Rescue came in the form of Posy, who ran over to get Luke’s attention. “Chickens!” she said excitedly, pointing, and insisted on dragging him over to the coop to show him the chickens in question.

Sera checked her phone. She had an email updating her about an online order, a slew of new photos of Malik’s baby, Evie, and a new text from Theo. Still at Alex’s.

Sera was not a parent and hadn’t had the faintest idea what to do with a child who had crossed the breadth of the country in the dead of night without so much as a courtesy text, however noble his motives.

So, after much discussion with Jasmine, she’d gone with what had seemed to her to be the most straightforward option and had told Theo that until she could trust him to make sensible decisions, the only places he was allowed to go without supervision were school and Alex’s house.

And she expected regular status updates too. Hence the text.

She texted him back. Lunch?

Alex’s grandma says I can eat here, is that ok?

Yep. Remember your manners.

On cue, Theo sent her the emoji of the smiling haloed face. Sera grinned.

She looked up to see that Luke was returning from the bottom of the garden.

He jerked his head in the direction of Matilda’s vegetable patch.

“There’s a spell keeping those pumpkins and cabbages alive, isn’t there?

Is this the right season for cabbages? Is this even the right climate for artichokes? ”

She shrugged. “If you ever see the way Matilda’s face crumples when one of those stupid plants dies, you’ll understand why I do my best to keep them alive.”

He gave her a long, curious look. “I also noticed there are heat spells in all the rooms.”

“You sound surprised.”

“From the way people talked about it, I always assumed the resurrection spell left you with no magic at all.”

“No, not quite.”

“If there’s something there, why hasn’t the rest of it come back? Magic is supposed to replenish itself.”

“I think it tries.”

“So why doesn’t it work?”

“Exit wounds,” said Sera, thinking of the holes she’d punched through the night sky, those wounds that still bled stardust. “I went too far.”

Luke’s brows twitched together in confusion, but something in her face made him let it go. He nodded at the kitchen door. “What’s the spell clinging to all the doorways?”

“That’s for hygge,” Sera explained.

“Excuse me?”

“Hygge. Cosiness and contentment.”

“My mother’s Danish, Sera, I know what hygge is. What I don’t know is what a spell has to do with it.”

Delighted to discover she possessed some magical knowledge that Luke didn’t, Sera very nearly clapped her hands with glee. “Why, Luke, you disappoint me. With all the reading you do for a living, you’re telling me Eighty Spells for a Suitably Toasty Winter hasn’t yet made the cut?”

He didn’t rise to the bait. “How have you read it? It was out of print until six years ago.”

“Theo. Thanks to the agreement the Wise Women of Reykjavík made with the Guild when I brought him here, Theo can request books from the Guild’s library. I read them too.”

Luke looked amused. “I bet you do.”

She looked up at the doorway, her eyes tracing the lines and knots of the invisible spell that clung to the corners. “It’s supposed to provoke a feeling of warmth and well-being.”

“Does it work?”

“It had better,” said Sera. “God knows I could do with it.”

A familiar sadness swept over her. It was the sort of sadness that made her want to double over laughing until tears rolled down her face because, really, when you thought about it, it was absolutely ludicrous that hygge and a bit of warmth and cabbages, fucking cabbages , were the sum total of her magical power.

She was Sera Swan, and those ridiculously ordinary, outrageously unexciting cabbages , remarkable only because they were still there, were all she was capable of.

And if she couldn’t find a way to translate that spell, it was just about all she would ever be capable of.

Before she could succumb to a full, vigorous emotional breakdown, there was a rustle of grass nearby, and Clemmie slinked around the side of the house.

“Sera, your rooster has spent the last hour following me around,” she announced, completely unconcerned with Luke’s presence.

“I tolerated that with saintly patience. Then he tried to demand a cuddle from me, so I decapitated him. You’ll have to reassemble him.

He’s over there, running around like a headless chicken.

Actually,” she added reflectively, “I suppose he is a headless chicken.”

“Stop decapitating the resurrected rooster,” Sera said crossly. “It’s impolite.”

“Well, you made me promise not to eat the other chickens anymore, so this seems like a happy compromise.”

Sera went around the side of the house, where Roo-Roo’s headless skeleton was dashing this way and that, bumping into the oak tree every so often. His head lay close by, squawking with such merriment that Sera suspected he was enjoying himself enormously.

She reattached his head, but before she could set him down again, he curled up decisively into a bundle of bones in her arms. Resigned, she took him back with her.

If Clemmie had hoped the arrival of a talking fox would terrify the living daylights out of Luke, she had picked the wrong target.

Luke, entirely unsurprisingly, just sighed. “A fox. That’s what she meant.”

“Who? What does that mean?” Clemmie demanded.

Sera interrupted. “Aren’t you supposed to be in hiding? Weren’t you insisting just yesterday that we shouldn’t be—”

“The way I see it, if the Chancellor of the Guild is willing to overlook my presence, everyone else can stuff it,” said Clemmie smugly. “Including What’s-his-name over here, who is very obviously a Guild spy on a mission to ferret all our secrets out.”

Sera picked up her tea and tried in vain to seek comfort from it. “He’s not a spy. I don’t think.”

“Forgive me if I’m not reassured,” Clemmie growled.

Luke had turned away to check on Posy, but now he met Clemmie’s glower with a narrow, assessing stare of his own.

“You know, Howard Hawtrey once told me a ridiculous story about a witch, a curse, and Albert Grey. I thought he was fucking with me. I couldn’t bring myself to believe anybody would do something so daft. And yet…”

Clemmie’s fur bristled so hard, she looked like a very angry basketball. “I may be a fugitive and a laughingstock now, but you mark my words, when I recover my human form and become Chancellor of the Guild, everyone will be sorry they—”

“When you become what?” Luke demanded. He looked at Sera. “Is she joking?”

“We should be so lucky,” said Sera.

“Under what circumstances, exactly, do you imagine any of the Cabinet Ministers will vote for you?” Luke asked Clemmie.

“I haven’t thought that far ahead,” said Clemmie haughtily. “Now that you mention it, though, I think my tragic curse would be a good place to start. Sympathy votes and all.”

“Sympathy?” Luke’s voice got more Scottish in his disbelief. “Weren’t you the one doing the cursing?”

Taking great comfort from the fact that a shoe would be more likely to be elected Chancellor than Clemmie, Sera left her to her happy daydreams and said to Luke, “Look, I know she’s obnoxious, but she is on the lam, as she likes to put it, so if you could maybe not mention to anyone that you’ve seen her… ?”

“I can’t begin to express how uninterested I am in mentioning anything to anyone,” said Luke.

“A spy would say that,” said Clemmie.

“They probably would,” Luke agreed.

Clemmie glowered at him. “Fine. Let’s say, hypothetically , that you’re not a spy. What are you?”

“A historian,” said Luke.

“What sort of historian?” Clemmie persisted. “Magical relics? Arcane languages? Document recovery? Botanical study? History of magical peoples?”

“All of the above,” said Luke. “I work for a professor of magical history who doesn’t believe in narrowing down her field of study.”

“What about—” Clemmie started.

Sera shushed her. “Which professor of magical history?”

“Verity Walter.”

Sera’s cup slipped out of her hands. It hit the grass, spilling the dregs of her tea.

Even Clemmie faltered. “Did he just say Verity Walter? He works for Verity Walter?”

Luke gave her a wry look. “So you do know her.”

“What does that mean?” Clemmie demanded.

Luke sighed. Again. “Before I left the castle, Verity mentioned a fox.”

“She did?” Excitement had Sera practically bouncing on the balls of her feet. “Was she the one who helped Clemmie get into the restricted archives?”

“Was she what?” Luke demanded. “She let Clemmie into the restricted archives?”

“To get The Ninth Compendium .”

“WHAT?”

Sera blinked. “I’m confused.”

“You know who probably isn’t?” Clemmie replied. “Verity Walter, that’s who. Can’t somebody get her on the bloody phone? Like, I don’t know, the man who supposedly works for her?”

“You’d think, wouldn’t you?” said Luke. “Unfortunately, she’s not answering my calls.”

Clemmie regarded him speculatively. “Well, if we can’t get hold of her, you have the potential to be an adequate substitute.”

“No,” said Luke.

“You thought he was a spy a minute ago,” Sera reminded Clemmie.

“That was before I found out he’s a sodding historian who works for Verity Walter, and that one of the things he’s studied is sodding languages , and that he might therefore be one of the few people who knows how to read that sodding spell!”

Movement at the other end of the garden caught Sera’s eye.

It was Posy, skipping along the edge of a flower bed.

For just a few seconds, though, in the sharp morning sunlight, she didn’t look like Posy at all.

She looked like another little girl, the first of the ghosts, the youngest of all the lost Seras.

The moment passed, as those moments always did, and it was just Posy again. And Clemmie was still talking. “Sera, what if your spell didn’t just bring him here because he needed the inn? What if, just this once, your spell also brought you something you needed?”

This hadn’t occurred to Sera, and there was a sudden, embarrassing lump in her throat at the possibility that magic had not abandoned her after all.

Wearing the expression of a man who wished he’d driven his car in literally any direction but this one, Luke said, in a steely, implacable tone, “Whatever you’re thinking, forget about it.

I don’t think I can possibly overstate just how uninterested I am in getting involved in whatever goings-on are going on. ”

“What if all you had to do was translate a spell?” Sera asked. “A spell to give me my magic back?”

He stared at her, into her, seeing far more than she wanted him to. She couldn’t look away. She felt like all the echoes of all those different Seras were watching, holding their breath, waiting to see if maybe this time, unlike every other time, she wouldn’t fail them.

“Show me,” Luke said, resigned.

“Really?”

He gave her a look. She meekly handed her phone over.

Luke put his glasses on and examined the photographs on her phone, his expression, maddeningly, giving away absolutely nothing. He typed something into her Notes app.

“There.” He returned her phone to her. “That’s what you’ll need to cast the spell. Good luck.”

Sera blinked. “You’re done? Already? Just like that?”

“I know the language.” Luke shrugged.

“I guess that’s—well, I mean—I suppose that makes sense—” Sera was deeply distressed to discover she wanted to hug the fuck out of him.

She prevented this calamity by tucking her hands under her armpits, where they were instantly swallowed by the fabric of her oversized sweater. “Thank you—I’m really—”

This hopeless floundering was too much for Clemmie. “WHAT DOES IT FUCKING SAY, SERA?”

Slightly wobbly of knee, Sera sat down on the edge of the herb bed again, and Clemmie peered over her shoulder. There were the usual few lines of advice, like the suggestion of the use of a glass teapot and so on, and then the actual ingredients:

A Strand of Sunset

A Phoenix Feather

A Thorny Heart

Sera looked at Clemmie. Clemmie looked at Sera. They both looked at Luke.

“Like I said,” said Luke, “good luck.”

“I’m going to need something stronger than tea,” said Sera.