“I’ll get my house on it tonight,” Scylla offered. The House of Scylla was skilled in the sort of illusion work that was as sturdy as rock—which meant that Scylla was almost as bad as Cassandra and Prospero about making her own rules.Case in point, deciding she preferred being called Lord over Lady.No one argued with her long.
Each house had its particular skills—that was what divided them into their respective houses. Water witches went to Yemaya; illusionists went to Scylla. Another witch was responsible for growing crops, another for medicine, and still another handled the planning of the town. Others were gifted in sport or music. One witch manipulated minds. One handled money. Every house had a purpose, and the magic seemed to know which houses needed more witches.
Every year, new witches filled the gaps in the houses.
Until recently, Crenshaw was idyllic. Sure, they had factions that argued. And maybe their justice system—turning witches into badgers—seemed a wee bit primitive, but it wasn’t like theykilledpeople for infractions like people in the Barbarian Lands did.
That peace ended when the water turned foul and witches started dying.
Now fear festered. Quarrels erupted. Politics became dangerous. Ultimately, Walter thought they all quarreled more because of the shared fear—death if Crenshaw collapsed. One faction thought they ought to drop the barriers and step into the light, and the other side thought any means necessary should be used to uphold the barriers.
Both are probably wrong.But Walt was damned if he could think of a third answer. So they’d muddle through until someone else did.
“Medicine?” Walt asked.
“I have sent one of mine over to retrieve it from a hospital,” Mae said.
The path ahead was deadly. Witches would continue dying unless they found an answer. Crenshaw couldn’t go on as it was, and theyalsocouldn’t survive without new witches. The water was now toxic, and after centuries of farming, the land had begun to yield questionable produce.
Can’t support what we have, can’t support new blood, but we’ll die without new blood.
There was no solution that worked, and the situation grew more direby the month. Perhaps it was time to accept the defeat of their hidden world.
Unless the new witch who made snakes at the rift was on to a plan…
That one had given Walter a reason to hope, but not so much that he was ready to tell the other Congress of Magic members.
Not yet.
23Ellie
A day later, Ellie walked into a meeting hall in what appeared to be a fully functional, semimodern castle. The stone walls and floors held a chill that was like natural air-conditioning, and an echo hampered the ability to speak freely, making whispering preferable.
Voices carried, despite the numerous gorgeous tapestries on the stone walls. Ellie suspected the inability to speak quietly wasn’t accidental. For a town that seemed to have an identity crisis as to what year it was, Ellie had no doubts that there were canny minds at the helm.
The reality of her situation was somewhere between “I’m fucked,” and “I can figure this out.”
“Welcome to the College of Remedial Magic,” pronounced the robed man in the front of the room.The headmaster.She’d glimpsed him briefly in the infirmary. Menace seemed to ooze from his skin like sweat.
Not unlike Prospero.
Ellie’s gaze darted toward her briefly, and she realized rather petulantly that onher,danger looked like how a fairy-tale candy-made house had to Hansel and Gretel. It was bait for some trap Ellie was certain sheshould avoid. Her initial instincts had been right: Prospero was temptation made flesh.
Prospero looked like her clothing here was a kind of armor, a second skin she wore into battle. Currently, she was dressed in trousers and a vest. Over them she wore a flaring suitcoat that draped over her back and stretched to her knees. Her coat was fitted in the waist, but there was an almost gender-free cut to the top half of the coat—double-breasted, satin lapels, and what Ellie suspected were bone buttons.
The bones of her enemies,Ellie mused. It shouldn’t be sexy, and yet… it really, really was.
The man continued speaking: “I am Headmaster Sondre, and over the next few months, I’ll be in charge of your education. You will meet the heads of several houses. These individuals were drawn here as they feel a magical pull to someone within our group. If you succeed here, you will join their houses as citizens of Crenshaw.”
The assembled class, roughly a dozen other people, had expressions somewhere between intrigued and irritated. One woman was practically bouncing on her toes. Another had her arms crossed over her chest in a fearful pose. One man—with a long thin ponytail that was bound by a series of silver clips against his shaved head, a braided beard, and a black T-shirt—seemed only to have eyes for the scrawny man next to him, who was watching everyone warily.
“Take your seats, please, and we can begin!” Sondre’s delivery was more resigned than energetic, and Ellie watched him pointedly not look at the students.
The oldest-looking person Ellie had seen so far stood. He moved slower, and Ellie had to wonder how many years it took to reacholdas a witch. She had no intention of finding out, but her brain was a librarian’s brain, so collecting answers was her thing. She thought he might have been the witch to approach her and Prospero at the rift.
“Welcome to Crenshaw.” The man paused and let his gaze drift over them, meeting eyes directly as if he were reading something about each of them. He stroked a cloud-white beard and announced, “I am the chiefwitch, head of the Congress of Magic. In due time, you will stand before me to be assessed.”
That’s him.
