Page 10
“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 come he 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 be liked .
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 the riffraff 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 placed The 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, cursed herself ), but she certainly seemed to aspire 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 just opened . ”
“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 him his 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. Do you 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.”
“There isn’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 want us 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.”
Table of Contents
- Page 1
- Page 2
- Page 3
- Page 4
- Page 5
- Page 6
- Page 7
- Page 8
- Page 9
- Page 10 (Reading here)
- Page 11
- Page 12
- Page 13
- Page 14
- Page 15
- Page 16
- Page 17
- Page 18
- Page 19
- Page 20
- Page 21
- Page 22
- Page 23
- Page 24
- Page 25
- Page 26
- Page 27
- Page 28
- Page 29
- Page 30
- Page 31
- Page 32
- Page 33
- Page 34
- Page 35
- Page 36
- Page 37
- Page 38
- Page 39
- Page 40
- Page 41
- Page 42
- Page 43
- Page 44
- Page 45
- Page 46
- Page 47
- Page 48
- Page 49
- Page 50
- Page 51
- Page 52
- Page 53
- Page 54