Chantel’s neck hurt from crouching over, and her eyes stung from the soot. Japheth didn’t like the fireplace at all. Chantel felt his scales sliding over her neck. He wriggled over her shoulder, down her arm, and away.
“You can be sure the patriarchs intend to get what they can for you. And I might help them out,” Mrs. Warthall went on. “I might just sell the little ones first, who’ll be easiest to train, and—”
She broke off with a squawk as Japheth slid past, a golden streak of life on the cold brick floor. She raised her ladle to strike.
“Don’t you dare!” cried Chantel, forgetting her deportment entirely. She burst out of the fireplace and gave Mrs. Warthall a shove in the stomach.
Blows from the ladle rained down on her. Chantel ducked and tried to cover her head with her arms. At least she was saving Japheth.
She didn’t know where Japheth went during the times he disappeared. She only knew that he always came back.
Chantel told Anna and Bowser what she’d heard.
“She can’t sell us!” said Anna. “We don’t belong to her.”
“So what do we do?” said Bowser.
“Tell the patriarchs,” said Anna.
“Then they’ll just sell us before she does,” said Chantel.
“I don’t think so,” said Anna. “They let the school exist. They need sorceresses. To strengthen the wall, and make plants grow, and—”
“Mrs. Warthall said she thought the patriarchs could do magic if they tried,” said Chantel.
“They can’t,” said Bowser flatly. “Only girls can do magic.”
They looked at him. He looked embarrassed. “Well, I’ve tried. And I can’t.”
Chantel was struck with a flurry of memories: Bowser looking longingly at the jar of dried mandrake root. Bowser surreptitiously making signs over a particularly badly burnt cauldron, Bowser casting herbs into a bubbling pot of soup, Bowser trying to get the skulls at the back of the skullery to talk.
She felt bad for never having noticed how much he wanted to do magic. She wanted to say that after all, no one had taught him. But he clearly didn’t want to discuss it.
“I think we should ask one of the other sorceresses for help,” Chantel decided.
So they went in search of sorceresses. They wended their way through twisting streets, and into arched alleys and up certain staircases that wound around watchtowers, and over various bridges.
“A couple of them live in a house up on Turnkey Crescent,” said Bowser. He knew the city better than they did.
Turnkey Crescent was a street that curved gradually around the hill on which the city was built. Beech trees grew thickly and joined overhead, their branches meshing. It was like walking through a green leafy tunnel, loud with birdsong. The sorceresses’ house was number 526, a thin, tall building with a narrow green door topped by a stained-glass transom, depicting a sorceress stirring a cauldron. They knocked.
A servant answered. She was about nine years old, and had pale skin, red pigtails, and a frightened expression. “How-may-I-be-of-service?” she demanded.
“We’re looking for Miss Tripes,” said Bowser.
“You’re too late,” said the girl. “They got her already, and Miss Davidson too. And they got Miss Faranoko up on Waterfall Blind, so don’t bother looking there.”
Chantel had a terrible feeling of foreboding. “Who?”
“Some man,” said the girl. “Came and said ‘Wayswitch.’”
“Did he look like death?” Chantel asked.
“Pretty much.”
“Who’s looking after you?” said Anna.
“I’m looking after myself,” said the girl. “Now if there’s nothing else—” She started to close the door.
Chantel felt like there was something else. “Wait!”
The girl stopped closing the door.
“You should come home with us—” Anna began.
“What about all the other sorceresses?” said Chantel. “Are they gone too?”
“How would I know?” The girl shut the door with a clunk.
“We should make her come home with us,” said Anna. “She’s too young to look after herself.”
“She’s better off here than with Mrs. Warthall,” said Bowser.
Chantel felt torn. They ought to try to help the girl, but . . . Bowser was right. They had no help to offer.
They wound their way back around the hill, bypassed Waterfall Blind, and then followed Rosewood Walk down to Bannister Square. The square was actually a triangle, a cobblestoned wedge that projected far enough over the city that you could see the sea. Chantel spared the ocean a glance—it was a distant, iron-gray band at the bottom of the sky—and hurried with her friends to the sorcery shop kept by Miss Waterstone and Miss Baako.
Chantel was vaguely aware of an abnegation spell beside the shop . . . something hidden, but she had no time to think about that now.
The shop door hung open. Everything inside had been removed, even the curtains.
“Miss Baako?” Chantel called. “Miss Waterstone?”
Her voice rang through the empty shop.
They went up the corkscrew staircase to the little apartment above. That was empty too. A single broken chair was all that remained.
No one questioned them when they came out of the shop. Everyone they saw looked the other way.
“Shall we ask them?” said Anna.
“No,” said Chantel. “They’re not going to tell us anything. I think they stole the sorceresses’ stuff.”
She was horrified to hear herself say this. One might think such a thing, but to say it aloud . . . !
“There’s an abnegation spell here,” she added.
She twitched her fingers in the signs to undo it. It was hiding nothing interesting—just a slab of rock, behind which was darkness and cold, dank air.
They went on searching for sorceresses. They climbed steep alleys and they followed dizzying walkways that spiraled out over open space. They plodded through the wide streets at the bottom of the hill, in the very shadow of Seven Buttons, and they followed the tightly wound passageways of the High Peak neighborhood, just below the castle. But it was the same in High Peak, and Buttonside, and Donkeyfall Close.
There were no sorceresses anywhere. They’d all vanished. The few people who would talk all told some version of the same story. The sorceress in question had been visited by a stranger who looked like death, and had gone off in a hurry, and that was all anyone knew, and wasn’t it time the girls got home?
In the end they had no choice but to do just that.
“All of the sorceresses are gone,” said Anna.
It was late at night, and they were sitting in the kitchen. Chantel stretched her bare feet out on the brick floor. Japheth, who had been exploring the kitchen in search of someone to eat and had found the place far too well scrubbed for his taste, slithered smoothly between her toes and snaked his way up to his favorite place around her neck.
“Sir Wolfgang says they’re busy with other things,” said Bowser.
“I think he knows they’re missing,” said Chantel. “He just doesn’t want other people to know. Because people might panic if they knew there was no one to do the Buttoning.”
The other two looked at her in surprise.
“You’re right!” said Anna. “There’s no one to protect the walls, and—”