“Is it?” Amy looked with unhidden satisfaction at baby Miranda, who had finally fallen fast asleep and flopped, apparently bonelessly, against her mother’s chest, snoring softly. “I seem to recall,” Amy murmured as she re-buttoned her bodice one-handed, “a certain young woman of my acquaintance being toldmanytimes—by some of the highest authorities in our nation!—that it was useless for any woman to dream of becoming a magician. And yet...”
“That’s true enough.” The weight of exhaustion pushed down on my shoulders, pulling my smile into a wry curve as I braced myself for the next great battle. “I never heard it from you, though. Not even in the very beginning.”
“Of course not. Iknowyou, Cassandra Harwood,” said my sister-in-law drily. “Telling you that something isimpossibleis a guaranteed method to make you throw yourself at it with all your heart within a day.”
“Ha!” I rolled my eyes at her. “As if you were any different? You’re only more subtle about your methods.”
“Which is why we work so well together.” Amy smiled serenely as she rose from her chair, balancing my sleeping niece in her arms. “Now, if you’ll excuse me—”
“Wait.” As little as I wanted to bring up dark magic and forbidden fey altars with my innocent niece in the room, this conversation had been the reminder I needed:no onewas more sharply observant than my sister-in-law. It would be foolish not to ask if she had seen that silver ring. “I wanted to—”
The door opened without a knock. “I’m sorry to interrupt you ladies,” Miss Birch said, “but I thought you’d better know: that good-for-nothing weather wizard never showed up for the class he was meant to teach this morning. So the back courtyard’s swarming with young ladies, all of them milling about without a thing to do—and those inspectors of yours are telling themallexactly what to think of it.”
* * *
I hadn’t even realizedI could run so swiftly through the green-and-bronze rooms of Thornfell. I emerged into the courtyard less than two minutes later, my pulse hammering against my throat, to find the time-weathered flagstones covered with pacing and fidgeting young women in various stages of irritation and distress—and Annabel Renwick’s voice rising authoritatively above all of them.
“Of course one never likes to speak ill of such an old and well-respected family—”
“And so,of course,one would never be so crass as to do so, particularly in their own home,” I finished firmly as I swept through the crowd at a far more dignified pace than I had used to reach it. Nothing could be done about the fact that my hair was mussed and my skin flushed and perspiring—but I kept my smile bright and my stride confident as I strode through my gathered students and pointedly focused on them rather than on my inspectors.
“Idobeg your pardon for the inconvenience,” I told them, “but unfortunately, Mr. Luton’s message to me went astray. I was only just alerted to the crisis that called him away this morning.”
“‘Called him away?’” Lionel Westgate’s eyebrows rose as he turned to me from where he’d been frowning in the direction of Luton’s staff cottage. “But the man’s right there, at home. He’s simply refusing to answer his door.”
Curse it!The bulk of the crowd stood between me and the small stone building, but when I slipped a quick glance in that direction, even I could make out a thin stream of smoke twisting and curling from its tall chimney.
I couldn’t march over there to bang on the door myself in front of all of these onlookers—or tell Luton yet what I thought of his behavior, no matter how many viciously accurate phrases boiled within me. But...
“Called awayfrom his teaching duties,” I said through my teeth. “The downside of having Angland’s greatest weather wizard on-staff...” I almost gagged on the words, but I forced them out regardless. “...Is that he may sometimes be called upon to assist other wizards in their times of urgent need.”
“Really?” Westgate’s brow knotted. “Which ones?”
“I don’t know the particulars of this case,” I said tightly. “But he made his needs perfectly clear when I first hired him.”
And I would makemyfeelings even more clear when I sacked him at the first possible opportunity. For now, though, I turned my back on Mr. Westgate to smile warmly at my students.
There was a wariness in more than one answering expression that I hadn’t glimpsed in any of them before. Annabel’s words had dealt their intended poison. I saw several of them dart questioning glances at her, looking for her assessment of the situation. I would have given a great deal to have Amy with me to defuse matters now, but I’d told her not to wake Miranda by coming with me.
She had trusted me to deal with this matter myself.
“I can’t offer you a course in weather wizardry today,” I said, “but wecantake a brisk walk around the Aelfen Mere to clear our minds before we dive into our next lesson. As the breeze isn’t too strong this morning, the lake might just be clear enough for us to glimpse the remnants of my father’s famous ballroom underneath. Can anyone guess exactly where the greatest challenge lies in creating such an underwater structure through purely magical means?”
There was no simpler way to distract a magician of any level than to set them a magical puzzle. Even Mr. Westgate’s brow crinkled in sudden, sharp interest, exactly as I’d hoped. Mother had never allowed him to read Father’s groundbreaking spell—a gift to her on their wedding day—despite all of his increasingly crotchety demands to view the particulars after Father’s death.
But he wasn’t too distracted by that question now to cast a final, speculative look backward as we all started up the hill toward Harwood House and the Aelfen Mere beyond, with Annabel and Lady Cosgrave murmuring ominously to each other at the back of our rustling group.
I’d wager anything that Mr. Westgate would be making a trip back to young Luton’s cottage later that day to interrogate my wayward staff member himself. I would simply have to terrify Luton into good behavior beforehand. That part, I might actually enjoy.
But when I cast a vengeful look back at the cottage from the top of the hill, an unexpected sight stopped my breath.
I’d passed that cottage fifty times or more in the last few weeks. I knew it from every angle, and I could swear that no ivy or other spreading plant had ever come within ten feet of its sturdy stone walls since my new gardener had beaten back the woods’ overgrowth. It should have been a plain gold block, neat and uniform on every side.
But from this angle, I could just catch a glimpse of the wall that faced the woods...and it was now colored a deep, dark green.Somethingwas covering all those stones—something that hadn’t been there the evening before, when I’d walked outside with Lionel Westgate.
Nothing could grow that quickly—nothing natural, at least. At the sight of that rich green, my stomach gave a convulsive lurch and my throat tightened uncontrollably...because it was a shade that I knew all too well.
It was exactly the color that had haunted my dreams every night for the past week and a half.
