“Yes, ate him. The brownies were in danger of being thrown out of this world. In atonement we agreed to do favors and services without benefit of thanks. Every time we’re thanked we lose a step toward that atonement.”

“Oh,” I said, trying to imagine one of the Brownes eating someone. “Well, at least they’re trying to make up for their wrongdoings …” I gave Dory a reassuring look. Brock put his arm around her.

“We’ll agree to remain peacefully outside if you’ll allow Callie to speak for us,” Brock said.

He turned to me, his face full of hope and trust. “You’re our only chance, Callie.”

I looked past Brock and Dory and saw Ike Olsen. He was standing next to the Norns. Skald held up her phone for me to see. The screen was full of the enigmatic lines I’d seen there before when she had consulted my future. They looked more chaotic than ever, but the knot at the center had loosened and was opening like a fern unfurling. My wards really were loosening. I felt them letting go with the trust my friends had in me. I felt a few more links dissolve as I turned back to Brock and Dory and told them, “Yes, I will speak for Fairwick.”

Beckwith Hall was one of the oldest and most elegant classrooms on the campus. A large, handsome rectangular oak table, which had once been in the refectory of a monastery, stood in the middle of the room. One side of the room was taken up by arched windows alternating with niches that held busts of the great philosophers and writers. Today the blinds were drawn over the windows and the busts of Homer, Plato, Sappho, Dante, Shakespeare, Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte were invisible in their shadowy niches. A projector shot images onto a screen behind the table and onto the covered windows: images of a sunlit grove surrounded by tall trees accompanied by a soundtrack of rustling leaves, bird song, and the flutter of wings so close that I had to resist the urge to duck as I crossed the room to sit beside Liz.

She was on the near side of the long table, next to a woman with very short silver hair that stood up in bristly tufts, whom Liz introduced as Loomis Pagan. The pixy Gender Theory professor from Wesleyan, I recalled. I was introduced in turn to Delbert Winters from Harvard, Eleanor Belknap from Vassar, Lydia Markham from Mt. Holyrood and Talbot Greeley from Stanford, who didn’t look like a Cluricaune, whatever one was. All the IMP board members sat on one side of the table. The other side was empty.

“They wouldn’t let Soheila in,” I whispered to Liz after I’d been introduced to everyone and had taken my seat. “Or Dory or Brock.”