CHAPTER FIVE
heo lived with Sera because his parents were afraid of hisT magic. He’d been seven years old when his magic had made itself known and a few days shy of his ninth birthday when Sera’s aunt Lilja, who had found out about Sera’s own magic when Theo’s had first appeared, had called her in tears to say she couldn’t do it anymore.
She couldn’t sleep for fear that Theo would burn the house down or make the hymnbooks dance in church, she’d said, and nothing Sera had said could convince her that witches didn’t actually do things like that in real life. So Sera had flown to Reykjavík, taken one look at Theo standing anxiously at the edge of the room like he was trying not to frighten his parents by saying or doing the wrong thing, and said, “You can come stay with me if you like.”
It was a splendid idea, in theory. Theo spoke fluent English already, a phone call to the village school had assured them that he’d have a place there as soon as he wanted it, and Jasmine had been thrilled at the prospect of having someone new to fuss over.
How Theo would get to Batty Hole Inn, however, was another matter. A new witch could not come to live in the country without the Guild’s permission, and Sera could not
conceive of a universe in which they were likely to grant her any favours.
Fortunately, the Wise Women of Reykjavík had pulled some strings, and within a week, Sera and Theo were on a flight home.
Two years on, Theo was still here. He had never asked to go back, his parents had never suggested he go back, and Sera didn’t want him to go back unless he had a safe and welcoming place to be. He FaceTimed with his parents every week, had made friends, was thriving at school, and, as far as Sera could tell, seemed happy.
So Sera would beimmensely displeased if, after all that, Theo were to be locked up in a dungeon.
She returned to the living room. Francesca had taken a seat in an armchair by the log burner, but Sera’s eyes skated past her and landed in the corner of the room where, out of Francesca’s line of sight, the house had shaken loose a translucent memory of Sera’s much younger self. Thirteen or fourteen years old, in her Guild school uniform, at the peak of her friendship with the old Francesca, bouncing excitedly on her toes like she was trying to getthis Francesca’s attention.
Sera, too accustomed to the house’s tricks, didn’t react. A blink later, the ghost was gone and Francesca looked up as Sera entered the room. “Well?”
“Here,” Sera said, handing the jumper-covered spellbook over and collapsing wearily into the opposite armchair.
Francesca unwrapped the book, folding Theo’s jumper neatly and placing it on the arm of her chair. “Out of curiosity, why didn’t they just take a photograph of the spell you wanted? Wouldn’t that have been easier than absconding with the entire book?”
“Much easier, but Theo left his phone here. I’m assuming his reasoning was that if Jasmine or I happened to glance at his location onour phones, we’d see him safely at home.”
“So he didn’t want you to know where he was?”
Francesca raised her eyebrows. “You reallydidn’t know about this, did you?”
Realising she’d said too much, Sera backtracked. “No, I knew. I must have misspoken about the phone thing. It was all my idea.” Technically, that last part was true. Sera had once said to Clemmie,sarcastically, that stealing the spellbook would be easier than convincing the Guild to let her look at it. And look where that had got her. “Do whatever you need to, but leave Theo out of it.”
Almost as if he had not stayed put as he’d been told to, and had in fact been listening in from just outside the door, Theo burst into the room. “No! They can’t blame you for somethingI did!”
Sera glared him into silence. Francesca looked between
them. “What about Clementine?”
“What about her?”
“She was obviously involved.”
You’re welcome to have her, Sera wanted to say, but didn’t. She’d regret it later. Clemmie had gone too far, as she so often did, but she’d been a part of Sera’s life for too long for her to abandon her now.
“You have evidence there was a fox with Theo,” Sera said. “You can’t prove the fox is Clemmie. Like I said, this was my idea.”
There was a long pause. Theo was practically quivering with outrage, his jaw set so mutinously that Sera just knew he was getting ready to insist all over again that if anyone ought to be punished for his youthful wrongdoings, it should be him. Really, this was all Nicholas’s fault for putting ideas
about knightly honour and noble sacrifice into Theo’s impressionable young head.
To her surprise, however, Francesca smiled. “Still loyal to
the bitter end, I see.”
Sera said nothing.
“As soon as I saw which book had been taken,” Francesca went on, “I knew it was the restoration spell you wanted.
This is about getting your magic back, isn’t it?”
There was no point denying it, so Sera nodded.
Francesca heldThe Ninth Compendium out. “I’m afraid it’s not quite as easy as that. Take a look.”
Wary of a trap she couldn’t yet see, Sera took the spellbook. The edges of the book were uneven, the pages not all the same size, the parchment varying from yellowed whites to faded browns. Fascinated, Sera touched the edges of the paper with a careful finger, thinking of all the possible places these spells might have been found, imagining the rustle of a scroll in the Library of Alexandria or the puff of an old man blowing dust off his late great-grandmother’s trunk and finding a spell tucked between her gloves. (Of course, none of these spells could haveactually come from the Library of Alexandria, not just because any such spells would rightfully belong to Egypt or Greece but also because the oldest spell in all twelve compendiums was only about four hundred years old. The old man and his glove- wearing, trunk-owning great-granny, though, could have been real.) The witch who had compiled the volume had created a table of contents in neat, beautiful handwriting, the ink bleeding very slightly. About halfway down the list were the wordsA Spell of Restoration. Sera turned to the right page,
fingers trembling slightly.
Her heart sank a bit. “Oh.”
Theo, looking eagerly over her shoulder, was confused.
“What is that?”
There were words on the page, in dark, slightly smudged ink, but they were not written in any script Sera could read.
“It’s a spellcasting language that predates the one we use now,” Francesca explained.
“I know.” Sera had come across it a few times as a child.
Every time she’d expressed an interest in learning it, Albert had reminded her how lucky she was to be apprenticed to him and had made it clear that he had no intention of wasting his time teaching her outdated, unnecessary things. It had not escaped Sera’s notice thathe had clearly deemed those outdated, unnecessary things worth learning, but it was only much later that she’d really appreciated how much of the five years she’d spent with the Guild had been dominated by Albert trying to keep as much knowledge from her as possible.
“Look,” Francesca said quietly, “I’d rather pretend this never happened. I don’t want to punish either of you for, shall we say,borrowing the book. I have to take it back with me today, but if you wanted to take photographs of the spell before I go, I wouldn’t stop you.”
Sera was quite certain she had to be misunderstanding this, because surely,surely, Francesca wasn’t actually helping her?
Theo ran out of the room, excitedly yelling, “Clemmie!
We’re not in trouble! And Sera gets to take photos!”
“Theo, I am on thelam.” Clemmie’s outraged voice could be heard in reply. “You can’t just announce my presence to the blooming Chancellor of the Guild!”
“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,” Francesca said to Sera.
Sera was still at a loss. “Why are you doing this?”
Francesca shrugged, one hand toying restlessly with a single loose thread on the cuff of her jacket. “Why not?”
“When we were kids, you used to fidget with your clothes when you were hiding something,” Sera commented.
Francesca yanked her hand away from her cuff. “Can we not overthink it? Don’t you have better things to worry about? Like, say, how you’re going to translate the spell?”
“I have no idea how I’m going to translate the spell! How many people still alive today have studied this language? A handful? And I can’t imagine any of them helping me!”
Francesca opened her mouth and then shut it again.
Sera frowned. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“No, it was definitely something. What were you going to say?”
Looking rather annoyed with herself, Francesca said, “Do you remember Verity Walter?”
“Professor Walter? Yes, of course. She was one of the few people who spent more time in the library than I did. Your father would try to put me off reading books that were, quote unquote,too advanced, but Professor Walter would put them in my hands, wink, and walk away.”
“She would have helped you. Shecan’t, which is why I didn’t say it, but she would have. Under different circumstances.”
Sera narrowed her eyes at her. “What are you talking
about?”
“I can’t really tell you the—”
“Well, you’re going to,” Sera shot back. “Why can’t she help me? And why are you so sure she’d even want to?” A sudden, horrible thought struck her. “Has she tried before?
When? What happened?”
“Ugh,” Francesca huffed, her carefully cultivated poise abandoning her altogether. “Father told Professor Walter that if she helped you, he’d make sure she’s never allowed into the Guild’s libraries again.”
“When?” Sera asked again. “Last month? Last year? How long after I lost my magic?”
Reddening, Francesca said, “Straight after.”
“Straight after,” Sera repeated, her voice tight with rage.
“Straight. After.”
“I don’t know if you ever read the newsletter that went out at the time, but Father made sure everyone in the Guild knew about the resurrection spell, the fact that you’d lost your magic, and that you’d been exiled,” Francesca explained, still pink. “He said it was important that everybody knew that meddling with dangerous spells had real consequences, but you know what he’s like.”
“He mostly just wanted to make sure everybody knew he no longer had an equal,” Sera guessed, unsurprised and unmoved. “Yes, that’s very him. Where does Professor Walter fit in?”
“She demanded a meeting with Chancellor Bennet and the Cabinet as soon as she saw the newsletter. She brought The Ninth Compendium with her and showed them the spell.
She said it would be a disgrace if the Guild let a gift like yours disappear when they had the power to restore it. She acknowledged you had been reckless with your magic, but you were also just a child and she said you deserved a more appropriate punishment than exile.”
Sera swallowed, touched by the unexpected kindness of a woman she’d only known in passing. “But?”
“Chancellor Bennet agreed with her,” Francesca said.
That didn’t surprise Sera. The ancient and perpetually confuddled former Chancellor had certainly enjoyed basking
in the glory of her extraordinary magical gift, but for all that, he’d also been something of a softy. “But ending a person’s exile has to be put to the entire Cabinet for a vote.” The streaks of red on Francesca’s cheeks were now crimson.
“Ten of the twelve Ministers voted to let you come back, but, well, one of the two who didn’t happened to, um, have the veto.”
“I’m sorry, how does that make any fucking sense?” Sera demanded. “Albert gets to just veto everyone else whenever he wants to?”
Francesca shrugged. “It’s in his contract. His, um, magically binding contract.”
“Magically binding contracts only work when people are
stupid enough to sign them!”
“My father can be very persuasive.”
“Then how comehe isn’t the Chancellor of the Guild?”
With a short, mirthless laugh, Francesca said, “Getting eleven Cabinet Ministers to sign a document is easy enough when you’ve known their families for years and the ones who don’t fawn over you are terrified of you. Persuading a few thousand ordinary witches of the Guild to vote for you to be in charge, on the other hand…” Another shrug. “Father is feared, admired, and maybe even respected, but he’ll never beliked. He’s spent too long flexing his power, sneering at the riffraff, and ignoring the plebs.”
“Well,you’re the Chancellor of the British Guild of Sorcery now,” Sera said sharply. “You got enough people to vote for you. If you want to do better by theriffraff and the plebs, if you want to be different from your father, then do it.
Be different.”
“I’m the puppet dancing at the end of his strings, Sera. I always have been. I don’t know how to be different.”
Sera shook her head. “If that were really true, you wouldn’t be here right now.”
There wasn’t a whole lot else to say, so Sera took several photographs of the restoration spell and then filmed a short video of the page from every possible angle to make sure she didn’t miss a single bit of ink. Theo came back in, immediately dismissed Sera’s assurance that she’d taken plenty of footage already, and took a few videos of his own. (“You’re too old to properly understand how technology works,” he said wisely, to which Sera replied that he was lucky he was cute because he might otherwise have found himself unceremoniously ejected out the window.) When Theo was at last satisfied, Francesca placedThe Ninth Compendium into a protective case and stood up. Her hand on the doorknob, she paused and said, simply, “Father mustn’t find out about this, Sera. He’ll find a way to stop
you.”
Sera nodded. “I know.”
Almost as soon as the front door clicked shut, Matilda came in to show off the mushrooms she’d collected, which put an end to any talk of magical compendiums and untranslated spells. Sera sent Theo, who had obviously been running on little but adrenaline for the last twelve hours, off to bed, and promptly relieved Matilda of every poisonous mushroom in her basket. (This wasn’t for Matilda’s sake, because Matilda knew which ones were deadly and knew better than to go about eating wild things willy-nilly.
Nicholas, on the other hand, had the courage of a lion, the lovability of a puppy, and the common sense of a goldfish.) By the time Sera had dispensed with the mushrooms, run a hoover around all the rooms, collected fresh basil and rosemary from the garden, recast her heat charms, and
almost tripped over the undead rooster eighteen different times, she was exhausted.
Exhausted, but more hopeful than she’d been in a long time.
It was just after four o’clock and the inn was quiet at last.
Theo was still asleep, Jasmine and Matilda typically retired for a nap in the afternoons, Nicholas wouldn’t get home from work before six, and they had no other guests with them at the moment. The big kitchen captured the last of the day’s golden light, and with a fresh pat of homemade butter sitting in the fridge and a loaf of bread baking in the oven, Sera curled up in an old and immensely comfortable armchair in the corner of the room and watched the sun tilt over the hill.
“So?” she said into the silence, toying with the thin gold chain of her swan necklace. “What’s the rest of the story?”
Clemmie’s red ears poked around the edge of the open back door, followed shortly by the rest of her. She padded into the kitchen, tail swishing. “I see your feathers are still ruffled.”
“You can’t possibly be surprised I’m still angry.”
“Why? We got what we wanted.”
“We got lucky.Theo got lucky.” Even as she said it, she knew there was no point. Clemmie was incapable of hearing anything that might inconvenience her. She was not outright villainous (that would require a certain level of competence, and Clemmie had, after all, cursedherself), but she certainly seemed toaspire to villainy and, therefore, thought of little but herself.
“Well, be that as it may, Theo and I already told you everything,” Clemmie insisted.
“Nice try, but you left something out, something I’m guessing Theo doesn’t know either. I know what the restricted archives are like, remember? You can’t just stroll
in, and as Theo doesn’t know the right unlocking spell and you can’t use your magic, I’m at a loss as to how, exactly, you got in.”
“I hate it when you do that,” Clemmie complained.
“Do what?”
“Work things out,” said Clemmie sulkily. “If you must know, everything went perfectly until, as you suspected, Theo couldn’t unlock the door. We stood there for fifteen minutes, getting ourselves worked up into a right tizzy and probably arguing louder than we should have been, and then,
all of a sudden, the door justopened.”
“Oh, it did, did it? Just like that?”
“Obviously not,” Clemmie retorted in annoyance.
“Someone must have been working late in the library, overheard us, and decided to unlock the door for us.
Knowing we’d been spotted would have just frightened Theo, though, so I told himhis spell must have worked.”
Sera stared at her. “To be clear, you’re saying an unknown individual decided for equally unknown reasons to help a child and a talking fox get into the restricted archives
of the Guild’s library?”
“Exactly!”
Acutely pained, Sera said, “And that strikes you as a normal thing to do? It didn’t cross your mind that this unknown individual might actually have been setting a trap to catch you in the act of stealing from the Guild?”
“So what if they were? We got the book, didn’t we?And Chancellor Grey let us get away with borrowing it. Happy days! Now I, for one, would like to talk about what we’re going to do about that spell.”
Sera gave up. “Fine. Doyou know the language it’s written in?”
Clemmie made a grumbly, growly noise in her throat.
“No. We’ll have to get someone else to translate it for us.”
“Thereisn’t anybody, Clemmie! We’re exiles! Who would you trust not to run straight to Albert?”
“An irksome but fair point,” Clemmie acknowledged grudgingly. “Then the only other option is to speedily acquire books about this dratted language and translate the spell ourselves.”
“You wantus to learn an obscure spellcasting dialect?
Without help, supervision, or timely intervention if and when we make a mistake?”
“You don’t sound very open to this,” Clemmie observed.
“I am not,” Sera assured her.
“And I suppose you think it’s silly and irresponsible to cast a spell that may or may not have been translated properly.”
“You suppose correctly.”
Clemmie plonked herself on her tail and crossed her front paws over her chest, which made her look like a petulant and unusually furry toddler. “Then I’m not budging from this spot until you come up with a better idea.”
This dire reality, thankfully, did not last long. Moments later, Matilda trotted into the room, oblivious to the bushy tail whisking itself out of sight above the kitchen cabinets, and peered at Sera with interest. “Are you talking to yourself
again, dear heart?”
“Usually,” said Sera.
“Such a good habit,” Matilda said approvingly.
Jasmine joined them as dusk turned to deep dark, whereupon she noticed the fox but somehow failed to notice the gooey, adoring way that Matilda looked at her, and then Nicholas clanked in without noticing anything at all. By the time a rumpled, yawning Theo came downstairs for dinner,
completing the household, the concept of peace and quiet was but a fond memory.
That said, maybe there was something to be said for mayhem. With Matilda chopping carrots and singing a sea shanty, Jasmine dancing to said sea shanty, and Nicholas and Theo engaged in a noisy, vigorous duel with wooden sticks one careless elbow away from the lamb stew reheating on the hob, there simply wasn’t room for Sera to think about the restoration spell, the vote that could have changed the entire course of her life, and the fifteen years Albert had taken from her.
Halfway through the fourth sea shanty, Jasmine limped up to Sera’s spot by the stew and said, in an undertone, “You don’t happen to know where Roo-Roo is, do you?”
Sera did a double take at Jasmine’s empty arms. She was so used to seeing Roo-Roo there that she hadn’t even noticed he wasn’t.
She cut a look out of the window, down the length of the dark, starlit back garden, and saw the very thing she’d hoped she wouldn’t see: the white gate, open, swinging gaily in the breeze.
“Take over the stew, would you?” Sera said, and exited the kitchen with all haste.
She wasn’t far from the gate, having almost broken her neck tripping over uneven knots in the ground in the dark, when the beams of headlights flashed past the hedge and she heard the unmistakable sound of a car screeching to a halt.
Sera rushed through the gate, where she found a skeletal chicken in the middle of the lane, a car about ten feet away from the aforementioned chicken with its headlights pointed straight at it, and a man standing beside the driver’s door.
She ran into the lane, snatched Roo-Roo up, and swiftly sidestepped the beams of the headlights. Trying (and failing)
to think of an explanation while also trying (and failing) to stuff a jumble of animated bones into her armpit and out of sight, she was about to give up and flee without a word when the driver of the car did the most peculiar thing.
He sighed.
“Of course it’s you,” said the stranger, and far be it from Sera to quibble at a time like this, but she couldn’t help noticing he didn’t sound especially pleased. “Hello, Sera.”
