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It took Sera a moment to make sense of these words. With her thoughts full of death and illegal spellwork, skiing , of all things, felt like a concept from another universe altogether.

“Um, that’s very kind of him,” she said politely, and winced as she heard the lack of enthusiasm in her voice.

Sera had a complicated relationship with Albert Grey, who, in addition to being her instructor, also happened to be Francesca’s father.

When he’d first accepted her as his apprentice and introduced her to the strict but dizzyingly magical world of the Guild, she’d had a childish, na?ve hope that he’d become something of a father figure to her.

They were the two most powerful witches in the country by a mile, after all, which was an immense privilege but a lonely one too. There was no one else like them.

To anybody looking in from the outside, Albert probably did seem fond and parental, but Sera had never been able to shake the feeling that he was faking it. That, in truth, he resented her intrusion into a space he’d enjoyed ruling alone.

Fortunately, Francesca was too excited to notice Sera’s tone. “Please say you’ll come, Sera! I know you won’t want to leave Great-Auntie Jasmine alone at Christmas, so I persuaded Father to invite her too. You’ll both come, won’t you?”

Sera was touched by this gesture, but with Clemmie pacing in front of her and jabbing a paw pointedly at the clock, it was difficult to give it the response it deserved. Guiltily, she tried to rush her friend off the phone. “I’m so sorry, can we talk about this later?”

“What’s the matter?”

“I feel a bit sick. I’ll call you this evening, okay?”

“I notice they didn’t invite me to go skiing,” Clemmie remarked as soon as Sera had ended the call.

“They don’t know you exist,” Sera pointed out. “Which was what you wanted, I might add, or have you forgotten the eighteen times you’ve warned me not to tell anyone outside this house about you?”

Clemmie made a disgruntled sound. “Come on. We’ve wasted enough time.”

The garden, green and summery and overgrown, sloped quite dramatically downhill and was drenched in sunshine and the pinks, yellows, and whites of wildflowers.

At the bottom, past a tiny orchard of fruit trees, the beehive, and the little mound of grass beneath which they’d buried Jasmine’s beloved pet rooster, a low stone wall and latticed arch gave way to a narrow lane and rolling green hills.

As Clemmie circled Great-Auntie Jasmine’s silent corpse, muttering under her breath about compass points and gravewitchery, Sera knelt on the grass in the shade of the citrus trees and squeezed her great-aunt’s cold hand.

“It’s going to be okay,” she whispered. “I promise.”

Clemmie came to a halt beside Sera and sat back on her hind legs. “Ready? Repeat after me.”

Magic was a funny thing. You were either born with it or you weren’t, but how much you had and how it made itself felt was as unique to the witch wielding it as a fingerprint.

For Sera, it was a wild, joyous updraft that set her soaring into a night sky lit by thousands of tiny twinkling stars, each shining as brightly as suns.

(For Clemmie, before she’d lost the ability to use it, it had been teeth and claws, which was rather fitting considering she now quite literally had both.)

The act of spellcasting wasn’t quite as chameleonlike as magic itself, but spells could still be wrought in a dozen different ways.

Some, for instance, were cast with just a thought, while others were cast with a wiggle of one’s fingers, with the meticulous tying of tidy knots, or with a set list of ingredients.

And then there were the rare spells, the enchantments that only a handful of witches had the power to conjure: these spells had to be spoken aloud, had to be shaped and contained by the eerie, musical dialect of sorcery, or else they might go wildly wrong.

Sera had cast such spells before, but the stakes had never felt so high. Her throat felt too tight and her heart thumped so fast it almost made her dizzy, but she said the words without faltering.

The moment Sera finished speaking the incantation, her magic rose to answer her. Whole galaxies of stars exploded behind her closed eyelids, and she felt better at once: her heart took wing, her grief lost its sharp edge, and her fingertips tingled with joy.

This. This. This was why she loved magic so much.

She opened her eyes.

Her hands were wreathed in threads of warm, soft light, each as delicate as if it were made out of the easily dissolved substance of dreams. The spell had taken shape and was ready to cast.

Sera gathered the threads, placed her hands over Jasmine’s heart, and pushed . The shining strands spun through her fingers like she was Rumpelstiltskin at a loom.

Light flooded from Sera’s fingers to Jasmine’s heart, suffusing cold skin with warmth and magic.

Beat, Sera silently ordered the silent heart beneath her hands. Beat.

The glorious, dizzying joy gave way to needles of pain. It was so unfamiliar and disconcerting that Sera felt a moment’s doubt. The spell was pulling more power from her than she’d ever had to give before.

It wasn’t too late to undo it, to break the connection and pull the magic back, but she couldn’t do that. She had to do this for Jasmine.

The world tilted. She pressed one hand into the grass to keep herself upright, not noticing as she did so that a little bit of the spell burrowed into the earth.

Then, miraculously, Jasmine’s stiff limbs softened. Her greying skin flushed with new colour, a healthy, rosy shade of pink setting into the warm brown of her cheeks. Her heart gave a vigorous thump.

Her eyes opened and settled at once on Sera. She offered the gentlest of reproofs. “But, my love, how could you let me fall asleep out here? The sun is the worst possible thing for the skin!”

Sera’s shoulders dropped in exhaustion. A happy, overwhelmed sob caught in her throat, but she choked it back, scrubbed a hand across her wet eyes, and offered a wobbly smile.

“You weren’t asleep,” she confessed, reaching for Jasmine’s fallen cane. “You were dead, so Clemmie and I brought you back.”

Jasmine, who never liked to make a fuss and held good sense in great regard, accepted this revelation calmly. “That was very clever of you, dearest,” she said. “You’re much too young to fend for yourself, and your parents are dreadful cooks.”

“Dreadful parents too,” Sera pointed out. Jasmine tsked.

With her cane in one hand and Sera’s arm in the other, Jasmine clambered slowly back to her feet.

She was a delicate, bony woman who looked like a strong breeze would knock her over (and indeed, the strong breezes of Lancashire had been known to do so), but even after her untimely demise, she was impeccably put together.

Her hair, luxuriantly black through the religious application of henna, was still in its neat bun; her berry lipstick had not budged; her long, prim, lace-edged nightdress remained miraculously unwrinkled; and neither of her specially made boots had slipped off her feet in all the hubbub.

Sera put her arms around her great-aunt, hugging her fiercely. “Don’t ever do that to me again.”

“Oh, pet,” Jasmine said tenderly.

At that precise moment, there was a small commotion from the bottom of the garden. The bees in the hive, who were usually placid and gentle, were abuzz, enormously offended by something.

That something turned out to be the disturbed lump of grass near the hive, from whence there came a shrill and cheerful disembodied crowing that made Clemmie rear back in outrage.

The crowing was followed swiftly by the appearance of an energetic jumble of bones that clattered straight over to Jasmine.

“Bok,” said the skeleton, which, on second glance, bore a striking resemblance to a chicken.

Sera’s mouth fell open. Jasmine let out a cry of unalloyed joy. “Roo-Roo!”

“Marvellous work,” Clemmie said to Sera. “I was just thinking this morning that what we really needed in our lives was not a new fireplace or a nice car but, in fact, a resurrected fucking rooster.”