Primrose smiled. “No, she wasn’t. Or rather, she was, but that was just an excuse to get her to places all over the world.”

“An excuse?” Jamie’s eyebrows drew together. “An excuse for what?”

“My sister and I had a difficult childhood,” Primrose explained. “I’ll spare you the worst of it, but in short, our aunt and uncle discovered very early on that we were witches and did their utmost to stamp it out of us. On one memorable occasion, there was an attempted exorcism that almost killed us both. We reacted to this upbringing in vastly different ways. Lillian became reckless while I became cautious and mistrustful. She wanted witches to live out in the open while I wanted the safety of secrecy. That’s what she was doing, using the cover of her work as an archaeologist. She was obsessed with the possibility that somewhere out there, there might be a place where witches live openly, without fear, without prejudice. The last time I saw her, fifteen years ago, we had a towering row about it.”

There was a pause after this, and Mika felt a surge of pity for the absent Lillian. She had made choices Mika would never understand, but this? This she understood.

“Reckless or not, I still can’t fathom what she was thinking when she brought three witches here to live together,” Primrose went on, sounding genuinely aghast. Mika tensed. “That surge of power Mika took the blame for, was that the children?”

“I was the cause,” Mika said firmly.

Primrose nodded, frosty and imperious as ever. “Well, we can talk about all that in a bit. First, the solicitor. You need me to extract all of his memories of the events that took place today, correct?”

Mika led Primrose to the garden shed, made sure she had Edward spelled and docile, and then left her to it. She knew, from scattered memories across her childhood, that Primrose’s memory magic was delicate, difficult, and took a long time.

While Primrose worked, Mika went into the house to check on the children, who were working on a jigsaw puzzle in Altamira’s bedroom (the jigsaw puzzle, the one that had caused so much trouble) and pretending they weren’t dying to know what was going on outside. Mika told them the truth, briefly. They were more riveted than troubled by the news that Primrose was the mysterious Peony, but Mika suspected that was because they hadn’t considered the possibility that they might actually be taken from their home and family. They were still certain the grown-ups would fix everything.