Chapter 4
It all happened so fast. If Bryn was just a little more superstitious, she would have interpreted this as some kind of sign, some kind of preordaining that this was the correct path for her to take.
But she wasn’t that superstitious, and Amelia’s words that first evening kept echoing back to her: You’re here.
That’s why she was the one, because she just happened to be the person that Professor Herringbone had left her library to.
If it had been some other witch in her year, or some other student they’d never met, that’s who Amelia would have tagged to step in and take over the professor’s classes.
It wasn’t that she was special; it was just that she was there, and Amelia needed someone.
The cottage Amelia had taken her to was tucked out of the way behind the kitchen garden, and by the entrance to the grotto, which was what everyone called the indoor pool.
Students were not allowed to swim in it; she’d only ever peered through the windows, and even then, you had to squat down because it was sunken, although not quite underground.
The usual rumors abounded—it was haunted; it was off limits because someone died there, an untold number of years ago; and, once they were older, that it was used secretly by the professors for sex parties.
Looking back, that last one was the least likely; the idea of Professor Herringbone and Mr Wicks and Madame Schneider all at the same sex party bent even Bryn’s fantastic imagination.
In any case, at least her new borrowed cottage was not on the students’ paths to any of their classes. The only time she’d been on the far side of the kitchen garden as a student was to round up escaped chickens and rabbits.
The cottage itself was tiny, but in a way that added to its quaintness instead of subtracting from its usefulness.
Everything she needed was there: kitchenette, bathroom, bed …
corner, and a little nook with a chair and table that she supposed was a sitting room of a sort.
Amelia had apologized for how small it was but said this was the one in best repair, which reminded Bryn of something else Amelia had said, about the school needing money.
It hadn’t really occurred to her that Grimoire Academy would ever need money, but now that she was an adult and could only guess at how astronomical the costs were to run such a place, it seemed a very real and practical concern.
Still, the cottage was clean and warm, and the thickness of the stone walls on the outside definitely suggested a significant amount of mechanical insulation.
All the same, she did a few charms: the usual ones that she would do in any living space—for privacy, barriers to air and moisture, things that she hadn’t quite perfected but that still seemed to help.
She could do an entire book on such intermediate household charms, if she ever got them completely right.
Hell, she could be one of those witches who went into business for herself doing such charms for people who had no magical abilities.
She’d wondered whether other races and groups could use spells.
Was there a type of spellcasting that demons might need?
She knew of many spells that would be helpful to sirens, though she’d never been able to test any of them because her mother did not allow magic in the house; Bryn didn’t take it personally.
She knew that was just one more thing outside her mother’s control, and there was very little that her mother hated more.
For that matter, were there things sirens took for granted that might also be helpful for witches?
What chances were all of them missing by failing to consider cooperative efforts between magical races?
Was this something she would know if she’d gone to university?
Magical universities, for practical reasons, were fully integrated; anyone magical could attend.
Still, even if that was so, why did it seem like universities were the exception instead of the rule?
She needed to think more about it all, and made a mental note to return to it later.
At that moment, she had enough to do, settling into her cottage and getting ready to teach.
She’d hardly brought any luggage, not intending to stay, and now that she was here, she realized she didn’t miss much either.
She could pick up a few more clothes, but what else did she need?
Certainly not reading material, not with all of the professor’s books at her disposal.
And while she knew she needed to leave the papers to the school, this would give her a chance to thoroughly go through them, index them, even create her own kind of taxonomy …
perhaps take high-res pictures of anything that might be helpful to her.
That wasn’t cheating, right? She suspected Amelia would be in favor of it, especially if it took her five months to do.
She had all of Sunday to figure out what exactly she was supposed to be teaching, and she’d left the cottage only to gather up any potentially helpful papers from the professor’s office, as well as relevant lesson plans she needed to familiarize herself with.
Except, to her growing dismay, she hadn’t found any lesson plans.
Around late morning, there was a knock at her cottage door, which she answered expecting Amelia, but it was, in fact, a man maybe a few years older than herself that she’d never met before.
“Hi there,” he said, his accent nebulously East Coast, or at least not matching the relaxed tones that she was used to from California and Colorado. “Headmistress sent me down to update you on Professor Herringbone’s classes.”
“Oh, good, come in. Obviously, I just moved here, and it doesn’t really feel like my place yet, but come in all the same,” she said, smiling.
He nodded in a friendly way, but didn’t move. “Sure. I’m Piper. Er, Professor Anderson … Piper Anderson, um.” He cringed. “Sorry.”
Someone more awkward than she was, what a relief. Bryn found herself smiling even more widely. “Please come in, Piper. I’m Bryn.”
“Amelia told me— I can call her Amelia, right? You went to school with her. That’s not some kind of breach of etiquette, is it?”
“No, no, it’s fine,” she said. He was really seriously awkward.
He reached out his hand more formally than seemed necessary and said, “Piper Anderson. My pronouns are they/them. I teach athletics, sort of, you know, witchy athletics.” They did a funny little head bob as they said it.
“That’s great. I’m Bryn Delmar, she/her.” She mentally corrected Piper’s pronouns, hoping she didn’t screw it up. “But would you like to come in? Because it seems like we’re losing heat just standing here in the doorway.”
Piper nodded. “Yes, I would like to come in, thank you. I have my own cottage here on the grounds. I get the impression that Amelia would like some members of the team to be, you know, under fifty.”
Bryn smiled at that and led the way inside, only then remembering her lack of seating. “You go ahead and take the chair, I’ll take the bed. Would you like tea? I don’t think I have coffee yet. I haven’t been to the store.”
“The kitchen will give you some instant if you ask nicely. They might give you ground coffee too; I don’t drink it, so I’ve never asked.”
“Good to know,” she said. “I’ll have to get used to that. When I was in school here, some of the students attempted to argue it was a human rights violation for the kitchen to withhold coffee.”
Piper grinned. “Very dramatic.”
“Right? I didn’t get into coffee until after I left. Would you like tea, though?”
“No thanks.” Piper looked around. “It is funny that none of the cottages are exactly the same. You’d expect them to be, but they were all built at different times for different reasons, I guess.”
“Oh. Hmm.” She searched her memory for what she knew about the outbuildings.
“Yes, I think they were initially for the staff of the castle, and eventually became guest houses. There are rumors that they’re all connected by some kind of tunnel system to the main building, but if that was ever true, the tunnels are most likely collapsed now. ”
Piper raised their eyebrows in appreciation. “Really? I hadn’t heard that one.”
She shrugged. “Hazard of going to school here—you hear all the true and made-up stories. Where did you go?” She immediately wished she hadn’t said it. Not all witches went to school at witchy schools, and it could be a real social faux pas to imply they should have.
“Well, I went to USC, but that’s probably not what you mean.” Their expression was a little pained.
“Sorry, not my business. Should not have asked. Don’t know what your situation is—”
Piper waved a hand. “No, no,” they said. “You’re right. I went to Academy New Amsterdam, obviously in Manhattan.”
Which meant that—in terms of wealth—if Amelia’s family could be considered very wealthy, then Piper Anderson’s family was extraordinarily wealthy. Academy New Amsterdam was the poshest possible school on the East Coast. She checked the thought, scanned her mind, and amended that to in the country.
Some of Bryn’s good cheer dried up in a momentary internal flailing of class consciousness. “Oh,” she said. “And how was that?”
“It was fine.” After a moment of thought, they amended, “It was high pressure, I didn’t get a good night’s sleep for the four years I was there, and I escaped out here as quickly as I could. I never plan to return, but that’s probably not the school’s fault, if you know what I mean.”
She realized she did know what they meant. Entirely. “Well, I understand that.”
“Oh … but I thought you were from here.”
“I am, and then as soon as I graduated, I left.” She gestured to the cottage with a sense of oddness she wasn’t sure how to explain. “And now I’m apparently back accidentally, or at least temporarily.”