9

9

L ady Winter had been a figure of awe and terror to me the first time I had knocked on her door. Her house was a few miles away from our farm, and though I knew her by reputation, I had never seen it before. It was a grand redbrick Georgian mansion up a long flat lane, and it had been in the Winter family for centuries. Her husband, William Herbert Winter, had been a pale, clever, delicate man, who other than for his choice of bride had aroused little comment before he had been shot dead at the Somme along with most of his men. Lady Anjali Winter, the daughter of a wealthy Indian merchant from Madras, was another story entirely. The village rumours were that she had come to England to study mathematics at Cambridge, where she had met the young Lord Winter and eventually agreed to marry him. I had never, of course, believed the darker rumours that she was a witch, and so I had been more surprised than I should have been when they turned out to be true. Nobody had dared suspect Lord Winter of being a wizard, even though that was exactly what he had been.

It turned out they had met at Camford, not Cambridge, at the turn of the century; she had been studying advanced arithmancy, not mathematics. That was all she would tell me about herself, the entire year she was teaching me. She never spoke of her husband at all, nor what about him had drawn her from the heat and colour of her home to the damp grey Lancashire countryside. But from the place of honour his portrait kept in the hall, the black dress she wore when the time for mourning was long past, and the tightness that still gripped her face when she was forced to mention his name, I suspected she had loved him very much.

Sam Truelove Wells was a second cousin of her husband's, or something of the sort—the connections between the Families are as tortured and tangled as the roots of an entire forest. It might have been for that reason that she had agreed to tutor me when he asked it of her. I had never been able to work out how deep her interest in me ran. From the start, she was nothing like what I expected. I think I had pictured her tall, ghost-like, mysterious, Lady Dedlock crossed with a princess from the Arabian Nights (my reading material truly had been hopelessly old-fashioned). She was even shorter than me, to begin with, and despite her old-fashioned clothes, she had the sturdy, wiry strength of a dancer or a fighter. There was a fierce intelligence in the proud tilt of her head and the glint of her dark eyes; as a tutor, she drilled me relentlessly, her voice with its foreign lilt clipped and precise. And yet nothing she said was ever cutting or cruel, only occasionally impatient. In the right mood, she could talk for hours about the principles of magic, face alight and entire body animated. I grew less afraid of her over the year we had known each other; I never lost my awe.

She was sitting in her study when I was shown in that day, a few days before New Year, reading a book in the green velvet armchair by the fire. I couldn't tell if it was a book of magic or merely the ordinary kind; she looked up from it readily enough, removing her reading glasses to look me over.

"Ah! Clover Hill. I wondered when you'd call on me," she said. "How was your first term?"

"Wonderful," I said, and meant it. The miserable homesickness and exclusion of the first week had dwindled into nothing by now, as a station does when a train pulls away. "I love it."

"I'm glad to hear it. I was concerned you might find it hard going at first. Camford is not always kind to the people it wasn't made to fit."

I started to protest, on reflex, but stopped in time. My memories snagged uncomfortably on the restrictions Hero and I still rubbed against as female students, the way Eddie was lightly pushed aside by students and teachers alike, the sideways looks at my clothes and my hair and my lack of money, the way nobody had spoken to me until Alden had brought me into the fold.

"It isn't," I conceded. "But it's got better, since I made friends. And I'm doing well at the classes, I really am. If I'm good enough, they won't be able to treat me like an outsider forever. Times are changing."

She laughed, not happily. "I hope so. They certainly didn't change fast enough for me."

"Why didn't you stay at Camford after you graduated?" I asked, greatly daring. I was thinking of Hero, and my newfound knowledge that even the wealthy couldn't do everything they wanted. "Was it money?"

"I didn't graduate, officially," she reminded me. "It was only this year that Camford acknowledged women who had completed their degrees as graduates. No, in my case, it wasn't money. I was married to Lord Winter by then, and he would have paid for me to study had I asked. Perhaps that was part of it. I had intended to return home with a degree from Camford, whatever my father wanted. Once I knew I wasn't going to put it to that use, it felt unfair to use Lord Winter's money for my own indulgence alone." She paused, considering. "It wasn't truly that, though. Perhaps I simply fell out of love with Camford. That can be the most insidious way to keep someone out of a place: to make it so unpleasant they no longer see the point in fighting to be there."

I should have asked more, I knew even then. But I was eighteen, and Lady Winter was an adult. Eighteen is shy around adults, and yet thinks it can do better than them; it wants to know everything, and thinks it already does. Besides, Lady Winter had been at Camford twenty years ago. That was a lifetime and a world war ago. It had nothing to do with the university I knew.

"I was wondering if I could use your library," I said instead, after an awkward pause. "Just for today. I'd be quiet."

"Of course," she said, her briskness back in place. "I remember the load of assignments they like to give over Christmas break. Take as long as you need."

I didn't quite have that long—it had been difficult enough to get away from the farm for the day, and I'd promised to be back in time to take the little ones to the winter fair in the village that evening. The middle girls were going to a dance, their first night out for months, and Matthew had repairs to make that wouldn't be done in time. Still, that left me hours.

"If you're certain you don't mind…"

"Not at all. It's good for it to be of use again. Is there anything in particular you're looking for?"

I drew a deep breath, hesitated, then plunged ahead. If there was one thing Camford had taught me, I reminded myself, it was that it never hurt to ask.

"I was wondering… Do you have any books on faerie binding runes?"

My offhanded tone hadn't worked. Her eyebrows shot up. "I can't imagine Camford has set you an assignment on faerie magic. Not these days."

"It's… it's for Folklore." I am not a good liar. My entire face forgets basic expressions and flushes pink. "We have an essay on midsummer rites. I wanted to look up the spells. I couldn't find them in the Camford Library."

"I'm sure you couldn't. And I'm sure you know perfectly well why." She studied me carefully, her dark eyes taking in every inch of my face as it probably went from pink to bright red. "You already know I have nothing on faerie curses that might help your brother. You aren't planning to summon a faerie, I trust?"

"No." I was relieved, at last, not to be lying. "Nothing like that, I promise. How could I, with the Accord in effect and faerie country locked off?"

"That's true."

Lady Winter looked at me a moment longer, as if searching for something very particular she would recognise. It was the first time I had ever seen her hesitate. At last, she nodded.

"Very well." She rose to her feet in one sprightly movement. "Come with me."

Lady Winter's library was tiny compared to the Camford Library—only a single room. Yet it was a large room, a narrow gallery spanning the entire length of the house, and it was a beautiful one: lined with oaken shelves, dark green velvet curtains sweeping the floor, leather armchairs by the fireplace, and a matching oak desk in the centre. It had been the first place I had ever seen books of magic, a year ago. Entering it felt like being swept into a familiar embrace.

Lady Winter ignored the shelves from which we had studied for the entrance exams. Instead, she swept over to the wall directly above the flickering fire. I had never even looked at the titles there, thinking the books too old and dusty to be relevant, perhaps even for display only.

"They should be hereabouts. I think I have a copy of Gluckstein here." She studied the spines, frowning. "Most of the Families threw their faerie scholarship out, as I'm sure you know, or at least they pretended to. I didn't. This library was my husband's. It was here long before any Accord, and it will be here long after it."

"You don't agree with the Accord?" It was the first time I had heard anyone of her generation voice any objection. "Most mages do, I thought. I mean—it's meant to prevent accidents like what happened to my brother."

"I'm sorry for what happened to your brother." She meant it, but she'd never met Matthew. Her sympathy was general, not specific. "But practicing magic means understanding that accidents happen when it comes to spells. I studied magic in Bombay before I came to England, you know. There, young mages are taught to respect magic as a force of nature, to be navigated and not tamed. We go into it with our eyes and minds open, the way mariners set sail into the ocean—respectful of its power, knowing that not all will come back. I don't agree with trying to force it to do our bidding and then locking it up when we find we can't."

"So you think we should be allowed to use whatever magic we like?"

"I don't believe allowed comes into it. Faerie magic exists, whether the Board like it or not. Sooner or later, if something exists, it will be used. All we can do is try to understand it as well as we can, so we can use it for good." She shrugged very slightly. "Look at Madame Curie in Paris right now. The implications of her work with radioactive isotopes are frightening, terrifying even. That does not stop her, nor should it. Thousands of lives were saved in the war by her X-ray machines."

My heart was beating rapidly. "Does this mean you won't tell anyone if I look at these books?"

"What should I tell anyone? You're doing your Folklore homework, are you not? Ah, there it is." She took a volume off the shelf and held it out. "This is Gluckstein's Introduction to Binding Rituals , the one we learned from in our day."

I took it, with more reverence than the tattered textbook probably deserved. "Thank you."

"You're welcome. I'll have the maid bring you some tea down here. Watch you don't let it near the books."

Lady Winter paused just once before she left the room. "I told you that I didn't go on to study further at Camford because it felt dishonest to use my husband's money," she said abruptly. "Because the university made it difficult and made me unwelcome. I feel differently now. If you want to stay at Camford, then you fight tooth and nail to stay there, by whatever means necessary. If you want to use Camford to help your brother, then you do that too. But be careful. Do you understand?"

I nodded dumbly.

"Good." She nodded at the book in my hand. "The others on that shelf will be along the same lines as that one. I trust you'll put them back when you're done."

God, those books. I still think back to that long afternoon spilling into evening, and the hairs rise on the back of my neck. It was real research, the kind I wasn't supposed to do at Camford until I was a postgraduate, the kind I still try to recapture with every new project. Many of those books hadn't been touched in years—dust rose from the pages when I turned them, and I had to squint at faded writing. My world shrank to a circle of candlelight as the sky darkened outside.

Gluckstein's introductory text was nothing startling, it was true. Most of it I at least half knew already. But I had learned it all sideways, from lectures and textbooks on other magic. Seeing it all laid out clearly and simply in black and white was a revelation, like a light coming on in a half-lit alley. I spent an hour reading the basics from the ground up, feeling my understanding put down real roots and branch out. How to draw a binding ring, and what runes were best for what purpose. How to open a door between the human realm and faerie country. How to lure a faerie out, to trap them, and to bargain a wish for their release. How to bargain safely, first and foremost. Most of the deals that went wrong, Gluckstein cautioned, happened at the bargaining stage. Every word had power, and the fae had centuries to learn the nuances of meaning that could trip a mere mortal.

That hadn't been the problem at Amiens, however. That had been a problem with the binding ring—a rune drawn incorrectly in the heat of battle, most likely, allowing the faerie to burst through its bounds and wreak havoc in the world. Reading this, I could understand why. It was far more precise than we had understood, and every line not quite joined or incorrectly shaped could spell disaster. Alden's theory that we could find something stronger, simpler, impossible to break began to look more unlikely the more I read. There had been so much work done already, and it had all failed spectacularly when the world had gone mad.

The other books were even more interesting. Advanced spellbooks, the kind that perhaps we would have studied at third year or postgraduate level. Theories about the nature of the faerie world. Accounts of bargains with the fae, written up as dry and detailed as case studies in a medical journal. Linguistics specialists discussing possible tweaks and refinements to the binding runes (I really needed Hero for the intricacies of that one). A brief reference to an expedition into faerie country in the 1860s, which took my breath away (of course, the explorers never made it back).

And one book—small, shabby, barely holding together—that set my brain on fire.

That's what I really long to recapture, every time I set to work on something new.

That feeling, the one that makes all the hours of frustration worthwhile, of something clicking together. This is it.

It was past ten o'clock by the time I returned home, and I was expecting to find everyone in bed. Country hours were very different from Camford hours. I'd been adjusting to the early to bed, early to rise well enough so far. That night I couldn't have been less tired if I had tried. My mind was fizzing with the new ideas I had read, with the notes in my satchel, with, most importantly, the small tattered book that Lady Winter had kindly allowed me to make a doppelganger of by magic. It would last a few weeks, perhaps a month—enough time for me to take it back to Camford and share it with the other three. I wondered if it was worth writing to them tonight. If I could get it to the morning post, then they might have the news by the following day.

You'll never guess what I found , I imagined myself writing, only to mentally discard that page. It sounded too coy, too old-fashioned. I have something exciting to tell you all , I tried. No, too much for a mere theory. Something interesting , perhaps…

I didn't realise anyone else was in the living room until I had closed the door behind me.

"Back, are you?" My mother's voice came icy from beside the hearth. The fire had burned low, but she was still mending one of the little ones' shirts by the glow of the embers.

I blinked, unsure of her tone. "Yes."

She continued sewing, each jab of her needle like a death-thrust, and I knew I was missing something.

"I'm sorry I wasn't back for tea," I hazarded. I took off my hat and started unwinding my scarf. "I found something unexpected in the library—it might have been important for some research some friends and I are undertaking. I didn't think you'd—"

"We didn't expect you for tea," Mum said. She finally let the sewing drop, and her eyes rose to meet mine with a glare as hot as her voice was cold. "We expected you after, to take the little ones into town for the fair."

Oh. Oh no.

The plummet back to the real world was like stepping through ice.

The fair. The stupid winter fair.

"I'm so sorry." I cast about for the children, seeing only empty chairs. They were in bed by now, of course. I thought of Iris's and John's worried faces at breakfast that morning when Matthew said he couldn't take them, their immediate confidence when I'd promised to be back in time. They'd believed me. Even Mum had believed me. "I'll do something special with them tomorrow, I promise."

"It's all right." Matthew spoke up from where he was leaning against the doorframe—he must have heard our voices from upstairs and, as always, come down to referee. "I took them. No harm done."

He said it sincerely enough, but there was a certain flatness that might have been disappointment or simple fatigue. Either possibility squeezed my heart in a guilty fist. I'd hoped he'd be better after the midnight had passed; instead, he seemed more exhausted than before.

"There was harm done," Mum corrected him. "You didn't have time to take them, that was why Clover was supposed to go. You had a fence to mend before the morning."

Matthew dismissed this. "I'll get up early and do it first thing."

"What do you call getting up early? If you get up much earlier, there's no point in you going to bed at all."

"Well, then I won't go to bed at all! Leave it, Mum."

"I'm sorry," I repeated miserably. "I'll help with the fence tomorrow, Matty, I promise. I just lost track of time. I forgot about the fair."

"You forgot about us." Mum's voice was crisp with anger. "Not for the first time."

Injustice shot through me, momentarily scalding my guilt. "I've never forgotten you!"

"No? You've been gone three months. How often did you write to us?"

"I told you in the letters! I wanted to write more, but it's a school of magic. The post doesn't exactly deliver to our doorstep. I have to get into town—"

"How often did you even think of it?"

"All the time!"

"Rubbish." She got to her feet in a single burst. This was what she had been waiting to say to me since I arrived home, what Matthew's warning glances and my good behaviour and her own forbearance had been holding at bay. "When you did write, we were barely worth a sentence. All your talk was about that place. And now you're back here, it's the same. You think we can't see you looking down on us? Do you think we can't see how much you want to get away?"

"That's not true!"

It wasn't, it really wasn't. I had missed them terribly. I had written when I could, or when I thought I could. I had counted the days before I came home for Christmas. All this was true. I didn't let myself dwell on what might also be true—that my letters had indeed barely asked after the farm, that I had filled them with my own doings out of a selfish and unconsidered thought that what I was doing was new and exciting while this old place was the same as ever, that while I had wanted to come home, I had also seen it as a favour to my family and was already counting down the days before I was to leave again.

"Dad wanted me to go away to study," I said. "He didn't want me to be stuck here forever."

It was a stupid, desperate shot, and it hurt far more than I had wanted. I saw Mum's eyes flash hard as shards of metal.

"Your dad wanted you to study to be a teacher," she said crisply. "Do you really think he would be happy if he knew what you were doing instead? All that schooling, all those books he bought you, and teaching in the village school wasn't good enough. You had to go and be a witch."

"I'm not a witch!" I snapped. "I'm a mage. I'm a scholar ."

"Try telling that to the neighbours who wonder where you are. Do you think Peter Brooks would ever be allowed to walk out with Mary if they knew her sister was away learning the dark arts?"

I refused to rise to that characterisation, though it stung. "Have you ever thought that Mary might not mind that? That perhaps she could do better for herself than marry Peter Brooks to pay your debts?"

"Oh, and you're going to pay our debts for us by magic, are you?"

"I want to! Do you think Camford is just about me? I want to help all of you. I want to be a scholar and earn a living that could help support this farm. I want to have the little ones down to London when they get older so they can find better futures than being farmers and farmers' wives. I want to find new magic to break the curse so Matthew doesn't have to be in pain all the time."

"He wouldn't be in pain if you hadn't encouraged him to go to war."

"Mum, for God's sake!" That was Matthew, sharp with exasperation. I had frozen. I'd known Mum believed that Matthew going away had been my fault. I'd believed it myself. But I'd pretended, for a long time, that I'd been wrong. Now I knew I wasn't.

"Clover had nothing to do with my going away," Matthew was saying. "She might have helped me talk you into it, but I didn't need your permission or hers. I made the choice myself, and I'd make it again. There was a war on."

"Yes," Mum said. "Yes, there was a war on. Now it's over, and the country's in pieces, and the farm's in trouble. And your sister couldn't wait to run away from it all."

"Why shouldn't I run away?" I couldn't stop myself. I didn't even want to. I had just enough self-awareness left to know that I would wish I had stayed silent later, and not enough to care. "Do you think I want to be stuck in this dump? Do you think Matthew would if he had any other choice? Why do you think he went away to war in the first place?"

"Clover, stop it," Matthew said. It was the first time in my life I didn't listen to him.

"He wanted to get away from here so badly he nearly died for it! Only he didn't die, Dad did, and now he's stuck here killing himself to try to keep this cursed place alive."

"Oh, and you'd know all about curses, wouldn't you?" Mum retorted.

I started to respond. Matthew got there first. His anger shot out like a whip. "Would the pair of you just shut up ?"

We stopped, stared, both of us shocked into silence. Mum and I fought often, even if it wasn't usually this vicious. Matthew never lost his temper. He was the peacemaker, the optimist, the one who had taught me that nothing couldn't be fixed. He would stand up for himself and others, but any anger he betrayed was always pointed, deliberate, a weapon ready to return to its place on command. Not this time.

"Rip each other to shreds if you want," he said into the silence. He had pushed himself away from the door, his stance taut and furious, his eyes harder than I'd ever seen them. "But don't you bloody dare pretend it has anything to do with me. Mum, do you think I don't wish every day that things were different? That there had never been a war, that I had never gone, that I had got some ordinary common wound and been sent home in the first few months, that I had never come back, anything other than this? Things are the way they are, and there's nothing to be done about it. And, Clover… I'm happy for you and your friends and your studies, but you're at Camford for you , not for me, all right? I never asked you to fix me. It's my life. And I am so bloody sick of reassuring you both that I'm all right with it all when of course I'm not."

He didn't wait for either of us to respond. He snatched up his jacket from the banister, grabbed his keys from the table, and headed for the door.

Mum found her voice then. "Where are you going?"

He laughed, hard and bitter. "Well, there's no point my going to bed at all these days, didn't you say? I'll be back to mend the fence in the morning."

The door shut behind him with a resounding slam. Moments later, the motorcycle engine coughed, revved, and roared with its usual sputtering hesitation off down the drive.

I didn't dare look at Mum. My insides were a confusion of shame and fury and fear; my eyes were hot with tears, and I knew if I looked in her direction, they would fall.

"I'm going to my room," I said instead, and I walked blindly toward the stairs. I wondered if she would call me back, but she never did.

One good thing about Holly and Mary being in town that night: Our room was empty. I shut the door, not hard enough to wake the little ones in the next room, and threw myself on my bed boots and all. I cried a little then, muffling my face in my pillow, bitterly aware that I was feeling sorry for myself and unable to stop. I had done a stupid, selfish thing, forgetting to come home, and I was furious with myself for it.

But I was furious with Mum too. I had made a mistake, it was true, but she had been waiting for me to make it all holiday, storing up her resentment until it was my fault, and she had loved the chance to release it. She had no right to accuse me of forgetting them when it was for Matthew that I had been researching spells in the first place. She had no right to accuse me of running away when being at home was unbearable.

And I was furious with Matthew, helplessly and unfairly. I understood now how hard he'd been struggling since the end of the war, how much worse everything had been since I had left, how much it had cost him to let me go. But how dare he hide it all from me and then unload it on my shoulders in one terrible crushing landslide? It wasn't fair. He should have told me before I left, and I wouldn't have gone, or he should have never breathed a word of it.

My furious tears must have given way to sleep at some point. All I know is that sometime later I opened my eyes to quiet darkness, and when I tilted the alarm clock by the bed into the moonlight it was sometime after three in the morning. My anger and shame had been extinguished, as was usually the case upon waking after a fight with Mum. Usually the heat of anger was replaced by the soggy ashes of guilt and self-recrimination. This time, though, I felt only cool and calm and hard with purpose.

I couldn't stay there. That didn't feel like a decision so much as fact. I had been fighting the feeling since I had stepped off the train into the snow, and in one blow, my defences had been swept away. I didn't belong. Magic was sparking in my blood now, perhaps not as literally as it would be in the blood of one of the Families, but just as truly, and I couldn't hide it anymore. It was like trying to force myself into ill-fitting clothes, all the while twisting with guilt at not fitting them better. Besides, the thought of facing Mum and Matthew in the morning made me feel sick.

My trunk was easy to pack—most of my things were still inside it. I had only to dump in the last of my clothes and more carefully pack my Christmas presents from my family. The hardest part was wrestling the thing downstairs, thumping it past the bedroom doors and down the creaky steps. It was pitch-black there, and once or twice I nearly fell to my death. But no door opened. The little ones were sleeping, presumably, and if Mum was lying awake, she ignored me.

It was safer to light a candle in the kitchen. I wrote a letter telling my family that I was fine, I was on the early train to Oxford, I was sorry to miss New Year, but I thought it was for the best. I told them I was sorry about the fair, and the argument, and I hoped they would forgive me. I wasn't sorry about Camford, and never would be. It was a child's letter, filled with mixed pride and contrition and sulkiness, and it frustrated me reading it back how contradictory and confused and feeble it sounded when it had felt so clear and reasonable in my head. I had no time to rewrite it. The early train left in two hours, and I needed to be gone by the time the household rose. Matthew still hadn't returned when I closed the door behind me and set off in the dark and the cold.