On my first day of school, I woke up on a train surrounded by ghosts.
I know how that sounds incredibly, and almost intolerably, dramatic. But how about you wake up after a night of tossing and turning in a tiny, cramped train bed you have to bend your knees to fit into, only to find the face of a semi-transparent housekeeper from the seventeenth century peering down at you and see how dramatic that makes you feel?
"Death," the housekeeper droned. Death comes for you, Theo Crowley.
"Death," another ghost agreed as he oozed forward. The spirit's bottom half was gone, and he dragged spectral entrails behind him in bloody glory.
"Death," a third, a young boy with hollow eyes and a face bloated with purple bruises, intoned. "Death. Death comes for you."
"Oh, shut up," I told the lot of them and rubbed my face. My head felt full of angry, buzzing bees. I squeezed my eyes shut again. Sometimes, if I ignore the dead long enough, they'll just float away and slink around churchyards, cackle away in attics, or do whatever it is they usually do when they're not bothering the living hell out of me.
"Death," the housekeeper repeated.
"Death," said the legless man.
"Death comes for you," the boy agreed, and I couldn't help but notice he sounded almost cheerful.
No. I shook myself. No, you're not doing this. You're not engaging. Just go back to sleep, and maybe they'll be all gone when you wake up again. I held my eyes shut and willed myself to sleep. Big fluffy clouds. Nice green pastures full of sheep. That stew Mum used to make in the winter with potatoes and mutton…
"Death…" the housekeeper hissed in my ear, each word she uttered carried the stench of rotting fish.
My eyes snapped open, and I sat up sharply, smacking my head against the wooden ceiling of the bed compartment. I yelped in pain, my hand rushing to my throbbing forehead. I glared at the ghosts as they floated around my bed. "What the hell do you want?" I asked, wincing.
The spirits, of course, choose not to say anything remotely useful. "Death," they hissed, "Death. Death. Death. Death comes for you, Theodore Crowley!"
I had only been seeing ghosts for two years, but I was already thoroughly sick of it. Having spirits occasionally show up to give you warnings or advice sounds great in theory. That is right up until you realize most ghosts are too trapped in their own Narratives—that power of story which all magic is beholden to—to care about the rest of the world, and those who aren't, are far too cryptic or insane to be remotely helpful.
I rolled out of bed, planting my bare feet on the train compartment's cold floor. The vibrations from the train cheerfully moving along, powered by the cage of fire elementals locked up in some far away compartment of the engine car, rumbled under my feet.
I stood up and made my way over to the small window fixed into the wall of the sleeping car. The legless ghost moaned as I walked through him, tasting the sour dregs of ectoplasm on my tongue. I ignored both and pulled the curtains back with the gold tassel string. A few beams of sunlight lazily drifted into the car, and the spirits recoiled like cats having a bucket of wet water thrown on them. They slunk into the shadows, diving for cover underneath the old dresser built into a wall and under the bed I barely fit into.
Since I was already up, I decided a bit of breakfast would sit nicely with me. I opened my suitcase and paused, staring down at the uniform on the very top of my clothes. Crisp red coat, black slacks, and a tie with a white-buttoned undershirt. The coat had the insignia of Angitia Academy embroidered on in silver thread: the serpent eating its own tail surrounding the six-pointed star of Solomon. I touched the symbol, and for a moment, I could almost see my mum, or one of the dozen or so women like her back home, stitching the design. Quickly, I withdrew my hand and laid the uniform on my bed to continue shifting through my small suitcase. There were a dozen other coats just like it, packed away with the rest of my things in a trunk in the luggage car.
I put on a simple, non-school uniform coat and cravat from the bottom of my suitcase. The ghosts hissed and muttered in the shadows as I changed, but I ignored them. When I pulled my nightshirt over my head and exposed my Witch's Mark, the sprawling pattern that stretched from right above my heart and spilled tendrils over my stomach, the ghosts chattered even louder. There seemed to be more voices, almost shouting.
"Deathdeathdeathdeathdeathdeath," it all swirled together. "TheoTheodoreCrowleyCrowleyCrowley!"
"Oh, shut up." I hissed again; I had to stop myself from yelling at them. It's sometimes hard to remember I'm likely the only person around who can see or hear ghosts, especially when they're being particularly obnoxious.
The spirits calmed down a bit as I put on a shirt and pants, slipped into my coat, and walked out the door. They still whispered, though, when I closed the door behind me.
"Death. Death comes for you, Theo Crowley…"
"Yeah," I muttered and made my way to the dining car. "Tell me something I don't already know."
When I stepped into the dining car, the first thing I noticed was Lord Woodman was already there, sitting at a table, wearing a crisp blue suit and absently sipping from a porcelain teacup as he browsed the newspaper. His cold green eyes flicked up when I walked into the dining car, and for the briefest of moments, panic stabbed me. I couldn't remember if he told me to meet him for breakfast. If he had, then I was probably late. If there was one thing I had learned about Lord Fitzwilliam Woodman during our two-year acquaintance, it was that he detested tardiness.
Lord Woodman's eyes stayed on me for a second or so longer before returning to the newspaper. Still unsure of whether we were planning on meeting that morning, I made my way over to his table, brushing past the handful of null waitstaff serving breakfast to a smattering of wizardly nobles and their children about to be dropped off at Angitia Academy for Sorcerous Youth.
I reached his table and gave Lord Woodman a quick bow of my head and a tight smile. "Good morning, Uncle." The term still felt awkward even though I'd had two years to practice saying it. Whenever I said the word, it felt like trying to talk with a mouth full of glass chips.
We look nothing alike. Not really. Lord Woodman has red hair greying at the temples, eyes like cold emeralds, and the tight smile of a hungry snake. Whereas I'm blue-eyed, straw-haired, and have been told I resemble the blunt end of a shovel on more than one occasion. Officially, I'm a distant orphaned cousin whom Lord Woodman graciously took in shortly after the untimely demise of my parents. Unofficially, I'm just some random magicless boy completely unrelated to Lord Woodman by blood who woke up one day as an Irregular and was thus apparently ideal to be used as an easily disposable pawn masquerading as a tragically orphaned relation.
I wasn't actually sure why he had done nothing to make me look more like him to help sell the ruse better. Like giving me red hair, or that way his smile never quite reached his eyes. But I'd always been too afraid to ask.
Lord Woodman grunted in response, which I interpreted as an invitation to sit in the chair across from him.
"I was not expecting to see you so early today, Theodore." Lord Woodman noted, and it took all I had not to slump in relief.
"Something woke me up," I said, while a server quickly poured a cup of tea and placed it before me with a small jar of honey. I mixed a spoonful in and took a sip. "The usual sort of thing."
Lord Woodman raised an eyebrow but didn't look up from his paper. "Really," he mused. He turned a page in his newspaper. The air around us stilled slightly, and my Witch's Mark prickled slightly as Lord Woodman pulled me into a Working. Soft. Silent. No sound shall pass outside the two of us. Not a drop. Not a whisper. Not a word.
"Did you learn anything useful?" Lord Woodman asked me.
"No, sir."
The Working released itself, and the world around us breathed again. No one in the cabin seemed to have noticed that anything amiss had occurred.
Sound and light were Lord Woodman's bread and butter. He could hear a conversation a mile off, turn a barn to ash with a wave of his hand, and everything in between. It's all much more impressive than anything I could do. Though in all fairness, Lord Woodman was a wizard fully grown into his power with a few decades' worth of experience backed with several hundred years of purebred mystic pedigree. And I was just fifteen years' worth of… well, me.
Being woken up by ghosts giving vague warnings, occasionally entering a room and knowing exactly how many people have died in it, and my favorite, sometimes knowing exactly how the meat I'm eating died midway through chewing it. The first time that happened, I spit out a piece of Beef Wellington in the middle of one of Lord Woodman's more elegant dinner parties.
He had my da flogged in front of me for that one.
I asked the server for a plate of eggs, which rarely gave me any trouble on the eating front, and a slice of toast. She quickly returned with my food, refilling Lord Woodman's teacup before curtsying and scurrying off. "It appears Sir John Thorne captured another Irregular the other day."
I paused, a forkful of egg halfway to my mouth. I gave Lord Woodman a tight smile. "Really, Uncle? Didn't he catch one just last week?"
"Indeed," Lord Woodman said and took another long-absent sip of his tea. "If you'd believe the papers, a Hunter seems to catch a different Irregular every day. Though I wouldn't put much stock in that sensationalist fluff, mostly, I think." He folded the newspaper neatly and turned it around to display a black-and-white photograph printed on one page. A man dressed in the crisp military uniform of Special Branch's Hunters gripped a woman's arms behind her while he pressed her into the mud. Her clothes, plain and worn, marked her as a magicless null. But one of her dress sleeves had been torn off to expose the telltale spiraling Witch's Mark that showed the world what she really was, regardless of how much she might pretend otherwise.
"Though in this case," Lord Woodman noted, "It is rather hard to argue with a picture, isn't it?"
"Yes, sir."
I looked down at my plate of eggs and shoveled them into my mouth.
***
After my delightful breakfast with Lord Woodman, I excused myself and retreated to my room, saying I needed to pack some things before we arrived. He didn't even look up from his paper as I left.
A maid had been walking down the sleeping car toward my room, presumably to clean it, before she saw me and ducked into another room. I could hardly blame her. Nulls learn from a very early age that it's safer to give a wide berth to any wizards they come across.
The smart ones usually do.
Upon returning to my room, I found the bed unmade, and the ghosts gone. They usually slithered back to wherever they came from if I left a room for long enough. I had to change once more, this time into my uniform. When I had my shirt off and my Mark exposed for anyone to see, I paused. I ran my fingers over it. The Witch's Mark didn't feel any different from any other part of my skin. It was rather distinctive, though, intersecting lines of red, blue, and black.
It had sprung up on my chest, blooming like a flower almost two years prior, the day I brought a dog back to life. Well, not back to life, not really. It was more like an undead husk that shambled around a bit, making an awful wet noise that should have been barking before it exploded. Still, it was the most impressive bit of magic I've ever done.
Well, honestly, it's probably the only piece of magic I'd ever done.
I had heard it's like that for most young wizards; we have some moment where we first manifest magic powerfully and dramatically. Something we can't replicate without years of study and practice. Though I am rather good at sniffing out magical Workings, and I can usually tell what they can do.
Only Irregular wizards, those of us born to null parents, manifest a Witch's Mark, though. A spiraling triskelion that blooms somewhere on our body and marks us for death in the eyes of the wizards around us.
I finished putting on my uniform. It fit a bit loosely on me, but otherwise didn't feel so terrible. I packed away what few odds and ends I had scattered around the room, and I got ready to leave.
***
I met Lord Woodman in front of his cabin. A null servant I didn't know terribly well, Winston or Cheston or something, pushed Lord Woodman's luggage on a cart behind us. He offered to take my bag as well, but I declined.
We climbed off the train and onto the platform, and a sensation washed over me. The hollow thunk of bodies hitting the ground, the rust-stained smell of blood, and bile rising in my throat.
Angitia Station was built directly into the Angitia School for Sorcerous Youth, and the station was honestly rather innocuous. Red brick walls trimmed with lovely little bits of ironwork. I supposed that to anyone else, it probably looked much like any of a dozen or so other stops on the rail line that ran from one edge of old Albion to the next. But to me, the place stuck out in horrific detail.
Ghosts infested the entire place. More than I'd ever seen or heard in one place before.
I stood there. Frozen like a rabbit in the face of some sort of large predator. Other people, other students dressed in Angitia uniforms of red and black, seemed to mill around me.
I didn't even realize I'd been standing still for a long stretch until Lord Woodman's cane prodded sharply against my pack. A subtle knock of the silver snake's head against one of my shoulder blades. "Come on, boy," he said gruffly. "You're holding up the line."
I glanced behind me, and I saw he was right. There were people behind us, fancy ladies in chiffon dresses and men in fine suits. More kids dressed like me. Parents wanting to drop off their brats at one of the finest magic schools in the British Empire.
I swallowed and forced my legs to move again. I made it clear of the crowd of bustling wizards before leaning against a pillar. The ghosts, thankfully, didn't seem to notice me. Too caught up in whatever Narrative, whatever story about how they died. When I looked closer, I could see a lot of them wore the same clothes as I did. Angitia students. Some walked around completely on fire, screaming silently with perfect black circles for mouths. One boy's throat had been perfectly slit, spilling out phantasmal drops of ruby blood. A pair of girls dragged themselves across the floor, fully missing the lower half of their bodies.
They whispered different things, soft mutterings repeated.
"Blair, I'm so sorry…."
"He lied. He lied heliedliedliedlied—"
"The Hunt. The Wild Hunt is coming."
Over and over again and—
Lord Woodman grabbed me by the elbow and briskly pulled me along. "Come boy," he said. "I know being away from home for the first time is a lot to take in, but we only have a little while to see you settled before I catch the next train to Dublin." He squeezed my arm tightly. "I know this is all a lot to take in," he repeated, voice soft as velvet and eyes sharp as a razor blade. "But think of how proud your parents would be if they could see you now."
I stiffened sharply and quickly matched my stride to his, distinctly aware of the threat in his words. The subtle reminder of why I served this man.
I mustn't forget.
I mustn't forget there are reasons Lord Woodman has passed himself off as a doting relative and myself a hapless orphan. There are reasons I must do whatever tasks he sets me to.
"Just think of all the things you'll learn," he added, almost conversationally. A reminder of all the things there, hidden away in the school of magic. All the things he wanted me to steal for him. All the secrets he wanted to know. It's the primary reason I was there.
"And all the friends you'll make." Lord Woodman said, almost as an afterthought. There wasn't much point in me making friends. There were people at Angitia who'd slit my throat for being a necromancer, let alone an Irregular. It was best not to risk anyone getting close enough to figure either out.
The ghosts shouldn't surprise you, I told myself. Magic schools like Angitia are proving grounds, places for young wizards to experience and gain power. Or die in the attempt. Or be stabbed by a jealous teacher or classmate. If anything, the Empire encouraged such behavior. Makes better, sharper wizards.
The wisdom of Galton. That's what the nobles called it. I thought the actual quote was something along the lines of: "By testing the young, we shall cull the weak from our populace, and leave only the strong to breed and prosper to further improve our mighty nation."
I couldn't, and still can't, remember for sure, though.
The Angitia Academy for Sorcerous Youth came into full view after we left the train station. It was all grey stone and sheets of colored glass built into a series of towers held loosely together by connecting walls. I swallowed deeply.
Lord Woodman pointed out buildings to me. The library, Lion Hall, the different academic buildings. I listened with half an ear. Places I'd probably have to break into at some point.
As I said, Angitia was supposed to be filled with all kinds of magical secrets and treasures. Which made me wonder, was one of those secrets a way to strip a wizard of their magic?
A way for me to stop being a wizard and become a null again?
A way to get Lord Woodman to leave my family and me alone forever?
A way for me to finally go home?
If there was, I certainly planned on finding it.