The Head Teacher at Eltisley Hall was a gentle old lady named Carmen Edelstein. She wore her silver hair in a dignified pageboy and always had an elegant silk wrap around her neck and shoulders. Carmen encouraged the students to come to her with any problems or questions, and Patricia soon found herself confiding in the old lady—but she learned the hard way that she must not mention her encounter with some sort of Tree Spirit a few years earlier. Magic was a practice and an art, not a spiritual belief system. You might have your own private spiritual experiences, just like any normal person—but believing you had a direct line to something great and ancient was the beginning of Aggrandizement.

“Trees do not talk to people,” said Carmen Edelstein, her usual cheer replaced by a worried scowl. “You had a hallucination, or someone was playing a trick. This is why it’s terrible that we get so many students so late, after they have already experimented on their own. Those bad habits can be a nightmare to unlearn.”

“It was probably a hallucination, sure.” Patricia squirmed in her stiff chair. “I remember I had eaten a lot of spicy food.”

The Head Teacher at The Maze was Kanot, whose face and voice changed every time you met him. Sometimes he was an elderly Sri Lankan man, sometimes a pygmy, sometimes a giant white man with a crazy neck-beard. Patricia soon learned to recognize Kanot by certain tells, like he way he rolled his shoulders or narrowed his left eye—if you failed to identify him or misidentified someone else as him, you would find yourself at the bottom of the deepest pit in The Maze (other than the bottomless one, that is). People said that if Kanot ever wore the same face twice, he would die. Whenever you met Kanot, he’d offer you a terrible bargain. Patricia did not try to tell Kanot about the Tree.

Patricia had no real friends at Eltisley Maze. She was friendly with a few of the other kids, including Taylor, who had messy mouse-brown hair and ungainly, twitchy arms and legs. But the main cliques at the school never found a place for Patricia, especially after it was clear that she kind of sucked at most of the school assignments. Nobody wanted to befriend someone who was both nerdy and bad at homework.

If you went out into the tree line near Eltisley Hall at a certain time in the late afternoon or after lights-out in the Eltisley dorm, you might have seen a teenage girl with dark brown hair and big wondering eyes looking up at the trees and saying, “Are you here? What’s your deal? Is Parliament in session?” And chattering to the birds, which just glanced at her and flew away.