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It was chance that Bliss, taking a message for Miss Fairfax, passed by the music hall windows just as a low, red car pulled up to the front gate of Lowood House. The second-former pressed her nose to the glass in great interest. Jillian in the Meadow dorm was always saying that if her parents truly understood how harsh the mistresses were, they’d take her away at once. “If your mother only knew!” the girls would mimic her. Maybe it had finally happened.
A girl got out of the passenger seat – a tall girl in a short yellow dress. She had long blonde hair and long purple ribbons fluttering from it. She looked very glamorous. Beyond her, in the driver’s seat, Bliss saw – another girl! Gosh, was she really old enough to drive? But Bliss didn’t get a good look, because as soon as the blonde girl had taken suitcases and bags out of the back seat, the car sped away.
The girl turned and looked up at Lowood House. A hard scowl met Bliss’s stare. Bliss flushed in guilt – what a first impression she had made on behalf of her school! But the newcomer merely gestured towards her pile of luggage.
Bliss hurried out to help her. “Hallo,” she said. “I’m Bliss, in the second form. I expect you’ll be going up to see Mrs. St-John.”
“You can show me the way,” the girl said. “I’m Nanami Kiryuu.” She had a high, sharp voice. She looked even more elegant close up. Was that real gold thread on her cuffs? She waited until Bliss had picked up as many bags as she could possibly hang off her arms, then took the last suitcase.
Bliss led her up the main steps. “That’s the crest of Lowood House,” she said proudly, pointing – as best she could – at the large brass honeybee that stood in relief above the main doors.
Nanami sneered. “I don’t like insects,” she said.
How beastly! Bliss thought. She had been going to explain what her dorm mistress had said to her – that the honeybee represented hard work, community, and generosity – but she thought that speech might be wasted on Nanami.
The fourth-formers, who met their new classmate at supper that evening, came to the same conclusion. “Have you ever seen anyone so stand-offish?” Cora muttered in disgust to Millie.
“No indeed,” Millie said. “But keep your eyes open! I expected she’s only getting started.” There was a gleam in her eyes. Cora grinned. Millie was on the case – her wicked tongue would put Nanami out of sorts soon enough. Wait ‘till she got started!
“You’re being terribly rude,” Delphinia drawled, when Nanami got up to get a glass of water. “The manners might be different in her world.”
“What do you mean, her world?” asked Ettie, startled out of one of her usual daydreams.
“See?” said Delphinia triumphantly, even though Ettie hadn’t been the one rolling her eyes at Nanami. “You’re all being so ungracious. You didn’t even stop to think that Nanami’s from Series Five.”
“Come off it, Delphinia,” said Cora, who knew that Delphinia could only have come by this information through sucking up to Matron.
But, “Oooooh,” said Ettie, and the damage was done. No matter how haughty Nanami was, every girl in the school suddenly wanted to talk to her. None of the students had ever met anyone from another world before – let alone another Series!
"She's unbearable," Cora complained to Millie. "Aren't you going to do something about her?"
"In time," Millie said airily. Although she was conscious of her reputation as the school's merriest trickster, she was a little wary of the new girl. There was a hardness in Nanami's eyes that set her apart from others who were inclined to boast or put on airs.
Besides – annoying as they found her – it wasn't the fourth-formers with whom Nanami held court. It was the younger girls who pestered her for stories of Series Five, and Nanami obliged – for little favours, such as polished shoes, or work copied out in a neater hand, or biscuits saved over from a midnight feast.
One cold day, Cora went for a walk to the village in the break before afternoon class, and Millie elected to stay inside, foregoing the seniors’ study for the warm main hall. A group of second-formers came chattering past her. "If your mother only knew," one of them, Rosa, crowed to another, Jillian. "Oh, so you say!"
"If your mother only knew," Nanami said, startling Millie and all the second-formers by the way she suddenly appeared, "her heart would surely break in two."
"Oh," Rosa said, "is that another of your stories, Miss Nanami?"
Nanami sat gracefully down beside them. "Once upon a time there was a queen," she began, "and that queen had one daughter…"
"A princess!" said Jillian, brightening.
"Yes, a princess," said Nanami.
Millie quite forgot the red jersey she was knitting as she listened to the story, all about a princess and a witch, a talking horse, a rude boy and a king.
It was a good story. It gave her an idea. "How are Winnie and Vinnie doing these days?" she asked Florence during French the next day.
"I can hardly say," Florence said, with a laugh muffled behind her hand. "Vinnie’s of an age that she just wants her big sister to leave her alone! I say, 'How are things, Lavinia?', and she pretends she doesn't answer to that name, and I know things are just the same they always are."
"Up to their usual tricks, then," Millie said with satisfaction. "Well, I think they might be glad to hear from me."
She was right. Winnie and Vinnie were delighted. Since their previous year's attempts to rival Millie's tricks had nearly got them into serious trouble – trouble Millie had had to get them out of – they had promised to keep their heads down – or at least keep their mischief from coming to the notice of the older girls.
"You're not in hot water," Millie assured them. "Yet. I have a mission on which to engage you…"
"You set second-formers after Nanami?" Cora asked disbelievingly.
"It's called delegation," Millie told her loftily. "One of those leadership skills Mrs. St-John always says I should cultivate…"
Winnie and Vinnie felt their responsibility keenly. To play a trick on a fourth-former – at another fourth-former's request! Nothing could make them feel more grown-up. On the next school walk, they added themselves to Nanami's audience, demure and attentive but really storing up Nanami's sayings and mannerisms to use against her.
Playing at clumsiness, Winnie bumped into Nanami as she walked. "You oaf! Move off," Nanami said, slapping her aside. All of Nanami's other followers – not just second-formers, but first-formers and third-formers too – smirked to see Winnie scurry away. Winnie felt not angry, but pleased. It satisfied her odd sense of honour that she now had a personal slight against Nanami.
A week later, Nanami had the seniors' chore of supervising a group of younger students in evening study. She sat at the end of the classroom, reading a book, when loud voices were heard in the corridor.
"Have you heard? Have you heard?"
"It's a royal scandal!"
"Oh, I love those! Dalliances and divorces! Phone calls and letters to be burned!"
"No, not that kind of scandal! Haven't you heard that our dear princess-"
"Say, say!"
"-is actually a wasp?"
Then laughter.
Nanami stormed to the door and threw it open. There was no one in the corridor. That was because Winnie and Vinnie had attached an rubber cup on string to the outside of the corridor windows, had shouted down into it from the windows above, and had jerked the crude telephone away at the end of their weird message.
"I thought you were going to start with 'Once upon a time'," Winnie said to Vinnie.
"It doesn't matter," Vinnie said, shrugging. And indeed, Nanami was as jittery and annoyed that evening as any prankster could wish.
Her hands shook, and her shadows shook, as though the lights that cast them also trembled.
Vinnie and Winnie had learned from last year's disaster – they were far too artful to repeat the same trick twice. But they heard, to their great satisfaction, that others had taken up the joke. The shadows around Nanami were apt to take on odd shapes as various students bent mirrors or disingenuously brushed against lamp-shades in her presence, and whispers of witchly weirdness found their ways to her on the breeze.
Then Nanami's omelet turned back into an egg one morning at breakfast, and the school realised that something greater than a caper was afoot.
Perhaps it wouldn't have taken so long for everyone to see that something genuinely strange hung about Nanami, if the idea had not been raised and discarded already. Winnie, going about reconnaissance for her trick, had followed Nanami down the hall one day. The bell rang for the second morning lesson, only it surely wasn't the school bell. It sounded like someone hand-ringing quite a small bell, somewhere close by, a bell with a dull, clanking sound. Nanami reached up towards the window sill. Suddenly she was holding a little black box, which swung out on a hinge to reveal rows of buttons. "Hello?" said Nanami, bringing the box towards her ear. Then the box vanished, and Nanami's hand, trembling only a little, continued back to stroke her hair into place.
Winnie went to Dossie.
She didn't mention the trick. Dossie would be the last person to help with a plot hatched by an older student. Dossie had been badly hurt the previous year when the magical talent she'd been hiding had come out, and that two-faced prefect Genevieve had blackmailed her into all kinds of things - theft, and setting a fire, and even causing accidents to two students! It had all come clean, Genevieve expelled and Dossie forgiven - but Dossie kept herself quite boxed up these days, and all the second form knew how hard they'd have to work to gain her trust.
Instead, Winnie said, "Dossie, you don't imagine Nanami's a witch like you, do you?"
Dossie put her pen neatly down on her Maths prep. "You know Miss Rivers would have tested her when she came, just as she does everyone."
"I know that, of course," Winnie said. "It's just there's something strange. She's from a different Series. Maybe her magic's harder to see."
Dossie frowned at Winnie. "Why do you want to know?"
"I just do," Winnie said. No use giving Dossie a clever reason. "Can't you get Miss Rivers to test her again?"
"Maybe," said Dossie, her frown going even harder against anything else Winnie might say.
But Winnie only said, "Well, all right," and turned away.
In her deepest heart, Dossie wanted to please others - before the previous year, not even she had known how much. The moment Winnie was out of sight, her frown fell away, and her face instead took on a serious look as she wondered what to say to Miss Rivers.
She quite flubbed it. "Really? You were wondering if Nanami Kiryuu has magic, Eudosia?" Miss Rivers asked her. "Why?"
"Ah," said Dossie. "Some of the girls were saying…" She came to a stop. She found she was particularly bad at fibbing to Miss Rivers, who was her mentor. Miss Rivers was so constantly glad to have a witch to teach.
Somehow that led her to say - "I was just thinking it would be nice if I wasn't the only one. That's all, Miss Rivers."
"Oh," said Miss Rivers. "Well, I'm sorry, but it's not possible, Eudosia. I test very carefully - and you know there are watch-charms set around the grounds to detect active magic. If Nanami had cast anything at all, they ought to have picked it up."
"Well then," said Dossie, and sighed, relieved to be done with Winnie's question.
Then, when she heard of the trick Winnie and Vinnie had played, she thought: So they were just trying to see how to get one up on her!
Winnie hadn't lied to her, so Dossie couldn't quite feel herself betrayed, but all the same she wasn't very happy with the situation. It was almost as if she'd lied to Miss Rivers for Winnie just so Winnie could play a prank.
And yet - having said those words to Miss Rivers, she realised they weren't a lie. She really did wish she wasn't the only witch at Lowood House. And if she were to have another witch to study with, she thought it wouldn't be so bad if that witch were Nanami. She didn't quite hang off Nanami's words like some other second-formers, but all the same, she listened to Nanami's stories when she could, and when silly Bennie came rushing up with a book for Nanami's history assignment, and offered to read it to her, Dossie felt terribly queer. She didn't want to fetch and carry like that! But she did.
Then Nanami's omelet turned into an egg.
Then when Nanami played cards with the other fourth-formers one day, every card she played turned into the Eight of Swords.
Then when Nanami went out for a walk, a flock of yellow parasols rose up from the wood behind her and soared gracefully into the sky.
It quite confounded Miss Rivers, and it almost flustered Mrs. St-John - but nothing flustered Mrs. St-John. And it seemed that Nanami wasn't going to be flustered either. Something strange would happen, and everyone would remark on it, and Nanami would laugh her long, rilling, shrill laugh, and nobody was ever hurt, so it seemed that a laugh was just the right response to the occasion. After all, what else could one do?
Miss Rivers called in her sister Miss Rivers, who suggested to her over cups of fortified tea that perhaps Nanami had picked up a goblin - or a sprite - or a spirit of a sprite - in her passage between worlds. Certainly there seemed something clinging to her - not from her, but of her - although after a couple of cups of such strong tea, neither Miss Rivers was quite sure of the distinction.
They also called in a medium called Madame Adele, but a taste of Nanami's scorn and the distinguished Madame left almost as soon as she arrived, claiming that she couldn't work around persons who did not show the utmost sensitivity to her craft.
Mrs. St-John found both parties in this matter exasperating; she had had no great confidence in Madame Adele's celebrated abilities, but Nanami's attitude was grating, bordering on an unattractive arrogance, and so while the headmistress sent out what enquiries she could, she saw no urgency in getting to the bottom of what was proving an expensive case.
Dossie watched the entire charade. She was beginning to think that Nanami's laugh was not quite so rich and scornful as she'd thought. It was becoming hollow - something was eating it out from the inside.
Dossie, walking to the squash court one day, passed by something rather strange on the ground - a cat collar, quite a nice one, velvet studded with rhinestones, lying open on the path. The groundskeeper kept cats, though Dossie wouldn't have thought such a fashionable thing would be to his taste. Taking no further notice, she kept on her way - but she heard a jingling behind her, and turned to see.
Nanami had picked up the collar, and stood staring off to the side of the path. To Dossie's utmost surprise, Nanami put the collar around her own neck - and had it really been large enough? - and did the buckle up. Then she tossed her hair so it fell around the collar in waves.
Dossie stared.
Nanami turned, and caught her eye.
They stood locked for a long moment, Dossie's heart hammering in her chest. Then, Nanami tore the collar off with a furious little huff and threw it aside. She marched past Dossie, who felt herself to be invisible again. But just for a moment, Nanami had seen her. And she had seen Nanami. She had seen that whatever charmed thing that collar had been, Nanami hadn't found it funny at all.
That night she lay awake and listened, the collar clutched in her hand. Most of Nanami's strange things disappeared soon after they'd come - but they'd been lingering longer and longer. Dossie was a little frightened of the collar - she wanted it to disappear just as much as she wanted to feel out what it was, and where other things like it might be.
There was something out in the grounds that she felt - something that sparkled like the collar's diamante points - or, at any rate, that was the nearest way she could think of it.
Dossie got up, and slipped past the sleeping second-formers, and went out into the moonlit grounds.
It was very dark. She conjured a little bit of light. She knew she might be seen - but if she was, well, perhaps she could lead Miss Rivers to the shining thing she could feel, and if not, perhaps she'd find it on her own.
The light, bobbing along the ground to stop her stumbling into things, didn't keep her from stumbling into the bars of the climbing frame. "Ow," said Dossie, lifting her ball of light and adding to its strength.
Nanami lay underneath the climbing frame. "Oh!" said Dossie, alarmed, but between that and the next breath she drew to cry for help, Nanami stirred and sat up. "Oh," said Dossie, the wind knocked out of her sails.
"Do you sleep here?" Dossie asked, seeing that the ground was worn bare in the shape of a prone girl.
"Sometimes," Nanami said. She drew her knees up to her chest. "Tonight I can't sleep at all."
"Maybe you should come back to the dorms," Dossie said cautiously.
"No, I don't think so," Nanami said.
"Why?"
Nanami raised a scornful eyebrow. There was a pause, Nanami disdainful and Dossie abashed. But the silence defeated Nanami.
"I can't," she said at last, quite matter-of-factly. "The roses won't let me."
"The roses?" Dossie marvelled.
She ducked under a bar - Nanami hissed - and stepped up beside the older girl. "What roses?"
Nanami pointed at the bars. They were covered with roses. The climbing frame was a cage, green where the light hit it, shading into spiky black. Now that Dossie saw them, she could smell them. They covered every way out, and sharp thorns poked out wickedly between the leaves. But Dossie also knew they weren't there.
"You must be a witch," Dossie said, baffled.
"Of course I'm not!" said Nanami.
"Well, I am," said Dossie boldly. "Maybe I can get you out of here."
Nanami snorted.
"Think," said Dossie. "Maybe you brought something with you from your other world, something smaller than a charm, something light and little, something under your skin…" She could feel her words pressing on something. "Something you feel with," she added, inspired. "Like that story of the Snow Queen you were telling, about the prince with ice in his heart."
"I don't want to hear about princes," Nanami said, her voice muffled by her knees.
Dossie was annoyed, because she'd felt something push back against that idea.
"Maybe you shouldn't talk about them so much," she said, and saw a tear slide down Nanami's face.
"Something you see with," she said, continuing with that idea.
Nanami reached up suddenly and tore something off her face that wasn't there. A pair of plain, round spectacles with thin frames went bouncing off into the shadows. "Like that," Dossie said, feeling that this had been very important indeed. The roses began to fade, and night crept in around them, and the stars shone through.
"Nothing's happened," Nanami said, and when Dossie squinted very carefully, barely looking at the bars at all, she could see that the roses were still there. Then she un-squinted, and stared the bars back into sight just as hard.
"Yes, it has," Dossie said. She went over to where the spectacles glinted. She hesitated for just a moment - but they weren't real spectacles, in the way that her foot and her slipper were real, and so, surely, her foot and her slipper should win over glass that would cut her in the ordinary way of things. She stamped down on the spectacles, and didn't feel anything.
Nanami laughed a shrill but watery laugh. "Good," she said. Dossie knew she could still see roses.
"They're not there," Dossie said, as firmly as if she were talking to a bad dog, not a fourth-former. "You have to trust me, and I'll make it so. You destroyed the charm-holder -" though in truth she was not sure there had been anything physical to destroy -"so it's just you. Stop believing in roses."
Nanami sneered.
"I suppose you never believed in roses," she said. "Most people don't appreciate things like nobility and purity - true love and true sacrifice and true worth."
"I do," Dossie said.
Nanami stared at her.
Dossie felt quite overwhelmed. "I know," she said, a bit wildly. "My cousins told me. I'll swear to you. Blood brothers. You prick your finger, and I'll prick mine, and we touch fingers, and that seals it. I wouldn't lie to you, not with something like that."
Nanami smiled quite a wicked smile, and pressed her finger into the thorn of a rose, and held it up so that Dossie could see the blood welling up. She didn't need to say: see?
"Go on," she said.
If Nanami had thought she'd have to prick her finger with a rose that didn't exist so that she could swear that the rose didn't exist - well, she was wrong. Dossie had a little pocket-knife and she took that out instead. She swallowed. "You do it," she said, holding the knife out to Nanami and closing her eyes. There was a sharp pain. "There," she said. "Now, there, see. Now you have to believe me."
"Because you're my sister by blood?" Nanami jeered. She had got to her feet to take the pocket-knife, and now Dossie had to tilt her head up to speak to her.
"Yes, I suppose," Dossie said. She hadn't quite meant it like that, but it didn't matter. "Now come on," she said, and gave Nanami a hard pull. She caught Nanami off balance, as she'd planned, and just like that, they were through and out the other side.
The shining thing was gone. The spectacles were gone. The roses were gone. Only Nanami remained.
Nanami raised her hand as if she wanted to slap Dossie, but lowered it again. Her finger wasn't bleeding any more. Dossie's still was.
"I should be in bed," Dossie blurted. There didn't seem to be anything else to say.
"I will tuck you in," said Nanami.
"Oh!" said Dossie, alarmed. "You don't have to!"
"But that's what sisters do," said Nanami. "Adopted and by blood - and adopted by blood! Come on."
Dossie bit her lip. She felt that she had leapt into something completely unknown. It was too late to explain about blood oaths properly - surely? Because she wasn't sure she wanted to try.
And when Nanami tucked her in and kissed her on the forehead, she wasn't sure her thoughts were sisterly at all.