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Luke had absolutely no idea how it had happened, but somehow, the following morning, he found himself driving Sera, Nicholas, and Posy to Blackpool to the home of an ornithologist.

“How did you get me to agree to this?” Luke, who was not by any means accustomed to feeling flabbergasted, required answers.

“I’m convinced that one minute I was drinking my tea and the next I was in the car.

You could put me in front of a jury of my peers and I still wouldn’t be able to explain how it happened. ”

“I’m surprised too, to be honest,” Sera confided from the passenger seat.

“I would have bet good money that you’d never have agreed to it.

I wouldn’t have asked you at all, but my car wouldn’t start, and Matilda and Jasmine have bingo on Monday mornings, and Nicholas’s car is still at the Fair, so you were the only one left.

Maybe I should have waited until Matilda got home, but you know what it’s like when you get an idea stuck in your head. You just want to go do it.”

“I do know,” Luke agreed. “Right now, for example, the idea stuck in my head is leaving you in Blackpool to make your own way home.”

Sera chortled. “You could have said no.”

“If I could have said no, I would have,” Luke said with utter certainty. “Nothing you just said adequately explains why I’m here.”

“You did tell me that Posy would love the penny arcades along the pier.”

It was all coming back to him now. He had told her that. It explained quite a bit, but still. “And Nicholas is with us because…?”

“My spirits were low,” Nicholas offered from the back, where he’d been playing Rock Paper Scissors with Posy.

Inexplicably, he was in his historically inaccurate Fair armour again.

“I’m not allowed to go back to work until Wednesday, but Wednesday and Thursday are my days off, so I won’t actually be able to go back to work until Friday.

Why do I have days off anyway? What sort of knight takes days off? The shame of it is nigh intolerable.”

Luke wondered what he’d done to deserve this. “Who’s the ornithologist?”

“Retired ornithologist. She used to be one of Jasmine and Matilda’s bingo friends before she moved to Blackpool to live with her son.

Jasmine says she has an impressive collection of feathers from birds from all over the world.

” Sera shot a quick look over her shoulder into the back seat before adding, meaningfully, “Some of those feathers will be red .”

Luke sighed. He really ought not to say anything, but it was too much to ask that he not correct an egregious error.

He glanced in the rearview mirror, made sure Nicholas was entirely occupied with Rock Paper Scissors, and said, “I think you may be overlooking one of the things that sets Adaptable spells apart.”

He didn’t think he’d ever been glared at with such ferocity.

He weighed his survival instincts against his academic integrity before saying the rest. “A red feather from someone you’ve never even met before is not going to do the trick.

The spell’s adaptable . As in, it adapts to the person casting it.

Whatever you put into it has to have some kind of meaning to you . ”

“This has meaning,” she said at once. He raised an eyebrow. She looked away, glared out the window, and said, “Okay, it’s a stretch, but I’d kick myself if I didn’t try everything. Just in case.”

He let it go.

They parted ways in Blackpool, with Sera heading into town to find the ornithologist while Luke, Posy, and Nicholas walked to the pier to the penny arcades.

A cold, briny wind blew in from the water and whipped Posy’s hair around her, making her giggle.

“Silly hair,” she said to Luke, who grinned.

Maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing he’d let Sera rope him into this.

He’d never have brought Posy here on a weekend, what with all the people everywhere, but, it being a Monday morning during school hours, there was hardly anybody around, and besides, the sea air was rather nice.

If only they’d come here just for the sea air, but alas, as the horrifying musical jingle getting ever closer reminded him, they hadn’t.

He steeled himself. The flashing lights and obnoxiously loud music in arcades were his idea of sensory hell, and that was before you got into the finer, nightmarish detail of the relentless clatter of coins dropping into machines filled with hideous toys and key chains that hardly anybody ever actually won, but Posy, for reasons he’d never be able to understand, loved it.

The lights, the sounds, the act of dropping coins into the machines to make things happen, all of it.

For all the ways Luke and Posy were alike, from their ability to hyperfocus on something they loved for hours to their loathing of crowded places to their uncompromising refusal to wear anything made out of scratchy wool, arcades were one of just as many things that they absolutely did not see eye to eye on.

“A DANCE MACHINE!” Nicholas yelled, careening past Luke and Posy, armour clanking.

Resigned, Luke got Posy a bucket of pennies, watched her rush merrily around the room, and wished he’d remembered to bring along a few dozen ibuprofen.

When Sera found them an hour later, Nicholas was a bit woozy (doing a merry jig on a dance machine for an hour while wearing armour and possibly recovering from a concussion was, apparently, not the wisest course of action), Posy had sped through a tenner’s worth of pennies and won herself a bag of sweets that was already almost empty, and Luke…

Well, Luke had just been to all nine circles of hell and lived to tell the tale, so there was that.

“If it helps,” Sera said, sounding both sympathetic and amused, “I have a gloriously red cardinal feather.”

“It doesn’t help,” Luke assured her.

“An early lunch, then? There’s a pub on the way home that does the best waffles with fried chicken.”

That, Luke admitted, probably would help.

It did. After a cosy lunch at the White Stag, they piled back in the car, and Posy and Nicholas were fast asleep by the time they returned to the inn. Luke moved Posy inside to the sofa, tucked a blanket around her, and picked up Magic, Ethics, and Law , leaving Sera to rouse Nicholas.

Two chapters and a page of notes later, some time after Jasmine and Matilda returned, Sera came into the room to throw more wood on the fire and recast her heat spells.

Luke, who’d spent half his life working in a library where people came and went at all hours, barely noticed, but then, on her way out, Sera’s footsteps stopped in the doorway.

Maybe it was the hesitation in the sound that got his attention. He looked up.

Her jaw was set. “You were right, by the way. The red feather didn’t work.”

There was, surprisingly, no satisfaction in being right about that. “I wish I’d been wrong.”

“Thanks.”

He hesitated, then said, “You’ll find what you need sooner or later.”

“Thanks,” she said again. Light crept back into her eyes, gilding the dark brown with gold, and he had the stray, almost absent thought that her eyes really were lovely.

She left the room. He went back to work.

Over the next few days, between keeping an eye on Posy, helping her draw pictures of chickens and foxes, learning to navigate his way around the maze of a house, and getting through the boxes of reference materials Verity had sent over, Luke kept himself busy.

If he were a different sort of person, perhaps he might have been able to settle into this rhythm.

There was a part of him that wanted to, that wanted to believe it was possible for somebody’s life to be nothing but this: the work he loved, his sister tearing around a wild, overgrown garden in bare feet with a smudge of jam on her chin, hot cups of strong tea and scones that crumbled in his mouth, and fairy-tale evenings by the fire with a book.

But that, there, was the problem. Fairy-tale.

Reality was traffic and steeples and old bookshops in Edinburgh.

Reality was tedious meetings with Guild bureaucrats over whether the acquisition of a priceless book was really worth the funding.

Reality was the question mark over Posy’s future, and his own, and the cold, secret fear that came late at night and made him wonder if maybe it wasn’t normal , really, to have nobody in your life you could say all of that to.

This place, this inn, which was every bit as batty as its ridiculous name promised, was not reality as Luke knew it. This was a place of fables and stories and peculiar magic, and such a place, he was certain, had no place in the real world.

So Luke did not settle. He waited, calmly, icily, resigned , for the fairy tale to end.

Funnily enough, the first disruption to the rhythm of those early days did nothing to dispel Luke’s certainty that the Batty Hole Inn was an incomprehensible departure from reality, good sense, and all things regular.

He woke, blinking, groggy, to the sound of something going on outside. Posy was fast asleep in the other twin bed, having been awake and remarkably chirpy from the hours of two to six in the morning, but it sounded like everybody else was up and about.

Rubbing the sleep out of his eyes and swapping his sweatpants for jeans, Luke checked the time on his phone. Half past nine, which was frankly too early for mayhem at even the best of times.

He descended two flights of creaky stairs, passed through the long hallway, and crossed the kitchen to the open back door, by which point the indistinct sounds had become shrieks and hollers of “Catch it!” and “Not that way! That way!”