CHAPTER THIRTEEN
uke had absolutely no idea how it had happened, butL somehow, the following morning, he found himself driving Sera, Nicholas, and Posy to Blackpool to the home of an ornithologist.
“How did you get me to agree to this?” Luke, who was not by any means accustomed to feeling flabbergasted, required answers. “I’m convinced that one minute I was drinking my tea and the next I was in the car. You could put me in front of a jury of my peers and Istill wouldn’t be able to explain how it happened.”
“I’m surprised too, to be honest,” Sera confided from the passenger seat. “I would have bet good money that you’d never have agreed to it. I wouldn’t have asked you at all, but my car wouldn’t start, and Matilda and Jasmine have bingo on Monday mornings, and Nicholas’s car is still at the Fair, so you were the only one left. Maybe I should have waited until Matilda got home, but you know what it’s like when you get an idea stuck in your head. You just want to godo it.”
“I do know,” Luke agreed. “Right now, for example, the idea stuck inmy head is leaving you in Blackpool to make your own way home.”
Sera chortled. “You could have said no.”
“If I could have said no, I would have,” Luke said with utter certainty. “Nothing you just said adequately explains why I’m here.”
“You did tell me that Posy would love the penny arcades along the pier.”
It was all coming back to him now. Hehad told her that.
It explained quite a bit, but still. “And Nicholas is with us because…?”
“My spirits were low,” Nicholas offered from the back, where he’d been playing Rock Paper Scissors with Posy.
Inexplicably, he was in his historically inaccurate Fair armour again. “I’m not allowed to go back to work until Wednesday, but Wednesday and Thursday are my days off, so I won’t actually be able to go back to work until Friday. Why do I have days off anyway? What sort of knight takes days off? The shame of it is nigh intolerable.”
Luke wondered what he’d done to deserve this. “Who’s the ornithologist?”
“Retired ornithologist. She used to be one of Jasmine and Matilda’s bingo friends before she moved to Blackpool to live with her son. Jasmine says she has an impressive collection of feathers from birds from all over the world.” Sera shot a quick look over her shoulder into the back seat before adding, meaningfully, “Some of those feathers will bered.”
Luke sighed. He really ought not to say anything, but it was too much to ask that he not correct an egregious error.
He glanced in the rearview mirror, made sure Nicholas was entirely occupied with Rock Paper Scissors, and said, “I think you may be overlooking one of the things that sets Adaptable spells apart.”
He didn’t think he’d ever been glared at with such ferocity.
He weighed his survival instincts against his academic integrity before saying the rest. “A red feather from someone you’ve never even met before is not going to do the trick.
The spell’sadaptable. As in, it adapts to the person casting it. Whatever you put into it has to have some kind of meaning toyou.”
“This has meaning,” she said at once. He raised an eyebrow. She looked away, glared out the window, and said, “Okay, it’s a stretch, but I’d kick myself if I didn’t try
everything. Just in case.”
He let it go.
They parted ways in Blackpool, with Sera heading into town to find the ornithologist while Luke, Posy, and Nicholas walked to the pier to the penny arcades.
A cold, briny wind blew in from the water and whipped Posy’s hair around her, making her giggle. “Silly hair,” she said to Luke, who grinned. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing he’d let Sera rope him into this. He’d never have brought Posy here on a weekend, what with all the people everywhere, but, it being a Monday morning during school hours, there was hardly anybody around, and besides, the sea airwas rather nice.
If only they’d come here just for the sea air, but alas, as the horrifying musical jingle getting ever closer reminded him, they hadn’t.
He steeled himself. The flashing lights and obnoxiously loud music in arcades were his idea of sensory hell, and that wasbefore you got into the finer, nightmarish detail of the relentless clatter of coins dropping into machines filled with hideous toys and key chains that hardly anybody ever actually won, but Posy, for reasons he’d never be able to understand, loved it. The lights, the sounds, the act of
dropping coins into the machines to make things happen, all of it.
For all the ways Luke and Posy were alike, from their ability to hyperfocus on something they loved for hours to their loathing of crowded places to their uncompromising refusal to wear anything made out of scratchy wool, arcades were one of just as many things that they absolutely didnot see eye to eye on.
“A DANCE MACHINE!” Nicholas yelled, careening past Luke and Posy, armour clanking.
Resigned, Luke got Posy a bucket of pennies, watched her rush merrily around the room, and wished he’d remembered to bring along a few dozen ibuprofen.
When Sera found them an hour later, Nicholas was a bit woozy (doing a merry jig on a dance machine for an hour while wearing armour and possibly recovering from a concussion was, apparently, not the wisest course of action), Posy had sped through a tenner’s worth of pennies and won herself a bag of sweets that was already almost empty, and Luke… Well, Luke had just been to all nine circles of hell and lived to tell the tale, so there was that.
“If it helps,” Sera said, sounding both sympathetic and amused, “I have a gloriously red cardinal feather.”
“It doesn’t help,” Luke assured her.
“An early lunch, then? There’s a pub on the way home that does thebest waffles with fried chicken.”
That, Luke admitted, probablywould help.
It did. After a cosy lunch at the White Stag, they piled back in the car, and Posy and Nicholas were fast asleep by the time they returned to the inn. Luke moved Posy inside to the sofa, tucked a blanket around her, and picked upMagic, Ethics, and Law, leaving Sera to rouse Nicholas.
Two chapters and a page of notes later, some time after Jasmine and Matilda returned, Sera came into the room to throw more wood on the fire and recast her heat spells.
Luke, who’d spent half his life working in a library where people came and went at all hours, barely noticed, but then, on her way out, Sera’s footsteps stopped in the doorway.
Maybe it was the hesitation in the sound that got his attention. He looked up.
Her jaw was set. “You were right, by the way. The red feather didn’t work.”
There was, surprisingly, no satisfaction in being right
about that. “I wish I’d been wrong.”
“Thanks.”
He hesitated, then said, “You’ll find what you need sooner or later.”
“Thanks,” she said again. Light crept back into her eyes, gilding the dark brown with gold, and he had the stray, almost absent thought that her eyes really were lovely.
She left the room. He went back to work.
Over the next few days, between keeping an eye on Posy, helping her draw pictures of chickens and foxes, learning to navigate his way around the maze of a house, and getting through the boxes of reference materials Verity had sent over, Luke kept himself busy.
If he were a different sort of person, perhaps he might have been able to settle into this rhythm. There was a part of him that wanted to, that wanted to believe it was possible for somebody’s life to be nothing but this: the work he loved, his sister tearing around a wild, overgrown garden in bare feet with a smudge of jam on her chin, hot cups of strong tea and scones that crumbled in his mouth, and fairy-tale evenings by the fire with a book.
But that, there, was the problem.Fairy-tale. Reality was traffic and steeples and old bookshops in Edinburgh. Reality was tedious meetings with Guild bureaucrats over whether the acquisition of a priceless book wasreally worth the funding. Reality was the question mark over Posy’s future, and his own, and the cold, secret fear that came late at night and made him wonder if maybe it wasn’tnormal, really, to have nobody in your life you could say all of that to.
This place, this inn, which was every bit as batty as its ridiculous name promised, was not reality as Luke knew it.
This was a place of fables and stories and peculiar magic, and such a place, he was certain,had no place in the real world.
So Luke did not settle. He waited, calmly, icily,resigned, for the fairy tale to end.
Funnily enough, the first disruption to the rhythm of those early days did nothing to dispel Luke’s certainty that the Batty Hole Inn was an incomprehensible departure from reality, good sense, and all things regular.
He woke, blinking, groggy, to the sound ofsomething going on outside. Posy was fast asleep in the other twin bed, having been awake and remarkably chirpy from the hours of two to six in the morning, but it sounded like everybody else was up and about.
Rubbing the sleep out of his eyes and swapping his sweatpants for jeans, Luke checked the time on his phone.
Half past nine, which was frankly too early for mayhem at even the best of times.
He descended two flights of creaky stairs, passed through the long hallway, and crossed the kitchen to the open back door, by which point the indistinct sounds had become shrieks and hollers of “Catch it!” and “Not that way!That way!”
Jasmine stood at the edge of the stone patio, leaning on her cane, tutting gently to herself as Luke drew level with her. The garden looked like a meteor had hit it in the middle of the night. In fact, for a moment, Luke wondered if a meteorhad hit it—what else could possibly have overturned half the earth, sent large clumps of grass flying in every direction, beheaded a few dozen wildflowers, decimated most of Matilda’s vegetables, and even apparently laid waste to Sera’s red wellies?—but then, at the heart of the disaster,
he saw Matilda and Nicholas.
Trying, and failing, to catch a goat.
“I thought Rule One wasno goats,” Luke remarked.
Jasmine nodded. Luke wondered if her cheerful calm was an ominous indication that these things happened rather too often around here.
“Matilda,” Jasmine explained, “was of the view that if she borrowed a goat from the Medieval Fair, and showed Sera just how sweet and adorable it was, Sera would change her
mind.”
“Just how many goats did she borrow?”
Pressing her lips together like she was trying not to laugh, Jasmine said, “One.”
Luke looked at the garden, and then looked at the small goat merrily eluding its would-be captors, and then looked at the garden again. “One goat did all this?”
“In just over an hour,” Jasmine confirmed.
“Can’t see this changing Sera’s mind, can you?” Luke said wryly.
“Thank you for that excellent contribution!” Matilda wailed from halfway down the garden. “Now get over here and help us catch this dratted creature! We havemaybe half an hour to corral this menace, return him to the Fair, and fix
this mess before Sera gets back from the supermarket and murders us all!”
“I don’t see why she’d murderme,” Luke pointed out.
“She’s not going to murder anybody,” Jasmine said in a wounded tone of voice. “She’ll be alittle cross that the garden has been completely destroyed, and who could possibly blame her, but it’s not like she’s a terrifying dragon who’ll gobble everybody up.”
“You’d deserve it if she did gobble you up,” Nicholas said to Matilda, deeply disapproving. “Howcould you? That you’d even dream of causing Lady Sera theslightest anguish—”
“I would never, you sweet, ridiculous, lovestruck puppy!”
Matilda shot back. “Not on purpose!”
“Lovestruck?” Nicholas was appalled. “I’m not in love with her! I am a loyal knight! I would no more make advances on my lady than I would cut off a single lock of her glorious hair!”
“Does he say these thingsto Sera?” Luke asked Jasmine
with interest.
“He does,” said Jasmine.
“Are you sure? He seems to still be alive.”
“Don’t you start,” Jasmine said reproachfully.
Luke relented. “How’s shereally going to feel about this?”
Jasmine gave him a long, searching look before saying, “She’ll never say it, but she loves this house. Every creaky stair, every crumbling brick, every bit of dirt under our feet.
We all know it. You don’t really think Matilda’s panicking because she’safraid of Sera’s wrath, do you?” At Luke’s furrowed brow, she explained, “You see, what’s going to happen is Sera will come home, and she’ll glower, and she’ll compete with Matilda to see which of them can be more dramatic, and then she’ll put this mess to rights even if it
takes weeks, but the whole time, what she’ll actually be is quietly, devastatingly upset.”
Luke had never heard a word as understated asupset hold so much weight, but somehow, in this woman’s gentle, dignified voice, and in the honest, tender simplicity of her answer, it felt weightier than almost anything else.
Resigned, Luke heard himself say, “Matilda, maybe you and Nicholas ought to go to the Fair and bring the goat’s owner back with you. Trying to catch it yourselves obviously isn’t working.”
“Go there?” Matilda’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Why?
The man must have a phone.”
“And risk him saying he can’t get away until lunchtime?”
Luke replied without missing a beat. “Like you said, we have maybe half an hour before Sera gets home. If you get going right now, you might just be able to get rid of the goat before she sees it. I’ll see what I can do about sorting out the mess here.”
“I shall be honoured to be of service to you in that endeavour, sir,” said Nicholas. “You’ll need a strong pair of arms and a devoted, unwavering heart.”
“Matilda doesn’t know her way around the Fair like you do, dearest,” Jasmine said at once. “If we want to be quick, you’d better go with her.”
Giving Luke a look of deep gratitude, Jasmine whisked Matilda and Nicholas away, ferrying them herself out to the car to prevent either from doubling back at a most
inconvenient moment.
Luke got to work.
First, the goat.
His magic was a library of old books, the rustle of its pages a constant, comforting hum of background noise in his mind. The spines of spellbooks cracked open when he
wanted to cast a spell, pages turning until the spell he needed was at his fingertips, and the spell he needed right now was one that would lull an animal to sleep.
It was a tricky spell, particularly for somebody like Luke, who, on top of having a completely ordinary amount of magic, tended not to mess about with spells that affected living things.
Take the goat, for example. The sleepy spell was supposed to conjure lavender and lullabies and other soporific sorts of things, but as the fingers of one of Luke’s hands moved in the air, almost like he was playing notes on an invisible piano, the goat wasn’t having it. Like a toddler rebelling at the first sign of drowsiness, determined to put bedtime off as long as possible, the goat bucked and baaed and, outraged, tried to chew at the knee of Luke’s jeans.
Luke refused to relent, even with one very soggy knee, and bit by bit, the infernal creature was bested.
Once the goat was drooling blissfully on an undamaged patch of grass not far from the disgusted chickens, Luke moved on to his next spell. It was a much easier one, and also a much more tedious one, but frankly, Luke felt like he could do with a bit of tedium right about now. The spell was the one witches usually used when they wanted to summon their coat from across the room or, say, arrest the fall of a child who insisted on jumping off balconies, but on this particular occasion, Luke needed to use it to restore many, many clumps of grass and ravaged lumps of earth to their rightful places.
Matilda, Nicholas, and the goat’s exasperated owner arrived just as he was finishing up. Matilda grabbed Luke’s face in her hands and planted a smacker of a kiss on his forehead, Nicholas goggled at the repaired garden in awe, and the owner of the goat retrieved the goat, muttering,
“Don’t see what all the fuss was about, everything looks fine to me,” as he departed.
After that, the only thing left for Luke to do was to salvage what he could in Matilda’s vegetable patch. Jasmine convinced Matilda and Nicholas to go inside for a restorative cup of tea so that Luke could have a few more minutes unobserved. He didn’t have quite enough magic to revive beheaded wildflowers or regrow partly digested vegetables, but he took stock of what had survived (one pumpkin, a handful of pepper plants, and three artichokes, all of which probably had Sera’s magic to thank for their resilience in the face of the goat’s onslaught) and tidied up the rest of the patch.
“It’s adorable that anybody thinksanything happens in this house that I don’t know about,” a voice said behind him.
He stood, turning. Sera was studying the garden. Luke had a feeling she could see every seam and stitch of his
magic.
She looked intrigued. “Was it a goat?”
He cracked a smile. “Of course it was a goat.”
She was quiet for a moment. Then, pushing her windblown hair behind one ear, she turned to look at him.
“You fixed it.”
“I fixed what I could. You’ll need new wellies.”
“You didn’t have to do that.”
“No,” Luke agreed.
She smiled, a proper smile, one that reached all the way into her eyes. “Thank you.”
It felt essential, somehow, that Luke look away. He nodded at the house. “Are you going to tell them you know?”
“No, I think I’ll take that one to my grave.”
As she stomped across the overgrown grass back to the house, Luke thought he was beginning to understand.
Matilda’s despair over the goat she’d so optimistically brought home for a visit. Nicholas’s chivalrous outrage.
Jasmine sayingquietly, devastatingly upset. Sera choosing to pretend not to know. It seemed at first glance like ridiculous theatre, unnecessary and a bit silly, but at the heart of it, weren’t they just a handful of people trying to be good to one another?
It was the first thing about the inn that made sense to him.
It would probably be the last thing too.
