Eventually he appeared. He’d grown up so much since he’d epiphanized on that rainy afternoon in October. He’d lost a bit of his puppy fat though he was still a broad, imposing-looking child. He’d taken to wearing mostly black, and drinking quite a lot of strong coffee. Odile wondered when she should tell Maximilian that she knew what he was trying to hide. She’d heard him playing Beethoven. She’d seen the way he now looked at art. He’d asked for opera tickets for his twelfth birthday.

He was a dark mage, just like his father had been.

He was a scholar, too, although who knew where that had come from? Not that kharakter was really something that people inherited. Not usually. But it was uncanny just how like his father Maximilian was. He had the same eyes. The same jawline. But he was kind where his father had been cruel. That was the big difference, of course.

Odile looked at the recipe her neighbor Dill Hammer had given her for the meal they had shared last night. It was simpler than she’d thought it would be.

Maximilian, being a mage scholar, should really have been spending all his time in his bedroom thinking of dark things and finding new ways to travel to the Underworld (Odile knew all about those trips too, and had asked her friend Calico Quinn to keep half an eye on her Neophyte son when he was there). But Maximilian had been popping over to Dill Hammer’s bungalow quite a lot lately to talk about the Diberi, and conspiracy theories, and the best ways to cook quinoa. It made sense that Maximilian liked quinoa—his taste in food had been very odd since he’d epiphanized—and so last night Odile and Maximilian had gone to Dill’s and eaten what became a feast of strangeness: a warm winter salad with chicory, kale (which Dill Hammer had actually massaged) and blood oranges, alongside tempeh burgers with kimchi and miso. Dessert had been a special fermented pudding that Dill Hammer had been tending in his cellar for weeks.

It was all a bit suspicious.

Odile knew almost everything about her son, except this. Why on earth would a mage scholar who wore black and listened to Beethoven all the time want to hang out with a fusty old hedgewitch with a whole shelf devoted to books on identifying mushrooms? Mind you, mushrooms could be sort of magey too. Maybe that was it. And Dill was nice. He and Odile had been friends for years.

“Maximilian!”