tie me down if I did not sit still. This was enough to cow me and I shrank down against the Ottoman, while they backed away from me, eyeing me warily.
"I've told Missus before about that child," Miss Abbot said. "It's bad luck to have someone of fairy blood in the house, and she's a sly, wicked little thing. And to attack Master John!"
I looked pleadingly at Bessie, who did not seem quite so fearful and hateful as Abbot. "Why would you behave so, Miss Eyre? You ought to be grateful to Mrs Reed. She keeps you. If she were to turn you off, you would have to go to the poorhouse."
And as they talked, as they reminded me of my dependency, of how humble and grateful and agreeable I ought to be, my hands clenched in my lap, and I thought about how I had done magic. I could still taste the rain on my tongue, could feel the keen edge of magic vibrating in every part of my body. It was only a memory now, but I itched to return to The Language of Birds, to revisit Thomas Lanchester's work. I would find new meaning there now, I was certain. But even as I thought this, the memories of the magic were growing distant, breaking apart like a dream after waking. It was slipping away from me, and I could not remember how I had done it.
I could not remember, and I was beginning to wonder if it had happened at all.
"Come, Bessie," Abbot said. "We will leave her. I am glad that I am not in any way a fairy. Say your prayers, Miss Eyre. Your kind cannot help being wicked, and if you don't repent something bad might be permitted to come down the chimney and fetch you away."
And with that they left, closing the door behind them. I flinched at the snap of the key in the lock.
The red room was seldom slept in, only when an influx of visitors to Gateshead Hall made it necessary. With the blinds always drawn, and the windows draped with heavy swags of fabric, the room existed in a state of perpetual twilight gloom. It was a place of silence, the room where Mr Reed had passed away, lying in the vast mahogany bed, which was hung with dark red damask curtains and carved with a myriad of birds and twining tendrils of ivy. Everywhere I looked was shadow, gathered about the bed, and around the heavy furniture.
I tore my gaze away from the darkness and sought to fix the memory of how the magic had felt in my mind, but with every moment that passed, I continued to forget, until there was nothing but the gloom and the shadows and my hands' white knuckles in my lap.
From where I sat on the Ottoman near the marble chimney piece, I could see my reflection in the looking glass between the windows. A slight pale little thing, half-hidden in the shadows myself, my white face and hands little more than blurs in the gloom. And in the mirror, it seemed almost as if the shadows were darkening around me, as if I might be lost entirely.
I half wished I would be, that they would come back to find me gone and the door still locked. The magicians of long-ago had been able to open up doorways to Faerie. They had been able to travel along the King's Roads as simply and as quickly as they might walk through a door. Why should I not do the same thing? John Reed was cruel to me. He abused and mistreated me, while his sisters and his mother and the servants looked away.
Georgiana was spoiled and spiteful, and Eliza headstrong and proud and selfish, and still they were indulged and respected, but I was a fairy, a changeling, and no matter that I tried so hard to please them, tried not to seem sly and untrustworthy, nothing that I did made one scrap of difference. I had fairy-blood in me and I was the daughter of a magician and I could not be trusted.
The room seemed to be growing darker. I glanced at my reflection, at that slight shivering shape in the mirror, whose face I could not see. Here the fire was seldom lit, and the air was so cold it leached away the last scrap of my courage. The rain drummed against the windows, muted by the heavy drapes, a low drumbeat that rumbled in my throat. Weak and dizzy from the blow, I turned my mind to the book, to The Language of Birds, tried to imagine the feel of the leather beneath my hands, how it felt when I gripped the cover and turned the page to the frontispiece, to the etching of the Raven King striding over the moors.
He had left England centuries ago, but he was not gone. He was not dead. Someone like him, who had been raised in Faerie, who knew how to talk to the stones, the wind, the rain, someone like him could never die.
John Uskglass was said to snatch away Christians to Faerie, and they said abductions always came in threes. I had never been afraid of fairies – how could I be when I had fairy blood myself? I did not belong here and I was not welcome here. I was not like Eliza or Georgiana, not pretty or careless or bold; I had taken after my father, and as far as they were concerned, he had taken after his. They did not love me, and I did not love them, and I began to wonder if I should not be happier in Faerie? Many magicians had gone there after all, centuries ago.
And I had done magic. I had–
A bell tolled. It was a far off distant sound, low and mournful, and one which I was certain I had never heard before. I exhaled, my eyes widening at the sound, my eyes darting to the mirror.
My courage deserted me.
Perhaps I was wicked. Perhaps I was a cruel and capricious little thing. Because I had meant to hurt John Reed. I had wanted to make him cry out and beg for mercy, as he had done to me countless times before. It was wicked to want to do that, and it was wicked to wish I could be snatched away, and still all I could think of was the etching in that book, of the Raven King and his messenger, the black bird against the white sky.
The Raven King. Oh God, the Raven King.
The bell tolled again, and a sensation of frost seemed to burn over my skin, raising goose flesh and making me shiver. I stared at my reflection in the mirror, saw the shadows grow darker still and my own reflection paler and less distinct, as if I was sinking into the shadows, as if they were gathering around me. I would disappear, I thought. The shadows would envelop me and I would be gone.
With a soft cry I stood, and moved forwards out of the gloom. My reflection moved with me, but I had the curious fear that it was no longer my reflection, that the mirror looked instead on some other room, similar to this one but changed in some way that I could not define, and the child in the mirror was not me, but a wicked little thing, as heartless and cruel as Mrs Reed thought me. A thing of spite and malice, who would pinch and bite and rend, dig her sharp little nails into flesh and–
The bell tolled again. Louder now. Closer. And an image flashed through my mind. The images I had seen countless times in The Language of Birds, a vast swollen moon hanging low over an ancient forest, and hanging from the trees were bodies, and the shrike working the body of a lizard down onto the spike of a hawthorn tree, only it was not the body of a lizard any longer but of a man, his skin strangely mottled as if with woad.
"No," I whispered, and the reflection in the mirror echoed me, mockingly, with a sly little smile. No, no, no.
And deeper in the mirror, something was coming. The mirror clouded over as something formed just on the other side of the glass. I saw dark hills and what might have been an old Roman road, rutted and crumbling, and a shape coming towards me along that road beneath an overcast sky. A man with black hair and black eyes and black clothes, his helm mantled with raven feathers, and behind him a seething darkness which surged past him, until it filled the sky. Until I could make out the shapes in the darkness and I could see the black mass was a vast flock of ravens. Millions of them. So many they blotted out the sky.
They crashed through the mirror and burst into the room, the sound of their wings and their cawing deafening. And behind them still was the road, still the sense of something coming for me. I screamed, and flung up my hands to protect my face. Something scraped against my cheek with a sharp stab of agony, and I flung myself to the ground, rolling into a ball, while the ravens continued to pour from the mirror, claws scratching at my neck, my clothes, my scalp.
I screamed, and the bell tolled on.
Waking felt like struggling to surface from a deep lake, my body weighed down by my sodden clothes, and in the shadows I could still hear the mournful bell, and it seemed to be coming from the depths of the lake. Surfacing, I saw the sky above black with ravens and at the edge of the lake a man stood waiting.
I woke to find myself in my own bed, staring at the nursery fire with its guard. Someone was talking, but my thoughts were tangled as a thicket; I could not seem to make out what they were saying, and for an instant I thought that I was in the wrong place, that I had been carried into the reflection and had not escaped the red room at all.
A soft voice whispered reassurances, and I closed my eyes, my fears slipping away. A few moments later, I felt well enough to open my eyes again. This was the nursery, not the strange shore of some desolate lake or the room inside the mirror. Bessie sat by the bed, regarding me with concern.
"Do you feel as if you could sleep again, Miss?" she asked. There was a caution about her, and I wondered if she knew or suspected anything of what had happened in the red room. Had she seen the ravens or had they vanished back into the world of the mirror? But if she had seen them, surely she would have said something.
"I will try," I said, and still she hesitated. She knows, I thought. She knew or suspected something had happened, something fearful.
"Would you like to drink, or could you eat anything?"
I shook my head and thanked her. She drew back, watching unhappily as I settled down, but still she seemed unwilling to go.
"I saw him," I whispered, and she frowned.
"Saw who, Miss?"
"The Raven King. He was in the mirror."
She drew in a sharp breath, then reached out and stroked my hair. "You must have been dreaming, Miss. That's all it was. A dream." But her face was pale and her hand was trembling and I do not think she believed her own words.
She left me then, and when I slept I dreamed of John Uskglass and a sky black with ravens.
Some days passed before I felt able to leave the nursery again. The incident in the red room had left my nerves shaken. Finally, however, my anxiety about what had happened to my book became too much to bear. I remembered the way Mrs Reed had stared down at the book in her hands and the terrible look on her face, full of terror and fear, and although I would have stayed in the nursery, wrapped warm by the fire, I had to know.
When Bessie left for the kitchen, I ventured down to the breakfast room in search of my father's precious book. Mrs Reed had gone out in the carriage with her three children, so I should have been quite safe, but somehow I no longer felt so. I did not think I would ever feel safe in that house again. Whenever I passed a mirror I had to turn my gaze away, shuddering, afraid of seeing a sky black with countless birds and a man in his raven-mantled helm.
The book was not in the breakfast room, nor could I find it in the library, and as I paced the shelves, I realised I could find none of my Uncle Reed's other books of and about magic either.
They were all gone, and a deep feeling of unease filled me. The thought that Mrs Reed might have destroyed them ran through my mind, but she was superstitious and the ancient crime of book-murder, for which the punishment was hanging, would have been quite beyond her. I hoped only that she had locked the books away, and that they were not lost to me completely, but I felt certain that they were. With this thought in my mind, I ventured to the kitchen to find Bessie and to ask her if she knew what had happened to my uncle's books.
I had to pass a mirror in the hall, and began to turn my head aside, afraid of what I might see, when the grandfather clock began to chime. I cried out in terror, jerking towards the noise, my heart skittering so quickly in my chest I thought I might die.
But it was only the clock striking one. I shuddered, and glanced nervously around at the mirror behind me, certain I would see that spiteful little reflection sneering at me. Instead it was only my own face, drawn and pale, and with tears of fright on my cheeks, and I moved quickly on, hurrying towards the kitchen, hoping Bessie would be there.
She was, but there was someone else sitting at the table with her. A man I had never seen before, and whose appearance made the low embers of my fear flare suddenly brighter.
He was lean and dark, a dangerous-looking sort of man, unshaven and gypsyish, with long black hair which fell raggedly about his pale face. It was as if the Raven King himself had stepped fully formed from my waking vision in the red room and now sat at the kitchen table. As the scullery maid set a tankard of beer before him, he gave a nod and thanked her, and his voice was as dark as his hair and his eyes and his clothes, and his accent was clearly that of Yorkshire. And in my dazed, frightened state, I was able to think only one thing: It is John Uskglass. He has come for me.
At my intake of breath the man glanced up and saw me cowering in the doorway. I shrank back, about to flee, but it was too late: he had seen me. "It's all right, girl," he called out. "You've nothing to fear from me."
And now that he had called me, I could not escape. Reluctantly, I slunk inside the kitchen, and although his appearance terrified me, I was unable to look away from him. He watched me as I edged around the kitchen table, trying to keep it between us.
"This is Miss Jane Eyre, sir," Bessie explained. "Her mother was the late Mr Reed's sister, and Mrs Reed has taken her in. Miss Eyre, this is Mr Childermass."
"You've been crying, Miss Eyre," he said. "Are you frightened of me?"
I hesitated, fidgeting, wishing that I could escape from the kitchen without answering the question, but I could see no way of doing so. "Yes, sir."
"Miss Jane," Bessie said, reprovingly, but Mr Childermass lifted his hand and she fell still, her eyes resting on his face.
"It's no matter," he said. "I dare say I am a frightening sort of man to a child. Was there anything in particular about my appearance that startled you, Miss Eyre? My hair, perhaps?"
"It... it was no one thing, sir," I said, but he continued to watch me shrewdly. "Just for a moment, I mistook you for him."
"For whom?"
"John Uskglass, sir," I said, and he stared at me in surprise. Whatever he had expected to hear, it was not this.
I shrank back, afraid he would be angry, but then his eyes flashed with amusement and he smiled, a strange one-sided smile, mocking and delighted all at once. "You thought I was the Raven King?"
"Miss," Bessie said, her eyes wide and shocked, "apologise to Mr Childermass."
He shook his head, still smiling. "No, she must not apologise. I am a man of Yorkshire, and the Raven King is my king. It's an honour to be mistaken for him." And then to me: "But what do you have to fear from him, Miss Eyre?"
"I saw him, sir. He came to take me away."
His smile did not slip, but the glittering amusement vanished from his eyes. His voice sharpened. "You saw him? Where?"
Bessie sighed, shaking her head. "She's a fanciful child, sir. She lies."
"I do not lie, Bessie," I protested. "It's Georgiana who lies. I called for him, like in Thomas Lanchester's book, and he came."
"You should not make up stories, Miss–" Bessie began.
"Let the girl speak." And this sharpness in his voice was new. It snapped like a whip and there was power in it. I felt a strange shivery sensation ripple down my arms, raising goosebumps on my skin. The mocking amusement in his voice was gone, and although he had not moved, although he still sat back in his chair like a lord, an eagerness seemed to have tightened every sinew in his body. A startled expression crossed Bessie's face, and she sank back, cowed and blinking. "Tell your tale, Miss Eyre."
"I saw him in the red room, sir," I said, no more able to disobey him than Bessie was. "In my Uncle Reed's room. He was in the mirror. A bell rang, a King's Road opened up, and I saw him..."
"How did you know it was the Raven King?"
"There were birds. Ravens, sir. One scratched my cheek." I pointed to the healing welt on my cheek, and he beckoned me forward and gently took hold of my chin with his calloused fingers, turned my head to examine it.
"She was in a fit of terror, sir," Bessie said, unable to stay silent for long. Her voice was softer now, a little gentler. "Most likely she did it to herself without realising."
"Maybe," he said, still frowning at me. He released me. "What did he look like?"
"Like you, sir. He had dark hair and was very pale, and he was dressed all in black."
Did he believe me? I could not tell. There was doubt in his eyes, but a kind of hunger too, a longing for my tale to be true.
"You spoke of Thomas Lanchester's book," he said, after a few moments of silence. "You mean The Language of Birds?"
"Yes, sir. It belonged to my father. It is the only thing I have of him."
There was a flash of something in his eyes that might have been pity, but his expression did not change. "I'm afraid it belongs to my master now, Miss Eyre. He has bought it from Mrs Reed, along with several other volumes of and about magic."
Helpless hopeless fury flooded me, but there was nothing I could do. I sank back in silence, tears prickling in my eyes, hands knotted together.
"Do you make a habit of reading magical volumes, Miss Eyre?" he asked.
"I have read all my Uncle Reed's books of magic, sir," I said. My voice was numb, hollow; the loss of The Language of Birds made my throat ache. "Except De Generibus Artium Magicarum, because it is in Latin and I cannot read Latin." I swallowed. "Have you purchased them all, sir?"
"My master has. He's not discriminating when it comes to books of magic." He paused, regarding me thoughtfully. "The Raven King, where did you say you saw him?"
At the red room he went in first. With Bessie behind me, I hovered at the door, too nervous to cross over the threshold into that terrible room. Mr Childermass moved slowly to the mirror, a strange sort of reverence about his movements, which only served to make me more fearful still. He believed me. Or, if he did not quite believe, then at least he had a suspicion that what I was saying might be true, and that possibility filled me with a terrible dread. If I went into that room, the King's Road might open up once more and I could be snatched away to Faerie and enchanted.
He raised a hand to the surface of the mirror, tilting his head as he studied his reflection. He didn't quite touch the glass, but snatched his hand away, and stood for a moment, as if in thought. "Come in, Miss Eyre," he told me.
I held back, gripping onto the door frame. Bessie pressed me forwards, hissing, "Do as Mr Childermass says, Jane," and I could not disobey them both. I stumbled into the room on legs unsteady as a colt's. He watched me, I think, in the mirror as I drew closer. My heart raced so fast in my chest I wanted to cry out with the terror of it. I stopped partway, certain if I took another step I would crumple to the ground.
The air seemed charged about me, thick with an undefinable energy, not so strong as it had been when the King's Road opened up, but still so thick I could almost taste it, and I wondered that he could not.
"Come forward," he said.
"I... I don't think I can, sir." But I took a step, and another, until I stood beside him at the mirror. His hand rested on my shoulder. He smelled of tobacco and of horse and of the rain itself. Side by side we stared into the mirror.
"Good girl," he said and the mocking edge to his voice was gone. There was a strange sort of gentleness about him now, but his hand felt heavy on my shoulder and his eyes were still hungry and eager. "Tell me what you see."
"I don't see anything, sir."
"Look deeper," he told me. And as my eyes darted to meet his reflection's gaze: "Into the mirror, girl, not at me. Tell me what you see."
And far off I heard the distant ringing of a bell. I shivered; it was a mournful sound, and I thought of the shrike, the little body impaled on a spike. "I see the room, sir. Nothing more."
"And?"
"And..." And as I stared deeper, only distantly aware of his reflection and Bessie's, how she was holding back now, a hand pressed over her mouth. She seemed to have taken on all my fear, all my dread, for I no longer felt afraid. Something was spreading through me now, the same prickling sensation of power which had overtaken me when John Reed had thrown the book at me.
The reflection of the room in the mirror was shrouded with shadows. And instead of my eyes growing accustomed to the gloom, if anything the shadows seemed to be thickening about us, gathering like folded cloth, until our pale faces were nothing more than smears upon the glass, our eyes empty holes. And in the very depths of the mirror a strange speck of light had appeared, only a brief flicker at first, but it was growing stronger and steadier, drawing closer. My breath speeded up, and Mr Childermass's hand tightened upon my shoulder. He murmured something – I do not know what it was he said, but his tone was encouraging, and even so, underlying it, there was that urgency.
The bell rang again, and now it was louder, much louder. I flinched and he held me steady, and I could see the speck of light now, I could see what it was. It was a road, oh God, it was the road again, and something was coming for me. Not the Raven King now, but something else, something terrible. I tried to close my eyes, tried to tear myself away from the mirror, but a strange languor had gripped my body and I could not seem to make myself move.
A sudden flurry of noise and commotion shattered the spell. Bessie cried out, startled, and Mr Childermass released me. I sagged, gasping, cast one terrified glance into the mirror, then tore myself away.
The cause of the noise was a bird, and as Mr Childermass swung around, his clothes brushed against me like a burst of wings, and for an instant I was back in the storm of birds, the chaos around my head. As Bessie ran to the window to let out the bird, he swore, staring up at the bird, and it was clear to see what he must have been thinking. Although he did not seem like a man easily given over to superstition, he was still a man of the North, and he must have been taken by the notion that it was a raven that had been sent by John Uskglass himself.
But then the curtains were open, the blinds raised, and although it was a cold overcast day, the light was almost blinding. We could all see it was not a raven at all, but a magpie, and with the curtains open it was easy to see what had happened from the dark scattering of soot on the rug before the hearth: the bird had come down the chimney.
He helped Bessie usher it out, while I shrank against the wall, creeping towards the door. I was afraid that once they had rid the room of the bird, he might make me look in the mirror again, and I was afraid of what I might see. I never wanted to look in that mirror again.
Once the bird was gone and the window closed once more Bessie murmured something I did not hear. He laughed, a self-mocking sort of sound, and in it I could hear the release of tension. "For a moment I thought it was," he admitted, turning away from the window.
"John Uskglass himself?" she teased, her eyes lingering on his face as if she were quite entranced by him.
"Aye," he said, and as he turned his eyes caught on me. His face twisted in a smile. "And young Miss Eyre the first practical magician to open up a King's Road since the sixteenth century. Wouldn't my master be surprised to hear that?"
"I did tell you she was fanciful, sir," Bessie said. "But she can't help it. I expect it is her father's influence and the fairy-blood in her." Her gaze roamed around the room, resting on the mess of the rug, her smile vanishing. "Oh, look at this room."
"Don't blame the girl," he told her. "It was my fault, not hers."
Bessie was stooping to pick a feather from the carpet by the Ottoman. She shot him a strange look as she straightened up. "It was nobody's fault, sir. You did not call that bird down the chimney, and Miss Jane certainly did not."
He looked a little taken aback. "No," he said, slowly. "I suppose not, but..." And then he broke off, staring at the feather in her hand. He took it from her, turning it over in his hands, his brows lowering into a frown. It had not come from the magpie, as it was entirely black.
It was a raven's feather.
Mr Childermass's gaze turned my way, not angry, no longer mocking or amused, but filled with a strange glittering darkness.
I did the only thing I could.
I fled.
A/N: All comments are hugely welcome and appreciated, particularly constructive criticism. Thank you for reading.