Fic: Arcana 4b/4
Title: Arcana
Fandom: Sherlock (BBC)
Rating: Mature
Characters: Joanna (John) Watson, Sherlock Holmes, Harriet Watson, Mycroft Holmes, Anthea, Mrs. Hudson, Lestrade, James Moriarty, Original Characters
Summary: Sometimes, her grandmother has said, in the simplest, strongest of magics that’s all that’s required - a sacrifice and an intent. Her blood, and his words: I want to forget.
In which Joanna Watson is a witch, Sherlock Holmes is himself, and every spell has its price.
chapter one chapter two chapter three chapter 4a
Joanna is completely unsurprised when she opens the door of the waiting town car and finds Adrienne already inside, tapping at her Blackberry.
“I could be wrong,” Joanna says, “but I think there are sigils for invisibility written on these tyres.”
The Blackberry chimes. “You’re not wrong.”
Joanna looks again at the white, curving lines painted on the rubber. “An invisible car?” she says. “Isn’t that a bit dangerous?”
Adrienne sighs. “You’re oversimplifying. Turn around.”
“What?”
“Turn around, and then look back at the car.”
Joanna turns around. The building rises tall above her, its featureless stone façade almost deliberately bland. She turns toward the street and sees one of Mycroft’s town cars waiting for her, door open. Adrienne is already inside, staring at the screen of her Blackberry.
Joanna leans down and looks into the car. “I could be wrong,” she says, “but I think there are sigils for invisibility written on these tyres.”
Adrienne purses her lips, as if she’s trying to fight a smile. “Well spotted.”
Joanna looks again at the white, curving lines painted on the rubber. “An invisible car?” she says. “Isn’t that a little-” She stops, frowning. There’s something eerily familiar about this moment. About the words she was about to say.
Adrienne looks up from her mobile, expectant.
Sigils are complex, capricious things, often highly personal and easy to misread; the basic intent of the spell on the tyres is invisibility, sure enough, but the subtleties-
Adrienne smirks.
“Oh, very funny,” Joanna says. She climbs into the car and takes the seat opposite, slamming the door behind her. “A forgetting spell, then. How many times did it take before I realised?”
“You don’t want to know.” She looks down at her mobile again. “Your grandmother’s house is still one of the most heavily warded buildings in Greater London. Anything you want to keep from Moriarty is safer there than in Baker Street.”
Joanna has a vague memory of a spell on the front door that chased off a pushy Bible salesman; that was years ago now, but the house is old and that sort of magic tends to linger. She shrugs. “What I want isn’t at the house.”
Adrienne nods. “Haringey, then,” she says, and the car pulls away from the kerb.
The self-storage facility is in a business park, a sprawling ghost town of concrete and glass. The car drops them at the main entrance, and after a few minutes of echoing footsteps they find the right environmentally controlled corridor. The key Harry gave her months ago is marked with a tag for storage unit number 337; Joanna takes it from her coat pocket and reaches for the lock.
Adrienne steps close behind her. “You don’t need that.”
Joanna pauses. “I do, actually. If I’m going to open the door.”
Adrienne holds out her hand, empty and palm up. “I’ll give it back if you can’t manage,” she says. Her lips quirk in a small, taunting smile. “Think of it as an experiment.”
A test, more like. Joanna drops the key into her open hand. “I’ll try, but it isn’t going to work.”
Adrienne closes her hand, and when she opens it again the key is gone. “I assume you remember how to begin?”
Joanna bends down slightly, rolls out the stiffness in her bad shoulder, and places her left hand over the lock. It’s stainless steel, new or in very good nick, and its edges press sharp and cool into the flesh of her palm. Sherlock could pick it in minutes.
Joanna closes her eyes. I belong inside, she thinks. Let me in.
The answer comes in nothing like words, but she understands it nonetheless: She does not belong. Those who belong have the key. Strangers do not have the key, and strangers do not come inside. She does not come inside.
I am not a stranger, Joanna thinks. You belong to my sister. My blood.
The lock is not a house lock - it does not belong to anyone. It opens for the key. Strangers do not have the key, and strangers do not come inside.
Joanna opens her eyes and looks up at Adrienne. “This lock is an idiot.”
“I don’t know about that,” Adrienne says, leaning against the door of unit number 339. “From here it looks as if it’s doing its job rather well.”
“I told you this wouldn’t work,” Joanna says, but Adrienne just stares back at her, unmoved.
“Try anyway,” she says. Her Blackberry chimes, and she looks down at the screen. Her jaw tenses briefly before her expression turns blank again.
Joanna knows that jaw clench - she’s felt it often enough, usually just after Sherlock summons her with one of his ill-timed, infuriatingly cryptic texts. “If Mycroft needs you at the office-”
“He doesn’t,” Adrienne says, and walks off down the corridor, phone already at her ear. “Now stop stalling and open the damned door.” Her heels click in quick percussion against the concrete, and Joanna listens as the sound of her footsteps fades.
Gran had disapproved of witches who used magic when a mundane solution would do just as well. She’d called them wasteful, self-indulgent, and Joanna never had any reason to doubt her - her grandmother was the only other proper witch she’d ever met.
Gran would never have opened a door with magic when she had the key in her pocket. That sort of flash behaviour was for amateurs and table-rappers.
But then, Joanna is an amateur, and she doesn’t have the key. And her gran has been dead for an awfully long time.
She reaches into her trouser pocket and takes out the broken stick of white chalk she’d nicked from a drawer in Sherlock’s desk that morning. It’s been some time since she last wrote in chalk; it feels cool in her too-warm hand, sliding smooth between her fingers. She crouches in front of the storage unit lock and writes the first sigil. Chalk squeaks against steel.
The lock objects. Those who belong have the key, and that is not the key. That does not belong.
“Sorry, mate,” Joanna says, joining a second sigil to the first. “You’re not really in a position to argue.” The third sigil is a signature of sorts, a declaration of intent, and as she writes she feels the world shift a bit, uneasy beneath her feet. There’s a sound like approaching thunder, a slow rumble of pressure building behind her eyes, and she quickly returns the chalk to her trouser pocket. “Suppose I haven’t forgotten everything she taught me,” she says, and presses her left thumb over the keyhole.
Well, shit, the lock does not quite say, and a moment later the sigils flare blue and white with heat. The door rattles like a caged animal in its frame, echoed by every door along the hallway, and the sound grows louder and fiercer until there’s a hard click from inside the lock. The sound stops, and the corridor is still.
The left side of Joanna’s body feels as if it’s been plunged into ice water; she staggers to her feet and grins. “Hoo boy,” she says, to no one and for no particular reason. Then she says it again, louder, just because she can. Magic is brilliant.
“Ah,” Adrienne says, appearing from bloody nowhere like the creepy witch-person she is. “You’re one of those.”
“So’s your face,” Joanna says cheerfully, and yanks hard on the door handle with the cold-numb fingers of her left hand. It opens, and the lights overhead blink on to reveal a long, narrow room piled high with boxes.
The nearest stacks are the remnants of Harry’s married life, crates of china and cookware and large boxes of clothes little more than a season out of style, all labelled in Clara’s pleasant, looped handwriting. Joanna shuffles down the breath-tight aisles between stacks, moving deeper into the unit. She eases past the small pile of banker’s boxes she’d left with Harry before she’d gone to Afghanistan - packed with books she couldn’t bear to part with and the few small things from her Barts years she’d let herself keep - and nearly falls over a cardboard mausoleum dedicated to Harry’s shoe collection, circa 1997. Behind her, Adrienne sneezes. The sound is vaguely goose-like, and Joanna smiles.
“If I knew what you were looking for, I might be able to help you find it,” Adrienne says, sounding like someone so used to knowing all the answers that she can’t quite remember how to ask a question. Joanna can’t help but notice that she also sounds like someone who needs to blow her nose.
“Snotty,” Joanna mutters, just under her breath, and weaves her way through stacks of boxes and crates and disassembled furniture. The dust grows thicker as she passes from the mid- to the early nineties, and then, from the corner of her eye, she sees her grandmother’s kitchen table.
The table is propped up on its end, pushed against the back wall of the storage unit and surrounded by dust-dark cardboard boxes. Layers of greying bubble wrap protect the table legs where they jut out into the room, but the names etched on the underside are exposed. Adrienne pushes past her, steps neatly around the pieces of a broken loom, and moves close enough to read them.
“This should be with you or your sister,” she says, her eyes on the long columns of names and dates burnt black into the wood. “It’s meant to be used.”
“I know. But Harry won’t take it, and I don’t have the space.” Joanna tears through the tape sealing nearest cardboard box. It’s filled with record albums, the ones her grandmother would play when she sat up at night, unable to sleep. Joanna remembers lying in bed, half-awake and straining to listen. She could never quite hear the music.
She looks up and sees Adrienne still staring at the table. She’s reaching out with one hand, fingers almost touching the wood.
“I’m looking for a book,” Joanna says. “I’ll probably find it faster if you help.”
The hand falls back to Adrienne’s side, and she turns. Her expression is a careful blank. “A spell book?”
“Not exactly.” She closes the box of albums and sets it behind her, on the floor. She opens the next box in the stack. “Just bring me all the books you find. I’ll remember it when I see it.”
Adrienne sniffs. “How efficient,” she says with a familiar edge to her voice, and rips the tape off the lid of the nearest box. She opens it, rolls her eyes, and drops it to the floor beside her.
“Let me guess,” Joanna says. “Gran’s prized collection of rare animal bones.”
“Worse,” Adrienne says, moving on to the next box. “Her prized collection of Barry Manilow albums.”
They search without speaking for more than half an hour, each trying to pretend they hadn’t heard the other humming Mandy under her breath. Adrienne brings Joanna boxes of Harry’s ratty schoolbooks, her mother’s murder mysteries, her father’s favourite anthologies of modern poetry. Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood, her father liked to say, but they were not his words - no more than the moment of the rose and of the yew tree or April is the cruellest month. Not with a bang but a whimper.
Fear death by water, she thinks, and hears the words in her father’s voice.
There is a book in her hands. She doesn’t remember taking it from the box, but now she feels its weight, and the soft, curling edges of its blue paper jacket. The cover is blank, and when she opens to the first page to find its title, the paper slices into the vulnerable skin between her thumb and forefinger. Startled by the pain, she drops the book and raises her hand to her mouth. She tastes dust with the blood, and looks down to see the book open on the floor.
It’s a storybook. The paper is yellow-edged and thick, the typeface familiar in its old style slenderness. CONTENTS, it says at the top of the page, and the stories are listed below. The Singing Bone, Page 3. The Lion and the Thorn, Page 6. The Woman Who Had No Shadow, Page 8.
Joanna picks up the book with unsteady hands. These were the stories of her childhood - Oda and the Snake, The Witch and the Hare, Simon the Thief and the Hand of Glory. The Golem of Prague, The Endless Tale, and Dildrum, King of the Cats. She and Harry read them over and over again, stealing the book back and forth between them in the day and repeating their favourites aloud each night in the dark, long after they were meant to be asleep.
They’d packed the book away when their parents died, along with her mother’s murder mysteries and her father’s poetry. Harry was too old for fairy stories then, and as the years passed Joanna forgot, as she’d forgotten so many things.
Agamede and the Moon is the book’s last story. Joanna sinks down to sit on a nearby steamer trunk, turning past brittle pages filled with animals that speak and murdered children who sing, men built from river clay and thieves who fear the dark. Stories that change the shape of the world.
They all begin the same way.
Once upon a time there was a man who was dying, and Death came and stood outside his door.
The man was a hermit, and he lived alone in a small cottage in the forest. A young girl was gathering wild-growing herbs in the shade of the trees, and when she saw Death waiting outside the cottage door, she took up her basket and went to him.
“He will not open his door to you,” the girl told Death. She did not curtsey or bow or say good day, good sir as she had been taught; she was not the sort to waste time with pointless courtesies. “This is a hermit’s cottage,” she said, “and he does not welcome strangers.”
“I am a stranger to no man,” Death said. “Nor to any woman, or little village girl.” Death turned back to the closed door. “The hermit will leave with me before moonrise. He need not welcome me.”
The girl thought this over carefully. Then she said: “Sir, I would offer you a wager.”
Death, as every man, woman, and little village girl knows, cannot be begged nor bought nor fooled, but he does have a gambler’s fondness for a likely wager. “There is nothing you could give that I should want,” Death said, though of course this was not true, and they each knew it. “You have no business here. Return home to your mother and father.”
“You have already taken them,” the girl said without reproach. “I was very young then, but I remember you well.”
Death looked again at the girl. She had a stubborn chin. But for the healthy summer flush of her skin, it was not unlike his. “The hermit’s fever is a fatal one, child. You cannot win his life from me.”
“I will cure the hermit whether you agree to my wager or not,” the girl told Death. “His life is not the prize.” She opened the door of the cottage and raised her stubborn chin. “If the hermit lives through the night, you will give me one gift - one that I will name.”
“Very well,” Death said. “And if he does not?”
“Then you may take me as well,” the girl Agamede said, “and save yourself the journey later.”
“It is your life to gamble,” Death said, and, satisfied, the girl closed the door and set to work.
The hermit’s cottage was dark and smelled of rotting food and sick; the girl pinned the curtains back from the windows and let in light and the summer air. The hermit slept and sweated with fever; the girl drew pails of cool water from the well and scrubbed him clean with a rag torn from the hem of her skirts. When all this was done she built a small fire in the hearth and brewed a tea with the herbs of her basket.
The hermit woke as she pulled him upright and set the cup to his lips. “I am already dead, girl,” the hermit said in a voice that crackled like burning wood. “I wish to suffer it alone. Leave me be.”
“It is alone that has killed you, old man,” the girl said. “Now save your breath and drink.”
The hermit drank the tea, and when it was gone he slept again. The girl sat beside his bed and watched the sun sink below the trees. She lit a candle to keep away the dark, and it burned until sunrise.
When daylight filled the cottage, the girl went to the window and saw Death standing again at the door. “I think you’ll find, sir, that you owe me a gift of my choosing.”
“So choose,” Death said. “You will have anything it is in my power to give.”
“I want to never again suffer famine or drought. I want never to be hungry.” The girl leaned out the window and gave Death a grin not unlike his own. “I want the cornucopia.”
Death reached into his cloak and drew out a twisted, bone-white horn. It looked to be hollow, but when Death raised it, the air around them filled with the golden smell of a harvest feast, of ripe, full fruits and warm-baked bread. The girl accepted the horn and tucked it close under her arm. “You intend to take the hermit at moonrise,” she said.
“You have stolen for him one day more of suffering,” Death said. “He will not thank you for it.”
“I do not want his thanks,” the girl said. “I want him to live through the night. If he does, you will give me a second gift - one that I will name.”
“Very well,” Death said, rather more reluctantly than he had the time before. “And if he does not?”
“Then you may take me as well,” the girl Agamede said, “and save yourself the journey later.”
“It is your life to gamble,” Death said a second time, and, satisfied, the girl left the window and returned to the hermit’s bedside.
The hermit slept restlessly, burning still with fever. The girl touched cool fingers to his forehead, to the echo of his heart’s beat at throat and wrist. He stirred, but did not wake.
The twisted horn was not heavy in the girl’s hand, and it was not light. When she looked into it she saw nothing, but when she reached inside she felt its potential - the weight of the world’s abundance in her small hand. Her mouth watered at the thought of olives and of wine, of ripe apples and rich creams and foods she’d only ever dreamt of, but when her hand emerged from the horn she held only a single pomegranate. It was as red as a drop of a village girl’s blood, and smelled as sweet as a kiss.
The hermit opened his eyes. “The fruit of the dead,” he said, his voice raw with fever. “Do you prepare my funeral meal, girl?”
“Only a fool wastes his food on the dead,” the girl said, and set the pomegranate aside. She reached inside the horn again, and this time she pulled out a tangle of summer radishes. “Now save your breath, old man, and eat.”
The girl ground the flesh of the radishes into a thin paste and seasoned it with the last herbs of her basket. She warmed the paste over the hearth fire and then fed it to the hermit, spoonful by spoonful.
“Death must taste better,” the hermit said, but he ate all the same. When it was gone, he slept deeply. The girl sat beside his bed and watched the sun rise in the sky before it sank again below the trees. She lit a candle to keep away the dark, and it burned until sunrise.
When daylight filled the cottage, the girl went to the window and saw Death standing again at the door. She held out a hand and offered him the pomegranate. He did not take it. “The hermit’s fever has broken,” the girl said. “He has no need of you now.”
“Fever is not the only way a man might die,” Death said. He moved closer, and his long shadow fell over the open window, blocking out the sun. “Choose your gift, child. You will have anything it is in my power to give.”
The girl stood silent for a long moment. Then she lifted her stubborn chin. “I want a blade as sharp as blood is red,” she said to Death, “with a shaft as long as night is black.”
“There is only one such blade,” Death said, “with only one such shaft.”
“Yes,” the girl said, “and it is yours to give.”
And so Death gave the girl Agamede his scythe, with its blade as sharp as blood is red and its yew-wood shaft as long as night is black. The girl took it, and held it close at her side.
“I will reap your hermit tonight, blade or no blade,” Death said. “But first I would offer you a wager.”
The girl’s grip on the scythe tightened. “I will listen.”
“If the hermit lives through this night,” Death said, “you may ask a third gift of me, and when that business is done I will leave this place. You will keep my gifts, and not see me again for many years yet.”
“And if he dies?”
Death reached out and plucked the pomegranate from the windowsill. “Then I will take you as well,” Death said, “and save myself the journey later.”
“It is my life to gamble,” she said, and returned to the hermit’s bedside.
The hermit lay awake, his clever eyes unclouded by fever. The girl touched her fingers to his forehead, to the echo of his heart’s beat at throat and wrist. He batted her hand away. “Girl,” he said, “you have not slept.”
“No,” she said, “but you have.”
She reached again into the twisted horn of plenty and used its gifts to prepare a thin soup for him to eat. He held the spoon himself and lifted it to his lips with an unsteady hand. “Girl,” he said, “you have not eaten.”
“No,” she said, “but you have.” She took the empty bowl from his hands. “Now save your breath, old man, and rest.”
The hermit slept through the heat of the day, and when the sun sank below the trees the girl lit a candle to keep away the dark. She sat in the chair beside the old man’s bed, and though she was as tired as she had ever been, she did not sleep. She watched the flickering light of the candle, and though she was as hungry as she had ever been, she did not eat.
Instead she listened.
There was the smallest of sounds from without the walls, a sound as soft as the footsteps of scattering mice and as sharp as the slow scrape of five bone fingers at the door. The girl sat by the burning candle and waited.
The door to the hermit’s cottage opened and a thief came inside. His hands and feet and face were wrapped in black rags, and he carried a knife, its blade wicked and stained.
“We have no gold,” the girl told the thief. She did not quiver or cry or say please, sir, I am only a little village girl as was expected; she was not the sort to waste time with pointless courtesies. “We have no gold, but if you seek shelter, you are welcome to share this roof until morning.”
“I do not seek shelter,” said the thief.
“We have no coin,” the girl said, “but if you hunger, you are welcome to share our food.”
“I do not hunger,” said the thief.
The girl stood from her chair beside the old man’s bed. “Then there is nothing to be done for you,” she said, and blew out the candle.
The thief struck out in the dark with his knife, but the girl raised Death’s scythe and with one swing parted the thief’s soul from his body. His empty flesh fell at her feet, and the rest of him went out again through the cottage door, where Death waited with open hands.
The hermit watched from his bed, his clever eyes open wide in the moonlight. “Girl,” he said, “you are cut.”
“Yes,” she said, “but you are not.” She lit the candle again and used a strip of cloth torn from the hem of her skirt to bind the bleeding wound in her arm. Then she sat again in the chair at the hermit’s bedside and waited for the sun to rise.
When daylight filled the cottage, the girl went to the window for the third time and met Death with her stubborn chin raised high. “The hermit lives,” she said, and behind her the old man sighed in his sleep.
“Choose your gift,” Death said, “and choose wisely.”
The girl did not hesitate. “I want your book of secrets,” she said, “so that neither I nor any person I love ever need fear you again.”
And so Death reached into his cloak and drew out a small book of yellow-edged pages bound in skin, withered and black. The girl took it from him and held it close to her chest. It was as cold in her hands as a slab of ice, and the heat of her skin did not warm it. She smiled.
“Good day, good sir,” the girl Agamede said to Death.
“And to you, child,” Death said, and was gone.
Years passed, and Death kept his word; the girl did not see him again. She took the book, the blade, and the horn and travelled far from the village where she’d been a child, through forests and cities, along deep ravines and across storm-churned seas, and wherever she went she used Death’s own gifts to save those he would have taken. Word of her skill spread far, and with the secrets written in the black book she cured kings in their castles and labourers in their fields, delivered whole those infants meant to die and restored to the aged the strength of youth. The girl grew to be a woman, and where she walked the people had no fear of death.
But the woman Agamede was not content. Before he had given her his final gift, Death had torn a single page from the book of secrets - the only page the woman truly wanted. She had at her fingertips the hidden, final fate of every man, woman, and child she met, but without that page she could not know her own. Death had deceived her, and for all her skill and secret knowledge the woman was as mortal as she had always been.
After many years her travels led her back to the forest of her childhood and the cottage of the old hermit. The man lived there still, for after three days and nights spent waiting outside his door Death had tired of the sight of him, and now felt no eagerness to return.
“Or so I imagine,” the hermit said, and there was laughter in his clever old eyes. “Whatever the reason, I have not seen him - not since last I saw you, girl.”
They talked of her travels, of the places she had seen and the deaths she had undone, and when they had finished the hermit emptied the cup in front of him and said, “I never thanked you for what you did.”
The woman shrugged. “I did not do it for you, old man.”
He laughed. “I do not doubt that. Still, I owe you a debt; I would like to see it settled.”
“There is nothing you could give that I should want,” the woman said.
The old man’s lips spread in a wide, bone-white grin.
There was a forgotten legend, he said, a legend of a pool in the forest whose waters were as dark as ink and as still as a mirror. It had been hidden long ago and wisely, for a man who looked on his reflection in the pool’s surface saw not his own face, but a reflection of the future - a glimpse of his final, mortal fate.
“Show me,” the woman said, and the hermit led her out of the cottage and deep into the forest night.
They found the pool at the heart of a grove of birch trees, far from the village and the home of any living man. The trees were bare, and stood like pale sentries around the water. The woman reached out and found their bark cold to the touch. The pool lay just beyond, its surface as still as silence and as smooth as glass.
“This is what you wanted,” the hermit said. “This is what you sought from the beginning.”
The woman walked past him, through the trees and close to the water’s edge. “I was tired of being afraid.”
“There was nothing to fear, child. All things die.”
“I am not a child anymore,” the witch Agamede said, and looked down at her reflection in the pool’s still water.
A stranger looked back at her, his round face luminous and pale. He was beautiful and his eyes were kind, and Agamede, who had cared neither for beauty nor for kindness, could not turn away from him. She sank to her knees beside the water and as the hours passed she forgot all but the sight of his face. The sun rose, sanguine and gold, and when its light touched the pool the man was gone.
“I should have spoken to him,” Agamede said, her words weighted with grief. “I should have begged him to stay.”
“He will return,” the hermit’s voice said from the trees. “You need only wait.”
And so the witch Agamede stayed by the water, the memory of the man’s face burning in her mind like candle flame.
Night fell again, and the man’s image returned to the surface of the pool. Agamede spoke to him, told him of her travels, of the places she had seen and the deaths she had undone, but if the man heard her, he did not reply. The sun rose and set and rose again, and for ten nights and days she slept and watched and wept at the water’s edge, offering the man her secrets and her skill, her blood and her breath. He wanted none of it, and as one night passed to the next her love slowly turned away from her, his pale face fading into the dark.
On the eleventh night she offered the horn, and held it low over the water. “If you are to leave me,” she said, “I shall need neither food nor drink.” She opened her hands, and the cornucopia sank without a ripple. Her love did not reply.
On the twelfth night she offered the scythe, and it shook her in her hands for the first time. “If you are to leave me,” she said, “I shall need neither blade nor shaft.” Death’s scythe slipped into the dark water; her love still did not reply.
On the thirteenth night the witch woman Agamede stood at the pool’s edge and waited for her love to appear in the water. Hours passed, and the surface was as dark as the moonless sky above.
“He is gone,” said a voice like the hermit’s, a voice from the white birch trees. “He has left you.”
She looked down at the pool, the book of secrets cold in her hands. “If he has left me,” she said, “I shall have no fear of death.” She watched as the book sank seamlessly beneath the water, and then she turned.
Death stood among the trees, the pomegranate red in one hand and a single torn page of yellowed paper in the other. She did not need to read it to know what it said.
The Lady Agamede followed her love into the water.
“I never much liked that version,” Adrienne says, her even voice echoing in the metal-walled silence. “Never liked the ending.”
Joanna looks up and sees the other woman standing above her, lips pressed in a bloodless expression too sharp to be a smile. The book lies open between them, clutched in Joanna’s white-knuckled hands. “I forgot this,” Joanna says, and the pages buckle in her grip. “How did I forget this?”
“Some things aren’t meant to be remembered.”
Joanna stands, furious and beautifully, beatifically calm. “And what the bloody fuck,” she says, “is that supposed to mean?”
The other woman takes a step back. “Doctor Watson-”
“Moriarty asked if I remembered the story of Agamede’s Mirror. I’d forgotten, but I knew I’d seen the name before - in Seostris’ burned arcana, and in this.” She raises the book between them. “Tell me this is just a children’s story. Tell me it isn’t real.”
Adrienne stares back at her, sphinx-like and unmoved, and eases the book from her hand. “This is only a story. The mirror is real, and Agamede was its creator.”
Joanna sinks back down to sit on the streamer trunk. The anger is gone, but the clarity stays - the clarity and the terrible, steady-handed calm. “A mirror that shows you your own death. My grandmother’s mirror.”
“Agamede’s, passed down from descendant to descendant. Passed down to you.” Adrienne steps closer, and her heels click on the concrete floor. “What did you see in it, Joanna?”
A boy, Joanna thinks. I saw a lonely boy, and he saw me. She closes her eyes and sees him again - pale face and dark hair and the effortless, steadying surety that whether she could see him or not he was always there, just on the other side of the glass.
A hand touches her shoulder. “Watson?”
“Sherlock,” Joanna says. “When I looked in the mirror, I saw Sherlock Holmes.” Then she covers her face with her hands and laughs.
“Ah,” Adrienne says. “You’ve snapped, haven’t you?”
“Yes,” Joanna gasps, laughing so hard tears well in her eyes. “Yes, but ages ago. Oh god-” She dissolves into giggles again, and Adrienne stands back, the book tucked awkwardly under one arm. For the first time since Joanna met her, she looks as if she doesn’t know what to say.
“It’s not - the mirror is as difficult to interpret as any other form of divination. It doesn’t mean Sherlock is going to kill you.”
“Of course he’s bloody well going to kill me,” Joanna says, grinning wide enough to make her cheeks ache. “Less than twelve hours ago I put a psychotic criminal mastermind in a headlock for the man, and God only knows what I’ll be doing for him twelve hours from now; I hardly need some ancient magical artefact to tell me how that’s going to end.” She shakes her head, drying her eyes with the edge of her sleeve. “Oh, what a relief. I thought for sure all this was going to mean something awful once I sorted it out.”
“You’re insane,” Adrienne says flatly.
“Probably. But then, I’m also a crime fighting ex-Army witchdoctor, so that may come with the territory.” She pushes herself to her feet. Her leg feels wonderfully solid beneath her, the strongest it’s been all morning. “You’re going to tell Mycroft about this, aren’t you?”
The other woman pauses, and for a moment she looks almost bemused, as if she’d forgotten the elder Holmes entirely and was struggling to place the name. “I don’t see why I should,” she says finally. “We’ve been aware of Moriarty’s obsession with the mirror for some time, but without Moran he had little hope of finding it. Now that his pet warlock is returned to London-” She shrugs and offers Joanna the book. “Moriarty will either use the mirror or he will not. What you’ve seen in it is irrelevant.”
“Not to me, and certainly not to Mycroft. If he knew I was destined to die for his brother’s sake-”
“You’re not destined to do anything,” Adrienne says, her voice hard with an emotion Joanna can’t define. “That’s not how it works, and you know it. If you stay with him, you’re choosing this. If you leave Baker Street tonight-”
“Not going to happen,” Joanna says, and though she’s smiling, there’s nothing friendly in it. “Not tonight, and not tomorrow night. Probably not the night after that, either, but that depends more on the state of Sherlock’s latest toxic mould experiment than on anything you might say.” She takes the book from Adrienne’s hand and drops it neatly into an open box. “I’d like to go home now. Are you driving me, or do I need to phone for a cab?”
The ride back to Baker Street is silent but for the hum of the engine and the soft sounds of Adrienne’s mobile. Joanna leans against the town car window and watches the city flow past, a London bleached colourless by the height of the midday sun. Her shoulder aches, but her mind is clear.
When the car slows to a stop outside the flat, Adrienne breaks the silence. “Moran will try to get access to the house. He’ll have guessed Helene hid the mirror there.”
Joanna turns from the window, but the other woman’s eyes are still fixed on the glowing screen of her mobile. “You didn’t just read about my grandmother in a file, did you? You knew her.”
“The wards on the house will hold, and I’ll see to it that your sister’s home is secure. Your flat, on the other hand-”
“I’ll take care of the flat. Gran died in ’91; you must be older than you look.”
Adrienne lowers her mobile and meets Joanna’s eyes. “James Moriarty knows that you and your sister are the last surviving descendants of one of the most powerful witches who ever lived. The only reason he hasn’t shut you up in a cellar somewhere and unravelled your intestines inch by inch is his now incorrect assumption that you don’t know anything worth hearing. In that light, it might be wise to spend a little more time planning your next move and a little less speculating about my personal life.” She reaches across the seat and opens the car door with a sharp tug on the handle. “Now if you don’t mind, I’m needed at the office.”
Joanna laughs, the sound dry and humourless. “No, please - let’s talk more about my vivisected intestines. It was doing wonders for my appetite.” She pushes the door open and climbs out. “Wouldn’t have figured you for the type to be sensitive about your age.”
“Goodbye, Doctor Watson,” Adrienne says, and slams the door shut. The car disappears into the Baker Street traffic, white chalk sigils still spinning on its tyres.
Joanna knows what to look for, now. She doesn’t forget.
chapter 4c
Fandom: Sherlock (BBC)
Rating: Mature
Characters: Joanna (John) Watson, Sherlock Holmes, Harriet Watson, Mycroft Holmes, Anthea, Mrs. Hudson, Lestrade, James Moriarty, Original Characters
Summary: Sometimes, her grandmother has said, in the simplest, strongest of magics that’s all that’s required - a sacrifice and an intent. Her blood, and his words: I want to forget.
In which Joanna Watson is a witch, Sherlock Holmes is himself, and every spell has its price.
chapter one chapter two chapter three chapter 4a
Joanna is completely unsurprised when she opens the door of the waiting town car and finds Adrienne already inside, tapping at her Blackberry.
“I could be wrong,” Joanna says, “but I think there are sigils for invisibility written on these tyres.”
The Blackberry chimes. “You’re not wrong.”
Joanna looks again at the white, curving lines painted on the rubber. “An invisible car?” she says. “Isn’t that a bit dangerous?”
Adrienne sighs. “You’re oversimplifying. Turn around.”
“What?”
“Turn around, and then look back at the car.”
Joanna turns around. The building rises tall above her, its featureless stone façade almost deliberately bland. She turns toward the street and sees one of Mycroft’s town cars waiting for her, door open. Adrienne is already inside, staring at the screen of her Blackberry.
Joanna leans down and looks into the car. “I could be wrong,” she says, “but I think there are sigils for invisibility written on these tyres.”
Adrienne purses her lips, as if she’s trying to fight a smile. “Well spotted.”
Joanna looks again at the white, curving lines painted on the rubber. “An invisible car?” she says. “Isn’t that a little-” She stops, frowning. There’s something eerily familiar about this moment. About the words she was about to say.
Adrienne looks up from her mobile, expectant.
Sigils are complex, capricious things, often highly personal and easy to misread; the basic intent of the spell on the tyres is invisibility, sure enough, but the subtleties-
Adrienne smirks.
“Oh, very funny,” Joanna says. She climbs into the car and takes the seat opposite, slamming the door behind her. “A forgetting spell, then. How many times did it take before I realised?”
“You don’t want to know.” She looks down at her mobile again. “Your grandmother’s house is still one of the most heavily warded buildings in Greater London. Anything you want to keep from Moriarty is safer there than in Baker Street.”
Joanna has a vague memory of a spell on the front door that chased off a pushy Bible salesman; that was years ago now, but the house is old and that sort of magic tends to linger. She shrugs. “What I want isn’t at the house.”
Adrienne nods. “Haringey, then,” she says, and the car pulls away from the kerb.
The self-storage facility is in a business park, a sprawling ghost town of concrete and glass. The car drops them at the main entrance, and after a few minutes of echoing footsteps they find the right environmentally controlled corridor. The key Harry gave her months ago is marked with a tag for storage unit number 337; Joanna takes it from her coat pocket and reaches for the lock.
Adrienne steps close behind her. “You don’t need that.”
Joanna pauses. “I do, actually. If I’m going to open the door.”
Adrienne holds out her hand, empty and palm up. “I’ll give it back if you can’t manage,” she says. Her lips quirk in a small, taunting smile. “Think of it as an experiment.”
A test, more like. Joanna drops the key into her open hand. “I’ll try, but it isn’t going to work.”
Adrienne closes her hand, and when she opens it again the key is gone. “I assume you remember how to begin?”
Joanna bends down slightly, rolls out the stiffness in her bad shoulder, and places her left hand over the lock. It’s stainless steel, new or in very good nick, and its edges press sharp and cool into the flesh of her palm. Sherlock could pick it in minutes.
Joanna closes her eyes. I belong inside, she thinks. Let me in.
The answer comes in nothing like words, but she understands it nonetheless: She does not belong. Those who belong have the key. Strangers do not have the key, and strangers do not come inside. She does not come inside.
I am not a stranger, Joanna thinks. You belong to my sister. My blood.
The lock is not a house lock - it does not belong to anyone. It opens for the key. Strangers do not have the key, and strangers do not come inside.
Joanna opens her eyes and looks up at Adrienne. “This lock is an idiot.”
“I don’t know about that,” Adrienne says, leaning against the door of unit number 339. “From here it looks as if it’s doing its job rather well.”
“I told you this wouldn’t work,” Joanna says, but Adrienne just stares back at her, unmoved.
“Try anyway,” she says. Her Blackberry chimes, and she looks down at the screen. Her jaw tenses briefly before her expression turns blank again.
Joanna knows that jaw clench - she’s felt it often enough, usually just after Sherlock summons her with one of his ill-timed, infuriatingly cryptic texts. “If Mycroft needs you at the office-”
“He doesn’t,” Adrienne says, and walks off down the corridor, phone already at her ear. “Now stop stalling and open the damned door.” Her heels click in quick percussion against the concrete, and Joanna listens as the sound of her footsteps fades.
Gran had disapproved of witches who used magic when a mundane solution would do just as well. She’d called them wasteful, self-indulgent, and Joanna never had any reason to doubt her - her grandmother was the only other proper witch she’d ever met.
Gran would never have opened a door with magic when she had the key in her pocket. That sort of flash behaviour was for amateurs and table-rappers.
But then, Joanna is an amateur, and she doesn’t have the key. And her gran has been dead for an awfully long time.
She reaches into her trouser pocket and takes out the broken stick of white chalk she’d nicked from a drawer in Sherlock’s desk that morning. It’s been some time since she last wrote in chalk; it feels cool in her too-warm hand, sliding smooth between her fingers. She crouches in front of the storage unit lock and writes the first sigil. Chalk squeaks against steel.
The lock objects. Those who belong have the key, and that is not the key. That does not belong.
“Sorry, mate,” Joanna says, joining a second sigil to the first. “You’re not really in a position to argue.” The third sigil is a signature of sorts, a declaration of intent, and as she writes she feels the world shift a bit, uneasy beneath her feet. There’s a sound like approaching thunder, a slow rumble of pressure building behind her eyes, and she quickly returns the chalk to her trouser pocket. “Suppose I haven’t forgotten everything she taught me,” she says, and presses her left thumb over the keyhole.
Well, shit, the lock does not quite say, and a moment later the sigils flare blue and white with heat. The door rattles like a caged animal in its frame, echoed by every door along the hallway, and the sound grows louder and fiercer until there’s a hard click from inside the lock. The sound stops, and the corridor is still.
The left side of Joanna’s body feels as if it’s been plunged into ice water; she staggers to her feet and grins. “Hoo boy,” she says, to no one and for no particular reason. Then she says it again, louder, just because she can. Magic is brilliant.
“Ah,” Adrienne says, appearing from bloody nowhere like the creepy witch-person she is. “You’re one of those.”
“So’s your face,” Joanna says cheerfully, and yanks hard on the door handle with the cold-numb fingers of her left hand. It opens, and the lights overhead blink on to reveal a long, narrow room piled high with boxes.
The nearest stacks are the remnants of Harry’s married life, crates of china and cookware and large boxes of clothes little more than a season out of style, all labelled in Clara’s pleasant, looped handwriting. Joanna shuffles down the breath-tight aisles between stacks, moving deeper into the unit. She eases past the small pile of banker’s boxes she’d left with Harry before she’d gone to Afghanistan - packed with books she couldn’t bear to part with and the few small things from her Barts years she’d let herself keep - and nearly falls over a cardboard mausoleum dedicated to Harry’s shoe collection, circa 1997. Behind her, Adrienne sneezes. The sound is vaguely goose-like, and Joanna smiles.
“If I knew what you were looking for, I might be able to help you find it,” Adrienne says, sounding like someone so used to knowing all the answers that she can’t quite remember how to ask a question. Joanna can’t help but notice that she also sounds like someone who needs to blow her nose.
“Snotty,” Joanna mutters, just under her breath, and weaves her way through stacks of boxes and crates and disassembled furniture. The dust grows thicker as she passes from the mid- to the early nineties, and then, from the corner of her eye, she sees her grandmother’s kitchen table.
The table is propped up on its end, pushed against the back wall of the storage unit and surrounded by dust-dark cardboard boxes. Layers of greying bubble wrap protect the table legs where they jut out into the room, but the names etched on the underside are exposed. Adrienne pushes past her, steps neatly around the pieces of a broken loom, and moves close enough to read them.
“This should be with you or your sister,” she says, her eyes on the long columns of names and dates burnt black into the wood. “It’s meant to be used.”
“I know. But Harry won’t take it, and I don’t have the space.” Joanna tears through the tape sealing nearest cardboard box. It’s filled with record albums, the ones her grandmother would play when she sat up at night, unable to sleep. Joanna remembers lying in bed, half-awake and straining to listen. She could never quite hear the music.
She looks up and sees Adrienne still staring at the table. She’s reaching out with one hand, fingers almost touching the wood.
“I’m looking for a book,” Joanna says. “I’ll probably find it faster if you help.”
The hand falls back to Adrienne’s side, and she turns. Her expression is a careful blank. “A spell book?”
“Not exactly.” She closes the box of albums and sets it behind her, on the floor. She opens the next box in the stack. “Just bring me all the books you find. I’ll remember it when I see it.”
Adrienne sniffs. “How efficient,” she says with a familiar edge to her voice, and rips the tape off the lid of the nearest box. She opens it, rolls her eyes, and drops it to the floor beside her.
“Let me guess,” Joanna says. “Gran’s prized collection of rare animal bones.”
“Worse,” Adrienne says, moving on to the next box. “Her prized collection of Barry Manilow albums.”
They search without speaking for more than half an hour, each trying to pretend they hadn’t heard the other humming Mandy under her breath. Adrienne brings Joanna boxes of Harry’s ratty schoolbooks, her mother’s murder mysteries, her father’s favourite anthologies of modern poetry. Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood, her father liked to say, but they were not his words - no more than the moment of the rose and of the yew tree or April is the cruellest month. Not with a bang but a whimper.
Fear death by water, she thinks, and hears the words in her father’s voice.
There is a book in her hands. She doesn’t remember taking it from the box, but now she feels its weight, and the soft, curling edges of its blue paper jacket. The cover is blank, and when she opens to the first page to find its title, the paper slices into the vulnerable skin between her thumb and forefinger. Startled by the pain, she drops the book and raises her hand to her mouth. She tastes dust with the blood, and looks down to see the book open on the floor.
It’s a storybook. The paper is yellow-edged and thick, the typeface familiar in its old style slenderness. CONTENTS, it says at the top of the page, and the stories are listed below. The Singing Bone, Page 3. The Lion and the Thorn, Page 6. The Woman Who Had No Shadow, Page 8.
Joanna picks up the book with unsteady hands. These were the stories of her childhood - Oda and the Snake, The Witch and the Hare, Simon the Thief and the Hand of Glory. The Golem of Prague, The Endless Tale, and Dildrum, King of the Cats. She and Harry read them over and over again, stealing the book back and forth between them in the day and repeating their favourites aloud each night in the dark, long after they were meant to be asleep.
They’d packed the book away when their parents died, along with her mother’s murder mysteries and her father’s poetry. Harry was too old for fairy stories then, and as the years passed Joanna forgot, as she’d forgotten so many things.
Agamede and the Moon is the book’s last story. Joanna sinks down to sit on a nearby steamer trunk, turning past brittle pages filled with animals that speak and murdered children who sing, men built from river clay and thieves who fear the dark. Stories that change the shape of the world.
They all begin the same way.
Once upon a time there was a man who was dying, and Death came and stood outside his door.
The man was a hermit, and he lived alone in a small cottage in the forest. A young girl was gathering wild-growing herbs in the shade of the trees, and when she saw Death waiting outside the cottage door, she took up her basket and went to him.
“He will not open his door to you,” the girl told Death. She did not curtsey or bow or say good day, good sir as she had been taught; she was not the sort to waste time with pointless courtesies. “This is a hermit’s cottage,” she said, “and he does not welcome strangers.”
“I am a stranger to no man,” Death said. “Nor to any woman, or little village girl.” Death turned back to the closed door. “The hermit will leave with me before moonrise. He need not welcome me.”
The girl thought this over carefully. Then she said: “Sir, I would offer you a wager.”
Death, as every man, woman, and little village girl knows, cannot be begged nor bought nor fooled, but he does have a gambler’s fondness for a likely wager. “There is nothing you could give that I should want,” Death said, though of course this was not true, and they each knew it. “You have no business here. Return home to your mother and father.”
“You have already taken them,” the girl said without reproach. “I was very young then, but I remember you well.”
Death looked again at the girl. She had a stubborn chin. But for the healthy summer flush of her skin, it was not unlike his. “The hermit’s fever is a fatal one, child. You cannot win his life from me.”
“I will cure the hermit whether you agree to my wager or not,” the girl told Death. “His life is not the prize.” She opened the door of the cottage and raised her stubborn chin. “If the hermit lives through the night, you will give me one gift - one that I will name.”
“Very well,” Death said. “And if he does not?”
“Then you may take me as well,” the girl Agamede said, “and save yourself the journey later.”
“It is your life to gamble,” Death said, and, satisfied, the girl closed the door and set to work.
The hermit’s cottage was dark and smelled of rotting food and sick; the girl pinned the curtains back from the windows and let in light and the summer air. The hermit slept and sweated with fever; the girl drew pails of cool water from the well and scrubbed him clean with a rag torn from the hem of her skirts. When all this was done she built a small fire in the hearth and brewed a tea with the herbs of her basket.
The hermit woke as she pulled him upright and set the cup to his lips. “I am already dead, girl,” the hermit said in a voice that crackled like burning wood. “I wish to suffer it alone. Leave me be.”
“It is alone that has killed you, old man,” the girl said. “Now save your breath and drink.”
The hermit drank the tea, and when it was gone he slept again. The girl sat beside his bed and watched the sun sink below the trees. She lit a candle to keep away the dark, and it burned until sunrise.
When daylight filled the cottage, the girl went to the window and saw Death standing again at the door. “I think you’ll find, sir, that you owe me a gift of my choosing.”
“So choose,” Death said. “You will have anything it is in my power to give.”
“I want to never again suffer famine or drought. I want never to be hungry.” The girl leaned out the window and gave Death a grin not unlike his own. “I want the cornucopia.”
Death reached into his cloak and drew out a twisted, bone-white horn. It looked to be hollow, but when Death raised it, the air around them filled with the golden smell of a harvest feast, of ripe, full fruits and warm-baked bread. The girl accepted the horn and tucked it close under her arm. “You intend to take the hermit at moonrise,” she said.
“You have stolen for him one day more of suffering,” Death said. “He will not thank you for it.”
“I do not want his thanks,” the girl said. “I want him to live through the night. If he does, you will give me a second gift - one that I will name.”
“Very well,” Death said, rather more reluctantly than he had the time before. “And if he does not?”
“Then you may take me as well,” the girl Agamede said, “and save yourself the journey later.”
“It is your life to gamble,” Death said a second time, and, satisfied, the girl left the window and returned to the hermit’s bedside.
The hermit slept restlessly, burning still with fever. The girl touched cool fingers to his forehead, to the echo of his heart’s beat at throat and wrist. He stirred, but did not wake.
The twisted horn was not heavy in the girl’s hand, and it was not light. When she looked into it she saw nothing, but when she reached inside she felt its potential - the weight of the world’s abundance in her small hand. Her mouth watered at the thought of olives and of wine, of ripe apples and rich creams and foods she’d only ever dreamt of, but when her hand emerged from the horn she held only a single pomegranate. It was as red as a drop of a village girl’s blood, and smelled as sweet as a kiss.
The hermit opened his eyes. “The fruit of the dead,” he said, his voice raw with fever. “Do you prepare my funeral meal, girl?”
“Only a fool wastes his food on the dead,” the girl said, and set the pomegranate aside. She reached inside the horn again, and this time she pulled out a tangle of summer radishes. “Now save your breath, old man, and eat.”
The girl ground the flesh of the radishes into a thin paste and seasoned it with the last herbs of her basket. She warmed the paste over the hearth fire and then fed it to the hermit, spoonful by spoonful.
“Death must taste better,” the hermit said, but he ate all the same. When it was gone, he slept deeply. The girl sat beside his bed and watched the sun rise in the sky before it sank again below the trees. She lit a candle to keep away the dark, and it burned until sunrise.
When daylight filled the cottage, the girl went to the window and saw Death standing again at the door. She held out a hand and offered him the pomegranate. He did not take it. “The hermit’s fever has broken,” the girl said. “He has no need of you now.”
“Fever is not the only way a man might die,” Death said. He moved closer, and his long shadow fell over the open window, blocking out the sun. “Choose your gift, child. You will have anything it is in my power to give.”
The girl stood silent for a long moment. Then she lifted her stubborn chin. “I want a blade as sharp as blood is red,” she said to Death, “with a shaft as long as night is black.”
“There is only one such blade,” Death said, “with only one such shaft.”
“Yes,” the girl said, “and it is yours to give.”
And so Death gave the girl Agamede his scythe, with its blade as sharp as blood is red and its yew-wood shaft as long as night is black. The girl took it, and held it close at her side.
“I will reap your hermit tonight, blade or no blade,” Death said. “But first I would offer you a wager.”
The girl’s grip on the scythe tightened. “I will listen.”
“If the hermit lives through this night,” Death said, “you may ask a third gift of me, and when that business is done I will leave this place. You will keep my gifts, and not see me again for many years yet.”
“And if he dies?”
Death reached out and plucked the pomegranate from the windowsill. “Then I will take you as well,” Death said, “and save myself the journey later.”
“It is my life to gamble,” she said, and returned to the hermit’s bedside.
The hermit lay awake, his clever eyes unclouded by fever. The girl touched her fingers to his forehead, to the echo of his heart’s beat at throat and wrist. He batted her hand away. “Girl,” he said, “you have not slept.”
“No,” she said, “but you have.”
She reached again into the twisted horn of plenty and used its gifts to prepare a thin soup for him to eat. He held the spoon himself and lifted it to his lips with an unsteady hand. “Girl,” he said, “you have not eaten.”
“No,” she said, “but you have.” She took the empty bowl from his hands. “Now save your breath, old man, and rest.”
The hermit slept through the heat of the day, and when the sun sank below the trees the girl lit a candle to keep away the dark. She sat in the chair beside the old man’s bed, and though she was as tired as she had ever been, she did not sleep. She watched the flickering light of the candle, and though she was as hungry as she had ever been, she did not eat.
Instead she listened.
There was the smallest of sounds from without the walls, a sound as soft as the footsteps of scattering mice and as sharp as the slow scrape of five bone fingers at the door. The girl sat by the burning candle and waited.
The door to the hermit’s cottage opened and a thief came inside. His hands and feet and face were wrapped in black rags, and he carried a knife, its blade wicked and stained.
“We have no gold,” the girl told the thief. She did not quiver or cry or say please, sir, I am only a little village girl as was expected; she was not the sort to waste time with pointless courtesies. “We have no gold, but if you seek shelter, you are welcome to share this roof until morning.”
“I do not seek shelter,” said the thief.
“We have no coin,” the girl said, “but if you hunger, you are welcome to share our food.”
“I do not hunger,” said the thief.
The girl stood from her chair beside the old man’s bed. “Then there is nothing to be done for you,” she said, and blew out the candle.
The thief struck out in the dark with his knife, but the girl raised Death’s scythe and with one swing parted the thief’s soul from his body. His empty flesh fell at her feet, and the rest of him went out again through the cottage door, where Death waited with open hands.
The hermit watched from his bed, his clever eyes open wide in the moonlight. “Girl,” he said, “you are cut.”
“Yes,” she said, “but you are not.” She lit the candle again and used a strip of cloth torn from the hem of her skirt to bind the bleeding wound in her arm. Then she sat again in the chair at the hermit’s bedside and waited for the sun to rise.
When daylight filled the cottage, the girl went to the window for the third time and met Death with her stubborn chin raised high. “The hermit lives,” she said, and behind her the old man sighed in his sleep.
“Choose your gift,” Death said, “and choose wisely.”
The girl did not hesitate. “I want your book of secrets,” she said, “so that neither I nor any person I love ever need fear you again.”
And so Death reached into his cloak and drew out a small book of yellow-edged pages bound in skin, withered and black. The girl took it from him and held it close to her chest. It was as cold in her hands as a slab of ice, and the heat of her skin did not warm it. She smiled.
“Good day, good sir,” the girl Agamede said to Death.
“And to you, child,” Death said, and was gone.
Years passed, and Death kept his word; the girl did not see him again. She took the book, the blade, and the horn and travelled far from the village where she’d been a child, through forests and cities, along deep ravines and across storm-churned seas, and wherever she went she used Death’s own gifts to save those he would have taken. Word of her skill spread far, and with the secrets written in the black book she cured kings in their castles and labourers in their fields, delivered whole those infants meant to die and restored to the aged the strength of youth. The girl grew to be a woman, and where she walked the people had no fear of death.
But the woman Agamede was not content. Before he had given her his final gift, Death had torn a single page from the book of secrets - the only page the woman truly wanted. She had at her fingertips the hidden, final fate of every man, woman, and child she met, but without that page she could not know her own. Death had deceived her, and for all her skill and secret knowledge the woman was as mortal as she had always been.
After many years her travels led her back to the forest of her childhood and the cottage of the old hermit. The man lived there still, for after three days and nights spent waiting outside his door Death had tired of the sight of him, and now felt no eagerness to return.
“Or so I imagine,” the hermit said, and there was laughter in his clever old eyes. “Whatever the reason, I have not seen him - not since last I saw you, girl.”
They talked of her travels, of the places she had seen and the deaths she had undone, and when they had finished the hermit emptied the cup in front of him and said, “I never thanked you for what you did.”
The woman shrugged. “I did not do it for you, old man.”
He laughed. “I do not doubt that. Still, I owe you a debt; I would like to see it settled.”
“There is nothing you could give that I should want,” the woman said.
The old man’s lips spread in a wide, bone-white grin.
There was a forgotten legend, he said, a legend of a pool in the forest whose waters were as dark as ink and as still as a mirror. It had been hidden long ago and wisely, for a man who looked on his reflection in the pool’s surface saw not his own face, but a reflection of the future - a glimpse of his final, mortal fate.
“Show me,” the woman said, and the hermit led her out of the cottage and deep into the forest night.
They found the pool at the heart of a grove of birch trees, far from the village and the home of any living man. The trees were bare, and stood like pale sentries around the water. The woman reached out and found their bark cold to the touch. The pool lay just beyond, its surface as still as silence and as smooth as glass.
“This is what you wanted,” the hermit said. “This is what you sought from the beginning.”
The woman walked past him, through the trees and close to the water’s edge. “I was tired of being afraid.”
“There was nothing to fear, child. All things die.”
“I am not a child anymore,” the witch Agamede said, and looked down at her reflection in the pool’s still water.
A stranger looked back at her, his round face luminous and pale. He was beautiful and his eyes were kind, and Agamede, who had cared neither for beauty nor for kindness, could not turn away from him. She sank to her knees beside the water and as the hours passed she forgot all but the sight of his face. The sun rose, sanguine and gold, and when its light touched the pool the man was gone.
“I should have spoken to him,” Agamede said, her words weighted with grief. “I should have begged him to stay.”
“He will return,” the hermit’s voice said from the trees. “You need only wait.”
And so the witch Agamede stayed by the water, the memory of the man’s face burning in her mind like candle flame.
Night fell again, and the man’s image returned to the surface of the pool. Agamede spoke to him, told him of her travels, of the places she had seen and the deaths she had undone, but if the man heard her, he did not reply. The sun rose and set and rose again, and for ten nights and days she slept and watched and wept at the water’s edge, offering the man her secrets and her skill, her blood and her breath. He wanted none of it, and as one night passed to the next her love slowly turned away from her, his pale face fading into the dark.
On the eleventh night she offered the horn, and held it low over the water. “If you are to leave me,” she said, “I shall need neither food nor drink.” She opened her hands, and the cornucopia sank without a ripple. Her love did not reply.
On the twelfth night she offered the scythe, and it shook her in her hands for the first time. “If you are to leave me,” she said, “I shall need neither blade nor shaft.” Death’s scythe slipped into the dark water; her love still did not reply.
On the thirteenth night the witch woman Agamede stood at the pool’s edge and waited for her love to appear in the water. Hours passed, and the surface was as dark as the moonless sky above.
“He is gone,” said a voice like the hermit’s, a voice from the white birch trees. “He has left you.”
She looked down at the pool, the book of secrets cold in her hands. “If he has left me,” she said, “I shall have no fear of death.” She watched as the book sank seamlessly beneath the water, and then she turned.
Death stood among the trees, the pomegranate red in one hand and a single torn page of yellowed paper in the other. She did not need to read it to know what it said.
The Lady Agamede followed her love into the water.
“I never much liked that version,” Adrienne says, her even voice echoing in the metal-walled silence. “Never liked the ending.”
Joanna looks up and sees the other woman standing above her, lips pressed in a bloodless expression too sharp to be a smile. The book lies open between them, clutched in Joanna’s white-knuckled hands. “I forgot this,” Joanna says, and the pages buckle in her grip. “How did I forget this?”
“Some things aren’t meant to be remembered.”
Joanna stands, furious and beautifully, beatifically calm. “And what the bloody fuck,” she says, “is that supposed to mean?”
The other woman takes a step back. “Doctor Watson-”
“Moriarty asked if I remembered the story of Agamede’s Mirror. I’d forgotten, but I knew I’d seen the name before - in Seostris’ burned arcana, and in this.” She raises the book between them. “Tell me this is just a children’s story. Tell me it isn’t real.”
Adrienne stares back at her, sphinx-like and unmoved, and eases the book from her hand. “This is only a story. The mirror is real, and Agamede was its creator.”
Joanna sinks back down to sit on the streamer trunk. The anger is gone, but the clarity stays - the clarity and the terrible, steady-handed calm. “A mirror that shows you your own death. My grandmother’s mirror.”
“Agamede’s, passed down from descendant to descendant. Passed down to you.” Adrienne steps closer, and her heels click on the concrete floor. “What did you see in it, Joanna?”
A boy, Joanna thinks. I saw a lonely boy, and he saw me. She closes her eyes and sees him again - pale face and dark hair and the effortless, steadying surety that whether she could see him or not he was always there, just on the other side of the glass.
A hand touches her shoulder. “Watson?”
“Sherlock,” Joanna says. “When I looked in the mirror, I saw Sherlock Holmes.” Then she covers her face with her hands and laughs.
“Ah,” Adrienne says. “You’ve snapped, haven’t you?”
“Yes,” Joanna gasps, laughing so hard tears well in her eyes. “Yes, but ages ago. Oh god-” She dissolves into giggles again, and Adrienne stands back, the book tucked awkwardly under one arm. For the first time since Joanna met her, she looks as if she doesn’t know what to say.
“It’s not - the mirror is as difficult to interpret as any other form of divination. It doesn’t mean Sherlock is going to kill you.”
“Of course he’s bloody well going to kill me,” Joanna says, grinning wide enough to make her cheeks ache. “Less than twelve hours ago I put a psychotic criminal mastermind in a headlock for the man, and God only knows what I’ll be doing for him twelve hours from now; I hardly need some ancient magical artefact to tell me how that’s going to end.” She shakes her head, drying her eyes with the edge of her sleeve. “Oh, what a relief. I thought for sure all this was going to mean something awful once I sorted it out.”
“You’re insane,” Adrienne says flatly.
“Probably. But then, I’m also a crime fighting ex-Army witchdoctor, so that may come with the territory.” She pushes herself to her feet. Her leg feels wonderfully solid beneath her, the strongest it’s been all morning. “You’re going to tell Mycroft about this, aren’t you?”
The other woman pauses, and for a moment she looks almost bemused, as if she’d forgotten the elder Holmes entirely and was struggling to place the name. “I don’t see why I should,” she says finally. “We’ve been aware of Moriarty’s obsession with the mirror for some time, but without Moran he had little hope of finding it. Now that his pet warlock is returned to London-” She shrugs and offers Joanna the book. “Moriarty will either use the mirror or he will not. What you’ve seen in it is irrelevant.”
“Not to me, and certainly not to Mycroft. If he knew I was destined to die for his brother’s sake-”
“You’re not destined to do anything,” Adrienne says, her voice hard with an emotion Joanna can’t define. “That’s not how it works, and you know it. If you stay with him, you’re choosing this. If you leave Baker Street tonight-”
“Not going to happen,” Joanna says, and though she’s smiling, there’s nothing friendly in it. “Not tonight, and not tomorrow night. Probably not the night after that, either, but that depends more on the state of Sherlock’s latest toxic mould experiment than on anything you might say.” She takes the book from Adrienne’s hand and drops it neatly into an open box. “I’d like to go home now. Are you driving me, or do I need to phone for a cab?”
The ride back to Baker Street is silent but for the hum of the engine and the soft sounds of Adrienne’s mobile. Joanna leans against the town car window and watches the city flow past, a London bleached colourless by the height of the midday sun. Her shoulder aches, but her mind is clear.
When the car slows to a stop outside the flat, Adrienne breaks the silence. “Moran will try to get access to the house. He’ll have guessed Helene hid the mirror there.”
Joanna turns from the window, but the other woman’s eyes are still fixed on the glowing screen of her mobile. “You didn’t just read about my grandmother in a file, did you? You knew her.”
“The wards on the house will hold, and I’ll see to it that your sister’s home is secure. Your flat, on the other hand-”
“I’ll take care of the flat. Gran died in ’91; you must be older than you look.”
Adrienne lowers her mobile and meets Joanna’s eyes. “James Moriarty knows that you and your sister are the last surviving descendants of one of the most powerful witches who ever lived. The only reason he hasn’t shut you up in a cellar somewhere and unravelled your intestines inch by inch is his now incorrect assumption that you don’t know anything worth hearing. In that light, it might be wise to spend a little more time planning your next move and a little less speculating about my personal life.” She reaches across the seat and opens the car door with a sharp tug on the handle. “Now if you don’t mind, I’m needed at the office.”
Joanna laughs, the sound dry and humourless. “No, please - let’s talk more about my vivisected intestines. It was doing wonders for my appetite.” She pushes the door open and climbs out. “Wouldn’t have figured you for the type to be sensitive about your age.”
“Goodbye, Doctor Watson,” Adrienne says, and slams the door shut. The car disappears into the Baker Street traffic, white chalk sigils still spinning on its tyres.
Joanna knows what to look for, now. She doesn’t forget.
chapter 4c