She walked out of the kitchen and into the living room, took up her carpet bag from beside the couch and put on her coat and came back.
‘I don’t think I belong here anymore,’ said Dot. She hugged Archie and patted Celia on the head and reopened her notebook to the rune she had studied over and over.
‘What are you doing?’ asked her father.
‘Going home,’ said Dot. She waved her hand and Willard’s chair soared back to the ground and tipped him out of it. He tumbled harmlessly to the slate floor. ‘I’ll be back after New Year’s.’
Then, she balanced the magic once more and hoisted the carpet bag on her tired shoulder and took out the chalk that she kept in her pocket and carefully drew the rune against the stone floor. Up kicked the smell of magic and chamomile and for the very first time, Dot cast a portal. She stepped into the whirling darkness and was gone.
CHAPTERFORTY-SIX
It was winter in the city of Alliaster, and the jacarandas were bare. The colossal trees, planted in the previous century, had survived the flood and were now sprinkled here and there with the remnants of sea salt. They lined the boulevard and cast gentle shadows over the capital.
For the second time, Dot arrived in the city in search of the witch, Theodora.
Now, however, the young woman was not distracted by the dazzle of the metropolis, nor the trams nor the tourist attractions; she stepped out of the portal and straight onto the corner of Wren Court and Ethel Avenue.
The witch could have been, for all Dot knew, up at the Ollianne Shrine, or down at the factory on Stirrup Street, or across the city in the houses of parliament. She could have been in the art studio or in her study at the Royal Palace. Yet, there was Theodora, stood in the rubble of the tea shop with Belchamber beside her, both of them peering at a sheet of drafter’s paper and the building plans inked atop it.
Theodora looked up, startled for only a moment, before a ray of warmth broke out over her countenance. Dot smiled and said, ‘You’ve no house for me to break into this time.’
‘If I did,’ said Theodora, leaping gracefully over the rubble and broken bricks, ‘I wouldn’t dare cast you out of it.’
The witch pulled her apprentice into a fierce hug while Belchamber watched on, teary-eyed. They stayed that way a long time, until at last the spirit came to them and took Dot’s hand. The young witch wiped her face on her sleeve and smiled as Theodora showed her the diagrams of the new tea shop, which already included the bedroom they had set aside especially for her.
EPILOGUE
Dorothy Louise Walcott was twenty-five years old, and still felt like a child. The jacaranda petals had returned to Alliaster again, and it was her third time watching them cascade like confetti over the city.
To the eyes of any passing tourist, the great flood was a thing almost unacknowledged. The trams soared again over the cobbled hills and the salt had been removed entirely from the red brick buildings.
The people remembered it. They constructed a memorial statue in Lecustre Square. They kept tinned peas under their kitchen sinks like they had in the years after the war. Yet, in spite of the whispers and rallies and posters, Article 13 and the Prohibition on Magic remained unchanged.
The politicians of Calléum squabbled at length over whether the legislation on magic had contributed to or hindered the tragedy that took thousands of lives and cost their capital city hundreds of thousands in taxpayer silver. No one was more dedicated to the restoration of their city than Ruth Armstrong, the new Minister for Sorcerie and Magic. Now, she was joined by a bright-eyed colleague with curly, blonde hair – the young minister for City Infrastructure and Planning, who had only recently mastered the finger wave.
The Opposition Minister for Sorcerie and Magic watched them, session by session, from the opposite benches. Marcidus had decried Salamander’s evil as an embarrassment to incorporeal kind and forfeited his inheritance of the daemon’s empire and department store; he did this to spare himself a daemotion and was left with nothing in the world but his role as a public servant.
‘A fair punishment,’ Belchamber had chuckled, waggling the newspaper before them as they ate cheese tartlets in the small café with wiry black chairs.
Across Alliaster, on the corner of Wren Court and Ethel Avenue, the tea shop had been rebuilt. It stood proudly with its arched front windows and its wrought iron sign. A jacaranda tree had been replanted beside it. It now bloomed with adolescent petals.
They added two additional levels to the tea shop. They widened the rooms and instead of an attic created a terrace, with little chairs and geraniums and tomato plants. Theodora took the bedroom between Dot’s and Lio’s. They heard the witch’s shouts more fiercely now when she tore about looking for her keys.
She and Dot had scoured the department stores together for armchairs and wooden tables and vases and tea pots and anything they would need to restore the shop as best they could. They found wallpaper adorned with lily of the valley; they found picture frames and new passages of poetry to place within them; they found lamps of brass and bright stained glass; a silver till; a wide blackboard and a fleet of twenty jars, all of different sizes, to contain the tea leaves.
The storey above the tea shop was entirely Lio’s design. Each of the classrooms had been carefully planned by him, with cauldrons and desks and every book he could possibly need, which had been ordered through the black-market magic channels that Theodora had connected him to.
Before the paint upon the skirting boards had even dried, there came a knock on the side door, which displayed a sign only visible to those who looked for it:Theodora’s College of Magic
‘Are you the head teacher?’ asked a boy with red hair and a bruise about his eye.
‘Sort of,’ said Lio, flummoxed. ‘Well, Theodora is, I suppose, technically the headmistress, but I will be teaching the classes. I’m Mr Lashkari. Who are you?’
‘Finn Armstrong,’ said the boy, who looked so much like his brother.
Lio led him inside before the boy could notice his sudden flurry of tears.
Before its first term was over, the magic school had thirty students: a mix of children, adults and the elderly. Lio studied his own magic by night and, during the day, tailored his teaching to each student, grateful indeed that Theodora had suggested she put her name on the door and let her worry about financing and tuition and all of the things for which he did not care.
