When Ellie opened her eyes, her brain felt overcharged from the image of creating a cage around her wife. She’d been in the other world with Maggie Lynch, the headmaster’s new wife.
Does she remember? Was that why she cornered me?
Why can’t I remember her if I was running away with her?
Was IwithMaggie? Unfaithful to Prospero?
It hit Ellie with a sickening force that she had apparently run away from her wife with another woman. That thing she’d forgotten? It was apparently that she cheated on her wife with another student there.
No wonder Prospero keeps rejecting me.
Ellie had more questions than she knew what to do with since she remembered jumping into a car with Maggie. It was very clearly an erased memory, not a dream. Ellie was certain of that. Ellie was unsettled by the thought that she was hunted over there—by my wife!—just as the current escaped witches were.
Witches aren’t allowed to go to that world! I don’t even know Maggie. I can’t recall a single conversation we’ve had until yesterday.…
And that was the crux of the problem, though. Ellie couldn’t recall it. That wasn’t the same as it not happening. It was simply that Ellie had no recollection of it.Which means Prospero erased more than a memory of whatever was happening there.… What else don’t I know?
Ellie walked through the increasingly busy castle. The hallways were filled with witches she didn’t recognize, and most of them had carts of belongings. Some were more like old-fashioned train trolleys, stacked with trunks and boxes and baskets. A few looked more like luggage carts. One woman who seemed to have an enormous bustle under her dress was carrying a raccoon that was wearing a bonnet. Odder still, the raccoon was swaddled as if were an infant.
The raccoon, for its part, looked perfectly content to be wrapped in a baby blanket—or maybe it was simply tolerant of the witch’s actions.
“Make way,” the witch barked out. “If you lollygaggers wake the baby, I’ll make you wish you’d never met me.”
“I wish that already, Bells.” An older man in a pair of overalls that had seen better days shook his head and made eye contact with Ellie. “Silly bird can’t tell a forest beast from a baby.”
Ignoring him and everyone else, the witch swayed exaggeratedly as she ploughed through the hall with a luggage cart in front of her like acowcatcher on the front of a train. Her other arm was wrapped around her “baby.”
At her side, the Norwegian singer from her remedial-magic classes said, “Hello, Ellie.”
“Axell.” Ellie eyed him suspiciously, thinking back to their recent interrupted conversation. He knew things she ought to know. Of that, she was certain. “I’m looking for Maggie.”
He smiled wider and said quickly, “Maggie is your friend, Ellie. You are close, and then this last week you stopped talking suddenly. Both of you.” He stared at her like she ought to be understanding his peculiar pronouncements. “You can tell this is true,ja?”
“Yes.” Ellie’s eyes looked at him appraisingly. “Werewefriends?”
“No, but I would like that.” He beamed at her. “I am Maggie’s friend now. You? You are frightening. Like your wife.”
They paused to let the raccoon in the bonnet run past them. The little furry fellow had escaped his swaddle, but he still had on the bonnet and what looked like pink gingham bloomers and a dress. Ellie had the distinct impression that her sense of “normal” was long gone, but even with the adjustments of a magical world, the raccoon in bloomers was still a bit odd.
“Well, grab the baby, you ninnies!” The overalls-clad witch strode past them like a warrior on a mission. “C’mere, Chester.”
Axell and Ellie watched as the man used some sort of magical energy to reach out and swoop Chester the raccoon up into his arms.
“Arabella worries,” he told the chubby mammal.
It chittered at him, and the man listened as if he understood. Then he frowned. “Just eat your porridge for her. I’ll fix you a nice plate of eggs and crayfish when she goes out with the ladies.”
If anyone had told Ellie that raccoons and badgers were often people before she’d lived in Crenshaw, she’d have thought they were liars. She glanced at the man as he came back toward her.
“Are people turned into raccoons for a different crime than badgers?”
The man in overalls stopped, scowled at her, and announced, “Chester is not a criminal, miss. He’s a raccoon born and bred.”
Then he carried the raccoon away as it chittered angrily at her. She didn’t understand a word he said, but she knew it was angry.
“Sorry,” she called after the raccoon. “I wasn’t trying to be rude!”
Ellie wasn’t sure what to think. Raccoons were raccoons, but badgers were people who had committed crimes…? She shook her head and turned back to Axell. “Right. Maggie was my friend.”
