Burn Mark by Laura Powell Page A

the bridling itself. The iron cuffs would remain until he left school and found a public-sector job as a practising witch. Even then, he would be monitored to ensure he only committed witchwork as part of authorised government business.
    So these were his last hours of freedom. Lucas looked at his wrists, picturing the metal bands that would soon circle them. A bridled witch was like someone with a disfigurement. The civilised, polite thing to do was not to look. You always noticed, of course, but you and the witch both pretended you hadn’t. If you weren’t civilised then it was a different matter. People would spit and jeer; Lucas had seen it. There were beatings too.
    When it came to his friends, he wasn’t sure what would be worse – their pity, or disgust. He remembered the raised eyebrow he and Tom had shared when Ollie told them about his cousin. It had seemed admirably restrained of them at the time. He tried not to think of Bea’s face, flushed and hopeful, leaning towards his by the pond.
    Instead, Lucas kept returning to his single act of witchwork. Obsessively, he went over every detail of Philomena’s bane. It was like picking at a scab: revolting yet pleasurable.
    He also brooded on what Ashton Stearne would be saying to his colleagues. Decisions were being made and processes set in motion that Lucas had no control over. If only , he thought, I could know what they all really think. If only I knew what’s going on behind the scenes. I need to be prepared .
    But you can be, said a small treacherous voice. You have other resources now. And another inner voice, a voice Lucas didn’t even admit to hearing, whispered, it’s your last chance. There was an itch in his blood that was still unacknowledged, and unsatisfied.
    As the afternoon wore on, he kept coming back to a discussion he’d heard between Ashton and a colleague about the use of the fae in surveillance operations. Maybe it was time to put his insider knowledge to the test.
    At about four o’clock, Lucas heard Philly stump along the corridor and down the stairs. The front door slammed. A moment or so later, and before he could think better of it, he was making his way into his father’s study.
    Lucas surveyed the room, and realised he was past the worst of his shock. Everything was easier now he had a task to work on. He assessed the challenge with the cool recklessness of someone with nothing to lose.
    A witch with a scrying-bowl filled with water could see through walls and across cities. It was a building’s entrance and exit points that made it vulnerable. The bowl was usually made of glass because windows were made of glass, and this enabled the fae to work through the panes. A wooden or steel bowl would let a witch see through a wooden or steel door.
    But scrying was one of the few witchworks that could be stopped with iron. (It was usually only the witch, not their work, which was blocked by the metal.) People with something to hide or protect installed iron shutters over their windows and fixed an iron panel to the centre of their doors. Ashton’s study was iron-proofed. And in any case, you couldn’t hear anything in a scrying-bowl.
    Lucas had tried to listen through doors before. When his father first got involved with Marisa, he had even attempted the glass-held-to-the-wall trick. The theory went that the wall picked up the vibrations of sound in the room, and the glass helped channel them. It had not worked when Lucas was eleven. But things were different now.
    Ashton’s study was next to the dining room. From the cabinet there, Lucas took out a pair of crystal wine glasses. His pulse was speeding up in anticipation, and he could feel the blot on his shoulder blade begin to warm.
    A talisman was any kind of witchworked object; an amulet, by contrast, was a witchwork device made from scratch. From what Lucas could remember of the spying trick his father had described, he needed to cast his fae into the two glasses so that they