Beryl is silent, then sighs.All right. But you are not taking me along on the first jump. If it goes wrong, I do not fancy being scattered across the country.
Agreed.
We plan.
I use paper magic to purchase the Enterprise Zone plot through a forgettable company, hiding the trail like a spider concealing its web. I rent a warehouse near the shifter wall in Harriet’s son-in-law’s name and quietly send my most precious possessions there: sentient objects, stored spells, delicate constructs.
If I succeed, I will collect them. If I fail and they remain unclaimed after six months, the lease will lapse and everything will pass to Harriet’s family. At least something of me will reach them.
We time the move for a night when the neighbours sleep, televisions dark, letters to the council unwritten. I must take not only the walls but the foundations, the pipes, the garden—the whole shape of myself.
Objectively, it is a terrible idea.
And yet, as I run through the calculations once more—feeling how my magic might gather every brick and beam into its filaments and step sideways—I am excited.
For the first time in decades I am not merely reacting to what others do to me. I am choosing.
If they want to cage me, they will have to find me first.
Chapter Eight
Thirty-Nine Years Ago
Harriet is home.She seldom visits now—travelling taxes her and the new sector rules make it worse. In a pale lilac dress and her favourite cardigan, she sits, ramrod-straight, on the sofa, a cloth-bound bundle in her lap. Her white hair is pinned back. At eighty-seven she is no frail old woman—still beautiful, younger than her years.
Beside her, granddaughter Mary, forty-four, looks so much like Harriet did at that age: the same gentle gaze, the same quiet wariness.
We have completed the awkward introductions.
Harriet is loyal and never breathed a word of our secret. After Beryl’s transformation, she stayed four more years, then met her young man. I vetted him like acriminal—family histories, records, the lot—but found nothing amiss: simply a kind man who loved her.
Harriet told him, and later her children, about us, yet in their eyes we became eccentric, long-presumed-dead relations.
The truth has stunned Mary; she perches on the sofa’s edge, casting wide-eyed glances from the stake on the coffee table to the walls around her. Beryl stays silent.
“So this is the house you grew up in?” Mary asks.
“From when I were sixteen till I met your grandfather at twenty-three,” Harriet replies, accent unchanged despite decades of Beryl’s coaching.
“Right,” Mary says slowly. “So, until you were nineteen, Miss Beattie was a real person, and now she’s a sentient object. And the woman who cared for you was… is… a wizard’s house?”
“We don’t say ‘wizard’s house’—daft name, that. Miss House is…” Harriet’s voice softens. “Family. These ladies are me friends.”
Mary blinks. “Grandmother, that is some secret.”
“Oh, I know.”
“It’s a secret you have kept a very long time. So—I presume we are here for a reason?”
Harriet bites her lip, brown eyes shining. “Why yes, we are.” She takes a deep breath. “Miss House, I need yer help.”
Beryl twitches on the coffee table.
Through the years Beryl and I have helped many—never enough to draw dangerous notice, yet as the sectors tighten the peril grows. I would never refuse Harriet; I would do anything for her family.
Still, I sense she is about to ask something I shall not like. I do not trust the sparkle in her eyes.
Harriet,I say gently,what do you need from me?
