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Sera walked into the living room and did her usual double take at the sight of Clemmie on the sofa, watching TV, stretched out and taking up as much room as humanly possible.

Humanly being the key word there. It had been four days since Sera had broken Clemmie’s curse, but the sight of her still took everyone by surprise.

Upon regaining her human body, Clemmie had moved into Matilda’s old room and had refused to come out until she was bathed, was appropriately clothed, and had stopped walking on all fours out of habit.

This had involved Sera having to borrow clothes from the Medieval Fair until Professor Walter, roped into coming to the rescue by Luke, could sneak them the paperwork Clemmie needed to reactivate her old bank account.

Once that had been sorted out, Clemmie had sallied forth from her room with the air of a corseted conquering hero.

Now, the corseted conquering hero in question twisted around on the sofa to watch Sera check that Theo had finished his homework.

“He’s a witch ,” Clemmie pointed out, as if none of them had known this already. “What does he need to know grammar for?”

Theo laughed. Sera didn’t. “If I wanted your advice, I’d ask for it.”

“Well, if you insist on sending him to that woefully conventional school,” Clemmie went on, “I ought to at least give him a proper magical education as well. Posy too.”

Now Sera laughed. “Clemmie, I would entrust them to literally anyone but you.”

“There’s no need to act like I’m a career criminal. My unlawful activities have been limited to a single curse and one act of thievery.”

“Didn’t you also set fire to Albert Grey’s study when you broke into his house?” Theo asked with a grin.

“A single curse, one act of thievery, and an entirely justified incident involving arson,” Clemmie amended. “It doesn’t sound so bad when you put it like that, does it?”

Having established that he had indeed finished his homework, Sera packed Theo off to Alex’s house before Clemmie could put any ideas in his head.

Luke came in, phone in hand, jaw set. “It’s for you.”

Sera took the phone from him, puzzled, and found a pair of unlikely faces looking back at her from the screen.

“Professor Walter,” she said, blinking, “…and Francesca.” It had only been a few days since she’d talked to Francesca, to let her know the restoration spell had worked, so she hadn’t been expecting to speak to her again this soon.

“It’s time,” Verity said without so much as a hello.

“Father’s in Nairobi at the Congress of International Witches,” Francesca explained. Her face was a little paler than usual, but her mouth was set. “He’ll be away for another three days. Professor Walter and I think this is the best opportunity we have to…” Her voice faltered.

“To oust Albert from the Cabinet and eliminate his influence over the other Ministers,” Verity finished.

Across the room, Clemmie sat bolt upright.

“It won’t stop him being Albert , of course,” Verity went on in her gruff voice, chewing on the end of a pipe.

“On the other hand, nothing will. This, at least, will give the Chancellor and the Cabinet a chance to oversee the Guild without his interference. As you know, as long as he’s in the Cabinet, with more than half the Ministers too afraid to disagree with him and a veto to boot, he will always get his way. ”

“Aha,” Clemmie said in a smug undertone. “And so it begins. They need you.”

“We need you,” Francesca said quietly at almost exactly the same time. “He can’t be voted out of the Cabinet so long as that binding magical contract he made them sign is in place. You’re the only one with the power to break it.”

“If you’re agreeable, we’d like you to come up tomorrow, meet with the Cabinet, and break the contract,” Verity added.

Francesca tugged on the perfectly ironed cuffs of her blazer, obviously struggling with plotting against her father behind his back, but her eyes were earnest when she looked up. “Whatever you decide, Sera, you should know you’re no longer in exile.”

Sera hadn’t said a word so far, but now she said, “And Luke?”

“Luke’s exile has been rescinded as well,” Verity said at once. “I already discussed that with the Chancellor.”

Clemmie cleared her throat pointedly.

“What about Clemmie?” Sera asked.

Francesca opened her mouth to say something, but Verity got there first. “To be perfectly frank, Sera, the answer’s yes to whatever it is you want. Just get here. Do you want to bring Clementine with you? Fine. Do you want to bring the pope? That’s fine too. We’re the ones who need you .”

This was a little overwhelming. “I think I’ll manage without the pope” was all Sera felt able to say.

She looked at Luke over the top of the phone. His face was entirely expressionless, a far cry from the man she’d woken next to this morning, his blond hair falling boyishly over his forehead, his face open in sleep, his ( not tin) heart beating against her.

“Hang on a second,” she said to the screen. She muted the call, put the phone down, and took a step closer to Luke. “You don’t like this.”

He didn’t deny it. “Not much, no.”

“You were the one who said Albert needed an equal to keep him in check. Isn’t this what you wanted?”

Luke sighed. “He won’t be happy. If you do this, it’ll put a target on your back. That’s the part I’m not keen on.”

She put a hand to his face, running her thumb over the line of his jaw. “I have my magic back. He doesn’t frighten me anymore.”

He turned his face into her hand and kissed her palm. “Then I guess we’re going to the Guild.”

“And by we , he means me too,” Clemmie said at once.

Sera picked up the phone, unmuted the call, and said, “We’ll see you tomorrow.”

She wasn’t sure how she felt about it. In a way, it was everything she’d wanted all those years ago, the fantasy she’d clung to when she’d first lost her power: the Guild acknowledging her worth, revoking her exile, more or less begging her to come back.

A child’s fantasy, undoubtedly, but she wasn’t above feeling a certain satisfaction at hearing the words we’re the ones who need you .

It was true, too, that Albert wasn’t the threat to her that he’d been just a few weeks ago. So why did she feel uneasy? Just a little. In the back of her mind. Like she’d forgotten something.

The next day, she, Luke, and Clemmie drove up to Northumberland, crossing the snowy, craggy breadth of the north of England.

They skirted the Bennet ancestral home, bypassed the Bertram-Mogg country house, came within a stone’s throw of Grey Manor, and finally wound their way up the long, twisting drive of the Guild’s estate.

For the first time in fifteen years, Sera stood in the old courtyard beside the statues of Meg of Meldon, Michael Scot, and Mother Shipton, and looked up at the grand, imposing spires and towers of the British Guild of Sorcery.

It was a pompous, unwelcoming, and slightly ridiculous world, but it was also the only world young witches had, and it had so much potential. It could be so much better.

“Morning, Meg,” said Clemmie, patting the base of the statue. If she was having the same sort of emotional upheaval that Sera was, she was doing a very good job of hiding it.

“In Reykjavík, the Wise Women have a bust of the witch goddess Freyja in their gardens,” Sera commented.

“In Canada, they have a statue of a bear,” said Clemmie.

Sera was dubious. “You’re making that up!”

“I am not! You’ve obviously never come across the legend of the Witch-Bear of the Rockies.” Clemmie tossed her black waves of hair (which were now enchanted to hide any grey) and jerked her head at the doors. “Shall we?”

Luke didn’t say anything. He just waited patiently for Sera to decide she was ready.

She nodded. “Let’s go.”

The castle’s huge, lavish entrance hall was thankfully empty when they entered.

It was the middle of a weekday, and they were expected, which meant the Cabinet Ministers would be awaiting them upstairs while the young witches would be in their classes and any other adults on the premises would be instructing them, working, or visiting the library.

Portraits of illustrious witches from generations past stared disapprovingly at Sera from the walls as she climbed a long, sweeping flight of stairs, and she marvelled at how alike they all looked: white, aristocratic, and bored.

“This one’s a Bennet,” she said to Clemmie.

Clemmie snorted, looking up at the portrait of a sour woman with a powdered wig. “Dear old Agnes. An ill-tempered bag of bones, if her diaries are anything to go by. She was my great-great-great-great-grandmother. I think. I’ve probably got the number of greats wrong.”

Footsteps clattered down a hallway just off the landing above, then stopped abruptly. A man looked down at them incredulously. “Clementine? Is that you?”

“Stephen! Darling!” Clemmie’s voice became a catlike purr, which disturbed Sera greatly.

“We used to bang, as you young people like to say,” she whispered in Sera’s ear, before sidling off in the astonished man’s direction and raising her voice again.

“Well? This is your cue to declare why, Clementine, you haven’t aged a day… ”

“Well,” said Luke, a tremor of laughter in his voice, “at least that’s got rid of her for the moment.”

Upstairs, Francesca and Verity were waiting for them outside the Cabinet meeting room.

They’d been pacing the corridor, like they hadn’t dared to believe Sera would actually turn up.

Verity had an unlit pipe sticking out of the corner of her mouth and, even more inexplicably, was wearing riding boots.

Francesca was in her best pantsuit, her hair arranged in an elegant, efficient knot, every inch a Chancellor demanding to be taken seriously.

“There’s a hole in your jumper,” Francesca said, slightly despairing. “Right there, under your arm.”