CHAPTER TWO
t ought to have been a wholly happy ending, but that, alas,I was not in the cards. Scarcely two days had passed before Sera, still reeling from the toll Jasmine’s death and subsequent resurrection had taken on her, made a most troubling discovery.
“Clemmie,” Sera whispered, so Jasmine wouldn’t hear.
“Clemmie, the stars are almost all gone.”
Clemmie was across the room, suspiciously eyeing the rooster Sera had inadvertently resurrected, but her fox ears pricked up at this and she padded over to where Sera was on the sofa hugging a cushion to her chest. “What do you mean, the stars are almost all gone?”
“The ones inside me.” Sera swallowed hard, trying not to panic. No matter what, the one thing she’d always been able to count on was the stars. “The ones I used to see every time I closed my eyes. There used to be whole galaxies there, but I only see a few constellations now.”
Clemmie stared at Sera in consternation. “Bollocks, bollocks, and more bollocks! I wasso sure this wouldn’t happen!”
That was not the response Sera had hoped for. “You were surewhat wouldn’t happen?”
“You pushed yourself too far,” Clemmie said in a tone that suggestedshe was the one most inconvenienced by this development. “Magic’s like anything else. It gets depleted when you use it, and then time, rest, and a nice cup of tea top it up again.”
“Does that mean I just have to wait a little longer?” Sera asked hopefully. “Because the resurrection spell was so big?”
“I certainly bloody hope so,” Clemmie replied. “I’m not optimistic, though. You should have stopped when it started to hurt. I think you pushed yourself so hard that you didn’t just deplete the stars. I think you fractured thesky. It can’t hold all the stars you used to have. Those constellations you see are all you’ve got left.”
Sera’s fingernails dug into the soft fabric of the cushion.
She wanted to reject everything Clemmie was saying, but she could feel that there was truth in it. She could feel a heaviness in her limbs that had never been there before. She could feel that where that infinite sky had cradled her magic before, keeping it safe, it was now full of exit wounds that were quietly, relentlessly bleeding stardust.
“Maybe I just need more time,” she said desperately. “My magic will come back. It has to.”
“It had better,” Clemmie muttered. “Without it, I’ll be stuck like this forever.”
Sera blinked, momentarily distracted. “You were hoping I’d break the curse that turned you into a fox?That’s why you came to the inn? Why didn’t you ask me before?”
“I was getting to it!” Clemmie said indignantly. “You’ve only known me a few weeks. If I’d pushed too soon, you might have said no! Believe me, I wish Ihad just come out with it and asked!”
“My magic,” Sera repeated, furious, “will come back.”
Pretending to be struck down with the flu, Sera put off returning to the Guild estate, hoping her magic just needed a few more days. Hoping the galaxies would return to their skies.
It wasn’t to be. The vast dark spaces behind her eyelids remained unchanged, interrupted only by a handful of stubborn, surviving stars. Everyday spells that had come as easily to her as breathing, like the vanishing of the pain in Jasmine’s clubfoot or the transformation of gooey batter into delicious cake in four seconds flat, were now impossible. Her magic did not come back.
Panic gave way to dismay, and dismay to heartbreak.
Shutting herself in her room, Sera sobbed long and hard. The magic she’d loved so dearly, and taken so thoroughly for granted, had left her. She didn’t know who she was without it.
If there was one thing the last five years with the Guild had taught her, it was that her power was everything. From the moment she’d arrived at their towering, gargoyle- bedecked castle in Northumberland, her instructors, Albert Grey among them, had given her test after test to find out just how much power she possessed. Surrounded by glittering workshops and endless libraries and magic everywhere she looked, she’d mended broken bones.
Alchemised scrap metal into gold. Enchanted bolts of silk so not even a bullet could pierce it.
“You’re the future of magic, Sera Swan,” old, doddery Chancellor Bennet would say, oblivious to the way Albert’s eyes would harden. “Don’t you think so, Albert? Why, she’s the next you!”
Sera’s future, everyone had agreed, would be
extraordinary.
And now that future was gone.
Days passed, muddling together in a tempest of grief, until, inevitably, fear found its way in too. Sera felt nowhere near ready to face a future without magic, but she had no choice. There was only so long she could delay returning to the Guild.
“I have to go back,” she said to Clemmie.
“Of course you do. If there’s some way for you to get your magic back, you’re not going to find it here. You need the Guild’s library.”
“And this?” Sera gestured at her almost magicless self.
“How am I supposed to explain this?”
“Lie to their faces, of course,” Clemmie said at once. “Tell them you woke up one morning and your magic was just gone. They absolutely mustnot find out you cast an extremely forbidden resurrection spell, not least because they’ll realiseI was the one who taught it to you.”
Before Sera could ask her why they’d come to such a conclusion and, moreover, exactlywhy Clemmie was afraid of attracting the Guild’s attention, Jasmine popped her head around the door of the kitchen. “My love, could you show Mrs. Cooper and her little girl to their room?”
Sera obliged. Jasmine’s clubfoot caused her a lot of pain if she navigated the inn’s many stairs too often, so when she’d first reopened the inn, she’d hired a taciturn woman from the village to come in for an hour each morning to keep the four guest rooms in order. Bryony’s ability to make sinks gleam and bed linen crisp was nothing short of enviable, but she took great pains to avoid everyone except Jasmine and was, therefore, not the best person to ask to make a guest feel welcome.
“I’m really glad you had a room,” Mrs. Cooper said to Sera in a soft, tired voice as they made their way up the stairs of the guest wing. “I’d been driving so long I didn’t
think I could stay awake another minute, and then I turned down the lane and there you were. It was like magic.”
“Magic isn’t real, Mummy,” her young daughter said with a giggle, and Sera smiled for the first time in days.
The inn was more magical than any of its guests knew.
The actual house was almost two hundred years old and had been in the possession of a feckless viscount before an enthusiastic innkeeper had acquired it and named it Batty Hole for reasons that would forever escape Sera. It had changed hands a few times since then, becoming a boardinghouse for unwed mothers, a hospital during the First World War, and an inn once again, before ending up an unwelcome and run-down part of someone’s inheritance.
Enter Sera’s parents. Enchanted by the name, the history, and the leaky, crumbly mess before them, they’d bought it.
Restoring it to its former glory, they’d decided, would be their next great adventure.
Between Sera’s father’s magic and Sera’s mother’s money, they’d turned the old house into something approaching liveable. They’d also refused to change the name, which was why Sera’s postal address all her life had been the intolerably preciousSera Swan, Batty Hole Inn, Briercliffe, Lancashire.
As was their way, her parents had soon grown bored of the house, and of parenting too. So, when Sera was two, they had invited Jasmine, her father’s favourite aunt, to move all the way from the south of India to this lovely but secluded pocket of northwest England. Jasmine’s bags had scarcely been unpacked before Sera’s parents were gone, destined to visit only a few times a year for the rest of her childhood.
In hindsight, it was the best possible thing they could have done for everyone. They got their adventures, Jasmine got Sera, and Sera got Jasmine.
Sensibly realising that the money Sera’s parents sent back for their upkeep covered little more than the mortgage, and possessed of a deeply welcoming nature, Jasmine had decided the best course of action was to resurrect the old inn. Sera, brimming with too much magic to contain, had eagerly helped her with clever bits of spellwork.
Then, shortly after Sera’s tenth birthday, they’d had a trying few months. They’d had an epidemic of difficult guests, the sort of people who turned up expecting pillowcases of mulberry silk and threw a fit upon discovering that a bed- and-breakfast didn’t actually involve being served breakfast in bed. When a particularly shouty twosome had driven Jasmine to tears, Sera, vibrating with fury, had cast a spell.
What that spell was, she couldn’t say. That was what was so extraordinary about it. It was heartfelt, it was huge, and it was inexplicable.
The difficult guests had stopped coming. The guests who did come were usually sweet in temperament, often buffeted by tempestuous weather or circumstances, and always relieved. The inn, it seemed, had become a port in a storm.
Whether they were the exhausted parent who needed just one night away from it all, Mrs. Cooper with the bruised cheek she’d been trying to hide since she’d arrived, or the boy who’d left home for the first time and had had his wallet stolen outside Preston, they all came forsomething that the inn could give them.
The best way Sera could describe her spell was this: if you didn’tneed the inn, you’d drive on. (And if you were a dick, you’d definitely drive on.) This was the spell that had first brought the Guild to her door. Some weeks after casting it, she’d described what the spell had wrought in one of her progress letters and had piqued Albert Grey’s interest. When he and Chancellor
Bennet had come to see her, they’d cast the spell that revealed the presence of other spells, and Sera would never forget the look on their faces when they discovered that the entire inn shone warm, bright, and dazzling, like a single lit window on a dark night.
“You’re wasted here, Sera,” Chancellor Bennet had said,
and she had believed him.
What was she supposed to do now?
The inn’s doorbell pealed, rescuing Sera from her increasingly bleak thoughts. She ran quickly downstairs, the worn steps creaking beneath her feet, calling “I’ll get it!” to
Jasmine as she went.
She opened the door.
And froze.
“Francesca?” Sera’s heart gave a violent lurch. This was very,very bad.
“What’s going on?” Francesca demanded, throwing her hands in the air with an exaggerated air of drama. “You won’t answer your phone, you haven’t come back to the estate, you— WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?”
Sera squeezed her eyes shut in despair. She had known, of course, that the Guild would find out she’d lost her magic sooner or later, but losing one’s magic wasn’t a crime.
Resurrecting a person from the dead, on the other hand, was, and that part she probablycould have kept a secret.
If only it hadn’t been for the rooster.
Jasmine had been dead only minutes when she’d been brought back, but Roo-Roo had been dead a full year. He had, to put it delicately,decomposed. He was simply not alive in the way Jasmine was alive. He was, in fact, decidedly zombified.
He clattered up to Sera’s feet now, pecking at her in order to convey his desire to be picked up. Sera did pick him
up, but only to prevent him from scuttling out the open door.
There was nothing to be done but tell the truth.
“Shhhh,” Sera said fiercely. “We have guests upstairs! I’ll explain everything, but you have to promise not to tell anybody what I’m about to tell you. Especially not your father.”
“I promise,” Francesca said at once, her wide eyes watching Roo-Roo like she couldn’t tear them away.
“Jasmine died two weeks ago. I brought her back.”
Francesca’s eyes snapped up to Sera’s face. “What do you mean, you brought her back? Like, with CPR?”
“No, she wasdead dead, not whatever kind of dead CPR works on. I cast a resurrection spell. It brought her back, but it took away most of my magic.”
There was a long, incredulous silence. Sera watched Francesca anxiously. Then Francesca said, “Okay, first things first. Can I use your loo?”
Sera let her breath out in a relieved whoosh. Maybe she’d lost most of her magic, but at least she hadn’t lost her friend. She’d go back to the Guild and she’d study every book they had until she found a way,any way, to get her magic back.
Everything, she was certain, would be okay.
Three hours later, Albert Grey was storming into the inn, and Sera had no choice but to accept that everything would most decidedlynot be okay.
* * *
Confined to the inn’s living room while Albert went outside to examine the skeletal rooster, Sera, furious and feeling utterly betrayed, couldn’t bear to look at Francesca. It was almost a relief when Albert marched back into the room.
“A resurrection spell,” Albert said coldly, spelling the door shut so that Jasmine could not follow him in and intervene on Sera’s behalf. “All that power, and you throw it away. After everything we’ve done for you.”
Sera had expected those words, or something like them, and yet she couldn’t help feeling like Albert’s tone was all wrong.
The truth struck her almost at once.It’s because he’s only pretending to be angry. Every time she’d ever doubted Albert’s sincerity as her mentor, every time she’d caught the hard look in his eyes when someone else praised her, she’d glimpsed thereal Albert Grey. Whatever he thought of her casting a resurrection spell, it was outweighed by far by his pleasure that her magic was now a sliver of what it had been. He was, once again, without rival. His throne, once again, was wholly his own.
That Albert was capable of pride and petty jealousy didn’t exactly come as a surprise to her, but it still hurt. She’d been his apprentice for five years. Didn’t he care about her at all?
“Sera.” Albert’s voice grew softer and coaxing, which was never a good sign. “Where did you learn the spell?”
Sera fidgeted with the ragged end of one fingernail. “It was in one of my library books.”
His eyes narrowed. “Don’t lie to me. For one thing, you’re not very good at it. For another, Francesca has already told me about the fox she spotted slinking up the stairs shortly after she arrived. Curious behaviour for a fox, don’t you think?” Gripping her chin between his thumb and forefinger, Albert tilted Sera’s face up so she had nowhere to look but at him. “Clementine has been here, hasn’t she? Did she teach you the incantation?”
Sera jerked out of his grip, teeth clenched, and stayed quiet.
Albert, who was accustomed to getting his way, looked both surprised and irritated. Sera was suddenly reminded of the time she’d asked him if his magic was a night sky, like hers, and he’d said no, his was lightning. She hadn’t understood what that meant then, but she did now. His was an angry, pitiless magic, quick to lash out and indiscriminate in its destruction.
“You’ve forgotten who you’re talking to, Sera,” Albert said sharply. “I am still a Grey, born from a long, unbroken line of witches, and I still have every bit as much power as I did a week ago. You, on the other hand, do not. You are just a swan who has clipped her own wings. So when I ask you a question, youwill answer.”
Unfortunately for Albert, this speech just made Sera angrier. Albert, it seemed, had forgotten thathis history might be a legacy of power, buthers was a legacy of resistance. Not to get too dramatic about it, but Sera’s ancestors had not defied tyrants and broken free of empires for her to now give this man a single inch.
“I told you,” she said, “I found the spell in a book.”
To her surprise, rather than losing his temper, Albert tilted his head at her with sudden interest. “You’ve grown fond of her, haven’t you? Good God, Sera, I’d credited you with more intelligence than that.” Whatever he saw in her expression made him bark a laugh. “She hasn’t told you what she did, has she?”
Later, Clemmie would tell Sera the whole story. In short, she had once been a witch of moderate talent and great ambition, and, bitterly resentful of Albert, who’d been insufferable throughout the years they’d known each other, she’d decided (in her words) to strike a blow for underdogs
everywhere by cursing him.
As in, with a literal magical curse.
(Thatanybody would do something as seismically senseless as attempt to curse the most powerful witch born in generations was, frankly, ludicrous, and yet Sera found it remarkably easy to believe that Clemmie would do just that.) The curse, a rare spell that turned its unfortunate target into an animal, was supposed to be temporary, but as was always the way with Clemmie, she hadn’t thought it through.
She hadn’t considered that she might not have the power to break the curse after casting it. She hadn’t even considered that she might not have the power tocast the curse in the first place.
Plot twist: shehadn’t had enough power to cast such a curse. Not properly, anyway. Her spell had backfired, trappingher in the form of a fox.
The undoing of a curse was no easy matter, and the few witches who possessed the power were unwilling to risk Albert’s wrath by doing so. At that point, the Guild had felt that being stuck in the body of a fox was adequate punishment, but that had by no means been adequate for Albert. He’d wanted Clemmie under lock and key in the Guild’s castle.
Declining to be imprisoned, Clemmie had flexed her claws, bitten Albert around the ankles, and bolted.
On that afternoon in the inn, however, all Albert said about it was, “She tried to curse me, but ended up cursing herself instead. She’s been in hiding for years, but I should have realised she’d come to you as soon as word of your existence made its way to her. I have no doubt she thought she could hoodwink a young, powerful, and unutterably naïve witch into breaking her curse.”
Sera maintained a stony silence, refusing to give him the satisfaction of a reaction.
“Fortunately for you, Sera,” Albert went on, “I’m minded to be lenient. You’ve lost your power, possibly for good, but you needn’t lose your place among us. A resurrection spell is no small thing, and the Guild does not make it a habit to overlook such egregious lawbreaking, but if you help us capture Clementine, I’m sure I can persuade the Chancellor to forgive this transgression.”
Sera knew that she was being offered a lifeline, and she wanted very, very badly to take it. The only way she’d ever get her magic back, if such a thing was even possible, was with the Guild’s help. Without them, without their resources and their libraries and their scholars, she’d have no chance at all.
All she had to do was betray Clemmie first.
All she had to do was give an inch.
She couldn’t. Clemmie had kept secrets from her, including deliberately neglecting to tell her thatshe’d been the one to cast the curse that had turned her into a fox, but without Clemmie, Sera wouldn’t have been able to save Jasmine.
So Sera looked her former mentor in the eye and said, “I can’t help you. I found the spell in one of my books.”
As soon as she said it, she realised she’d made a mistake.
This was what Albert hadwanted her to do. He didn’t care about capturing Clemmie. He probably hadn’t even spared Clemmie a thought in years. But the moment he had clocked that Sera cared about her, Clemmie had become a convenient way to use Sera’s loyalty against her. The only thing Albert cared about was his own pride, and now that Sera’s magic was no longer a threat to his, thelast thing he wanted was for her to come back to the Guild and get a second chance.
“Then, on behalf of Chancellor Bennet and the Guild,” said Albert, not bothering to hide his satisfaction, “I leave you to the consequences of your choices. You are exiled from the Guild from this day forth. For the safety of all witches, you will still be beholden to the Guild’s laws, but you will not receive any further education or assistance from us. You will not be permitted on Guild property. You will have no access to library books or spellcasting materials. Not a single witch in the country will extend a friendly hand to you now.”
Well, there was really nothing left for Sera to do but lean into the drama, point a warning finger like a sorceress of old, and say, “You will rue this day, Albert Grey.”
And, most magnificently, it even rhymed.
