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Margot had expected setting foot on the island to feel more momentous.

It had been created by magic and the will of a man who was over six hundred years old by St Izabetan standards.

She’d read of it and dreamed of it and wanted it so badly, it had become a thing of legend to her – and shouldn’t that make her legendary, too, being here right now?

But when she stepped from the boat, her boots sinking into the wet sand, she felt no different than she had when Elixane was just a smear of colors emerging from the mist. It was solid in a way it hadn’t been in her daydreams. The scent of brine and vetiver filled her nose, and the same breeze that pulled the waves up and down the beach tangled in her braids.

Nothing about the island screamed magical, unless you counted a complete absence of birdsong.

“Creepy, isn’t it?” said Jesy, disembarking beside her. “I think his house is this way. Come on.”

Margot smoothed down the folds of her skirt and followed, still waiting in vain for that spark of rightness to light up her soul.

***

Harlan Langford lived in a townhouse on a cliff overlooking the rest of Elixane.

It was impossible to sneak up on him without being seen from a mile off, and even still the house was surrounded by a massive hedge with no visible gate.

An arched doorway appeared when they arrived, closing behind them in a crinkle of foliage.

The yard was decorated with rows of flowers, paved paths, hanging cypress trees, and reflecting pools.

The birdsong that had been missing from the rest of the island chorused in this haven; wrens and thrushes, sparrows and robins all hopped from branch to branch, calling to one another or watching Margot and Jesy pass with their unnervingly steady gazes.

The Archmage waited for them on the wraparound porch, his scowl firmly in place.

“As I said, I’ll only be needing one assistant.

If neither of you want to cede the position to the other” – he glanced at them hopefully and, when silence followed, deepened his scowl – “then I suppose we should have some sort of exam.”

Margot’s spine stiffened. “Would it really be inconvenient to take us both?”

“I hate people,” said Langford, as though it should have been obvious. Margot was glad her dark skin hid her resulting blush. “What were your university marks?”

Jesy had beaten her by half a point, but Margot had been valedictorian because Jesy “didn’t have time for any kind of speech”. She left that out when she added the accolade, and, thankfully, Jesy didn’t correct her.

“What have you been doing since you left school?”

Jesy’s expeditions were with some of the most respected names in the magical field, but Langford clearly didn’t recognize any of them.

Margot listed the results of her expeditions rather than the personnel, detailing the experimental magic she’d been lucky enough to work with.

It was only impressive until Jesy followed up with a similar answer – and the magic she’d researched made Langford’s thick eyebrows climb his forehead.

He stroked his beard. “Which one of you talks more?”

“I do,” Jesy easily admitted. “But not when I’m working.” She paused, and added, “Stern talks to herself as she works.”

“I—” Margot’s face burned. “I don’t have to do that. I can keep my thoughts in order in all kinds of ways.”

For a long time, he simply studied them as though there were a particularly complicated summoning circle.

The panic returned with a vengeance as Margot overthought all of her answers, unsure if she had given the Archmage anything close to what he was looking for.

Would it help to express how much she wanted this apprenticeship?

How much she needed it? Or would that only make her sound desperate?

Margot had never understood how the very act of wanting had become so vilified.

It seemed like the height of privilege, to look down on someone for wanting anything desperately.

Sometimes, she felt like she was nothing but want, wrapped in the skin of a woman who worked herself to the bone for scraps.

There were many theories about the origin of magic.

Some scholars thought it was the earth’s gift to humanity, the stewards of the world given the power to shape it.

Some reasoned that magic was an excess of soul inherent to everyone, their own lifeforce to manipulate without extinguishing.

Less secular theories involved spirits that had created the planet and everything on it, spirits who rewarded their most devout followers with power beyond compare.

Margot had always cared less about the origin of magic than she did about her origin as a magician.

The first time she had successfully performed a spell – a simple charm to float a cookie jar from the top of the fridge to her outstretched hands – it had felt like everything was awash in new possibilities.

With nothing but her word and will, she had left an indelible mark on her world.

That was what magic meant to Margot: a legacy.

And as one of twelve children, those weren’t easy to carve out.

Would it help her case for Archmage Langford to know that? She couldn’t tell, and so she said nothing.

Finally, he said, “We’ll do this another way, then. Two months. You’ll stay in Elixane and we’ll work together for two months. At the end of that trial period, I’ll pick my permanent assistant. Does that sound fair?”

Margot couldn’t say yes fast enough. She could feel Jesy’s eyes on her, but she didn’t dare look at the other woman.

Starting now, every word she said and every move she made mattered too much to be wasted on their petty rivalry.

She would kiss Jesy Bellchant on the mouth right here if it got her access to ancient magical knowledge and a letter of recommendation.

“You’ll both stay in the cottage,” said Langford. “It’s around back. Now, I don’t want to see you again until dawn.”

***

The cottage was smaller than the townhouse, yet no less luxurious.

It had enough bedrooms for six apprentices, as well as three bathrooms, a fireplace and stone chimney, and a thatched roof.

Ivy curled around the curtained windows.

Cobblestones lined the path that wound from the main house to the front door.

A vegetable garden hid in the shadows of the cottage, bearing several plants that were out of season yet ripe and plump and ready to eat.

“So,” Jesy said as soon as they were inside, toeing off her shoes by the door. “Truce?”

Margot watched her balefully from the fireplace. “We’re not at war. Just because we don’t like one another doesn’t mean—”

“Who says I don’t like you?” Jesy quirked an eyebrow. “I highly respect you, as a matter of fact.”

“Now it sounds like you’re trying to start one.”

“One what?”

“A war.”

Jesy’s teeth flashed as she smiled. “I wouldn’t dare, Stern. Not while you have access to me as I sleep.”

Margot rolled her eyes. Any magician worth their salt would ward their door to protect their possessions – and, especially, their research – from enemy hands.

If Jesy was arrogant enough not to, she deserved to live with the paranoia of thinking she might wake up with Margot’s hands around her throat.

She hadn’t lied, she thought, as Jesy carried her bags down the hall to claim a bedroom.

She wasn’t at war with Jesy Bellchant. There was no point in fighting a losing battle.

But the first time they’d met, Margot had swiftly realized that there was a world of difference between letters – which could be written and rewritten, every word chosen with care – and being in front of a fellow intellectual, whose body language and patronizing tone could cut sharper than any sword.

After suffering two hours of Jesy’s condescension, Margot had excused herself to the bathroom only to return and find her pen pal talking about her to the other scholars at the benefit.

“She’s boring,” Jesy had said with a little sigh. “Her mind is sharp, but she has no charisma at all. She won’t get very far in any field that requires connections.”

“How disappointing,” her companion, a man with a small brown mustache wearing a bowler hat, had said. “We need a professor at Hexenhall, but I’d prefer someone with leadership qualities.”

“Margot Stern has no leadership qualities whatsoever. She’ll only ever be a follower.”

Margot had chosen then to clear her throat, taking a sick sort of satisfaction in the way Jesy and the man had paled.

The small throng of scholars had fallen silent, their eyes darting between her and Jesy.

It was one of those moments that Margot wished could be like a scene from her romance novels, where she would have flung the perfect caustic response at Jesy’s feet and walked away triumphant.

Instead, her eyes had filled with tears, and she’d made some sort of odd choking sob that she could still recall with enough clarity to hate herself for.

Jesy had said her name, and the pity wrapped around the syllables had sent Margot running to catch the first coach back to her hotel.

The next time Jesy had written to her, Margot responded:

To Miss Bellchant,

Do not contact me again.

She’d burned Jesy’s letter without reading it.

Now, standing in front of a different fireplace in a different cottage, Margot wanted to be as insouciant as Jesy was.

She wanted to smile and laugh and act like those words – Margot Stern has no leadership qualities whatsoever – didn’t live in her head, waiting for any chance to hurt her again.

But Jesy was the one with the charisma, the one who could strut into a room and have everyone in it fall for her elegance and wit.

Margot, one of twelve, from a decimal point of a town in the valley, was lucky to be in the room at all.