The Atrium, as all the others so lovingly called it, was just about the strangest building Hannah had ever known. As George led her emphatically from room to room and up and down the numerous flights of stairs that led to each of the floors, she found her eyes going dry as dirt from how widely she held them at each new surprising sight. It appeared to be a grand estate of large proportions, made of solid wooden beams of walls of black brick and mortar. Hannah discovered as they climbed a third set of stairs from the room they began in--George referred to that common area with the dining table as the Mess--that frosted windows peppered the walls and let in startling amounts of sunlight from the world beyond the panes. This knowledge gave her reason to believe that the Mess was in a basement, or at least that it was on one of the lowest floors according to the height that rose from ground-level with each staircase that they dutifully ascended.
The floor above the Mess was lavishly designed with stone pillars and marble floors, and George walked her through a few cavernous hallways with a couple stray offices lining their ribs.
“This is the foyer,” he said lightly as they stepped into the main entrance of the home. “It’s not used much, mostly just for show.”
“Where’s the front door?” Hannah asked, staring at the large blank wall sided with two massive, cloudy bay windows that shafted in daylight onto the polished floor. It was the perfect place for a front door to be, but as far as she could tell, it didn’t have a lick of an entrance carved into it. “Is it magical, too?”
“Heavens no,” George laughed, waving a hand at the wall absentmindedly. “We don’t bother with one, here. No one can get into the Atrium without the use of a Guild Token, so there’s no need for a door.”
“Is that like a secret password?”
“Well, I guess it is sort of like that, huh?” He shrugged as he led her down another hallway with a floor runner bolting down the center of the marble floor that led to another ascending staircase. “It’s more of an item that only we Guild members possess. So unless you’re with one of us, you can’t get through. Safety first!”
“How many of you are there? Guild members?”
“Eh, I’ll let Emery tell you anything like that if he sees fit to.”
The next floor yielded a massive common room with bookcases on every wall, an array of sofas and soft armchairs, a wide hearth, a long table covered in playing cards and pencils, and two long hallways opposing one another on each parallel wall. There was a round, plush carpet in the center of the room, and a few blankets were crumpled up on the floor with discarded heavy novels; almost as if a few recently dozing inhabitants had been curled up before the fire, their backs leaning heavily on the legs of the sofas as they read. The coffee table still held a few dirty teacups and saucers, and Hannah spotted a lone cube of sugar at the center of the table’s surface, leaving a trail of glistening dust from where it had traveled from its dish and into the great unknown.
“This is the Roost,” George picked up a lone throw cushion from the floor and tossed it onto one of the sofas. “All the girls’ rooms are down the right, and all us lads are on the left.” He motioned to each hallway and gave her a mischievous smile, the gap in his front teeth making him appear almost fiendish. “Because the ladies are always right.”
“I won’t fight you on that,” Hannah stifled a grin as she took in the cozy luxuriousness of it all. There was an ancient guitar in the corner with the fraying end of a recently-repaired string sticking off of its top, and Hannah also spied a scattered collection of magazines on one of the other tables off to the side, a shirtless photo of some celebrity heartthrob from Hannah’s own England pasted across the front of the topmost article. “Is this the common area for you all?”
“Oh yes, you can always find a couple of us here in our downtime,” they moved to a spiral staircase in the corner, and George gripped the handrail, leaping up a couple steps. “We love to gamble.”
“What?”
“The cards! We love Poker--it’s one of the best things Commoners have come up with, in my opinion.”
“Whatever do you bet on?” Hannah followed him as they circled upward, their sock feet casting soft echoes on the iron, vibrating the metal under her palms. “Can’t you just magic whatever you want?”
“Being able to wield doesn’t mean you can just pull things out of thin air,” George gave her a skeptical look, as if she had asked something very childish and he was surprised at her ignorance. “Only Conjurers can create things, and it takes a really skilled one to get specific like making money or gold or what have you. We usually bet on sweets, or pocket change.”
“Pounds?”
“Not a chance!” They emerged onto a floor that was unmistakably the library, and it was stacked floor to ceiling with shelves as long as the entire expanse of the room. “The Vale deals in lucre--it’s our currency, conjured only in Mull. Pounds are useless here, I’m afraid, so if you’ve got any, I’d tuck them away for now.”
“This is marvelous,” Hannah breathed, gazing around at the library’s splendor. Sunlight came in in droves from the large frosted windows lining the western, and the padded bench seats at their bases looked so inviting that it was all Hannah could do to keep from immediately searching for a novel and sinking down onto one of them for at least a long, honeyed hour. This room was remarkably taller than the others had been, and there were a few smart-looking little ladders on wheels that slid on tracks around the base of the shelves so that curious bookworms could peruse the novels from top to bottom should they wish to.
A few narrow isles branched off from the main reading room, and Hannah could see little desks in each of them amid the cases, undoubtedly workspaces for those who needed to delve deep into the pages or who sought a bit of respite in their studies. There was a ladder that led up to a platform built halfway up to the ceiling, and Hannah saw a few chairs up on the loft, and she was entranced by the idea of lounging up there with a pile of books of her choosing.
“Eh, it’s mostly dust. There’s so many books here, and I have no idea where they’ve all come from. In fact, each year they only seem to multiply, and I haven’t the faintest as to who is towing them all here, let alone who is taking the time to put them all away!” George strode through the library, heading for another spiraling staircase, but Hannah walked in a dream after it, taking her time to soak in the spires of books that occluded every inch of free space. “I suspect it’s Emery, although I don’t know where he finds the time to go gallivanting off on library reconnaissance.”
“Are you much of a reader?” Hannah looked longingly at the nearest row that she wandered by, her hands itching with urgency to browse. She had always treasured her library cards, both in her hometown and then again in London, and to be in a home with a fortress of novels built into it such as this one was something out of a dream for her.
“I got all the looks, whilst Dean got all the smarts,” George pushed his glasses up on the bridge of his nose and placed a hand on the archway that led to another hallway with yet another staircase at its end. “Reading takes up too much of the time where I could be getting beauty sleep.”
“Is that you, George?” A voice drifted from up atop the loft, and Hannah jumped in surprise. “Do we have a visitor?”
“I’ll say we do!” George cackled, turning on his heel and moving back towards Hannah at the center of the room. “Come introduce yourself, Jane!”
A girl, younger even than Hannah, stuck her nose over the edge of the loft and through the ladder to peer down at them. She had a bushel of black hair tied back from her face in a loose braid, and she was pale as a sheet out from underneath the neck of her white tee shirt. She had a pinched-up nose, and startlingly lovely green eyes that snapped down at them from underneath heavy lashes.
“Holy Ire,” the girl gasped at the sight of Hannah standing starkly below her. “That’s not what I think it is, is it?”
“Direct from The Known,” George smiled, slinging an arm around Hannah’s shoulders and giving her a warm shake. “She’s here on Emery’s explicit order, and on Dean’s massive failure. It’s delightful, really.”
There was an incredible gust of wind, and the girl called Jane was suddenly swept up from above them and suspended in midair for a split second, her legs dangling and her fingers splayed around her in two delicate fans. Hannah drew back with a gasp, and George whistled as Jane floated gently downward, riding on the air hanging in front of the ladder’s wooden rungs. “Beautiful bit of wind-work,” he commented as she landed softly before them, her slippers tapping once on the wooden floor and her gold earrings swinging from side to side as the wind died down seemingly instantly. The girl stood barely at Hannah’s chin, and she puffed out her chest and pushed back her shoulders to face her squarely, as if she were trying to make up for the lost centimeters that were obvious between them.
“I’ve never actually seen one in person before, you know,” Jane commented lightly to George, her eyes studying Hannah with a curious intensity that could have made her blush if she hadn’t been growing semi-used to interrogatory gazes since that fateful morning. “For some reason, I imagined they’d look a lot different than us.”
“Your youth is showing, Jane,” George clucked, giving Hannah’s shoulder’s a squeeze before dropping his arm to his side. “The Known isn’t just a zoo, you know. There’s sentient beings there as well.”
“Why are you here?” Jane asked in a voice that wasn’t altogether unpleasant, but more so quizzical. Hannah couldn’t stifle the choked chuckle that bubbled up in her as she shook her head, perplexed at the girl’s bluntness.
“A fair question,” she replied. “I’d like to know the answer to it as well. I’m Hannah,” she stuck out her hand to the girl, and she met her eye, trying to appear confident despite sensing the anxiety at meeting yet another stranger who wasn’t entirely agreeable to her existence. “I’m from London.”
“That I can tell,” Jane answered, taking Hannah’s hand after a beat. “I’m Jane. How did you get here?”
“Dean pulled me headlong into a moving tube, and I woke up in your city’s train station.” Jane flinched, but her emotions were imperceptible.
“Why’d he do that?”
Hannah felt her face flush, “I don’t know.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that I have no idea why he did it,” Hannah wished her palms would stop sweating. “He practically kidnapped me.”
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“He wouldn't do something like that without provocation.” Jane cocked her head with that same unflappable blankness. “Why did he really do it?”
George sighed, “Jane, my friend, I’m smack dab in the middle of giving Hannah a tour of our home. Can’t the verbal waterboarding wait? I’m certain Emery is going to enlighten all of those who need the knowledge of why she is visiting when he sees fit to do so. Probably at dinner, when he usually makes his grand speeches.” Hannah felt her shoulders slump, grateful for George’s interruption beyond words. “Why don’t you walk with us? You can show her your greenhouses, if you’d like.”
“Do you garden?” Hannah asked Jane, feeling a low pang of longing rifle through her chest at the thought of the greenhouse by the shed in Bartrum’s backyard--the one that they had both spent hours designing the planter box assignments for--and she felt the wind knock from her ever so slightly. I will get home. I will see it again. Don’t let this overwhelm you.
“Janie is a real…green thumb,” George chided with a hint of amusement in his voice. “Her greenhouses up top are some of the best in the city. She’s been gifted with it.”
Hannah nodded, “I’d love to see them, if you’d be willing to show me.”
Jane didn’t answer for a moment, instead opting to simply stare at Hannah a little more softly than she had before. George tapped an impatient foot as he looked at his wristwatch, a beautiful gold emblem that glinted brightly on his pale arm.
At last, she spoke. “Alright,” she shrugged in the direction of George. “I figured it must be a special occasion if you were in the library, anyways.”
“Right you are,” George beamed, waving an arm dramatically to the archway leading upward. “After you.”
Jane walked forward, glancing back over her shoulder at Hannah. “So, you’re from London. What’s it like?”
Hannah blinked, taken aback, “it’s…a city. It rains a lot there. You’ve never been?”
“Not to The Known,” the three of them boarded the staircase and began to climb, and Hannah felt a muscle in her hamstring pull at the exertion of yet another formidable enemy in the form of a flight. “Is it quite like Brink?”
“That’ll be our next order of business,” George interrupted. “We have to figure out a way to get Hannah out and about in our quaint little town so she can explore it for herself.”
“That would be grounds for expulsion,” Jane’s response was so nonchalant that Hannah didn’t anticipate the strange chill to run down her spine at the comment. But it was then that Jane smiled sarcastically, “perhaps even termination.”
“Wouldn’t that be a juicy bit of flare! I’m sure that’d stir the pot even more than her arrival has. I’m afraid I’d outdo you, Hannah.” George elbowed Hannah as they stepped onto the landing.
“I’d welcome the one-upping,” she laughed, and to her surprise, they did as well.
The floor above the library was a row of rooms with propped-open doors that looked vaguely like classrooms. Hannah saw a few chairs in circles in some of them, stacks of scrolls, desks lined with bottles, and a few rooms where there were just great open spaces with nothing in them, but distinct marks of blackened wood on the floorboards gave her pause.
“These are training rooms,” Jane broke through her thoughts. She motioned at the one with the burns, and she stopped to stick her head in. “I thought Nelson might’ve been up here setting up for this afternoon’s practice.”
“He’s still out on private work,” George stated. “I noticed he wasn’t back today at breakfast, even when he sent his letter two weeks ago.”
“What do you practice here?” Hannah questioned, her eyes searching around the seemingly very plain room. It was wide and tall, with darkened lights hanging from the beamed ceiling on long lines of metal. There was no furniture save for a few armchairs and a stack of books on a window ledge. The charred floorboards, clearly now an indication that some sort of fire had been ignited within and had licked up and down one of the far walls, were freshly made with tiny fragments of coal flaking off of the tracks in a myriad of piles around the room. Hannah could smell the remnants of its flaming past--as if it had been done over the hours that the Guild had been enjoying breakfast.
“Wielding, naturally,” George clapped a hand on her shoulder. “We’ve got to keep sharp.”
“You mean you must practice magic?” Hannah felt as if she were asking a great deal of garishly stupid questions, but she craved certainty in this strange, uncontrollable place like a dog to a full waste bin. “It’s not inherent?”
“It’s inherent to those it chooses,” Jane stated, fixing those glassy eyes on Hannah and studying her like a bit of convoluted parchment. “We all have gifts, but it’s largely up to us to master them. Emery is strict as it is, but especially on our training. We are all up here roughly four days a week--five in the winter months.”
“But how can you practice? Isn’t it just a lot of moving things around?”
George held out his palm in front of Hannah, and a glimmer of red light snapped across his palm. All at once, the lights hung high up on the ceiling above in the room burst out of their dormancy and the room was cast in sharp yellow lantern light that beamed down from the rafters like glossy rainfall. Hannah gasped, and Jane chuckled beside her, tossing a dismissive hand at George.
“Oh, show off,” she chided, and George winked at her. He flicked his fingers, and the red glow danced once more across the lines of his palm. The lights blinked out in unison, leaving the room as silent and dim as it had been when they first stopped inside of its doorway.
“George has a knack for light,” Jane told Hannah, and Hannah couldn’t help but glance at George’s palms, which she found had become extraordinarily normal once more. “Among other things.”
“That’s brilliant,” Hannah managed. “That’s downright amazing, George.”
“That’s nothing,” George rolled his eyes dramatically, but Hannah saw the bit of prideful pink that overtook his cheekbones underneath the mess of freckles. “You should come to a full moon session with us sometime. That’s where I really shine.”
“And what’s your gift, Jane? Is it light as well?”
George snorted with laughter, and Jane shook her head with an amiable smile. “No, I wasn’t gifted with the same sort as most of the lot here. Mine is…well, it’s much more interesting.”
“Hey now,” George quipped, jabbing a finger at Jane. “I was just told I was brilliant. I’d like to see you top that compliment!”
“Well, now you simply must show me,” Hannah motioned for Jane to continue walking onward down the hallway. “The suspense might hang me by my ankles.”
They continued down the hall and to a final door at the end, which opened to a stairwell with three flights of steps all stacked opposing one after the other. There were no windows on the walls of the stairwell, but a dim golden light was gleaming down upon them from the final flight of steps, casting the whole of the area in enough of a glow for Hannah to see where she was placing her feet. As she turned her face upward to see the source, she saw that at the very top of the stairwell’s final landing, a large door constructed of frosted glass led to what she could only imagine was the outside world based on the quality of the natural sunlight flooding inward.
They stepped onto the landing, and George strode forward to reach for the door handle.
“This is my favorite part of the tour,” he grinned as he pulled the door inward, allowing a wave of brilliant sunlight to cascade over them all, practically blinding Hannah in its intensity. “The Haven.”
Hannah stepped out of the stairwell and onto a rooftop that defied all reason. A stretch of cobbled stone below her feet that gave way to vibrant grass pushing up from between the dirt and mortar around the rocks stretched out in a wide rectangle as any proper building should. But trees loomed over her in masses, their branches swaying gently in some warm breeze that tickled her cheeks, their branches heavy with flowers and fruits of the sorts that she had never before seen. Rows of stone garden boxes lined the pathway forward, all of them teeming with life in the form of flora and fauna, and a little ways off, a tremendous greenhouse crafted entirely of brightly-colored stained glass stood regally, the sunlight shooting off of it in starry bits of fractured rainbow.
Amid the trees’ stumps were a myriad of lush mosses, fanning ferns, berry bushes, and waving field grasses that all seemed to be sprouting directly out from the rock beneath each of them, their roots buried deep underneath the mortar and out of sight. Ivy climbed every surface of the short pony walls that rose up on all sides around the rooftop, and it busied itself with creating chains and chains of dark green veins that wove their way onto every tree trunk.
Above it all--reaching upward in an unfathomable dome of what could only be described as some otherworldly, smudged snowglobe--Hannah recognized that they were in an enclosed space that was electric with magic. The sunlight that came through the haze of whatever was covering over them was dimmed, but still strong enough to completely warm her from head to toe, as well as the plant life all around her. The world outside of the rooftop was unable to be seen with that strange shield of fog doming overhead of it all, but the indescribable feeling of safety somehow wriggled its way beneath Hannah’s skin as she took in one breath, and then another. They--this sacred place, included--were utterly protected from the eyes of Brink.
The smell of earth, and rain, and warm summer air through flower petals filled Hannah’s nostrils, dazzling her and knocking her speechless as her mount hung open, her eyes scanning every inch of the magnificent sanctuary. Birdsong permeated the air, and a butterfly flitted chaotically in front of her eyelashes, causing her to lurch backward and break herself from the spell.
“Pretty neat, eh?” George said after a few moments of Hannah’s stunned silence. “This is the Atrium’s crown jewel. It wasn’t nearly as nice before Jane came--it was mostly just a stuffy roof where we’d get some space from each other during arguments, or where Dean would bring his girlfriends--it really wasn’t much more than a recreational piece of stone. But when Jane arrived, and when her gift grew strong…”
There was a fondness in George’s voice that made Hannah’s eyes swing to him. He was gazing at Jane, his mouth quirked in a smile, and his eyes gentle as he looked at where she stood a few steps ahead of him, her back turned in his direction. “You took it upon yourself to make something out of it; didn’t you, Jane?”
“You did all of this?” Hannah breathed, and Jane turned to face her, those sharp eyes hinging on every word. “How on earth did you manage to get all of these plants up here? These massive trees?” Hannah waved around in earnest at the towering boughs that creaked and bowed over them in delicate arches, all at the mercy of yet another gust of kind, directionless breeze. “These look as if they’ve been growing for centuries!”
Jane didn’t answer for a moment. She looked thoughtful, as if she were trying to craft the words in her head to neatly hand to Hannah, but she couldn’t quite decide how to make them come out right. George, surprisingly, was silent as well, watching Jane with an eagerness that Hannah could practically see ruminating off of him.
Jane finally let out a small held breath, and cleared her throat, straightening her shoulders back. “Like this,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper.
In one fluid motion, the girl reached knelt to the cobbles before where Hannah stood, and she placed her palms flat against the stone, splaying her fingers out wide in sharp points. Her eyes blinked shut, and she took in a slow breath.
The sudden smell of ash was cut down immediately by the fragrance of the roses that shot up from the stone all around Hannah’s ankles, their stems rocketing upward to nearly her knees and the fat buds of curled petals unwinding themselves in brilliant little pops of color as they bloomed in an instant. The bushes that sprouted around them formed a perfect circle, capturing the three of them in a ring of flowers containing soft oranges and pinks, with a few drops of bleeding red here and there that exploded in a frenzy. The bushes were so lush and so healthy that they appeared mature as if they had been growing proudly on some finely-pruned lawn for decades, and Hannah recalled Batrum’s carefully, diligent care over his own few bushes during the fall as he prepared them for their slumber until the balmy spring.
“You make things grow,” Hannah stammered after collecting herself from where she had been thoroughly scattered in awe. “I’ve never seen anything so incredible in all my life.”
George gasped in pretend betrayal at her words, slapping a hand over his heart. “Sakes, Hannah! You wound me! I thought I was the one with the greatest bit of showmanship!” He grinned at Jane, then. “A bit of photosynthesis, that’s all she is. Come now, don’t you remember calling me brilliant?”
Jane stood with a brush of her palms against her pants, and she glanced around at the wreath of roses surrounding the three of them in a single vibrant shape, the corners of her little mouth wound up in a proud smile as she shrugged at Hannah.
“I told you so when we were downstairs; much more interesting.”