Other than this, and it was admittedly a small thing, her first week at Nowhere House had gone very well. Over the course of their lessons, she’d watched the children’s confidence and control grow; she’d taught them the properties of her eight Can’t-Do-Withouts; they’d foraged for ingredients and brewed potions together; the girls had stayed up late one night so she could show them how to harvest moonlight; and Mika was quite certain she had Nowhere House’s reserves of power well in hand.

There’d been a few other hiccups. Altamira needed constant rescuing from the well-meaning but overenthusiastic magic that tended to gather around her; Jamie seemed to be going out of his way to avoid being in the same room as Mika; and Mika had had to firmly quash Ian’s and Lucie’s hope that she would be able to teach How to Be a Woman of Colour as well as Witch 101.

The latter had taken her by surprise, and she’d had to point out the obvious: that just because she was a witch and just because she had brown skin, it did not mean she had answers to all the questions the girls would inevitably have about their own identities. But she’d said so kindly because she knew that, mistaken as Ian and Lucie had been in assuming she could be everything to everyone, all they really wanted was for the kids to have the opportunity to know others like them.

Which was far from easy, of course. Like Mika, the girls had an intersection of identities that put them smack dab in the middle of a small minority in Britain. They were witches, they weren’t white, and they’d been born far away. Much as they might all wish otherwise, there would always be people who would question whether they were British enough, normal enough, anything enough. And the one place they might have all found something close to acceptance and kinship, in a community of diverse witches, was a place that didn’t exist outside of a measly couple of hours every third month.

“Damn it, Primrose,” Mika said under her breath. Since their first lesson, this had become Altamira’s go-to response to any inconvenience, and it had only been a matter of time before Mika had found herself saying it, too.

Now Mika left Altamira to her stirring and went to check on Rosetta’s cauldron. She’d handed Rosetta her spellbook at the start of their lesson, opened it to a relatively simple energizing infusion, and had set her the task of brewing her first potion entirely by herself. Rosetta, whose skill far outstripped her confidence, had been terribly nervous at first, but the moment she’d started work, her nerves had been forgotten.