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Captain Charles Cathcart shifted uneasily in the driver’s seat of the donkey cart. He firmed his grip on the donkey’s headstall and gave an order that was, for him, unusually terse.

“Keep your head down, Charlie.”

The donkey, who was not called Charlie and, even if it had been called Charlie, would probably have paid no mind, did not comply. But in the back of the cart a young lady—a really very young lady, of that age which is freshly out of pigtails and only a year or two older than can fairly be categorized as “little girl” still—ducked obligingly behind the panels of the cart, reducing the prominence of her tousled head with its freckled, sunburnt profile. Even so, she kept stealing bright-eyed glances at the alley around them, determined not to miss a thing.

This was Charlotte’s first revolution (and, if Mother ever caught wind of this, almost certainly also her last) and as far as she could see, the whole experience left nothing to be desired in the way of entertainment or atmosphere. The entire to-do was deliciously loud and smoky, full of people dressed in the most fascinatingly improbable garments, and seemed entirely casual about its policy for general admission.

In the time it had taken her father to bound into their little room at the hotel, order her to put on her shoes and hustle her out the door into a narrow side street populated by one baleful donkey and its elderly cart, Charlotte had observed no fewer than four hotel personnel and one highly enthusiastic patron take up arms and invite themselves to join the fracas. One had even attempted to compel Charlotte and her father at pistol-point to become part of the proceedings, which invitation Captain Cathcart had forcefully declined.

Revolutions, it seemed, were open to absolutely anybody who was in the mood, and Charlotte thought that was very egalitarian of them. She didn’t suppose her father would be interested in signing on to this one even if he had been asked more politely, because they were to sail home next week after Mother got Julia settled at her pensionnat, and naturally Dad would be expected at the office and Charlotte was due back at school, so revolutions didn’t figure. Only she did rather yearn to hear him say they would instead chuck it all in, and help overthrow the government.

How many chances did a girl get to overthrow a government, anyway?

But she did not put it to her father in that light, because she knew how improbable it was that he would take her side of things. Dad could be a decent parent in a lot of ways, but he did have that depressing tendency to also consider what Mother might say, and Mother would never countenance Charlotte being part of a revolution. Mother, Charlotte was pretty sure, was not the revolutionary type, and Dad would probably feel bound to honour this character deficiency.

Instead, fighting to maintain eye contact with everything unfolding around her, Charlotte asked a question that had been jostling around in her head ever since her father had ordered her into the cart.

“Of course this is only my first revolution,” she said modestly, “so I haven’t what you’d really call experience, and maybe it’s different if you’re doing the fleeing bit, rather than the fighting, but does one normally stick so much to the back alleys like this?”

Her father, occupied though he was with guiding the donkey through a close, ancient passageway of exactly that type, nevertheless spared a backward glance of pure amusement.

“What in God’s name makes you think I would know that? D’you imagine I find myself cast into political uprisings on the regular?”

“Well.” Charlie scratched thoughtfully at a bug bite on one knee. Fresh, red and angry, it stood up in a proud, indignant lump. “I don’t know, really. Only I did sort of wonder. After the sword.”

“Ah.” Captain Cathcart returned his attention to the donkey so Charlotte could no longer see his face, but the set of his shoulders seemed to go a little sharpish ‘round the edges. “The sword.”

Charlotte waited, expectant if not altogether hopeful, but her father chose not to explain the sword he had conjured with one crackling and unknowable word the moment the pistol had been drawn on them in the corridor of their hotel. Nor did he explain the startlingly competent manner with which he had brandished it, the better to persuade that fellow with the moustaches and the pistol and the proud blood of his ancestors—or possibly just the goat he’d eaten for lunch—rising within him that actually, it was as much as his life was worth if he would only stand aside so that they could leave the hotel and get in their donkey cart.

Instead he gave a muffled oath as the donkey, who had apparently not noticed Captain Cathcart’s adroit handling of the sword—or maybe it had, and simply, in stolid donkey fashion, been unimpressed—swerved to the side just shy of the alley’s end and came to a halt. No ferocity of threat or quantity of flattery could budge it from that spot.

“Confound the beast,” muttered Captain Cathcart, "it seems to have caught the spirit of revolt quite thoroughly."

Giving this mode of transportation up for lost, he surveyed their surroundings. Charlotte, not altogether sure what she was looking for, nevertheless did the same. The alleyway was a close, dusty affair, and aside from the usual assortment of stray cats, hosted no living thing but they. As far as Charlotte could see it offered little in the way of guidance, but it seemed indicative of something to Captain Cathcart.

“We’ll have to chance the side streets,” he decided, “until we can get out of the city. I don’t expect anybody will look at us particularly, but then, I don’t particularly want them to. If we can go it on foot to the outskirts we should be in the clear. At least . . .”

But whatever qualifying thought had occurred to him, he did not give voice. Instead he swung over the side of the cart and put up both hands to catch his daughter round the waist.

“Down you come, Charlie. Hope you kept your shoes on.”

Charlotte had, but they were not of a pair. Too startled by her father’s sudden appearance and command to don her shoes to even register which ones she grabbed, she’d shod herself with a mismatched arrangement of one sturdy leather brogue with stout laces, suitable for tramping around markets and back roads and suchlike, and one gloriously silly bit of brown velvet and silk-ribbon edging. It was a slipper inherited from Julia the day she had accepted, ungraciously, the fact that her feet had not stopped growing when she turned sixteen. The slipper was well suited to decorous lounging, which was one of Julia’s particular specialties, but no earthly good for actual travel, and certainly not travel from a cramped, narrow alley onto a cramped, narrow side street.

When her father for the third time lost his grip on Charlotte’s hand and asked, not unkindly but with some impatience, whether or not Charlotte’s legs were still in working order, she extended the foot in its offending slipper, already half shredded by their awkward dash across the mud and brick cobbles, as explanation.

Captain Cathcart swore.

“We’ll have to fix that. I can’t carry you all the way to the airfield.”

“I suppose,” said Charlotte, “there wouldn’t be a taxi service running just now.”

“I don’t suppose there would,” her father agreed. He turned a sharp half-circle in the street, sizing it up.

There were people here, but not ones who had caught the revolutionary feeling. They were regular folk shuttering the windows of their family homes and places of business, mothers ordering children indoors with clean, brief syllables that brooked no nonsense, and boys too young to take up arms marshalling rudimentary implements of defence under the direction of men too old to do the same.

Charlotte felt a sudden pang of concern, and remorse that she should not be able to assuage it.

“Will they be all right?”

Her father started. He first looked at her in surprise, then with a sudden softness of understanding. He considered the streetscape anew, as if realizing how it must look to someone experiencing her first revolution.

“They? I should think so. It’s not . . .” He hesitated, as though weighing his next words very carefully. “I think you will find it’s not these people who are after changing the government. If it were, I never should have brought you here to begin with. The region is stable. No shortages, no conflict . . . the usual petty-ante bickering between factions, of course, same as one sees in governments the world over, but nobody in this part of the world is in the kind of state that would drive a fellow to take up arms.”

Charlotte, who had only minutes ago been confronted by a man very willing to do exactly that, looked in bewilderment at the parent who had not only been with her to see it, but had likewise taken up arms to address the situation. Captain Cathcart, quite comprehending the direction of her thoughts, nodded.

“Right. They act like they’re in the mood for it, but look here.” He put his hand out as one might in the dark of an unfamiliar house, feeling one’s way to the light switch on the wall. “Just . . . about . . . there.”

He spoke a quick, low word and twitched the air. Under his hand the world shimmered, as if he had plucked at a translucent veil hanging across the street. An invisible curtain was caught in his grasp, drawn back, and underneath it Charlotte could see the same street, the same people, all exactly as they were, only now she could see that moving alongside them were sparks of green and yellow light. These bright little blobs puffed plumes of green-gold smoke as they chuffed from house to house, resting on a forehead here, settling on a shoulder there. Wherever the lights rested, the child or woman or man so afflicted would shudder, or scowl, and move a little faster, as though freshly convinced of an immediate threat and their purpose in avoiding it.

Charlotte stared, and struggled to bring herself to full comprehension of the sight.

“What is it? A spell? It moves like one, but there are so many points of contact.”

“It’s a working, all right,” her father agreed. He maintained his hold on the veil he held—some form of obscurity enchantment, Charlotte supposed, if it worked to hide evidence of the spell from onlookers like that—without any discernible effort, and let her gaze her fill. “And you’re right about the size of it. This is a working on a damnably large scale. I spotted it just before breakfast. Near as I can make out, it’s cast to put the revolutionary spirit into all men of fighting age, and the fear of government retribution into the rest. It was laid on the city sometime last night, so that everyone woke up fighting mad with no real idea why.”

“How extraordinary.” Charlotte watched as one spark drifted toward them. The fizzing little pinpoint of light hovered, as if considering, then veered off. “Oh! Did you see that? It didn’t want to touch me. Why not?”

If they’d been at home, Captain Cathcart would certainly have corrected her attribution of an emotion like desire to the spell; he was very particular about terminology where magic was concerned. Possibly, Charlotte thought, being caught up in a magically-provoked revolution in company with your child made a man less particular about that same child’s whimsical habit of anthropomorphising magic.

“I expect it’s because we’re not from here. I can’t run a proper study on it just now, so I don’t know for sure, but for a revolution it makes sense that the intended target would be the actual citizenry, and the working’s parameters set accordingly.”

Charlotte watched the lights travel a moment longer, grasping only in the most hazy, sideways fashion the true scale of power that must lie behind them. Even when she and Julia worked together, on the rare occasions they tried to, they could never manage more than three or four points of contact at a time, and in one street alone here were six or seven. Lights enough to cover the city? How many workers would that take?

Only as her father released the obscurity and let it drop back into place, concealing all evidence of the enchantment, did it occur to her to ask, “But why? Why provoke a revolution at all? Why should somebody want that, especially if the area is so settled and stable?”

Her father did not immediately answer, but turned to signal a very small boy who was in the process of toting home an assortment of scraps and strips of hide and leather. He bent down, holding eye contact, and smiled reassuringly. In a moment he had traded a number of coins for a good scrap of hide, which he then applied with grim purpose to the least protected of Charlotte’s feet.

“Give me a word, Charlie,” he prompted. “Something sturdy. Suited. Got to fit you, see?”

Charlotte saw. She cast about for a word which was of that sort to her; one that she was unlikely to say until she needed the enchantment to end.

“Bonnet,” she decided, thinking of the hat she had worn as a little girl, its white felted wool brim shielding her eyes from the wind and rain. For a moment, in the face of the memory, the heat and dust of Ebadmur blew away. She was a little girl in wool coat and wet gaiters on the pavement in front of their home in Rosedale. Her small, mittened hand was caught fast and firm in Dad’s large one. Its strength grounded and warmed her throughout. She looked up from beneath the brim of her bonnet, beaming, joyful, exulting in an unexpected return . . .

The memory faded. She stood on a street under the blistering midday sun, her foot in her father’s hand. He focused on the hide he was shaping, sweat sheening his forehead, lips working, speech without sound. The hide moulded itself in obedience to his guidance, encasing the ruined slipper with Charlotte’s foot secure inside it. At last he applied the final word as binding—Charlotte couldn’t hear it, but she felt the finality of the seal, snugging the hide, encasing it strong and sure as a father’s hand at the end of wartime—and the parts became a whole.

“There.” Captain Cathcart rose and clapped a satisfied hand on his daughter’s shoulder. “Should hold you.”

She did not doubt it.

“Now,” he started down the street once more, keeping them close to one wall, moving with energy and purpose, “let’s see if we can’t find a more obliging donkey than the last.”

Three streets later they had still not found a second donkey, but they did find a car.

Of sorts.

A vehicle of notable antiquity, its structural integrity likely owing itself more to donkey-like obstinacy than any devotion to regular maintenance on the part of its mechanic, it was of a model that predated the last war and quite possibly the one before that as well.

“Oh,” said Charlotte, when she realized her father had stopped to stare. Then, when he looked up and down the road before crossing to inspect it at closer range, “Not really?”

“Mm-hmm.” Captain Cathcart circled the vehicle with every sign of deep pleasure and satisfaction. “This will do.”

“But it’s not even ours!”

Such was Charlotte’s upbringing that, even in the midst of a revolution, she believed this an excellent argument on both logical and moral grounds. Her father, however, who’d had a different upbringing and a bit of Life Experience besides, was already coaxing the side of the hood up in a clamorous groan of tortured metal and inspecting the interior workings with a deeply proprietary air, as though the very act of observation had conferred upon him ownership of the vehicle so observed.

“It’s not, but I don’t think that signifies at present. See this?” He indicated the faded door panel facing the street, and Charlotte marked the faintest outline of a coat of arms which had once been emblazoned on the door. “Royal crest. Very unpopular thing to be flashing around in the middle of a revolution. I don’t imagine the car will be in much demand for a while. Give me a second to get the motor going, another minute to get a glamour on the crest, and it should take us out of the city easy enough.”

Charlotte, her logic and morality thus overborne, advanced to stand at her father’s shoulder and watch as he plied his magic and hands and a rock he’d found in the road in service of the first of his ends. When at last the thing sputtered and spat into shuddering, choking animation, Captain Cathcart drew back with an expression of transparent pleasure. Charlotte was on the verge of climbing into the vehicle when she saw his pleasure catch; slip.

“Dad?” She turned back, uncertain. “What is it?”

Captain Cathcart shook his head.

“Might have overdone it a bit,” he murmured. And indeed, Charlotte saw, he did look unusually chalky under his tan. Like some of the vitality had ebbed out, sucked away as fuel for the engine. Which, she supposed, it essentially had. “Not sure I have it in me to do the door as well.”

“Oh, but does it matter?” Charlotte wondered. “I mean, it’s awfully faded.”

“It is, but it’s not invisible. Driving through the streets in a car bearing the royal crest? With matters as they stand? It’s a risk.” He looked at her, then: really looked at her, for the first time since he’d come bounding into their room back at the hotel, and Charlotte was frightened by what she saw in his face. Captain Cathcart cleared his throat, and looked at the crest again.

“Even a small one . . .” He put out a hand, then stopped. Assessing. If he gave it all he had, Charlotte saw him calculate, how much would he have left?

“Could I do it?” she wondered. “If you told me how?”

“No, I don’t think—hang on, though,” a fresh thought clearing the concern from his face. “There’s a thing we used to do in wartime, when we were done in but we still needed to make a final push. I can’t teach you how to do a full glamour in two minutes, but if you’re willing, I can borrow enough from you to do it myself.”

“Borrow?” Charlotte echoed. Captain Cathcart nodded, pushing his hat a bit off his forehead.

“Siphon it off. Your magic. It’ll take more out of you than it would just to do the working, I’m afraid, because you’ll need to work a spell to do it, but once I have that it’ll run through me like it was my own.”

“Oh!” Charlotte’s expression cleared. “Like a blood transfusion.”

“Yes, clever clocks, exactly like. Are you up for it?”

Charlotte, her eagerness to be of service warring with indignation that her father even thought he had to ask, nodded so fiercely that if she’d thought to bring a hat along with her shoes, it would certainly have deserted her in that moment.

Her father’s instruction was clear and straightforward. The spell Charlotte had to work on herself was not too complicated; little more than a variation on the nursery games she and Julia had played, opening and closing the door when they were angelically abed, making sport of their poor old nurse. Except it was a door in her own self Charlotte opened now, somewhere in the vicinity of her sternum, and when it was open she felt the magic flow through, clear and bright and rushing, summoned by her father’s reciprocal conjure. She watched with pleasure and not a little pride as his colour evened out, his face lost the worst of its peaked, worried look, and she knew, with the same simple, exultant conviction of a child on the pavement in a street far away, that everything was going to be all right.

When he’d availed himself of what he judged to be enough of his daughter’s magic, Captain Cathcart signalled Charlotte to close the spell, and Charlotte did.

Or rather, she tried to.

But the magic was still there, right in the way, roiling and rushing and spilling out through the door so that she could not bang it to. It was like trying to close the nursery door, Charlotte thought, while Nurse was still standing in it. Of course you couldn’t close the door while somebody was standing in it. They’d get stuck. And the mental image of Nurse standing in the nursery door while it flapped against her comfortable posterior was such that she giggled, or tried to, but then found she did not quite have the energy to manage it.

How strange, she thought. I wonder why.

She turned to her father to ask if he knew, and was even more bemused by the look of urgent horror on his face. He seemed to be calling to her from a great distance, so that it was difficult to make out the words.

Charlotte, he was saying, as if through water, fogged and very far away. Listen, you’ve got to shut it down. Shut it off, Charlie; now!

“I can’t do that,” she told him, purely irritated. “Nurse is in the way.”

Her knees were no longer there to hold her up, but that was all right, because her father had caught her round the waist. He wouldn’t let her fall. He was looking down at her now, really down at her, staring into her face with his hat blotting out the worst of the sun overhead, his mouth working, contorting, and she thought maybe it was another spell . . .

A heavy blow struck her just below the ribs. All the wind went out of her and the door inside came crashing to, as if slammed by a shoulder so fast and fierce that it broke apart at the edges with a crack and an explosion of splinters. Charlotte fell back under the force of it, spiralling through time and space until she crashed into the wall, fell to her nursery cot, and into the waiting darkness.

The nature of revolutions is often such that people are so focused on the revolution part, they’re more inclined than usual to overlook smaller things in their midst. This has the effect of allowing those smaller things to pass, unimpeded if not altogether unnoticed, while the revolution is still in process.

Smaller things like a donkey cart hired in the marketplace turning up, abandoned, at the mouth of an alleyway in the city’s hotel district, from whence it was restored to an owner who had, somewhat optimistically, given the beast up for lost.

Smaller things like a child coming home to announce he has sold two pieces of his toughest and least valuable pieces of hide for a princely sum to a foreigner with a hotel accent and kind eyes.

Smaller things like a long, lean man in a rumpled suit of pale linen, badly streaked by sweat and the dust of the streets, bundling an unconscious teenage girl into the passenger seat of the same type of ancient car that used to be used for government work before the people decided they didn’t want a government after all, or at least, wanted a different sort than the type they’d had previously. This car was probably not a government car, though, because it bore no sign of the usual royal crest; only a battered door with the paint chipped here and there, shut and locked securely in guarantee against the sleeping girl inside it risking a tumble out.

That same lean man, his face drawn into an expression of grim purpose not unsuited to a foreigner who is making it his business to get the hell out of a country whose revolution is certainly none of his own affair, guided the car with speed and skill along a network of side streets as though drawn by raw instinct toward the edge of the city, and the airfield that was, in the most nominal and technical sense, operating there.

That same lean man, on arriving at the airfield, applied himself with unsettling quiet to the task of marshalling a pilot to his service. He was, that day, the only one successful in that aim. Where others had come before him to shout and bluster and threaten, to promise all manner of riches to any who met their demands and woe betide any who did not, the lean man with the kind eyes sized up all parties present and settled on a grizzled fellow leaning against the hangar, watching the melee on the airfield with the air of a spectator who is trying to make himself interested in a sporting match when none of the teams on the field are his own.

How the foreigner knew that this man, of all the men who worked in and frequented the hangar, was the one who had an airplane not merely for hire, but for sale, was anyone’s guess. How he contrived to negotiate for the sale of that plane when, so far as anybody could tell, he had arrived with nothing to trade for it but a battered possibly-not-government car and the meagre contents of his own dusty pockets, well, that was between him and his god to explain.

All that could be said with any certainty, when important parties came later to ask questions about this much smaller thing that had happened in the middle of a revolution, was that a bargain of some type was struck, and the foreign man in dusty clothes with kind eyes extracted from his probably-government-but-we-won’t-talk-about-that car the unconscious form of a girl whose clothes were equally creased and streaked with dust and sweat, whose hair was uncovered, and whose feet were wrapped in mismatched, mottled leather. He carried the girl to the airplane he had bought, or bargained for, or traded—nobody ever found out exactly which, because by the time those important people arrived asking questions the man who had done the selling had vanished as completely and efficiently as if spelled away by magic—and settled her inside it with exquisite delicacy and care.

Precious additional minutes were devoted to negotiations with men who worked as ground crew, and it seemed that his investment of time was well spent, for by the time the foreigner had finished making his case, every one to whom he spoke felt compelled to support his aim of having the aircraft made ready and the field cleared for takeoff. The foreigner himself saw to the business of guiding the craft into the appropriate position, sent the plane jouncing purposefully along what passed for an airstrip in that particular part of the world, and guided it up, up, up and away from the ground of a peaceful territory inexplicably thrown into turmoil, and into the open air.

Even on a clear day like that, with the sun tossing white-light reflections from the silver wings, it was not many minutes more before the throaty roar of the engine thinned to a distant hum and thence into memory, as the peculiar foreign gentleman’s newly-purchased plane carried onward, becoming in rapid succession a dot, a wink, a twinkle, before finally vanishing from sight.

Bertie Garfield, concierge of the Hotel Clarice, found the chief difficulty with Canadians was that they had not, as a people, altogether made up their minds as to what they wanted to be. It was his experience that Canadians knew themselves to be Colonials still, but suffered such embarrassment over the fact that their manners veered wildly between the overtly familiar gregarious American type, and the more staid reserve expected of the English, which meant that one never knew exactly what class of Canadian one would get until they arrived. This was, however, the first time in Mr. Garfield’s living memory that the Canadians he got arrived twice, and seemed to shift from one type to the other between the first arrival and the next.

The Cathcart family of Toronto had seemed, on first arrival, decidedly conscious of their Colonial nature. They had Manners, there was Family Behind Them, and they were, although memorable in their own way, certainly not overly familiar on first acquaintance, nor were they prone to make themselves distracting in a public place. Mr. Garfield had put them, decidedly, in the Self-Consciously Colonial column, subcategory Not a Nuisance.

Mrs. Cathcart, a woman of notable beauty and indomitable presence, was herself the daughter or granddaughter of something British, though not altogether English. She was forceful but never vulgar, and her husband had seemed, when he seemed anything at all, the affable type of bland, blond attachment that women of Personality the world over were wont to select as the least inconvenient path to the necessity of matrimony.

True, the daughters were a slightly American degree more grown up than English girls of the same age, but not in any worrisome or undesirable way. The elder, Julia, was decidedly conscious of her figure, which she dressed to flatter, and received some encouragement from her mother in that area in the form of a storm of shopping excursions during their first week in residence. The younger, Charlotte, had not seemed to be at all conscious of her figure, nor desirous of possessing one, but she was keenly conscious of and interested in the people around her to a degree that seemed to have no natural origin in either immediate ancestor. She and her father had been thrown into each other’s company a good deal, the sideshow to the main attraction that was the elder girl’s pending installation at one of the finer finishing schools across the Channel, and Mr. Garfield had frequently welcomed them back from a hodge podge of excursions to parks, museums, the Zoo, and like institutions.

When the family had divided itself in two parts, Mrs. Cathcart and Julia bound for a culminating Shopping Event and subsequent planned education in Paris, while Captain Cathcart and Charlotte were fated to tour some vague farther reaches of the Mediterranean, Mr. Garfield had guaranteed that their rooms should be held over in anticipation of their return and thought nothing more of it. Nothing, that was, until the exact moment of their return, when two sunburnt, filthy figures like something out of T.E. Lawrence exploded into the quiet lobby of the Hotel Clarice and Mr. Garfield’s every professional nerve thrummed to full alert.

“Please!” he bleated, coming out from behind his desk and making all haste to intercept these interlopers, whatever their designs on the tranquility of his establishment might be. “Please, I need you to—oh!” He drew back, abashed, as the taller figure supporting the smaller turned a bright, clear gaze upon him, and he realized that he knew this man, though he had entirely failed to recognize him.

“Good afternoon, Garfield,” said Captain Cathcart, in tones of greatest warmth and equanimity. “Delighted to see you again. Forgive my haste; my daughter is unwell. If you could summon a metaphysician, I’d be obliged.”

Mr. Garfield reeled back, much shaken. By the time he could contrive to offer his assent, Captain Cathcart had already disappeared down the corridor and Mr. Garfield appointed himself to carry out the charge he had been given, as a kind of penance for failing to recognize his most quiet and unassuming guest. He then mentally adjusted his categorization of the Cathcart family to Colonial, subcategory What the Hell, and made a point of personally escorting the metaphysician up to the Cathcart suite directly the little man arrived.

Dr. Ezekiel had been chosen by hazard of proximity, rather than his being contracted to the Hotel Clarice particularly. Mr Garfield had not bothered to preface the situation with anything resembling an explanation, but merely presented him to Captain Cathcart, who had by now shed his jacket to stand before them in rolled shirtsleeves and an expression of terrible, steady calm.

“Good afternoon, Doctor,” said Captain Cathcart.

“Captain,” said the Doctor, his expert gaze already roaming intelligently over the man’s face and frame. “Well, you are in better condition than I was led to believe, but I do mark the signs of enduring—”

“You were not called here to assist me,” Captain Cathcart cut in, somehow contriving to make the interruption feel like nothing more or less than a natural break in the conversation. “I may not be the man I once was, but I’m as fit as they were able to make me. Your patient is my daughter. Please,” he stood aside with courteous gravity, “come in.”

The role of Mr. Garfield was acknowledged with a grateful nod, whereupon Captain Cathcart closed the door behind the metaphysician and left Mr. Garfield standing, adrift and abandoned, in the corridor of the Hotel Clarice.

Charlotte was a very long way away.

But that was all right.

The room was dark, but not frightening. It was warm and safe. Nurse’s hand found her forehead any number of times, brushing her hair back, settling her comfortably in the cot. Her father was calling to her from far away, but it didn’t matter. How could it? She was so very settled here, and at peace.

Still, her father kept calling.

It annoyed her. Especially when he bade her wake. She did not want to wake, but it was getting brighter there in the dark and more difficult to ignore his summons. Nurse must have thrown the curtains back. She resisted, grudgingly, only to have it get brighter still and hear her father say, in gentle encouragement,

“Yes, Charlie, that’s it. Come along, now.”

Another voice, unfamiliar, murmured approvingly at her response, and all at once the light crashed over her, blinding, brilliant, forcing her exit from the darkness so that she cried out and put up her hand to shield her eyes from the glare, only to find they were still shut tight.

“There!” her father said, “Charlie, you’re—” But adjectives failed him. Instead he caught her crushingly against his chest.

“You smell,” said Charlotte, and he released her at once.

“So do you, kid,” he said lightly, but she heard a tremor of emotion underneath.

“What happened?” She kept her eyes shut tight against the glare. “What did I do?”

Her father’s hand held hers, turning it over between his own.

“You cracked yourself wide open. Blood transfusion, nothing; more like opening an artery. Of course being a prize fool I hadn’t thought to warn you against it, and you . . . well, you damn near poured out everything you’d got. I only just got you sealed up in time, and you went down like a top. Gave me a nasty jar.”

“I’m sorry,” said Charlotte, flushing with guilt at the sound of that deepening tremor. “I didn’t know.”

Her father was silent a moment before he said, his voice still strangely choked, “It wasn’t your job to know, Charlie. It was mine to tell you.”

So wretched was his guilt and self-reproach that she felt she must brave even the blinding light to open her eyes, purely in order to prove to him that she still could. On doing so, she was surprised to discover that the room was not too bright at all. The hot, white light that had seared the inside of her eyelids seemed to have no origin in the room around her, which was, she saw, not their hotel in Ebadmur at all, but quite a different one, though still familiar.

“Why,” she said, “have we come all the way back to London already?”

“Yes.” Her father spoke lightly, but still there was that note underneath, the quaver, which caught her ear and stirred her to unease. “Hell of a trip.”

Charlotte tried to summon any recollection of the journey at all, and failed. The last impression she had was hazy, of an open door and narrow streets, and a succession of calamitous conveyances which collectively refused to budge.

“How did we get back here?”

Captain Cathcart affected an air of bland nonchalance, as though the answer were of no particular matter. “Oh, I found us a little plane. Type I was passably familiar with, owing to my service days. I got us here in jig time as you can see.”

Charlotte could not see at all. She felt as though she had walked off the stage at the start of the play and come back in from the wings just in time to hear the butler accuse the second footman, only to be shot by the Duchess.

“But how? Surely we can’t have come all the way back so soon? Not even in a plane. Why, it took us days to get out there.”

“It did,” her father agreed, and she at once regretted asking about it, pressing him for details, because alongside the bland nonchalance she could see traces of his Company Face creeping in around the edges, ready to smooth over the raw vitality of energy which had seized command of him from the moment he entered the last hotel room and bade her get ready to leave. “Circumstances inspired me to find a tailwind.”

Charlotte frowned, still failing to understand how any circumstance could have possibly so shortened the physical distance between the easternmost reaches of the Mediterranean and the central regions of London that they could have covered the distance in a plane that should not even have managed a third of that range, but she did not give voice to her thoughts. Captain Cathcart, leaving his daughter to struggle with this problem of impossible geography, turned to express his gratitude to the other man in the room, a portly fellow with gold-framed spectacles and an air of professional calm.

“Not at all.” The doctor, having just concluded storing some magical-medical apparatus in his black bag, still pulsing with a faintly residual white light, dismissed the quiet, earnest profusion of thanks with a gentle wave. “I don’t doubt it was an alarming sight for a parent, especially given your history. Been through it yourself, haven’t you?” He shot a penetrating stare at Captain Cathcart over the top of his little spectacles. “The real business. I treated a few in that state during my own service days. There’s no mistaking it, when you know the signs. I quite understand your concern, but this was not at all the same sort of thing, and you mustn’t speak as though she were at death’s door. She was in a much removed state of consciousness, but nothing more grievous than that. Nothing meant, you understand? She could have brought herself out of that easily enough if she’d only had the benefit of a little training.”

“They don’t go in for much of that sort of training in our schools back home,” Captain Cathcart admitted. “Least, not at Charlie’s age. Certainly not at Seton Hall. Very respectable place, Seton Hall. Good family, good breeding, bad manners to make too much work of a magical inclination.”

The doctor, with a gusty harrumph and certain angulation of his gaze toward his patient, managed to communicate his opinion of any system of manners which deprived young women of the training they needed not to get locked into their own state of unconsciousness. However he had tact enough not to put this thought into words, and instead addressed himself to Charlotte with great warmth and kindness.

“You’ll be quite yourself again in a day or two, Miss Cathcart. A good night’s sleep and a little rest where your gifting is concerned should be all that’s required to put you to rights.”

Charlotte nodded and smiled, to show that she heard and understood, and something in her manner seemed to inspire the doctor to lean in, almost confidentially, as though he were about to offer her a particular diagnosis on top of the expected one.

“You’ve a very strong natural talent, my dear. Please take it as my professional recommendation that such potential warrants all efforts of study and refinement that you can pursue. Certainly your father does not seem to have stinted the refinement of his own.”

Then he cut his eyes at Captain Cathcart, muttered “Tailwind!” as though he’d never heard such nonsense, and departed the room with an air of aggrieved professional dignity.

Charlotte’s father contorted an eyebrow at her, then ducked out to follow the doctor to the door. This left Charlotte to experiment with stretching this way and that, cataloguing the integrity and flexibility of her limbs, which was how she discovered that nothing hurt except her sunburn, and also that, given the deplorable state of her clothes, her father had probably been right: she almost certainly smelled just as foul as he.

That, at least, she had it in her power to remedy. Leaving the problem of how to refine a magical talent that her own program of schooling did not intend she should hone for another day, Charlotte swung her legs off the bed and saw that her stout walking shoe and her father’s enchanted contrivance both still clung to her feet.

Staring at them, Charlotte realized all at once how very like the nature of a dream her entire trip had taken on. Maybe that was the unconsciousness working on her, but she could hardly believe that less than a day had passed since she awoke in their hotel in Ebadmur. It didn’t, somehow, seem real.

She put her hand out and traced the seams of the hide, her father’s idea of cobbling still holding fast to her foot and the slipper beneath.

“Bonnet,” said Charlotte, and the spell broke. The hide fell off her foot, magic spent, and the last of her unplanned adventure seemed to fall away with it.

Charlotte regarded it a moment, the sad little remnant—her only souvenir, she realized, of their three days in Ebadmur, and its surrender to her spoken word the only proof that her memory of her father making it for her had even been real—before she sighed, gathered her sponge bag, and headed into the adjoining bathroom to wash and dress for bed.

Charles Cathcart had not tucked his daughter into bed since she was ten years old.

Tonight, though, he indulged in the forsaken ritual of her childhood, drawing the satin coverlet up under her chin and keeping vigil in the doorway until Charlotte nodded off. The sight of her return to unconsciousness stirred him to such uneasiness that he was obliged reach out, probing delicately, feeling the answering lively flare of her magic where it met his own, satisfying himself that this was unconsciousness of the natural state and not the nightmare of insensibility which had gripped her earlier in the day.

Yet even then he lingered, reluctant to leave, struggling against the belief that he should remain, stand guard against the encroaching menace of . . . what?

That was the devil of it. He couldn’t even say.

He had no fear of any force in the busily-revolting little territory of Ebadmur; he did not even expect that the revolution would last more than another day or two at most, and as to the problem of what shape their government would take once they had done away with the one they had, well, he supposed he could read a newspaper as easily as the next man.

No, it was not the outcome of the revolution which worried him, nor the people employed in the business of revolt; it was rather the impetus for the act itself and the startling quantity of magic deployed to accomplish it which denied him the ease of hard-won rest. It was that question Charlotte had asked, which he had been unable to answer in the heat of the city streets: the question of why. Why wake that inspiration in a people who were not oppressed, not downtrodden in any way? Why stir them to destabilize their own homeland, and probably attract all manner of attention from opportunists in surrounding territories and beyond?

Also disquieting on a more personal level was the fact that he hadn’t known it was going to happen until he and Charlie were in the middle of it. In his line of work he should have known it was coming, should have seen it was about to happen, and yet . . .

He checked Charlotte once more for that cheerful flare of dreamworld magic, then retreated to the main living area of their suite and availed himself of the heavy black telephone which sat on the desk. A bit of the routine jangling and shouting down the line got him as far as the international exchange, and thereafter a judicious application of clarifying spellcast solidified the connection with the person who sat an altogether ocean away.

“That you, Cathcart?” Pleased surprise warmed the voice of John Erskine, even along the static of the wire. “Hold on, I’ll lock it down on my end as well.”

A moment later and the voice was clearer still, so that there might only have been a room or two between them instead of an ocean and half a country besides.

“That’ll do,” Erskine decided. “We won’t betray any Crown secrets, but I think we’re well guarded against the ordinary sort of thing.”

“Had you reason to believe I was calling to betray Crown secrets?” Cathcart asked, amusement lightening his tone. Erskine chuckled in turn.

“None whatsoever, but on occasion a fellow likes to imagine the things that would surprise him the most. Then he’s less likely to be surprised by them if they come to pass.”

Cathcart allowed there might be something in that approach. He added, in tones of grimmer retrospection, that he probably could have done well to employ it himself before taking his daughter on a tour of Ebadmur.

“What?” Erskine’s astonishment crackled down the line. “The devil you did. Why, reports have been coming in all day that the place is about to go up like ballyhoo. And you were there? You and little Charlie were in Ebadmur?”

“Like sitting ducks,” Cathcart said, at last permitting his own self loathing to take supremacy in his feeling. “I’ve never felt such an ass in my life. I’d no notion the place was anything other than exactly what it’s been for years; not a whisper of unrest until this morning, I’d swear it. And I’d be inclined to doubt my own word even then, if I hadn’t gone digging around a bit and found a nice little obscurity set up over the whole city.”

A deep, poignant silence met this remark. Then, with feeling,

“My god.”

Cathcart nodded, grimly satisfied to hear his own shock so well-echoed.

“My thoughts exactly. It was fiendishly well laid, too. Really masterful stuff. Then, when I got it peeled off and had a look at the doings, you’d never believe the extent of it. A working like I’ve never laid eyes on, something on the scale of twenty, maybe thirty strong talents. And that’s if they shored it up beforehand; if they were working on it live, I’d put it closer to a hundred.”

“As many as that? You’re sure?”

“You know as well as I what it would take to manage anything on that scale. Hell, you probably know better than I.”

“Yes, I suppose I do.” A sigh filtered down the line; the sort in which a man’s years and all that have filled them can be felt. “You know, they’re not altogether unheard of; city-wide workings. We used a few ourselves during the war to keep spirits up.”

“I’d heard something of the kind,” Captain Cathcart admitted.

“Yes, it was a handy scheme. They’d retask the ladies in the secretarial pool; get them together with cups of tea and spell books, wittering away to bolster morale when a place took its second shelling in a month, or energize the factory workers; encourage housewives to make the rations count for more. That sort of thing. Respectable undertaking, really; my sister Ermintrude did work of that type, and so did my mother. Indomitable woman, Mamma. Remarkable. Why, I could tell you stories—”

“Yes, I’m sure,” said Captain Cathcart, hastily forestalling the stories. “Actually, I think my aunt Millicent put a little time in at a place like that, now you mention it. General Clerical, with magic. Made her feel all kinds of important, doing her bit. But that was war time; we had numbers behind us, then. What could anyone messing about in Ebadmur have to compare to that? Who’s backing them? More to the point, where would they come by such a quantity of power that we wouldn’t hear of it first?”

“Yes,” Erskine said slowly, so that Cathcart could almost picture the way he’d be pulling at his moustache, that great antiquated handlebar which would have grievously imperilled the man’s dignity, had he not been possessed of such gravitas. “That’s the question, isn’t it.”

Cathcart waited a minute, in the hopes his superior could contrive to think of an answer. When none was forthcoming, he shook his head.

“I don’t like it, sir.”

“No more do I. But of course, you’d be inclined to take a much sharper view of it under the circumstances. How’s Charlie taking it? I should have asked straight off. She isn’t hurt, I trust?”

“She’s fine. Even when we were in the thick of it I think she thought it was all a . . .” Cathcart was horrified to hear his own voice waver, unexpectedly, in the middle of the sentence. He cleared his throat quickly, and pressed on. “All rather a lark.”

“Ah!” Erskine roared with appreciative laughter. “The young people, Cathcart; the enviable insouciance of youth. There’s nothing like it. The risks a child thinks they can capably run, eh? Thanks be to god that spirit’s not catching among the populace, or we’d be in a real bind.” He chuckled again, warmly appreciative. “Well, she’ll be safe at home soon enough. And then . . .” A pause, barely perceptible, except that a new, cautious note entered the phrase that followed. “Back to school, I suppose.”

“Yes; Annie’s taken Julia over to Paris to get her settled, but when she returns we sail home in time for Charlie to start back at Seton.”

“Mmm.” A deeper, thoughtful pause. “I suppose she’s happy there.”

“At Seton? Happy enough, I should think. She has a goodly clutch of friends, and they certainly don’t overtax the girls in the academic department. Lots of free time for games and leisure.”

“More’s the pity. First rate aptitude, Charlie has, and you know I’m not only speaking of her lacrosse.”

A non-committal murmur from Charlie’s parent followed. A longer silence from his supervisor, and then,

“I wonder, Cathcart, what you’d say if I suggested you consider enrolling her elsewhere. At least for a term.”

“What, take her out of Seton?”

“It would be a necessary preliminary measure to enrolling her elsewhere, I should think, so yes.”

“Whatever for? I don’t pretend it’s a top academic institution, but it’s a fine school of its type. She’s been happy there.”

“I don’t say it’s not a fine school, and under ordinary circumstances I’m sure I should be glad to see her stay on. But try to see it my way.” A delicate, meaningful pause, quite uncharacteristic of John Erskine, sat at the end of that sentence. He cleared his throat. “You both travelled to Ebadmur under your own names, did you not?”

Cathcart stiffened under the question, and swore.

“That’s what I thought,” Erskine said grimly. “Of course you’d no reason not to, but with this magical revolt business flaring up I certainly don’t like to think . . . well. We won’t think of it. But I wonder if it might not be worth the precaution of sending her somewhere to which her name has not yet been attached, at least for the year. Even the term. We can grease whatever wheels want lubricant if you’d like to send her back to Seton later on, but perhaps you’ll agree that for this year, at least, she’d be better off somewhere . . . quieter.”

The unease that had hovered around Cathcart all evening, the very unease he had thought to banish by making this telephone call, roared up around him like a slavering, triumphant beast that has at last scented the fear of its prey, the truest sense of its basest self, and poised to plunge in for the kill.

Because this, of course, was the nameless dread which had hovered at his spine all day. Greater than revolutionaries, greater than unreliable transportation, greater even than the raw, choking fear that had gripped him when he first understood Charlie had not stinted or rationed herself in the application of the spell, but had rather unwittingly flung herself wide open to his demand, making of her very life force a conduit, a living artery of magic, channelling a torrent whose containment was a task to which even his own skill had been briefly unequal. Greater than all of that was his understanding that he, in exposing the workings of the revolution-that-wasn’t, in delivering his report to his supervisor back home, had simultaneously exposed Charlie to whatever forces lay at the back of the thing he had seen.

Whatever they had stumbled into together, no matter how unwitting his first encounter with the magic had been, there would be no mistaking the link between himself and the government forces which were about to bear down on the region with intent to inspect, evaluate, and sift through every grain of sand in search of some lingering stink or stain of magic that could be analyzed and tracked back to its source.

“It’s a bad business,” Erskine mused. “Marketing magical mayhem. I would never like to think we’d had a hand in exposing Charlie to whoever is behind it.”

“No more would I,” said Captain Cathcart, and marvelled, detachedly, at his steady and even tone.

“Of course you must do what you think best, but in my view—”

“No, sir, you’re quite right. It isn’t advisable that Charlie should be too accessible, at least not until we figure out who’s at the back of this, and how likely they are to retaliate if we try to shut them down. I’ll make arrangements.”

“What d’you reckon you’ll do; hire a governess?”

“Lord, do governesses still exist?” This antiquated point of educational particulars briefly diverted Cathcart’s attention. “I don’t think I’ve seen an actual, real live governess since I was in short pants. I’d some notion they thinned the herd after the first war, and the remnant migrated to England. But no; not a governess. Even if one or two of them did elude extirpation, I can’t think think any governess intelligent enough to keep pace with Charlie would voluntarily subject herself to the district superintendent role as embodied by my wife.”

“There is that consideration, of course. What’s left?”

“I’d quite happily put her in the high school if I thought her mother would countenance it, but as it stands I’ll probably reach out to her old church school and see if they won’t take her back.”

“Is Marianne any likelier to look favourably on that?”

“She’s not,” sighed Captain Cathcart, “but I don’t know that we’ve any other option. Anywhere Annie would approve of will have a wait list dating to the year Charlie cut her first tooth. I don’t pretend we’re nobody in the city, but you must know as well as I do, Erskine, that when it comes to the gated grounds of the best schools, we might as well be.”

Erskine did not deny that it was so, but neither did he counsel Cathcart to despair.

“I’ve a little notion I may be able to help you out there. We’ve a connection I would invite you to exploit, if you liked. A sister of mine, and a cousin, plus a few . . . well. Some number of the Erskine ladies have studied at Miss Dunlap’s over the years. For . . . reasons.”

Captain Cathcart, who knew well what the Erskine fighting spirit could look like when the blood was up, could too easily imagine what manner of reasons those might be. He politely declined to speculate, however, and let Erskine continue his gentle salesman’s spiel.

“It’s not in the class of Seton Hall, but it’s a good school in its own way. First rate magical program, which I know will interest you, and it’s been deemed the last, best hope of enough society mammas that Marianne might be persuaded to acquiesce. And of course,” the final argument was, as usual, the strongest, “you’d be spared the task of mediation with the governess.”

Captain Cathcart did not trouble to deny that an altogether attractive picture had been painted, and Erskine said he was glad to know it.

“I’ll reach out this afternoon and put the whole thing in order. You draw up the cheque, and work out how best to put the matter to Marianne.”

“I’ve three days,” said Captain Cathcart. “I’ll think of something.”

Mrs. Cathcart, on being informed that Charlotte had been given a place at Miss Dunlap’s for the fall, kindly assured her husband that he must be mistaken.

Once it was borne home to her that no mistake had been made, she struggled to reconcile herself to this news. She struggled, of necessity, mostly alone, for Captain Cathcart had retreated at once behind his paper directly he informed her of the change, knowing as he did that Mrs. Cathcart was, in the end, her own best persuader. And so it proved. After proceeding rapidly through the stages of debate with herself, she arrived at something very like acceptance.

“Of course,” Mrs. Cathcart said grudgingly, “there is nothing wrong with Miss Dunlap’s. I don’t say for a moment that there is. But I’d really thought we’d agreed she would stay on at Seton.”

“Did you?” Captain Cathcart turned a page in his week-old copy of the Times, scrutinizing it, despite its relative antiquity, with all the fascinated interest of a man who was to its contents as a perfect stranger. “I don’t recall agreeing to that.”

Here, of course, Captain Cathcart practised some slight deception on his partner in conversation, and life. There was no mystery as to why Mrs. Cathcart had sat secure in her belief that their aims for the education of their youngest daughter were in concert, for when last Mrs. Cathcart had waxed poetic on the subject, her part in the dialogue had been very much in the nature of a soliloquy. Captain Cathcart, deeply sensible of his wife’s dramatic sensibilities, had yielded to her the entire stage and played the part of the mute and admiring audience member to the hilt. But neither had he contradicted her aims, for they had not stood athwart his own, and until his conversation with John Erskine he’d had no strong argument against Seton Hall continuing to educate Charlotte however they saw fit.

But then had come Ebadmur, and revolution, and a magical machination whose meaning he could not divine but which he was determined should pose no further risk to Charlie. And so he had cabled overseas the day before they sailed for Halifax, seeking confirmation of what Erskine had promised to help him accomplish: Charlotte’s enrolment at Miss Dunlap’s. That institution had cabled back to guarantee Charlotte’s place in boarding for the fall, which missive had landed with small ceremony by the breakfast plate of Captain Cathcart, who had waited until luncheon to break the news to his wife.

Mrs. Cathcart, blistered by the Mediterranean sun and softened by a month’s profusion of good food in whose preparation she had taken no role, had by that point unwound to such a state of relaxation that the discovery of her husband’s high-handedness came as nothing more than a mild annoyance, rather than the grounds for a most bloody and satisfying row as it might have done had she uncovered the truth when they were still at home in the city.

One was, of necessity, far more tightly-wound in the city.

“Well,” said Mrs. Cathcart, deciding that here was an opportunity to be The Bigger Person, and perhaps shore up some rhetorical equity into the bargain, “I don’t say there’s any harm in it. Miss Dunlap’s is certainly an entirely acceptable school. They do go in for more magical training than I think is strictly fashionable, and it certainly didn’t help the youngest Erskine girl. Really a most regrettable match, she made. But the middle Cleary girl went there and she did very well for herself. Both of the Prentiss girls attended too, and one of them married a Fairfax, which only goes to show.”

Captain Cathcart did not ask what, exactly, marrying a Fairfax went to show, nor if there were any leftover Fairfaxes at whom they might expectantly fling Charlotte once Miss Dunlap’s had finished with her. He simply turned a page and said, “So that’s all right, then.”

And there the matter came to rest, until that night at dinner when the pupil was told of her fate. Charlotte regarded both her parents across the table with twice as much astonishment as her mother had first received the news, so gripped by confusion and dismay that her usual good humour failed her, and her temper likewise.

“Miss Dunlap’s?” she repeated. “But I was to stay on at Seton! With Winnie and May and—Mother!” She swivelled in accusation and disbelief. “You said I was to continue at Seton.”

“Yes, well,” Mrs. Cathcart made a helpless gesture. “Your father seems to have gotten things a bit . . . mixed up.”

“Mixed up!”

“Keep your voice down, Charlotte,” Mrs. Cathcart instructed, with a marked reduction in helplessness. “People will hear you.”

“Oh!” said Charlotte. “People! What do I care for people, if I’ve got to go to Miss Dunlap’s and study for an actuary?”

“Heavens,” said Mrs. Cathcart, now doubly at sea. “Whyever should you want to be an actuary?”

“I don’t!” cried Charlotte. “That’s the point!”

“Charles,” entreated Charlotte’s mother, feeling she had really borne a greater brunt of their daughter’s displeasure with her father’s error than it was right or fair to expect of her, “Charles, do explain, please.”

Captain Cathcart looked up from his soup bowl and considered, with not unsympathetic expression, his youngest child’s heightened colour and blank dismay. However he said only,

“You’d make a very good actuary, I think.”

“Daddy!” Charlotte flung down her napkin in a fit of temper. “How could you? And after I didn’t breathe a word to Mother about us being in a revolution, too!”

“In a what?” Mrs. Cathcart’s air of helplessness could not have vanished more completely if it had been borne out of the dining room on a covered tray. Hers was now the mien of one who scents cause for battle, and knows herself fully equipped. “Charles!”

“Charlie,” her father said, in tones of one betrayed, but Charlotte only met his accusation with a baleful glare that made it clear she thought it served him right, and fled the table.

Mrs. Cathcart, in her daughter’s absence, armed herself with a fish fork and, over the neatly-filleted corpse of a blameless salmon, proved in short order that she had more than her own share of revolutionary feeling when circumstances warranted, with no magic required to engender its provocation. Captain Cathcart, who had already known this perfectly well about his wife, and who had two and a half decades earlier fallen madly in love with Marianne McDonald in no small part because of her capacity for revolutionary feeling when she deemed a cause worth revolting over, was driven at once into a defensive rhetorical position and obliged to hold it for the remainder not only of the evening, but the entire voyage home.

The upshot of this matrimonial disharmony was, of course, that Charlotte was left almost entirely to her own devices to indulge the worst of her pique. Really, she fumed, it was almost not even worth surviving a revolution, if one couldn’t go to school with one’s friends! And while perhaps the effect of survival might eventually be the gift of additional years in which to gain some life experience and perspective that would adjust her thinking on this front, the more immediate impact was that she was gifted a great stretch of time in which to mope, and grieve, and draft tear-spotted letters to the friends whose companionship was to be denied to her, now that she was not to go to Seton Hall.

The effect of this font of emotion was similar to that of one unbalanced in the humours, bled by a doctor at the cutting edge of his own understanding. All the pique and ire which fuelled her flowed outward, through her pen and onto the page, matching her mother’s tirade shouted word for written one, so that by the time the ship made berth in Halifax, Charlotte had been depleted of temper. In its place was only trace remnants of grief, and quiet resignation.

It was in this spirit that she disembarked in company of her parents, permitted her mother to let them be interviewed by the bright-eyed society reporter who flitted and darted around the dock from passenger to passenger, and then surrendered to her father’s guidance on navigating the formalities of customs before they put the last of the ocean between themselves and the adventure that lay behind them, boarding the west-bound train for the promise of rest, and quiet, and home.

Possibly the most confusing thing about Miss Dunlap’s to any new initiate was the fact that there was no Miss Dunlap. Not anymore. There had been a Miss Dunlap some eighty-odd years ago, when the school had been a cottage affair run out of the property Mr. Dunlap had allocated for the use of a spinster sister who, not yet forty, had felt she had enough life left in her yet to serve greater ambition than could be embodied by her garden and her needlework. That Miss Dunlap had founded the institution on principles of domestic science, which quickly expanded to natural science and numerous ambitious adjacent fields. By the time Miss Dunlap passed from this world to the next, bequeathing the cottage and the school it contained to a worthy successor in the person of her Maths mistress, the school was so entrenched in the minds of all who knew it that to strip it of its title, no matter how ill suited the possessive attribution might technically now have been, was simply out of the question.

Now, Miss Dunlap and the Maths mistress alike long since consigned to their reward, Miss Dunlap’s endured as an institution known for its supremacy of vision, its eccentricity of academic rigour, and the pained smiles it brought to the faces of society matriarchs who knew that, while there was nothing especially wrong with Miss Dunlap’s, it was nevertheless best suited for that type of young gentlewoman whose parents know they have got to send her somewhere, but can’t very well send her anywhere else.

It was this sense of displacement from all that was most desirable which Charlotte felt so keenly as the family car advanced at a measured pace along the approach (owing not so much to self-conscious grandeur as to the collective tendency of the returning student body to sight a much-missed friend and bolt across the drive in pursuit of her, heedless of oncoming traffic) and she did not scruple to hide it.

“I won’t know anybody here,” she groused.

“Not at first,” her father agreed. He depressed the brake with patient care, the better to permit a pair of joyfully reunited schoolmates, arms linked, to stroll in front of the car with an inexplicable sense of leisure. “But there are ways to fix that, if your conversation is equal to an introduction or two.”

Charlotte, thus dismissed, sank back against the seat cushion to nurture her growing sense of resentment. Mrs. Cathcart at once applied herself to the conversational gap, leaning forward to peer out the window at the handsome stone cottage which had made itself a focal point of the grounds. There was no denying the place had a presence, and Mrs. Cathcart was not immune to its power of well-established antiquity.

“Well,” she allowed, “I suppose this could be all right.”

It did not, Charlotte thought, even seem worthwhile to point out that her mother would not be present to discover if it was all right or not. Instead she retreated further into her own grievances, feeling with keen discomfort the probing glances of the other girls when at last their car found berth and her father leaped out with what Charlotte deemed a really disgusting degree of gaiety to make enthusiastic gestures at a nearby individual who seemed to have been drafted for the occasion into the role of porter.

“Mother,” she entreated in an undertone, “must he caper? People will stare.”

Mrs. Cathcart betrayed surprise, then amusement, at this adolescent grievance. She settled Charlotte’s hand in the crook of her arm and inclined her head with regal warmth at a pair of passing schoolmates who were, indeed, staring quite openly at the solo pantomime of Captain Cathcart. Thus saluted, they made embarrassed little waves to Mrs. Cathcart, then linked arms and scurried away in a torrent of giggles. Mrs Cathcart watched them go with what Charlotte deemed a really unforgivable benevolence before addressing herself to her daughter.

“Your father is not an unobtrusive personality, darling. Not unless he wants to be.” That was how Charlotte knew that Mother must have made up her mind to be pleased about the school because there was no note of strain in the comment at all, nor the one that followed. “One must make allowances where men are concerned. They don’t mind about the same things we do.”

Charlotte had not even time to formulate a suitably vociferous protest against such self-effacing indulgence when another girl loped past. She at least had no friend with her and even carried a lacrosse stick under one arm, which should have filled Charlotte with all manner of joy. It should have signalled the hope of common interest and the possibility of friendship, but instead she was only conscious of despair as the girl drew abreast of their actively-unloading party and actually broke stride to stare. She looked first in astonishment at Captain Cathcart, who was making an absolute production of his instructions to the porter shouldering the trunk, gestures and snippets of Shakespeare and all, and then swiftly to Charlotte herself.

“Mother,” Charlotte groaned, and Mrs. Cathcart patted her hand.

“Let’s look at the garden bed,” she said, and steered Charlotte a respectable distance away from the car as the pantomime reached its climax. “It might give me ideas.”

The garden bed was uninspiring, as gardens went, but at least it made a kind of camouflage until the remnant of Charlotte’s things were borne at last away into the school and Captain Cathcart jogged over to join them, wreathed in smiles and unrepentant of his capacity for becoming a spectacle.

“Shall we make sure they get where they’re going?” he suggested, and offered an elbow to each.

Charlotte, covered in the shame of being seen, still could not bring herself to wound him by refusal. She released her mother’s arm and settled her hand on her father’s as her mother, smiling fondly up into his face, tweaked the brim of his hat before doing the same.

They travelled up the front steps together, crossing three abreast into a high, spacious hall, where they were received by an academic-looking personage of indeterminate vintage, who introduced herself as Miss Garrety.

“Very pleased to know you,” Captain Cathcart decided. “We hoped to take direction to the dormitory wing, and see Charlie settled there.”

Miss Garrety indicated she saw nothing to recommend against this plan, eventually.

“I wonder, though, if you would first come with me to meet Miss Adamson. She likes to meet all our new girls and their parents, you know.” Miss Garrety maintained a bright, friendly smile throughout this redirection, but there must have been something underneath it because Charlotte quite distinctly saw her father, whose gaze had already begun to slide away, return his attention to her with a spark of interest.

He’s doing it, she thought. That thing where he tries to get at what’s underneath.

She wondered, for far from the first time, if this probing stare of his was even something he did deliberately, or if by this point he’d simply gotten into a habit. She was still wondering as they accepted Miss Garrety’s guidance down the side corridor to the office of Miss Adamson.

They were shown into a room that seemed to have decided a long time ago it would not permit itself to be categorized. Equal parts library, study and sitting room, it suffered no visible economy of comfort or taste, and seemed at a glance a perfect setting for the tall, tastefully-dressed woman who rose and came around her desk at once to greet them.

Charlotte, on having her hand clasped, was conscious of an irritating desire to like Miss Adamson. She was not very much older than Mother, her hair hovering at that indecisive stage of middling-grey, and carried herself with an air of warm competence that at once made you feel she was somebody you could rely on. A few conversational sallies later, Charlotte had to acknowledge that she did like Miss Adamson, but she was not yet sufficiently resigned to the necessity of Miss Dunlap’s that she could bring herself to like the knowing of it.

“You’re handy with a lacrosse stick, I am told,” Miss Adamson was saying. “You will need to make yourself known to Harriet Gardner. She captains our team here and will be very glad of your interest, especially now that the Terris twins have left us.”

Charlotte was dismayed to feel her interest flare at the mention. That would never do, if she planned to dislike it here. She managed what she hoped was a politely non committal response, then suffered in near silence through the subsequent exchange, wherein Mother tried to make it sound like they had any good reason for sending her here (“not being challenged enough at Seton Hall, though of course they would have been delighted to keep her. Her father and I wanted more for her, you understand?”) and Dad was no help at all, alternately sitting back in his chair as though he found it infinitely more comfortable than it actually was, and strolling around the room with his hands in his pockets like he’d come here on a museum tour, and was wondering where they kept all the really good bits of pottery.

But then, thought Charlotte, almost without even meaning to, of course that’s only what he wants us to think. And she might have wondered at her own audacity, thinking such an unaccountable thing about her own father, had Captain Cathcart not caught her eye the very moment she thought it, and slowly, with exquisite care, shut a single eyelid in a long, leisurely wink.

It should have made her warm to him, she knew. That she could understand him so well even without his having said a word, and that he could in turn perceive her understanding. But instead it only stoked her ire, because of course Dad must know exactly how she hated to come here, and he was making her do it anyway. It wasn’t fair.

The interview concluded not long after that, and though nothing of the kind was definitively said, Charlotte definitely got the feeling that something had been decided about her by Miss Adamson, though she could not work out whether or not it had been decided in her favour.

She supposed she’d have time enough to find out.

The dormitory wing was at the opposite side of the building, and Captain Cathcart politely declined the honour of accompanying Charlotte to see it.

“I’ll kick around here until you and your mother have made sure it’s everything you’d like it to be,” he said, and settled himself in lounging posture against a wall of rich, dark panelling as casually as though it were the exterior of a drug store, and he were lying in wait to bum a cigarette.

Now, Charlotte saw, it was Mother’s turn to look like she thought he might be making a scene. She only wished that something more desirable might come of that than a row on the drive home that she would not even be on hand to witness.

“Very well,” said Mother, in tones that said quite otherwise. “Come along, Charlotte.”

The dormitory wing buzzed with the function of seasonal change. Greetings rang through the hall, screeches of joyful reunion and, occasionally, more pointed whispers targeted at an individual or two who were hoped to be out of hearing range.

The traffic of school return being what it was, girls did not enjoy perfect privacy just yet. Students who crowded here and there in noisy pockets of reunion were periodically obliged to pause and duck aside at each sight of hat and furs as a mother ferried her daughter to the desired berth. Charlotte transited these cross-currents of communication in the meagre pocket of tranquility cast in Mrs. Cathcart’s wake, emerging only when they reached the door of her own room.

“This is quite nice,” decided Mrs. Cathcart, so Charlotte knew she wouldn’t be permitted more than one or two minor complaints at most, and decided none of the ones she could make in that range were even worth the energy she had left to spend on them.

“I guess,” she said, and Mrs. Cathcart cut a sharp look at her, which would certainly have been followed by a few words of warning, if the redheaded girl from the pavement outside had not stepped in from the hallway just then.

“Oh!” she said. “Hello. Are you Charlotte?”

Before her mother’s Look of Expectation could find her, Charlotte made the obligatory gestures and responses of introduction, for both herself and her mother.

“I’m Harriet Gardner,” said the redhead cheerfully. “I saw you outside with your parents.” She gave a not-at-all unobtrusive look around, clearly wondering whether Captain Cathcart, who had been undeniably the most memorable part of that experience, had accompanied them into the dormitory also. “I expect they put us in a room together on account of the practice schedule; Miss Adamson said you’re something in lacrosse.”

“That shows foresight,” Mrs. Cathcart decided. She patted Charlotte’s arm with vague approbation, as if her daughter’s very presence in a school where the arrangements were so cleverly decided was somehow Charlotte’s own doing, and worthy of praise. “Perhaps your roommate could show you some points of interest while I arrange your things. I’m sure you’ll want to meet some of the other girls you’re going to spend the year with.”

Charlotte wanted exactly none of those things, but lacked the finesse of social acumen required to put such truths in Mother-approved language, and so mutely surrendered to the friendly energy of Harriet Gardner, permitting herself to be swept away into a torrent of schoolgirls while Mrs. Cathcart was left behind to unpack and arrange things in a style that Charlotte would then spend her first evening away from home rearranging into the order that suited her best.

The new girl, Maud Adamson decided, was all right. Or at least, she would be in the end. Parents didn’t necessarily understand what it meant for a girl to start at a new school, especially when she had been perfectly happy at the last one, and were sometimes inclined to gloss over a very natural feeling of resentment at such a painful reminder one’s life and affairs were not yet entirely one’s own.

But Charlotte, in spite of her obvious reluctance to be here, had shown appropriate spark and character, which nicely complemented the report of her from Seton Hall. True, Mrs. Cathcart was of A Type, but it was a type that Miss Adamson knew herself equal to managing. The father had not so readily given himself to categorization, but she put it down to his being some kind of arty soul, perhaps a trifle effete, and decided he was nothing to worry about.

In that very moment, almost as if he had divined her thoughts and taken them as a challenge, Captain Cathcart put his head around the office door with a beguiling air of apology.

“Sorry,” he said, “I’m sure you’re awfully busy, but I hoped to beg another minute of your time.”

Miss Adamson adroitly communicated that a minute was available, while still giving room for one to presume that no more time was necessarily available than that. Captain Cathcart nodded, sidled in, and pushed the door shut behind him.

This time he forbore to roam, but crossed to stand before her desk with an air that bordered almost on the deferential. Miss Adamson considered in new light the person of the gentleman who stood before her, no longer altogether certain exactly what manner of parent he might be classed.

“I think Charlotte will be happy here,” she hazarded, attempting to divine which sober second thought had inspired his return. There was, of course, a certain type of father who did not scruple to get her alone, but absolutely nothing about this man gave that impression. His gaze stayed steadfastly above her neckline, and at hearing her prediction he nodded in amiable agreement.

“I have no doubt. She’s adaptable, our Charlie, though she prefers to adapt when the circumstances are more to her liking.” His gaze broke from hers to skate around the room, probing, searching. “I didn’t like to uproot her on so little notice, but it couldn’t be helped.”

Miss Adamson considered the opening this gave her, and dared to take it.

“Mrs. Cathcart seemed to indicate the transfer from Seton had been planned for some time.”

“Well,” Captain Cathcart said mildly, “it would have been rude of me to contradict her.”

Miss Adamson digested this answer-that-wasn’t, and revised yet again her opinion of the peculiar gentleman with the perfectly-cut suit, the incongruously slovenly posture and an apparent compulsion to look at everything all around him at the same time. She cleared her throat.

“You are a colleague of John Erskine, I believe.”

“I am.” He immediately turned the full force of a bright and interested gaze upon her. “You know Erskine?”

“Chiefly by reputation. Three of the Misses Erskine studied here, and the family maintains an interest in the school. They’ve been very generous over the years, furnishing us with all manner of scholarships, staff, endowments and other gifts.”

“Ah!” The gaze became somehow less penetrating. She had lost the keenest edge of his interest with this answer, though she could not guess why. “Yes, the family.” He applied his interest to the back of a chair in front of him; put out his hand and traced the nearest wing. “Large family, the Erskines.” He looked back to her now, steady, watchful. “All . . . skilled. In their own way.”

Ah. Miss Adamson had, she felt, hit on it at last. She smiled.

“We have a strong magic program here, certainly. The Misses Erskine flourished in it. Is Charlotte, likewise, interested?”

“Oh! No,” Captain Cathcart shook his head. “Not interested at all, I should say. Wasn’t what the girls at Seton Hall cared to do, nor even were encouraged to. My wife says a serious study of magic isn’t thought fashionable in a girl, and she should know.”

His hand roamed idly across the back of the chair beside him, and he tapped out a compulsive little rhythm as he spoke.

“Mind you, that wouldn’t bother Charlotte; she’s not a follower of fashion. Games are more her line. Lacrosse, tennis, all that. Very sporty girl; hardly sits still one moment to the next. I was much the same at her age so do I understand the appeal, but I’m not interested in cultivating Charlotte’s backhand; I am interested in her talent. Her aptitude for the magical sciences. I say talent, of course, because at this stage she’s got no developed skill to speak of. But she is talented, and no mistake.”

This verdict might have been put down to an excess of paternal pride, except Miss Adamson did not hear it like that. Captain Cathcart spoke of Charlotte’s talent not in the tones of a father boasting of his child, but those of a General assessing the fitness of a recruit. Even so, it would never do to give a parent the false impression of themselves as an educational authority, so Miss Adamson made haste to tactfully damp this flame.

“Of course we administer an entrance examination to all our new girls, Captain Cathcart. Charlotte is welcome to prove her aptitude at that time.”

“Certainly, certainly,” said Charlotte’s father, descending into disinterest once more. His hand continued to work to and fro across the back of the chair, his expression pulled into an abstracted frown. “I don’t ask you to take my word for it, of course. What do I know? Probably nothing, where kids her age are concerned. Maybe they’re all just brimming with a natural gift to start with, and lose it in stages as they go on. Or maybe it wears out for lack of interest. Certainly it’s not much use to them when they don’t want to use it.” His hand paused thoughtfully on one side of the chair. He seemed to arrive at some conclusion, and gave the chair a smart tap.

“I don’t know that you’ll be able to make her take an interest, Miss Adamson, but I hope you’ll cultivate her talent. She’s been under-served in that area for years, and probably I oughtn’t have let it continue. I should have had her trained up from the starting gate, but domestic harmony is nothing to trifle with, you understand.”

Miss Adamson did not, but she had met Mrs. Cathcart so she could at least imagine.

“We’ll be sure to place her appropriately,” she offered, finding that she did sympathize with the spirit of Captain Cathcart’s request, and wanting to assure him on that point, at least. “The entrance examination is designed with that aim in mind.”

“Yes, yes, I’ve no doubt, I’m sure,” the Captain murmured. His gaze had come unmoored again, sliding around, darting into corners in search of who knew what. “Examine her all you like, Miss Adamson. Examine her, train her up, and keep her safe.”

He was, all at once, halfway to the door. The interview seemed to be at an end, yet Miss Adamson was left with only the vaguest impression that it had even taken place. She frowned, watching Captain Cathcart put his hand on the door handle, then hastily smoothed the frown into faintly disgruntled neutrality when he spun around once more.

“You know,” he said earnestly, “I hope you won’t think it an impertinence, but they’re doing really amazing things with patent wards these days. Get ‘em in the Eaton catalogue myself. Tinker with the things a bit, of course; bring ‘em up to snuff and all that, but there’s no real need. They’re good quality, usually.” His hand skimmed lightly down the door frame, as if seeking an imperfection he had spotted there earlier, and finding it unaccountably gone. “I only mention it, of course, because I noticed you had three transcription spells running in this room when we arrived, and I’d bet my last button you were only the author of one.”

Following which parting sally, Captain Cathcart made a beautifully correct, not at all slovenly bow, and took his leave.

The spirit of homecoming which that night seized the teachers’ lounge was more than usually exuberant. A significant grant had come through by way of a generous patron, with explicit instruction that it was to be used on the replenishment of all classroom supplies and equipment where needed or desired, so the prospect of a number of long-coveted niceties had heightened everyone’s sense of camaraderie.

“But of course, Betty, you will be sure to get that rowing thingummy you were pining after at the end of last term,” Joyce Abernathy said gaily. “The band or belt or whatever it is you wanted them to test themselves on. And I shall have that set of Keats that I hadn’t dared add to my booklist because the last set of Keats is not entirely worn out yet, and Joan must have her easels, and Trudy her long-range aerial, and oh!” She sighed happily. “We’ll be magnificent. Just think of it.”

“We are all thinking of it, Joyce,” Miss Adamson assured her, softening what might have been considered censure with an understanding smile. “But let’s not spend it all before the cheque’s even cleared, shall we?”

“Of course not,” Joyce agreed. “But won’t it be fun?”

“It should be that,” Miss Adamson allowed, and looked around with pleasure at her assembled staff. “Well! Another term upon us. Our veterans returned for another year, our new girls settling in, or pretending to . . . what do we think of them so far?”

“Lucy Entwhistle will give us a run for our money,” Joan Beamish predicted in tones of ghoulish satisfaction. “Do you know she opened her trunk and right there on top were two magazines that . . . well. Her aunt said she didn’t know how she came by them, and I almost believed her, except how stealthy can the girl be if she didn’t even think to hide them farther down in the trunk?”

“It’s all to the good if she’s not stealthy, then,” Miss Adamson pointed out, and this point was acceded to.

“The youngest Gordon sister is a treat. Just as pleasant and outgoing as Nat was at her age. I could do with a few more Gordons, if they all come out like that. And the Harper girl seems all right; mother says she’s delicate, but her cheeks are full of roses and you know what mothers are.”

“Talk of mothers,” this was Helen Benning, the school secretary, leaning in with eyes alight, “Mrs. Cathcart applied to excuse Charlotte from Mrs. Campbell’s magic courses.”

“What, all of them?” Trudy Campbell demanded, more astonished than indignant to find herself so scorned. “Practical and theory?”

“Every last one! Of course I told her magical training is considered core curriculum at Miss Dunlap’s, and always has been, so Charlotte must take the classes. She said she quite understood, but anyone could see she didn’t like it.”

“Her husband said something about her thinking it unfashionable,” Miss Adamson recalled, and in so saying, the peculiar parting line of Captain Cathcart returned. She had swiftly got over her initial shock at his words, but they had left a bitter aftertaste which lingered now even hours later. “I don’t suppose anyone knows anything about that family? Trudy? Joan?”

“Cathcart?” That was Joan Beamish, whose cousin was very highly placed in society. Joan and similarly well-connected staff members were relied on for the type of gossip and inside information which was more freely available at better connected schools. “Not much to know. The Captain is something in government, one of those useless branches that exist to make jobs for people too rich to really need them. Every couple changes in regime somebody kicks up a fuss and tries to get it shut down, but it limps along all the same. You know the kind of thing; political magic. I do think the family’s lousy with talent, but they’ve never done much with it that I’ve heard. Probably thought it would have lowered them, like going into trade.”

“Mrs. Cathcart was a McDonald,” Trudy Campbell offered. “The grandmother came over to marry . . . oh, I’ve forgotten already. There are so many McDonalds. But fey as they come, every last one of them. There’s talent on both sides there, fashionable or not.” Her voice took on a note of eager longing; she was a coach scenting raw potential. “I can’t wait to get an assessment on that girl. How did she strike you, Maud?”

“Oh,” said Miss Adamson, “she’s nothing to worry about, whatever the parents are like. Charlotte seems sensible; mannerly, but not in an affected way. Quite sporty, too, so Betty will make good use of her. It wasn’t Charlotte I was wondering about; more the family.”

But she forbore to say why.

“She enrolled quite late, didn’t she?” Miss Abernathy ventured.

“Yes,” Maud reflected, “and I shouldn’t have been so inclined to take her except she came with a recommendation from no less than John Erskine.”

“Well,” laughed Trudy, “That should be all right, then.”

“Oh, yes,” Miss Adamson said hastily, her colour creeping up, “of course it should. I don’t pretend it’s not. And she had some manner of education before; at least, her mother indicated we stole her from Seton Hall.”

“Oh, well done!” This competitive exultation broke forth from Joan Beamish. “Another one. What are we up to now, a half dozen?”

“Joan!” Miss Adamson cried, but she was laughing. “Oh, it’s fine, I’m sure. And if you’re right about her, Trudy, she’ll be a credit to your program.”

“I bet she will,” Trudy said, fully confident. “Look, I know all too well that we disquiet the established families, but if we’re going to properly expand the magic program, we’ve got to get their girls. You’ve no idea, the potential there, but I should know. The church schools don’t give them anything at all in the way of training, and that’s only where they start out. If they go on to a place like Seton Hall then it all goes untapped, often for good. A rotten waste,” she concluded, disgusted.

“Well,” said Miss Adamson in mollifying tones, “you’ve a chance to tap Charlotte Cathcart’s potential all right; her mother may have tried to get around it, but her father seemed most interested in having her pursue a course of instruction with you. Get her assessment done up tomorrow, and you’ll know where you stand.”

This assurance seemed to satisfy Mrs. Campbell, but something in her own phrasing struck Miss Adamson. She sat back, considering. The words of Captain Cathcart resurfaced in her memory for far from the first time since their peculiar second meeting earlier in the day. Why should it unsettle her so, to hear him speak of the extra transcription spell? Of course he must have been mistaken. There was no reason, certainly, that he should be correct. And how should he even know? But of course, there had been Joan’s assessment of him, and that peculiar classification that Maud herself had not previously heard:

Political magic.

Severely disquieted, Miss Adamson felt impelled to separate Helen Benning from the crowd near the end of their gathering, pulling her to one side in the hallway and saying, with an air of abstraction,

“Helen, I suppose the transcription action that you had run on my office . . . I mean, there isn’t another one, is there? You didn’t order two?”

“Two?” Helen looked most astonished. “No indeed, Miss Adamson. I ordered only the one, and at last inspection it was in perfect working order. Why? Is something wrong?”

“No,” said Miss Adamson, “nothing wrong.” But in so saying, she was conscious of deception. At least, she did not know that something was wrong, but neither did she feel quite the easy confidence with which she imbued her words. “I only wondered. But if yours is working, and mine is working also, I don’t see how anything could be wrong.”

This last, at least, was true enough.

But she wondered all the same.

Dear Julia,

Thanks for the letter. I’m not so upset as I was when I first wrote. I agree Miss Dunlap’s doesn’t sound like your kind of place, but it’s turned out to suit me better than I thought. Nobody here is at all like what I thought they’d be, but it’s not bad.

The mistresses here are keen on everything they teach. It’s strange at first, having somebody so excited to hear you conjugate French verbs, but once you get used to everybody really caring about things, you almost begin to care about them yourself. I don’t say I’d be able to traipse across Quebec without embarrassing myself just yet, but at least I know how to say we all did a thing in every tense going, and I think I’m getting the hang of Geometry at last. Though I don’t suppose anybody in Quebec cares about that.

I’m no earthly good at Magic, though. It’s been humbling. I thought I was pretty good when we were little and made games of it, but I guess night lights and talking picture books are nothing like deep study and planned workings. We were quite kids then, weren’t we? We did whatever came into our heads, and it seemed to go right. This is the real stuff, with a teacher who knows what’s what, and it’s only too clear I haven’t got a clue. This must be what Dad was always on about, wanting us to have a proper course of study and getting after Mother that we needed to be trained up properly. Now that I’m having to catch up on the training part I can see why.

I’ve had two letters from Winnie so far, and one from May. They tried to make it sound as if things are very dull at Seton without me. I know that can’t be true, but it’s nice of them to pretend. When I start feeling down about not being there with them anymore, I remind myself at least I’m not stuck rooming with Georgie this year. Winnie got her last year, and she said Georgie has terrible wind.

My roommate here is called Harriet, and thankfully no wind there to speak of. She’s captain of the lacrosse team and we get on very well. She’s two years ahead of me, so closer to your age than mine, but we still have some classes together because here they don’t mind as much about your age as what they think you’ll be good at, so they place you in courses for that. We even worked out that we know some of the same people. She’s friends with Phyllis and Louisa Truscott, and she thinks she might have met you with Betty’s crowd at the lake last year, but only in passing.

You’ll laugh, but ever since I got here I’ve been dreaming about Nurse. Isn’t that strange? I suppose it could be homesickness, but they’re not bad dreams. Nothing like Mother used to do, dreaming about those people in the war until she could hardly sleep for fearing she’d see another one. I don’t mind these dreams in the least. I see Nurse standing in the nursery, clear as if I were back there in my bed again, and I feel quite certain that everything is well looked after. As if I couldn’t possibly worry about a thing.

I don’t suppose you’ve seen her, too?

I don’t know anything about your green dress, sorry. You’ll need to ask Mother if she has it at home.

Love,

Charlie

“Good afternoon, Miss Cathcart.” Mrs. Campbell’s smile as she welcomed Charlotte to Magical Theory and Associated Practice seemed especially hopeful. Charlotte, by now conscious of the tragic inevitability of dashing those hopes, managed a wan smile in return.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Campbell,” she murmured, and slid into her seat beside Harriet. The sooner they got started, she supposed, the sooner she could get the disappointment over with.

To be fair, disappointment was mostly Charlotte’s word. If Mrs. Campbell was disappointed in Charlotte’s performance of the past fortnight, she never made Charlotte feel it. Mrs. Campbell was warm and encouraging, so prone to saying “well, never mind,” and “I think you are coming along very well!” and other thoughtful falsehoods of the type.

Charlotte knew that to be placed in this class at all must mean Mrs. Campbell thought she was equal to the performance expected of her, and Mrs. Campbell no doubt patiently anticipated the day that something would click and Charlotte could flourish. But Charlotte had so far failed to live up to this expectation, and even if Mrs. Campbell evinced no actual disappointment, Charlotte was mired in more than enough of it to make her head swim.

Heedless of Charlotte’s swimming head, Mrs. Campbell took up her position beside the blackboard with every appearance of optimism.

“All together now, girls,” she said cheerfully, and they rose in concert.

Class opener was always a recital drill. Unlike French recital drills where a new set of verbs were on the board daily, so you might forgive yourself for any errors of conjugation, in M.T. the drill was always the same. It should have been simplicity itself, standing together to read out a spell that never changed, yet Charlotte quailed before it. Even with Harriet at her side, trying to nudge and whisper and offer help when she could, she could not manage to get the thing said from start to finish. The opening spell was practically the first thing any girl at Miss Dunlap’s learned to do in M.T., and Charlotte was dolefully certain it must be her lack of exposure to magical practice and theory which made her so rotten at it every time.

“You’re not quite keeping time, Charlotte,” Mrs. Campbell noted, one verse into the drill.

Charlotte flushed. She knew perfectly well she was not, but she had no idea how to correct that.

Despite the spell never changing, Charlotte still wasn’t even sure what it said. Certainly not start to finish. She could look at any one word easily enough, but the minute she tried to string them all together the words squirmed out from under her eye, swimming around on the blackboard of their own volition, provoking her to switch them and mangle pronunciation and, inevitably, get it all somehow badly wrong.

It wasn’t even Latin, which would have been a respectable excuse for her struggle. Charlotte had never taken Latin, having long been warned against it by her father. “Dead languages are a gateway to necromancy,” he’d cautioned on more than one occasion. “They’re a ticklish business. You stay away from dead languages, Charlie; don’t want to go summoning diphthongs beyond all means of mortal control.”

But these words were plain English, or at least they were supposed to be. Certainly when her classmates read them out, they sounded like nothing so simple as the earliest poems one learned from the reader in lower school. There was something restful and familiar in it, those pretty verses about grass and sky and the wind in the trees. There was usually also a bit about a yellow door, though she was never clear on if it came near the middle or the end. Sometimes she even thought it was the first thing she was supposed to say, though whenever she looked to the start of the poem, the door was never there.

Mrs. Campbell’s pointer tapped helpfully at the next word, which was clarity, and Charlotte read it with an almost agonized sense of irony.

It was the only word in the line she managed to get right.

The business was especially bad this afternoon. Sometimes, when Charlotte gave up trying to read from the board and instead concentrated on what the girls around her were saying, she almost thought she could make it out. Some classes she even managed to get through a verse or two herself, just by copying the ones she heard the others say. The morning’s bright song part was fine, she never minded that, but somewhere between the call of clear air and together we travel, beneath the blue sky, she started to stumble. The lines didn’t seem to go in order any more. Sometimes the esses got caught between her teeth, and at others she would blank on whole lines, staring and silent, trying to remember why she was even speaking in the first place.

She could usually recover from this at first, and try to push through, but inevitably by the time they came to the sweet soft green hill and everybody else started to talk about the air in their lungs and how good it felt to roll bright and merry, down-derry-down, she would bite her own tongue, or fall into a coughing fit, and count the effort a loss.

Today she never even got near the hill. She wandered three or four times back over the bit about striking out, we merry band, before she gave it up for lost and lapsed into intelligently-shaped lip movements that made no sound at all. At the end of the drill she could not bear the sight of Mrs. Campbell’s encouraging smile, and dropped to her seat to conceal her mortification with a theory book.

The day’s assigned reading was about as engrossing as any page of theory could be, but Charlotte managed to persuade herself of its fascination long enough to miss the approach of her teacher. It was Harriet’s toe knocking against her shin that jerked her from the section on Workings of Removal; With Incantation and Without to look up and find Mrs. Campbell standing above her, craning her neck just a little to get a better view of Charlotte’s copybook.

“Never mind, Miss Cathcart,” Mrs. Campbell said kindly, in answer to Charlotte’s look of quiet panic, “I only wanted to see how you were getting on.” She leaned over and indicated a scribbled notation near the upper margin of her notes. “You’ll want to underline the second syllable. This working can be done without incantation, but if you plan to speak aloud it’s a matter of some urgency to get the inflection just right.”

“Yes, of course, thank you.” Charlotte dragged her pen awkwardly along the section so indicated. A quick sideways glance confirmed that Harriet’s own copybook revealed that, not only was it much more neatly laid out than Charlotte’s, with intelligent margins and notes taken in a beautiful hand, but she also had the inflection marked exactly right.

Charlotte sank into further despair. Although she didn’t imagine she was the first student to struggle with the course, she doubted many others would feel their difficulties so keenly. Knowing her own parents and their abilities as she did, Charlotte was so painfully aware of what she should be able to do that finding herself incapable of doing any of it had fairly well convinced her that, whatever magical talent she might possess, it was wholly inoperable by Charlotte herself.

Like having a heart, she thought, but being unable to dictate the speed and timing of one’s pulse. It was in there, but she didn’t really have any say over its function.

She was still brooding over this when the bell rang and Mrs. Campbell moved to dismiss the class. The girls around her closed textbooks and copy books, capping pens and going through the motions of end-of-day, but Charlotte was arrested in her progress by an additional word from the teacher.

“Miss Cathcart?” Mrs. Campbell made a little signal. “I’d like you to stay behind.”

Charlotte sank back into her seat. Her stomach sank even further. She managed a reassuring smile for Harriet’s inquiring eyebrows, and shook her head.

“I’ll be right along to practice,” she promised. “Soon as I can.”

Mrs. Campbell appeared sensible of having inspired anxiety in her pupil; at least, she did not wait long to smile her own reassurances and, once settled behind her own desk, beckon Charlotte to approach. Charlotte complied with comparative haste and passable grace, then stood before the desk making tiny, unobtrusive knots of her fingers in the skirt of her school pinafore until Mrs. Campbell finished examining some handwritten notes and looked up with another, even more reassuring smile.

“How are you finding the course so far?” she wondered.

Charlotte, through paper-dry mouth and an inexplicable sense of having disgraced everything anyone she cared about ever stood for, conquered the mountain of an intelligible reply.

“I . . . oh, fine, I think.”

Mrs. Campbell smiled even more gently, because of course, thought Charlotte, she would never call her pupil a liar. She’d let Charlotte’s own conscience indict her without any effort on Mrs. Campbell’s part at all.

“Charlotte, I do know that third-year magic comes with a steep learning curve, especially as an entry point. These are principles and concepts far beyond any they’d have handed you, not just at Seton Hall, but practically anywhere else. Our magic program is among the most advanced in the Commonwealth; you would ordinarily have to enter private tutelage to get anything comparable. It is not unusual for our new girls to struggle with the curriculum here, and I don’t want you to feel like you can’t tell me when you’re having difficulty.”

Charlotte’s face warmed. She kept her hands hidden in the folds of her pinny, but did unknot them just a little.

“No, Mrs. Campbell,” she agreed, then paused. “I mean, thank you. I won’t.”

Mrs. Campbell waited patiently, and Charlotte understood what was expected of her. Mrs. Campbell wanted her to express her difficulties. She wanted her ask for help. It was a perfectly reasonable expectation, and kindly meant. Charlotte made her answer in all frank humility.

“Well, I think you’re right. I’ve not had any training of this kind. I expect I’ll be very bad at everything here, no matter what my assessments might say.”

Mrs. Campbell glanced down at the handwritten forms in front of her, and Charlotte, following her gaze, recognized the foolscap she’d used for her entrance examinations, and her handwriting on it. Mrs. Campbell seemed to have made a number of notations beside many of her answers, and Charlotte was suddenly overcome with the desire to read them; to see what she could have written, and what Mrs. Campbell had thought about it, that made her believe Charlotte was a fit for this course rather than one of the several entry-level classes also taught.

“Your assessments weren’t intended to evaluate your grasp of theoretical magic,” Mrs. Campbell explained. “Theory can always be taught. My entrance assessments are meant to test a girl in the raw. I much prefer to get a base reading on what you’re starting with, aptitude wise. You came to us with quite a lot of that.”

“Yes, Dad said so too,” Charlotte agreed, almost without thinking. “He’s always said that. And the doctor I saw last month said the same, and even Mother, in her own way, thinks I’m probably going to be good at this. Like you do. And I want to do well, but I’ve started to wonder if there’s a problem with me. Something wrong inside me that stops me using magic properly. Because I try, I really do try, but nothing ever seems to come of it.”

Mrs. Campbell, far from looking alarmed or disappointed, looked as if she saw exactly why Charlotte might speak and think as she did.

“You know,” she said, “I understand what that’s like. My own mother travelled in society much as yours does, and like your mother I was brought up to expect I would marry, and continue in that life. But then the war came, and it changed things.”

She must have caught a certain look on Charlotte’s face at this point, for she smiled in wry understanding.

“Yes, I’m sure you’ve heard people my age say such things so many times that the words have lost all meaning. But it really did! There was a great sense of purpose in those days; a feeling of something much bigger than oneself, so that to pitch in and help was as though one had found one’s highest calling. We all felt it, though it affected some of us in more lasting ways than others.

“I knew after the war that I could not continue in life as my mother expected I might, and so it proved. I trained as a school teacher, and secured my post here, and it was exactly the right path for me. There is so much more that I can accomplish in my role here than I could in any other. But of course, to defy the guidance and direction of one’s own mother, no matter how worthwhile the goal, does come at a certain cost.”

Charlotte, finding herself too well perceived, flushed hot and prickly under Mrs. Campbell’s gentle comprehension. She looked away.

“It’s not . . . I mean, Mother doesn’t insist that I . . . she only expects.”

“The weight of an expectation can be a heavier burden than a command, though, can’t it? Because to feel that weight means you must have taken that expectation inside yourself. And once something is inside you, once it’s a part of your own understanding, it is a much more difficult thing to shake off.”

Charlotte was not sure some expectations could be shaken off at all. Though she was not conscious of saying so, Mrs. Campbell seemed again to understand.

“I don’t pretend it’s easy. Worthwhile things seldom are. It’s a great deal to shoulder; the need to do what is important, and to do right by one’s family. Some nights one can’t sleep for counting the costs. But in the end, I think, it’s worth it.”

Mrs. Campbell considered the papers in front of her again, and seemed to reach a decision. She shuffled them tidily into a dark green envelope on her desk, and set this to the side.

“I think what’s holding you back at present is beyond my power to ease or release. I only ask that you try to forget, as much as possible, how capable you think everyone expects you to be, and know that you are here on your own merit. I promise you, Charlotte, that as difficult as the tasks I set before you may seem, I would not have enrolled you in this course if I imagined there were no hope of your success.”

She looked up at Charlotte with deep and penetrating sincerity, so that Charlotte felt all at once very small and light and, again, almost unbearably seen. She could not think of a reply to make, and Mrs. Campbell, thankfully, did not require one.

“I don’t expect you will believe me. Not right away. But I think you are an honest enough girl that you can’t help seeing the truth of this in time.”

Then she nodded her dismissal, and Charlotte left the room beneath, if possible, a cloud of confusion and uncertainty even greater than the one under which she’d arrived.

“Trudy, hello.” Maud Adamson looked up in some surprise at the arrival of the magic mistress. Mrs. Campbell’s presence in her office was not a foreign one, but she was more inclined to seek an audience in the corner of the teachers’ lounge or under cover of the usual mealtime hubbub than something so formal as an office appearance. “Is anything wrong?”

“I suppose it must look that way,” Trudy Campbell allowed, crossing to Miss Adamson’s desk with an air of rushed apology. “Gosh, I don’t think I’ve been in here since you had the new chairs brought in. They’ve held up well.” She settled into one with every appearance of pleasure. “I’ve actually come in active search of a solution. It’s Charlotte Cathcart. She’s not doing too badly in my class, but she could be doing so much better.”

“I did warn you,” Miss Adamson said gently, “that I thought you might be placing a little too much importance on the entrance assessments. I don’t doubt Charlotte’s ability, but even so, there’s no point asking a girl to run before she’s even standing on her own two feet.”

“Oh, but it’s not that!” Trudy leaned forward eagerly in her chair, hands knotted tightly in her lap as they were always bound to do, whenever she was working especially hard to keep herself in check. “It’s not incapacity or even obstinacy; nothing like that. She’s just getting in her own way, and I don’t like to see it.”

Miss Adamson listened intelligently as Mrs. Campbell outlined the bulk of Charlotte’s difficulty, and her suspicion of the reason for it. At last she gave a thoughtful nod, and tapped a slow rhythm with the cap of her pen, turning the problem over in her mind.

“You don’t suppose she’d have greater confidence if she were placed in a lower course of instruction? Set tasks and theory that feel surmountable to her, at least?”

“To the contrary,” Mrs. Campbell said promptly. “If the girl’s her own source of difficulty, putting her in a lower class to also find herself a failure would be the worst thing we could do. At least in third year she can see it’s a more advanced curriculum, and the temptation to blame herself is accordingly lessened. In third year she can allow the possibility that it’s the curriculum, and keep from sinking into a total funk about herself.

“Only, it’s not the curriculum. Because she could do it, Maud, all of it. I’m certain of that. Not with skill or finesse, of course; not yet. She’s not had the training. But the raw magic is there sure enough, and the fact she can’t seem to tap into it is none of the course’s doing. That’s all her. Inhibited, or blocked, or . . . stuck, somehow. Shut up inside her. It will take a lot of patient working on her to get it out, but it’s in there, and no mistake.”

“Do you think it’s a medical problem?” Miss Adamson wondered, a note of deeper concern entering her tone. “Something gone awry, perhaps, in . . . in a physical way?”

“Metaphysical maybe,” Mrs. Campbell said, “but it’s more likely to be the sort of thing that requires an analyst than a physician. It’s in her head. I’m sure of it. And it will take time, of course, to help her work through it or around it or whatever the way out for her is going to be, but I thought if perhaps we could link it to her hobbies, or pastimes, or whatever they are, we might be able to make inroads faster.”

Miss Adamson said, with beautiful humility, that she was afraid she didn’t follow.

“Well, it would have to be something that made her comfortable, you see? Some part of her life where she was really full of confidence in her own ability, and didn’t mind letting it show. So I thought a hobby she’s already fond of, a skill she has, or anything where she’s sure she can succeed, would be the way to draw her other abilities out.”

Miss Adamson put up one eyebrow in very discreet amusement.

“Mrs. Campbell,” she said, “are you volunteering to coach the lacrosse team?”

Mrs. Campbell looked deeply nonplussed. “Oh hell,” she said faintly, and Miss Adamson smiled.

“That’s the spirit.”

Captain Cathcart studied the map put up on the wall with the air of one flying through densest fog. At last he frowned, and shook his head.

“I don’t like it, sir.”

“No?” John Erskine glanced sideways, considered, and gave a slow nod. “Well, that’s understandable. Bad business, revolution, and it seems to be flaring up in any number of pockets just now.”

Cathcart, busy tracking the series of pinpoints which signified the location of those revolutions, retained his frown. “Some very unlikely pockets at that. I shouldn’t say it was a natural set of occurrences.”

“Shouldn’t you? Hmm. Well, perhaps not. Certainly,” Erskine indicated a bright pinpoint with a nod, “this little patch was reported last month to be very settled. Yet at last report they up and took off their king’s entire head. A very extreme course of action, even with provocation.”

“Was there provocation?”

“I don’t know as there was. Yes, I understand your concern.” He stood back a little from the map, indulging in a moment’s perplexed kinship with his subordinate before the urge to philosophize won out once more.

“Of course, you know this is the reason our department exists in the first place. Not to say we should be glad of revolution, but we can at least find in this unrest proof of our own purpose. After things died down following the war, they knew there’d be cause for us to stand in reserve. Never know when somebody will take it into his head to do something of this sort, and so we’ve got to be ready to jump in and stamp it out.”

Cathcart made the expected noises of agreement, but his attention was clearly directed at something other than the business of stamping. His gaze roamed shiftlessly ‘round the map, alighting here and there on a telltale pin. He held himself with the air of one who longed to fidget, but held no object to fiddle with.

“It’s like that business at the lake,” he murmured, almost to himself. “Back at camp.”

Erskine looked at him in real surprise.

“What, during the war?”

“Yes. You remember how it shook out? The incredible amount of power it took to rile ‘em up at the top. How Fanshaw got tossed out his ear for no reason in particular, and they brought in C.B. instead.”

“C.B. . . . ah! Yes, Taylor’s man.” Erskine pulled thoughtfully on one end of his moustache. “Foul to-do that was. Whole department nearly came a cropper. Lucky we caught him when we did.” He paused. “Erm. Should say, lucky you caught him. That was entirely your show.”

Cathcart stood peculiarly straight and still. His face, if Charlotte could have seen in that moment, would have reminded her very like it looked in Ebadmur, when he’d come over all chalky. Erskine did not notice, but considered the map in light of this new perspective.

“You think it’s something like that, do you? Bleed the magic out of some unlikely source and use it to do a powerful working?”

“I think it could be, sir. At least . . .” Cathcart hesitated, thinking of the look on his daughter’s face the moment before her strength deserted her and she collapsed in his arms. The way torrents, tidal waves, of magic had gone coursing through his body at such dizzying rates he’d had no earthly notion of where even to direct them all.

In wartime fuel-ups they’d only siphoned off the magical equivalent of a neighbour’s cup of sugar; Charlie had, in all innocence, offered him everything she had. If such a transfer were effected on a much larger scale . . . Cathcart refused to complete the thought. Instead he only cleared his throat and concluded, “At least, I think it bears looking into.”

“Well, it’s as good a theory as any we’ve got to go on. I daresay it may even be something like that. But would it be practicable, do you think? Get all that set up for the long range? How would a fellow even manage it? You’d need a lot of folks to bleed off of, too. Can’t forget that. They’d need to be in on it, too, in order to do the incantation. If this is an affair of that kind there’d be a lot of people behind it, and no mistake.”

“That’s true. But it’s how it strikes me all the same.”

“And to what end?” Erskine asked, though more with the air of one talking to himself than expecting any real answer. “C.B. was put in for reasons that made perfect sense, once you knew his angle, but this business has no aim behind it that I can see. There’s no single force that could benefit from all these places turning upside down.”

“So not all of them, then,” Cathcart suggested. “Allow that some are regular revolutions, if only some of them make sense. Or . . .” He paused; fumbled for the thread of a notion, grasped at, and lost it. A bitter scowl twisted his features. “Damn. Almost had something there.”

Erskine looked sideways at him, and cleared his throat.

“That old business troubling you much these days?”

Cathcart took his time before answering, and when he did, his tone was affectedly casual.

“I’m all right. This business is the main thing now. I’d like permission to pursue that line of inquiry, if I might; see if I can’t find out where the magic’s being shored up.”

“Well, by all means, ask around if you like. You’ve got a good instinct for this sort of thing. You may turn something up.” Erskine seemed on the point of turning away when another thought struck him.

“How is little Charlie settling in at Miss Dunlap’s, anyhow? Heard much from her yet?”

“I believe Annie got a few lines, but no, nothing for me as of yet.” Cathcart grimaced. “I’m afraid she may still hold it against me, sending her there.”

“Ah, well, she’ll come around. Bound to. Charlie’s not the grudge bearing sort. In the meantime, I’m sure they’re just keeping her too busy to write.”

“I suppose so,” said Captain Cathcart. But he spoke without conviction.

Dear Charlotte,

I was so pleased to receive your letter. Your penmanship shows some improvement already; I trust they oblige you to practice.

Of course I am happy to hear you are settling in, and that you find your courses of instruction agreeable. Aunt Millicent was pleased to hear you are enrolled at Miss Dunlap’s, and indicated that she sent you a text of some kind she thinks may benefit you academically. I expect she means well, and certainly you must write to thank her, but do not burden yourself with any guilt if it proves outdated. Of course one understands that the educational standard of her day must have been advanced and expanded upon since then, and I ask only that you are polite enough to decline to mention it. She can be so touchy.

I am gratified to know that you have found the girls friendly and your mistresses congenial. Certainly I am not surprised to learn you are excelling in most courses of study, and I trust that you will not be long in likewise making sense of magical theory. Of course my family have always possessed some natural metaphysical capacity , though I was certainly not, in my own youth, encouraged to pursue it with any academic rigour. But we must keep abreast of the times, and who knows but that magic may even become the fashion for young girls by and by. If it does, you and your new friends will certainly hold an advantage.

I recall your roommate introducing herself to us as Gardner, and although I could not place the name at the time, on consideration I believe that she must be Hester Gardner’s great-niece. Miss Gardner is an old schoolfriend of your Aunt Millicent, and they maintain a friendly connection. She is a trifle eccentric, but they are an old family, and well established in the city. We should be glad to welcome Harriet here at half term if she would accept the invitation.

The garden continues to be tiresome. I am unable to entertain at present because the patio had to be taken up, which I distinctly recall telling your father I would not permit to happen. I am sure he was not listening at the time, and now all the paving stones are in a muddle along the side wall so that something may be done with the drains or the wards or whatever runs underneath that part of the lawn. In this state the garden is not fit for any civilised function, so I was obliged to host my Wednesday society at Aunt Millicent’s instead, which you may trust she will not soon allow me to forget.

I enclose a clipping from the society column, where you will see that your name appears under Notable in Transit. I was pleased to see they got your name right, as well as that of your school, but I’m afraid they made an error over the colour of your capelet. I suppose this is what happens when they send only a junior reporter to the quay. You may wish to make a note of the error when you put it in your album.

Write as you are able.

Your loving,

Mother

“Ooo-ooh!” Harriet Gardner made a show of dropping to her bed with a gasp, and clutched her stomach. “That’s it, Charlie, you’ve done for me.”

“That wasn’t me,” Charlotte retorted, “that was the meatloaf.”

“I deny it!” Harriet cried. “I deny the second helping, too. It was you, you beast, and your lacrosse game. It’s not enough that we are coming up on season’s end, you’ve also gone and ended me. I am done for.” Upon which dramatic declaration, Harriet expired with an artistic groan.

“I don’t see how you can blame me,” Charlotte laughed, settling onto her own bed with a descent devoid of comparable dramatic flair. “Never mind that was all over ages ago, before supper or mail call, and I watched you tuck away two portions of a very mediocre meatloaf; I plead innocence on the grounds that I’m not half the player you are, and you know it. If you’re done in, it’s none of my doing.”

“Well, maybe not,” Harriet allowed, though she did not sit up. “But I’m done in all the same. And you mustn’t malign the meatloaf; it was heavenly, and I was wrung out well before the first perfect morsel even graced my fork. The others were draggy too, don’t you think? I’ve never seen them play so badly. And I don’t think I can really blame Mrs. Campbell for that, either.”

“Oh, no,” Charlotte agreed promptly. “I know she doesn’t know much about lacrosse, but she didn’t direct us wrong. Just sort of stood there and called out encouraging things. It was rather sweet, if useless.”

“It was exactly that. Did you see the look on Miss Adamson’s face when she came out to watch? You could tell it was all she could do not to laugh. Poor Mrs. Campbell; whatever she did to get stuck with us, it must have been awful. But the girls were really something else. I know we’re never at our best when we practice after M.T., but today was a new type of terrible. I’d call us sluggish, even.”

“I suppose.” Charlotte considered. “I don’t feel any too tired myself, but I did nod off a little during last class, so possibly I rested up. Or maybe I wasn’t playing as hard as the rest of you.”

“Weren’t you, though!” Harriet cried. “Why, you liar, you had me going flat out just to keep up! I take it back, it was your doing, and in lieu of flowers at my funeral you may bring me chocolate while I live. There’s a bit left in my drawer. Hand it over, and I won’t leave a note incriminating you in my death.”

Charlotte acquiesced to this bit of blackmail, retrieving the scrap of chocolate in its tattered foil. She then sank onto the bed to reread the letter from her mother, and Harriet, catching sight mid-nibble, professed an interest in its contents, so Charlotte read it out.

At the end of the letter, catching sight of Harriet’s indescribable expression, Charlotte flushed.

“She’s not . . . I mean, she isn’t as bad as all that, really. Not always. She only . . .” Charlotte attempted to find a suitable description which would communicate the gentler reality of Marianne Cathcart to an outsider. “She has her passions.”

Harriet sucked thoughtfully on her chocolate, considering.

“Mothers do,” she allowed. “And aunts, come to that. Your Aunt Millicent must have any number of peculiar passions, if she’s friends with my auntie. Though even Aunt Hetty never dared to send me schoolbooks as a present! Only imagine. What sort of book do you think it will be?”

Charlotte, in answer, fished a slim grey volume out from under her pillow and held it up. Harriet bobbed up in bed to squint at it, greatly intrigued.

“Whatever is ‘Arcane Theory and Practice’? Oooh, is it dirty?”

“Harriet!” Charlotte laughed. “Who do you take me for, Lucy Entwhistle? No, it’s about magic. She’s made an inscription saying now I’m in a place with a decent course of study, I may get some use out of it. But it’s miles beyond me yet; I wouldn’t know how to even pronounce half of what’s in here, never mind do what they call ‘manipulating the field.’”

“What’s that,” Harriet wondered, “a strategy for games?”

Charlotte conceded some similarity.

“It’s not a lacrosse pitch, though. The thing they call the field is some magical network that runs beneath everything. Like longitude and latitude, only it’s metaphysical properties laid out in a sort of gridwork the whole world over. And they say people with metaphysical talent don’t really have magic so much as they have the capacity to access this network; an ability to tap into the grid. When you use the grid to do a working, they call it manipulating the field.”

“Hrmm.” Harriet rolled onto her back and studied her roommate with a canny eye. “It might not be the education that Lucy Entwhistle can offer, but for a book you say is miles above you, you seem to have a decent grasp of it already.”

Charlotte flushed. “Just because I read a bit of the introduction, doesn’t mean I understand it.”

Harriet brushed this modesty aside.

“Your problem, Charlie,” she decided, passing the last square of half-melty chocolate back across the bed to soften the blow of incoming criticism, “is you think you’ve got to be all silly and humble about yourself, and not make a really big noise about what you can do.”

“What I can do?” Charlotte echoed, disbelieving. “What can I do?”

“Well, you’ve got yourself placed in third-year magic theory despite coming from Seton Hall. I don’t mind telling you that’s never happened before. You must have done something awfully impressive at your entrance examination to convince Mrs. Campbell to take a chance on you. And your lacrosse game is ever so much more than decent.”

“Oh,” said Charlotte, “lacrosse. Yes, I’m not bad at lacrosse.”

“Hrmm.” Harriet appraised her shrewdly. “So maybe it isn’t you think you’ve got to be modest about what you can do; maybe you really don’t know.”

“And I suppose you do?” Charlotte frowned. Harriet dismissed her roommate’s wounded dignity with an airy wave of a chocolate-smeared hand.

“Don’t take offence, please. It’s so pointless when it’s not over something important. Did I take offence at hearing your mama wants you to drag me home by my hair like I’m an embossed invitation to whatever shambles the war made of city society? I did not. Because that’s not important. Now, do try to understand. This is like when a girl turns up here who’s a really good runner, or has a wicked backhand, or whatever other talent we happen to be in need of. She doesn’t always know she’s any good at that particular thing, and sometimes she wants a lot of training before she can use it the way it’s really meant for, but the minute we catch sight of her potential, we’re bound to get excited about it all the same. You see?”

She propped her chin up on her knuckles, staring searchingly into her roommate’s face.

“You’ve got a marvellous hand with a lacrosse stick, Charlie, and in the ordinary way of things I’d be glad enough of that. But it’s nothing next to the way you skipped out of M.T. today, while it was all the rest of us could do to limp onto the field. Did you really not see that? One hour with Mrs. Campbell, and we’re through. We always slump around at practice on a day we finish with M.T. because that class on top of the others is more than we can recover from. Whereas you . . .”

Harriet sucked a bit of chocolate off her pinky finger, pondering.

“It’s the damndest thing. Coming in here late as you did, from Seton Hall no less, and you’re still head and shoulders above most in our year when it comes to whatever you want to call it. Metaphysical capacity, manipulating the field, magic . . . I don’t know. Whatever it is that a person needs to really be good at that thing, you’ve got it.”

Charlotte frowned. She put her back to Harriet and rummaged around in search of her night clothes, not wanting to say it was easy enough not to feel tired when you’d spent a whole class unable to do any of the magic you were expected to. Harriet kindly did not interrupt her rummaging, but waited for Charlotte to fetch out a nightie before she made a thoughtful query, in tones just a shade too casual to be believed.

“On the subject of having it . . . is your family the same?”

“Same about what?”

“Oh, you know. Magic. Field manipulating. Whatever you want to call it. Are your parents the same way?”

“What way?” Charlotte spoke with a bitter edge. “Good but don’t know it?”

“Temper,” Harriet chided, but without rancour. “I only wondered. Because . . .”

She did not finish the sentence. Charlotte turned to find her roommate’s attention diverted to the collection of photos that covered the top of Charlotte’s little chest of drawers, framed studio shots alongside more casual snaps of Charlotte with Julia, Mother and Dad. She followed Harriet’s gaze to the nearest portrait of Dad: a candid, close study Julia had captured last summer at the lake. His head was thrown back and his eyes had that clear twinkle they got just before he came out with something outrageous. Charlotte could only imagine the fire of Mother’s reaction to whatever he must have said next.

“Why?” she asked.

Harriet shrugged.

“Oh, you hear things. About it running in families, I mean. I know my old auntie is always saying it does, though I think she found herself disproved in me. I can do the basic stuff, but not much more than that. She says that’s the Amory influence in me, of course, and she may be right; my mother has no earthly ability to speak of. Does yours? As much as your father, I mean?”

“Yes,” Charlotte said, after some hesitation. “At least, I think so. But she doesn’t like to do anything with it.”

“I think mothers often don’t,” Harriet said vaguely. Charlotte could not think of a suitable answer to this, so she gathered up her nightgown without comment and went to brush her teeth before changing for bed.

In the dream, Nurse was at the doorway. She was clutching the handle, though whether fighting to open the door or keep it closed was unclear. Charlotte sat on her cot, breathless, exhausted, and watched as her magic filled the room around her. It flickered and splashed against the walls, like an animal newly trapped in a net, desirous of nothing more than breaking free. If the door opened, Charlotte knew, it would all get out. It would be gone.

She wanted to get off the bed to go to the door herself. She wanted to help. But Nurse did not call to her, and without the summons, Charlotte was too scared to act. She stayed huddled on the bed, her knees drawn up to her chest, as her heart raced faster and faster and faster. She opened her mouth to scream—

Charlotte bolted up in her bed with a wet, rasping gasp. Her chest ached and itched, and she found she had been digging at it even in her sleep, scratching at the neck of her nightie in an effort to chase the source of her discomfort right to the bone.

“Oh!” she said.

For a moment the temptation was on her to reach in and open, but then the remnants of sleep fell away, and she shrank back. There was nothing inside her she wanted open; not now. Especially not after Ebadmur. Instead, she got out of bed, padded across to her bureau and scrounged up a stub of pencil and a sheet of foolscap. With shaking hand, with the support of scant, watery trickles of moonlight leaking in at the window, Charlotte dashed off a few frightened lines. She enumerated in brutal simplicity the nature of her dream, the behaviour of her magic, and the last time she remembered that particular feeling in her chest.

Then she signed it, folded it up, and took it back to bed with her for the night.

First thing in the morning, she would put it in an envelope and send it to her father.

“Oh, yes!” Mrs. Campbell applauded with untutored enthusiasm as Linda Veriker, who had made the lacrosse team purely so that the team could make numbers, galloped gamely down the field, stick extended before her. “Oh well done!”

“Well done?” Harriet looked as if her eyes might start from her head. “Walking the dog all the way to the net, and she says—”

“Shh-hh,” Charlotte said, a trifle urgently, as Mrs. Campbell seemed attracted by this flurry of derision. “She doesn’t know. And Linda has come a long way since she started.”

“That’s all due to Marie,” Harriet said, which was true enough. Marie D’Ailleboust, an extremely self-effacing girl who was unarguably their best player, had taken Linda on as her own final-year project. Her undemanding style of tutelage had meshed well with Linda’s near-constant state of hopeless confusion, allowing her to progress to the point that the style of play Harriet had so derided—cradling the ball before her and bearing it in that manner down the field—was at last not beyond her. “If Mrs. Campbell starts encouraging that sort of play as any kind of end goal, how long until you think Linda will be right back where she started?”

Charlotte, who didn’t think such a catastrophe was particularly likely, merely shrugged.

“It’s nearly season’s end anyway,” she pointed out. “Marie can work with her through the winter, and who knows. Come spring she might surprise us all.”

“She’d have to,” said Harriet, who seemed more than usually tired and correspondingly cranky. She bit back a yawn and moved off to the side of the field, anticipating a pass. Charlotte, her blood humming with ready confidence, moved in the opposing direction, the better to be in a position to intercept. Her feet struck the ground with an unusually pleasing rhythm, and for a moment she seemed to feel the very earth beneath her move in harmony with her goal.

As if it turned and glided with her understanding of the pitch, the necessity of her purpose, and . . . click.

Charlotte forgot the game. Forgot the girls around her, the ball in play, the very stick in her hand . . . she would even have forgotten the field itself, except it was the field that drew her focus now. The pitch shimmered. Like the air under her father’s hand in Ebadmur had shimmered, so that he could speak it into curtain form and draw it back from the enchantment hidden beneath it.

Only there was no enchantment under the grass. This was part of it, woven through it, running over the surface of the earth itself. Like a skin, or a net or a . . .

Oh, thought Charlotte, as simply and clearly as one remembers the lyrics to a long-forgotten tune. Of course; it’s the field.

And as she thought this she shifted her feet in time with her new understanding, watching the gridwork hum in response to her movement.

It knows me, she thought, then corrected herself. It’s a part of me. But no, that wasn’t quite right either. Too one sided. This felt reciprocal. I’m a part of it, and it of me.

She almost didn’t want to move, except she also desperately wanted to move, to see if she understood it any better standing in a new place than she stood now. Tentatively, fearful it might vanish, she put a foot forward . . .

“Charlotte!”

The warning cry did not alarm her, though it must have come from somewhere very close. Certainly the ball was simplicity itself to deal with. She caught it in the pocket of her net with a hard, pleasing thwock and fired it off to Harriet where she waited. Harriet took the pass and ran with it, but not before Charlotte, looking over at Harriet, saw very plainly that her magic was depleted. It made her look grim and grey around the edges, not at all like the healthy, clear magic of Charlotte herself, nor the girls and teachers who watched from the sidelines.

No wonder she’s so tired, Charlotte thought. And then, without even really stopping to think better of it, she sorted through the mesh of lines and pleasing shapes that comprised the gridwork underneath them until she found the one that looked most like Harriet.

Off you go now, she thought, and gave it a little push.

Harriet’s feet made the most pleasing thud as she ran down the pitch. Swift, steady, strong. The magic that Charlotte sent after her was likewise something rooted, grounded, but not inflexible. It chased Harriet’s shadow along the pitch until it made itself a puddle under her feet, skimming the earth, gliding beneath her, and every step she took struck it up in a shower. Like a puddle that got all over you, jumping down a rain-splashed sidewalk as a child.

The magic soaked Harriet’s ankles, then her legs, and Charlotte watched it soak in. Watched Harriet’s colour brighten and clarify, until the thin greyish bits filled out and fattened properly with the pulse of everything they should have held.

Harriet reached the end of the pitch at a dead run, and looked almost surprised at herself when she flung the ball decisively into the net.

Oh lovely, thought Charlotte, and looked around the field, thoroughly diverted by this unexpected new ability. She saw girls going grey and tired around the edges all over, six or seven all told, and shook her head. This would never do.

Come on, then. She marshalled what seemed like the best match for the next-nearest teammate, standing a little farther down the field. Let’s fix you up.

And quickly, quietly, brimming with confidence, Charlotte set to work.

In the dead of the night, Nurse leaned over the bed. She tugged Charlotte’s baby quilt up securely ‘round her neck, and smoothed it down with a pleasing weight of hand-press that relaxed every muscle she’d never even known she owned.

The magic in the air around her was settled, now. It hung on curtains, walls and door like paper lace, a subtle silvery skin that might almost have been taken for an effect of the moonlight, if there had been any moon.

“Where is the moon, Nurse?” she asked, but Nurse was not bothered about the moon.

“Never you mind now,” she soothed. “That’s not what matters here.” A touch on Charlotte’s brow, gentle, light, helped her see that this was true.

“Julia?” said Charlotte, the single word a question. Nurse clucked.

“Julia doesn’t need me yet.” She settled into the old rocking chair, her knitting on her lap, needles clicking. “I’m staying here for now.”

So that was all right.

The silver skin of magic shifted slightly on the wall around her, ordering itself more pleasantly, according to her thoughts. Charlotte sighed, snugged the cover up beneath her chin, and settled deeper into sleep.

The shipping office beside the trainyard was the one you weren’t supposed to know about. Captain Cathcart, deeply sensible of the disquiet that his lack of ignorance was bound to cause, arrayed himself very carefully for the occasion.

First he borrowed an entire set of clothes from his gardener, who was lacking in occupational tasks while half his usual field of work suffered the necessity of modernization and subterranean repair, and only too pleased to see one set of his working costume find a well-paying new home. Thereafter, struck by the prominence of his ankles showing up bright and pale below the trouser cuffs of a much shorter man, Captain Cathcart dug his most serviceable boots from the back of his wardrobe and contrived to conceal his shins.

Then, attired in clothing which did not match his usual state of hygiene (nor even that of the gardener, when he was not on the job) Captain Cathcart boarded a streetcar and let it carry him all the way out to the trainyard.

His arrival in the shipping office that nobody was supposed to know about caused an uneasy stir. He looked around in thoughtful appreciation of the dim little interior, the naked electric bulb its sole concession to modernity, and received with every air of pleased surprise the surly salutation of the proprietor.

“Help you?”

“Yes. I think. I hope.” He advanced with eager speed, a shabby cloak of haphazard illusions blurring his edges and further muddying whatever impression onlookers might have of him, a long-limbed stranger with pale hair and no hat, grey work coat too wide for him and trousers too short, bright eyes skipping here, there, everywhere all over the room before sliding back to settle, at least temporarily, on the man behind the counter.

“I’ve a box. It needs to get to Anatolia. Can you do that for me?”

The man frowned.

“Don’t see a box.”

“Well,” Captain Cathcart permitted himself the indulgence of audible exasperation, “I haven’t got it with me.”

This carelessness clearly did not sit well with the man behind the counter.

“Came here to send a box, didn’t bring the box.”

“I needed to know if you could send it, first.”

The pause deepened. Lengthened. Captain Cathcart noted, without any appearance of actually noting it, the way things that hung around the edges of the windows deepened and flickered, like they were working at keeping out something the proprietor was starting to worry had already gotten in.

Tempting as it was to take command of those flickers, Captain Cathcart let them persist. They settled soon enough, unequal to the muddle he’d made of his disguise, a skin of mud and magic applied in equal measure. Captain Cathcart carefully forbore to smile.

“Hm,” said the man behind the counter. “Suppose we could manage it for you.” He slid a thin blue slip of paper across the thick, scarred wood of his counter. “Need to complete a customs declaration.”

“Ah.” Captain Cathcart stared down at this declaration with every appearance of revulsion. “Well. I suppose that’s the usual way of things, only . . .” he glanced first to one side, then the other. Pretended he imagined that the figures which clustered in conversational shapes here and there were actually people at all. “I was given to understand you might know of a way around that.”

The window flickers intensified their agitations. Captain Cathcart’s muddy clothes, layered with a broken web of field-magic and the much filmier swaddling of his own invention, remained unperturbed and unpenetrated.

“Given to understand by who?” growled the man behind the counter. His customer’s ensuing agitation was decidedly that of urgent discretion, rather than evasion.

“Oh! I don’t know if I should say. He might not like it. No, might not like it at all . . .” He dropped back from the counter, first one step, then another. “I think I’d better not say.”

“Well.” The man behind the counter seemed, if anything, to gain interest rather than lose it. “If he didn’t mind telling me himself; vouching for you, as it were . . .”

“He mightn’t mind that,” Captain Cathcart agreed. He considered the interior of the shack. “I could send him along, but it’s time sensitive, of course. This box of mine. You could do it quickly, I suppose? Ship it out tonight, if I needed it there by a certain time?”

The man snorted. The window agitations had by now died to almost nothingness. Clearly, his customer’s sense of urgency had soothed his suspicions as nothing else had.

“We’ll get it where you need it to go. Mind you, speed costs extra. But we’ll get it there in time, if you’re willing to pay.”

“Ah,” said Captain Cathcart philosophically, in tones borrowed for the occasion from John Erskine, “I don’t suppose you have any prohibitions, do you, on items you can carry? There’s no, ehm, embargo on what you might call hazardous materials? Anything of that sort?”

The man behind the counter frowned, but it was now purely the frown of a mercenary struggling with the necessity of mental math. There was no trace of suspicion as he said,

“Well. We won’t carry raw power, if you take my meaning. Too volatile. Needs to come in the shape of a working, if you want to send a spell. There’s ways around it being a finished spell, of course, but they cost extra, and you can’t send a big one. Too risky. Our boys don’t like it, no matter how well you pay.”

At this, Captain Cathcart did not even bother to pretend he wasn’t crestfallen. His expression of dismay was wholly sincere as he asked,

“And there really is no way around that? Not at . . . any price?”

“None,” said the man behind the counter. And he looked very sorry as he said it, too.

“Ah,” said Captain Cathcart. “Well, then.”

He seemed undecided, for a moment, as to what course of action he should take next. Then he moved forward, stepping with the apparent intention of leaning conspiratorially on the counter. There might not have been anything wrong about that, except that in taking one long stride forward, the cuff of his too-short trouser rose above the top of his oldest sturdy boot, baring the ankle that lay below. The ankle, filmed only by the superficial illusion of Cathcart’s working, unsecured by the needful layers of old fabric lined, grimed and imbued with the mud of his garden, splintered with the necessary fragments of a magical field so muddled that its nature and intention rendered the nature and intention of the man below it hopelessly obscured, shone out like a beacon, a modern take on a dusty classic, the sole footnote of a man’s own downfall.

The window curtains flicked and fluttered and perceived, at last, a gap in the armour of a man who was not supposed to be standing in a place that he was not supposed to know was there. Everything went very deep and booming after that, and it was only by dint of some rapid reworking of his own muffling spell that Captain Cathcart was able to cushion himself on landing after he was blown clear.

The little building went up in splinters and smoke. He landed with ears ringing, senses reeling, and for a space of time whose duration he could never thereafter entirely determine with accuracy, he laid insensible in the train yard, perfectly silent and still.

Magical Theory, it turned out, was actually entirely possible to succeed in, once you knew about the field. Charlotte, who had previously fought so hard against the necessity of opening herself, fairly flourished now that she knew no such opening was required. There was magic inside her, of course, but there was magic all around her too, and she need not surrender the first provided only she learned to manipulate the second.

She focused pleasurably on the task before her, hearing only in a very distant and meaningless way the coaching of her teacher.

“Just a little firmer on the second syllable, Charlotte,” Mrs. Campbell advised. Her eyes, too, were fastened on the piece of paper that sat before Charlotte, open on the desk. The farthest edge was endeavouring to curl upward at her command, but something in the pronunciation had clearly gone wrong, because the paper would not curl.

Charlotte strove to emulate the pronunciation all the same, she really did, and at last got the paper to almost half curl up, but there was no help for the other half.

“Never mind,” Mrs. Campbell said kindly, “you did give it a good effort. I can’t fault you for that.”

Charlotte nodded, but her attention was still on the paper. She had seen what the field did when it heard her say the word, and she thought she might even know which part of the word had sounded wrong. Of course, saying it out loud at all seemed wrong too, when you thought about it. She remembered the way Dad had spoken in Ebadmur, like the words themselves came from the ground below him, the air around him, rather than something that was actually inside him.

Maybe, she thought, it was even possible to manipulate the field when you didn’t know it was there. Maybe it was only when you got too reliant on what came from inside you, rather than tuning into what existed all around, that you bled out what you needed to carry on with, and couldn’t carry on after all.

Almost as swiftly as she had formed this thought, Charlotte called to the field. The word she said wasn’t like Dad’s, exactly. It wasn’t crackling and unknowable, fed with fire. She didn’t have anybody behind her to protect; no daughter to shepherd out of the city at any cost. Instead she just had a piece of paper, and she saw the thing she needed to ask to help her fold it.

So she asked.

And the paper folded.

“Well done!” Mrs. Campbell exulted, the words as warm and glowing as the field itself. Her hand came fondly down on Charlotte’s shoulder, the congratulations all the sweeter for their sincerity. “Oh, Charlotte, that was well done!”

Then she gave an airy little whistle, as if summoning the end of the spell, and the girls in the class all around them applauded as the folded paper continued to fold in on itself, getting smaller and smaller until it folded up into nothing at all.

It really was a clever bit of magic; clean and simple, a little fun, exactly right for end-of-day. Charlotte’s applause, however, came much later than the rest, and was more staggered and mechanical than its fellows, because her focus was not on the paper. It was on the field of magic Mrs. Campbell had called on to accomplish her ends.

The magic did not come from the mesh of the earth nor the film of the air. It seemed to flow rather from her pocket, as if held there in storage. Oozed out, like a blob or a drip, a drop that puffed and floated up . . . Charlotte stared in fascinated horror at the field Mrs. Campbell had conjured: a darting, puffing orb of light, all mottled gold and green.

Charlotte had seen an orb like that before, and she remembered all too clearly where.

“No homework tonight,” decided Mrs. Campbell. “It’s Friday, after all. Good afternoon, girls; I’ll see you all on Monday.”

But Charlotte scarcely heard her. She hardly heard Harriet, either, asking her what she planned to do with herself now that the lacrosse season was at an end, and October was upon them. She made some reply, of course; she must have done. But she could not for the life of her remember what.

The moment it was plausible to do so, she made her excuses to the friends around her and raced to the upper hallway, taking the stairs two at a time, where she commanded use of the nearest of the bank of three telephones set out for student use. She negotiated frantically with the exchange, and got herself put through with what felt like an interminable series of delays, but was in actuality only the most modest of waits.

Another switchboard later, and she was answering the cheerful inquiry with breathless desperation.

“Freda? Freda, It’s Charlotte. Is Dad in the office?”

The answer, regretful, was in the negative. Charlotte nearly dashed the heel of her hand against her forehead in an agony of frustration, but with an effort got herself under control. Instead she said only,

“Very well. Please tell Dad . . . I saw lights like the ones in the city. Can you do that? The same colour and shape and everything. Tell him I’m going to look into it. And please, please tell him to call me back.”

Captain Cathcart picked himself up off the ground of the trainyard at dusk. His head rang and rattled, and he wasted no time at all in bending over at the waist and being thoroughly sick. Then he took a step or two, stopped, and considered his options.

The office was out. They’d have closed up by now, and anyway, they didn’t keep anybody really specialized on their medical staff anymore. Not since a year after the war, when the election had happened and the first of the budget cuts had come through.

He needed help, though. Or at very least, a looking over. Their family metaphysician was all right in the usual way of things, but if there was anything unusual at all about what had been done to him when the spell went off in the shed, it wouldn’t do to bring poor Dr. Perrin into all this. Dr. Perrin was closer to his retirement than any stage of life when it might have appealed to him to sign the Official Secrets Act, and Captain Cathcart wanted to leave it that way.

Instead, he picked his way across the trainyard with exquisite care, pausing to be sick at two more intervals before he reached a much more respectable-looking shed, with a sign attached and everything. There, he politely troubled them for a telephone, and after a moment’s hasty conference, secured the certainty of his destination. Then he walked with slightly greater haste to the entrance of the yard, and sought once more the nearest place the streetcar stopped.

That night, as the school lay abed, Charlotte laid awake in hers. She counted her every indrawn breath, then subtracted from each one the exhalations. She kept herself constantly at nought, trading new air for old, until at last the field that laid all around them in the dark had silvered and settled too.

Everyone, save Charlotte, was asleep.

Still she waited half an hour longer, just to make extremely sure, before she slipped out of bed and donned slippers and cardigan. Then she crept down from the dormitory wing, certain that at any moment her heart must pound so fierce and loud that it would give her away. She clung to the shadows on rawest instinct, that far-flung gift of her proto-human ancestors reaching down through the ages to terrify her into making herself as small and shrunken as she could, thus to slink from one patch of shadow to another, wrapping herself in stray bits of the field she found there until at last she reached the plain wooden door with the innocuous lettering across the panel: E. Campbell.

Charlotte, draped in scraps of magical workings like so many cobwebs, standing outside the door like nothing more substantial than a shadow herself, put her hand to the knob and turned.

The knob, with an air of distant professional apology, akin to a butler returning the card on its salver, declined to yield.

Locked. Well, of course it would be locked, Charlotte reasoned. Even teachers who didn’t have anything to hide probably locked their office doors. They’d have to, confiscating so many fun and lovely things they way they did, otherwise girls would be in and out at all hours to take their playthings back.

Charlotte applied herself to the problem of the lock, choosing with unspoken confidence the parts of field she wore that could best be persuaded to shape themselves to her purpose. The lock yielded in short order, and the door handle moments after it. In a trice she was inside, standing in Mrs. Campbell’s office, heart hammering wildly in her chest.

The space was clean and dark. Quiet. The field here looked no more or less disordered than it did in any other part of the building, which was to say it was not the raw, living thing it was when you stood out of doors and felt it running through the grass around you, but it was in there all the same. Dusty, quiet, substantively subdued. Like it had been painted into the walls, lacquered down in the woodwork of the floor, and lived on, lived among, without special interest being paid to it ever since.

It was there, but it was quiet. It was possible to ignore, at least, and Charlotte did so in favour of examining the room itself.

The desk was in a sensible place, with bookcases behind it. A low chair sat facing the desk, and a filing cabinet against the far wall. Some textbooks were piled in one corner that seemed in an arrested state of reshelving, and a drab green mackintosh, school-regulation shade, hung disused on a peg. It was exactly the sort of room Charlotte would have expected it to be even before she entered it, and at the sight of it arrayed thusly, so ordinary, so right, she scolded herself with remorseless aggression for her unwarranted suspicion of her teacher.

There’s nothing here, she told herself sternly. This is all entirely your own imagination, you’ll see.

The part of her that prickled and fizzed when her magic was trying to leap out of her did not answer, but Charlotte knew as plainly as if it had that there was no point saying there was nothing there until she’d actually taken the time to look for it.

She approached the filing cabinet with nervous intention. It wasn’t even locked. She thumbed her way through the top drawer with nothing to show for it from one end to the next. The second drawer seemed similarly bound to disappoint her, except then, at the almost-end, tucked into a folder bearing the innocuous, faded label Geography, Charlie found them.

Maps.

Three in total.

The first was a very haphazard affair, drawn in three different colours with a peculiar range of lines crossing through, so that they made Charlotte dizzy to look at for very long. Blue, red and green ink did not harmonize well at all when they were applied in this manner. The next was more of a Baedeker type drawing, very staid and normal and detailed. And the last . . .

Charlotte held it with shaking hands, willing herself to commit its every detail to memory, as though she had not already done so when first she walked those streets.

This was a map of the capital city of Ebadmur.

She bore it over to the desk and laid it out flat. Pinned it down at curling corners with a glass paperweight and studied the points marked on it, little stars and circles drawn, an arrow here and there, delineating what seemed to be a path of some kind. A progression. Tracing one route through the city, including an end point, with notations made that seemed to indicate some kind of outward spread.

Charlotte, her heart threatening to beat apart her ribcage in a bid to escape her chest, fumbled open the desk drawer in search of foolscap. She tried, with trembling desperation, to duplicate the map as she saw it on the sheet of paper, and she failed miserably in the attempt. Her hands shook so badly she couldn’t even steady the pen. Rather than creep down to the office at the speed of a whisper, she might as well have run three times around the building and vaulted directly into the window, for all the command she had of her breath.

She was about to step back in an effort to exert some control over herself when a noise reached her that made her blood run cold. She wasn’t shaking any more; she stood frozen, transfixed, in the middle of the office as footsteps approached. Two sets. Steady. Swift. Coming straight for . . .

A corridor light was put on outside the door, and a silhouette showed up against the frosted glass. Charlotte at once seized all evidence of her presence in the office, everything she had strewn out over the desk, and dove behind it, shaking, seeking whatever meagre shelter it could offer as the handle turned once more, and the door swung open.

The staid stone residence which was Captain Cathcart’s destination was not on any streetcar line. It was not even near any street lights. To make this journey out from the bowels of civilization, he was obliged to first stop in at home, evade with great effort the peripheral presence of his wife, and make some clumsy efforts to re-clothe and neaten his person before he settled in behind the wheel of his car and drove well beyond the city limits, into territory that had, a century before, been only used as farmland.

The house he chose was at the end of a long and winding drive, set well back from anything even resembling a road, and bore signs of its own comparative antiquity, as a colonial edifice in colonized territories, in the size, settling and settlement of its thick-cut masonry. The deepest shadows of night were relieved only by the harsh light cast by his headlamps, and the much warmer, golden glow that brightened the many-paned windows of the house from within.

The Hudson he parked carelessly short of the front step, and advanced to signal his presence to the occupant within, though he knew better than almost anybody how pointless that exercise really was. Indeed, before Captain Cathcart had even finished his first knock, the stout white door swung inward to grant him entrance.

“Well,” said the woman facing him, “you’re a mess. At least this time you had sense enough to come directly to me to clean you up.”

“I’d have come to you every time, Aunt Milly,” Captain Cathcart said mildly, “only you were usually otherwise occupied.”

“Of course I was!” Millicent Cathcart grumbled, turning to stride, with a grace which belied her advanced years, through a side parlour toward the kitchen. “There was a war on, Charlie. Everybody was doing their bit. You can’t have wanted me to sit knitting at home and wait for you to turn up with head wounds of any sort. And Hetty patched you up pretty neatly after that, you can’t deny it.”

“She did me a great service,” Captain Cathcart agreed. “I’d never deny it. I am even now entirely in her debt. But . . . I can’t help but think you could have done even better.”

“No? Well. Perhaps so. There’s something in the belonging type of magic we’ve still not got a real grasp on yet. Not even after all this time.” So saying, Millicent came to a stop in a low-ceilinged kitchen at the back of the house. Its great, open hearth, a relic of a long-bygone building convention, blazed as bright and hot as though she were expecting to prepare an entire meal upon it. A quick gesture sent Captain Cathcart to settle meekly at the table while she rummaged through a little cupboard hanging on the wall beside the hearth, coming up with a thick, green glass bottle half-full of a dark tincture.

“Iodine,” she said, in answer to his apprehensive look. “You’ve a very nasty cut on your forehead. Bathe it, will you, while I get a look at what’s underneath.”

She settled herself in the chair facing him, watching with bright, intelligent eyes as Captain Cathcart, somewhat clumsily, daubed iodine onto the aforementioned cut. This task accomplished, Aunt Millicent grunted and put out her hand.

“Hold still,” she said, and gave her gnarled old fingers a hard twist. Something to the left of Captain Cathcart’s right ear gave a pop and he cried out, startled. Then all at once the nausea was gone, the only pain that remained the one in his head, and he could see without any difficulty the thick, charred, ghost of a splinter that was suddenly held between Millicent’s fore and middle fingers.

It did not exist, he knew. Not really. If he tried to touch it, chances were good his own fingers would pass right through it. But he watched as it sailed through the air from her hand to the fire, where it burned up thoroughly in a satisfying hiss and pop of carnivorous flame.

“Much better,” Millicent decided. “What have you been getting yourself into, anyway? And where is little Charlie? I was told you’d finally sent her to a decent school at last, but I hope that doesn’t mean she’s too high in her instep to still visit her old auntie.”

“She is not,” Captain Cathcart assured her, “but she was much too close to something I didn’t plan to get either one of us into, and as a precaution I thought it better that she be sent somewhere different, for a change.”

“You thought that, did you? Very intelligent. And you sent her somewhere different, all right. Good school, Miss Dunlap’s. Never mind that old Dunlap was a proper fool, he at least let his sister have her own way in how she spent her time, which is more than some as I could name, if I hadn’t the manners to prevent my doing so.”

Aunt Millicent’s practised eye took in the rest of her nephew’s physique before she sighed and settled back in her chair.

“Well. You chose a profession that suits you, even if it’s run you rather closer to the bone than I care to see. I suppose that this . . . whatever it was you stepped into, is related to your work? And I suppose you’ll give me some piffle about not being able to discuss it with me, as you usually do?”

“You are, as always, perfectly correct in all things, Aunt Millicent,” Captain Cathcart said earnestly. “Only you have omitted to mention that I must also avail myself of your telephone. I need to give a report to whatever luckless soul has taken the night watch before I finally call it a day.”

“Same place as usual,” said his hostess graciously, and flicked a hand in the direction of the front parlour.

The heavy old candlestick contraption sat handy to Aunt Millicent’s preferred chair, a generously-stuffed wingback upholstered in rose damask with a doily of hand-tatted lace adorning the headrest. Captain Cathcart performed the necessary acrobatics with the lever before the exchange deigned to notice him, and he shouted optimistically down the ancient mouthpiece, managing with some effort to make his intentions known.

A click, a blank space of quiet near-sound, and the necessary burr of communication filled his right ear. At last he heard the clear, bright tones of a lady yet awake when most others began to think of bed, and in the buoyancy of his own gratitude at the sound, rushed to reply.

“Freda? Oh, Ellen. Yes, of course, night shift. Should have known. Did know; should have remembered. I need to leave a message for Erskine, and . . . eh? For me? Well, there’s a novelty. Yes, go on, let’s hear it.”

Captain Cathcart heard his message.

Captain Cathcart turned six shades of red, from palest pink to mottled crimson fury, and ground out a sentence shaped like gratitude. Then he banged the earpiece back down on the lever and shot to his feet.

“God damn,” he said hoarsely. “God damn it. How could it possibly . . .”

Aunt Millicent had, unheard, unseen until that moment, traversed the space of floor between her kitchen chair and her parlour one, and stood in solemn appraisal of his agitation.

“Well,” she said, “don’t just stand there. Go.”

Captain Cathcart went.

Charlotte, crouched behind her teacher’s desk in a muffled agony of terrified silence, listened to the office door swing inward. Heard the footsteps, small clicking pumps, neat and trim, advance to the centre of the floor. Heard a heavier step, solid, purposeful, advance behind the first.

“Are you really certain,” began Miss Adamson. Before she could even finish the question a second voice spoke, rich and warm and beautifully familiar.

“I know my daughter,” said Captain Cathcart, “and I assure you that if she says—”

But what he could assure her of went unspoken, for Charlotte leaped up into the middle of the sentence, shaking, wrung out, to cry, “Dad!”

And then she was around the desk in a trice, her entire story spilling out of her in thick, heavy sobs, so that all her father could do was hold her tight and say,

“All right then, kid. All right. It’ll be all right now, you’ll see.”

The dormitory wing was entirely abed when Miss Adamson escorted the Cathcarts to Charlotte’s room, but of course the activity of preparing for departure was by no means a quiet one, and what with the application of the light and even the most moderate of necessary sounds, it was no surprise that Harriet’s slumber was unequal to the task of endurance.

She sat up in bed first bleary eyed, then wide eyed, and then, Charlotte thought, really quite agog. When she spoke, it wasn’t Charlotte she addressed, but her father.

“Look here,” said Harriet. “I’m sorry, but I know you, don’t I?”

“Do you?” Captain Cathcart turned from helping Charlotte bundle a few small personal items together to this more diverting declaration. He looked at her with the air of one both intrigued and entertained. Harriet’s cheeks coloured bright pink, but she nodded.

“Yes. I thought so at first when I saw you outside the day Charlotte got here, but I couldn’t be sure. Not even when I saw her photos, because you looked so different and of course I was only a child when it happened.

“It was near the end of the war, when I went to stay with my aunt. She didn’t want me, but at the time I didn’t understand why. She’d have visitors at the strangest hours, and I would hear voices coming from rooms where I’d know she was supposed to be alone, so I thought at first the house was haunted. But then one night I woke up and went down for a glass of milk, and found you on her kitchen table.”

At this revelation Captain Cathcart gave a very visible start. Charlotte, marking it, looked from her father to her roommate in wonderment. Harriet, heedless of Charlotte’s stare, rushed on.

“I know you might not remember; I think you must have been very ill. You were talking all manner of nonsense, about water and a camp and something about locking it very deep inside your mind, but when you realized I was standing there, you said hello. You were very nice to me.”

“Was I,” said Captain Cathcart, looking at her very hard. “Was I, really. Well, that’s all right.” He paused a very long moment, considering. Then he said, in tones that suggested the answer might really matter, maybe even like he might already know, “Who is your aunt?”

“Hester Gardner,” said Harriet.

Charlotte noted, with genuine astonishment, the effect this seemed to have on her father.

“The devil she is! Well, if that’s not . . . well.” He stepped forward and, most unexpectedly, seized Harriet’s hand, giving it three enthusiastic shakes. “Well. You’ve something very solid to build on, Miss Gardner, and no mistake. Whatever you plan to do with it, I should think you’ll do very well.”

Then he stood back abruptly, took a considering look around the dorm, and wondered, “Got everything you’ll need, Charlie?”

“I think so.” Charlotte displayed her little bag, and her father at once relieved her of it.

“All right, then. That will do to be going on with. Miss Gardner,” again, with real pleasure evident in his face and tone, “I am indebted to you.”

“You should take her to Auntie,” Harriet suggested, following them into the corridor where Miss Adamson waited. “Auntie will know what to do.”

“Now, there’s a thought,” Captain Cathcart agreed. “I’d thought to take her to my aunt outside of Oakville, but Miss Gardner would be an even less obvious choice. I cannot recall, does she live very far from here?”

“Closer to Caledon,” Harriet said, and gave particulars of the address. “I could call ahead and let her know you’re coming.”

“You will do nothing of the kind,” interposed Miss Adamson firmly. “I will make any necessary call with which the Captain sees fit to entrust me, and he shall make the remainder.”

“Yes,” Captain Cathcart agreed, “that’s the sensible, adult thing to do, isn’t it? Very sorry, Miss Gardner, I know it’s a perfect adventure and all that; any friend of Charlie is bound to go in for that sort of thing, so this must be rotten for you. Even so, you had better go back to bed, and pretend to sleep.”

Harriet accepted this understanding dismissal with moderately good grace, gave Charlotte a fierce hug of farewell, and retreated to her bedroom once more. Miss Adamson escorted them both down to the front door and, after giving Charlotte warm wishes of her own, saw them both into the car and away into the night.

Charlotte slept in fits and starts for most of the drive. At first it was all right; warm and settled. Safe. But she woke up as they passed through a little township, and the kind of midnight groggy she was did something to her temper. Suddenly Dad sitting beside her all restful and easy, like nothing bad could ever happen, seemed less a reassurance than a kind of mockery of all her uncertainty of the past few days, and she could not stop the question that came ripping out of her.

“Why didn’t you write back?” she demanded.

Dad looked over at her, startled.

“Write back? When?”

“To my letter. Why didn’t you answer the first time? When I told you I felt something inside me trying to get out, like that time in Ebadmur, why—”

“You what?” The question came out of her father like a whipcrack, startling Charlotte, however briefly, into silence. “The devil you did.”

“I did,” she whispered. “In the middle of the night. I woke up and felt like it was trying to go out, like I was supposed to let it, and I wrote you right away to let you know.”

Her father was staring at her in mingled shock and incredulity.

“What the hell do you mean?”

Now it was Charlotte’s turn to stare. Her father pulled off the road in a clumsy spray of gravel and turned to face her.

“Charlie. Charlie. What do you mean, you wrote? Wrote a letter? Where did you send it? To the house? What did you say?”

“I . . . I told you,” she whispered. “About the feeling inside me of the magic trying to go out, like back in Ebadmur.”

“You wrote this in a letter. You addressed it to me? Warded it?”

“I didn’t ward it. I wouldn’t have known how. I sent it to your office, to make sure Mother wouldn’t see.”

“My office.” Captain Cathcart dropped his hands from the wheel and sat back, dazed. “You sent it to my office. And the telephone call you made this afternoon—that was to my office, too.”

“Yes. I spoke to Freda.”

He looked doubtful a moment, considering. “You’re certain it was Freda? You’d know her voice, I suppose.”

Now it was Charlotte’s turn to suffer a moment’s doubt.

“I think so. At least, I called her Freda and she didn’t contradict me. And I think it sounded like Freda, but of course I expected it was she, and I wasn’t really trying to see if it was or not.”

“No, I can see that,” her father agreed. “Over the telephone one voice can be very like another, especially if you’re not expecting it to be different. But it could have been Freda, and even if it wasn’t, it was somebody in the office at least. Somebody who could suppress letters sent to me from the school, and possibly be in a position to intercept telephone calls . . . I don’t like it, Charlie. I sent you there to make sure that business in Ebadmur didn’t follow you, and somehow it seems you’ve landed in it up to your neck.”

He sat behind the wheel a moment longer, staring out into the night. When he spoke again, he sounded as uneasy as Charlotte could almost ever remember hearing him.

“She would have had to gather it, first. Your magic. How did she manage that?”

Charlotte had not actually worked the answer out until that moment, but with her father sitting beside her and the school so far away, it seemed suddenly quite obvious.

“We would say a recitation at the start of every class. Like declining nouns, but for magic. I think . . . I think it must have been the same one you had me say in Ebadmur, or at least a version of one meant to accomplish the same thing. All the girls always left the class absolutely knackered, but I never seemed to. Harriet thought it was my aptitude, but really you know, I think it was because you broke the door.”

Her father looked at her in confusion, so Charlotte explained about the door inside her, the one she always saw in her dream, and how Nurse seemed to be the one standing guard.

“Ingenious,” her father murmured, almost to himself. “A sort of . . . instinctive control. You couldn’t have known you’d need one, but something in you must have reacted to protect you against it all the same. She’s been there since Ebadmur, you say? Your old Nurse?”

“Yes. She was there in the door when you had it open, but she’s been inside with me ever since it was shut. I thought at first she was just there to look after me, but she’s always between me and the door, every time. I think now she’s been trying to keep me in. To prevent my opening it.”

“Yes, as long as you wished it, she would be. I’m amazed that your Mrs. Campbell hasn’t devised a workaround yet, but perhaps she thinks it’s lack of training on your part that keeps you battened down. She’d have no reason to expect you installed a control.” His hand settled on her shoulder a moment, warm and sure. “Remarkable, Charlie. Really, remarkable.”

Then his pleasure ebbed away, replaced by unease once more.

“There’s somebody doing this, you know. Somebody at the back of it all. I don’t think it’s just your teacher; I don’t see how it could be. Why would it be? Someone might have used her to gather magic from the girls, but how could she have stored it? Sent it? I was looking into that angle today myself, and it looks like there’s no ready way to send raw power across the ocean. Legal or otherwise. It’s got to be done up as a spell of some kind, and even then it seems they’d be sending a lot.”

“Could it be sent by airwaves?” Charlotte wondered. “Radio signals? Mrs. Campbell had an aerial, you know. Brand new this term. It was something to modernize the program, somehow.”

“Wouldn’t work that way,” Captain Cathcart sighed. “Short range, possibly. But nothing that far-flung. No, I’m damned if I can see how she did it. Nor even at whose behest.”

Charlotte tried, and failed, to imagine who it might have been. She was still trying as her father pulled back onto the road and they finished the last leg of their journey in uneasy silence, which terminated at the end of a driveway in Charlotte’s own horrified cry.

The door of the house they had reached stood ajar, light spilling out from within. A prone form in a patterned housedress lay half in, half out of the house, and stirred only very slightly as Charlotte and her father both leaped from the vehicle and went running to see if they could be of any assistance.

The woman on the ground blinked, and looked up with some surprise at both the people leaning over her.

“Miss Gardner,” said Captain Cathcart, in tones of great emotion. “Miss Gardner, what can have happened—”

“Oh,” scowled the woman, “I don’t know my age, I think.” She paused, and coughed. “Mean magic in that witch, and no mistake.”

Except, Charlotte thought perhaps she didn’t actually say witch.

“You had word of our coming?” Captain Cathcart asked, urgently. “You were at least a little prepared for her?”

But Miss Gardner didn’t seem to think this was as important as imparting additional information, which she expended the greatest part of her strength to communicate.

“There’s a deep net around her. A terrible working. She’s very thoroughly trapped. You won’t be able to cut her free without . . . without great cost. Consider . . . consider carefully . . .”

The completion of the sentence was more than she was equal to. She sank back into insensibility, so that Captain Cathcart was obliged to carry her into the house, Charlotte following close behind.

He sent up great, careless lashings of magic all around the room, jangling nets lining the walls, and availed himself of the telephone once more. A shouted summons to Aunt Millicent duly effected, he turned to stare at Charlotte with a really frightening expression of bewilderment.

“Can’t send you home,” Captain Cathcart muttered, almost to himself. “It would be too obvious, and utterly undefended. I’ve been redrawing the wards through the garden for weeks now. They’re all inactivated. We’d stand no earthly chance . . .” He broke off, brooding, and then a thought seemed to strike him.

“Hang on. How in the hell could she have even known we were coming here? There’s no chance of her guessing at it. The connection with your roommate is too slight, surely. Even if she knew you were friends, even if she somehow knew who her aunt was, why should she assume that this place, of all places . . .”

His hands caught and released the air around him. Fists, working out the agony of active thought.

“Your head mistress. She knew. She was supposed to telephone, but what if, instead . . . dear God. Is it even possible . . ? But why would she? There’s no motive I can imagine there. And why wouldn’t your teacher stay here? Wait for us to arrive?” He looked around uneasily, and seemed to reach a decision.

“Your aunt is on her way. I’ll see if I can roust a neighbour to sit with Miss Gardner until she arrives. As for you, Charlie,” he was already on his feet, heading for the door, “get back in the car.”

This leg of the journey seemed the most impossible to mark or understand. They were going back, Charlotte noted dimly, to the city. Lights flared brightly around her, little points of civilization in the dark, or what passed for civilization in the countries that liked to call themselves civilized, at least.

But Charlotte wasn’t sure that lights in the middle of the night counted for all that much, when they reminded her so strongly of the lights her teacher had sent, somehow, from this very civilized country to a place she probably would have thought was not civilized at all, to make all the people there turn on each other in a way they wouldn’t even have ever wanted to, if she hadn’t set their stolen magic to the task in the first place.

That, thought Charlotte, didn’t seem very civilized at all.

She looked sideways to her father, seeing him in profile, seeing him in an endless line of profiles cascading through time to the earliest years of her memory. Driving her to school, flying her in a plane, driving her here, there, all over the place.

Standing beside her on the pavement when she was six years old, her bonnet tugged firmly down over her ears. The bonnet she had lost when a gust of wind caught it the day they went to meet him on the train . . .

She froze.

“Dad?”

Her father glanced sideways, seeming surprised to find her awake.

“Hmmm?”

“Dad . . .” She sat up a little. “Did you . . . I mean, during the war, after you left the first time. Before you came home again. Did you . . . come home again?”

He stared at her for a second that seemed much longer than was strictly safe before he looked back to the road.

“Yes.”

She shook her head in confusion.

“But . . . why? How? Mother never talks about it. She says you were gone for four years. She never mentions that you came back.”

“She doesn’t know.”

The words were so simple. Too simple for the confession they really were. Charlotte could not even begin to understand it.

“Why not?”

“It was a secret, Charlie.” He downshifted skilfully as they neared a corner. Turned with purpose onto the quiet, tree-lined street. A suburb of respectable antiquity, something extremely Victorian, spread out before them. Charlotte, if she had been paying any better attention, would have felt it looked familiar.

“Why?”

He did not answer her right away. It took him another entire street to find the words.

“I was . . . extremely classified stuff, kid. All through those years. We were not as far away as your mother thinks I was. One day, near the end of it all, about six months before I finally did come home, I turned up . . . something. Something nobody else seemed even able to understand bore looking into. Like they didn’t want to see it. Like somebody had made them unable to see it. But I got to the bottom of it with an effort, and they . . . sent someone after me. Someone to make me forget.”

Charlotte processed this information with care.

“And . . . it didn’t work? What they did? Because you didn’t forget it, did you; you’re telling me about it right now.”

“Oh, it worked all right,” her father said grimly. “Worked a damn sight too well. Made me forget nearly everything I knew. I was a wreck, Charlie. A kind of shell. They would have taken me to your Aunt Millicent, except she was busy with her own show in those days. Real big stuff, your Aunt Millicent. If you get her in the right mood before you ask her, she might even tell you about it. Very little respect for the Official Secrets Act, your great aunt. But no. They took me to her friend, instead.”

Charlotte felt the understanding click into place.

“Harriet’s aunt.”

“Harriet’s aunt. She had me up on her kitchen table like it was an operating theatre. Reached inside me and rebuilt everything she could of my mind, every part she could salvage, she put it back together. Unscrambled me, really. Like unbreaking an egg. An absolute national treasure, some of those women were, and not a one of them is supposed to breathe a word of it.

“I suppose during the time I was there was when your friend saw me. I don’t remember her, of course. Her aunt would not even have known she was in there to put back. But she put the rest of it in there, all right. She put everything she could find back where it went, or close to. Julia, your mother . . . and you.”

He turned in at a driveway whose terminus Charlotte didn’t mark. She was too busy staring at him, drinking in every part of this story, including her own.

He turned to return her stare, and cracked a very small smile.

“When I was back on my feet, you were the first place I went. The clearest damn memory in my head, kid, is you on the pavement in front of that house, just learning to walk. One step you took, then two, and by the time you took the third your mother and I were in no condition to even expect that you’d trip, so there was nobody there to catch you when you pitched over.

“Gave yourself a rotten knock on the chin, came up covered in blood and tears, and I told myself it was the last time you’d ever fall that I wasn’t there to catch you.”

He looked away from her then, staring out in front of the car at the house that waited there.

“So, here we are.”

John Erskine opened the door of his beautiful brick Victorian after a very prolonged period of knocking and ringing and clanging that lit up the quiet of his leafy suburban street. He wore a dressing gown and slippers. Charlotte was so embarrassed at the sight, she hardly knew where to look.

Her father, dissimilarly burdened, got right to the business of issuing a breezy, “Good morning.”

“Cathcart, my god . . . Cathcarts, I should say. Hello, Charlie. Why the hell aren’t you at the Gardner place?”

“We were,” said Cathcart, “but someone got there before us.” He detailed in as few words as possible what had transpired. “Now I must intercept Annie en route and find another place for us to alight.”

“Another place? Nonsense. You’ll stay here, of course. I can send someone out to find Marianne.”

“Don’t rely on it, sir,” Captain Cathcart advised wryly. “If my wife thinks she shouldn’t be found, you’ll never manage it. But if you don’t mind my dropping Charlie off, I can carry on to find Annie.” His hand settled under Charlotte’s elbow with gently restorative warmth. “She’s done in.”

“Of course,” Erskine nodded, “of course. There’s no better set of wards in civilian property, I’d stake my life on it.”

“Very good,” said Cathcart, guiding his daughter inside. “But I’m asking you to stake even more.”

Her father’s car pulling out of the driveway should not, Charlotte knew, have occasioned in her such a sense of abandonment. She knew he was not going away forever; only as long as it took to track her mother down on whatever route she had taken to join them at Miss Gardner’s house. But after the events of the night, and especially given how little sleep she’d had, it was difficult not to imagine that her father really was going away for, if not exactly ever, at least another unbearably long stretch of time.

The room her father had left her in was not the one she wanted, but Charlotte still took pains not to let that show. It wasn’t Mr. Erskine’s fault that his home wasn’t hers; that the room she longed above all else to be in was not this warm, quiet front library, but rather her own room at home, and that even the simple comfort of her bed was to be denied to her for some time yet to come. This was a very good room, really, and she was not even entirely not glad to be in it. At the very least, she knew it was safe.

She focused on the comforts of the space around her; the homey touches of open fire, deep chairs and good, well-used furniture. A few paintings hung here and there—dogs, boats and horses. What Mother sighingly referred to as the masculine trifecta—but the greatest pride of place was given to a collection of photographs and knickknacks which adorned the walls and other surfaces.

She noted these with real pleasure, this reminder that she was in the home of a family friend, and that even though it wasn’t her home, it was a home, and her parents would shortly join her. They could figure the rest out together.

“I’ll take your bag up to your room,” Mr. Erskine told her gently. “I’ve no live-in help, I’m afraid, so I’m bound to muddle the, erm, hospitable touches, but your mother will be along to help you settle soon enough. Until then, can I get you something to drink? I’d be equal to a pot of tea, or I could get you a soft drink if you prefer. I am almost positive Mrs. Deacon has told me that we have a store of soft drinks. We’ll pretend we don’t think it will unsettle your stomach at this hour, hey?”

Charlotte favoured the joke with a very real, if very little, smile, and gratefully accepted the offer of a soft drink. Erskine departed with her bag to perform the promised errands, and she walked slowly around the outer perimeter of the room, continuing to peruse the most human parts of his walls.

Her father was represented in several of the framed pictures, a much younger version of him done up in rugby kit, with Erskine and another man, whose face Charlotte knew was familiar enough that he must work in the Ministry too, beside him. Then again in his uniform, a trifle too solemn and stiff, and then here again out of it, laughing, the group of them gathered against a backdrop that Charlotte could not place. It would have been wartime, she thought, wherever they were. The camp, maybe, that he was so careful not to speak of. The place she’d heard him just once or twice mention to Erskine, when both of them thought she was too young to hear; to understand the sound of a secret.

Dad and John Erskine had secrets together. Well of course they did; this was government work, after all. But the secrets somehow ran deeper than that. Back through the years, through whatever happened that they did not talk about, and maybe even a little before.

Charlotte thought, when she put her head sideways and was very careful not to look directly at it, that the timeline of Dad and Erskine’s friendship was a kind of field as well. Like the one that lay under the lacrosse field when she ran on it. The field described in Aunt Millicent’s book. Between Dad and John Erskine there was an embedded line of really settled magic, running deep into the darkness, binding up words that could never be said.

It would be so lonely, Charlotte thought, to carry a secret like that. She liked knowing that at least they could carry it together.

Her attention wandered on, across the little watercolour of a lake house, good Muskoka timber on rocky shore, sparse pine trees done by a confident if amateur hand. Initials E.E. at the bottom . . . another Erskine, probably. One of the women? Lots of them, Charlotte thought, were Es.

A family photograph, too, where people wore the sort of things they had before the war. Long, narrow dresses on women with marcelled hair, and men in high collars, stiff and well starched. Erskine was there, unmistakable even twenty years previously, his hair parted differently and his handlebar moustache looking a little less like an affectation with those clothes. That would be old Mrs. Erskine beside him, Charlotte supposed, and the much vaunted Anthony Erskine, the ill fated war hero, on the far side of her. And beside Anthony—

Charlotte’s gaze snagged; caught on a face and held, like a sweater on a nail. Like something fit to make it all unravel, if you happened to do something very foolish, like twist and turn and pull.

Erskine walked back into the room, soft drink in hand, a smile on his face, perfectly cheerful, unsuspecting, kind.

“I hope you like lime.”

Charlotte hadn’t time enough to change her face; to alter her expression. She tried, but it was worse somehow that she did. Like turning to twist, and pull, only to watch the sweater unravel.

John Erskine looked at her thoughtfully, and then from her face to the picture on the wall. He sighed, and gently, firmly, shut the door.

Charlotte was on her guard in a trice, backing up, heart hammering in her chest.

I could scream, she thought. I should scream. Climb out the window, run down the drive and scream. There are houses out there. Someone would hear. Someone would come . . .

But she did not believe it. Not really. Mr. Erskine would not have shut the door with both of them in here if he really thought he could be stopped by something so simple as a scream.

He set the soft drink on the edge of his desk and turned to smile fondly at the photograph.

“I suppose I ought not to have kept that up. But you see, it was no real risk, I thought, her being spotted by anyone who knew her. Your father wouldn’t remember ever meeting her in person. Your mother might, of course; she knew her as a girl. But after her marriage, she disappeared from society altogether. There was no risk of them moving in the same circles. The risk seemed so small.”

Charlotte stood shaking, the impossible truth that was really not so impossible at all making itself at home in her understanding. Settling in. Taking root.

“Mrs. Campbell . . . is your sister.”

“Yes.” He was so gentle. So awful and pleasant and kind. The same kind of warm understanding Mrs. Campbell had shown when Charlotte couldn’t get her magic right.

“She married a man who had some very unusual ideas, I’m afraid, about how best we ought to conduct ourselves during the war. Campbell was . . . not fanatical, you understand, but very single minded of purpose. It was as well for him that his aims aligned with my own, or I really could not have tolerated his treatment of my men. He did some very nasty things, I am afraid; a lot of very damaging workings in an effort to cover his tracks. He got to three of our top people before he came up against his equal in your father. It took Campbell and Trudy together to clean the memory of his name out of Charles’s head, and even that, I am afraid, was a little much for both of them. Campbell hasn’t been the same since. And of course,” this said with a genuinely sorrowful note, one which galled Charlotte by the very sincerity of it, “neither has your father.”

Charlotte was suddenly deeply grateful she’d not had the opportunity to take the soft drink. She otherwise would have brought it right back up in this moment.

“It was her inside Dad’s head, during the war? You made her do that? Made him forget what Campbell did, so they had to take him to Miss Gardner to put his mind all right again? And in Ebadmur, too . . . you made her do those spells. Made her use all of the girls at the school as a power source for the working.”

Mr. Erskine shook his head in real astonishment.

“Nobody made Trudy do anything. She wanted to help! She knew we were at risk of being declared obsolete after the war. She couldn’t allow that to happen. She knew I had a responsibility to my men. Trudy has a strong sense of family; a clear understanding of her obligations to us. She knew where her duty lay, and she had wonderful resources at her disposal. Naturally, she was only too happy to permit me use of them. Stir up a little trouble here and there, we march in to crush it down as we have for time out of mind. A most efficient system.”

“Create rebellion,” Charlotte said, “just to ensure you always have a job of crushing it.”

“Yes. And it was going so well, until that slip up in Ebadmur. It’s a very desirable location, Ebadmur; pivotal to a number of bordering interests, so that a revolution would be sure to necessitate widespread and prolonged intervention. Except your father saw what was behind it, and I had to make a good show of investigating. He bought it too, I think, though he mightn’t have done if he hadn’t been so distracted with worry for you.”

Charlotte tucked her hands into her skirt to conceal some part of how they shook. Why was he telling her all this? He must know she’d tell her father. He must. Unless . . .

As if divining the path her thoughts took, Erskine smiled. “Now. What are we to do with you? A memory working, I think, would be easiest. Kindest, certainly; I should not like anything too permanent to happen to you, but of course I can’t have you walking around discussing this. Especially not with Charles.”

“You think he won’t know you’ve done a working on me?” Charlotte said. “You really think he won’t be able to tell?”

“He might know if I had done it, of course,” Erskine agreed. “One gets to know the signs of familiar tampering. Like a fingerprint, almost. A scent. That’s why when he got so close to Campbell during the war, it was imperative Trudy be the one to clean his mind up. Remove all memory of the man, his connection to her . . . he doesn’t even properly recall the name. She did that part all right. Even so, she was very raw then; made a bit of a mess of parts she ought not to have touched. She’s studied a great deal since, and I don’t think there’s any risk of her muddling it nearly so badly as she did before.”

He didn’t think . . !

Now Charlotte did scream, and did run, but somehow when she ran for the window it wasn’t in the place she’d seen it before. It seemed to move; jump. The room turned all around her, so she could hardly tell which way was what. She made a desperate dash for where she thought it might be, the place she’d seen it a minute ago, and did not know her error until she crashed through the net of illusion and fell heavily against the door. The same one he had closed behind him when he came into the room.

The same one that opened now, just as natural and noiselessly as you please, to admit Mrs. Campbell.

Charlotte drew back, breathing ragged, under the gentle, sympathetic smile of her teacher.

“Charlotte . . . oh, my dear. I’m sorry. So very, very sorry.”

Then she looked over Charlotte’s head to Mr. Erskine, and said, “It’s not in her bag.”

“No? Well, then. Just as well we didn’t do a wiping on you yet, hey, Charlie?”

Charlotte twisted back and forth, looking from one to the other, struggling to see, to understand.

“It’s not . . . what’s not in my bag? What are you looking for? What do you think I have?”

“Don’t let’s play such silly games, Charlotte, please,” said Mrs. Campbell. She looked genuinely disappointed in her pupil. Like she didn’t want to think Charlotte capable of such pointless evasion. “Come across with it now, and we can get on with tidying up all the rest of it. You really won’t feel a thing.”

Charlotte was conscious of deep and desperate irony as she stared up into her teacher’s kindly face. The way, just as Mrs. Campbell had been so certain Charlotte could access her own magic when in truth she could not, she was now so certain she could access whatever elusive object Charlotte was supposed to have stolen without even knowing it.

“I don’t have anything,” she said, her voice almost a breathless sob. “Oh, it’s like a nightmare. I didn’t take any—do you hear me? I don’t have anything!”

Mr. Erskine gave a derisive snort and started forward. Charlotte turned with a scream, backing up until she cannoned into Mrs. Campbell and the torn edges of the room illusion. Then she looked back up at her teacher, and screamed again.

There, clearly visible in the ragged framing of John Erskine’s spell on John Erskine’s library, was John Erskine’s spell wrapped all around his sister.

Miss Gardner’s words came back to Charlotte with a crash.

There’s a deep net around her. A terrible working. She’s very thoroughly trapped.

“Oh god,” Charlotte wept, as Mr. Erskine caught her arm in a terrible grip. “Oh, my god, what did he do to you?”

Mrs. Campbell looked briefly startled at these words, then looked sharply up to her older brother.

“John, wait. She may really not know.” She looked back to Charlotte with that same awful kindliness, which now seemed even more dreadful once Charlotte could see the criss-crossing tangle of dead and choking magic that wrapped around every living inch of Ermintrude Campbell, nee Erskine. “Charlotte, the pen. When you broke into my office tonight, where did you put the pen? It had to have been you; it was very particularly spelled so that Miss Adamson could not see it, and you were the only other one who had any time to take it. What did you do with my pen?”

For another moment, as Mr. Erskine held her against him and Charlotte stared in frozen horror at the decades’ worth of workings he’d layered over his sister, she still could not comprehend. Could not remember. But then like a bright, cool breeze finding its way into the most stifling second storey room of the dormitory on an early September night, Charlotte recalled the map.

And the lines that hurt to look at.

And the pen she’d seized in a scrabbling attempt to create her own copy, before her father had arrived and rendered the exercise pointless.

“The pen,” she said. “You want . . . you want the . . .”

Unbidden, her free hand started to the pocket of her cardigan, then stopped. Froze. But Mrs. Campbell sighted its direction, and Mr. Erskine’s own gaze followed. He plunged his hand into her pocket with greedy triumph, and extracted the most innocuous-looking school-standard still-capped fountain pen. His target acquired, he discarded Charlotte with a complete lack of interest, and bore the pen over to a desk set against the far wall.

Charlotte stared.

“You put . . . you put all our magic in a pen?” She turned back to Mrs. Campbell. “Why?”

“You mean,” her teacher said lightly, “beyond the wanton indulgence of a literary reference? Well, because I needed to send the magic elsewhere, of course. I’d write with the pen, I’d do a little working, and the spell would set to paper just as neat as you please. Then one only needed fold it up, pop it in an envelope, and send it wherever John said it was most wanted.”

Charlotte blinked. Grappled with the audacious simplicity of the plan.

“You sent revolutionary spells all around the world . . . by post?”

“Yes, and it worked very well, too.”

“But . . . to whom? To people who paid you for it? Wanted their governments toppled?”

“No, no,” Mrs. Campbell sounded deeply shocked. “Nobody who received the letters ever knew they were spelled. The thing was meant to rub off on the people who handled the letter first, and spread through the postal system.”

“So you addressed them to . . . to random people? Just anyone?”

“Not just anyone, no.” Mrs. Campbell smiled just a little, like she was pleased Charlotte had followed along this far. “To the Old Girls.”

Charlotte blinked again.

“Miss Dunlap’s has alumni all around the world. So many addresses to choose from! It was perfect. I set up a transcription spell in Miss Adamson’s office—the same one I used to hear her call Harriet’s aunt and let her know you were on your way. I’d hear her dictation to Miss Benning, and note the dates that newsletters were drafted. Then I could check the alumni address list, and let John know the locations. He would tell me which ones were suitable targets, and I’d draft a new copy of the original letter using the spell. The woman who received it would never even be the wiser. How could she? It was in every particular otherwise the same. A little news, a little nostalgia . . . a solicitation for endowment . . . you’ll receive that sort of thing yourself, someday.”

She twinkled fondly at Charlotte.

“Who knows. You might even be living somewhere that I’ll be able to send you one of mine.”

Charlotte was still struggling to process this entire revelation when a grunt of annoyance sounded behind her.

“Confound it, Trudy, are you sure this is the right pen? I can’t get it to come right.”

Mrs. Campbell sighed, then swiftly covered over her irritation with a mask of pleasant efficiency.

“Yes, John, it’s very tricky. It needs to be, of course, or just anybody could make use of it. I’m happy to help—”

She started forward, hand outstretched. Mr. Erskine was some two or three metres away yet, the pen in his own hand, held away from him with the masculine disgust of somebody who cannot understand how a thing works, and cannot imagine that his incomprehension could be his own fault.

Charlotte watched her walk through the torn edges of the room spell, a solid and unmovable thing, wrapped in the solid and unmovable net of Erskine’s own dead magic.

How much of her own magic, Charlotte wondered, had he bled from her? Decade upon decade . . . time out of mind . . . hadn’t her father said the aerial could work in the short range? What if that was how he’d done it? Siphoned hers off for himself, maybe some of the girls’ magic too. Obliged her to imagine it was her duty to give it up to him, to surrender, to keep surrendering, to never perceive the fullness of the power that lay raw and living beneath her own two feet . . .

The field.

Charlotte looked down, startled. She could have sworn it had not been here when she entered, just as she had not thought it awake and alive when she was in the office. But it lay below her now sure enough, as clear and bright as it had when she was on the lacrosse field. Awoken, at the ready, in answer to the sureness that she felt. The absolute conviction of her own anger, her desire to defend even her own teacher, who had stolen from her friends, because she’d had so much stolen from her and could not see any way clear of what had been bound around her, stifling her, for years.

Charlotte spoke a crackling and unknowable word. Something her father had said all those days ago, that entire lifetime ago in Ebadmur.

A piece of the field beneath Mr. Erskine reformed itself as the sword that had been in her father’s hand, the one he had not needed to wield because he’d made a greater weapon of his own transparent willingness to use it in defence of her, and it sliced right through the pen.

Broke it open.

Set it free.

The magic spilled and spilled and spilled. Like ink. Like water. Like blood. Leaping, flowing, running. Wave after wave of enchantment cascaded from the pen in Mr. Erskine’s hand, years of schoolgirls’ talent siphoned off without their knowing, coursing across the floor to flow wet and wild, light and airy, into every corner of the room, the house, before spilling out into the streets and town beyond.

Go on, Charlotte thought fondly, watching it run. Go find whoever you came from. I bet they’ll be glad to have you back.

Then she looked back to the Erskine-Campbell contingent, and realized, with a prickle of unease, that whatever they were or weren’t capable of perceiving about the field, they definitely understood that the magic was gone, the pen was destroyed, and though they were unsure how, they knew it was probably her fault.

“What,” Mr. Erskine thundered, “the hell did you do?”

He stepped forward, and Charlotte saw, to her horror, what happened when he drew on the feedlines of his sister’s net. Mrs. Campbell gasped and bent double. The dead fishing net coursed and pulsed to life as her brother took what he needed, fuelling himself up with her magic for his fight.

“Oh!” Charlotte cried. “Oh, stop it, you’re hurting her!”

“No, no,” Mrs. Campbell gasped, “of course not.” But the reassurances were superfluous, because Mr. Erskine very clearly did not care.

“She is pleased to be of service to a much greater cause,” Mr. Erskine promised. “How do you think I have managed to evade detection for so long? It could not have been accomplished without a great quantity of magic. Trudy furnished all of it. Otherwise . . .”

He did not finish the sentence. He didn’t have to. Charlotte saw its terminal point as surely as she saw the living field of magic John Erskine seemed to have no earthly notion was all around him, a field he could not access, obliging him instead to use his sister as a living donor for as long as he needed to put her father off the scent.

“Otherwise Dad would have found out,” she whispered. Stared, searchingly, into his face. “You’re scared of him,” she realized. “My father.”

The accusation was clearly unpalatable to Mr. Erskine, though not as distasteful as the suggestion that he should care that he was taking advantage of his sister.

“Scared? Of course not. You must understand, when a man has a family talent such as mine, there is very little he has to fear from a man like your father.”

“But that’s just it. It’s a family talent. You say that like it’s a legacy, like it was born into you, but really, you stole it. The magic you had to use just to keep ahead of him . . . it wasn’t even yours. It was Mrs. Campbell’s. That’s why you’re scared of Dad. He was trained by Aunt Millicent. She maybe didn’t tell him all about it, but he worked out something. He worked out enough. When he really needs to, Dad can tap into something you didn’t even know was there.”

The truth hit home like a lightning bolt, and Charlotte watched in unconcealed wonder as it brightened his face with terrible light. This, she saw, must be what Dad saw when he rambled on, spitting out sentences of no consequence, idle chatter all designed to land until the truth would out.

“And so can I.”

It was maybe more warning than she should have given him, but she couldn’t help it. Not with Mrs. Campbell writhing there, caught in her net, the one that Miss Gardner had warned could not be removed save at great cost. She saw the dead lines of magic between the Erskines, choking Mrs. Campbell, enriching her brother at cost to herself. Then she looked down and saw, for the first time, the first time she really knew it for itself, her own field. Laid out before her like a pavement, calling her home, into the sheltering arms of every person she best loved and most longed to see.

The people who were there to catch her, no matter what.

She smiled down the length of pavement, into the history that knit her up with bloody lip and lost white bonnet, a shoe her father had put on her foot and every road he had ever driven her down, to any destination. She reached into memories of Mother waking in the night, choking on her own screams as the about-to-die found her, and she did all she could to save them from the knowing of it. To Julia whispering magic words into the dark, words that meant nothing when you were too little to know that the very thing you reached for wasn’t inside you, or not only just, but in every atom of every thing all around you.

To Nurse, rocking by the bed, lamplit, placid. Knitting needles clicking.

“All right,” she said. “That’s enough, now.”

And she crossed the floor, the pavement, the nursery, the dormitory, every place she had ever been safe in at any time in her life, to open the door.

Her father stepped through.

Dad blinked down at her in surprise. Turned. Saw John Erskine, and Mrs. Campbell.

He sucked in his breath.

“God almighty,” he whispered.

Mrs. Campbell gave a terrible flop, like a fish in a net, and lay still. Charlotte, moved by equal parts pity and horror, reached for her with a cry, only to have her father’s arm lock around her and jerk her back just as Erskine made a very passable lunge in her direction.

A crackling word from her father sent the rug rushing sideways under Erskine’s feet, giving Captain Cathcart time enough to look bewildered askance at his daughter.

“Mrs. Campbell,” said Charlotte. “She’s his sister.”

About seven emotions at once seemed to collide in her father’s face. He turned to face Erskine, his face a thundercloud, and said,

“This ends, John. You need to stand down.”

Erskine looked as if he could hardly believe his ears.

“Stand—? I’ll do nothing of the kind.”

“It’s over,” Captain Cathcart said quietly. “You must see that.”

Erskine stumbled to his feet, using the table beside him as leverage. He shook his head.

“Don’t be foolish, Charles. I’ll do a working on both of you. None of this ever need come out. You’ll forget, both of you. It will all be like it never happened.”

“Like hell I’m letting you inside my head,” Captain Cathcart said cheerfully. “Last fellow got inside my head drove me damn near insane. I locked the place down six ways from Tuesday after that, and I’ve no earthly intention of letting anyone else take up the lid.”

“I think,” said Erskine gently, “we can both think of one or two things you hold even more dear than your own memory, though, can’t we?” And here he looked over to Charlotte.

“John,” said Captain Cathcart, in a terribly steady voice, “don’t.”

“I hope I won’t have to, Charles. I hope you’ll listen to reason. Nothing unpleasant need happen to Charlie if you’ll only agree—”

“Oh,” cut in Captain Cathcart, this time with a note of apology, “I hope you don’t think I was asking for her sake.” His eyes flashed, clear and meaningful. “I was asking for yours.”

The air at the heart of the room hummed. Hummed and thickened with . . . what? Charlotte couldn’t even tell. She’d seen the field in every form she knew it took, but this, she thought, was something on another level entirely. As if the very fabric of the air were knit together by magic, and her father were drawing on it, pulling it around him, so that he was all charged up and buzzing like a symphony of honey bees, every one of them intent, fierce, fixated on Erskine.

John Erskine grew pale.

“Charles—”

Miss Gardner’s words circled round between Charlotte’s ears. The cost she had said. The cost of freeing Mrs. Campbell. Was it—

Erskine made a sudden lunge, hands flying, something thick and clumsy reaching out of him, something rotten, reaching for Charlotte. But it wasn’t nearly enough. Not fast, not skilled, not even intentional enough to count. Charlotte half thought even she could have stopped it, except her father got there first, blotted it out of existence with the honeybee swarm of magic like anyone else might step on an ant.

And Charlotte saw, belatedly, reflected in John Erskine’s face the truth of what she’d already known; what she’d sad. He was terrified of her father.

With damn good reason, too.

The magic that was Cathcart’s own, entirely his, not stolen or borrowed but born into his blood and bones, rose and thickened and descended, buzzing with fury, on the person of John Erskine. Oh help him, Charlotte implored, almost unthinking, and the field rose in answer to her summons. Charlotte still could not tell if her father knew it was there, but the field, at least, seemed to know him. It knew his working, and agreed to work in concert with him.

Dad’s magic, Charlotte's field, wrapped all together around John Erskine. Snuggled him round and stopped him up and felled him, stiff and mummy-like, to the carpet of his very nice library. Then he simply . . . laid there. Unable to get up.

Done.

Charlotte looked from Erskine to her father, then back again. By the time she was about to look to her father once more, he was there, arms encircling her, steering her away from the sight. Mrs. Campbell lay beside him too, and Charlotte longed to reach for her, to assure her that whatever needed to happen in consequence for the rest of it, at least in one other sense she was finally free.

But it wasn’t time for that. Not yet. For now it was just her and Dad, standing together on the pavement at the almost-end of wartime, and he caught her.

Held her tight.

And it was good.