“Pfft.” He hunched one shoulder, scowling down into his teacup. “What piffle.”
“Piffle?” I raised my eyebrows. “I don’t know where you spentyourchildhood, but I can tell you from experience that the fey take a keen interest in these parts at this time of year—and my family agreed a long time ago to leave their woods in peace in bluebell season. If we don’t bother them, they won’t bother us—so take carenotto venture inside the woods yet, if you please, and make certain you don’t let any of our students wander in that direction, either.”
There. I’d done my duty. With a sigh of relief, I shut the door on his petulant scowl and hurried down the corridor to greet my next arrivals.
The great bell rang again and again as the next few hours compressed into a happy blur of activity. A growing collection of young women strode through Thornfell’s refurbished doors, slapping their gloves against their sides and glowing with excitement and nervous energy, whilst their commanding mothers swept in after them to ask final, probing questions and inspect all of their bedrooms for any last-minute threats.
Amy and I plied the mothers with Miss Birch’s finest scones as the daughters settled into their living quarters. I answered every challenging technical question, while Amy supplied all of the soothing charm. Even my infant niece—once my brother had delivered her for her regular afternoon feed—supplied a perfectly charming distraction for all of us. Energetic young voices echoed up and down the corridors for the first time in Thornfell’s history.
One day, I hoped, I would standardize the entrance age for Thornfell College of Magic as the Great Library had done centuries ago. This initial class of students ranged from seventeen to nearly twenty-three years of age, a disparity I’d worried over more than once. Still, I’d been in no position to be exacting when so few hardheaded Anglish mothers would allow their precious heirs such a scandalous education in the first place—and I could hardly punish any talented young woman for the year of her birth. I knew too well what it was to hunger for magic and be denied it.
It was an ache under my own skin every day.
One of the latest arrivals was one of the oldest—and the only one of my students with whom I was already acquainted. “Miss Banks!” Smiling, I rose from the round table where I’d sat with Amy and three stern, icy matriarchs who were helplessly thawing as they gathered around my niece. Leaving them in Amy’s capable hands—with Jonathan hovering nearby, ready to leap into the breach should baby Miranda set up any sudden storms—I hurried across the parlor to clasp Miss Banks’s small white hands. “Was your journey tolerable?”
Beaming, Miss Banks nodded, her fair ringlets rippling around her face. “I spent most of it reading. I’ve readeverybook you sent me. I read the Larchmont twice in a row! And then I studied it again on the journey here. I feelsoclose to understanding the formulas. If I could only—”
“We’ll practice them here,” I promised. “Of course, you’ll have to wait for the rest of your classmates to catch up with you, but we should reach those spells by October at the latest.”
Her face fell, and I laughed, giving her hands a sympathetic squeeze. “Who knows? Perhaps we’ll find time to study them individually beforehand. Then you could help me tutor the others later on.”
“I’d like that.” There was a glint of determination in her forget-me-not blue eyes, matching the willpower I’d learned to respect in our acquaintance thus far.
Miss Banks might be soft-spoken, small, and deceptively pliable-looking, but she was the secret fiancée of one of the Boudiccate’s greatest political hopes for this next generation. Together, those two young women had hatched a radical plan long before I’d met them, a plan that would launch both of them into the public eye within the next decade—and Miss Banks, I noted, was the only one of my students to have traveled across the country entirely on her own, without exhibiting any concern about the matter.
She would need every bit of that hidden steel to carry her through the controversies to come. I gave her an approving nod in return as I stepped back.
“Now,” I said, turning to the room at large, “I believe everyone has arrived, so—”
Before I could finish my sentence, a whirlwind exploded in the center of the room. The air blurred before me. Wind whipped in a tightly controlled circle around the gradually solidifying outlines of four people...and my jaw dropped at the outrageous extravagance of the gesture.
Our Boudiccate inspectors were making their arrival into a statement—with a stunningly wasteful misuse of magical power. There was no sensible reason they couldn’t have simply arrived by carriage; no reasonat allexcept to make a declaration of dominance inmynew school’s parlor. The task of transporting another person required a phenomenal output of magic. To transport more than one was nearly unheard-of—and to do it with such astonishing accuracy was positively miraculous.
Whatever officer of magic had been required to take on this absurd task would be depleted for days, if not weeks, afterward—and among all the clever officers of magic for the Boudiccate, I only knew a few gentlemen with the power and skill to judge a pinpoint landing across the country with more than one passenger in their wake.
Only a few...
My heartbeat thrummed in my throat and wrists as I started forward, my mouth dry and my skin alight. It had been so many weeks, so many endless nights—
The air cleared, and I rocked to a halt.
It wasn’t Wrexham. I should have known better than to hope, even for an instant, that it could be.
The gentleman who stood with his back to me now had tight salt-and-pepper curls above the sliver of dark brown skin displayed over his elegant cravat, and I recognized him immediately. Lionel Westgate had been chief magical officer for the Boudiccate ever since the days when I’d been a sulky young girl dragged by my mother to observe her political meetings against my will.
She had butted heads more than once with Mr. Westgate—a powerful magician and an honorable man with a will more inflexible than iron and a mind that was never easily changed nor diverted. Like my mother, I had always respected him, even when he had infuriated me in later years for his obdurate refusal to even consider opening his brotherhood of magical officers to me as a female recruit.
In that, at least, he was no more nor less hidebound than most gentlemen in Angland.Myhusband was not so stupidly closed-minded...but we could have done a great deal worse in the Boudiccate’s choice of magical officer to accompany this aggravating inspection. So, I swallowed down my irrational disappointment as I looked beyond Mr. Westgate to see who our political judges would be.
Three women stood before him, and the first was nearly fully blocked from view by his broad shoulders, but as I recognized the other two, my lips stretched wide into a smile of pure, astonished wonder.
Lady Cosgrave, stylish as always in a peacock-feathered bonnet and a silver-trimmed pelisse, was one of the youngest members of the Boudiccate, still only in her mid-forties. More importantly, she’d been one of Amy’s closest friends for years. To win her as one of our auditors was a gift beyond any I’d dared to hope for—but behind her stood an even more welcome sight: Lady Cosgrave’s young, long-limbed blonde cousin—and political protégée—Miss Fennell, who was my own Miss Banks’s secret fiancée.
There was no politician in the world who could be more committed to the success of our radical new school...because tradition dictated that no lady should be invited to enter the Boudiccate unless she was married to a practicing magician. Until now, that ancient rule had prevented any ambitious young politician from wedding another lady, no matter what her own private inclinations might be—so for the sake of Miss Fennell’s romantic and political future, Thornfell College of Magiccould notbe allowed to close down.
My shoulders relaxed for the first time in weeks as I swept forward without waiting for Amy to lead the ceremonies as usual. “Lady Cosgrave!” I held out my hand. “Miss Fennell!AndMr. Westgate.Whata pleasure to welcome—”
“Miss Harwood.” Lady Cosgrave cut me off with a tone more chilling than ice. “And...Mrs. Harwood. Of course.” She flashed a quick, cool glance at Amy and then looked away, dismissing my sister-in-law entirely. She didn’t grant my brother—whom she’d known for twenty years—so much as a look.
