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Halfway through their third week at the inn, Luke and Posy drove back to Edinburgh to visit their parents, which was, frankly, a complete waste of time.

He got nowhere with getting them to agree to an actual, permanent plan for Posy (“Let’s see where things stand once you’ve found somewhere for both of you in the city,” said their mother, and, when Luke pointed out that seeing where things stood was not a plan, she said, “Well, I don’t know what you want us to say, Luke!

As long as she’s still levitating herself into the air willy-nilly, we’re stuck, aren’t we?

”), and left when Posy’s repeated exclamations of “Sera’s house!

” grew more and more distressed the longer she spent away from Batty Hole.

It was this, more than anything, more than their parents’ objections and the nightmarish rental market in Edinburgh, that had kept Luke at the inn all this time. That had turned a week into two, then three, then more. Quite simply, Posy wanted to be there.

Luke couldn’t think of a single other place that Posy had actually wanted to be. (He didn’t count the time she’d refused to get off the carousel at the fairground.)

It was difficult not to conclude that everyone who’d ever been responsible for Posy had failed her.

Between their parents, her old school, and the Guild, Posy, like Luke before her, hadn’t been able to take so much as a step without someone saying, “Don’t touch that, Posy,” or “Stop doing that, Posy,” or “That’s not how one behaves, Posy.

” It wasn’t a coincidence that Posy, who used to retreat into herself and put her headphones on for hours a day, almost never did anymore.

The inn was far from perfect. The soft rugs and crackling fireplaces and sugary baked goods couldn’t completely disguise the fact that the house was falling apart, for one thing, and the apple blossom tea that rained in Posy’s bedroom every Sunday was decidedly irksome.

It was only ever quiet in the wee hours of the night (and then it was almost too quiet), the undead rooster was constantly underfoot (and had taken to sleeping at the foot of Luke’s bed every now and then, which was by no means a comfortable experience), and the (living) inhabitants of the inn were categorically and unapologetically weird as hell.

But Posy was happy here.

And when Luke stopped to think about it, why wouldn’t she be?

Where else did Posy get an endless supply of leaves of just the right shape, fresh bread with homemade butter, carrots and cabbages right out of the ground, cinnamon buns aplenty, and warm scones slathered in clotted cream?

At the inn, Posy had lessons with Matilda, and while it was certainly an unorthodox sort of education, involving about eighty percent more mushrooms and sixty percent less arithmetic than a typical school, both Posy and Matilda seemed to be enjoying themselves thoroughly.

At the inn, when Posy jumped on the sofa, she was firmly but gently asked not to, and then the following day, there was a trampoline in the garden.

(“Theo’s been asking for one for ages,” Sera said, which, judging by the surprised look on Theo’s face, was news to him.) At the inn, Posy was obliged to brush her teeth, even when she made a fuss about it, but she was also given eighteen different kinds of toothbrushes to try until she found one that she liked.

(“It’s no trouble at all,” Jasmine insisted.) At the inn, Posy was praised and appreciated for putting things in their proper places and never, ever shouted at for putting them in what might, perhaps, not actually be their proper places.

And above all, at the inn, Posy had Theo.

Posy had adored Theo since the day he’d played the dragon game with her.

She was willing to share her beloved trampoline with both Theo and Alex, and she had a definite soft spot for Sera, who had been the provider of chocolate cake on that first bewildering night, but there was absolutely no doubt that it was Theo who had replaced Luke as her favourite person in the whole world.

When he came home late from school for one reason or another, Posy would stand at the back gate and say “Theo?” with the air of a tragic waif abandoned on wintry Dickensian streets.

It was the purest love Luke had ever seen.

“Don’t go yet,” Theo would say every week, and every week, Luke would say, as gently as he could, “We’re not going yet, but we can’t stay.”

“Why not?”

“This isn’t our home,” Luke would reply.

“What if it could be?” Matilda would chime in.

Ah, Matilda. She gave Luke not one moment’s peace. He had no idea how she’d done it, but in the space of just a few weeks, Matilda had managed to, well, manage him.

Luke’s usual weapon of choice was an arctic politeness that expressed implacable, unbudging refusal, but Matilda had discovered his fatal weakness: he couldn’t bring himself to use that arctic politeness on someone as sweet and gentle and fundamentally kind as Jasmine.

And so, on the occasions Matilda failed, she swiftly and shamelessly deployed Jasmine, who, with an apologetic smile and complete sincerity, would say, “It’s impossible to get Sera to do anything, you know, even if it’s for her own good, so I think Matilda’s decided she stands a better chance with you,” and Luke would find it very difficult to argue with her.

One time, torn between amusement and exasperation, Luke said, “You two are a lot more dangerous than anyone realises, aren’t you?”

Preening like he’d just given her a compliment, Matilda smiled at Jasmine. “We do make quite the team, don’t we?”

Jasmine blushed a deep, charming crimson and, slightly flustered, retreated to her worktable to mend a pair of curtains.

When she had left the room, Matilda, gazing down the hallway in the direction Jasmine had gone, said, “I should tell her how I feel, shouldn’t I? Sera says I need to give her time, but really, at our age, how much time do we have?”

“Can’t be much,” Luke agreed, which was just the sort of clipped, ruthlessly direct reply that usually put people off telling him anything more about their private lives.

It didn’t work on Matilda. “Sera won’t permit anybody to hurt Jasmine.”

“I don’t doubt that.”

“Wonderful, isn’t she?”

“Jasmine? Absolutely.”

“That goes without saying, but we both know it wasn’t Jasmine I was referring to.”

Luke gave her a hard, icy look.

Her twinkling, mischievous eyes softened. “You think I ought to mind my own beeswax, but how can I? Someone has to look out for you.”

He rejected that immediately. “I’m not your problem, Matilda.”

“I’m making you my problem, dearest. You and I are more alike than you think, you know.

Nobody ever looked out for me either. This is the first place I’ve ever felt sheltered.

This is the first place I’ve ever had space to be exactly what I am.

It could be that for you, too, but I suspect you’re determined not to let it.

I , however,” she went on, “am much harder to keep at a distance, so I will stick my nose in, and I will interfere, and I will look out for you.”

Luke didn’t say anything. He couldn’t.

After that , it seemed a little churlish to object to her utter certainty that if he would simply let her make all his decisions for him, he would soon ascend to a realm of joy no human being had ever had the privilege of experiencing before.

November sped by, the colours deepening into the warm, lazy, saturated tones that marked the end of autumn.

The rolling hills yellowed into soft olive shades, and in the woods at the top of the hill, dark and spiky evergreens mingled with the toasted golds, burnt oranges, russets, and deep poppy reds of the oaks, birches, and poplars.

In the garden, hazy golden sunlight dappled the wild grass.

Late-blooming wildflowers added pops of white, lilac, and scarlet.

Clemmie, with her orange and red fur, got even better at vanishing when it suited her.

As for Sera’s glass teapot and restoration spell, Luke was doing his very best not to take any interest in it, but it was impossible not to notice that nothing had changed since the artichoke.

There’d been no discovery of a phoenix feather and no epiphany about a strand of sunset, and anybody with eyes could see that as time went on, Sera, who had been so eager and so full of ideas when Luke had first translated the spell, was losing heart.

“We’re getting nowhere,” Clemmie groused, kicking petulantly at a handful of pebbles on the stone patio. The weather had turned, bringing bitter December winds to the wild garden. “I’m going to be stuck like this forever.”

Luke, who had had the temerity to venture outside to make sure the kids were still alive and accounted for (yes and yes), and had been immediately accosted with this information, was unimpressed. “Sorry, I forgot this was all about you.”

“ I’m the one without opposable thumbs.”

“If you mention opposable thumbs one more time—”

“It’s not my fault nothing we’ve tried has worked!”

Sera, who was sitting in the old, battered rocking chair that lived outside next to the herb beds, knees close to her chest, her expression far away, said nothing. Luke wasn’t even sure she’d heard them.

You’ve gone away, my love. It was what Jasmine would say, quietly, whenever she happened to see that expression on Sera’s face. Luke didn’t know where away was, but he couldn’t help thinking Jasmine had been saying it a lot lately.

Sera stood abruptly. “I have to go recast the heat spells.”

Before he could stop himself, Luke said, “I’ll do it.”

“It’s fine, it’s my job.”

Exactly. So why was he saying it again? “I’ll do it.”

“Oh. Okay.” She blinked at him, coming back from wherever she had gone. “Thank you.”

So Luke cast the heat spells (half of which had to be worked with an undead rooster on his shoulder), put the kettle on, and went back to his books.

Like it was a normal part of his day.

In fact, a lot of things had started to feel normal. He’d even started to look forward to some of them.

Like the evenings. Firelight, hot tea, buttery toast, and a cranky innkeeper.

Luke and Sera were, inevitably, the last ones awake each night, the last to leave the living room, and Luke couldn’t help but notice that he was going up later and later.

He wasn’t even sure why. Sometimes the TV was on in the background, and sometimes they talked about something that had happened that day or about the kids or about a random obscure fact from magical history, but mostly, they just did their own thing on opposite ends of the sofa, not even touching, her feet just inches from his leg, his forearm propped very nearly on her ankle.

And yet, for some reason, it felt like that was exactly where they were supposed to be. Like this was a thing that had, somehow, become important. Like his lonely and her lonely fit perfectly into the empty spaces at the other’s side, saying nothing, asking nothing, just keeping each other company.

The incomprehensible, it turned out, was becoming comprehensible.

Whether it was Sera, who’d forgotten how to fly and longed for the sky, or Jasmine, who hadn’t been loved and now loved everybody else twice as hard, or Nicholas, who had walked away from a life of luxury in Mayfair because he couldn’t bear to be a part of a family that had built its wealth on the blood and bones of others, these people were becoming clearer and realer, all of them.

Their fairy-tale peculiarities side by side with the quiet, ordinary things they dreamed of.

Their unwavering hope for the future hand in hand with the desolation of their pasts.

That , Luke could understand. History was how he made sense of the world, after all, and what was history if not a collection of stories to make the incomprehensible comprehensible?

The downside of this understanding, of course, was the discovery that he was the odd one out.

This was a place stitched together by resistance, by acts of defiance by people who could not or would not go gently down the path the world had decided was inevitable, but Luke had never resisted.

He had never defied. If resistance had an opposite, surely that opposite was resignation, and if there was one thing Luke had always done very well, it was resigning himself to the inevitable.

He didn’t belong here, any more than he’d ever belonged anywhere else, but for the first time in thirty-four years, oh, how he wished he did.