Calling E-Book

Molly Harper

• Herausgeber: NYLA
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 333

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

"A spunky Cinderella story with a heroine who's equal parts compassion, determination, and pure magical delight." —Rachel Vincent, New York Times bestselling author After discovering and rescuing a group of magical Changelings just like herself, Sarah Smith must now figure out what to do with the unruly children – and how to keep them and the rest of the magical world safe! Having left the structure of Miss Castwell's Institute for the Magic Instruction of Young Ladies behind, Sarah and her two best friends, Alicia and Ivy, hide out with the Changeling children in the countryside while they try to formulate a plan. They have no weapons, no guidance, and the Mother Book is gone. They only have each other and the creeping threat of Miss Morton's revenant army on the horizon… New alliances must be forged, and old friends provide what support they can, but the trio wonders who they can truly trust. They are searching for the mysterious artifact that may prove to be the undoing of the undead, after all! As the rest of magical society prepares for what they think is the highlight of Lightbourne's endless party season, Sarah, Alicia, and Ivy throw themselves headlong into planning for the night that holds their last chance to protect the safety of the entire magical world! Join the ladies of Miss Castwell's in this adventurous tale of magic, mystery and, occasionally, young romance!

Leseprobe

CALLING

MOLLY HARPER

This book is licensed to you for your personal enjoyment only.

This ebook may not be sold, shared, or given away.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the writer’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Calling

Copyright © 2021 by Molly White

Ebook ISBN: 9781641971812

KDP Print ISBN: 9798784667823

Interior illustrations by Polina Hrytskova @PollyKul

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

No part of this work may be used, reproduced, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without prior permission in writing from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

NYLA Publishing

121 W 27th St., Suite 1201, New York, NY 10001

http://www.nyliterary.com

CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Discussion Questions

Also by Molly Harper

Acknowledgments

About the Author

1

There was raspberry jam on the ceiling.

How did raspberry jam even reach a fifteen-foot ceiling?

Was it some sort of jam-specific spell? Was this the end-result of physics combined with the energy of a dozen rambunctious youngsters at breakfast? Or was I finally facing the fruit-based consequences of what had proven to be a series of ill-fated decisions I hadn’t been prepared to make?

I stood in the dining room at Hazelcliffe Manor, staring at the ceiling, pondering these questions, when my closest friends, Ivy Cowell and Alicia McCray, approached, slipping their arms through mine.

“Strawberry?” Alicia guessed.

I shook my head. “Raspberry, actually.”

“Hmm, that’s new.” Ivy pursed her lips. In unison, we tilted our heads as we gazed up at the jam constellation.

It had been a difficult few months here at Mrs. Winter’s country estate in South Wickeshire. It sounded like such a simple idea at first. Step one, disrupt our holiday at Alicia’s home in Coventry to search for a secret training facility we’d heard might be located in the nearby mountains where Changelings like myself were being trained to serve as bodyguards to the magical elite. Step two, use a flying airship, also owned by Alicia’s family, to move those children across the country, somewhere safe, where they wouldn’t be treated like tiny soldiers. Step three…

We never got around to figuring out step three.

Also, step two had been interrupted when my nemesis, Miss Morton, confronted us, burning the Mother Book and consuming the ashes to cement her place in a dead politician named Sebastian Crenshaw – while announcing her plans to use necromancy to attack magical society with an army of the re-animated dead.

Step two had gotten rather complicated.

And despite months of searching, we hadn’t found a way to bring the Mother Book back from the ashes. It seemed vital to our success, having that knowledge back, and we’d thrown ourselves into the search whole-heartedly. But there simply wasn’t a title in the Winters’ library called, How to Undo Your Massive Magical Foul-Up, Which Might Doom the Whole World.

In anticipation of our arrival, Mrs. Winter had sent her staff away from Hazelcliffe Manor, which was perfect for our needs, but a far cry from her palatial mansion in the capitol city of Lightbourne. The estate was a working herb farm owned by Mrs. Winter’s branch of the Brandywine family. The bucolic stone house was quite luxurious, all things considered. The rooms were spacious, painted in calming blues and filled with sunlight. It was exactly what the children needed, after being kept on a wind-plagued mountain for who knows how long. We were only meant to be there for a few weeks, but our residency had lasted through the winter months. Mrs. Winter had assigned the staff and farm tenders elsewhere, explaining that a floral blight had halted operations temporarily.

At first, the children’s collective relief that they escaped the school was enough. They slept. They ate rich, filling meals, provided by the one adult they could trust from the mountain facility – their cook-slash-housemother, Mrs. Lumpkin. But they stayed in their rooms, unsure of what to do. And while Mrs. Lumpkin was handling a good deal of the cooking and cleaning, someone had to gather food from the kitchen garden. Someone had to gather eggs and milk the cows. Someone had to keep the house from becoming a pit of chaos and dirty socks.

More often than not, Alicia, Ivy, or I were that someone. While I had grown up as a servant in Mrs. Winter’s house and could probably clean most of Hazelcliffe in a matter of hours, my friends were not accustomed to this sort of labor and sometimes left more serious messes in their wakes. Mrs. Lumpkin found their efforts endlessly entertaining, while also letting me know I didn’t make beds up to her standards, either.

Eventually, the Changelings’ uncertainty faded and they became… children. They ran. They played games in the gardens. They gathered in the kitchens for late-night biscuit raids. They staged massive food fights at the breakfast table.

I suspected this was how we ended up with jam on the ceiling.

While she was a housekeeping wonder, Mrs. Lumpkin was very little help when it came to bringing order to the household. She’d seen firsthand how callously the children, including her own son, Robert, had been treated at the “Crenshaw School for Gifted Youth.” And she was just so thrilled to see them enjoying themselves and living comfortably, Mrs. Lumpkin couldn’t bear to tell them “no.” And yes, it was lovely to see smiles blooming on their faces, but I was the one who was going to have to explain to our hostess how we got jam on her ceiling.

“Mrs. Winter is not going to be happy about this,” Alicia said. “Or the state of the library. Or the upstairs water closet.”

“Alicia,” Ivy interjected.

“Or the parlor,” Alicia added.

“You’re not helping,” Ivy told her.

Alicia added, “Or the second-best parlor.”

Ivy sighed and drew her ritual blade, Prudence, from her sleeve holster and drew the symbol for “cleanse” on the air. The light green shape floated gently toward the ceiling, like a stain on the air, where it effortlessly scraped the jam from the plaster. Unfortunately, we had not considered that the jam would have to land somewhere – and it landed on Alicia’s face.

“I should have expected that,” Alicia admitted, wiping the splotch of smashed fruit from her eyelids.

“I’m so sorry!” Ivy exclaimed, though it was from her attempts to hold in her cackles rather than the mortification she might have felt years ago. “It’s not funny.”

“No, it’s very serious,” I agreed, flattening my lips together and nodding. For the first time all week, laughter bubbled up from my throat. I coughed, making a sound like a constipated bagpipe. I glanced up at Ivy, at the sight of her face, a perfect cameo of brown skin, contorting as she tried to hold her giggles in – I covered my mouth with my hand. My shoulders quaked and I took deep gulping breaths.

“If you’re going to laugh, you might as well do it now,” Alicia muttered.

I burst out laughing, nearly collapsing into a dining chair. Ivy doubled over, howling, her dark curls bouncing wildly.

“You know, sometimes, I think we magicals forget about little things like gravity and need to be reminded,” Alicia sighed as she drew the “cleanse” symbol on the air with her own blade, Resolve. The turquoise symbol floated upwards and the jam dropped harmlessly into a bowl I held.

I grinned at her. We’d managed to advance to wordless magic, simply drawing the symbols on the air with one’s blade, over the years. And I was proud to have mastered a few advanced bladeless spells, even if they sometimes turned out badly. But for Alicia? Doing any spell well and without negative consequences was a major accomplishment. Just the previous year, she wouldn’t have been able to aim a spell at her own person without risk of serious injury. From birth, Alicia had suffered from reverberation. When any practitioner used magic, the body suffered gradual damage from the energy drain of creating spells. Most practitioners were able to heal from this damage quickly. In reverb patients, the magic echoed inward and instead of healing, the damage festered and eventually killed them.

Alicia survived much longer than most reverb patients, because her mother’s influence limited her to small spells. The disconnection from her magic, her very life force, kept Alicia undersized and sickly. Somehow, after combining magic between the three of us to defeat Miss Morton at Miss Castwell’s, Alicia’s magic had come back full-force and couldn’t be contained. She was growing up before our eyes, physically and metaphysically. Once small and sickly, she was just as tall as I was now, leaping right over the awkward adolescent phase into creamy skin and a refined, elfin bone structure that emphasized her large green eyes.

“I would rather the reminders didn’t land on my forehead,” Alicia grumbled as Ivy wiped at her eyes.

“I would tell you I’m sorry, but that would be a lie,” I giggled. “I really needed that.”

“Being the de facto leader of a dozen or so children is rather stressful,” Alicia agreed.

“I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. For Mr. Crenshaw’s re-animated corpse to show up at the front door,” Ivy sighed. “Or worse, my grandmother.”

I shuddered. I didn’t want to think of Mr. Crenshaw’s body, and how it trembled and collapsed when we cast Miss Morton out of it. But we had every reason to believe Miss Morton was still using that body as her “vehicle,” considering that Mr. Crenshaw had been seen in Lightbourne, behaving in a distinctly not-dead fashion. Miss Morton had managed to impersonate him for months – long before we realized she was curling inside him, controlling him like a puppet, which was more than a little embarrassing. From what we heard, she was using Mr. Crenshaw’s political authority to further her cause – revenge on Guild Guardian society at large for wiping her family off the map.

When I’d first arrived at Miss Castwell’s, Miss Morton had approached me as a mentor, as a friend. I trusted her, only to find out that for her entire life, she’d hidden the fact that she was descended from the (not quite) extinct family of necromancers. I thought she’d recognized in me that element that didn’t believe I belonged there. Instead, she was just trying to get access to the Mother Book, to drain us both of magical energy to launch her on this road to megalomania.

“Your grandmother isn’t so bad,” Alicia objected. “She only wants to rule your family, not the world as we know it.”

“That you’re aware of,” Ivy muttered.

“Sarah!” a high, girlish voice shrieked upstairs.

I bolted for the staircase. It had been strange, returning to my real name, the name under which I’d served the Winter family. The other Changelings had been confused, me introducing myself as one of them, Sarah Smith, while I was known to my school friends as Cassandra Reed. So we’d all simply agreed that I return to myself, to Sarah. And while it was an adjustment at first for Alicia and Ivy, they made the effort, which only proved that they were worthy friends.

“You mentioned another shoe?” Alicia asked as we scrambled up the sweeping staircase to the guest wing. We ran past portraits of apple-cheeked, laughing Brandywines of generations gone-by – not exactly the memory I had of my sternly elegant former employer. Great Houses like the Brandywines and the Winters specialized in certain areas of magical research. The Brandywines were master gardeners, supplying herbs for potion markets around the world. They presented themselves as jolly farmers, but they were just as ambitious as the Winters, healers who balanced the art of curing the sick with their need to run the world. Mrs. Winter was the perfect blend of the two families’ skill sets.

I ran to the guest bedroom where I was sleeping and found Lizzie, a little girl of around nine, pointing at my vanity mirror. After years of living in spartan facilities where little about her life was soft or pretty, Lizzie relished living with older girls. She would spend hours in our rooms, playing with our things, trying on our clothes, using our hairpins to arrange her lustrous black hair. She would bounce between our rooms, spending hours going through our trunks, gazing at herself in the mirror, imagining herself at a ball, practicing her fan-fluttering skills. She was just so earnest about it, we couldn’t tell her no – which I supposed, made us no better than Mrs. Lumpkin. Besides, she never damaged what she played with. If anything, she would scold us for not being careful enough with our things.

Lizzie was hopping up and down, my lace shawl bouncing off her shoulders as she waved wildly. I paused, wondering how she was able to jump gracefully in high-heeled boots when I could barely walk in them. Lizzie took my face in her little hands and turned my head towards the glass. Bright red lines were forming on the mirror, shaping into letters.

Someone was sending me a scrying message. While formal invitations and society correspondence were sent by proper messengers on pressed linen paper, quick notes to close friends and family were written on mirrors with the tips of our blades. The words appeared instantaneously on the mirror nearest the intended recipient, no matter where they were. It was a rather ingenious method of communication, which Mrs. Winter and I had not made use of since our arrival at Hazelcliffe. Mrs. Winter worried our adversaries might find some magical means to intercept our private messages, so we’d taken several measures to obscure our location and identities – including addressing me as her fictional friend, Mrs. Agatha Pennythorn.

“Dearest Agatha,

I’m so pleased you and your companions are enjoying the countryside. While I was saddened to receive news that you couldn’t travel to Lightbourne, please don’t trouble yourself to return from your holiday. It would be a shame for you to cut your enjoyment short on my account, especially with the busy season upon us. Things are so tedious and hectic in town right now.” Behind me, Ivy and Alicia clamored into the room, smacking into my back as more words appeared on the mirror. Allow me to extend my invitation indefinitely, so you might enjoy the restful quiet of the country. Also, I am sending a parcel of much-needed essentials from our fair city. Country life should be a bit more agreeable with them. No need to thank me. Cordially, Annie.”

I chewed my lip, considering. “That’s Mrs. Winter’s handwriting, but that doesn’t sound like Mrs. Winter.”

“Mrs. Winter allows you to call her ‘Annie’?” Alicia asked, frowning.

“Aneira Winter would never allow anyone to call her ‘Annie’.” I snorted. “Mrs. Winter once used the cut direct on an acquaintance, Wilhemina Pond, who had the nerve to call out her proper first name, without permission, on the sidewalk in public. Mrs. Winter pretended not to know her and climbed into her carriage. Mrs. Pond was removed from her research guild. Madame DuPont would no longer take dress commissions from her family. Mrs. Pond had to move to America where nobody knew her.”

Alicia and Ivy winced in unison. Perhaps it had been a mistake, to use open, though vague, communication instead of complicated ciphers and codes that were so popular among the Guardian set these days. But it seemed to me the best way to show anyone who might be watching that we weren’t trying to hide anything, and therefore, not worthy of monitoring, was to be as boring as possible. It took work to be this unremarkable.

“You have to look through the filter of passive aggression and figure out what she’s really trying to say,” I noted, pointing at the words. “Lizzie, could you go get Robert, Cathy, and Mrs. Lumpkin, please?”

Lizzie nodded, carefully folding my shawl and leaving it in a neat pile on the bed.

“Well, unlikely pet names aside, this isn’t the busy season,” Ivy scoffed. “Nothing happens in Lightbourne this early in the spring. My mother always complains how bored she is sitting around the house, waiting for invitations that will never come.”

“Mrs. Winter wouldn’t make a mistake like that unless she was trying to tell us something,” I muttered. “Everything is so tedious and hectic, right now. That communicates a certain amount of annoyance and dread. Mrs. Winter hates anything tedious. She wouldn’t give two figs for my enjoyment, but she wants me to stay in the quiet of the country where no one can find us.”

“Something must be happening in town,” Alicia reasoned. “She doesn’t want us to move from our current location.”

“And she doesn’t want you to thank her,” Ivy added.

“Which is also incredibly unlike her,” I said. “Mrs. Winter is a stickler for observing the social graces. You respond to a thoughtful message with another thoughtful message. So, she doesn’t want me to respond. I suppose she’s still worried that someone is watching our communications.”

“What’s happening?” Robert asked as he, Cathy, and Mrs. Lumpkin filed into the room, with Lizzie trailing behind them. As the oldest people in the house, we’d formed a sort of council of elders to make decisions for our group. The next oldest Changelings, Joseph and May, were only twelve and it seemed cruel to force them back out of the childhood they were enjoying for the first time.

Alicia blushed a hilarious shade of magenta at the sight of Robert. In the weeks since we’d arrived at Hazelcliffe, the two of them hadn’t formally defined their relationship, which was really none of our business. She was happy and that was all that mattered. However, watching her cheeks go bright colors whenever he entered a room was one of the highlights of my day. But I had no time to enjoy it now. I would have to file it away for later consideration.

“Mrs. Winter seems to think it wouldn’t be safe for us to try to move at the end of the month as planned,” I said. “Something must be happening in Lightbourne.”

“Would it be worth going to the nearest town? Looking for a newspaper?” Robert suggested.

Alicia clutched at his hand. “No, you couldn’t. It’s too risky.”

“We’ve stayed here too long as it is,” Cathy insisted. “You know what that Miss Morton wants to do. We need to stop her or get out of England and find some place that’s safe from her.”

“There’s no place that will be safe from her, if she gets what she wants,” I countered.

“All the more reason to move,” Cathy told me.

Cathy was a lithe, quick-witted girl around our age, who had been called “honey” by Mrs. Lumpkin when she’d been living at the mountain school. Of all the people at Hazelcliffe, Cathy worried me the most. The last time I’d made friends with a Changeling my own age – the first fellow Changeling I’d ever met – she’d stolen the Mother Book and gave it to Miss Morton. My former ladies’ maid, Jenny, hadn’t wanted magic. She just wanted to go back to her life the way she knew it. That hadn’t happened, of course. I presumed Jenny was still with Miss Morton somewhere. I hoped she was all right. Unlike my own sister, Mary, who had sided with Miss Morton against me – out of pure spite, rather than desperation – I couldn’t be angry with Jenny. She’d only wanted normalcy.

I just didn’t want to repeat that experience with Cathy. She was unhappy, as Jenny had been, and unhappiness could make people do desperate things. So, we’d given Cathy what we hoped was the space to be herself and find some peace. When she found a few old-fashioned riding habits in the attic, at least twenty years out of date but much more comfortable to run about the farm in, we offered to hem them and make them more comfortable for her. When she cut her dark hair off at the nape of her neck, sending Mrs. Lumpkin into an all-out tizzy, we offered her our hair pins to make styling it a bit easier. Cathy ignored our offers, but at least she was less verbal about doubting every single move we made.

For the most part.

At least, to our faces.

“There’s too many of us to just run into the night, without a plan, Cathy,” Ivy said gently. “We can’t put the smaller children at risk.”

Appealing to Cathy’s love for her unofficial siblings might have seemed like a low blow, but it was an effective one. She would never put the other Changelings in danger, so she simply pursed her lips into an unhappy line and grumbled, “Fine.”

“So, we’re staying here for now?” Mrs. Lumpkin asked, stepping between her son and Alicia. Mrs. Lumpkin didn’t really like that Robert was interested in Alicia. She didn’t think that anyone was good enough for her “sweetling.” The fact that Alicia was an heiress to one of the largest fortunes in magical England made very little difference to her – which was also very entertaining… for Ivy and myself, not Alicia. She didn’t find it amusing in the least.

“It would appear so,” Ivy said.

“Well, that’s a relief,” Mrs. Lumpkin said, shrugging. “My rhubarb isn’t due to come in for another few weeks.”

“Yes, rhubarb was the key to the girls’ strategy, Mum,” Robert said. Mrs. Lumpkin swatted at him lightly, even as she smiled. Like me, Robert had shown signs of magic when he was just a baby – which was supposed to be impossible for us, and all of the other Changeling children, because we were born into non-magical “Snipe” families.

Generations before our births, magical people had been quite alarmed at the scientific progress that non-magicals had managed to make during something called “the Industrial Revolution.” While Guardians might have enjoyed the luxuries of steam engines and gas energy, magical practitioners from across the world agreed that non-magicals would eventually create weapons beyond magic’s strength or ability to protect magical society. Magical families hadn’t agreed on any issue for generations, but they agreed to form an international “Coven Guild” to approach non-magical governments all over the world. Those governments were informed that the Coven Guild would be running things from now on. It was their job to protect us from the escalating threat of our own technological innovations, they claimed, before we did real damage to the planet and ourselves.

Over the years, the world’s course was reversed to a system where non-magicals were a paid servant class with no political power. We worked in Guardian households. We learned trades. We earned a fair wage. That was the best we could hope for. Guardians made decisions that shaped society, the economy, and magic itself. As long as they were accepted into the right research guilds after graduation from their various schools, they could study any number of magical occupations.

My family did not have magic, nor did any of our friends and neighbors. I was told so every day of my life. I believed it, right until the moment I levitated one of Mrs. Winter’s favorites vases out of sheer panic. My parents, who worked as the Winters’ housekeeper and gardener, had given me magical suppressants as a toddler to hide these talents. Like Alicia, it kept me under-sized and sickly, until the day my magic decided it wouldn’t be contained any longer.

Afraid that her family would suffer social and political ruin, Mrs. Winter gave me a false identity and placed me at Miss Castwell’s Institute for the Magical Instruction of Young Ladies as her heretofore unknown distant cousin from the expansive Brandywine side of her family. And for a few months, my life had been a bit of a fairy tale – the Changeling child born with magic she wasn’t supposed to have, who learned to live among the rich and powerful… until I made the mistake of befriending the school librarian, Miss Morton.

I thought I’d been alone in the world, the only Snipe born with magic in history. After revealing her true character, Miss Morton had laughed at my ego – rightfully so. I wasn’t the Chosen One. I wasn’t even the chosen one in a dozen. Certain powerful Guild Guardians had known about Changelings’ existence for years, but had kept it to themselves. They made a resource out of children like me, training Changelings to serve as magical, expendable bodyguards. That’s what was happening at the mountain school. Robert and Cathy were supposed to be the next graduates.

“I still don’t like this,” Cathy told me, giving her usual disapproving grimace. “We can’t sit around forever, waiting and planning. Your Miss Morton isn’t just planning. That madwoman is on the move.”

“I won’t say that you’re wrong, Cathy, but the goal is the same as it always has been, to keep us all safe,” I said. “Anything else – like preventing Miss Morton from taking over magical society as we know it – is merely icing on the cake.”

“That answer is vague and unhelpful, as most of your answers so far have been,” Cathy sneered. “I suppose I should congratulate you on your consistency.”

“If you have a better plan, Cathy, we’re more than willing to hear it,” Ivy replied.

As Cathy did not have a better plan, she huffed out of the room without another word – which I supposed was better than a direct insult. It was at times like this, I really missed the Mother Book. The book was the one special thing about me in this group. As the Translator, I was the only person who could read its magical cuneiform, spells, and information left behind by previous generations, and discover its secrets. Every time I’d needed answers over the previous year, the book would guide me. I would approach it with a question on my mind and it would flop open to some page that would eventually lead me in the general direction of the information I needed. It was never a direct route, because that would be too easy, and the book wanted me to learn.

To be fair, Cathy was right to be frustrated with me. I was simply moving too slowly. I couldn’t seem to make a decision or consider an idea without seeing all the things that could go wrong. I’d never been responsible for so much before, beholden to so many – and not just in terms of the people in this house, but everyone. No matter what I did, there was a huge chance that many people could get hurt. Innocent people. People I loved. And at night, when I was alone, staring up at the canopy over my bed, a tiny, shameful part of me wanted to give up, go home, go back to my normal life, where I didn’t know anything about magic or secret evils or how the world really worked. I wanted to go back to my parents and their lovely mundane, not-potentially-world-ending problems. But I couldn’t. I’d seen too much. Most of it, I saw through the ever-shifting pages of the Mother Book.

And I supposed, that never knowing magic would have meant never meeting Ivy or Alicia, never knowing real friendship. It would have meant never meeting Alicia’s brother, Gavin, who I was almost certainly in love with – though I hadn’t had time to fully explore what that meant, either.

I paused, stroking the charm bracelet on my wrist with tiny books attached to the chain. It was a library I could carry on my arm. Gavin had given it to me as a courting gift. It was one of the few personal things I’d kept with me on our “travels,” besides my ritual blade, Wit.

I turned to Alicia and Ivy. We were having growing pains of our own since coming to the farm. We were accustomed to having every moment of our day scheduled and managed for us. Gone were the Castwell green gowns laid out for us each morning. We had to decide how we would spend our days, what we would wear, what we would eat and when. It was terrifying to suddenly have so much control of our daily lives… and that was when we didn’t take into account the magical and social revolution we had inadvertently started.

I was becoming a young adult and I didn’t much care for it.

As usual, my familiar, an imperious blue-green songbird named Phillip, sensed my distress and landed on my shoulder with a peep, nuzzling against my neck. I got the strange feeling that maybe Phillip missed the book as well. He’d spent a lot of time in my room, on his little driftwood perch near the bookstand, well, sulking, in a bird-ish manner.

“Missing the Mother Book again?” Ivy asked, while Mrs. Lumpkin frowned. Phillip was the only familiar at Hazelcliffe and she did not approve of animals roaming unfettered in the house.

I nodded. “I can’t help but think that if I had the book, I would have some idea of where to start.”

“Again, with that silly book. No use crying over spilled milk, Sarah. Better to make use of what you have,” Mrs. Lumpkin grumbled. “And I have pies in the oven. Let me know if there are any more dramatic announcements. Keep the bird out of my kitchen.”

“Mum doesn’t really know what it’s like to have a familiar,” Robert told me gently. “Or what it’s like to lose a centuries-old artifact that contained all the magical knowledge of generations past.”

“Thank you, Robert,” I said, nodding.

“You could always try to make a new book, you know?” Lizzie told me from my vanity seat, where she was carefully braiding my Castwell green ribbons into her hair.

I stopped suddenly, turning towards her. “What do you mean?”

“Geoffrey’s father was a book binder, before he came to the mountain school. He knows all about making books. He would tell us very boring stories about it at mealtimes,” Lizzie said, flipping her braids over her shoulders. “You should ask him.”

“Lizzie, you know we’ve been looking for a way to bring back the Mother Book for months. Why didn’t you say anything before now?” I asked.

Before flouncing out the door, she said, “You didn’t ask.”

“Do you think that could work?” Ivy asked as I stared after Lizzie, speechless. All of our attentions were focused on retrieving the book from its destroyed state. It hadn’t occurred to me that we had the will or the right to create a new one.

“I don’t see why not,” Alicia said. “You said the book was more aware than most objects, that it had a mind of its own. Maybe we just try to invite that mind into another book?”

“Or we could create a new monster that we have to fight off instead of concentrating on the Miss Morton problem,” Ivy sighed.

“That is also a valid point,” Robert agreed.

“Please stop agreeing with us,” I told him.

He smirked. “All right, then.”

“Robert!” I snapped at him, but with little heat, because I was laughing.

Alicia gave him a fond look. “As much as I enjoy you vexing my friends, now may not be the right time.”

“It’s always the right time for that,” he replied. “The faces they make are hilarious.”

It turned out that all we needed to do was to give the children a joint project and they became a creative force to be reckoned with – a truly terrifying creative force.

Geoffrey, a small boy around eleven years old, whom Mrs. Lumpkin had called “sugar lump,” was more than happy to tell me anything I wanted to know about assembling books from paper, canvas, and linen. His father didn’t make magical books, of course, but he assured us that assembling one would be simple enough if we were willing to dismantle other books for spare blank pages. Every book seemed to have a few blanks, but to get to them, we would have to tear the books apart. Mrs. Winter’s library books. I tried not to think of that part as I stacked potential titles on the library table.

Meanwhile, Robert went outside to find a birch tree stump, which he planed into thin rectangles to serve as covers. He spent hours in the garden shed, sanding the planks smooth, but I suspected he was just staying out there longer than necessary, just for the sake of peace and quiet. Meggie, a ten-year-old with pale, freckled cheeks and flaming ginger curls, crawled through the attic to find a bolt of undyed linen in an old hope chest. Lizzie offered up her favorite hair ribbons to use as binding cords. Her giving them up for “the cause” was oddly touching, even though they were technically my hair ribbons.

As the children descended on the library to find more suitable titles to deconstruct, we realized there were other problems to consider besides Mrs. Winter’s bibliographical wrath. For one thing, we didn’t have a book press or printer’s ink. And there was also Ivy’s notion that we would accidentally create an evil version of the Mother Book, which sometimes woke me up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat.

“How are you going to remake a priceless font of ancient wisdom from pieces you’re scavenging from other books?” Cathy demanded from the second-level balcony, which housed histories of England’s magical families. She glared down at me, hands on her hips.

The library was my favorite room in Hazelcliffe Manor. Shelves, bursting with books, lined the room from floor-to-ceiling, which might have made the room feel claustrophobic, if not for the large windows on the second level. On the (frequent) evenings when I couldn’t sleep, I curled in one of the deep leather wingback chairs, flanking the large fireplace, staring into the flames. Over the white marble mantle, the Winter’s sigil of a raven plunging at an apple, had replaced the Brandywine blossoms. It reminded me of my first day of Miss Castwell’s, when the book had broken through its glass display case to mark me as Translator.

“I just… have a feeling,” I told Cathy, rubbing at the dragonfly mark on my palms, a gift from the Mother Book on the day it chose me. “I know it doesn’t make much sense, but so much of my work with the book was based on feeling magic, instead of knowing it.”

“You’re right, that doesn’t make any sense,” Cathy told me.

I shrugged. “This just feels like the right thing to do. And if you don’t want to help, you don’t have to.”

“She’s going to help,” Meggie shouted, shooting a hostile look at Cathy. “She’s just being contrary. It’s all she’s done since we got here.”

Cathy pulled a rude face at Meggie, whom Mrs. Lumpkin had called “little bairn” at the school. Mrs. Lumpkin would not have appreciated Cathy making faces at her darling. Part of me wondered whether this hostility was Cathy’s true personality or if it was simply a response to being kept in that harsh place for years, raised by so-called adults who didn’t encourage her to feel human emotions. Maybe she was only displaying negative emotions like disdain and distrust because she hadn’t been allowed to express them at the school. I hoped it meant she felt safe with us. Or at the very least, she would eventually display something else.

“We appreciate your support, Cathy,” Ivy told her.

Cathy grumbled and tossed aside a copy of The Rise and Fall of House Grimstelle. I caught it and tucked the book into my “late night reading” pile, because it could eventually prove useful. Grimstelle had been Miss Morton’s family house, a once-powerful group of necromancers that had been pruned from magical society after their experiments and in-fighting were deemed too dangerous to the public good. Miss Morton was a fringe descendent, deeply resentful of losing her place in society, the family money, the legacy she believed was hers.

There were moments where I ever-so-briefly sympathized with Miss Morton. Every House had its magical gifts – for House Cavill, it was mystical metallurgy; for Brandywine, it was horticulture – why should Miss Morton suffer, simply because her family’s gift could be dangerous? But then I remembered that Miss Morton had actively used that gift to put me and my own in peril and my sympathies dried up.

Shaking my head, I turned back to the books in my hands. Harvesting them made sense. The blank pages had been stored in those books for decades, and they’d been absorbing all the magic over the years. But destroying Mrs. Winter’s books? Flinging jam at her ceiling was one thing – willfully destroying her precious cache of botany books was another.

I thumbed through a copy of Vibrations of Crystals from Amethyst to Zektzerite. Between the title page and the opening text, there were two entirely blank sheets of paper. Taking a deep breath, I closed my eyes and pulled the paper from the book’s spine.

“So we have enough books to pull pages from? Excellent.” Alicia noted gleefully, joining me at the table. I nodded, putting the paper aside.

“You look like you might throw up,” Ivy told me.

“It’s very likely,” I said, as the others took up their own books and began ripping out papers. We spent hours in that fashion, paring blank pages from the books and clearing away damaged editions once we were done. The scavenged books were placed in a pile that we would probably bury in the backyard and never speak of again. Eventually, I had a stack of two hundred pages roughly the same size.

I took Wit out of my sleeve holster as the dragonfly mark hummed. Just like I’d told Cathy, sometimes magic was about following instinct instead of a plan, and assembling the book now felt right.

“Wait, we’re going to try this now?” Ivy exclaimed.

“No time like the present. I think we’ve waited long enough, don’t you?” I asked them. Both Alicia and Ivy gave me apprehensive looks, but joined me, nonetheless.

Meggie ran for the linen and wood we’d collected while Lizzie threw the ribbons at me. I didn’t even know what spell to use, but my hand was moved by some invisible force to make an eight-shaped sigil. It felt like “bind” and left a bright gold stain upon the air. I was acting on instinct, and some of the best magic I’d work came from instinct. It felt right.

The others gathered around me, hands joined, watching as the papers flew into the air, swirling in a strange, bird-like flight pattern over our heads. Magic crackled between them, in a rainbow of lightning against the ceiling. The wood planks and linen floated upward and for just a second, it looked like the lot of them were going to form a bookish shape. Lizzie hopped up and down, clapping, as the ribbons snaked upwards to the paper. “Look!”

Alicia and Ivy joined hands. All of us seemed to hold our breath as the whole arrangement seemed “this” close to a finished book. I could almost feel that connection to the Mother Book, reaching out, nudging against my magic like an old friend bumping my ribs with her elbow. But then the connection broke and I felt it slip away.

And suddenly, chaos.