“Come in!” he said. “Come in from the rain! You’re soaking.”
I hovered. “Just a minute, Da.”
“You’ll catch your death.”
I glanced over at where Sylvester was standing. Reading my meaning, he stepped into the spill of light from the open door, and Da saw him. He blinked. He looked at me.
“Foss?” he said.
“Can we come inside? Both of us, I mean,” I said.
“Are you safe?” Da asked, narrowing his eyes. I suppose he thought the sorcerer might be coercing me somehow.
“I promise I am, Da. It’s pouring down out here. Can we come in?”
He searched my face, then stepped back and held the door open. I had barely stepped over the threshold when he gathered me in a bear hug. I let myself relax for the first time in what felt like forever, feeling the familiar scratch of his stubble against my chin. I almost felt safe. Almost.
I pulled back. “Da, this is Sylvester,” I said.
Da looked the sorcerer up and down. He didn’t seem enthralled or impressed by him at all, that I could tell, which I put down to the strength of his fatherly concern overriding any magical influence.
“So, you’re the one that led my Foss on a wild-goose chase,” he said.
Sylvester flushed a little. “I did not intend to. Sir,” he added quickly.
“Da, we have to talk,” I said.
“Well, then, come into the kitchen,” he said. “I can heat up what I made for dinner if you’re hungry. Pot roast.”
Cornelius shot me a pleased look.
I busied myself in the kitchen, more amazed and comforted by its ordinariness than I had ever been. Nothing appeared magically beneath my fingertips but staying as far away from magic as possible—except for that contained within Sylvester, I suppose—had become my new aim in life, and so I loved every spoon and mug for which I had to hunt.
It felt so good to be back at home again: having good, solid flagstones underfoot instead of black magic, and smelling real food cooking on our trusty old potbellied stove. Cornelius, of course, was right at home at once, leaving my arms to explore the kitchen.
I had told him to hold off on speaking until I gave the word, because I thought my Da had more than enough to take in without adding a talking cat into the mix. Da liked cats, though, and bent down to pet him on the head as Cornelius sauntered around.
“Nice kitty,” Da said. Cornelius shot me a long-suffering look but purred enough like a regular cat to pass muster, and then settled himself down on the hearthrug for a good wash, knowing that pot roast was in the offing.
I excused myself to have a good wash, too, at the basin in my old room. All the plain, serviceable dresses hanging in my tiny wardrobe felt like old friends. I selected the most comfortable—a faded green, because I would be perfectly happy if I never saw black again—and laced up a pair of my old boots before going back downstairs.
Seeing Sylvester inside our little house felt completely wrong, as if a panther had wandered in and sat down at the dinner table with a bib around its neck. He had to stoop to get through the doorways, and he looked all kinds of odd sitting in one of our dining chairs. He couldn’t lounge in it as he did on the throne—but he clearly wanted to—and he seemed all elbows and knees.
I could see him desperately wanting to conjure one of his magical toys in order to have something to do with his hands, and resisting. His fingers twitched a little.
Da set a bowl down in front of him—pot roast, with a beef rump, potatoes, and carrots that bobbed up and down in a brown gravy, with a hunk of good workman’s bread at the side for dipping. He had been the one to teach me how to cook, after all.
Sylvester needed no urging to start slurping it up. Da raised his eyebrows at me as he plonked mugs of tea on the table, surprised at the sorcerer’s appetite. I suppose he had imagined that they all lived on gossamer sandwiches and dewdrops or some such. Da picked out some of the choicest bits of meat and gravy and set a plate down for Cornelius, as well.
Da was a man who respected food and enjoyed eating, and so there was a period of silence while we all bent over our bowls. When we paused to take a breath, Da leaned his elbows on the table. “Well, then. Tell me everything.”
Well, of course, I wasn’t going to tell himeverything.Da didn’t need to know how often I’d come close to being filleted like a side of beef, nor did he need to know I’d murdered one of the sorceresses with my own hand. Not yet anyway.
“Here goes,” I began, and tried to explain everything that had happened as simply as possible, leaving out all the most embarrassing bits.
“Wait,” said Da, afterward. “The sorceresses are made from what, again?”
“From street urchins, I think,” I said. “Orphans. Lost children. Sold children. He trains them up for years in all his magicks until they are of age, like Sylvester. Sylvester only just started being a sorcerer.”
