Chapter 10
Whether due to exhaustion or overwhelm, Bryn was at least sleeping through the night more frequently than usual, and not consistently waking up to obsess at two a.m. Still, when she did happen to be up in the middle of the night, her thoughts frequently turned not to the stress of teaching, but to Amelia.
Or, okay, to both. It would start with something distinctly school-related—had she explained too much about how wands were useful tools, but eventually one could cast common spells without them, due to the way witches innately interacted with magical fields?
At what point had the kids’ eyes started to glaze over?
Somewhere around the first five words, she feared.
She could talk to Amelia about it. Was that just an excuse?
But Amelia was so helpful. And anyway, she always assured Bryn that she was available any time.
She’d think about seeing Amelia in the hall and finding a way to invite herself to Amelia’s rooms. Or Amelia to hers.
She’d dwell on the way she’d phrase her question.
About Amelia leaning in to reassure her, maybe touching her arm, or even her hand.
She would lean towards Amelia, smell that intoxicating scent of jasmine, breathe her thanks, look into the other woman’s eyes, and …
At which point she’d snap out of it (most of the time) and attempt to wrench her thoughts back in a not-kissing-the-headmistress direction.
Maybe her fourth-years needed more of a challenge.
Should she be talking to them more about what they planned to do next year?
She wasn’t even sure how many of them planned to go to university.
Should she have gone to university? What if she and Amelia had both gone to university, and spent their young-adult years together?
They might have dated. Might have shared walks back to the dormitories late at night, held hands, kissed on squeaky dorm beds …
Bryn’s nights were not unpleasant, but they were also not necessarily restful.
The field trip idea wasn’t firm in Bryn’s mind until the next after-school club meeting.
She’d asked the kids more about their backgrounds, their families.
What was their experience with magic? How familiar were they with witchy culture?
At first, all three of them had clammed up—if Circe could be said to clam up when she actually didn’t speak in the first place.
She did, though. Bryn was getting much better at reading her body language.
Circe clamming up looked like hiding behind her bangs and doodling in her notebook, as though she could pretend she wasn’t in the room if only she didn’t acknowledge anyone else.
Luke, somewhat surprisingly, was the one who had started talking. He’d confessed that while being a witch was awesome and learning about his witchiness really helped him understand his life and his identity, in other ways, it had been less helpful.
“My sisters either make fun of me or are jealous, or both—like, at the same time. But mostly it’s just weird with my dad.
He raised us on his own. He did a really good job.
But then there’s this thing that I can’t really share with him, even if I want to.
How do you explain that your brain can do magic even without really knowing how? ”
Bryn nodded sympathetically. “My mom’s a siren,” she said. “My sister too.”
“Is that easier?” Luke asked. “I mean, with them being— Are sirens magical? Sorry, I don’t really know.”
Bryn sighed. Sirens were rare, and most of them were clustered around the equator.
They didn’t settle into family groups, and it was uncommon for a siren to have more than one child.
They were mostly on their own. The only other sirens she knew were vague relatives who lived far away, though her mom had said that there was a siren community down south somewhere.
“Sirens are magical, at least in the context of how we use that phrase to denote everyone who isn’t non-magical, like sirens, demons, and shifters.
That doesn’t mean they understand being a witch,” she said.
“Or at least the sirens in my family don’t understand it.
I’m not sure how much it helps that they’re also magical, because it’s so different.
” It had been a shock to everyone and not necessarily a welcome one.
Her mom, she reflected, had cried in her bedroom by herself late at night after they found out what Bryn was, and for years she’d assumed the tears were for the failure of her eldest daughter to be a good siren.
Only as an adult did she wonder if her mother was weeping in recognition that her eldest daughter needed things that she herself could not provide.
That would be enough to make any parent cry.
Luke nodded. “Yeah, it was hard for my dad too. He doesn’t really get it. He doesn’t understand why I have to go to a special school. He thinks that everything you need to be a witch can be found online.”
Violet snorted. “A lot of things can be found online, but a lot of nonsense is also online.” Then, with a glance at Bryn, they added, “I know, because I checked. I really liked my old school. I liked my friends.”
“But you decided to come here?” Bryn asked.
“Well, yes, it’s not every day you find out you’re special and that there’s a place where you can go to meet people who are special in that same way.”
“Uhh.” Luke frowned. “Isn’t everyone special?”
Violet only waved this off. “Yes, but you know what I mean. I always knew I was different, and then suddenly someone didn’t just recognize that, but could explain it. Finding out I wasn’t just randomly weird, but actually a witch …” She paused. “It meant a lot to me.”
“And your family?” Bryn asked.
“They’re fine.” With a violent hair-flip, Violet continued, “The weirdest thing is that even regular stuff like going to the shops is different for witches. They go to different shops. They buy different things.” Violet set their chin down on their hands.
“There’s this whole … context I don’t understand. I’m not sure I’ll ever understand it.”
Different shops. Bryn’s question to Amelia had been playful. Field trips? Wouldn’t that be fun? Maybe after they petted the ponies. But in that moment her ideas coalesced into something more specific.
What if there was a program at the school for kids who didn’t have witching backgrounds?
A program to give them the context that Violet despaired of ever having?
And what if it started here, with these kids?
There were only three of them, and out of everyone, on staff or otherwise, Bryn was probably the best person to take them on a field trip into Grimoire town.
With some effort, she controlled her wilder imaginings—a pilot program, one that other types of schools later took on (because surely there were sirens born into witching families and maybe even demons growing up amongst shifters or something)—and suddenly she understood why Amelia wanted to make so many changes.
Once you began to see a vision of how to make things better, where did you stop?
After the club ended that day, she stopped by Amelia’s office and when no one answered the door, she left a note.
Just a couple of lines. What about we take a field trip into town?
Bring the kids to a witchy shop or two. Let them pick out something to charm or something to— At this, her invention failed her.
They could, of course, get potions and ingredients, but getting Mr Wicks on board to advise about potions seemed fraught, given his resistance to new teaching tactics.
She’d never been quite sure if he agreed with the inclusion of non-witchy families into the school, though now she was back as an adult and a teacher, he had been nothing but kind to her, so maybe the perception of his bias was unfounded.
She admitted to herself that as Mr Wicks was kind of a grumpy old straight white guy, she might have misjudged him.
Maybe. She admitted to herself that her own ideas about Mr Wicks had been informed not just by his stern demeanor, but also by her experiences with other grumpy middle-aged men.
Perhaps she’d misjudged him all along. Either way, she didn’t feel the need to get him involved with her field trip for the after-school club.
Once she’d tucked the note under Amelia’s door, she went to her cottage with a sense of relief that almost didn’t seem justified after so little time in her new place, but returning to it at the end of the day was more like coming home than going to her apartment in Denver had ever been.
Part of that, of course, was working outside.
When she worked mostly in her apartment, it felt a lot less like a relief to end the day. Surely that explained it.
Teaching was nothing like writing a book, or working on research, or testing out new spells.
After her school day, Bryn was exhausted mentally and physically, though she didn’t really understand how she could be so physically tired.
Mentally made sense; she’d implemented a five-question quiz at the start of every period—easy stuff she was certain her students would know, but which would aim their thoughts towards the most high-priority topics.
After her disastrous pre-tests, she felt the need to rebuild their confidence, even if that meant she wasn’t exactly testing their knowledge, but she hadn’t realized how challenging the preparation for all these daily quizzes would be.
She was already repeating questions, and it had only been a couple of weeks.
Physically, though, she’d barely done anything except walk to and from the castle each day.
She hadn’t done her Pilates once since returning to Grimoire, and back in Denver she’d done some kind of workout five days a week.
She knew it helped not only her body, but also her mind, especially when she was stressed out.