This was a throwaway gambit, a piece of infamous British history she’d plucked out of thin air in the hope that Primrose would be so annoyed that she would pooh-pooh this theory and tell Mika the real story.

Instead, the response Mika got was: “I wouldn’t put it quite like that, but yes, the blame lies with him. And others like him.”

Primrose said this so matter-of-factly, so nonchalantly, that for a moment Mika was stunned into speechlessness, her cup frozen halfway between her mouth and the saucer. “It’s true?” she spluttered at last, astonishment giving way to indignation.

“More or less.”

“And you never thought about mentioning this before?”

“You never asked, poppet,” said Primrose serenely.

Mika had to very sternly remind herself that it was not polite to throw teacups at people. Teeth gritted, she pointed out the obvious. “You always told me not to ask questions.”

“Naturally, dear. That was for your own good.”

Mika tightened her grip on her cup, genuinely concerned that if she relaxed her hold a fraction too much, the teacup would fly out of her hands and knock Primrose out cold. She took a handful of deep breaths before saying, in what was frankly a voice of heroic calm, “So you’re saying witch-hunters cursed us? That’s why we’re orphaned soon after we’re born?”

“Don’t be absurd,” said Primrose, sniffing. “The Witchfinder General and his ilk wielded a great deal of power, but it was the power of politics, not enchantment. How could they possibly have cursed us?”

“But you just said—”

“I said the blame lies with them, not that they cast a curse on us.”

Somewhere in the mess of Primrose’s half-explanations and woolly maybes, Mika thought she could see a glimmer of the truth. “They hunted us, so we tried to defend ourselves,” she guessed, tracking the inevitable sequence of events to its tragic end. “Only we cursed ourselves instead.”

“Which is just as I’ve always said,” said Primrose. “A spell went wrong, for which we can thank the prejudices of an uncaring, patriarchal society that went out of its way to punish anybody it deemed too wilful, too powerful, or too different.” Her lips twisted. “Not unlike the society we live in today.”

“But what kind of spell was cast? How could it go so badly wrong?”

“You are irksomely inquisitive today, Mika,” Primrose replied, looking very put-upon. “There isn’t much more to tell you. The seventeenth century was a time of growing prejudice and peril all over the world, and young witches were particularly vulnerable. The spell was supposed to give newborn witches greater protection. It went wrong, and essentially did the opposite. It killed the parents of new witches, a curse that has persisted in every generation since.”