10

10

C amford was quiet in the winter break. It was a fair cold day in Oxford, the skies almost the pearl grey of my old sketch, but when I stepped through the door in the Bodleian, I was instantly engulfed in a shimmering mist of rain. It was light enough for the wind to swirl about the courtyard, twisting through the air like a murmuration of starlings. I hurried as quickly as I could through the crooked paths to Chancery Hall, careful not to trip on the roots poking through the cobbles. As far as I could tell, there wasn't a soul in the place.

The lecturers had warned us that the university would be all but abandoned over the winter break. Students were supposed to stay away from Camford during the holidays unless they sought special permission to stay, and that was often denied. I certainly wasn't supposed to return to my rooms without informing anybody. The doors opened readily enough at the touch of my silver ring, but the building was deserted, my room dark and cold.

It didn't trouble me: Camford, overgrown as it was, never wanted for firewood. I went to the wooded copse behind the building, shivering in the icy drizzle, and collected up as many loose branches as I could. I dried them with a charm, imbued them with a spell to help them burn longer, and lit them in my fireplace. It was simple, then, to take off my wet clothes and spread them to dry on the hearth, to wrap myself in the dressing gown I'd left hanging on the door, to unpack my trunk and put my books back on the desk where they belonged. The kettle boiled quickly, and I had a pasty from the Oxford station in my bag. I curled up in front of the fire as the deepening rain spattered the window and, for the first time in weeks, felt absolutely at home.

It didn't last. I spun out the rest of the evening working on my history essay and by nine or so had a passable first draft. Once that was done, the fire was dying even with all the magic I could throw at it, and I decided to go to bed.

It should have been easy to sleep. I'd had a very early start after a disturbed night, and a long, frustrating journey in the cold and wet. The trouble was, I was beginning to realise that my calm, cool state of the night before hadn't been calm or cool at all, but rather a furious sulk. That sulk had carried me all the way across the country; now, job done, it had set me down and forced me to think about what I'd done.

I lay there, insides twisting with guilt, and the darkness helpfully played every scenario of the past day across the low ceiling. I pictured Mum coming downstairs this morning and reading the note, her face like stone; I pictured Holly and Mary coming back from town after breakfast, flushed and alive with last night's dancing, asking where I was; I pictured the little ones confused and upset. Matthew's reaction I couldn't picture at all. I didn't even know if he had made it back safely. He had been so bitterly angry, so unlike himself, that I couldn't help being frightened.

I'd felt like an independent adult extricating herself from an unbearable situation. Now I felt like a child who had run away from home.

I couldn't lie still. I sat up and lit the candle by my bed. I went to my desk, looking for the train timetable to see how easily, theoretically, I could go back to Pendle Hill tomorrow, and found I'd thrown it in the struggling fire. I got out a sheet of paper to write a letter home, just to make sure everything was all right. The trouble was, I'd written my letter already. I could think of nothing new to say.

I had just climbed under the covers for the second time when there was a light rap at the window.

At first, I mistook it for the rain and barely glanced up. When it came again, more insistently, I was startled to see a familiar face behind the rain-speckled glass.

"Alden!" I struggled out of bed yet again, nearly tripping over the quilt, and fumbled to unlock the window. He stepped in so easily he might have done it a hundred times.

"Oh, you were in bed," he said, with a glance at the rumpled sheets. "Drat. I saw your light."

"Only just." I remembered, belatedly, that I was in my pyjamas with my dressing gown out of reach across the room; that it was after ten o'clock with nobody else around; that as comfortable as I'd become with Alden, we had never been alone together any place that wasn't a library, and he was emphatically not allowed in my bedroom after dark or unsupervised. "When did you get back?"

"I might ask the same of you, and probably will. I came back three days ago. There's only so much home I can stand. You?"

"Apparently there's only so much home can stand of me." It came to my lips on reflex, bitter with self-pity, and I regretted it as soon as I saw Alden's eyes narrow. "I didn't mean that. They're just busy on the farm, and I was in the way, so I came back this morning. Did you want something?"

I wondered if that sounded suggestive, but Alden didn't seem to notice. Possibly it was difficult to be suggestive in blue flannel pyjamas.

"Clover," he said seriously. His curls were dark with rainwater, as were the shoulders of his jacket. "How sleepy are you right now? I mean, are you desperately, irrevocably unable to keep your eyes open, or do you think you could bear to stay up and read a few books with me?"

"Are you asking me to come study with you?"

He winced apologetically. "I can't sleep. The storm's keeping me awake. I'm curled up in my room with a pile of old books and liberal amounts of hot chocolate, working on our project, and frankly I'd love some company."

I wasn't allowed in a man's room after lights-out, of course. If I were found, Alden would be punished in an indulgent sort of manner, and I would be expelled. Suddenly I didn't care. Those rules belonged to an old, safe world—the world that had brought us to war and blown everything to bits. I was so bloody sick of them, and sick, too, of being told what to do.

"I can't sleep either," I said. "I'd love to come study with you. I have something to show you, as a matter of fact." So much for all that agonising about how to write it in a letter. "Though I never took you for a hot chocolate sort."

"There might also be liberal bottles of Madeira in my room. But I feel like hot chocolate. It's a little past ten, it's raining outside, a fire's going, and I'm getting over a cold."

"It probably wasn't a good idea to cross the courtyard in the rain, then, was it?"

"God, you make so much sense." He sneezed. "Excuse me. But I saw your light, so I had to cross if I wanted to add your company to my store of riches, and now I have, and there you go, I've just run rings around your logic. Do you have a coat, or do you want to borrow mine?"

And so, at a little past ten, I found myself sitting cross-legged at the foot of Alden's bed, a mug of hot chocolate balanced precariously on a wobbly stack of books. Alden stretched out reading the book I had brought from Lady Winter's library, his own hot chocolate forgotten as he turned the pages. His room was neater than I had expected, and emptier—aside from the extremely old books that packed every corner, there were few personal possessions at all. It was so much more like being in a library than a bedroom that my thrill of nerves soon settled. Outside, the wind howled around the old stone buildings, and the windows were lashed with rain.

"It's been like this since I got back," Alden said, following my glance outside. "I've scarcely seen a soul about the place—a few teachers, and a postgrad or two in the library. I think this building's deserted. They're not even serving food in the dining hall. I lived on Christmas cake and mince pies in my room for two days before I worked out that we were supposed to go over to Darwin Hall."

"Did you get into trouble about coming back?"

"None at all—so you needn't worry. As long as we don't make any work for the poor staff still working through Christmas, they don't care about a student or two extra. I've just been drifting around the library all day. I found the lost volume of Agrippa this morning, by the way. Apparently someone had it out for their MA. Nothing of interest to us."

"Are you still on Agrippa? He was wrong, you know."

"Wrong," Alden agreed. "By my understanding, his methods would only work in faerie country, which would rather defeat the purpose. But he was looking in the right direction. Why were you looking at him that day we met, if I may ask? If you'd wanted faerie curses, there were more obvious leads even with all the restrictions."

I shrugged. "Honestly, not for any special reason." He raised an eyebrow, and I smiled reluctantly. "If you want to know the truth, I was homesick. I told you, I grew up on Agrippa. When I saw him in the library, he reminded me of home."

"Home," he repeated. "I envy you that."

I tried not to think about the last words that had passed between my mother and me, the finality of that not-quite-slammed door. We had fought often enough, after all. It had never meant anything, not for long.

"You have a home," I said instead. "Ashfield. Hero told me about how you all spent summers there."

"Did she? Well. I do indeed have Ashfield—or will, once my father dies. I assume he hasn't died already. They would have mentioned it, surely, when I was there."

I was used to the kinds of things rich students said by now. "What's it like? Ashfield?"

"Cursed." Apparently I looked sceptical, or just expectant, because he laughed. "Ashfield Manor is a Victorian Gothic property in West Yorkshire," he said, in the dry, overly formal tone of an architect or a real estate agent. "The estate comprises two hundred acres, encompassing a lake and the remains of an historically significant twelfth-century monastery. The land has been in the Lennox family since the seventeenth century. The current house was built on the site of an older Tudor manor that burned down in the late eighteenth century and was reconstructed in 1858 by the grandfather of the present owner; it has upwards of one hundred and fifty rooms and I forget how many windows. Does that satisfy your curiosity?"

I shoved him lightly. What it did, of course, was intimidate. I knew better than to show it. "It must be lovely in winter."

"Let me know, if you're ever there. I try not to be. Certainly I won't be next year while I have a perfectly good room here. I don't know what I was thinking."

Belatedly, I remembered his odd mood in the weeks leading up to the end of term, the prickles and sharp edges Hero had called him on. "You didn't want to go home for Christmas?"

"I told you," he said absently. He was turning the pages more slowly now—I peeked and found he was reaching the part I had underlined. "Ashfield is cursed. Christmas is a dreadful time for ghosts in a cursed house. Never mind, though. I survived, with naught but a lingering bout of insomnia and a mild head cold, and both will melt away with term time like frost on the lawn. Or something. I missed you, Clover Hill."

I felt my cheeks burn, and tried to laugh it away. I never minded when Alden and Hero used my full name, as they often did. I knew they thought it was funny, but I also knew they liked it. "You missed my help with your project."

"I missed that too. The two things are separate, neither mutually exclusive nor dependent upon each other. This book is fascinating."

"Isn't it?" I craned my neck to look over his shoulder, brief self-consciousness forgotten. "Have you got to the part about the faerie doors?"

"I'm just there now. Not a single door at all. Two doors, inner and outer, one in faerie country and one here. When we open a door, we punch two holes in two worlds."

"You know what that could mean for us, don't you?" I rushed on without giving him a chance to answer. "There's a space in between the doors—barely, perhaps a million times smaller than the width of a human hair, but it still exists. If we could trap a faerie there , before it reached our world—"

"We could still deal with it," Alden finished, "but it couldn't cross over. It could be exactly what we were looking for. Not a new binding spell—an entirely new approach to faerie binding."

The magnitude of the idea hung between us, luminous and awe-inspiring. In that moment, I forgot my family and Alden's; I forgot who and what we both were. All that existed was magic and possibility.

"It might not be true about the doors," I forced myself to point out. "This is an old book, and the theory wasn't mentioned in any of the later ones. It might have been disproved. We'd never know."

Alden nodded slowly. "Let's test it."

I blinked. "Here? Now?"

"No, of course not. We couldn't do that sort of magic in Camford. We'd be caught at once. We'll have to go out to Oxford—or Cambridge, I suppose, but the Bodleian would be more convenient. Now, though, yes."

"Even out there, we couldn't open a faerie door! The faerie world is sealed, remember?"

"We could open an imp window. Those go to the other world too—the principle should apply. And they're too small to be affected by the seals locking off the faerie world."

An imp window was what had been used to teach students to breach the boundaries between worlds, back when such things were taught. It was a much smaller version of a door, about the size of a saucer; the only thing that could make it through were the tiny imps that ran wild on the borders of faerie country, and they could do no real harm.

"That's still illegal," I said, more doubtfully.

"But not dangerous. We only need to hold the window open long enough to have a good look at it—to test if there really is a gap as the book suggests."

"Hero was very clear that we weren't going to do anything that might risk us being expelled—and definitely not arrested."

He shrugged. "That's her decision, and I respect it. She isn't here. I understand if you don't want to risk it either, of course. But I was going to try it sometime this break anyway. It's difficult to study faerie magic without ever having performed the rituals."

"We study all kinds of spells without performing them, Alden! I've just finished an essay on the death curses of the Civil War, and I've yet to work one of those!" It wasn't the point, and we both knew it. We also knew that if I was resorting to that kind of protest, it was too late. I was already in.

Honestly, I'm not certain I can explain why. Part of it was the same rush of rebellious contempt for old-world authority that had brought me to Alden's room. Part of it was a desire to prove to my mother and to Matthew that I truly wasn't here for my own advancement, that I was willing to risk losing Camford entirely if need be. Part of it, I'm ashamed to admit, was how much I was enjoying the glow of Alden's company. Truly, though, more than anything, I longed to know if it would work. We had a new idea, glittering and splendid, and everything we needed to test it. The thought of sensibly going back to bed with a few notes to follow up on was unbearable.

"It's raining," I said, very weakly.

Alden got to his feet in a single bounce, sending books tumbling and paper scattering. "We will take," he said, "an umbrella."

It wasn't raining in Oxford, anyway. The long, narrow alley of the Bodleian where the door opened was almost warm after the brisk chill of Camford. It was pure excitement that made me shiver as we closed the door behind us and crept deeper into the library, spellbooks tucked under one arm and my breath misting in front of my face.

I had never spent any time in the Bodleian, only passed through the same corridors to and from the Oxbridge. My impression had always been a dark, formidable space teeming with old books, as straight-lined and secretive as the rest of Oxford. I knew it was really several libraries, and I assumed they were all very different, but I'd been too nervous to explore further. They weren't meant for me. My library was the Camford one: rambling, circular, ever-shifting, with its great oak at the domed centre and its roof to lift us up above the world.

Alden had no such qualms—I doubt he'd ever been told a place wasn't meant for him in his life. He pushed through the long corridor, opened a door, and nodded in satisfaction. "This will do, do you think? Which would you prefer to draw—the window or the circles?"

I had a brief flare of panic— we'd be caught, this was ridiculous, could we really scribble all over the wall of a library? I quashed it firmly. For this one night, I was going to break rules. I may as well break good ones. "I'll take the circles."

"Probably for the best," he conceded. "You're the artist. I can barely manage stick figures."

A faerie door needed two chalk circles on the ground before it, connected by a single line. The first was to bind any faerie that stepped through, a complicated ring of spells and runes. The second was far simpler: a plain circle where the summoner stood, which would connect them to the faerie standing in the other circle. It was what enabled the faerie to work its magic on them for the purpose of the deal, when it couldn't touch the rest of the world, but it also made them vulnerable. If the faerie was to slip its bonds, the person standing in the circle would be the first to be taken. That was when, if things went very wrong indeed, the faerie would slip into their body. That was what had happened to Private Koenig at Amiens.

A tiny window like the one Alden was drawing on the wall posed no such threat, but I tried to draw each rune carefully, checking the book frequently. The surroundings were distracting. Apart from the scratch of chalk on wood, the room was utterly still. It seemed to stretch for miles about me, all history and tradition and dust.

"This building's nowhere near as old as Camford, is it?" I asked into the quiet. It was something I had wondered before. "So how can the Oxbridge be here?"

"They've shifted it around over the centuries," Alden explained absently. "For that matter, there was only one door to begin with—this one, at Oxford. The one at Cambridge is a copy. We don't know how to make either now, of course."

"Doesn't that bother you?" Despite my resolution, I couldn't resist asking, just once more. It was that sort of a night. "We step through the Oxbridge all the time, and we don't know how the magic works. We don't even really know where the door opens."

"I'm sure the Faculty and the Board know that, at least. All I need to know is the doors open to Camford." He stepped back from the wall. "And this will open to faerie country."

All thoughts of the Oxbridge were pushed to one side. To my unpracticed eye, what he had drawn was perfect. All the runes in place, the circular window right at eye level. It was only a chalk outline yet, but my limbs thrilled.

He was examining the circles I had drawn with the same attention. "Beautiful," he declared. "Shall we try to open it together?"

There was only one answer to that. I nodded.

What does it feel like, the first time you open a window into faerie country? The nearest I can compare it to is like drawing a deep breath and opening your eyes, when your eyes are already open and your lungs are already full. I stood in the circle with Alden, the library silent and cavernous around us, very aware of the heat of him beside me and the quiver of anticipation between us. We spoke the words together, as we had learned during group work in class: The closer you can mirror the tone and stance of a partner, the stronger the magic will be. We had always partnered well together, and we did here. The first few tries yielded nothing, as expected—it always takes at least a couple of attempts to find the feel of a spell. And then, there was a rush of air, rustling the pages of the books of the shelves and stirring my hair; on the wall, the circle glowed with the faint silver of the moon.

There it was. Faerie country. I could see very little of it, just a glaze of light and faint shadows beyond, but I could feel it. Deep in my chest, with an ache like nostalgia or yearning, I knew there was suddenly one less veil between me and the fae.

Alden felt it too—his body tensed beside me, and I heard his sharp intake of breath.

"It works," I said quietly.

He blinked and shook his head, as though awakening from a reverie or a dream. "That's no surprise," he said. "It isn't difficult to open a window or a door to faerie country, after all. We need to see if we can trap a faerie between its layers."

"If there are layers," I pointed out, on reflex. Staring at that window, knowing we had punched a tiny hole in the world, I couldn't believe any of our theories might be wrong.

Something flew at the window then, a small winged shape, the size of a bat. We both jumped; Alden snapped the closing spell, and the window vanished as quickly as it arrived. The room already seemed dark without it, even with the glow from our lanterns.

"I think that was an imp," Alden said into the startled silence, and I laughed before I could stop myself.

"It's a shame you closed it so quickly. If it had come through, we could have tested if the binding circle worked."

"Some things I'd rather not test, thank you." He sighed, somewhere between relief and disappointment. "Well. I suppose that's it for tonight. Now that thing's found the window, it'll be waiting to get back through every time we open it again. And… What is it?"

A thought had come to me.

"Did you see?" I asked slowly. "As it approached the door, the window flared a little? The lines began to change from pure silver to a bluish colour."

"Yes," he said. "Now that you mention it, I did. What are you thinking?"

"What if we closed the window as soon as we saw that change?" Excitement and trepidation was creeping into my voice, despite myself. "Just a fraction of a second before it made it through? If there really is an inner door and an outer door, that might be the exact moment it's passing through the gap between."

He caught the idea at once. "We'd have to be incredibly precise. There's nothing to measure it by except instinct. But God, if it could work…"

There was no stopping either of us then. I knew I should advocate a retreat for the night—we'd both done a good deal of new magic already, we were getting tired, there was more research to be done. I didn't care. I could do nothing else until I knew if it could work. Neither of us could.

"We can try as often as the imp keeps coming back, after all," Alden pointed out. "If it gets through, it'll only find itself in the binding circle."

Privately, I thought I'd rather not trust my very first set of binding runes, and until a few minutes ago Alden had thought the same, but I agreed that this was nothing to worry about.

We were too quick to close the first time, and again the second. Each time, the imp hurled itself at the window; each time I flinched at the first sign and slammed the window shut as if at the approach of a wasp. By now, we had been opening and closing imp windows for a good half hour. My fingers were sore, my back ached, and my hair was damp with perspiration. Alden looked much the same. He didn't seem to notice.

"I wonder," he said thoughtfully. "Stay in the circle, will you? I want to know if I can feel a difference when I keep my hand on the door. There might be something more tangible than the light."

I frowned. "Is that safe?"

"Is any of this?" he said cheerfully. "Come on. We were close that last time, I know it."

This time, though, when the window opened, the imp was nowhere to be seen. I peered at the window, puzzled, my glasses slightly fogged. I wondered if we'd pushed too far. Perhaps the imp, like my fingers, was starting to get a little bit fed up.

I had underestimated it. Out of nowhere, with the speed of a crow at full flight, the imp barrelled through the window. The door flared; I gave an undignified yelp of surprise; the closing spell burst from my fingertips.

An instant too slow. The imp sprang into the room, a scrabble of limbs and claws, and bounded straight into the binding circle. For the first time, in the mingling glow of the window and our lanterns, I saw it: the size of a large rat, with tiny leathery wings, claws like curved daggers, a jutting overdeveloped jaw, and round yellow eyes. I held my breath, certain that the runes would hold, worried that they wouldn't.

It bounded straight out again. The barest hesitation, and it was through to the library, claws scratching the hardwood floor, teeth chattering angrily. I stared in silent horror. Beside me, Alden swore under his breath.

"No!" Alden stopped me as I started out of the circle. "Stay there, I'll chase it through the window. You be ready to close the window the moment I get it back through."

I nodded, and he circled the imp gingerly, stripping off his jacket to use as one might try to wrangle an angry bird that had flown into a classroom. God, how could this have happened? I had drawn the right runes, I was sure of it. Alden had checked them. Was it the book? Was it too old, out-of-date, had the copying not worked…?

Thank God we had closed the door to the rest of the library, at least. The imp tore about the room, rebounding from walls, floor, ceiling. One minute it was clinging to the beams overhead, the next it had glanced off the bookshelves, its claws sending books flying through the air and landing with a thud that made me wince. I had a horrible image of the librarians coming in the following morning and seeing books scattered on the floor, spines scored by claws, chalk dust smeared on the covers.

Our bodies on the floor with them. I'd always heard imps were harmless, but I had seen those claws. I had seen claws like that before, on a badger defending its home, on a cornered fox breaking into our barn. They were not harmless.

I held my ground. If I stepped out now, there would be nobody to close the window. Just a moment longer.

The imp paused, perched on the back of a chair, sniffing the air with flared nostrils. Alden, hovering with his jacket draped over his hands, seized his chance. He lunged forward. My heart leapt—for an instant, I would have sworn he had it. Then the imp wheeled and launched itself off the chair and into the air toward Alden, with a screeching hiss like an angry cat. Alden took a hasty step backwards, shielding his face with his jacket, and the thing glanced off his hands and knocked him to the ground. Then it turned, ears back, and its yellow eyes lit on me.

It sprang, half flying, half propelled by its long back legs. I held my ground, muscles screaming to run, racking my brains for a spell. There had to be one, surely, to stop it in its tracks. I didn't know it. I had only been studying a few months, my mind was frozen, nothing came to my fingers when I raised them.

I looked about, trying to find some weapon, anything. Then I saw it.

The umbrella. The umbrella we had brought with us across Camford, still slick with rain from the other side of the Oxbridge door, was leaning against the wall, pooling water. I snatched it up, and before I had a chance to think, I swung wildly at the imp.

It dropped to the ground. It was so unexpected it was alarming, like one of those moments when you swipe at a fly and hit it by pure chance. It lay sprawled on the wooden floorboards, limbs splayed, wings crooked. While I was still gaping, Alden swept it up from the ground in his jacket and hurled it back through the window. I had just enough presence of mind to shout the spell, and the window shrank to nothing.

"There," Alden said into the breathless silence that followed. "I knew it was a good idea to go out in the rain."

We examined the rune circle carefully, and we couldn't see anything that might have gone wrong. The circle seemed unbroken, the runes correct. At last, Alden stood with a shrug.

"Perhaps it was the grain of the wood, or something too small for our eyes to see. We'll wash it off for now and do better next time."

"I'm so sorry." I ran my eyes over the circle one more time, mortified. "So much for my skill at drawing."

Alden gave me a playful nudge with his foot. "Don't be ridiculous. I'm sure even Agrippa made a mistake the first time. Anyway, there's no harm done." He was still breathless, his shirt torn and his forearm bleeding from a long scratch, but his face was alight. My embarrassment faded. "And I was right. I did feel something. Right as it came through, the lines cooled to the touch, like a shadow passing. That's what we need to wait for. Come on. One more try."

"I thought you wanted to wash the runes away?"

"Yes, and then draw them better next time. Next time being now, I meant. Well?"

"No!" It was a laughing no, though, despite myself. I sounded like a girl at a party who wanted to be persuaded into a kiss. "I think we've done enough, don't you?"

"We were onto something. You felt it too. We were only missing the timing."

"We just unleashed an imp in the Bodleian."

"So we know how not to do that the second time." He gave me a winning look, and I rolled my eyes even as I couldn't hold back a grin. "Besides, it was only a small one."

"That's true," I conceded. I stood, brushing the dust from my skirt. "Let's see if we can get a bigger one this time."

This time, it worked.

Alden stood to the side of the window with his fingers pressed to the edge. When his signal came, I knew it was right, because I barely needed it. I could feel when the window was ready, the exact pitch that meant the imp was through one door and not yet the other. It thrummed through me like the chime of a crystal glass flicked with a finger, and I slammed the window shut.

There was a flash of light, and this time the opening in the wall went opaque—as if it truly was a window and the glass was flawed or dusty. On the other side of the sheen, the imp raged. It hurled itself against the window, its shrieks muffled, claws scratching furiously at nothing at all. Alden and I stared at each other, wonder brimming between us.

We had done it. It was shaky and patched together and wouldn't stand a chance against a faerie, but we had the beginnings of a spell that could revolutionise faerie magic. That could make faerie magic safe again. That could fix everything. All it needed was more work, and we had all the energy in the world.

"When we present the paper," I said, "let's not tell the Faculty we did this."

Alden looked at me, then exploded into a fit of helpless laughter. I lasted a few seconds before I joined him.

It was midnight by the time we slipped back across the Oxbridge, cold and dishevelled, straight into a volley of glittering rain. It drenched us through before I could even think of getting the umbrella up, and in that mad, exhilarated state I didn't want to. I caught my breath at the shock and then laughed aloud, spinning in a dizzy circle as the rain swirled. Alden sneezed violently and laughed too.

"I love Camford," he said. "Always so eager to welcome you back."

"Hero's going to think we're both mad when she hears about this."

"Hero isn't going to hear about this," Alden said, as if it was obvious.

"You don't mean that, do you?" It was difficult to tell with Alden at times. Nonetheless, unease twinged my stomach. "Why wouldn't we tell her?"

"Because you said yourself—she'd think we were mad." He was definitely serious now. "Hero doesn't want to break any rules that would jeopardise her place here—she's said so many times. She wouldn't approve of what we've just done, and she certainly wouldn't want to try again."

"You think we should try this again?"

"Of course. Until we get it perfect. Don't you?"

The prospect was irresistible. We could get it perfect, I was certain of it. All we needed was a few more nights over the next term or so, slipping out when nobody was looking and opening up the world. It had worked . It could be made to work again, every time.

"Still." I caught myself before my imagination could fly too far. "Even if Hero doesn't want to come with us, that's no reason she shouldn't know. Eddie too."

He smiled briefly. "Believe me, I've known them both my entire life. Hero won't be quiet about something she doesn't agree with, and Eddie won't be able to keep it a secret from Hero if we asked him."

I couldn't imagine keeping a secret from Hero either, nor from Eddie. But it was true that Hero wouldn't agree with our rule-breaking on such a scale. Faerie magic was important to her as a way to achieve her dreams and ambitions—she quite rightly wouldn't want those dreams threatened. Eddie, too, was in this only because we had asked him—because he wanted to help us and, if I was honest, to be one of us. The risk wasn't worth it for either of them. It was different for me. I was now all too aware, after my visit home, of how desperately Matthew needed this. The curse was eating him alive. He couldn't withstand it forever. I imagined being able to present this research to Camford, the Accord being lifted. I imagined coming home with a cure blazing in my veins. A furtive, petty thought: Mum wouldn't be able to say I didn't care then.

"Why do you want this so much?" I asked Alden, in a flash of suspicion. "You're right—Hero only has her academic future riding on this, not her brother's life. But you have even less, as far as I can tell. Why are you willing to risk being expelled from Camford?"

Alden shrugged, and his eyes glanced off mine. "Perhaps I just don't care about Camford."

I knew there was more to it than that, of course. It was probably true that Alden didn't care about Camford; it didn't explain what he cared about instead. Yet it was all I would get for now. I had to trust his reasons for not telling me, or walk away altogether.

"I'm not saying we don't ever tell them," he said into the silence. "I'm only suggesting we keep it between us until we're a little further along."

In the end, I'm ashamed to say, it was the between us that convinced me. I'd felt close to Eddie almost at once; Hero and I had drawn together a long time ago, united by books and struggles and shared laughter. Alden was still on a pedestal, tantalisingly out of reach. Tonight, the distance between us had closed, who we were ceased to matter, and our minds leapt together along new and surprising paths. I wanted it to continue.

After all, Hero and Alden had kept things from me, hadn't they? Even now, there were still things that passed between them over my head, glances that went unspoken. I didn't grudge them it—their friendship had existed long before I was there, and things had grown that I'd had no part of. Surely it wasn't so terrible to keep this one thing from the others, that had its roots in the time they'd missed?

"All right," I said, and felt once again the glorious shiver of rebellion. It was like stepping through yet another door, further and deeper, and being hit with the exhilarating sting of rain-specked wind. "Let's keep it to ourselves. For now. But we'll tell them both when we've had a bit more practice?"

"Oh yes." This time I knew he meant it. "We'll tell them then. I promise."

Somewhere in the main quadrangle, the clock chimed. Alden looked at me, his eyes still sparkling with leftover laughter.

"Happy New Year, Clover Hill," he said.

I'd forgotten entirely. The days between Christmas and New Year were always a blur to me, apart from the winter festival, and this year I'd lost track of even that. I'd spent the last day of 1920 travelling across the country—the last hour breaking a hole in the world—and I'd never even known.

"Happy New Year," I said, and saw the new year in a flash, shining and wondrous, glittering with possibilities as the imp window had glittered in the darkness of the Bodleian.