“You know,” I said to Suki, “a suspicious person might wonder if you knew just how bad the oobly-floobly would taste and you lured Pip right into a trap, you being the plant person and all.”

Suki blinked innocently at me. “Are you a suspicious person?”

I bit back a giggle. “No matter what this lesson is about,” I warned her, “I’m not licking anything.”

And that was pretty much how the day went. Pip and Suki tried to one-up each other every chance they got, Jojo and Samara did their best to ignore them and played Giants & Gargoyles instead, and Simha appeared to be deeply regretting his decision to stick with us.

But between it all, I started to learn. Suki showed me how to crush the petals of an iridescent purple flower to make a healing potion. I helped Jojo sew threads of starlight into the Crows’ costumes (“For that extra bit of protection,” he explained). Samara loaned me a book called When You Can’t Beat Monsters, Trick Them, with helpful sections marked with sticky notes. And, surrounded by the made-up adventures of my childhood, Pip and I made stink bombs, balloons filled with the oobly-floobly’s bitter goo, and mechanical insects (“They’re very distracting!”).

Even Simha, who hadn’t exactly signed up to be both babysitter and tutor, took a break from attempting to bake a loaf of focaccia to offer me a lesson.

“What,” he said, opening his jaws very wide a mere inch from my face, “does my breath smell like?”

In the pursuit of good manners, I tried very hard not to gag. (One could argue that it was hardly good manners to open one’s jaws and blow hot, carnivorous breath upon unsuspecting humans, but I wasn’t about to debate this point with a lion.)

“Um,” I said, as diplomatically as possible. “Is it meat?”

“The correct answer,” Simha rumbled, “is that what it smells like is irrelevant. If you can smell the breath of a creature my size, it is already too late.”

“Thanks for sharing that extremely new piece of information,” I said. “I’ll do my best not to put my head inside the maws of any lions, demons, or bears.”

“There are no bears in Mysore,” said Simha, and stalked back to the kitchen to check on his focaccia.

I kept myself busy, but in the quiet moments, I wondered if Mum was okay. I missed her and wished she could have come here with me, so that she could have been sensible and funny and kind and grown-up, but mostly, I couldn’t get away from the familiar fear that something terrible would happen to her. I tried repeatedly to remind myself that, for one, she was still fast asleep in her bed and time had not moved forward for her, and, for another, Ashwini had assured me that nothing else could get out of my sketchbook. Yet. But I was me, so I worried anyway.

Ashwini and Lej came back late that afternoon, both safe and sound. Neither had had any luck finding either the Witches’ Guild or a metalworker who could make me fly, but when the others told Ashwini how much I’d learned over the course of the day, she perked right up and insisted on giving me lessons, too.