“Sure.” Laurence found a marginally more comfortable arrangement on the couch, and Patricia handed him a fresh hot mug. They drank tea together in silence until Patricia’s roommates woke up and started giving Laurence the hairy eyeball.

Chapter 22

22

PATRICIA HAD SPENT years wishing she could run away to learn real magic. Then one day, she turned herself into a bird, and a man came to take her to the witch academy. Dreams? Fulfilled.

Eltisley Maze had two separate campuses, and they were as different as a cloudless summer day and a blizzard. Eltisley Hall had grand stone buildings over six hundred years old, and nobody ever raised his or her voice there. Students at Eltisley walked single file along the gravel walkways, wearing blazers, ties, and shorts, with the school’s crest over their hearts (a bear and stag face-to-face, holding a flaming chalice between them). You addressed your teachers or upperclassmen as Sir or Miss and ate in Formal Hall in the Greater Building. The Maze, meanwhile, was a disorienting jumble of nine-faced buildings and looping walkways, where you could wear whatever you pleased. You could sleep all day, do drugs, play video games, do anything you fancied. Except that you would find yourself trapped in a room with no door (or toilet) for weeks, until you learned some crazy lesson. Or you would be tossed into a bottomless pit, or chased around for days by people with sticks. Or you would find yourself unable to stop tap-dancing. Or pieces of you might start falling off, one by one. Nobody told you anything in The Maze.

Once, Eltisley Hall and The Maze had been two separate schools, representing two styles of magic that were at odds, but now they were joined because magic had been united, at great cost. The passage between them was a sandy hedge-lined walkway that only opened at certain times.

Patricia would spend weeks mastering some delicate healing art at Eltisley Hall, and then they would send her back to The Maze and she would be so confused and tangled up in herself that she forgot all her fancy skills. She would solve some nonsense puzzle at The Maze and figure out how to do some clever trick, only to be sent back to Eltisley Hall, where they’d drum endless rules and formulae into her again, and she would lose the twisty shape she’d been holding in her mind.

This would have been enough to make her cry into her pillow every night at lights-out (at Eltisley) or impromptu naptime (at The Maze). But also, Patricia missed her parents, whom she hadn’t even said goodbye to. For all they knew, she was dead. Or living in some alley like an animal. She wanted to tell them she was okay, but she wouldn’t know how to explain. Not to mention, she’d left her cat, Berkley.