A fanciful child with my head full of stories, I decided I was a princess in exile being kept safely in a secret hiding place until the time came for me to restore my kingdom. That seemed to explain so much about my family. My father was stern and remote with me, the way he wasn’t with my siblings when they visited, because he wasn’t really my father. He was my tutor, doing his duty to prepare me to one day rule my kingdom wisely. My mother must have been my nurse—in the stories, nurses always seemed to develop motherly feelings toward their charges.

When I was old enough to learn about biology, I discerned the likely truth. Although I had powers no one else in the family had and was very unlike my sister and brothers, I could see traces of my mother in myself. We had the same roundish face, wide-set eyes, and stubborn chin. It seemed as though my mother had been unfaithful to her husband with some magister, and I was the result. That explained my family even better than my princess fantasy—the large age gap between me and my siblings, the chilly distance between my parents, and the way my father was barely able to stand the sight of me when he wasn’t teaching me.

I’d read many novels about nonmagical governesses falling in love with and eventually marrying their magister employers, and then there were all the fairy stories about nonmagical girls captivating magister princes. None of these had mentioned that such relationships were forbidden, even though that would have made far more interesting reading. Although I knew better than to think that novels were an accurate reflection of reality, I felt betrayed. Someone who read as much as I did shouldn’t have been caught so unawares. But there had been few magisters at Yale because most of them went to England for their education, so I had learned everything I knew about them from novels, which I now realized had left out a critical fact. I had to wonder if these books perhaps reflected a magister fantasy about breaking with convention.

To think I’d worried that Lord Henry was secretly a bandit who knew I’d witnessed his crime when my real danger was that he might discover I was a magical half-breed. I wondered what would become of me if I were discovered, but there was no innocent way to ask. I told myself that I had nothing to fear as long as I exhibited no sign of having magical powers. I’d spent a lifetime keeping that secret, so it was second nature for me.

*   *   *