CHAPTER THREE
hat rooster,” Sera declared, fifteen years later, “is a“T menace. Why can’t he crow at a reasonable time? Why does he insist on cock-a-doodling at three, four, five, six,and seven in the morning?”
“Now, Sera,” Jasmine said with a mixture of sympathy and reproach, cuddling the aforementioned rooster in her arms and covering his ears like Sera’s criticisms might otherwise hurt his feelings, “you know Roo-Roo can’t tell the time. He gets discombobulated, on account of being”—and here Jasmine lowered her voice to a whisper—“undead. Which wasyour doing, my love.”
“Resurrecting him was an accident! I agreed to a lot of things when I cast that spell, but a lifetime with a zombie chicken was definitely not one of them!”
Jasmine’s dark brown eyes, so like Sera’s, were dewy as she gazed upon the skeletal abomination in her arms. “But he’s so fond of you,” she cooed. “Look at the way he’s trying to nibble your sleeve. If that’s not love, I don’t know what is.”
Sera retrieved the sleeve of her oversized sweater from the bony beak clamped around it and stomped across the kitchen to fortify herself with the booziest coffee that had
ever boozed. Was it only half past ten in the morning and, strictly speaking, too early to be consuming anything with more of a kick than a triple espresso? Yes, but the prospect of a glug of Baileys in her coffee was the only thing keeping her from returning to her bed immediately and just letting everyone fend for themselves.
Everyone, these days, meant Jasmine (briefly deceased great-aunt), Clemmie (overly opinionated witch doomed to live out her days as a fox), Sera’s young cousin Theo (also a witch, but thankfully not one doomed to a lifetime as a woodland creature), Matilda (geriatric oddball and aspiring hobbit), and newest arrival Nicholas (a knight).
It sounded madder than a box of frogs, and yet it was, somehow, the reality of Sera’s life. She had achieved a remarkable feat. Not many people went from where she’d been (the most powerful witch born in a generation, the Guild’s golden child, and glittering with promise) to where she was now (thirty years old, almost magicless, and running an inn filled with more than its fair share of people who were not, it had to be said, overburdened with normalness), but she’d done it.
Sera had neverplanned to run the inn. It creaked, it leaked, and worst of all, it had people in it. Still, with Jasmine getting older and Sera all too aware that it washer spell that had made the inn a beacon in the dark for the lost and adrift, she had found herself doing more and more.
Setting Roo-Roo back on the floor, Jasmine stacked the breakfast bowls into a tidy pile and said, “At the risk of adding another straw to your back, dearest—”
“Are you calling me a camel?” Sera asked.
“—I feel you ought to know that Matilda saw daisies burst forth from one of the teacups this morning.”
The universe was enjoying itself just a little too much at Sera’s expense. “What did she say?”
“She pretended she didn’t see it, but I know she did.”
“When I get my magic back,” Sera said emphatically, “the first thing I’m going to do is put an end to the magical mischief running amok in this house.”
When was doing a lot of heavy lifting there, considering she was well and truly stuck, butif would feel too much like admitting defeat.
In truth, Sera had a pretty good idea of how to get her magic back, and that idea was a book calledThe Ninth Compendium of Uncommon Spells. The problem was getting her hands on it.
As she helped Jasmine load the dishwasher, she put her mind to this conundrum, an oft-repeated exercise in futility that involved brilliant notions like “Just beg the Guild for a favour, pride be damned” and “What if I planned an ingenious heist instead…”
It was maddening. After years of exhausting the few magical texts still in her possession, chasing ideas dredged from Clemmie’s memory, and some dubious and desperate Googling, the injustice of finally having a real answer and for that answer to bejust out of reach was almost too much to bear.
The Guild had twelve compendiums of unusual spells in the estate’s enormous library, all collected and compiled by different witches over the centuries. They sat in the restricted section, gathering dust. Sera could picture them in her mind’s eye. She’d walked past them a hundred times as a child.
The Ninth Compendium was there. If she weren’t in exile, she could walk in and simply borrow it.
The fact that she even knew this much was down to her little cousin Theo, who was living with her at the moment. As he was technically under the aegis of the Wise Women of Reykjavík, the Icelandic equivalent of the British Guild of Sorcery, he’d never been to the Northumberland estate.
Nevertheless, hedid live in Britain, at least for the time being, so the Guild let him use their online library and borrow magical texts to study at home. (Not texts from the restricted section, alas, which could only be studied in person with special permission.) Within weeks of receiving access to the library, Theo had pointed out thatSera could use his account too. How would the Guild ever know the difference?
It had been the first chance Sera had had to study new texts and spellbooks since her exile. With Clemmie peering over her shoulder, she’d scoured the extensive index of spells, and there, under the Rs, the wordrestoration had caught her eye. A single click later, she knew where to find the spell.The Ninth Compendium of Uncommon Spells.
She just couldn’t get to it.
“You could ask someone to get it for you,” Clemmie had suggested. Having extracted a promise from Sera that she would break Clemmie’s curse if she ever got her magic back, Clemmie was every bit as invested as Sera was.
Sera had laughed bitterly. “Ask who, exactly?”
Albert Grey’s cold voice had echoed in her head.Not a single witch in the country will extend a friendly hand to you now.
“You’ve gone away again, my love,” Jasmine said gently, trying to shut the dishwasher door.
Blinking out of her reverie, Sera stepped out of the way.
She lifted the bubbling kettle off its cradle and looked for her favourite mug, which was, of course, missing. It was the most
ordinary of drinking receptacles, ochre with tiny blue flowers on it, and yet it was never around when Sera wanted it because, for absolutely no reason Sera could fathom, every other person in the house insisted on using it.
She made do with a subpar mug. There was a clatter of armour behind her, and she turned to see Nicholas trip into the kitchen. He stopped in the process of pulling on his gauntleted glove, black hair flopping into his earnest green eyes, and snapped to attention.
“Lady Sera!” One loose gauntlet flapped from his hand as he smacked that hand over his heart. Slashes of mortified pink appeared on his white cheeks. “I didn’t know you were here! Forgive me for presenting myself to you in such a state of unreadiness!”
Sera sighed. “You look ready to me, Nicholas.” Then, encountering his hopeful puppy eyes, she corrected herself: “Sir Nicholas. In fact, you look splendid.”
Nicholas, who was twenty-three years old and declared at least twice a week that he was willing to fall upon his very real and very literal sword for Sera, lit up at this compliment. “You honour me!”
Sera glanced at the clock. “Shouldn’t you have been at the Medieval Fair an hour ago?”
“I could not depart without polishing my armour first,”
Nicholas replied gravely.
He gave Jasmine a courtly bow, patted Roo-Roo on the head, and snatched up the sheathed sword propped against the door on his way out. A moment later, the sound of his Jeep sputtered up the lane.
Nicholas had arrived four months ago, on a stormy evening with rain lashing against the windows and every fireplace ablaze. Sera had answered the polite ring of the
doorbell and found him on the doorstep, soaking wet and shivering.
He had also been dressed in medieval armour from neck to toe. And there had been a sword at his side.
“Sir Nicholas of Mayfair, at your service,” this apparition had said, attempting a very wet bow, his teeth chattering and his sword clanking against the various layers of steel on him.
“There seems to be a mistake with the flat I rented in the next town over. I was driving past and I saw your lights…”
“Come in,” Sera had said. “Tea?”
Sera hadn’t expected Nicholas to stay longer than the night. She’d assumed all he needed was a toasty fireplace on a stormy night and would be gone when the skies cleared.
But when Nicholas had not gone, when he had abandoned the perfectly nice flat he’d rented and settled down at a rickety old inn instead, becoming more lodger than guest, she had realised that the thing he’d needed hadn’t been a toasty fireplace at all.
He’d needed someone to see him, armour and sword and all. To hear his ridiculous introduction and accept his courtly bow. And still sayCome in.
“He’s been with us some time,” Jasmine mused now, leaning heavily on her cane. “Do you think he still believes the story we tell the guests about Roo-Roo?”
“That the skeletal rooster is one of Theo’s toys and runs on batteries?” Sera winced, wishing for the thousandth time that she had the ability to cast a decent glamour over Roo- Roo. “I have no idea, and I don’t plan to ask.”
Jasmine acknowledged that this was a can of worms best left unopened. Roo-Roo scuttled out of the kitchen to go bother the actual,living chickens by the coop, and for a few moments, there was peace in the house. Jasmine wiped down
the old breakfast table while Sera sought out a speedy slice of toast.
“Have you seen Theo today?” Sera asked Jasmine, smothering her toast in lavender jam. “He wasn’t in his room when I came downstairs.”
“I think he was up before any of us,” Jasmine replied.
“On a weekend? That’s not like him.”
“I suspect he decided to set off on an adventure,” said Jasmine. “His coat and bicycle are missing.”
This struck Sera as suspicious. Theo, who tended to stay up late reading and normally stumbled yawning into the kitchen after everyone else had already finished breakfast, was not the sort of child who decided to embark on adventures at dawn.
“I’ll text him,” Sera said, mouth full of jammy toast. “He never goes anywhere without his phone.”
A moment later, the merry trill of an alert echoed from Theo’s bedroom above them and proved that this was not in fact the case. Where could he possibly have gone, and why wouldn’t he have taken his phone with him?
“Where’s Clemmie?” Sera demanded suddenly.
“If I had to guess, asleep,” said Jasmine, always prepared to believe the best of everyone.
Sera, who was not by any means prepared to believe the best of anyone, let out an unladylike snort. Before she could put her mind to the mystery of where Theo and Clemmie might be, however, a piercing, plaintive cry pealed across the
garden.
“SERAAAAA!”
Sera had no one to blame for this but herself. She could have abandoned the inn years ago. She could, at this very moment, be living on one of those tiny islands off the coast of Norway with only a polar bear for company.She’d decided
to stay.She’d decided to take on more and more of the running of the inn. Andshe’d cast the spell that had brought people like Matilda and Nicholas to her door.
Sera had made her bed.
If only she could go lie in it.
“Could you call Alex for me?” she said to Jasmine, shoving her socked feet into the pair of red wellies by the back door.
Alex was Theo’s best friend, so it stood to reason that their house was the most likely place he’d be.
“SEHHH-RAAAA!”
Sera clomped out into the cold and sun, making her way down the garden to the spot where, fifteen years ago, Jasmine had died.
The garden hadn’t changed a whole lot since then. The stone patio right outside the kitchen had new raised beds for herbs and edible flowers, there was now a chicken coop near the beehive, and Matilda had dug herself a vegetable patch.
Other than that, time had more or less stood still. The orchard of fruit trees was still there. The grass was still too long and the wildflowers too wild.
Sera came to a halt beside the vegetable patch, which was near to bursting with the colours of its harvest. There was a wheelbarrow beside it, as well as a trowel, a bright red watering can, and a wooden stool topped with a teapot and cup.
It was an idyllic picture, so long as you ignored the two people glowering at each other right in the middle of it.
The first of the two was Matilda, a smallish and oldish Black lady who had arrived almost two years ago, pronounced the inn perfect, and had never left. She was the first of Sera’s guests who had seamlessly segued into becoming a lodger. Clad in brown dungarees, she had a straw hat wedged over her cloud of grey corkscrew curls
and was pointing an accusing finger at her archnemesis.
“Sera, make him go away!”
“Malik,” Sera said, exasperated, “I love seeing you every Saturday, I do, but you know what would make me love the experience even more? If you gave me the week’s delivery without making Matilda’s voice go all high and screechy first!”
Malik, the extremely fetching archnemesis in question, pointed to the vegetable patch. “I’m a farmer!” Unlike the rest of them, with their mix of accents, his voice was all Lancashire. “There’s a time and a place for minding your own business, but the sight of cabbages and peppers planted side by side isn’t it!”
“Now you listen to me, my boy,” Matilda cut in, before Sera could reply. “If I wanted your advice, I’d ask for it! I am in the twilight of my life! I have earned the right to grow my vegetables, hunt for mushrooms, eat eight meals a day, and sing rousing drinking songs without interruption!”
“Rousing—” Malik cut a look at Sera, obviously trying to decide whether to be annoyed, incredulous, or simply delighted that he was thirty-eight and had been referred to as a boy.
Feeling that his sensibilities, so offended by the cabbages and peppers, might go either way, Sera intervened. “Quit it, both of you,” she said. “This week, it’s the cabbages. Last week, it was the sunflowers. I don’t care how many crimes against gardening Matilda commits, Malik! You’re just going to have to learn to not look! And as for you,” she went on, spinning round to Matilda, “Malik has a job to do and other places to go to. If you don’t want him examining your handiwork, don’t waylay him every time he walks through the gate!”
“I waylay him because a farmer should appreciate excellent produce when he sees it!” Matilda insisted. “Look at those pumpkins! Look at my precious babies! They’re perfect! But did he mention the pumpkins? No! He couldn’t get past the cabbages!”
“And the peppers,” Malik reminded her. He clutched the old key hanging around his neck as if it were a talisman that might protect him from the horrors before him. “And are
those artichokes?”
“I like the artichokes,” said Sera.
“Jesus, it’s a miracle any of this has grown.”
Sera, who snuck out in the dead of night twice a week to cast reviving spells on Matilda’s beloved plants with the minuscule amount of magic she had left, said nothing.
“You don’t deserve to have such beautiful cheekbones,”
Matilda informed him, snatching the teapot off the stool.
“Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to top up my tea and forage for mushrooms.”
Malik, who seemed both surprised and pleased by the tribute to his cheekbones, loped off in the direction of the van parked outside the gate. “You want to give me a hand with the crates? El sent you a massive pot of fahsa too.”
Sera bought all the inn’s fruit and veggies from Malik and his husband Elliot’s farm, which was quite a lot even when they didn’t have any extra guests. It took the two of them two trips to move a handful of wooden crates and a tureen of Yemeni stew from Malik’s van to the kitchen. After they were done, Sera pressed homemade honey into Malik’s arms and walked him out.
“Until next week, love.” Malik climbed into the driver’s seat. “As always, ta for supporting the efforts of your local farmers. El may be the better cook, but I take comfort in knowing I have the best cheekbones.”
Sera laughed. “Dinner on Wednesday?”
“We wouldn’t miss it.”
She watched him drive off, shielding her eyes against the sharp, angled sun. The last twenty minutes had left her with a throbbing pain precisely behind her left eyebrow. She shut her eyes, pressed the heel of her hand to the spot, and summoned the little magic she had left.
Most witches possessed a respectable amount of magic, enough to glamour an undead rooster or fix a broken chimney. Some had more than that. Some had less.
Sera, these days, had even less than less.
Years ago, when she had closed her eyes and reached for her magic, it had answered her instantly. Now it took a moment or two. Now it was like standing in the dark, calling for help and hoping to see the glow of a rescuer’s lantern.
She was always afraid that this time would be the time she’d call, and call, and get no answer.
But there was still a little magic in her, and it answered.
Just a few stubborn, twinkling constellations of stars. Not enough to glamour an undead rooster or fix a broken chimney. A headache, though?That, it could fix.
Sometimes Sera wondered what she’d have done if she had known what the resurrection spell would cost her before she’d cast it. She liked to think she’d have cast it anyway, that she’d have chosen Jasmine over her magic, but every now and then, in the guilty quiet of the night, she wondered.
“Bok!”
Apparently, Roo-Roo had lost interest in annoying the chickens. Sera nudged him away from the open gate with the toe of one wellie. The inn was at the bottom of a narrow, winding country lane that hardly anyone except delivery drivers and the occasional guest ever found themselves on.
Sheep-dotted farmland, wild woods, and green hills stretched
out for miles around. It was a half mile up the lane to the nearest pub and another mile beyond that to the nearest Tesco. A zombie chicken, therefore,could probably slip through the open gate and meander around the nearby countryside for a bit without being noticed, but it was best not to take any chances. Sera could do without breaking any more of the Guild’s laws.
She turned back to the house. It was a three-storey, 1840s hodgepodge of cream stone and brown brick, with multiple chimneys and sharply slanted red roofs long faded by the sun, and looked like it ought to belong to a Victorian dowager. The ivy climbing the walls was so overgrown that very little of the original brick was visible. The house was surrounded by low, weathered stone walls on all sides, and a shallow brook babbled its way past one corner. The front of the inn faced the same winding lane as the back, just farther uphill, and above the front door swung an ancient sign that read BATTY HOLE INN.
Sera was lucky fairy tales weren’t real, because a wolf could huff and puff andabsolutely blow the whole thing down. Moreover, the house needed lit fires and Sera’s heat spells for ten out of twelve months of the year, most of the furniture was old and worn, the hot water was a bit sputtery, the Wi-Fi was temperamental, and Clemmie left claw marks in the wood whenever she fancied a tantrum.
And then there was the magic. Whenever Sera checked, she could see that the inn still glowed bright with the spell she’d cast over it as a child. Spells were supposed to be finite, so there was no reason it ought to still be going strong, but somehow, it was. Unfortunately, it had also evolved. Over time, the spell had developed a most inconvenient propensity for whimsy and mischief.
Wildflowers bloomed spontaneously in empty teacups at
unexpected moments. The sunlit rooms teased her with echoes of her past selves. Doors opened and closed on a whim. One of the guest bedrooms rained apple blossom tea for exactly one hour every Sunday, after which said tea vanished like it had never been there. And it was anyone’s guess what might come next.
The most exasperating thing was the knowledge that if she could just get her magic back, the house’s inconveniences would be moot. The boiler wouldn’t need to be replaced if it was enchanted. Her heat spells would last weeks, not hours. With a wave of her hand, she’d be able to fix a crumbling chimney, seal a leaking pipe, mend a cracked window frame. With just a thought, she’d be able to paint walls, clean smoky fireplaces, and polish the wood until it gleamed. These spells had seen them through her childhood, had beeneasy back then, and it was utterly galling that they were now beyond her.
The house was an albatross around her neck, but it was, nevertheless,her albatross. Just weeks after she’d turned eighteen, her parents had decided she could now stand on her own two feet. They’d signed over the deed and the mortgage, kissed and congratulated her as if they hadn’t just plonked a crumbling colossus in her lap, and tootled off on their next adventure.
Jasmine had kept the inn going, but she wasn’t young, and as the years had gone by, Sera had taken on more and more of the work.
And lo, here she was. Exiled witch and cranky innkeeper.
Theo was fond of wholesome video games in which his character ran farms, tea shops, and inns with little more than a rusty axe and a winning smile. Sera, glancing over his shoulder every now and then, was more than a little bitter that real life wasn’t quite so easy.
Then again, she had neither a rusty axe nor a winning smile, so maybe that was the problem.
The ping of her phone started Sera out of her thoughts.
Jasmine, who was not the sort of woman who bellowed across the garden (or, indeed, at all), had sent her a text.
Alex says they haven’t seen Theo since school yesterday.
Which brought Sera rather neatly to: how thefuck had she misplaced an entire eleven-year-old boy?
She stormed back inside. Jasmine was at her worktable in the large living room and, amazingly, remained unfrazzled.
“Now, pet,” she said soothingly, “I’m sure there’s a very good explanation for this. Theo wouldn’t do anything untoward.”
“Wouldn’t he?” Sera replied. “Not even if Clemmie asked him really, really nicely? Untoward is her middle name!”
“I think she once told me it’s Mary, but I take your point. I do feel, though, that whatever Clemmie may or may not be capable of, Theo wouldn’t let himself be led astray. He’s an
angel.”
“So was Lucifer,” said Sera darkly.
“And I’m sure that was a very upsetting situation for all involved, my love, but it seems unlikely to be repeated. Oh!
Theo!”
Sera whirled. There, in the doorway, his coat still on and his cheeks all pinked like he’d been outside for hours, stood her young cousin. He gave her a look of complete (even— dare she say it?—angelic) innocence.
Clemmie, on the other hand, looked enormously satisfied as she sashayed into the room. “Good morning, Sera,” she said cheerfully, an emotion so removed from her usual self that Sera was instantly suspicious. “How are you?”
Sera scowled. “Where have you both been?”
“Nowhere.” Clemmie sat on her hind legs and examined one of her front paws. “That is to say,I haven’t been
anywhere. I couldn’t tell you where Theo’s been.”
Sera raised her eyebrows at Theo.
He was a lanky, lively young boy, with short, untidy brown hair, a firm jaw, and bright, eager blue eyes. He shook his head at her, though he couldn’t quite meet her eyes and kept glancing sideways at Clemmie. “I’ve just been out on my bike.”
“Theodór,” Sera said sharply, switching to Icelandic so Clemmie couldn’t interfere, “you’re a terrible liar. I don’t care if you’ve promised Clemmie you won’t say a word. You tell me where you’ve been right this minute.”
The doorbell rang.
Theo’s face went pale.
“I’ll answer it,” Jasmine said, retrieving her cane and leaving the room with all haste.
Clemmie bounded up to the windowsill and craned her neck to catch a glimpse of the front stoop. “Drat. I thought we’d have more time.”
Dread seized Sera. “What have you done?”
Jasmine reappeared in the open doorway before either Theo or Clemmie could answer, a most peculiar expression on her face. “Sera,” she said, a great deal shriller than normal. “You have a visitor.”
She stepped aside to reveal Francesca Grey, Sera’s former friend and the new Chancellor of the British Guild of Sorcery.
