2

2

I f it hadn't been for the Great War, I would never have gone to Camford University of Magical Scholarship. I would never have known it existed.

I was eleven when my brother went away to war. It was the October of 1914, the autumn after what everyone later called the last golden summer. It was an oversimplification, like most things, but I do remember those months as unusually perfect: the fields of our farm yellowed and dry under an endless blue sky, the ground already warm under my bare feet when I collected the eggs in the morning. Then all too soon the weather was cooling, the call for soldiers was ringing in the streets, and Mum was adamant that Matthew stay exactly where he was.

"Help me talk to her, will you, Clove?" he said, one evening in the barn. We were pitching hay from the loft; he kept his eyes on his work, and I couldn't see his face. "Please. She listens to you."

That was true back then, as much as Mum listened to anyone. Young as I was, I was the eldest daughter, and I was considered the brightest at our small village school. Recently, the schoolmistress had told my father she believed that in a few short years I could train as a teacher at a residential college. To my mother, who could barely read, that gave my opinions a grudging weight they shouldn't have had.

"You don't need her permission." The truth was, I didn't want him to go either. "She can't stop you."

"If she says I'm needed here," he said, "I won't go. You know that. But the war will be over in a few months. The farm will do fine without me until then. It might be the only chance I get to see the world. Besides, I should be out there. Everyone my age is going."

They were, I knew that. Officially, Matthew was still too young, not quite seventeen, but many lads even younger lied about their age and signed up. I also knew the shame that would settle on him if he didn't go with them—not just private shame, although that would poison him more surely, but public ridicule. The country was swept up in a wave of patriotism, and Pendle Hill was being carried away in the flood. I had already seen several young women in town handing out white feathers to any man who looked of combat-ready age, their eyes burning with silent resentment. Last Sunday the vicar had preached the honour of serving one's country, and the usually dozing church had erupted into applause.

I had been caught in the surge of those words too. If I had been a boy and older, I would have gone with Matthew myself, gladly. I longed for new experiences just as he did, and in those days I had read far too many adventure stories to doubt the glory of battle. The trouble was, I couldn't go, not even as a nurse. And all I could think of was my brother in some foreign field, alone.

"Do you really want to leave us?" I asked, and hated myself for sounding like a child.

"'Course not." He stopped and looked at me properly for the first time. "You know I don't. But I can't be here while it's going on. I just can't."

That, in the end, was what got me. Because however much I hated the thought of him going, the thought of what staying here would do to him was worse. I couldn't bear watching him every day of the war, and then beyond it, wishing he was somewhere else, watching regret eat at him until he came to hate himself and us for keeping him here.

I loved all my siblings, but Matthew was mine. It was how the six of us divided up: Matthew and I, the two eldest; Marigold and Holly, the middle girls; Iris and Little John, the babies. The five years between us, the fact that I was closer in age to the middle girls than to him, never seemed to make a difference. Nor did the fact he was confident and fit and eternally optimistic where I was quiet and bookish and sceptical. We shared an older-sibling responsibility for our family, coupled with a burning curiosity about the world away from the farm, and we had muddled through both together since I was old enough to walk. Neither of us said this in as many words—I doubt we could have. It was just there between us, an unbreakable thread woven of work and laughter and childhood adventures and serious late-night conversations in the hayloft. In some strange way, it was really my permission he needed to go, just as I had needed his when I had confided to him, the year before, that I wanted to leave home at sixteen and train to be a teacher.

"All right," I said. "I'll talk to her."

Matthew caught the train to London in October, a month before my twelfth birthday, and we didn't see him for over four years.

Letters came often at first, sometimes spattered with dirt, sometimes scored through with the censor's black lines, always cheerful, filled with allusions to alien places so exciting that I burned with envy and feared for his safety in one confused rush. We would write back telling him all our news, assuring him that we were fine without him, longing for him to come home soon.

Others came home, broken and scarred and hollow-eyed with fatigue, as the war stretched on long past the few months we had been promised, and the stories of horror began to trickle back with them. Matthew never did. Three times he was granted leave, and all three times he was too far away to make it to us. Twice he was hospitalised, first with pneumonia and then with a minor leg wound, and both times he was patched up and sent back up the line. The gaps between his letters widened, and the letters, when they came, soon said almost nothing at all. That hurt me a little, and frightened me a lot more. Matthew and I had always shared everything.

And then in August 1918, in what was to be the very last push of the war, we received a telegram telling us that he had been seriously wounded in action in Amiens. It was hard to know what to feel: relief, first and foremost, that the telegram had said wounded and not dead; terror that he may yet die; a wrench of the stomach to think of my elder brother, daring and mischievous and invulnerable, lying in pain in a filthy field hospital somewhere I couldn't even picture clearly in my head. France. All I knew about it were the bald facts I had learned in geography, and most of those would have been torn up by war long ago.

The next few months were long, anxious stretches of holding our breaths, punctuated by occasional gasps of air. One breath: a letter from Matthew, three weeks after the telegram, a short scrawled promise that he was alive and doing much better. We knew nothing more—whether he had been sent back to his unit or was coming home or had died the very next day. Another breath, or a sob of relief: The war was finally over, and there was to be no more fighting. There was dancing in the streets, and tears, and celebration mixed with terrible grief. But the soldiers wouldn't be home for weeks, we were told, even months, and however many letters I wrote, we could learn no news of my brother. One day he had been well enough to write, and that was all we had to cling to.

That winter the Spanish flu came in a greater wave than before, and it reached our house. For a time it seemed we might lose my little brother and sister as well. They were spared, in the end. It took my father. He died just before Christmas, never knowing what had become of his eldest son.

It wasn't until January 1919 that we heard a knock at the door. Standing on our doorstep was a small man, fair-haired, with horn-rimmed glasses and a round, anxious face that cleared at the sight of my mother.

"Ah! Mrs. Hill?" His voice was soft, with a Queen's English accent that had formed far from a muddy Lancashire sheep farm. "Please forgive the intrusion. My name is Samson Truelove Wells—I served with your son. May I have a word?"

It was there, seated around our heavy kitchen table nursing tea in chipped cups, that we heard for the first time about the magical world that lurked in the corners of our own—the world of mages and scholars, of hedgewitches and spellbooks and old Families. We learned, at the same time, that Matthew hadn't been struck by a bullet or a shell, but by a faerie curse.

"It should never have happened," Mr. Wells said. Beneath his glasses and refined accent, he couldn't have been more than in his early twenties—Matthew's age. But I was sixteen, I hadn't seen Matthew in years, and that seemed old to me. "Magic is a carefully kept secret and always has been. That was made very clear at the start of this war, and for that reason we were all strongly discouraged from signing up. Any mage who wanted to take to the battlefield, on either side, had to swear to never use magic in public, even at the cost of his own life. Nobody, though, was prepared for those battlefields. Most young men don't have it in them to die rather than break a promise to an authority that doesn't care. Things slipped out. And on that day, at Amiens, somebody opened a faerie door. That's difficult magic under the best of circumstances, and it went very wrong. The faerie broke free, and it killed men on both sides. Matthew was one of those hit by its curse. Thank God, I got to him in time."

"Are you his superior officer?" my mother asked cautiously. I think she still hadn't taken in the full measure of what he was saying. She was only wondering why a young man who was so clearly a gentleman cared if her son lived or died.

"Oh no." Mr. Wells understood the question perfectly. "I was a private—I enlisted three years ago. I could have bought a commission, I suppose, but I didn't want to lead. Being what I was, too, I thought it better to keep my head down. Your son and I came through the Somme together. He had been out there longer, even though he was a year younger than I was, and he looked after me, always. And so, when I could, I looked after him. Fortunately, I did an assignment on faerie curses at Camford in my first year, before I signed up. I performed the counter-curse before it reached his heart, inexpertly I'm afraid, but he's safe, and he'll be coming home to you as soon as he's permitted. First, though, I need to warn you—to tell you. To explain to you about our world."

If we'd been in London or even Manchester, among the well-read and well-informed, we might have heard whispers of it before. Magic, it seemed, had been practiced for centuries. It was a closely guarded secret, passed down through families yet forbidden to outsiders. Even so, history was full of moments when things had leaked out, odd miracles and happenstances and glimmers of spellcraft. There had never been more than in the last four years: platoons disappearing into midair, birds summoning help for injured men, nurses who could heal when all hope seemed impossible, deaths that couldn't be explained. The Great War had torn everything apart; it stood to reason it would tear those veils of secrecy too. As Mr. Wells had said, battlefields were no place for half-hearted promises, and trenches left little room to hide. Perhaps, too, this war had been better documented than those before it, with photographs and shaky camera footage bringing unthought-of images home. Nothing damning, but enough to spook the Families. And the incident at Amiens had more than spooked them. It had been an unprecedented disaster, and they were adamant that it should never happen again.

We barely grasped most of this at the time. It was all startling and impossible coming from Mr. Wells's lips—the magical Families, the rules, the secrecy. What I grabbed at and held to, as a drowning person might clutch at a branch, was that Matthew was coming home, and all things considered, he was safe. I had been the eldest child in the house through four years of war and all that had come with it, and I hadn't done that without holding firm to the belief that as long as we were alive there was nothing that couldn't be fixed. Matthew was alive, and that was what mattered. I heard everything Mr. Wells said about the curse, and it didn't faze me. He was going to be all right. I was going to make sure of it.

He wasn't all right. I could see that as soon as he stepped off the train.

It had been six months since he had been hurt, and he had spent them under lock and key in the care of the Families in France, half patient, half prisoner. I don't know if it was that or the years of war that had come before it that had whittled him so thin and pale, that had chiselled new lines at the corners of his eyes and between his brows, that had taken the light from his eyes and from his smile even as both kindled at the sight of us. Either way, it shocked me, and the shock never quite faded. When it was my turn to embrace him, I clung to him, his uniform coarse against my cheek, and felt the weakness in his left arm as he held me. The younger children hung back, shy and a little awed. Even Holly and Mary barely remembered him now, and John and Iris had been babies when he left.

"All right?" he asked as we parted, and his voice at least hadn't changed. "Jesus, Clover, you're nearly as tall as I am. When did that happen?"

"You tell me," I said, and hoped my own voice sounded as steady. "You're the one who shrank."

He laughed, but I wished I hadn't said it.

We saw the damage soon enough that evening. He still needed a hand to shrug off his jacket and shirt in those days, and beneath it we could see the wound the curse had left. I understood then why the Families had been worried—it looked like nothing that could have been inflicted by man or machine. The entire shoulder was withered and cracked and hard like the grey-white bark of a tree. It started just below the collar bone and crept out in dark fingers across his chest and down his arm and up toward his throat. I knew with sickening certainty that it had been reaching, in true fairy-tale fashion, for his heart.

"Does it hurt?" Iris asked, wide-eyed. I didn't have to.

"A bit," he conceded. "It's getting better. It's nothing," he added firmly, seeing Mum's face. "I'm lucky to be alive to feel anything at all."

He meant it, I know. But it was difficult to remember that, as the days turned into months and it never did get better. With our father so recently dead and our mother fully occupied with children and housework, the bulk of the farming fell squarely on him. And the farm was struggling worse than ever in the wake of years of war and sickness. I tried to help all I could, but he made this difficult by insisting that I go back to school. I had quietly not returned after that horrible Christmas, telling myself the farm and my family needed me, trying not to feel as though my future was being ripped away and nobody noticed or cared. Matthew noticed, and he wouldn't have it.

"You're going to go to train as a teacher," he said when I protested. "I didn't fight a bloody war to come home and watch you wither away here."

So I went back to school. I told myself that Matthew wanted it, that I needed to be learning again, that being a teacher would help my family, and all those things were true. It was also true, though, that with my father dead and my brother half a stranger and home so grey and miserable, I longed to leave more than ever. I hated feeling it, I was wretchedly guilty every time I did, and yet I needed there to be more to life than this. There was a shortage of teachers after the war, as there was of so much else, and my chances of being accepted into a training college looked hopeful as long as I worked hard.

I studied every spare second I could. I learned geometry and poetry and the kings and queens of England; after school, for an hour, the schoolmistress gave me extra lessons in Latin and ancient Greek. Then I came home in time to help my mother make supper, and watched my brother grow more frustrated every time he came in. I learned to tell the good days when his shoulder was a dull ache he could ignore, the bad days when every unexpected movement made him wince before he could hide it, the very worst days when he could barely move it at all, and I hated having to learn it more than any lesson school had ever given me. I hated watching pain and worry wear away at him, drip by drip, like water on stone. I hated watching him be brave, knowing he'd already had so much practice at it.

The worst part, though, was the midnights.

The midnights were what Mr. Wells had come to warn us about in person—what we needed to understand and Matthew couldn't explain except as second-hand information. On certain nights of the year, the nights of the old pagan festivals when faerie magic was at its strongest and mages would traditionally work their spells, Matthew would lose his mind.

"In the most literal sense of the word," Mr. Wells explained, his round blue eyes serious behind their spectacles. "He won't be himself anymore. It will last from sundown to sunup, give or take, so you'll need to be ready. During that time, he must be bound—with silver, preferably, though never underestimate a good, sound rope. He'll talk to you, implore you, threaten you, try everything in his power to convince you to release him. You mustn't listen. Keep the door closed, block your ears if you have to. Don't let him go, even for a second. He'll overpower you."

"What will happen if he does?" I asked, my throat dry.

"You'll lose him," Mr. Wells said bluntly. "The fae are always trying to steal human bodies—they can't survive long in the human world without them. That curse will do everything in its power to deliver Matthew to the nearest faerie door. If he made it through, the fae would claim him for their own. The doors are locked now, so that's impossible, but…"

He broke off, looking away for the first time. I had been through a war too. I knew what that meant.

"Your people will kill him, won't they?" I said. "The Families."

My mother stiffened beside me, and Mr. Wells sighed.

"Don't think too badly of them," he said. "They're very scared right now—both of exposure and of faerie magic. If he tried to get to the doors, out of his mind with a faerie curse, they would kill him on sight. You must understand, nonmagical people struck by faerie curses are supposed to die. I'm in a good deal of trouble for saving him in the first place, and a good deal more for using my family's influence to push for him to be returned to you. That's why it's absolutely imperative that he be kept safe on those nights. It will be terrible, I can't deny that. Nevertheless, you must promise me."

He might have been talking to my mother. I was the one who nodded, though, and so his gaze shifted to me.

"I will help if I can," he said. "I promise. Anything I can do, you need only to ask."

But Mr. Wells had left the house before Matthew returned, and he never saw him. We had to struggle with it on our own. And it was every bit as bad as Mr. Wells had said.

It was strange and sickening to tie him up, the first time. It was the night of the spring equinox—Ostara, on the calendar Mr. Wells had given us. We had no silver—the very idea was ridiculous—so we used ropes and chains with heavy padlocks, and shut the doors and windows tight for good measure.

"Go on," Matthew said, when he noticed me hesitating. He sounded calm, but I could read the set of his jaw and the way his eyes never quite met ours. He hated every second of this. "I can't remember what happens on these nights, but I've seen the state of the room the next day. You can't take any chances."

So we tied him to his bed, in the narrow attic room he had to himself, and at his insistence, we stepped out and locked the door behind us. Mum told me to go to bed; I wouldn't. The two of us sat outside on the stairs all night, not speaking, even when Matthew started to call for help.

They were quiet at first, those cries. His voice came, plaintive, asking if we were still there. We didn't answer. Mr. Wells had warned us it was better not to.

"It's all right," my brother's voice said. "I don't think it's happening tonight. You can let me go. Mum? Clover? Is anyone there?"

We still didn't answer. Mr. Wells had warned us of that too.

The calls escalated over the night. The pleading note deepened, then turned to anger. He begged us by name, then he threatened. By midnight the screams had started. Mum gripped my hand in her hard bony fingers, and I gripped back just as tight. The night seemed to last a thousand years.

I only made one mistake. It was almost dawn, the black around us beginning to lighten with the faintest hint of grey. My eyes were gritty, my bones hollow with fatigue. The voice behind the door had been quiet for over an hour. I was half dozing when it came again.

"Clover?" Matthew's voice was soft, almost a whisper. "Are you there?"

I sat up, blinking, rubbing my eyes hurriedly with the heel of my hand. A quick glance beside me revealed that Mum had fallen asleep, leaning against the wall.

"Clover," the whisper came again. "It's all right. It's over now. I'm back. You can come let me out."

It looks so obvious, set down on paper. I knew, really, what was speaking. In that hazy half-asleep hour, though, the world all shadows and uncertainties, I doubted what I knew. It sounded so like Matthew; curses and enchantments were such a new idea to us all. And what if it was him? I think, in the end, that was what caused me to get to my feet and creep to the door. What if it really was him—had been him all night, begging us for help, and we had been ignoring him?

"Clover," he said. "Please. Please let me out."

That please was the last straw. I pushed the door open.

The predawn haze through the window gave just enough light to see. My brother's body half sat, half lay on his bed, as upright as the ropes and chains would allow. He was not inside it. The familiar lines of his face had sharpened, shifted, contorted; when he smiled, it was a baring of teeth that chilled my stomach. He raised his head, and his eyes glinted.

"It's all right," the thing said with my brother's mouth, while that strange light gleamed in his eyes. "Come here."

I slammed the door shut and slid the bolt home so fast the hem of my dress caught in the gap. The fabric tore as I yanked it in a blind panic, leaving a small scrap of yellow caught against the wood. On the other side of the door, I could hear the faerie-thing chuckling.

I sat there on the stairs, shaking, fighting back tears as Mum dozed beside me. It truly was magic that gripped my brother. I understood it then for the first time, and my world, already in fragments, began to take on a new and terrible shape.

The following night, while my family slept, I carefully crept downstairs to the kitchen. The last embers of the stove were still burning, enough to see to light a candle. I sat at the table and carefully laid out a piece of string with a knot in the middle.

Mr. Wells had shown me the spell right at the end of his visit, almost as an afterthought. I had followed him out to the gleaming motorcar waiting on our driveway, ready to point out the shortcut back to the main road.

"Can anyone do magic?" I asked, right before he got in. "Or only people like you?"

"Anyone, in theory," he said. "Spells are simply a word and a gesture, very precisely performed. It's more difficult for anyone outside the Families, though. Something to do with blood."

"I could learn, though?"

"Slowly, with great effort. You wouldn't be able to do very much." He hesitated, looking at me with mingled guilt and doubt, then dipped into his pocket and pulled out a handkerchief.

"Here." It was the first time I noticed the silver ring on his left hand, though I didn't know then what it was. "Watch closely."

He tied the handkerchief in a loose knot and held it out in the palm of one hand. Then he passed the other hand over it with a twist of his fingers almost too rapid to see, and whispered, " Bebind ."

I felt a shiver in the air, like a breath of wind in the dark—nothing more. Mr. Wells must have seen my sceptical expression, because his mouth twitched as he handed me the handkerchief.

"There," he said. "Try to untie that. You'll find you can't. It's a simple charm, one that renders a knot unbreakable. If you could master it, it might help with the midnights."

I tugged at the knot experimentally, then tried to unpick it with my fingers. He was right. It was stuck as fast as if it had been glued. As magic went, it wasn't spectacular, but it was the first I'd ever seen. My heart quickened.

"Show me how the fingers go again?" I asked.

Now, at the kitchen table late at night, I tried myself. I joined my right index finger and my ring finger together and made the small, tight circle Mr. Wells had shown me; I whispered the Old English word over the knot. It didn't take, of course. I hadn't expected it to. There were a thousand variables—the size of the circle, the pitch of the whisper, the tension in the muscles. The only sure way to learn it was to do it right once, find the feel of it, and keep trying to replicate it until it was perfect.

I tried again. And again. By the end of the first hour my fingers ached and my throat was sore. I kept trying. I wasn't afraid anymore.

It truly was magic that held my brother. As terrifying as it was, that meant one important thing: Magic was real. It was real, and that meant that things could be fixed after all. Matthew was cursed—curses, every fairy tale told me, could be broken. I could break it, whatever it cost.

It meant another thing too. It meant that I could learn magic. And that, though I hardly dared to think it, was a doorway to more than just teaching. That opened a whole new world.

By the end of the summer, I was ready.

Anything I can do, you need only to ask. Mr. Wells had said that, and even though he'd never come back, I knew that he had meant it. I found his address in the drawer where Mum kept old correspondence from her relatives. I wrote to him that very night, short and businesslike, assuring him that nothing was wrong but I had a personal favour to ask of him the next time he chose to visit the house. A week or so later a letter came back from him, expressing his regret that he would be unable to visit in the foreseeable future. He would, however, be doing some business nearby in two weeks, if I wouldn't mind travelling to meet him for lunch. Enclosed in the envelope was a round-trip train ticket to Manchester.

Mum wasn't at all sure. I don't know what bothered her more—the magical world, or the idea of me travelling to the city by myself to meet a man we barely knew. It was my turn to appeal to Matthew to convince her, trying to suppress the guilty memory of where my efforts on his behalf had put him. He managed it, too, though he came out shaking his head with the same half-mischievous, half-chagrined air I remembered from the time I was ten and he had taken me with him into the pub on Friday night.

"Don't push her too far, all right?" he said. "You have to remember how this place can be about witchcraft."

Our farm wasn't far from Pendle Hill, where twelve people were accused of witchcraft during the Lancaster Assizes in 1612. Superstition clung to the hill like shreds of cobweb—it was the site of visions and visitations, encounters with fae and with devils. I knew even then that most of it had little to do with real magic, only fear. Still, I took Matthew's warning to heart. With my mother, fear was almost as dangerous as a curse, and just as inconvenient.

I had been to Manchester only a handful of times in my life, and never since the war. It startled me: its size, its redbrick solidity, its rattlings and its shouts and its smoke. It seemed in a constant state of construction, exciting and chaotic all at once. The restaurant to which Mr. Wells escorted me was startling in a different way. It was sleek and white and modern, its marble-and-glass interior defying the city outside to smudge it. We sat on plush chairs at a window overlooking the retail district, and I knew that whatever would be put in front of me would cost enough to feed my family for a week.

Mr. Wells looked the same as he had those few months ago—a little rounder and better rested, perhaps, with his suit sitting more comfortably on his shoulders. He apologised for making me come out to the city. It was, he said, difficult for him to get time away from his work, and I knew at once that he was lying without knowing why.

I decided to come out with it quickly. "You told me you learned how to counter faerie curses at a university," I said, after the waiter had given us our soups and left. "A magic university."

"Camford," he confirmed. "Or the Cambridge-Oxford University of Magical Scholarship, to give its proper title."

The name bewildered me momentarily. "Is it at Oxford or Cambridge?"

"Neither. Both. Very few people know where Camford itself is situated. Wales, possibly, or Scotland. It's a closely kept secret—most of the magical universities are the same. There are two doors, one at Oxford and one at Cambridge. You pass through one or the other to get there."

I nodded, as if this was the kind of information I received every day. "And it's where people like you go to learn magic?"

"It's where most of the sons of magical Families go when they turn eighteen or so, yes. Most learn very little there, it must be confessed, but it's the custom, and some do stay on to be scholars. I didn't graduate myself. I left after my first year to sign up, and I couldn't face going back. Why?"

"I want to go there," I said. "Camford. I want to learn magic. I want to be a scholar."

"Ah." He had just raised his spoon; he set it down and touched the napkin to his mouth on reflex. "May I ask why?"

"Many reasons." He kept waiting, cautious and courteous. "First and foremost, because Matthew needs help. He can't keep living like this. It isn't fair."

Mr. Wells's face tightened, as at some sudden pain. "Has he said that?"

"No, of course not. I do. I see what he's going through every day. And he isn't the only one, is he? There were others struck by faerie curses in that battle."

"There were," he agreed, still cautious. "Very few are still alive, however, and it won't happen again. The Families across Europe made an accord after the war—no more faerie magic. The doors between our world and faerie country have been locked for good. Too little, too late, but still…"

"But still," I countered. I hadn't known that, of course, but I was determined not to remind Mr. Wells just how little I knew. I was afraid, in an abstract way, that it would put him off helping me to learn more. "It doesn't help Matthew. And that's what I want to do. If he were injured in the usual fashion, I might train to be a doctor or a chemist. That won't be of any use in this case. He needs magic."

"He does, I agree. But—forgive me, I don't mean any offence. I just want to be clear. I'm not sure he needs magic from you . I'm not sure such a thing would even be possible."

It was no less than I had expected, yet it still stung. I drew a deep breath, making sure none of the hurt found its way to my voice. "Mr. Wells—"

"Sam," he interrupted. "Please. I grew used to ‘Private Wells' in the army. Mr. Wells sounds peculiar."

"Sam," I amended. "You did tell me, when you first came, that anyone could learn magic. I know people from outside the magical Families would never normally attend Camford—"

"I wouldn't say never," he interrupted, yet again. Normally I would grit my teeth at that; from Sam, though, it didn't feel dismissive. I could see he was ill at ease, and he was one of those people whose tongue runs away with them in such times. "There have been cases of people discovering our secret, just as you have, and attempting the entrance exam. Some have succeeded. Never a woman, though. There are few women scholars at Camford even from the Families. It's a stuffy old place at times, very set in its ways. It's expensive, too, like any prestigious university."

I appreciated the delicacy. He must have known we were poor as church mice. "Don't they have scholarships? Other universities do."

"Well, yes. Most of them are for postgraduate study, though—prizes. The top five graduating students in each year, for instance, receive the Merlin Scholarship, and that pays their way through a doctorate. The only scholarships to enter Camford at first year are hardship benefits, and they're rarely claimed. Most magical Families are wealthy, or at least would rather not attend at all than admit they weren't."

"I'm not wealthy," I said. "And I don't mind admitting it."

That wasn't quite true—I had a healthy degree of pride, as well as trepidation at the thought of how such people might look upon someone like me. I wouldn't let it stop me, though.

"It isn't so simple. They don't give such scholarships out of the goodness of their hearts. It would require you to not only pass the entrance exam but pass among the very top."

"I'd be one of the few who were truly trying, if magical Families are so wealthy."

"They won't need to try to outperform you. You don't understand. Anyone can learn magic, Miss Hill, there's no denying that. The truth is, though, those from outside the Families find it very difficult. I don't know why—nobody does—but for some reason, if it isn't in the blood—"

"I learned the spell you showed me." I thought it was only fair I took my turn to interrupt. "The binding spell."

That made him pause, curious, on the edge of sceptical. "Show me?"

I glanced around the restaurant, at the people eating their food and laughing.

"Oh, it's quite safe," Sam assured me, following my gaze. "This is a Family restaurant. You probably didn't notice the spell I performed at the door before we came in? If I hadn't done it, this would have opened to a very old-fashioned shoe store. We can do any magic we like without breaking the code of secrecy."

"Nobody else seems to be."

He laughed pleasantly. "Why would they? I daresay there's some magic being employed in the kitchens. Everyone here is busy eating. Here." He took up the cloth napkin in front of him, tied it in the middle, and slid it across the table to me. "Bind that, if you don't mind. I'd like to see it."

I tried to make it look simple, effortless, as though magic came as naturally to me as breathing and not at all as though I had practiced for hours every night for months until my voice was hoarse and my hands cramped and my head throbbed. I was so nervous that my fingers were stiff and clumsy, and I feared my voice had trembled at the wrong moment. It felt as though my future were hanging on that one incantation, the only one I knew.

Sam picked up the napkin, tugged it experimentally. His eyebrows rose above his spectacles.

"That's very good," he said. "Impeccable. You must understand, though, the students from Families have been doing magic since they were children."

"I'll keep up, I promise." Hope flared in my chest. He had sounded impressed. "I'll work as hard as I need to."

"I believe you, truly. I'm simply trying to make you understand how hard that will need to be, and that even your hardest might not be enough. Do you really want to go down this path, considering?"

"I want to help my brother," I said.

"I do understand that." I saw that flash of pain across his face again. "But scholars have been working on faerie curses for a long time. Believe me, if anything new is discovered, I'll make it available to you straight away. It's unlikely, though, to come from—"

"Me," I finished, when he looked awkward. "A woman from a nonmagical family. Nobody special."

"Clover, believe me, I have heard all about you from your brother," Sam said. "I know you're special. I know all of you are. Still, the lack of experience and the, well, the advantage one gets from magical blood…"

"Perhaps I am unlikely to help Matthew," I said, because I could get nowhere by arguing. "Even so, I want to learn magic."

"Why?" he repeated. "Let's set Matthew aside for a moment. Suppose it transpires that your brother can't be helped, that however hard you study, you will make no material difference to his condition. Would you still want it?"

"Yes." The answer came so swiftly I surprised even myself. "More than anything."

"Because…?"

"Because I've lived my entire life wanting to get away from my home and learn about the world." The words came easily in the end, the ones I had never planned to say. The ones I had been ashamed to admit to, lying in bed late at night in a house filled with dearly loved people who needed me. "I wanted to study to be a teacher because that was the only use I could see for education that didn't feel selfish, that I could use to earn a living and help my family. We could never have afforded to send me to a real university, even if one would take me. But if I can pass the entrance exams to Camford near the top, then everything would be paid for. That's right, isn't it?"

"That's right," Sam said slowly. "If you passed near the top."

"I can. I know I can. If I can learn Latin and Greek and geometry, I can learn magic. I proved that, didn't I? I taught myself that spell on my own. And—"

"And?" Sam prompted gently when I hesitated.

"And I loved it." I hadn't meant to say that either. I wanted to appeal to his reason, to argue my case on its own merits. It just came from me, because it was true. "When it worked—when I did that—I've never felt anything like it before. Like the universe was pure light, and I could run it through my fingers and stir it about like water." That was only a frustrating shadow of what I meant. When I looked at Sam, though, something in his face had shifted. "Do you understand?"

"I do," he said simply. "Any of us would."

I felt the bubble of hope grow stronger. "I know you've already saved Matthew's life. You owe us nothing—"

"I owe your family everything." This interruption I didn't mind at all. "More than you know. Of course I'll help if I can. You never know, after all. With the proper tutelage, you might learn a great deal in the next year or so. And I work for the Board of Magical Regulation now—I'll ask around and see if I can dig up any scholarships that most won't know about. We'll give it our very best shot." He hesitated. "How is your brother?"

"All right," I said. "Tired. The last midnight was hard on him." I wish I could say I didn't know then what I was doing, and on some level I truly didn't, but I wasn't surprised when I saw Sam wince. I was more skilled at manipulation than I admitted, even then.

"I'll help," Sam repeated. "I promise."

We finished our meal in silence broken only by pleasantries, and he walked me back to the train station afterwards. He offered to take me to the Manchester Museum, which I had never seen, but I explained I had to be home to help with the sheep at night.

"Why don't you come and visit us?" I asked him on impulse. He seemed so wistful as the train pulled up, and he had been so kind. "Matthew hasn't seen you since he was hurt."

"Perhaps I will," he said, and I knew that, for whatever reason, he wouldn't. "Either way, you'll certainly hear from me."

Within a week, a letter arrived for me in the post. It gave me the name and address of a house about an hour on horseback from our farm, and told me a witch was expecting me.

She owes my family a debt , he said. Besides, I believe you've rather intrigued her. Her name is Lady Anjali Winter—her husband was killed in the war. If you go to study with her once a week, she'll give you the benefit of her knowledge. She also has an extensive library, though you may find the books outdated. If by next summer she thinks you ready, you may sit the Camford entrance exam. Do let me know if there's anything more I can do, and give my best regards to your brother.

I did go to study with Lady Winter. I'll have more to say about her later—at the time, I'm not sure I saw her properly, as scared and in awe and utterly focused on magic as I was. For an hour each week, she taught me basic spellcraft, theory, history, and folklore. In between lessons I practiced harder than I had ever practiced anything before. I immersed myself in books from her library, wrote essay after essay, tried spells over and over until I hit them perfect every time. I kept my eyes on my work, and I never looked up.

In the summer of 1920 I journeyed to Manchester again, this time to meet a red-faced, disgruntled mage and be ushered into a small room. One hour of writing and two of practical tasks later, red-faced myself now and wrung dry with exhaustion, I was informed that I could start at Camford in September, on full scholarship.