3

3

C amford. I realise I've come this far without describing it, but it's difficult to know how. People say it resembles Oxford or Cambridge, which makes sense, given that centuries ago it was part of them. When Cambridge split from Oxford in the early thirteenth century, the magical department vanished to become its own institute. There was still a Camford staff member at each of those two universities, one to watch over each of the doors that led to Camford itself. The door that led from the Bodleian was still laughingly referred to as "the Oxbridge."

The truth was, the first time I came to Oxford, that sunny afternoon in late September, I disliked it on sight. I had expected to love it—the spires, the cobbled roads, the ancient seats of learning. It represented knowledge to me. I had dreamed of it most of my life, long before I learned there was such a thing as magic or faerie curses. Matthew had found a photograph of it in an old magazine and framed it for my eleventh birthday, the year I had first confided in him I wanted to go to training college, and I had hung it on my wall alongside my print of Tennyson's "Ulysses" and the watercolour of a clover my father had drawn for me when I was born. I had tried to fall asleep looking at those towers, hoping that in my dreams I would soar above them and find my place there as I never would in life.

But the Oxford I saw that first day, as I followed Sam to my new home, was not the one from my dreams. The greyscale of the photograph melted into bright sun, and in the light of it, those famous spires looked mildewed and yellow, in need of a good airing. The architecture, impressive as it was, somehow didn't touch me with anything except rising disappointment. There were too many straight lines and trimmed lawns, too many signs forbidding entry; the buildings had a crumbling, fusty look, as though the place was calcifying. I'd come from slow-moving, rugged hills where little had changed for centuries; in my heart, I'd imagined post-war Oxford as bustling, brimming over with shiny new scholarship, at the brink of a changing world. Yet here I was, and it just looked weary and set in its ways, like an old man falling asleep at a heavy dinner.

"Imposing, isn't it?" Sam asked, perhaps mistaking my silence for awe.

"Oh… yes," I said, truthfully enough. It was imposing. It wanted everyone to know it had been important once. "Is—is Camford much like this?"

"Oh no," Sam said vaguely. He was looking about him, my trunk in one hand. I had tried to stop him carrying it for me, until I realised that with a word he had made it feather-light while I would have been dragging a heavy case over cobbles. "Well, the architecture, perhaps. Buildings all look much alike to me. Now, where is that damn library? You'd think in a place where the streets don't move…"

He was right. I knew it immediately the first time I crossed the Oxbridge, and I stepped forward with a rush of wonder and excitement and sheer relief. Camford was not like Oxford at all.

Did you ever see it? I hope you did. I hope you stepped through that peculiar little door in one of the many secret rooms of the Bodleian and felt the temperature drop a few degrees, the wind tease at your hair and clothes and your blood thrill in response, seconds before the sprawling campus filled your eyes. I knew at once that we were somewhere different, somewhere wilder and colder than the mannered countryside we had left, though there was no way of telling where it might be. A high stone wall surrounded it, and beyond those fortifications all that could be seen was mist and haze that persisted even in the brightest sun. The light had a pale, silvery quality, as though filtered through glass, and the breeze brought the smell of rain and stone and autumn leaves. The architecture within it was similar to Oxford and Cambridge, in that there were spires and towers and cobbled streets, but it was Oxford through an imperfect mirror. The stone was darker, a silvery grey with odd patches of brick where buildings had been added or repaired. A great domed building rose from the middle—I thought it might be a cathedral and learned later that it was the library. Everything else was crooked, rambling, haphazard. Buildings teetered; paths wound like unspooled thread; a river twisted through the centre, spanned by bridges at random. The doors, for no reason I've ever learned, were all blue.

Strangest of all, it was entirely overgrown with trees. Oak and ash and ivy entwined every inch—holding up the massive walls, peeking through the cobbles, bursting through every courtyard, impossibly green against the stone. If it hadn't been for the students cycling down the pathways, laughing in the courtyards, it might have been a ruin left for a hundred years.

I had come looking for magic and possibility, and here it was. But there was something else here, too, something I had never felt before. History. Tradition. Beauty.

"Oh," I said, completely and wholly inadequately. My heart had risen so far in my throat I thought I might cry.

"It might take you a while to find your way around," Sam warned me, as if from a distance. "The pathways are tricky, especially with all the trees, and some of them move. You'll get there in the end. Everyone does."

I nodded, barely listening. In that moment, I knew I had done the right thing. I hadn't been certain on the train, dressed in my stiff Sunday best, the warmth of my family's embraces still fading from my body, everything familiar disappearing behind me while the world loomed ahead like a shadow. Magic, for God's sake. I was Clover Hill, bright and hardworking and good at drawing but nothing special, and certainly not a witch. Who was I to force my way in here, where nobody wanted me? But looking at Camford opening in front of me like a story waiting to be read, I knew I needed to be here. This place, at least, the war had never touched. It had been battered by so many centuries of magic and scholarship, and it had weathered all those centuries unchanged. From here I could fix everything.

Had it not been for that moment, the next week might have broken me.

Camford was a select university, five hundred students and a small staff. Of those staff, ten or so were on the Faculty (it was always capitalised, much like the Board, who governed magic in London, or the Families themselves, and I could hear those capitals whenever it was pronounced). The rest, as far as I could gather, were lecturers, librarians, custodians—it was a long time before I saw anyone who did the cooking and cleaning. For reasons of secrecy, everyone who worked or studied at Camford was housed on the campus; first-year undergraduates, even the few women, lived in a single building at the south corner known as Chancery Hall. All of them, apart from me, were Family.

I had known this before coming, of course. I hadn't understood what it meant. On that first day, as Sam led me down the confusing labyrinth of crooked alleys and winding streets to Chancery, every nook and cranny teemed with young men in the most expensive suits I had ever seen. Sam left me standing in a high-ceilinged entrance hall while he rushed off to ask somebody about my lodgings, and I stood there with the old blue leather trunk Mum had dug out of the attic and watched a group of them by the stairs. My classmates. They had clearly just arrived, too, and yet they just as clearly all knew one another. They called out to each other by name, laughed at old jokes; one moved his fingers too fast to follow and shot a stream of water at another while the others howled with mirth.

I had never been shy at home. Solitary, perhaps—our farm was out in the middle of nowhere, and at school I was always too focused to make real friends, set on learning as much as I could in the short time I had. But I never had trouble speaking up if I had to; I had never worried about what anybody thought of me except the people I loved. It was different here. Whether because I had inherited Mum's mingled wariness and awe of the wealthy or simply because I wanted to belong here as I never had before, the sight of these polished creatures talking and embracing in a sea of dark coats made me want to curl up and hide behind the nearest sofa.

One of them, a cheerful boy with red hair, caught sight of me and grinned. When I returned his smile, weakly, he peeled off from his classmates and came closer. "Hello. I don't think we've been introduced. Justin Abbott. I saw you come with Sam. Are you related to the Truelove or the Wells clans?"

For a fleeting second, I wondered if I could pretend. Sam wouldn't have minded. I could have claimed I was his cousin, from a distant branch in the north. I dismissed the idea almost at once. For one thing, my ring would have given me away. They all had them, like the one I had noticed around Sam's finger the day we had met, and each was emblazoned with a Family crest. I had been given one too—they were enchanted with differing levels of access to Camford, so I would need it to pass through the gates and even my own room—but my crest was blank. I was a nobody, and it wouldn't be long before they saw. Besides, I remembered, uncomfortably late, I wasn't ashamed of my family. I wasn't.

"No." God, why did I sound so young and so provincial? "Sam's a friend of the family. I'm Clover Hill."

His face at once closed off and sharpened with curiosity, a nosy neighbour pulling the window shut yet still peeking around the curtain. "Oh," he said, in a voice that made an effort to be pleasant. Behind him, a couple of his friends turned. "Oh, I see. We heard of you, of course. The scholarship witch."

I didn't know what to say, because I didn't know what to feel. Was witch an insult here? It certainly sounded as though scholarship was.

Fortunately, Sam bustled back, faintly out of breath. "Your room is this way," he said. "There's a separate wing for female students. Oh, hello, Abbott. Have I interrupted something?"

"No," Abbott said. "Not at all. It's good to see you, Sam. How are things at the Board?"

"Oh, you know," Sam said vaguely. "Boring. Excuse us, please."

He turned to me as soon as we were alone, still moving at a rapid pace down a dark corridor. "He wasn't being unkind, was he? Don't pay attention. The Abbotts are meddling, inconsiderate snobs to a one. I went to Crawley with his brother, I know—"

"Sam!" I forced a smile and shoved him lightly, as though he were one of my own brothers. I hoped he couldn't see my rising nerves. "I can take care of myself."

"I'm sure of it. But—" He stopped, so suddenly I almost collided with him. "If anything goes wrong, or you want to come home, please call me, won't you? I know what this place can be like."

"I will." I meant it. But I was also seventeen, and determined never to need to. "I promise."

My room was on the ground floor, at the far end of the west wing. I'm sure most students would have found it small and uncomfortable. I, however, had always shared a much smaller room with Mary and Holly, the three of us trying to colonise space out of a clutter of old clothes and scuffed Victorian furniture. This bare room, with its blank cream walls and low rafters and window looking out to a paved courtyard, both thrilled and intimidated me. I couldn't imagine ever being able to make a mark on it with the contents of my old trunk. That first night, I lay awake on the creaky mattress as light rain spattered the window and the shouts and laughter of young strangers drifted in, and panic and excitement battled for supremacy in my stomach.

By next morning, panic had won.

Sam had warned me that some of the Camford pathways moved; now, I could also tell you that some walls were false and required a spell to part, some staircases went nowhere, and the outer wall was constantly being made unsafe by the encroaching ivy. On that first day, I couldn't have told you which hazard was which. I spent most of my morning lost, stumbling through mounting terror down streets that made no sense, bursting into lectures conspicuously late, sitting breathlessly in the front row trying to calm down as the lecturers outlined material I couldn't understand and recommended books I hadn't read. In the afternoon, I met my tutor, Everett Dalrymple: a bored, gawky-looking young doctoral candidate, with carefully combed dark hair and a tweed jacket that he probably thought made him look scholarly. I could tell at a glance that I was the last person he wanted to be assigned; later, I learned that I was punishment for some unfortunate remarks about the vice-chancellor, made while drunk at the end-of-year party. He greeted me pleasantly enough, and his cool disinterest warmed marginally when I outlined the authors I had studied. When I mentioned Agrippa and faerie curses, though, he snorted.

"Agrippa," he said flatly. "Well, I don't think you'll find a use for him outside of specialist history courses, and then not until third year. Faerie magic is illegal now in any case. There aren't even any books on it in the library, save in the archives."

My heart sank. "I don't want to summon a faerie," I said, as reasonably as I could. "Only study counter-curses."

"Those are off the curriculum too. Anything pertaining to the fae is strictly forbidden since the Accord. It's a pity, I know. A friend of mine had to abandon his thesis because of it. After what happened at Amiens, though, well…"

I bit my tongue before I protested that my brother was at Amiens. It wasn't widely known that a non-mage with a faerie curse was alive in the world, and Sam had warned me to be discreet.

"Leave faerie spells alone, Miss Hill," Dalrymple said, "and Agrippa with it. You'll find a new area of interest. If, of course, you stay past this year."

The underlying threat didn't trouble me. I was used to the idea of having to prove myself, and it didn't occur to me, as it should have, that Dalrymple had the power to fail me whether I proved myself or not. But I was dismayed to find my reading was out-of-date, and the news that Camford wouldn't support my studies into faerie magic crushed me. It seemed that as far as helping Matthew went, I might as well go home. I knew, in the part of my heart I tried to ignore, that I should consider doing exactly that. I could study magic without Camford, or at least I didn't see how anyone could stop me. I could help my family best perhaps with no magic at all. And yet the idea sickened me. I wanted to stay, to learn, to succeed. It wasn't only about magic now. Now I had seen Camford, I wanted nothing more than to belong to it.

It was perfectly obvious to everyone else, though, that I didn't belong. Since I had spoken to Justin Abbott, every student in Chancery Hall ignored me. Their eyes slid over me with expressions ranging from kind embarrassment to pity to open contempt, as they might a beggar on the streets. If I asked them a question, they would answer briefly or pretend not to hear. They could have done so much worse, I know, yet part of me would have preferred open cruelty. I could have fought back against bullying. I could have told myself they were jealous or threatened. Instead, my existence was impolite and vaguely repulsive, like a sneeze. After a few hours of it, my skin would prickle and my stomach would tighten, as though I were wearing dirty clothes I couldn't slough off.

By the end of that first week, I was spending every spare moment alone in the library, reading doggedly, trying to cram my head so full of new information there would be no room for doubt or fear or longing for my family. The library, at least, I could always find, standing as it did in the very centre of Camford, and its books welcomed me with open arms. I tried to tell myself I didn't need anyone else.

It was in that state—miserable, homesick, fighting back despair with sheer stubbornness—that Alden found me and asked me what I was reading. Perhaps if I had been less unhappy, I might not have accepted his invitation to Stanford Corbett's luncheon. Perhaps I might have thanked him politely but told him I had more reading to do. I still wonder, in the darkest and most sleepless hours of the night, what would have happened if I had. If it would have been better, after all, though I know it wouldn't really.

It doesn't matter, in the end. I went.

When she first learned I would be going to Camford, all my mother had been able to focus on was the notion that I would be dining with wealthy students. The magical world was too far outside her knowledge; she neither understood it nor cared to. Class was real, and so was money, and she was determined I should be defeated by neither. Matthew and I had laughed, watching Mum frantically leaf through a book on the etiquette of cutlery she had borrowed from Miss Darby down at the village.

"Mum, she's not there to mess about with salad forks." Matthew was leaning against the kitchen door, arms folded. I was relieved to see the old playful glint dancing behind his eyes. "She's there to learn magic. She's a student now."

"Students have to eat," Mum said stubbornly. "And if she's eating with the likes of the aristocracy, she needs to do it properly."

I'd learned the salad forks, knowing it was her way of caring for me, fearing she might be right. So far, though I had dined in the student halls most nights, nobody had seemed to care greatly what fork I used or how I ate my soup. That luncheon with Alden was the first time I really, truly, dined with the wealthy students, at their invitation.

Stanford Corbett was a postgraduate with rooms on the second floor of Swan Tower. They were draughty and lavishly decorated and, on that day, already filled with students and scholars. The room brimmed over with them—young, red-faced men who laughed and pushed one another like workers at a tavern; well-dressed men tossing back champagne and snatching up little delicacies from the plates the servants carried; bored men already sitting at the long white table waiting for their food. My own stomach tightened, and I couldn't at that moment imagine swallowing a bite.

"So many people," I heard myself say, and immediately wished the ground to swallow me up. Honestly, I'd just felt that if I didn't say something, anything, Alden would forget I was there at his side and leave me to the wolves.

"Too many," Alden agreed, as if I'd said something astute and not very stupid. His eyes were scanning the crowd. "And too few with anything interesting to say. There's Hero, thank God. Hero!"

At the fireplace, Hero Hartley turned from the small man with whom she had been conversing.

I had seen Hero already. She was difficult to miss. In a room filled with charcoal suits, Hero's dress was white and gold and swept the floor, and there were white feathers in her rippling hair. The new fashion was for hair cut short and framing the face: Mum had cut mine herself before I'd left, using a faded sketch from a fashion magazine as a guide. I had secretly hoped, against all sense, that when it was done I would be transformed, no longer an awkward girl but a sharp, sophisticated young woman who had never brought ailing sheep inside in winter or heaved great bales of hay onto carts in the itchy, sticky heat of summer. It hadn't worked, of course. When Mum had towelled my hair dry roughly and stood back, it had hung limp about my face, which seemed to have grown rounder and pinker as my hair had shrunk. It didn't look like the fashion magazines at all. Hero didn't look like the women in the fashion magazines either. She didn't try to. Nor did she look like the few other women at Camford, who tended to dress soberly and practically, all felt hats and dark dresses. Her hair was long and deep chestnut, swept up in waves at the back of her head. She was tall, at least six feet, and in her heeled boots she rose a head above most of the men in the room. Her face was striking, cool and pale and oval-shaped—detached, I might have said, had it not been for the large dark eyes that glimmered with mischief. There was a sense of fun lurking beneath them that might be equally likely to turn on you or draw you in, and it invited you to try and see what you got.

They warmed as they fell on Alden, even as they brushed against me with curiosity. "Alden," she said pleasantly. "How the devil are you?"

"Rather under the weather, actually," he said.

"I'm not surprised, after last night. How much of it do you remember?"

"You'll have to fill me in." He took a fluted glass from a passing footman and motioned me forward. "Hero, may I present Clover Hill, the scholarship witch. Be gentle with her."

Hero's perfectly sculpted eyebrow shot up, and my stomach dropped. I had been snubbed too many times since I had come here not to recognise the signs. "What are you up to, Alden?"

"I thought you might like to meet one of your fellow female scholars," he said innocently.

"Oh, I would. I'm delighted to meet her. I just can't imagine that would occur to you."

"She's interesting. Not to mention clever."

"I'm sure of that. But what about her is of interest to you , Alden Lennox-Fontaine? You have brains enough of your own, after all, and little enough to apply them to. She's very pretty, but not in the way you'd notice."

"I don't have to be at this party, you know," I interrupted. I tilted my chin determinedly, to hide the fact my face was burning. In that moment, I knew I didn't belong here. It wasn't just my family or my sex or my lack of wealth. Nobody wanted me here. I was short, plain, round, bespectacled, and my hair was wrong. Hero's was too, technically, but she looked as though she'd done it on purpose. "Alden invited me. I could go."

Hero turned her gaze on me properly for the first time, genuinely surprised. "Why would you want to do that?"

"You've hurt her feelings," Alden said. He drained the glass and set it on the mantelpiece. "I told you to be gentle."

"I do apologise." Hero's deep, cultured voice did sound sincere. "I'm used to this crowd, who have no feelings at all. I really am delighted to meet you."

"She is," Alden confirmed. "It's me in whom she has no faith. I found her in the library reading Agrippa, Hero, does that satisfy you?"

A look passed between them, so quickly I might even have imagined it: a question and an answer when I couldn't read either. Then it was gone, and Hero was smiling, amused.

"You and Agrippa. That does make things clear. She tolerated your ramblings, and your interest in her is that you believe she finds you interesting. He really isn't, you know, darling."

"I know." I did my best to make my voice as careless as Hero's. "But Agrippa is. He was hanged for black magic four hundred years ago, which is more interesting than anything that's happened to anyone else in this room."

Hero laughed, a generous, unfeminine laugh, not at all the kind Miss Darby in the village had told me was used in polite society. "Well done."

"Don't mind us," Alden interjected. He was grinning too. "Quite apart from the fact it's customary to talk nonsense at these sorts of gatherings, I did warn you that Hero and I were more or less brought up together. Her father and mine were cousins or at school together or saved each other's lives in the Crimean or some combination thereof. She considers it her sworn duty to cut me down to size. You two will like each other, though. I can tell."

"I'm so grateful for your opinion," Hero said. "Please ignore him, Clover, and ignore me around him. Tell me about yourself."

"There's not much to tell," I said awkwardly. "My family have a sheep farm not far from Pendle Hill—"

"Not that sort of thing. I've found that out already, from other people. You're the only student here not Family, which is very clever of you considering you're not supposed to know we exist, but I'm sure everyone involved was punished or pardoned ages ago. What's your specialty?"

"I don't know yet." My heart unfurled just a little. I wasn't quite ready to mention my interest in faerie curses, though. "I tested about the same on all the different branches of magic in the entrance exam."

"Which is very strong, presumably. No wonder they had to let you in."

"What about you?" I meant to ask after Hero's specialty. She misunderstood.

"Oh, there was no way they would ever have been able to keep me out. Even if they hadn't decided to let women matriculate this year, which by the way is about bloody time, they haven't been able to really stop us coming for the last thirty years—not if we have money and brains, and I have both. My father might have stopped me by refusing to pay, admittedly. Fortunately he's an indulgent old thing when the mood takes him."

"And mine doesn't much care if I live or die," Alden added. "You can imagine what we got up to in our youth."

"Our youth?" The eyebrow went up again, but now I could better see the fondness behind it. "What are we in now, our twilight years? We aren't all suffering the effects of the night before, you know."

"I'm glad to hear it." He rubbed his neck and winced. "Well, I hope you bright young things will allow this elderly gentleman to escort you to the table. Corbett will throw a tantrum if we avoid him much longer. After all, he's paying for the food."

It was at that luncheon that I tasted quail's eggs for the first time, and caviar, and wine that was worth hundreds of pounds a bottle. (One bottle, at least. The rest of it, Hero assured me, was decidedly second-rate.) It was there that I received my first polite nods and small talk from upper-class accents, bathed as I was in the glow of Alden's and Hero's approval. It was there where I first saw magic fly freely across a table, in the manner of those who had been brought up with it and had never considered it a privilege. It was there, too, that I met Edmund Gaskell.

I had seen Edmund once or twice, always sitting in the lecture theatre alongside Hero and Alden. He had caught my attention only because he seemed so drab and awkward next to their golden loveliness, rarely talking, his head bent to his papers as though trying to disappear. When I found myself sitting beside him at the table, with Hero on the other side, I was struck mostly by how sorry I felt for him.

"I never know what to do at things like this," he confided to his plate, in little more than a whisper. The Yorkshire burr was even stronger in his voice than it had been in Alden's—not common, like mine, but a little countrified. "Alden and Hero bring me along. I just sort of eat the brussels sprouts and leave as soon as I can."

"Do you like brussels sprouts?" I was grasping desperately for conversation. To my surprise his face lit up. It was a thin, anxious, gentle face: attractive, in its own way, had it been stronger and less sallow against his dark brown hair. The remnants of acne at his jawline didn't help, nor did the fact his eyes never lingered on anything longer than a second.

"I grow brussels sprouts." He almost tumbled over his words in eagerness. "They're a beautiful vegetable. They have all kinds of magical properties, you know, that most people would never expect. Not cooked, of course. Cooked they just taste nice."

"Are you a botanist?" I was genuinely curious now. Spells to do with plants were usually practiced by hedgewitches, not scholars. It was soft magic: its curses imprecise, its healing powers too difficult to distinguish from traditional medicine. There was an optional botany paper, and I was taking it, but even the lecturer had made it very clear that it wasn't something to pursue seriously.

"No—well, yes, I suppose. Not in the usual sense." His eyes met mine for the first time. They were unexpectedly beautiful: the blue grey of a winter sky on the moors. "I believe that plants have a natural connection to magic, you see, Miss Hill, one that we can channel in all sorts of different ways."

His enthusiasm was infectious. "What sort of ways?"

"Well, for starters, you mentioned botanists. Hedgewitches use plants to heal all the time. Their techniques have never been properly studied. It's seen as mundane rather than magical science. But what if, instead of the plants themselves possessing healing properties, some actually draw on magical energy in the same way we do when we cast spells?"

"It would be fascinating," I said, sincerely. "If it were true."

"There's been some work done on it," he said. "I hope to do more myself, one day. Though the Faculty doesn't approve."

It made me think of Alden and his interest in Agrippa, and inadvertently my eyes drifted to where he sat across the table. He was talking to an older student with a ginger moustache, his fingers curled around a glass while his fork lay untouched beside his plate. The glint from the library was in hiding, but I thought I could see it still behind his eyes, and in the corner of his smile.

Edmund mumbled something beside me, and I wrenched my gaze back to him with a pang of guilt. "I'm sorry?"

"I said," he repeated, "I do like your name awfully."

"Did you have a good time?" Alden asked me afterwards. I had lingered by Hero uncertainly, not wanting to leave until I had spoken to him again but not wanting to approach him directly. He might have forgotten all about me. I was far too relieved he hadn't.

"It was interesting," I said honestly. "I'd never had that kind of food before. And Edmund was very nice."

"Oh, you spoke to Eddie? He's mad as a box of chairs, isn't he? Brilliant, though." He checked his watch. "Listen, I have a very tiresome party to go to in a few hours, and before that I desperately need to lie down and sleep away the last of last night, but in between that nap and that party, may I stop by the library and see you for a rational talk about Agrippa? Say seven?"

"I—yes. Yes, that would be fine." I usually had dinner then, but I wouldn't have said that for the world. Besides, I would be full now from the luncheon. "Yes, I'm sure I'll be somewhere around where we met."

He smiled. "Excellent."

"Oh, don't mind me," Hero retorted. "I suppose I'll only get to see you if I come to that tiresome party, where you'll be decidedly irrational and never mention long-dead magicians at all."

"Darling." He kissed her extravagantly. Watching, I couldn't help but blush. "I solemnly promise that if you come to the tiresome party, I will talk to you about any long-dead magicians you wish, as rationally as you could desire."

"With a promise like that, how can I possibly accept?"

"That's what I thought. I'll see you in a few hours and in far better senses, Clover Hill."

"Well, that does it," Hero declared as Alden walked away. "I'm afraid you're stuck with him now. It's a good thing you have me."

"I do?"

"Of course you do, darling. Well, me and Eddie. He doesn't usually speak to new people, you know. I think he's mistaken you for a vegetable. Would you like to come back to my room for a cup of tea?"

Half-formed thoughts and feelings fluttered like butterflies through my head. This couldn't be happening. People like this were not friendly to people like me. What on earth about Agrippa of all people had drawn Alden to me out of nowhere? It was best not to get involved. Besides, I had left my books in the library, and there was still time to study.

"Thank you," I said faintly. "That would be lovely."