Everyone spun and glimpsed Sophie’s small shadow through the mist, tottering down the Great Lawn, head bent to the ground, as if searching for something in the grass.

“She’ll see us if the mist clears,” Tedros fretted, voice somewhere between Essa’s and his own.

“Thirty seconds until fairies,” Dot said, the ugly jangling growing louder.

“Anadil, we need that wand,” Merlin pressed.

For the first time, Agatha saw a crack in the wizard’s poise. Hester, too, normally unsinkable, was blotched red, haranguing Anadil.

“You told Merlin it could find anything . . . that it’d find Dovey wherever she’s imprisoned and get her my message . . . you promised it’d bring back her wand in time!”

“It’s a talent, not a guarantee,” Anadil said weakly, her two black rats looking just as uptight.

“Fifteen seconds!” said Dot.

But now there were green fairy flashes from the east, flitting along the bank . . . while green mist receded along the south shore, about to reveal three Evil witches and a famous Good wizard, breaking in two strangers at the gates . . .

“Five seconds!” Dot cried—

“There!” Anadil hissed, pointing behind her.

Everyone whirled to see a white mouse hurtling out of fog, Professor Dovey’s wand in its mouth. Only as the mouse scuttled towards them, wheezing and sweating, Agatha saw its body engorging, its white fur blackening, its front teeth sharpening, its black eyes reddening, until the white mouse was no longer a mouse at all, but a rabid black rat charging straight for its master. With a last flail of effort, it flying-leapt towards Anadil, flinging the wand through the air in seeming slow motion. The albino witch caught it and whirled to the school gates, stabbing the wand tip at the glowing spikes . . .

The gates parted magically, opening a thin gap.

“Thanks, fairy godmother,” Anadil sighed in relief. “Wherever you are.”

She tossed Dovey’s wand to Merlin and the wizard jammed Agatha and Tedros through before the bars slammed tight behind the intruders. Together, Agatha and Tedros swiveled to see Merlin on the other side of the deadly gates.

“Midnight,” said the wizard. “Do not fail.”

Then he pulled off his hat and jumped through its brim like a genie into a lamp, before the hat vanished too with a thundering crack.

For Agatha and Tedros, being trapped in a witches’ dorm room was a lot like being trapped in a house on Graves Hill.

The first few hours they simply didn’t speak. Each claimed a bed—Agatha took Hester’s, Tedros’ took Dot’s—with Anadil’s between them like a castle moat. Neither even acknowledged the other, partly because they were embarrassed by their new bodies, but more because both had a lot of thinking to do. Hugging a moldy pillow, Agatha mulled every possible path into the School for Old—Halfway Bridge, sewers between castles, tree tunnels in the Clearing, or a long slog around the bay—while Tedros, charred pillow over his face, racked his brain for ways to get Sophie alone.