chapter 1
“You don’t have to do this,” Anne said.
We were in Canonbury, one of the districts within Islington. It’s one of London’s upmarket areas—not on the level of Westminster or Chelsea, but a long way from cheap. London has a lot of places like Canonbury, old expensive terraced houses crammed into winding tree-lined streets, with small parks in between where people walk their dogs. For the most part, mages don’t visit them. It’s true that mages are more common in cities, but there are close to ten million people in London, and that’s enough to dilute the mage population pretty heavily, even if they wanted to spread out, which they don’t. So they cluster, and the areas in between fall off their radar, to the point where the average mage knows about as much about the residents of Canonbury as the average resident of Canonbury knows about mages. It’s symmetrical, I suppose.
Right now we were standing under a sycamore tree, looking across the street towards a house on the other side. It was a July evening, with the sun setting behind the rooftops, and the air was still and warm. From around us, voices and chatter drifted up, the sounds of traffic coming from the main roads nearby. Anne had led me here by a roundabout route, taking a path down an old canal lined with benches and willow trees. It had been a pretty walk and I’d enjoyed it, but I had the feeling it had been a delaying tactic.
“Neither do you,” I told her.
“Yes I do,” Anne said. “You don’t have to.”
“Would you really prefer to go in on your own?” I asked. “Anyway, look on the bright side. You’re not going on trial this time.”
“That’s what you think.” Anne thought for a minute. “How long will we have?”
“Until we get the go signal?” I asked. “Call it about a twenty percent chance for the next hour, forty percent for one to two hours, twenty percent for later, and twenty for never.”
“So that’s a forty percent chance of being stuck here all night.”
I leant in and kissed the side of Anne’s head. “Come on. Are we really going to come this far, then turn around and leave?”
Anne sighed. “I suppose not.”
We crossed the street and walked up the steps to the house. It was on the large side for a terrace, with bay windows. Anne rang the bell and as we stood waiting, we heard footsteps approaching from the other side.
The door swung open, light and noise spilling out into the summer evening. From down the hallway I could hear the sound of chatter and raised voices. The woman who’d opened the door was in her fifties with greying hair, and wore an evening dress and a pearl necklace. “Oh good, you’re here. We were starting to think you wouldn’t make it. Alex, wasn’t it? Do come in. Anne, the coats are going in the hall.”
* * *
I sat at the dinner table and felt out of place.
There were seven others in the dining room. The woman who’d greeted us was sitting at the head of the table, presiding over the meal. At her right side was her husband, a thin, melancholy-looking man currently focused on drinking his soup. Occupants three through six were the two daughters and their partners. Number seven was Anne.
“. . . just can’t understand how anyone like that can get elected,” the younger daughter was saying. “I mean . . . no? Just no?”
“Well, it’s lack of education, isn’t it?” the boy who’d come with her said. “The funny thing is that they’re voting against their own interests. You’d think they’d be able to see . . .”
It was odd to think that this was the house that Anne had grown up in. Well, one of them. According to Anne, when she’d first been placed with the family, it had been in Finchley—they’d moved to Canonbury when she was twelve so that the elder daughter, Elizabeth, could go to a better school. That had been fourteen years ago, and apparently they’d been living here ever since.
I looked around at the dining room. Most of the walls were taken up with shelves, with plates and bowls mounted upon them, well spaced. There were several chests of drawers, all covered with white lace tablecloths. Despite its size, the room felt cramped. It didn’t really feel like a room for living in, one where you could stretch out and put your feet up: it was a display room, every piece of glass and china arranged for effect. A partition led into the living room, and a door at the side opened into a hallway containing the stairs and the entrance to the kitchen.
The older boyfriend was talking now. He was English, with short brown hair and narrow glasses, and looked to be a good five to ten years older than his fiancée. “. . . real problem is that people aren’t listening enough to experts,” he was saying. “Instead they’re being influenced by private elements in the media. All these billionaires who can just manufacture fake stories. I mean, we try to do the best we can to provide a more balanced view, but . . .”
“It must be very difficult,” the mother said sympathetically. Her husband sipped his soup.
Anne and I had been a couple for a year now. I’d suggested meeting her family more than once, but Anne had put it off, and now that I was here it wasn’t hard to see why. My time on the Council had gotten me into the habit of paying attention to social hierarchies, and on reflex I’d found myself analysing the other people around the table. The mother was the head of the household, and both the elder daughter, Elizabeth, and her fiancé, Johnathan, apparently had her approval. Elizabeth wore an engagement ring with a large diamond, positioned prominently. Neither the mother nor Johnathan wanted me here. In the case of Johnathan, the reason wasn’t hard to guess: he considered himself the alpha male of the group and I was an intruder. The mother’s issues were less obvious, and I suspected they were something deeper, something involving Anne.
The younger sister apparently held less favour in her mother’s eyes, judging by the choice of seating. Neither she nor her boyfriend had been paying attention to me so far, but I knew that when trouble started, it would come from her. As I formed the thought, I couldn’t help but smile. Trouble. What a dramatic way to put it.
“Why don’t you ask Alex?” the younger daughter said brightly.
Johnathan had been in mid-flow; the question caught him off guard. “What?”
“Well, you were just saying that the government ought to do more, weren’t you?” the younger daughter said. According to Anne, her name was Grace. “Didn’t she say you work for the government?”
“More or less,” I agreed.
“So what do you think the government should be doing to cut down on populism?”
“Come now, Grace,” the mother cut in smoothly. “We shouldn’t ask him to talk business at the dinner table.”