Feint and doublecross, p.1
Feint and Doublecross, page 1
Feint and Doublecross
Tournament of Shadows 4
Tilly Wallace
Copyright © 2023 by Tilly Wallace
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
v15022023
Cover design by Aero Gallerie
Editing by Moonshell Books
Proofreading by Ellison Lane (Kat's Literary Services)
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Contents
Blurb
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Also by Tilly Wallace
About the Author
Feint and Doublecross
Tournament of Shadows book 4
An unexpected move could place Sera in check… or will it be checkmate?
A strange beast stalks unfashionable Southwark, taking victims in a horrific fashion. Naturally, the Mage Council sends Sera to track the supernatural killer, while pressuring her to marry one of their hand-picked suitors.
With few clues as to whether the latest victim was targeted or if it was a random crime of opportunity, Sera casts a remembrance spell that brings to the surface a similar crime. Set on the trail of a decades-old curse that may have resulted in fatal consequences, Sera stumbles upon a tingle of familiar magic. Finally, she unravels long-buried secrets about her history.
Then, from the shadows, her opponent steps forward and makes a move. But with Sera distracted by revelations from her past, she could be in a deadly checkmate…
One
Late Autumn, 1788
London, England
There cannot be another Nereus.
When Seraphina Winyard first read that warning on Lord Branvale’s ensorcelled paper, it made no sense. Nor could she see how it had any relevance to her. And yet men had used those words to wrap her magic in chains. Now, snippets of information gleaned over the preceding weeks had begun to snap together like a mosaic. The picture that time slowly revealed made her skin crawl with foreboding.
She plumped up a teal brocade cushion and lay back on the settee in her little parlour. Eyes half-closed, she stared at the night sky she had painted on the ceiling and tried to unravel a tangled history.
In mythology, Nereus was the child of Mother Earth and Old Man Sea. In the context of the secret message sent to Lord Branvale, she believed it referred to the child of two mages. Yes. Those words tasted true as she mouthed them. The warning implied that shadowy forces sought to ensure she never took a male mage to her bed and birthed such a Nereus.
A snort huffed through her. They could have simply sat her down and requested that she not conceive a child with one of their number. Although when she looked around the council table, they didn’t even have to ask such a thing. There were probably tens of thousands of men in England she’d prefer for the task before she became desperate enough to consider a fellow mage.
Should she even be inclined to procreate.
But why exactly did the council want to prevent such a pairing? Apart from the obvious, in her opinion. Of those who had reached adulthood, none of them even remotely appealed as a potential lover. Lord Pendlebury made a fine friend, but she had no desire to peer beneath his clothing. As for the others… a shudder ran through her body.
From talking to the Crows, she had learned that Mother Nature imposed a limit on their numbers, just as she did with her mages. Twelve mages. Three Crows. Neither could create greater numbers of their kind than that first spontaneous appearance. But the Crows were different in an important way—the women gifted their magic to the next generation when the girls were ready.
If what Sera had discovered held true, any child she conceived by a mage or an Unnatural would wield their own unique magic, rather than being a powerless second generation. Not to mention that child would be able to transfer their ability to one of their descendants when they were ready to give it up. The same cycle could occur over and over, throughout her line, with no waning of their magic.
Yet Mother Nature still maintained some control over such offspring. Sera couldn’t mother a dozen (nor did she want to!) and create her own powerful army. So why was such an outcome so feared that, for centuries, the council had stopped girl babes from drawing breath? Given the nature of society and the rules imposed on women, she suspected there was a darker truth behind their actions: Men baulked at the mere idea of powerful women controlling which of their blood descendants received magic.
A cold shudder worked down Sera’s spine. If two mages produced a gifted child of similar ability to its parents, then the bestowing of their power was no longer subject to the random whims of chance. Magic would pass from one generation to the next with absolute certainty. Families could build political power on such a base, knowing they would always have a mage among them. Would children of a given bloodline vie to be that chosen one? Would they kill for it?
She let out a slow breath and, across the plaster ceiling, games between descendants played out to find the most worthy to receive an ageing mage’s magic. Like the battles of ancient gladiators.
“I’m not sure that would be an improvement over the current situation,” Sera whispered. Perhaps Mother Nature really did know best by ensuring that mages appeared spontaneously and unpredictably.
Another thought crammed itself into her whirring mind. What of children with a mage father and an Unnatural mother? Such couplings must have occurred throughout their history. But how to find out? Lord Pendlebury might assist her in finding more. She would also study the old genealogies for clues. There was one name she was determined to find, to see how the magical book treated such a mage—Morag, mother of the Crows.
The modest blue enamelled mantel clock chimed the hour. Morning had slid past while she’d been engaged in her silent contemplations.
“Bother.” Yet again, she had too much to do and too little time. Instead of interfering in her life, mages should direct their energies toward the problem of cramming more hours into a day. Although which was worse—mages meddling in women’s affairs or having the ability to control time and alter past events?
“Elliot! I need a hackney!” With a brush of magic, she made her request echo throughout the house. There might yet be time for a quick trip to mage tower before she was expected at the Napier residence in Mayfair for her visit with Kitty.
Footsteps stomped up the stairs. Then the footman appeared in the doorway, still clutching a piece of toast. Apparently, she had disturbed his breakfast, which meant he must have risen late.
“I’m short on time. I’ll finish dressing and need a vehicle ready outside by the time I come down.” She rose and headed for the door. That morning, she had descended the stairs in a robe to take breakfast while sorting out her correspondence.
“Challenge accepted,” he murmured, after swallowing his mouthful. He rushed out the front door and down the steps.
By the time Sera had donned a gown appropriate both to visit her friend and to wander the dusty hidden library, and Vicky had pinned up her hair in a loose style, Elliot stood by the door once more with a grin on his face. Out in the street, a hackney waited to take her to the tower.
“How did you manage that so quickly?” she asked.
Elliot winked, then broke into laughter. “He heard you one street over and was on his way here when I encountered him. You ever thought that summoning one directly might be handier than hollering at me?”
Sometimes she forgot how powerful her commands could be when projected by a push of magic. How many other vague requests meant for her staff alone were being trumpeted across her neighbourhood? Elliot was right, though—reaching out to a driver with magical tendrils was more efficient than sending the footman to chase one down.
On the ride out to the tower, Sera chatted with the driver and determined he was more than happy to answer any summons, should he be in the area. Probably the fee out to Finsbury Fields and back made it worth his while, as it saved him from finding a succession of smaller rides around London to earn the same amount.
Outside the tower, her oak sapling had shed its leaves in preparation for its first winter. The tree would go dormant and await the spring for its next burst of growth. The green lawn spread at its feet, and no doubt upset the long-standing test for admission to the hidden library. The council would need to create some other pointless test to torment young mages, now that she had caused the grass to grow all on its own.
Inside the tower, her footsteps echoed on the stone stairs as she journeyed deep into the chill earth. At the wrought-iron gates to the library, Sera whispered the spell to the entwined ouroboros snakes. With a slither, they untangled their bod ies to allow the door to swing open.
“Thank you,” she murmured as they locked together again behind her.
From what she remembered of Erin the Crow’s tale, Morag had been born sometime in the fifteenth century. The current edition of the mage genealogy sat on its rosewood stand, illuminated by a soft amber orb. To either side stretched an angled shelf housing the older editions. Each large volume was given sufficient space that it could be opened and read where it lay, as the old books grumbled if they were moved. It didn’t take too long to find the one she needed.
Sera summoned a stool, sat before the dusty book, then carefully lifted the thick cover. As she thumbed the heavy pages, a trickle of excitement wound through her. How would the book record the magical, shape-shifting daughters of a mage?
Page after page was crammed with the spidery lettering and straight lines of each long-ago mage’s offspring and the outline of their lives. Births, marriages, deaths, and a few words as to the type of aftermage gift they’d inherited from the mage. The next turn of the page revealed only the soft, grainy handmade paper. Two sides were almost entirely blank, except for the brief entry near the top of the left-hand side.
Morag Haynes
21 February 1450 – 11 October 1520
Sera traced the name with a gentle touch. This was no girl mage snuffed out before she reached adulthood, like all the other female names she found. Often there were only a few days separating the dates of birth and death. Morag had lived a full seventy years. Yet no births, deaths, marriages, or any other details appeared under her name.
In Europe, women mages lived in isolation, engaged in scholarly pursuits, and never married or had children. Their pages would appear similar to that of Morag. But the lack of detail didn’t fit with the story of the mage bearing children to her shifter lover. The two pages should have been crammed with the details of her descendants for the seven generations the book tracked.
There were two possibilities why they were not. First, that Erin’s tale was simply that, a story or family myth. Obscured by time and retelling, someone had added the embellishment of a mage being the matriarch of their line. Second, the book might have refused to recognise Morag’s love match with a shifter, and their children, which contravened the Mage Council’s rules.
Sera straightened her spine and stared at the book and its scant details. Morag had lived a long life for those troubled times and the council’s horrific policy of not allowing magic to flourish in inferior vessels. Considering the prevailing environment when she was born, Erin’s claim that an elderly mage had spirited the babe away to allow her a chance to grow to adulthood seemed plausible. Sera’s father, after all, had threatened to hand her over to the gargoyles for her safety.
Then her thoughts turned to the negotiations between her father and Lord Rowan. Branvale had sworn a blood oath in return for having his marriage to an Unnatural erased. The fact that the genealogy had recorded the marriage in the first place proved that the book itself had no prejudices against whomever mages chose to love, marry, or have children with.
Given what Sera knew of events from Erin, and the evidence that the genealogy’s magic recorded everything, left a third possibility.
Someone had erased Morag’s offspring from the book.
Lord Rowan had drained himself to exhaustion to remove the record of a failed marriage. What would it take to erase the records of three gifted daughters? More than one mage. Three at least, if all the magic in one mage was needed to coerce the book into removing just one entry. The blank page suggested that an entire council of powerful men had drained themselves to keep the secret that a woman had bested them and found happiness outside of their rules.
With reluctance, Sera rose to her feet and closed the book. Time ran through her hourglass and she could ponder the mystery of Morag’s blank pages on her way to Kitty’s home. So far, Sera had plenty of ideas but little hard evidence of what had happened long ago, who or what Nereus was, and how either might impact her.
How would she prove any of her theories? She most certainly was not going to get herself and Lord Tomlin drunk enough to perform an intimate act so that nine months later she could announce, “Aha! Just as I suspected.”
But until a theory was tested, it was merely a hypothesis. What if she found proof of Morag’s descendants being erased from the genealogy? If more than one mage had been drained, such an event might have been mentioned in their histories. Ideas spiralled inside her, each sparking another until the fire grew and fuelled her determination to uncover the truth. Locating Lord Branvale’s Unnatural wife was another possibility. Or simply asking Lord Rowan.
Had the time come to negotiate handing over the Fae bracelets, in return for the old mage’s divulging all the secrets her mind itched to know?
Perhaps.
Two
Later that same afternoon, Sera sipped tea in Kitty’s parlour while a rare foul mood unfurled over Hugh. The surgeon ignored the plates of sweet and savoury treats laid out on the table. Instead, he crossed his arms and huffed, his eyebrows pulled so low they nearly joined in the middle.
“Why is it that you ladies are allowed to go off on adventures, and I must stay here?” With narrowed eyes, he glared at the fireplace.
“Because there are many in London who rely upon you and your medical skills. Would you leave your patients unattended for a week?” Sera reached out and patted his arm. She managed to keep a sympathetic look upon her face, even though the situation amused her immensely.
Contessa Noemi Ricci, her companion Vilma Winters, and the latter’s mother were returning to Mistwood Manor to end the very ill Vilma’s life before the tumours snatched her away from them. Vilma would breathe her last in her own bedroom at the beloved old house. Then she would awaken as a vampyre. Kitty and Sera had a role to play in the process and would follow the group in another carriage, as they only intended to stay for two nights before returning to London. They wanted to celebrate the chain of events that had bound the four women together.
Hugh exploded with curiosity and excitement about the transformation, and Sera wondered that if they tortured him for any longer, he might stamp his foot so hard he would break through the floor. Noemi and Vilma had already agreed that he might join their party. The surgeon had proven his worth with the pivotal role he had played in freeing Meredith, the former Lady Hillborne, from Bedlam.
Kitty glanced at Sera, then schooled her features in a stern expression. “Well, Hugh, I think that if you could find another doctor willing to undertake your rounds before we depart tomorrow, then you may join us.”
The surgeon leapt to his feet with such force that the heavy armchair rocked back, slammed to the floor, and quivered. Hugh disappeared out the door at a run. Kitty and Sera shared wide-eyed looks, but before they could speak, he reappeared in the doorway gripping the jamb with both hands. “Apologies, ladies. I shall find a stand-in immediately and be ready to join you in the morning!”
His last words drifted from the foyer as he left, his footsteps scrabbling over the tiles in his hurry to leave and ask a fellow physician to tend any patients needing closer attention in his absence.
Sera erupted in laughter at his eagerness and Kitty chortled until they both struggled to draw breath and had to wipe tears from their eyes.
Kitty leaned back on the settee and placed one hand over her chest. “That was fun.”
“But so unkind. We shouldn’t use his enthusiasm as a weapon against him.” Only now did Sera consider whether it might be cruel to poke fun at the gentle surgeon.
“I only tease him because I like him. He is a good man and they are in woefully short supply.” Kitty waved a hand, dismissing Sera’s concerns. “Besides, when I offer myself as breakfast to Vilma, it will reassure me to have both you and Hugh there.”
