Page 11
About seven hours earlier, in the Guild’s towering castle in Northumberland, Luke Larsen, highly respected scholar of magical history and considerably less respected caretaker of one very determined witch, had been having a fiasco of a day. Week. Month, even.
Over the last few weeks, between endless battles over funding, tortuous bureaucracy, and far too little of the work he actually liked, Luke had had to, in short: retrieve his sister from the roof of the Guild’s greenhouse, track her down in the gigantic hedge maze, rescue the three other children she’d stranded halfway up a wall of ivy after inadvertently including them in her levitation spell, and explain to his employer that the reason her ornamental ginkgo tree was bare was because Posy had appropriated its leaves.
And those, it had to be said, were just the highlights.
While it was tempting to lay the blame at Posy’s door for her obsession with leaves, or even at Mother Nature’s for having the temerity to invent leaves, Luke was only too aware that he was the one who had brought his small, impulsive, autistic sister to stay at the Guild’s estate, a place of rules, decorum, and one too many disapproving gargoyles roaming its hallowed halls.
Which brought Luke to today, and the entirely unwelcome presence of one of the gargoyles in question.
“This,” said Bradford Bertram-Mogg, materialising beside Luke with the air of a horseman of the apocalypse and scowling up at Posy, who was nimbly pirouetting on the very edge of a balcony in her quest to reach a particular leaf on a vine, “is what comes of allowing foreigners into the Guild.”
“Not that it should make any difference, but we’re Scottish,” Luke said coldly.
“Exactly,” said Bertram-Mogg.
Of the Guild’s predominantly ancient and intolerable ruling Cabinet, Bradford Bertram-Mogg was by far the most ancient and very nearly the most intolerable, an anachronistic and malevolent old man who looked like he had one foot in the grave already.
Luke, for one, couldn’t wait for the rest of him to catch up.
“Posy, get down here,” Luke said for the third time, trying to ignore the harbinger of doom beside him.
She replied with a definitive shake of her head.
“ Yes ,” Luke insisted.
Another, crosser shake of the head. She even stamped one foot to make doubly sure he’d noticed her displeasure.
Luke wasn’t actually afraid she’d tumble off the balcony because Posy, at just nine years old, had the agility of an Olympic gymnast, the evasive talents of Houdini, and, if all else failed, a brother whose magic could keep her from falling.
This time. But what about next time? He wasn’t with her every second of every day.
He needed her to understand that heights and small children, even small witch children, were not a happy combination.
Of course, therein lay the rub. Posy didn’t, or couldn’t , understand.
She could figure out the best way in and out of a hedge maze in seconds, but she could not fathom the concept of an obstacle like personal safety.
For her, it was a simple matter of “there is a thing I want, so I will go get that thing,” and it was incomprehensible to her that there might be a reason not to.
This, however, was incomprehensible to other people.
No matter how many times Luke explained that Posy wasn’t trying to be difficult or defiant, nobody else seemed to see it that way.
Not even their own parents, whose oft-used argument was “but you had some peculiar habits as a young child too, and you grew out of them.”
“Stop calling them peculiar habits,” Luke would reply. “She’s autistic.”
“You coddle her.”
And repeat.
“What do you intend to do about this?” Bertram-Mogg inquired now, waving a hand in Posy’s direction. “And I am not referring to this precise situation, young man, but rather to the veritable cornucopia of discord that awaits us if we continue down this brambly path.”
As the Scottish son of an English father and a Danish mother, both of whom were professors of classical studies at Edinburgh University, Luke had been fluent in six languages before he was a teenager. Insufferable Toff, alas, was not one of them.
“If you have something to say, just say it. In small words, ideally, seeing as I come from a strange, foreign land a whole fifty miles away.”
The old gargoyle harrumphed. “The crux of the matter is that that child has no idea how to behave! How old is she? Eight? Nine? Does she even know how to read?”
“I don’t know. Nobody does. She hasn’t done anything to suggest she can, but I’m not going to assume—”
“She just put a leaf in her mouth!”
“She has sensory—”
“In my day, we knew how to deal with things like that,” Bertram-Mogg informed him.
Luke’s temper kicked at the iron battlements that kept it tightly confined, but as ever, the battlements won. Posy might wear her heart on her sleeve, but Luke did not, so his voice remained cold and expressionless. “Then it’s just as well your day is over.”
“Well, I never—!”
Luke ignored him. “ Now , Posy.”
Recognising that that particular tone meant she had lost the battle, Posy jumped off the balcony, blithely confident he would find a way to catch her.
(He did, but that wasn’t the point.) There was a collection of leaves clutched in one of her fists, and she tucked her free hand into his and said, “Car.”
“No. We’re not leaving yet.”
“ Car ,” Posy repeated.
“Not yet. Sorry.”
Rounding the side of the tower, they entered a round, cobbled courtyard with a stone fountain in the middle.
There were a handful of visitors’ cars parked in the courtyard, and the fountain, which was dry as bone, was topped with an old, cracked stone statue of three witches: Meg of Meldon, Michael Scot, and Mother Shipton.
The castle towered over the courtyard, complete with flying buttresses, mullioned windows, and spires.
Luke strode up the front steps, Posy in tow.
Inside, people were crisscrossing the huge entrance hall, ascending flights of stairs or passing through the tall archway ahead on their way somewhere else.
As always, all conversation was pitched politely, decorously low.
(“Like a museum,” Bradford Bertram-Mogg had once said, to which Luke’s employer, Professor Walter, had replied, “Yes, specifically those museums where they store the corpses of the deceased. I believe they’re called tombs. ”)
Luke had been eighteen years old the first time he’d come here, and all things considered, thank fucking Christ he’d been as old as that. As a child with absolutely no magical history in the family and an unremarkable amount of magical power, he wouldn’t have stood a chance.
Levitating in one’s sleep was almost always the way a witch’s magic first manifested itself.
Luke had been just shy of his seventh birthday when the startled cries of his parents had woken him from what he’d thought was a perfectly normal night’s sleep.
He’d crashed into his bed, realising only then that he must have been above it in order to crash into it, and all three of them had stared at each other in disbelief.
When it had happened a second time, and then a third, Luke’s parents had taken him to the family GP.
Hushed conversations, psychiatric referrals, and home visits from two nurses had led to a final, decidedly clandestine visit from a woman who had introduced herself as a witch from the British Guild of Sorcery.
Later, Luke had learned that there were people working in the NHS, schools, and government whose job was to spot these signs in children, notify the Guild, and smooth things over with everyone who was not in the know.
The Guild witch had been polite but aloof, as if she wasn’t thrilled about having to be there, and everything she’d said had seemed to actively discourage Luke from inflicting his unpedigreed presence on the precious darlings already taking lessons at the estate.
Upon discovering that an alternative to going to the Guild’s grand estate in Northumberland was studying magic on his own time at home, with access to as many books as he needed from the Guild’s library, and the only requirements of him being that he had to keep secrets, send in progress letters once a month, and never use his power in public, Luke had immediately said, “Yes, that. That’s what I want to do. ”
He’d never expected to grow up and spend so much time within these walls, but navigating the Guild as an adult was far less intimidating than doing it as a child, and he wouldn’t have brought Posy here if he’d been able to think of literally anywhere better.
Five minutes and two spiral staircases later, Luke and Posy crossed the third storey of the library to the nook Professor Walter had claimed as her own, where the lady herself stood beside a table strewn with old maps, documents, and books, gazing into the distance with a furrowed brow.
“There you are, old chap!” a voice boomed from the other side of the nook. “Good God, you look absolutely knackered! It’s just as well I popped by with a nice pot of tea!”
Howard Hawtrey, Cabinet Minister and scion of an old magical family. He was in his early forties, rotund, and always inexplicably jolly, like a very posh Santa. Against all odds, he was one of very few people in the upper echelons of the Guild that Luke actually liked.
Luke settled Posy in an armchair with her tablet, her fluffy headphones, and a biscuit off Howard’s tray. Howard poured tea into three cups and said, “You take yours black, don’t you?”
“As my heart,” said Luke.
Howard slapped his knee and laughed way more than the joke deserved. “I was just asking Professor Walter if she’s planning to attend Bradford Bertram-Mogg’s winter masquerade this year.”
“There’s no easy way to break this to you, Howard, but she would sooner die. She would welcome death with open arms if the alternative was to go to Bradford Bertram-Mogg’s winter masquerade.”
Table of Contents
- Page 1
- Page 2
- Page 3
- Page 4
- Page 5
- Page 6
- Page 7
- Page 8
- Page 9
- Page 10
- Page 11 (Reading here)
- 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