4

4

I t's strange to remember now, but part of me shied away from the idea of having friends. It wasn't that I didn't like Alden, Hero, and Eddie, because I did, very much. They were like nothing and nobody I had ever seen before. But I was at Camford to work . I wanted to be a scholar; I wanted to save my brother; the two desires collided and rubbed against each other in my head like a chorus of cicadas. This was my only opportunity, dearly bought. I couldn't justify being away from home if I didn't succeed, and I had enough disadvantages without the distraction of a social life. I needed to immerse myself in lectures, in libraries, in long hours scribbling notes by lamplight with a mug of coffee at my side and the world shrinking to a pen nib on a page. And I did. I really, truly did. It was just that increasingly, day by day, I found that I was not doing it alone.

It started with the lectures.

The Monday after my first luncheon, I came to my morning lecture unsure where to sit. In those days, Camford first-years followed the same core curriculum, with a few optional papers—it wasn't until second year that we were allowed to branch out into specialties. In the first semester we had lectures in Basic Incantations, Linguistics of Spellcraft I (Ancient Tongues), Introduction to Folklore, and History of Modern Magic I (Medieval to Renaissance) several times a week. My usual tactic was to come into the hall as the lecture was starting and sit quickly in the first row. This way I would avoid conversation before the lecture—or, to be more precise, it would be less obvious that nobody was talking to me. Alden and Hero, I knew, sat together halfway up the creaky stadium seating, talking and laughing; possibly Eddie would be alongside them. I wanted to join them. The trouble was, I didn't know if I was welcome. The time I had spent with the three of them the day before seemed part of some enchantment—as though I had briefly stepped into a faerie ring and woken the next morning to find only faded grass. I couldn't help but think they would look at me and not remember who I was.

They didn't, of course. Alden caught sight of me a moment after my eyes fell on him—Alden, I found out later, always felt a glance as though it was a touch. He smiled and said something to Hero; she looked up and waved me over.

" There you are," she said as I slid into the seat next to her. It sounded for all the world as though they had been waiting for me, as though my natural place was by their side. "I assumed you'd be here before us, having spent last night somewhat more rationally than we did."

"Speak for yourself," Alden said. "I was disgustingly rational last night. The party was dead before I got there, and for once I went home and let it rest in peace instead of staying on to try to revive it."

"I'd be so much more impressed if you left alone," Hero said dryly. "What was his or her name? I assume you got it?"

"It would have been irrational of me not to."

"Well," I said, before I could stop myself, "impolite, at least."

I was feigning the dry, ironic banter of Camford students, and I knew it. But they didn't, or they pretended not to. Hero laughed her generous cackle, and Alden tore a page from his notebook and threw it at me.

Eddie pushed through the doors last, dishevelled and out of breath. He glanced up, searching for a seat, and his cloudy-sky eyes caught mine like a twig snagging on fabric. The uncertainty in them stabbed my heart, because it was what I tried so hard to keep from my own. I knew at once that he would normally come and join Alden and Hero, but now, seeing me, he wasn't sure if I wanted him there—that he was used to people turning away from him for God knows what stupid reason. I remembered how kind and how interesting he'd been at the luncheon, and how often I'd probably looked away from him toward Alden and Hero. On impulse, with a daring I'd never have mustered for any other Camford student, I smiled and waved him over. His face lit.

"Eddie," Alden greeted him as he slipped into the seat next to me. "How rational was your night last night?"

Eddie blinked. "Well. I watered the plants, wrote a letter home, and went to bed early."

"God. That's not only rational, it's downright healthy."

"Please don't mind him," Hero said tolerantly. "He has a new favourite word."

After that first Monday, I never sat alone at the front of the class again. It felt natural to come in, to seek out the other three, to join them if they were there first or to sit and wait for them if they weren't. We were the ones who were laughing together as the lecturer came in, listening and occasionally questioning when he spoke, disappearing together in a cloud of books and dropped pens after the talk ended. From there, it became natural to stay together afterwards—to walk to the library or to dinner. We started to have places that were ours—our study table on the seventh floor in the astronomy section, our seats in the dining hall beneath the stained-glass window depicting an owl in flight. Our jokes and nonsense, that nobody else would understand.

I still might have been too shy or too proud to let it pass beyond that level of friendly classmates had it not been for Hero. Now I had come willingly to her attention, she took me up with all the proprietary kindness of an older sister. Rules around male-female segregation were more relaxed at Camford than the outside world—there simply wasn't room for it to be otherwise. Still, male visitors were strictly forbidden in the rooms of female students outside of daylight hours, and even then never unchaperoned. Hero, though, could visit whenever she liked. Within a week of Corbett's luncheon, I was sitting at my desk at midnight gnawing on a pencil and reading the same page over and over when I heard a sharp, unexpected knock at the door.

Truthfully, I almost didn't answer it. My room itself was no different from that of any of the other first-years, and I'd already come to love its old beams and courtyard window. But my belongings were meagre—a red knitted blanket on the bed, my books stacked haphazardly on my desk, my old stuffed bear that my sisters had insisted I take with me. My wall was covered in my own sketches of my family, our farm, Camford. All of these things I feared might draw laughter if word got around.

They would have done, I'm convinced, had others seen them. Perhaps Hero herself might even have laughed, in a different mood, in a different life where our acquaintance began in different circumstances. She could be as thoughtless as any other young girl who'd grown up with everything she asked for. But she had made her mind up about me by then. When I opened the door, her eyes flickered over everything once, taking it in, and all she did was nod approvingly at the blanket.

"I like that shade of scarlet," she said. "Very chic. Clover, darling, do you by any chance have a copy of Richmond's Rise and Fall of the Augustan Mages ? I need it by Tuesday, and of course so does every other first-year answering Question Three."

Soon, the two of us were in and out of each other's rooms as easily as I would have dropped in on my siblings at home. At first it was for study; then, when there was no study to be done, she dropped by late at night with biscuits and we curled up by the fire drinking tea until we couldn't stay awake any longer. I would have thought, only days before, that I would have nothing to say to Hero Hartley, nor she to me. About some things we didn't: I had never known anything like her wild butterfly adolescence, with its fashions and flings and fast cars, and she had certainly never been to a sheep farm. Her dry sarcasm left me tongue-tied at times; my naive seriousness probably frustrated her. But we had things in common now—not just the big things, like our ambitions and our studies and the fact that we were neither of us meant to be there, but the silly day-to-day ones that were much more important. We would giggle furiously about what on earth was in the pies in the dining hall, which of our lecturers would be the most fun at a party, why that stuffy youth in the front row wouldn't stop asking the same questions over and over again as if he expected different answers. I shared with her a little about my childhood on the farm, then listened with what must have been gratifying wonder as she told me about the summers she and Alden and Eddie spent at Ashfield, the Lennox-Fontaines' estate. It seemed to me a magical place, all old money and stone turrets and wild countryside, the kind of world I had never known and had thought lost forever. And, of course, as I had with Alden the day we had met, we talked about books.

My reading had always been voracious, but books trickled slowly to our small Lancashire village. I had missed the Bloomsbury set's takeover of London, the way words were being stretched out of their meanings to new and wondrous limits. In many ways I was still a Victorian—I had grown up nourished by Jane Austen and Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell, by Jules Verne and H. G. Wells and the Bront?s. Hero led me gently and firmly into the aisles of shiny new volumes. We read T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. She loved HD's Sea Garden and Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence ; I fell in love with E. M. Forster's Howards End . I can't remember which of us discovered Rebecca West—it may have been me for once—but afterwards we soaked up everything she wrote, fascinated not only by her words, sharp and glittering and illusive, but by the possibility of another kind of life. West was an adventurer, a brilliant political journalist and savage critic who had a child with H. G. Wells out of wedlock; her elder sister was a qualified doctor and had been Inspector of Medical Services for the Royal Air Force in the Great War. While my brother had been fighting, she had been a part of the same war, an important person with power to change things. Next time—not that there would be a next time, but if there was—that could be me.

"It will be both of us," Hero said. It was the first time I had told anyone at Camford what had happened to Matthew, stretched out by the fire surrounded by empty teacups and biscuit crumbs and open textbooks. "And we won't be mere medical doctors, the two of us. We're going to be doctors of magic. Witches."

"I need to earn a real scholarship for that," I said, though my chest had swelled. The term witches was archaic in the magical world: mages , Family , or the more modern practitioners were the terms currently in vogue. That was the reason people used it to talk about me—not openly cruel, not quite polite either, like most of the snubs at Camford. Yet there was something powerful about hearing it in Hero's voice, something that vibrated deep in the part of my heart that belonged to Pendle Hill. "A Merlin Scholarship, probably. And doesn't your father want you to go home and get married after you have your bachelor's?"

"You'll earn one," she said, as if this was a mere detail. "I've read your essays. And my father is just going to have to learn, that's all. I have no intention of marrying anybody, at least not until I'm good and ready. If he won't pay for it, I'll find another way. Perhaps I'll earn a scholarship too. There are five Merlins, you know."

She sounded so confident, so certain, her chin tilted and the firelight behind her catching her hair as it streamed down her back, that I could see our future unfurling ahead of her. I wasn't so radical as Hero. She was part of the new generation, the modernists and freethinkers who aimed to break the world apart and make it new. She wanted to change things. I wanted only to fix them. If I could be a part of Camford, of magic and scholarship and ideas, it was more than I could imagine. Yet this, perhaps, I could have. It wasn't so impossible, after all. My essays were good—I didn't need magical blood for those. Even practical spells had been coming far easier to me since I had come to Camford. Perhaps, if I worked three, four, ten times as hard as any Family member, I might truly earn that scholarship and be allowed to stay.

"We'll do it," Hero said.

She reached out, and I grabbed her hand and squeezed it very hard.

By contrast, I can't think of any one thing that drew Eddie and I together. We just seemed to fit, so that as much as I couldn't remember seeing him in lectures earlier, I soon could barely imagine him not being there.

He and I were two of a very small number of students who took the optional Introduction to Botany paper. Frankly, that course seemed designed not to be taken. The lectures were always early in the morning, and the Faculty must have known most students preferred to sleep late rather than listen to an elderly scholar talk about the uses of ragwort. But I wanted to learn all the magic I could, and Eddie would have abandoned every other course on the curriculum before that one. The natural world enthralled him. It wasn't just plants, though that was where his scholarly interests fixated. He could see magic brimming in every leaf and every insect and every change in the weather. Visiting his room was like stepping into something between a greenhouse, a laboratory, and a zoo. Every available space was crammed with potted cuttings from the flowers and trees outside, little brass instruments measuring soil quality and humidity, and in a wire cage, three baby grey-brown mice that he had rescued from the library cat. It reminded me of Matthew, who in every other respect was as unlike Eddie as it was possible to be. He had never been able to turn away a helpless thing in need either.

Eddie and I would sit together in those lectures, at the outdoor amphitheatre in the thin grey mornings, the stone seats cold and the sky often drizzling, and go for a pot of tea together afterwards while we waited for Hero and Alden to wake up. As I'd noticed at the party, he was generally ignored by the other students, sometimes teased and sometimes tolerated. He had, he told me, been at Crawley with most of them for a year. I had to ask him what that meant.

"Crawley's a school," he explained, without a trace of surprise at the question. Eddie was never surprised by what people did or didn't know. "A sort of public school, I suppose. It's not strictly a school of magic, but they teach basic spells there, and most Families send their sons when they turn eleven. More for the prestige than the education, really."

I understood perfectly. "You didn't stay?"

"I hated it," he said—matter-of-factly, but he was looking carefully at his teacup, the Yorkshire burr in his voice stronger than usual. "All those walls, and I never knew what to do or what I was supposed to say or where I was supposed to be. I got sick a lot back then, and I got picked on—just kids, you know. It wasn't as bad as it could have been at first, because Alden made them stop. But one time—you see, I used to grow tomatoes on my windowsill. I had wards on them to make sure nobody could hurt them, and I think that must have been asking for trouble. It's never good, in those kinds of places, to let it show what you care about. One of the other boys found a way to break through them, and he knocked the plants to the ground and trampled them. I lost my temper, there was a fight…" He shrugged. "They sent me home early, and I just never came back the next year. That summer, war broke out, so a lot of boys were kept home."

"That's awful ." I couldn't imagine gentle Eddie losing his temper. My own rose in response, hot and furious. "Did that boy even get in trouble?"

"Not from the school, no." He grinned, an unexpected flash of mischief. "I bet he was sorry, though. Those wards—I made them myself. Whoever broke them would come out in green spots for a week. I don't think that boy enjoyed the end-of-year dance as much as he'd been hoping."

My laugh caught me off guard, so that I nearly choked on my currant bun. It set Eddie giggling, too, and the fact that heads were turning in our direction made it even funnier.

"Still," I said, recovering a bit of my indignation along with my breath. "They shouldn't have sent you home. That wasn't fair."

"I wanted to go home." He was still smiling, but his eyes were serious. "I loved it at home. Our house is miles from anything, right on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales. There's nothing but moorland wherever you look, just flat countryside teeming with heather and wild things. I'd help out in the gardens and study by myself in the library. I'd still be there now, except my family wanted me to come here. They weren't happy about me leaving Crawley. I'm a disappointment to them."

My indignation deepened a little further, along with my guilt. I'd had my differences with my mother, but they were always rooted in her wanting me to stay home. I couldn't imagine being sent away.

"I'm sorry," I said.

"Oh no," he said, shaking his head. "Don't be. The gardeners at home had run out of things to teach me about plants anyway."

I smiled as if at a joke, but he meant that. I already knew that Hero was irritated sometimes by Eddie's lack of ambition, the way he could so lightly shrug off the very things we had to fight to hold. But I wished I could feel like that: sure of what I wanted to know, uncaring of anything outside it.

Alden, it had to be admitted, was the closest to being the kind of distraction I feared. His ridiculous gilded-marble good looks I taught myself to ignore, helped by the fact that Hero regarded them as a source of great humour. ("Alden," she would say dryly, "if you get any more decorative someone will nail you to the gallery wall, and I'll be happy to help them.") And he truly was a brilliant researcher, perhaps the best I've ever worked with. When the mood took him, the two of us would drag out old books in the library and pore over Agrippa and Nostradamus and several of the Renaissance scholars who had fallen out of favour. They were dizzying conversations, unlike any I'd ever had before, ideas and references flying so fast my brain was left fizzing like ginger ale shaken in a bottle. The trouble was, he was also unfocused. One morning, he would be a model scholar, lively and thoughtful, the gleam from our first meeting alight in his eyes. The same evening, he would disappear into a car with a gaggle of older students, get blind drunk, and not be seen until the following week.

This was normal, I reminded myself. People my age did that sort of thing in the modern world. Hero had her fair share of parties and late-night concerts and what seemed to my sheltered eyes to be thrilling excesses as well. Still, in Alden it was different. It was as though he was being chased by a wild black wind, always in motion. He radiated more energy than anyone I'd ever met. Even at his most relaxed it was the languidness of a tiger, all coiled muscle and simmering tension.

Yet it was this, more than anything else, that drew the four of us together into a tight group. When something came into his head, he wouldn't rest until he had pulled us along in its breathless current. I remember one afternoon, about a month into the term, emerging from a lecture debating where to go and get lunch. The dining hall would still be open, but the day was clear and crystalline, and the thought of shutting ourselves in a dark room filled with other people's crumbs and conversations was less than appealing.

"Have any of you been up to the roof of the library?" Alden suggested, out of the blue.

Hero arched a perfect eyebrow. "How and why would we want to be on the roof of the library?"

"Because I know how to get there, and as far as I've been able to find out, nobody else does. Doesn't that sound enticing?"

"Only if it's someplace that's worth getting to."

"Isn't it enough that it's a place we're not supposed to be?"

"That makes it a novelty for you , perhaps. You forget, until recently this entire establishment was a place Clover and I weren't meant to be. And there's no food on the roof of the library, as far as I know."

"We can buy it elsewhere and take it with us. I'm sure you've heard of the concept."

"I'd like to go," Eddie said, with what I had learned was his usual knack for cutting through Alden and Hero's banter before it turned into a squabble. "There are strawberries growing in the guttering on the library roofs, or something like them. I'd like a closer look."

" Thank you," Alden said, throwing up his hands. "At least someone has a sense of adventure even if it is primarily agricultural."

It took me a moment to realise that they were all looking at me expectantly.

"I'm game," I said as carelessly as I could, as if my heart wasn't pounding. It wasn't as though I had never been out-of-bounds before—Matthew and I had made a game of trespassing on the neighbours' lands when I was little. This trespass could have consequences, though. Camford was looking for any reason to throw me out. It would have been far smarter for me to say no. And yet the thought of being out-of-bounds with these people, as though I had the right to be anywhere they were, was suddenly irresistible. "I'd like to see the view."

"Oh, very well then," Hero said with an amused sigh. "But if I tear my dress clambering up a drainpipe, Lennox-Fontaine, you're buying me another."

There were no drainpipes involved. We bought sticky buns and lemonade from the quadrangle, and then followed Alden up the library stairs to the seventh floor, down a narrow corridor into a tiny back room that even I had never seen before. It was empty but for a stack of dusty wooden chairs and a shelf of yellowing pamphlets; Alden cracked open the filthy window, and sure enough it was easy to step out onto the tiled roof. The incline was gentle enough that I felt no fear of toppling, even when a gust of wind whipped my dress as I climbed out, and we were high enough that I was sure nobody working in the library could look out and spot us. Eddie did stumble once, so that I grabbed his arm on reflex, but that was only because he went forward eagerly to the greenery climbing over the gutters.

"They are strawberries!" he declared with satisfaction. "I thought they were. Here, try one."

The strawberries were undersized, at the end of the season, sweet and tangy at once. They would have been nice at the dining table, or on a picnic. Up here, high in the air with the turrets of Camford spread before us, they were a miracle.

"It is nice here," Hero conceded. She balanced as easily as a sea captain on the prow of her ship, boots braced on the tiles, head tilted up to catch the sun. "How on earth did you find it?"

"Thomas told me," Alden said, a remark that meant nothing to me at the time. He sat down on the edge and cracked open the bottle of lemonade. "Have a seat. You can see all the way to the wall from here."

We sat on the roof, our feet swinging, looking out over Camford.

I hope you saw Camford. I hope you sat up high as we did so often, a strange pale sun at your back. The air was never still, so that the trees rustled and whispered in constant conversation overhead. Sometimes now, when I'm half asleep and I hear the creak of branches outside, my eyes snap open and I'm sure that I'm home.

It wasn't home to me yet, that first time on the roof with Alden and Hero and Eddie. It was still alien and exciting and bewildering, like no place I'd ever been. But I wanted it to be. It hurts me, thinking back to that girl sitting on the roof eating sticky buns with her classmates, and remembering just how badly she wanted what was in front of her.

"What do you think is on the other side of those walls?" I asked. "Sam said Camford was probably in Wales?"

Alden shrugged. "Your guess is as good as mine. Actually, Eddie's is probably the best, because he likely knows where all the plants come from. Do they have strawberries in Wales?"

"They have strawberries everywhere in the British Isles," Eddie said. "Though it's late in the year for them."

I didn't press further. I could see that they genuinely weren't interested in talking about it. To them, the fact that nobody knew Camford's location was so well-established it hardly constituted a mystery. I didn't want to be the outsider asking questions, however much those questions niggled.

I don't remember much of what we did talk about that day. The usual things first-years do when they're getting to know one another, probably. I recall a long, rambling discussion of Shakespeare, of all things, sparked by my explanation of my own name and Hero, in consolation, pointing out that she had been named for the Bard's least interesting female character. ("You're absolutely right," Alden said. "I can't believe they chose Hero when Sycorax was available.") I remember how close Alden and Hero were—the way they picked up each other's sentences, spun them and threw them back to each other, the way each would unconsciously mirror the other's position when one shifted on the roof, the bantering affection that shimmered between them like dust motes in sunlight. I remember Eddie, quiet and almost translucent under his untidy thatch of dark hair, waiting just a little on the outside for his turn in the conversation, casting me the occasional quick, shy smile when he caught my eye. I remember our surprise later at how high the sun had climbed, as though we'd all thought time on the roof would stand still. I remember trembling on the verge of something I had never hoped to find.

Even then, I knew that there were things I wasn't being told. I knew, however much I wanted to believe otherwise, that Alden Lennox-Fontaine did not notice isolated young students and invite them to luncheons—that he was perfectly capable of generosity, even kindness, but Hero had been quite right that something had to catch his eye first. I hadn't missed the look that passed between Hero and him when he had mentioned what I had been reading, however quickly she had covered it. I saw those looks pass between them again, out of the corner of my eye, when I pulled out a book in the library or as we walked down Camford's crooked paths bubbling over with ideas about the lectures we had heard. I even asked Eddie about it once, trusting him not to lie or to mention it to the others.

"Hero and Alden are always up to something they won't tell anyone else about," he said. "Even when we were children at Ashfield. Don't let it worry you."

I tried not to. I loved spending time with them, on any terms—the thought of going back to that first week of miserable isolation made me physically sick. I tried to tell myself that if there was anything underlying our friendship, it would come to the surface eventually, and I could deal with it then.

It did. It just came sooner than I expected.