CHAPTER NINE
era returned to the kitchen to find that, happily, noS stabbings, kidnappings, or livestock adoptions had taken place in her absence. This unexpected stroke of good fortune seemed too good to be true, or at the very least unlikely to last, so Sera was not surprised when, the very next morning, a frazzled tavern wench from the Medieval Fair called to tell her that Nicholas had been knocked off his horse during the jousting.
“Can you come pick him up?” said the harried girl on the line. “He keeps saying he’d rather die than face the dishonour of retreat, but he hit his head when he fell and the doctor says he isn’t allowed back on a horse for two days.
He’s not supposed to drive himself home either.”
Serahad hoped to spend the morning putting her mind to the problem of translating the spell fromThe Ninth Compendium, but Jasmine couldn’t drive and Matilda was splashing ankle-deep in the brook, so off she went.
Without the benefit of being able to cut across fields, and with the sharp hills and narrow lanes making it necessary to drive slowly, it was a good fifteen minutes before she drew up at the entrance to the Fair. There, she collected a dejected Nicholas, who was still in his knight’s armour
(though his oversized jousting helmet, thankfully, remained inside somewhere), scabbard at his waist. He clanked his way into the passenger seat of Sera’s car.
“I must ask that you not look at me,” Nicholas said miserably. “I have failed you. I have failed everyone.”
Sera, quite unable to decide whether to feel sympathetic or amused, started the engine. “Don’t be a ninny. Knights get knocked off their horses all the time. Isn’t that the whole point of jousting? You must have been knocked off before.”
“Of course, but I always got up and went again! I’ve never pulled out of a tourney before! Knights must always get back on their horses or die trying.”
There was no use reminding Nicholas that the tourney was about as real as Clemmie’s conscience, so Sera only said, “You got a clonk on the head. I know employee safety might seem like a distressingly modern concept to you, but they had no choice but to send you home. In fact,” she added, patting him on the shoulder plate, “you did your duty. They told you to go home. You obeyed.That sounds like something a good knight would do.”
“I suppose that’s true.” Nicholas perked up. He turned from the window to look at her, distracted from his own woe.
“Jasmine told me our new guest is an old friend of yours.”
Those were definitely not the words Sera had used when she’d told Jasmine about their new arrivals the previous night. “I wouldn’t exactly call him a friend.”
Instantly, Nicholas’s hackles rose. “Why not? What did he do? Shall I take up my sword against him?”
“And do what after that?” Sera asked with interest.
“Throw him in our invisible dungeon? You’d probably like him if you met him, actually. When I knew him, he was, er, really into history.”
Well, it wasn’t like she could sayHe was studying magical history at the only library for witches in the country, could she?
“If you wish it, I’ll guard him with my life,” Nicholas vowed. Apparently, with Nicholas, there was no middle ground between a duel and undying devotion.
“He was only planning to stay the one night. He might not even be there when we get back.”
Nicholas grinned at her. “I remember whenI was only planning to stay the one night.”
“Trust me, Nicholas, Luke’s not like you.”
“He doesn’t have to be. You have a way about you. It makes us want to stay.”
“The inn tends to do that,” Sera said without thinking.
“No,” Nicholas said earnestly. “Not the inn.You.”
She couldn’t correct him again, not without saying a great deal more about magic than she ought to, but luckily their timely return to the inn spared her having to reply. She pulled into her usual parking spot, next to Matilda’s comically tiny electric two-seater, and noticed at once that Luke’s car was still there.
“He’s still here!” Nicholas almost tumbled out of Sera’s car, armour clanking, and, on the off chance that she had lost her powers of observation in the last thirty seconds, added, “Sera, look! He’s still here!”
The front door of the inn was standing open, as if someone was just inside, and sure enough, Luke materialised in the doorway a moment later.
“My lord!” Nicholas’s earnest cry was dented only slightly by the fact that he was swaying due to a possible concussion.
“Consider me your loyal subject!”
If Luke was surprised at being accosted by a youthful knight swearing lifelong fealty, he recovered quickly. “Thank
you. I’m Luke.”
“Sir Nicholas of Mayfair, at your service.” Nicholas paused, and reconsidered. “Actually, my family’s from Mayfair. I’m a knight of Batty Hole now.”
Nobody but Luke, Sera suspected, could have kept a straight face at that, but he didn’t even blink.
Jasmine limped out of the inn, positively aglow with happiness. “Look, Sera,” she called, as if she, too, was fearful that Sera might not have noticed the full six feet of human man standing right there.
“Are you on your way out?” Sera asked him.
Luke shook his head and said, in a perfectly even voice, “Something’s come up. Jasmine said Posy and I could stay a few more days, but if you’d rather we didn’t—”
“I told you!” Nicholas cried triumphantly.
“Don’t mind him, he just fell off a horse,” Sera said to Luke. “Of course you and Posy can stay. Come on, I’ll show you the lay of the land.”
Sera paused to take Nicholas’s sword away from him before leaving him to Jasmine’s tender care. Leading the way into the house, she glanced back at Luke and said, “So that
was Nicholas. Have you met the others?”
“Just Jasmine. What’s with the armour?”
“Nicholas’s armour? He works at the Medieval Fair near Winewall.”
Luke was unconvinced. “That was not medieval armour.”
“I don’t think the Fair’s overly concerned with historical accuracy.”
Sera had never seen anyone look more appalled than Luke did in that moment. “Not. Concerned. With. Historical.
Accuracy?”
She tried and failed to suppress a giggle. “I gather you won’t be visiting, then?”
He didn’t dignify that with a response.
They ran into Matilda on their way to the kitchen. She had a sticky cinnamon bun in one hand and the front pocket of her dungarees was bursting with autumn wildflowers.
“Sera, we need to revisit the question of the baby goat.”
“I am not getting a baby goat,” said Sera.
“What abouttwo baby goats?”
“No.”
“Half a goat?”
“In a stew?” Sera asked hopefully.
“I walked into that one, didn’t I?” Matilda said regretfully to Luke, and then, like she’d only just taken proper notice of him, did a comical double take. “Well.Well. Did it hurt?
When you fell out of whichever Norse myth you came from?”
And with that, she was gone, trotting up the stairs and vanishing out of sight. Luke gave Sera a look that suggested he thought she had not adequately prepared him for the trifecta of Nicholas, Matilda,and an undead rooster, but really, who could?
In the kitchen, they found Posy wearing a pair of fluffy headphones, arranging the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle in a line along the surface of the dining table, and eating what looked like her third cinnamon bun. Sera also observed that, predictably, the mug Posy had been drinking out of was Sera’s beloved, chipped, and perpetually purloined favourite.
“So are you going to tell me why you changed your mind about leaving?” Sera asked Luke, putting the kettle on.
“No.”
Having had better luck getting blood from a stone, she gave up. “Well, if you’re going to be here a bit longer, you’d better get acquainted with the corkboard.” She pointed to the wall. “That’s where everything important goes. Shopping
lists, reminders, the shared calendar, the key to the first-aid box, emergency phone numbers, et cetera, et cetera.”
“Inn Rules,” Luke read out loud, starting, unsurprisingly, with the sheet of yellow paper pinned to the very middle of
the corkboard. “One.No goats.”
“Zero goats,” Sera confirmed.
“Two.Do not under any circumstances eat any mushrooms without checking with Jasmine, Matilda, or Sera first.”
“I find it best to leave no room for ambiguity where Nicholas is concerned,” said Sera.
“Three.Do not wake Sera from her slumber.” There was a pause, and then a suspicious tremor in Luke’s voice as he added, “Except someone’s crossed outSera and replaced it
withthe dragon.”
“Potayto potahto,” said Sera.
“And four.Don’t be alarmed by the fox. She’s harmless.”
“Would that I lived in a universe where that were true,” said Sera wistfully.
Posy, who had completed a perfectly straight line of jigsaw pieces and had moved on to drawing on the inside of the box with her crayons, took her headphones off, put her empty plate and mug neatly beside the sink, and trotted into the garden to acquaint herself with her new surroundings.
Luke set two empty cups beside the kettle. “Do you still drink your sugar with a splash of tea?”
Sera was startled into laughter. “How do you even remember that?”
“How do I remember having to pour excessively sweet tea down your throat to rapidly sober you up after you and our new Chancellor stole our former Chancellor’s brandy?”
“Well, when you put it likethat, I can see how that might be, um, memorable.”
“Just a bit, aye.”
Sera was about to reply when, out of the corner of her eye, she saw her again, that younger Sera, fourteen and silly and blindingly magical, brimming with endless, infinite possibility.
Just a ghost now, sitting quietly at the table, watching her.
A blink, and the ghost was gone. By the time Luke followed her eyes across the room, there was nothing to see.
She snapped her gaze back to him. “Sorry. Four sugars,
please.”
“Where did you just go?”
“Oh, you know. Away.”
Luke’s eyes dropped to her throat, to where her hand, without permission, had started fidgeting with her necklace.
She let go immediately, dropping the pendant beneath the neckline of her jumper, but he’d already seen it. “Was that a swan?”
It wasn’t the first time Sera had wanted to throw her necklace in the bin. It also wasn’t the first time she knew she wouldn’t. “Itis my name.”
“Why are you wearing your name around your neck? Are you thirteen?”
“I’ll answer that when you tell me why you’re still here.”
Silence.
“I didn’t think so,” said Sera.
She took her tea outside and found a perch on the edge of one of the raised herb beds, setting her steaming cup down beside her. Cross-legged, chin propped on her fists, she breathed in the lavender, rosemary, and hollyhocks and absently watched Posy assess the shape and quality of one of Matilda’s cabbages.
She became aware that Luke had followed her out. He stood at the opposite end of the herb bed, his eyes on his
sister, the rigid, unbending lines of his shoulders positively screaming at her to keep her distance.
And then, unexpectedly, he said, “My mother didn’t think
it was a good idea to take Posy home.”
“Is something wrong?”
“With our parents? As in, are they both gravely ill and concerned they won’t be able to care for their own child at this exact moment? No. They’re fine.”
“How long has it been since Posy was home?”
“About a month.”
“I see.” Sera’s mind flashed to Theo standing at the edge of the room in his parents’ home, trying to make himself as small and unthreatening as possible. She clenched her jaw.
“What happened?”
“Posy doesn’t hide her magic. If she wants to use it, she does.” Luke’s voice was perfectly, painstakingly level.
“There’d been awkward questions from the staff at her school, so I took her to the Guild. It wasn’t right for her.
They were fine with the magic part, but…”
Sera could guess. “They were fine with the magic part,
but not the rest of her?”
“More or less.”
“What would have happened if youhad gone back to Edinburgh last night?”
“Nothing. It’s not like our parents would have kicked us out. I could take Posy back right now if I really wanted, but after that, as our mother took great pains to explain on the phone an hour ago, they’d have no choice but to pull her out of school and keep her away from other people until she learns to hide her magic. One of our parents would have to quit work and stay home with her.” Luke’s voice was a sea in outer space, miles and miles of frozen, unforgiving desolation. “It would be the easiest way to keep her safe, but
they’d hate it.She’d hate it. So she’s staying with me for now. Our mother assures me we’re more than welcome to
visit, though.”
“Big of her,” said Sera.
Luke cracked a smile. “Your turn.”
With an enormously martyred air, Sera tugged her necklace out from under her jumper. The pendant was a small crystal swan, each clear facet refracting a rainbow of light, its wings outstretched in flight. “After the resurrection spell,” she said, “when Albert exiled me, he gave me this big speech about howhe was still the powerful descendant of an old and distinguished magical family, whereasI was nothing but a swan who had clipped her own wings.”
Luke looked at her for the first time. “Sounds exactly like him.”
“To my great and enduring irritation, it got to me,” Sera went on, with a fearsome glower. “Then, a few weeks later, I was in this dusty, poky charity shop and I found this.”
She extended the chain away from her neck, as far as it would go, so he could see the pendant properly. It was hard to tell unless you looked very closely, but there was a hairline fracture down one wing where someone had broken the swan and mended it again.
“It’s silly, but it was the thing I needed at exactly the moment I needed it. When I put it on, it felt like I was saying fuck you, I can still fly.”
Luke looked at the pendant for a long time before saying, “No. It’s not silly.”
“Well, silly or not, I don’t know how true it was. I’m not the girl I was. I’ll never be her again.”
And that, Sera felt, wasquite enough truth-telling for one day.
Before Luke could say anything, she asked, abruptly, “What are you going to do if taking Posy home is out of the question for now?”
“I don’t know yet.” He looked away. “Don’t worry, we won’t stay long. My flat in Edinburgh’s tiny, so Posy can’t live there with me, but as soon as I find somewhere bigger—”
“You can stay as long as you need to.”
“You don’t have to—”
“I’m not saying it again,” Sera said, immediately ruffling the pointy, spiky ends of her feathers. “You need time to find somewhere new. Make a plan. Whatever. I’m giving you that time. So stay. For fuck’s sake.”
The corner of Luke’s mouth twitched. No, that was an understatement. Itquivered.
Sera scowled. “Yes, yes, I’m an intolerable grump. A belligerent harpy. A cantankerous shrew. Well, too bad. If you wanted someone warm and welcoming and snuggly, you should really have had this conversation with Jasmine instead.”
Luke’s first laugh was a rusty, startled sound. Then he kept laughing.
Sera was furious. She had (mostly) been able to avoid noticing how (very, very) attractive Luke was, but now he was laughing (at her! The nerve!), and as if that weren’t enough, the sun had decidedthis was the very moment to sally forth from behind the clouds and halo him in gold like he was a fucking archangel or something. It was unacceptable.
He was still laughing.
Sera drank her tea in wrathful silence.
