That Sunday, Theo came home from the Medieval Fair in high spirits, pink-nosed from the cold and hopped up on too much sugar (Malik’s revenge, no doubt).

He arrived just minutes after Luke and Posy, who’d spent the afternoon by the sea, and wasted no time in whipping out his phone to show them all the pictures he’d taken.

“That’s Nicholas before the first round, and that’s him after he won that round, and that’s the girl who won the second round, and that’s Alex and me with Nicholas’s horse—”

“Nicholas,” said Posy, pointing. “Theo. Alex. Horse.”

“Good job, Posy,” Theo said enthusiastically. “And this one’s a picture of the huge slice of carrot cake Malik got me, and ooh, look, this is the Black Knight. He’s the villain .”

“Black Knight,” Posy echoed.

“Alex thinks he’s swoony,” Theo told Sera and Luke, rolling his eyes with youthful disgust.

“He’s wearing a spiky black helmet and full armour,” Sera pointed out. “How does Alex know what he looks like?”

“They said that’s what makes him swoony. He could be anyone. He’s not anyone, though,” Theo added, addressing this last bit solely to Luke in the manner of one imparting vitally important information. “His real name is Greg. Sera knows him in the biblical sense.”

“Theo!”

“What? That’s what Clemmie told me.”

Luke arched an eyebrow at Sera. “In the biblical sense? Him?”

Sera shrugged. “He kept most of the costume on.”

Luke looked at Sera. Sera looked at Luke.

Theo looked at both of them. “Why are you being weird?”

“SEHHH-RAAAA!”

Matilda’s timing had never been so perfect. Sera bolted.

As soon as Sera had dealt with Matilda’s crisis (the persistent attentions of a crow that Sera had once had the audacity to leave a leftover cinnamon bun out for, which meant it now returned to the inn on an almost weekly basis, bringing sticky gummy bears and bubble-gum-flavoured lip balm and other gifts that suggested it thought Sera was thirteen years old), Matilda whisked her to the chicken run, where Jasmine was feeding the chickens, and said, “So?”

“No,” said Sera at once. “No goats.”

“I wasn’t going to ask for a goat!” Matilda said indignantly. “I want an explanation! Jasmine! Tell her we want an explanation!”

Jasmine’s eyes twinkled. “Matilda is suffering from a rather serious case of unsatisfied curiosity, my love.”

“What about?” Sera asked.

“The sexual tension, that’s what!”

“Where?” Sera asked with interest. “Has Nicholas met someone? Oh! Did you finally tell—”

“No!” Matilda said at once.

“What?” asked Jasmine.

“Nothing,” said Sera and Matilda at exactly the same time. Jasmine looked confused. Turning back to Matilda, Sera said, “Who exactly are we talking about?”

Matilda looked like she dearly wanted to take one of her wellies off and throw it at Sera. “Who. Do. You. Think?”

Oh. “Me? And Luke? No, that’s not a thing.” Sera looked from one deeply loving and deeply unconvinced face to the other, gave in, and admitted, “Fine, there may have been a moment.”

“I KNEW IT!” Matilda cried. “I mean, no, I didn’t know there was a moment , per se, but there’s positively a crackle in the air when the two of you are in the same room!”

Sera opened her mouth to object, thought about Theo looking at her and Luke just a minute ago and asking them why they were being weird, and closed her mouth again.

Matilda was still going. “Something’s changed in the last few days. Something happened. Hence the crackle .”

Jasmine shushed her. Hanging the bag of chicken feed off the end of her cane, she leaned on it with both arms and said, in her usual calming, gentle, steadying way, “Tell us about this moment.”

“It was a couple of nights ago. Nothing happened.”

“Did you want it to?” Jasmine asked.

Sera wondered if she could blame the sharp, bracing wind for the way her cheeks were going pink.

“Yes. I don’t know if he did, though. I thought he did at the time, but in hindsight, I might have been imagining something that wasn’t there, and in any case, I’m pretty sure his senses had been addled by Matilda’s apple cider. ”

“You have got to be joking.” This contribution came from Clemmie, who had materialised on top of the chicken coop and was looking down at them in disgust. “Sera, I was under the impression that you and I were sensible adults who had our priorities straight. You want your magic back. I want to not be a fox. Where, pray, does sexual tension fit in?” Before Sera could come up with a suitable reply to this, Clemmie turned to Jasmine and Matilda and said, “I can’t believe she thinks his senses were addled by cider. ”

“I don’t think she’s seen the way he looks at her,” Matilda mused.

Jasmine, ever loyal, objected. “We can’t blame her for that, dearest. He only does it when she’s not looking.”

“She doesn’t have fox ears either,” Clemmie admitted somewhat grudgingly. “She doesn’t hear the way his heartbeat stutters when he looks at her.”

“How did this turn into the three of you gossiping about me like I’m not even here?

” Sera demanded, seeking refuge in overly exaggerated grumpiness to hide the fact that her heart was doing all sorts of fluttery, flippy, thoroughly obnoxious things in her chest. (It didn’t help matters that Clemmie could probably hear that too.)

“Nobody panic,” Jasmine said suddenly, obviously not panicking in the slightest, “but I think we ought to start talking about something else. Right away.”

“Oh, no , that’s not true at all,” Matilda insisted, rising to the occasion at once.

“Pigs are actually very clean! And who can resist their tiny, snouty noses?” Apparently foreseeing that Sera would have no qualms about sharing that she could very easily resist all noses, snouty or not, Matilda went all in on the drama and added, “Look at me, Sera. Look at my ancient, fading bones. How can you deny me what could be my very last wish in this cold, cruel world?”

“Even for you that’s a bit much, don’t you think?” Sera said under her breath, trying not to laugh.

Matilda promptly began to wail into an enormous, flowery, and remarkably convenient hanky that she whipped out of the front pocket of her dungarees.

Sera, who had seen mushrooms, daisies, cinnamon buns, satsumas, birdseed, an umbrella, a whole cabbage, and at least two grasshoppers come out of that exact pocket on one occasion or another, couldn’t help thinking Mary Poppins’s bag could learn a trick or two from Matilda’s dungarees.

From somewhere behind Sera, Luke’s dry voice said, “What set her off this time?”

“I think I said hi,” said Sera.

Matilda’s noisy wails were interrupted by a short, wheezy laugh, but if Luke noticed, he didn’t let on. He jerked his head off to the side and said, “Can I interrupt?”

“Please interrupt,” said Sera, clambering over the fence of the run and following him away from the sounds of fussing chickens and fussing Matildas. “What’s up?”

He held up a wrinkled piece of paper. “I found this.” It was Sera’s list of ideas for the restoration spell, almost the entirety of which had been ruthlessly scratched out. Luke tapped something about halfway down the page. “Why’s this scratched out?”

It took Sera a second to make out the words in the darkening twilight. “Essence of sunlight? Oh, I was excited about that for roughly five minutes, but Clemmie said it wouldn’t work.”

Luke shook his head. “Clemmie’s wrong. It’s a good idea.”

Clemmie, who had no trouble hearing him from the top of the chicken coop, yelled, “Anybody with a halfway decent magical education knows essence of sunlight is too volatile for spellcasting!”

“Not if it’s been tempered with black sand,” Luke replied.

Clemmie froze. “That’s not a thing.”

“It’s definitely a thing,” said Luke, and, with what must have been heroic restraint, didn’t even add that in future, Sera might want to run her ideas past someone whose magical knowledge wasn’t almost twenty years out of date.

“Look, I’m not saying this is going to work.

I’m just saying it’s possible. There’s every chance your teapot will just spit the essence of sunlight right back out, but we won’t know until we try. ”

“We?” A tiny smile tugged at the corners of Sera’s mouth. “You were pretty adamant that you weren’t going to get involved.”

He gave her a faint answering smile. “And here I am anyway.”

Oh, fuck this.

She hugged him.

The top of her head collided with his jaw, her chin banged into his shoulder, and she ended up practically hanging off his neck, but for the few seconds it lasted, it still, somehow, felt warmer and more comforting and more right than anything had in a long, long time.

Stepping back and moving on hastily, she said, “How good are our chances? You keep saying that whatever goes into the spell has to matter to me…”

“I think this counts. Do you remember getting your magic tested?”

Sera would never forget it. On her first day at the Guild, she’d been whisked off to a restricted alcove of the library where, surrounded by dusty books and old records and strange, glittering bottles of ingredients, she’d met old, haughty Bradford Bertram-Mogg, who’d looked down his nose at her before pointing one bony finger at a granite pedestal.

The pedestal was black, polished smooth, and its surface perfectly round and perfectly flat.

Pursing his lips like she was putting him to a great deal of unnecessary trouble, Bertram-Mogg had plucked a small, round bottle off one of the shelves.

Sera had had no idea what was inside, but she could see that it gleamed so brightly that she almost couldn’t stand to look directly at it.

“That’s essence of sunlight,” Chancellor Bennet had explained, clapping his hands with childlike excitement. “We use it to find out how much magic a witch possesses.”

“Who did you say her father was?” Bertram-Mogg had asked Chancellor Bennet. “Where is he from? Why can’t his country take her?”