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I was too stunned to temper my expression. “What? Why? ”

“My dear muse didn’t like it.” Dumley shrugged absently. “Said it was stilted and lacked movement.”

I looked over at Theodore, he at me, and we shared a private confoundment.

“In any case,” the professor continued as he took the teapot from its tray, “we should speak of things less bleak for our first meeting.”

“First, sir?” asked Theodore.

“Ah, of course! I ought to explain myself.” The teapot clattered back down. His arms widened as though a grand tale were poised to unspool. “I have taken it upon myself to tutor you privately!” He slapped his knees and smiled broadly.

Theodore cleared his throat. “Privately?” he pressed. Again, we shared a mystified glance. “Is that… er, usual?”

“Not at all,” Dumley chortled. “And I’ll admit, it’s been a while since I’ve presided over a class, but with two new Charmers in one cohort, I can’t help but want a hand in your tutelage.”

His smile was still kind. There was nothing at all to suggest the meeting was anything but what he said. And yet…

I will be kept informed of your progress.

“Professor?” I asked cautiously, wondering if I ought to shut up, but if I were to sleep tonight, or any night, I needed to know. I tried to mimic Theodore’s inflection. “Does this have anything to do with… Lord Tanner?”

I felt Theodore’s stare swivel between Dumley and myself, but I did not look away from the professor. I wanted to catch the flicker of a reaction, if it were to come.

But Dumley’s smile only widened. “But how did you guess, Miss Clarke?” He chuckled again.

“It was Lord Tanner’s very idea! And you both should feel honored that he’s already taken such a keen interest in you.

We’ve had many a water Charmer pass through, Mr. Shop, but I’ve never seen the House of Lords so excited! ”

For some reason, Theodore’s smile fell slightly. “My father is a minister there, Professor,” he explained. “Likely Lord Tanner saw the relation.”

Dumley waved the assumption aside. “Lord Tanner sees potential , Mr. Shop. You ought not diminish yourself. A Charmer is a prize to be coveted. I should know.” With that, Dumley waved his hand toward the waiting hearth, and a fire blazed to life, unaided by wood or tinder.

It simply floated there, several inches from the clean tile base.

He laughed merrily at it, his chins stretching.

“Of course, we’re not the most humble of creatures, are we?

And as for the lovely young lady who stopped us all in our tracks!

” He held his arms out as though he expected me to run into them. I did not.

“A Charmer of earth ! The first of your kind in more than a century. Where, oh where, did you come from, young Nina?”

“Sommerland,” I answered immediately, too loudly. It took several seconds to realize the question was rhetorical.

“Of all places!” he chortled. “A farming town, if I’m not mistaken?”

“Sheep,” I said. I’d been sure to research my “hometown” the second I’d found the school’s expansive library. “And cattle. For the wool and leather and meat.”

Professor Dumley nodded politely, feigning interest, as though I were an infant pointing to something entirely base. I wondered vaguely what he’d have to say of the terranium mines of Scurry.

Theodore and I sat on the settee, drinking tea, listening to Professor Dumley chatter about the exploration of learning we would embark upon together.

He told us stories of his own years as an apprentice and his assent to headmaster.

His hands danced to the stories with ever-intensifying flourish, and the room grew hotter and hotter until I was desiccating, desperate for escape.

“And now, we should really turn our attention to today’s lesson,” he said with gentle reproach, as though Theodore and I had been a grievous distraction. “Tell me, Mr. Shop, have you yet experimented with your medium?”

Theo blushed. It was somewhat endearing. “We aren’t permitted to use our mediums unsupervised in our first year, professor.”

“Oh ho!” Dumley laughed. “Yet no one’s the wiser when those dormitory doors close, are they? I was once an apprentice, too, you forget.”

Theo grinned, then said, “I can levitate small amounts, but I’ve yet to make it take shape.”

“But levitation is quite advanced!” Dumley said. “Would you show me?” And he opened the lid of the teapot, gestured for Theo to do as he may.

Theo hesitated for a single moment, then, with a glance in my direction, he slid to the edge of his seat, wiping his hands on his trousers. “Should I just…?”

“Don’t be bothered by any mess,” Dumley assured him.

Theo cleared his throat, then, with a certain measure of awkwardness, he brought his palms up.

The teapot trembled delicately, threatened to tip sideways, but then a speck of liquid floated from the spout, another from the opening. Theo’s hands trembled.

A shifting orb of tea slowly appeared, its shape morphing in the air. It held for a moment, suspended above the tea set, to the resounding cheer of Professor Dumley, and then it shuddered and fell, the tea splashing off the spoons and saucers.

And Dumley laughed and clapped.

After a moment, I clapped, too. It seemed bad manners not to.

Theo panted slightly and sat back in his chair, a smile spreading from ear to ear.

“Quite amazing, isn’t it?” Dumley said, watching Theo closely. “That sensation?”

Theo nodded, his hands trembling. “There’s nothing like it.”

Dumley winked. “Worth dying for, some would say.” He clapped once more, shaking his head in a show of amazement. “What a talent you’ll be.”

Then he turned to me.

“But I haven’t forgotten you, my dear.” He wagged a finger at me, then stood and consulted a dusty credenza, lifting from its top a large clay urn.

He dropped it on the tea table with a clatter, and Theodore and I jumped.

He said, “Here we are!” as though he’d just proffered a gift. “Just dug it from the rose garden myself.”

The urn had been half filled with dark, damp earth. I could smell it from here. Feel its texture already, as though my mind had fingers, soil building up beneath the nails.

“How about you, Miss Clarke? Have you yet dabbled?”

I twisted my fingers together. “A little.”

“Well, do not be intimidated by young Theodore here. We must all start from the beginning.” He looked upon me kindly, already sitting back in his chair, already sympathetic. “Why, it takes many students some time to learn to levitate their medium at all. When I was a lad—”

But his sentence was cut short.

The earth rose from the urn, and Dumley’s mouth went slack.

What I had learned so far in my “dabbling” was that my mind was an extension of my hands.

I now felt that familiar expansion, my mind unfolding until it tripled.

I felt the dirt in my palms as though I cradled it.

I felt it sift and crumble. It was wet, heavy.

Malleable. My hands twitched at my sides.

I compacted it first, made it into a planet hovering before me, smoothing out its edges until it was near perfect, then I made it spin.

I’d yet to try charming earth so pliable. I made the sphere into a cube next, then a funnel, a small windstorm, and finally I lifted all those specks of dirt higher, higher, until they were suspended in that vaulted ceiling like a thousand muddy stars.

I knew Dumley and Theo were on their feet, as I was, staring up at the galaxy I had made. And then my mind shuddered, the pressure grew insurmountable—elastic stretched to the furthest extent.

Then it snapped.

Dirt rained to the floor, onto the settee, into the teacups. It plinked off Dumley’s head, clung to his whiskers.

His eyes remained on me.

“Well,” was all he said. “Well, well, well.” It seemed he was coming to some grand summation. He looked around his drawing room, at his sullied rug.

I suddenly felt foolish. “S-sorry,” I said, gesturing lamely to the tea table. “For the mess.”

A grin dawned slowly over Dumley’s face.

I heard Theodore mutter a curse. Quite unlike him.

Then Dumley walked over to me. He gripped either side of my face in his papery hands.

“My word,” he uttered. A laugh escaped him.

“Idia has blessed us.” And I thought I saw tears in his eyes as he took my hands and patted them.

“What a blessing you’ll be.” His chest ballooned.

He turned to Theo. “What fine assets you will both be.”

An hour later, Theodore closed those ornately carved doors behind him, the ringing trills of Dumley’s goodbye following us.

“Well,” Theodore uttered. And from his pocket, he drew out two handkerchiefs. “Our headmaster is insane.”

Perhaps it was the heat trapped in my skin, or the absurdity of the meeting, but a laugh escaped, then more of it.

“Here,” Theodore said, waving a handkerchief toward me. I took it gladly, mopping the sweat from my throat and the back of my neck. Theodore did the same with his own.

I giggled again, half relieved that I’d not been thrown from the school, half feverish. “Do you think the rest of the class will notice us drenched in sweat?”

Theodore took a moment to respond, and when I looked back at him, his eyes had stuck to me. They narrowed with interest. “Where did you say you were from?” he asked.

I realized then that I’d allowed my tongue to slacken. A drawl had snuck free. “Sommerland,” I said, tightening the consonants. The letter at my hip burned.

“Huh,” he said. “Not far into the brink, then?”

“Near enough.” I hoped my voice had morphed smoothly into something less graveled.

“You sound almost Northern,” he stated, smiling easily.

Eastern , I wanted to say.

“I’ve always wanted to travel out to the brink,” he continued, and somehow he managed to loosen the knots in my stomach, if only slightly. “Do you have many friends there?”

“No.”

He frowned at me, gesturing that I go first down the stairs. “Have you met any new ones here? It seemed like you were sitting alone at breakfast this morning.”

He would have seen me blush if my cheeks weren’t already mottled with heat. “Not many.” I had the strange urge to tell him about the taunts in the hallways and the worms in my bed, but I saw pity in the way he averted his eyes, and I was suddenly sure he already knew about them.

“Sit by me,” he said. “Whenever you’d like.”

My answering smile was grim. “You don’t mind worms in your food?”

He turned a brilliant crimson, and it was as good as a confirmation.

“Thank you, Theodore,” I muttered. “But I’m all right.”

The halls were filling with students, all identical to the next in their deep Artisan blue. Theodore paid them no mind at all. “I insist,” he said. “As long as you stop calling me Theodore. Just Theo will do.”

“Theo, I really—”

“Come on,” he said, and he took my hand in his, just like that, and as though he’d magicked it, some of his light trickling onto me.

That’s how it was from that moment onward: Theo leading me through runnels of apprentices, me basking in his glow. Hot drawing rooms and mad headmasters and the promise of passions big enough to consume.

Big enough to kill you.