The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door

2

If it hadn’t been for the Great War, I would never have gone to Camford University of Magical Scholarship.

I would never have known it existed.

I was eleven when my brother went away to war.

It was the October of 1914, the autumn after what everyone later called the last golden summer.

It was an oversimplification, like most things, but I do remember those months as unusually perfect: the fields of our farm yellowed and dry under an endless blue sky, the ground already warm under my bare feet when I collected the eggs in the morning.

Then all too soon the weather was cooling, the call for soldiers was ringing in the streets, and Mum was adamant that Matthew stay exactly where he was.

“Help me talk to her, will you, Clove?”

he said, one evening in the barn.

We were pitching hay from the loft; he kept his eyes on his work, and I couldn’t see his face.

“Please.

She listens to you.”

That was true back then, as much as Mum listened to anyone.

Young as I was, I was the eldest daughter, and I was considered the brightest at our small village school.

Recently, the schoolmistress had told my father she believed that in a few short years I could train as a teacher at a residential college.

To my mother, who could barely read, that gave my opinions a grudging weight they shouldn’t have had.

“You don’t need her permission.”

The truth was, I didn’t want him to go either.

“She can’t stop you.”

“If she says I’m needed here,”

he said, “I won’t go.

You know that.

But the war will be over in a few months.

The farm will do fine without me until then.

It might be the only chance I get to see the world. Besides, I should be out there. Everyone my age is going.”

They were, I knew that.

Officially, Matthew was still too young, not quite seventeen, but many lads even younger lied about their age and signed up.

I also knew the shame that would settle on him if he didn’t go with them—not just private shame, although that would poison him more surely, but public ridicule.

The country was swept up in a wave of patriotism, and Pendle Hill was being carried away in the flood.

I had already seen several young women in town handing out white feathers to any man who looked of combat-ready age, their eyes burning with silent resentment. Last Sunday the vicar had preached the honour of serving one’s country, and the usually dozing church had erupted into applause.

I had been caught in the surge of those words too.

If I had been a boy and older, I would have gone with Matthew myself, gladly.

I longed for new experiences just as he did, and in those days I had read far too many adventure stories to doubt the glory of battle.

The trouble was, I couldn’t go, not even as a nurse.

And all I could think of was my brother in some foreign field, alone.

“Do you really want to leave us?”

I asked, and hated myself for sounding like a child.

“’Course not.”

He stopped and looked at me properly for the first time.

“You know I don’t.

But I can’t be here while it’s going on.

I just can’t.”

That, in the end, was what got me.

Because however much I hated the thought of him going, the thought of what staying here would do to him was worse.

I couldn’t bear watching him every day of the war, and then beyond it, wishing he was somewhere else, watching regret eat at him until he came to hate himself and us for keeping him here.

I loved all my siblings, but Matthew was mine.

It was how the six of us divided up: Matthew and I, the two eldest; Marigold and Holly, the middle girls; Iris and Little John, the babies.

The five years between us, the fact that I was closer in age to the middle girls than to him, never seemed to make a difference.

Nor did the fact he was confident and fit and eternally optimistic where I was quiet and bookish and sceptical.

We shared an older-sibling responsibility for our family, coupled with a burning curiosity about the world away from the farm, and we had muddled through both together since I was old enough to walk. Neither of us said this in as many words—I doubt we could have. It was just there between us, an unbreakable thread woven of work and laughter and childhood adventures and serious late-night conversations in the hayloft. In some strange way, it was really my permission he needed to go, just as I had needed his when I had confided to him, the year before, that I wanted to leave home at sixteen and train to be a teacher.

“All right,”

I said.

“I’ll talk to her.”

Matthew caught the train to London in October, a month before my twelfth birthday, and we didn’t see him for over four years.

Letters came often at first, sometimes spattered with dirt, sometimes scored through with the censor’s black lines, always cheerful, filled with allusions to alien places so exciting that I burned with envy and feared for his safety in one confused rush.

We would write back telling him all our news, assuring him that we were fine without him, longing for him to come home soon.

Others came home, broken and scarred and hollow-eyed with fatigue, as the war stretched on long past the few months we had been promised, and the stories of horror began to trickle back with them.

Matthew never did.

Three times he was granted leave, and all three times he was too far away to make it to us.

Twice he was hospitalised, first with pneumonia and then with a minor leg wound, and both times he was patched up and sent back up the line.

The gaps between his letters widened, and the letters, when they came, soon said almost nothing at all. That hurt me a little, and frightened me a lot more. Matthew and I had always shared everything.

And then in August 1918, in what was to be the very last push of the war, we received a telegram telling us that he had been seriously wounded in action in Amiens.

It was hard to know what to feel: relief, first and foremost, that the telegram had said wounded and not dead; terror that he may yet die; a wrench of the stomach to think of my elder brother, daring and mischievous and invulnerable, lying in pain in a filthy field hospital somewhere I couldn’t even picture clearly in my head.

France.

All I knew about it were the bald facts I had learned in geography, and most of those would have been torn up by war long ago.

The next few months were long, anxious stretches of holding our breaths, punctuated by occasional gasps of air.

One breath: a letter from Matthew, three weeks after the telegram, a short scrawled promise that he was alive and doing much better.

We knew nothing more—whether he had been sent back to his unit or was coming home or had died the very next day.

Another breath, or a sob of relief: The war was finally over, and there was to be no more fighting.

There was dancing in the streets, and tears, and celebration mixed with terrible grief. But the soldiers wouldn’t be home for weeks, we were told, even months, and however many letters I wrote, we could learn no news of my brother. One day he had been well enough to write, and that was all we had to cling to.

That winter the Spanish flu came in a greater wave than before, and it reached our house.

For a time it seemed we might lose my little brother and sister as well.

They were spared, in the end.

It took my father.

He died just before Christmas, never knowing what had become of his eldest son.

It wasn’t until January 1919 that we heard a knock at the door.

Standing on our doorstep was a small man, fair-haired, with horn-rimmed glasses and a round, anxious face that cleared at the sight of my mother.

“Ah! Mrs. Hill?”

His voice was soft, with a Queen’s English accent that had formed far from a muddy Lancashire sheep farm.

“Please forgive the intrusion.

My name is Samson Truelove Wells—I served with your son.

May I have a word?”

It was there, seated around our heavy kitchen table nursing tea in chipped cups, that we heard for the first time about the magical world that lurked in the corners of our own—the world of mages and scholars, of hedgewitches and spellbooks and old Families.

We learned, at the same time, that Matthew hadn’t been struck by a bullet or a shell, but by a faerie curse.

“It should never have happened,”

Mr.

Wells said.

Beneath his glasses and refined accent, he couldn’t have been more than in his early twenties—Matthew’s age.

But I was sixteen, I hadn’t seen Matthew in years, and that seemed old to me.

“Magic is a carefully kept secret and always has been. That was made very clear at the start of this war, and for that reason we were all strongly discouraged from signing up. Any mage who wanted to take to the battlefield, on either side, had to swear to never use magic in public, even at the cost of his own life. Nobody, though, was prepared for those battlefields. Most young men don’t have it in them to die rather than break a promise to an authority that doesn’t care. Things slipped out. And on that day, at Amiens, somebody opened a faerie door. That’s difficult magic under the best of circumstances, and it went very wrong. The faerie broke free, and it killed men on both sides. Matthew was one of those hit by its curse. Thank God, I got to him in time.”

“Are you his superior officer?”

my mother asked cautiously.

I think she still hadn’t taken in the full measure of what he was saying.

She was only wondering why a young man who was so clearly a gentleman cared if her son lived or died.

“Oh no.”

Mr.

Wells understood the question perfectly.

“I was a private—I enlisted three years ago.

I could have bought a commission, I suppose, but I didn’t want to lead.

Being what I was, too, I thought it better to keep my head down. Your son and I came through the Somme together. He had been out there longer, even though he was a year younger than I was, and he looked after me, always. And so, when I could, I looked after him. Fortunately, I did an assignment on faerie curses at Camford in my first year, before I signed up. I performed the counter-curse before it reached his heart, inexpertly I’m afraid, but he’s safe, and he’ll be coming home to you as soon as he’s permitted. First, though, I need to warn you—to tell you. To explain to you about our world.”

If we’d been in London or even Manchester, among the well-read and well-informed, we might have heard whispers of it before.

Magic, it seemed, had been practiced for centuries.

It was a closely guarded secret, passed down through families yet forbidden to outsiders.

Even so, history was full of moments when things had leaked out, odd miracles and happenstances and glimmers of spellcraft.

There had never been more than in the last four years: platoons disappearing into midair, birds summoning help for injured men, nurses who could heal when all hope seemed impossible, deaths that couldn’t be explained. The Great War had torn everything apart; it stood to reason it would tear those veils of secrecy too. As Mr. Wells had said, battlefields were no place for half-hearted promises, and trenches left little room to hide. Perhaps, too, this war had been better documented than those before it, with photographs and shaky camera footage bringing unthought-of images home. Nothing damning, but enough to spook the Families. And the incident at Amiens had more than spooked them. It had been an unprecedented disaster, and they were adamant that it should never happen again.

We barely grasped most of this at the time.

It was all startling and impossible coming from Mr.

Wells’s lips—the magical Families, the rules, the secrecy.

What I grabbed at and held to, as a drowning person might clutch at a branch, was that Matthew was coming home, and all things considered, he was safe.

I had been the eldest child in the house through four years of war and all that had come with it, and I hadn’t done that without holding firm to the belief that as long as we were alive there was nothing that couldn’t be fixed. Matthew was alive, and that was what mattered. I heard everything Mr. Wells said about the curse, and it didn’t faze me. He was going to be all right. I was going to make sure of it.

He wasn’t all right.

I could see that as soon as he stepped off the train.

It had been six months since he had been hurt, and he had spent them under lock and key in the care of the Families in France, half patient, half prisoner.

I don’t know if it was that or the years of war that had come before it that had whittled him so thin and pale, that had chiselled new lines at the corners of his eyes and between his brows, that had taken the light from his eyes and from his smile even as both kindled at the sight of us.

Either way, it shocked me, and the shock never quite faded.

When it was my turn to embrace him, I clung to him, his uniform coarse against my cheek, and felt the weakness in his left arm as he held me.

The younger children hung back, shy and a little awed. Even Holly and Mary barely remembered him now, and John and Iris had been babies when he left.

“All right?”

he asked as we parted, and his voice at least hadn’t changed.

“Jesus, Clover, you’re nearly as tall as I am.

When did that happen?”

“You tell me,”

I said, and hoped my own voice sounded as steady.

“You’re the one who shrank.”

He laughed, but I wished I hadn’t said it.

We saw the damage soon enough that evening.

He still needed a hand to shrug off his jacket and shirt in those days, and beneath it we could see the wound the curse had left.

I understood then why the Families had been worried—it looked like nothing that could have been inflicted by man or machine.

The entire shoulder was withered and cracked and hard like the grey-white bark of a tree.

It started just below the collar bone and crept out in dark fingers across his chest and down his arm and up toward his throat. I knew with sickening certainty that it had been reaching, in true fairy-tale fashion, for his heart.

“Does it hurt?”

Iris asked, wide-eyed.

I didn’t have to.

“A bit,”

he conceded.

“It’s getting better.

It’s nothing,”

he added firmly, seeing Mum’s face.

“I’m lucky to be alive to feel anything at all.”

He meant it, I know.

But it was difficult to remember that, as the days turned into months and it never did get better.

With our father so recently dead and our mother fully occupied with children and housework, the bulk of the farming fell squarely on him.

And the farm was struggling worse than ever in the wake of years of war and sickness.

I tried to help all I could, but he made this difficult by insisting that I go back to school. I had quietly not returned after that horrible Christmas, telling myself the farm and my family needed me, trying not to feel as though my future was being ripped away and nobody noticed or cared. Matthew noticed, and he wouldn’t have it.

“You’re going to go to train as a teacher,”

he said when I protested.

“I didn’t fight a bloody war to come home and watch you wither away here.”

So I went back to school.

I told myself that Matthew wanted it, that I needed to be learning again, that being a teacher would help my family, and all those things were true.

It was also true, though, that with my father dead and my brother half a stranger and home so grey and miserable, I longed to leave more than ever.

I hated feeling it, I was wretchedly guilty every time I did, and yet I needed there to be more to life than this.

There was a shortage of teachers after the war, as there was of so much else, and my chances of being accepted into a training college looked hopeful as long as I worked hard.

I studied every spare second I could.

I learned geometry and poetry and the kings and queens of England; after school, for an hour, the schoolmistress gave me extra lessons in Latin and ancient Greek.

Then I came home in time to help my mother make supper, and watched my brother grow more frustrated every time he came in.

I learned to tell the good days when his shoulder was a dull ache he could ignore, the bad days when every unexpected movement made him wince before he could hide it, the very worst days when he could barely move it at all, and I hated having to learn it more than any lesson school had ever given me.

I hated watching pain and worry wear away at him, drip by drip, like water on stone. I hated watching him be brave, knowing he’d already had so much practice at it.

The worst part, though, was the midnights.

The midnights were what Mr.

Wells had come to warn us about in person—what we needed to understand and Matthew couldn’t explain except as second-hand information.

On certain nights of the year, the nights of the old pagan festivals when faerie magic was at its strongest and mages would traditionally work their spells, Matthew would lose his mind.

“In the most literal sense of the word,”

Mr.

Wells explained, his round blue eyes serious behind their spectacles.

“He won’t be himself anymore.

It will last from sundown to sunup, give or take, so you’ll need to be ready.

During that time, he must be bound—with silver, preferably, though never underestimate a good, sound rope. He’ll talk to you, implore you, threaten you, try everything in his power to convince you to release him. You mustn’t listen. Keep the door closed, block your ears if you have to. Don’t let him go, even for a second. He’ll overpower you.”

“What will happen if he does?”

I asked, my throat dry.

“You’ll lose him,”

Mr.

Wells said bluntly.

“The fae are always trying to steal human bodies—they can’t survive long in the human world without them.

That curse will do everything in its power to deliver Matthew to the nearest faerie door.

If he made it through, the fae would claim him for their own. The doors are locked now, so that’s impossible, but…”

He broke off, looking away for the first time.

I had been through a war too.

I knew what that meant.

“Your people will kill him, won’t they?”

I said.

“The Families.”

My mother stiffened beside me, and Mr.

Wells sighed.

“Don’t think too badly of them,”

he said.

“They’re very scared right now—both of exposure and of faerie magic.

If he tried to get to the doors, out of his mind with a faerie curse, they would kill him on sight.

You must understand, nonmagical people struck by faerie curses are supposed to die.

I’m in a good deal of trouble for saving him in the first place, and a good deal more for using my family’s influence to push for him to be returned to you. That’s why it’s absolutely imperative that he be kept safe on those nights. It will be terrible, I can’t deny that. Nevertheless, you must promise me.”

He might have been talking to my mother.

I was the one who nodded, though, and so his gaze shifted to me.

“I will help if I can,”

he said.

“I promise.

Anything I can do, you need only to ask.”

But Mr.

Wells had left the house before Matthew returned, and he never saw him.

We had to struggle with it on our own.

And it was every bit as bad as Mr.

Wells had said.

It was strange and sickening to tie him up, the first time.

It was the night of the spring equinox—Ostara, on the calendar Mr.

Wells had given us.

We had no silver—the very idea was ridiculous—so we used ropes and chains with heavy padlocks, and shut the doors and windows tight for good measure.

“Go on,”

Matthew said, when he noticed me hesitating.

He sounded calm, but I could read the set of his jaw and the way his eyes never quite met ours.

He hated every second of this.

“I can’t remember what happens on these nights, but I’ve seen the state of the room the next day.

You can’t take any chances.”

So we tied him to his bed, in the narrow attic room he had to himself, and at his insistence, we stepped out and locked the door behind us.

Mum told me to go to bed; I wouldn’t.

The two of us sat outside on the stairs all night, not speaking, even when Matthew started to call for help.

They were quiet at first, those cries.

His voice came, plaintive, asking if we were still there.

We didn’t answer.

Mr.

Wells had warned us it was better not to.

“It’s all right,”

my brother’s voice said.

“I don’t think it’s happening tonight.

You can let me go.

Mum? Clover? Is anyone there?”

We still didn’t answer.

Mr.

Wells had warned us of that too.

The calls escalated over the night.

The pleading note deepened, then turned to anger.

He begged us by name, then he threatened.

By midnight the screams had started.

Mum gripped my hand in her hard bony fingers, and I gripped back just as tight. The night seemed to last a thousand years.

I only made one mistake.

It was almost dawn, the black around us beginning to lighten with the faintest hint of grey.

My eyes were gritty, my bones hollow with fatigue.

The voice behind the door had been quiet for over an hour.

I was half dozing when it came again.

“Clover?”

Matthew’s voice was soft, almost a whisper.

“Are you there?”

I sat up, blinking, rubbing my eyes hurriedly with the heel of my hand.

A quick glance beside me revealed that Mum had fallen asleep, leaning against the wall.

“Clover,”

the whisper came again.

“It’s all right.

It’s over now.

I’m back.

You can come let me out.”

It looks so obvious, set down on paper.

I knew, really, what was speaking.

In that hazy half-asleep hour, though, the world all shadows and uncertainties, I doubted what I knew.

It sounded so like Matthew; curses and enchantments were such a new idea to us all.

And what if it was him? I think, in the end, that was what caused me to get to my feet and creep to the door. What if it really was him—had been him all night, begging us for help, and we had been ignoring him?

“Clover,”

he said.

“Please.

Please let me out.”

That please was the last straw.

I pushed the door open.

The predawn haze through the window gave just enough light to see.

My brother’s body half sat, half lay on his bed, as upright as the ropes and chains would allow.

He was not inside it.

The familiar lines of his face had sharpened, shifted, contorted; when he smiled, it was a baring of teeth that chilled my stomach.

He raised his head, and his eyes glinted.

“It’s all right,”

the thing said with my brother’s mouth, while that strange light gleamed in his eyes.

“Come here.”

I slammed the door shut and slid the bolt home so fast the hem of my dress caught in the gap.

The fabric tore as I yanked it in a blind panic, leaving a small scrap of yellow caught against the wood.

On the other side of the door, I could hear the faerie-thing chuckling.

I sat there on the stairs, shaking, fighting back tears as Mum dozed beside me.

It truly was magic that gripped my brother.

I understood it then for the first time, and my world, already in fragments, began to take on a new and terrible shape.

The following night, while my family slept, I carefully crept downstairs to the kitchen.

The last embers of the stove were still burning, enough to see to light a candle.

I sat at the table and carefully laid out a piece of string with a knot in the middle.

Mr.

Wells had shown me the spell right at the end of his visit, almost as an afterthought.

I had followed him out to the gleaming motorcar waiting on our driveway, ready to point out the shortcut back to the main road.

“Can anyone do magic?”

I asked, right before he got in.

“Or only people like you?”

“Anyone, in theory,”

he said.

“Spells are simply a word and a gesture, very precisely performed.

It’s more difficult for anyone outside the Families, though.

Something to do with blood.”

“I could learn, though?”

“Slowly, with great effort.

You wouldn’t be able to do very much.”

He hesitated, looking at me with mingled guilt and doubt, then dipped into his pocket and pulled out a handkerchief.

“Here.”

It was the first time I noticed the silver ring on his left hand, though I didn’t know then what it was.

“Watch closely.”

He tied the handkerchief in a loose knot and held it out in the palm of one hand.

Then he passed the other hand over it with a twist of his fingers almost too rapid to see, and whispered, “ Bebind .”

I felt a shiver in the air, like a breath of wind in the dark—nothing more.

Mr.

Wells must have seen my sceptical expression, because his mouth twitched as he handed me the handkerchief.

“There,”

he said.

“Try to untie that.

You’ll find you can’t.

It’s a simple charm, one that renders a knot unbreakable.

If you could master it, it might help with the midnights.”

I tugged at the knot experimentally, then tried to unpick it with my fingers.

He was right.

It was stuck as fast as if it had been glued.

As magic went, it wasn’t spectacular, but it was the first I’d ever seen.

My heart quickened.