Changeling (Sorcery and Society Book 1)(33)

The only subject in which I excelled remotely was medicinal botany with Madame Greenway, and that was only due to growing up as a gardener’s child. I knew all of the proper Latin names for the plants, the appropriate temperatures and water and shade for their care. And thanks to Mrs. Winter’s tutoring, I could parrot that Balm of Eirin could mend broken hearts and a troublesome cough. Leaving bloodroot on a witch’s doorstep could reverse her spells. Garlic had many uses, both magical and medicinal. My display had merited a specimen of Blushing Orchid, a white tropical flower that flushed pink when one spoke to it in a soft, sweet voice. But then, Callista dropped a bottle of sticky, red dragon’s blood tree sap down the front of my gown, cooing, “So sorry, darling” after I identified ten plant extracts by their smell. Even Hannah’s most dedicated scrubbing couldn’t help me get the sap stain from the gown. So I learned that if I wanted to stay off Callista’s list of targets, I couldn’t excel, even if it was the one area where I showed promise.

By the time I fell into bed each night, it felt like every fiber of my body was strained. I smiled through Callista’s discourtesy. I barely had enough energy to clean my face and take my hair down for bed, much less study the Mother Book. But at least I didn’t have any more nightmare-daydreams about corpses and owls lurking outside my bedroom. I missed my family. I missed my home. I missed the simplicity of my old life. I even missed the Winters.

My sanctuary was the library, a place Callista avoided at all costs because being unable to speak prevented her precious “socializing.” So I would plead a headache or some other acceptable symptom of delicate ladyhood and retreat to the bookstacks. I’d never had enough time to study at the Warren school, but I’d always made good grades. I’d hoped that if I applied myself and read everything I could about the Principals of Magic, chemistry and the histories of the magical houses, that it would just come to me, like osmosis.

But it didn’t.

And neither did more information about the strange owl sigil that had appeared to me in the Mother Book. There had to be a reason that book was showing me the owl – and only the owl, no matter how many times I asked to be shown something more. Every day for almost a week, I had no luck with the answers, until one night I woke up to the midnight bell clanging in the bell tower and my face pillowed against a page that had been blank when I started that afternoon.

And despite my exhaustive search of the genealogy section, I couldn’t find any mother house that used owls in their sigils. Miss Morton even helped me look through books listing the off-shoot branches in Asia, Europe, and the prison colonies in Australia, but nothing.

Miss Morton was glad of the company though, tempting me to stay past the younger grades’ usual retirement hours with offers of soothing chamomile tea and ginger biscuits. She gave me a few books on meditation, which I barely understood, but from what I could gather Miss Morton wanted me to stop thinking so much when I was studying the book. I was supposed to leave my mind blank, to open my magic up to the possibilities the Mother Book could offer.



Miss Morton also found wonderful botany books for me, full of specimens I’d never even heard of – snapdragons that posed a real danger to the cultivator’s fingers, humming dahlias that could lull bystanders to sleep with their song before strangling them with tentacles they kept hidden underground, and roses with scents so sweet that the gardener would swear they never wanted to smell any other aroma. But Miss Morton said I had to be careful not to focus too much on one area, so she also plied me with volumes of folk stories, history, anatomy of magical creatures. She even found me a book on proper dancing technique when I confessed my (carefully edited) fears about the social.

Though many of the faculty members were friendly, despite my many classroom failings, Miss Morton was becoming my friend. She offered me advice about the Mother Book, recommending that I sit at a table with the book open, surrounded by all of the genealogy books the library had to offer. She left me to concentrate on my work. I took Wit from the exquisitely tooled leather holster that secured it under my sleeve, and held it over the open Mother Book, begging it to either show me more information on the owl sigil or some other bit of information that would drive me less insane.

I closed my eyes and imagined all of my hope and curiosity focusing on the tip of Wit’s point.

I held the knife over the books and was startled enough to send it flying across the study area when I heard a small voice whisper, “That won’t work.”

I yelped and was immediately shushed by Miss Morton, even while Wit embedded itself through a copy of Levesque’s Guide to Ladylike Broom Use. The intruder was as small as her voice, pale and delicate as a new reed. She had to be one of the youngest students here, nine or ten maybe? She might have been quite a beauty if not for the hollow cheeks and dark circles under her wide green eyes.

Something in those eyes reminded me of myself, before the Spinning Vase Incident, when I was still on the suppressors. Undersized and underestimated. Too quiet for my own good.

“Has anyone ever told you not to sneak up on people holding sharp objects?” I asked her quietly as I retrieved my wayward knife from where it was embedded in the very expensive-looking book. The girl ducked back behind a shelf as Miss Morton approached to take the damaged book from me with a lift of her greying eyebrow. She pulled her own athame from a holster in her sleeve – dark metal with a rounded, grooved handle-end – and muttered something I couldn’t make out while dragging the tip over the hole Wit had punched through the book. The pages knit themselves together without a mark left behind.