Page 68 of The Water Witch (Fairwick Chronicles 2)

“No one is being forced to do anything.”

The soft but precise voice came from behind the blond man. I saw the smooth silver chignon first and then smelled Chanel No. 5, a scent that always sent a chill down my spine.

“Adelaide,” I said, greeting my grandmother by her first name, mostly because I knew it would annoy her. “Why can’t Brock and Soheila attend the meeting? Brock’s family has watched over the woods and protected Fairwick for more than a century. Soheilateacheshere. It’s hardly fair to exclude them from a meeting deciding their fate.”

“We’ve provided a video simulcast,” Adelaide said, pointing to two flat-screen TVs mounted on the lobby walls. “You are all welcome to stay out here and listen. But we can’t have any demons who are capable of magically influencing the proceedings inside. It’s a simple precaution.”

“Brock’s not a demon!” I said. “He’s a Norse divinity! And Dory!” I cried, pointing at my friend, who was wearing a floral skirt, a yellow sweater set, yellow espadrilles, and carrying a quilted handbag. “She’s a brownie. What could be more harmless than a brownie?”

Adelaide gave Dory a withering look. “Brownies are one step away from boggarts. Do you know why brownies don’t like to be thanked?”

This was something I’d always wondered about. Dory and her cousin brownies were always doing good deeds, but they did hate being thanked for them. “I assume it’s because they’re modest,” I answered.

Adelaide laughed. “Shall I tell her?” she asked Dory, whose pink cheeks had gone pale.

“No, let me,” Dory said, turning to me. “Many, manyyears ago a brownie did a favor for a human being, but the human didn’t thank him. The brownie got so angry that he…well, he killed him.”

“And ate him,” Adelaide added.

“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 brownieseatingsomeone. “Well, at least they’retryingto 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. Perhaps the lines represented my wards 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, sat in the middle of the room. One side of the room was taken up by arched windows alternating with niches that held bustsof 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 Brontë 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, birdsong, 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 studies professor from Wesleyan, I recalled. I was introduced in turn to Delbert Winters from Harvard, Eleanor Belknap from Vassar, Lydia Markham from Mount Holyrood, and Talbot Greeley from Bard, who didn’t look like a cluricaune, whatever that 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.”

“I know,” Liz said, clucking her tongue. “They’ve made us weaker by excluding the fey. They even tried to ban Talbot and Loomis, but we objected and got them admitted.”

“Exclusion is the hobgoblin of little minds,” Loomis Pagan began, but then the entrance of the Grove members silenced her.

Six figures filed into the room. For a moment they appeared to be wearing hooded robes and beaked masks, but then that illusion faded and I saw they were all wearing somber dark suits. They filed behind the table and each stood for a moment behind a chair. The slide show resolved into a single image of the tree-encircled glade and the light brightened as if the sunhad come to stand directly above the open clearing. I looked down at my hands and saw that they were dappled with leaf shadow…and something else. A shadow of wings passed overhead just as the sound of wings on the soundtrack grew louder. I looked around, half-expecting some giant bird to come swooping down from the ceiling, but there was nothing but a stirring that seemed to be coming from the shadowy niches—as if the luminaries enclosed in them were trying to get a better view of the proceedings.

Adelaide’s two blond companions stood at either ends of the table. I was surprised that they were actually on the board. I’d thought the Grove was an all women’s club and that the men were security guards, but perhaps they were representatives from the London Seraphim Club. My grandmother stood at the center, between an older woman and a young woman with bangs and horn-rimmed glasses. Except for the blond twins, the council was made up of women in sensible, boxy suits and low-heeled pumps. It could have been the board of the local PTA or garden club instead of the governing body of an ancient order of witches.

A bell rang and the six Grove members pulled out their chairs and sat. The audio loop grew quieter and the light grew brighter over the long table. My grandmother clasped her hands, leaned forward, and addressed our side of the table as if we were a large crowd a long way off.

“As Chancellor of the Oak, I call this meeting between the Grove and the Institute of Magical Professionals to order.” I thought I saw the two blond minions sneer a bit at the wordprofessionals. Adelaide turned to the older woman on her right. “Miss Davis, do you have the report on Fairwick?”

“That’s Garnette Davis,” Liz whispered. “She’s descended from a witch who was executed at Salem.”

Garnette Davis opened her briefcase and took out a boundreport that was at least four inches thick. As she handed it to Adelaide the pages rustled. Adelaide put her hand on the cover as if to calm the pages within, then opened to the first page and read aloud, her clear aristocratic voice silencing even the recorded noises in the room.

“In the autumn of 2009, a committee was formed to investigate irregularities at the institution of Fairwick College, the village of Fairwick, and the outlying woods and farmlands. Because the last door to Faerie existed in the woods of Fairwick the area has long been a haven for supernatural creatures—fey, demon, and undesignated.”

“Could you please clarify what you mean by the term ‘undesignated’?” Loomis Pagan asked archly.

Adelaide gave Loomis a withering look, picked up a separate sheet, and began reading aloud in a bored monotonic voice. “Vampires, werewolves, shapeshifters, half breeds…”

Half breeds? I wondered. Wasn’t I a sort of half breed? I focused back on Adelaide, who was still listing creatures who came under the undesignated label. “…trows, poltergeists, revenants, zombies…”

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