Florence promises me we’ll find an answer, and I’m trying not to worry, but the truth is I am. I thought Finn stealing my magic was the worst thing that could happen to me, but this almost hurts more. The part of me I love the most is just out of reach.

It nags in the back of my mind now, a shadow to the joy I’m witnessing on my students’ faces.

Florence can’t come up with an explanation for what’s happening to my power. Neither can Maxine or any of the library books or terrifying Therese Theresi or the other hedge witches at the Bizarre Bazaar.

I haven’t told the students. There’s no reason they need to fuss over me too.

What is the saying, again? Those who can’t do, teach?

For ninety minutes nineteen sets of hands loop and twist, their mouths trying to make sense of old Gaelic. Once they’ve mastered the simpler spells, they can move on to working on creating bigger fire with more creative, less precise magic.

But when it comes to fire, I’ve learned to start with the basics.

At the end of the ninety minutes eight girls have created flame from nothing, which I count as a success.

Despite the pride I feel as a teacher, I find it a relief to retreat upstairs. There’s something profoundly exhausting about being looked at like I have the answers when I don’t even know what is happening within myself. Teaching is more difficult than I anticipated but more rewarding, too. It’s nice to have something to pour my focus into. I don’t know what I’d do otherwise.

Usually this time of day I’d head to the kitchens, make myself a cup of coffee, and settle in the library for a few hours of independent research before lunch. I’m making my way through a stack of books on the magical history of the Scottish Isles looking for anything useful, anything that might help me understand what is happening to me. Nothing has been helpful so far. It’s like searching for a needle in a haystack without knowing if a needle is in there at all.

Or I’d find my mother in the solarium, where she’s taken to tending a particularly finnicky group of orchid plants after her morning lessons.

It was Florence who suggested moving her in after her release from the asylum. After all, she’s hardly the first Haxahaven pupil over forty, and her magical education wasn’t finished when she ran away with my father at eighteen.

She’s still fragile, still… my mother in all the good and bad ways, but like her orchids, she’s begun to bloom.