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How in the world—
I shook my head but slipped the pen into my pocket. I had thought that pen lived in Holmes’ pocket, so how it ended up in my bedroom was anyone’s guess. I would have to remind him to stay out of my room.
Not that the intrusion mattered overmuch—or truly qualified as an intrusion. After so many years of sharing rooms, his things blended into mine and frequently became ours. Packing only my things had been comically difficult a handful of times when preparing for my marriage.
Then the next drawer found one of his indices instead of the journal I sought. A sigh tossed the tome onto my bed and started searching in earnest. One item could be carelessness, but two suggested a prank. Had he moved anything else?
Two manuscripts, a pen, another journal, and three novels had vanished from their places, replaced with visually similar items from both the sitting room and his bedroom. They all piled onto my bed, where a strange shape revealed the settee pillow under the coverlet. I could not quite hide my amusement. Exchanging belongings constituted one of his milder pranks, but I would have to return fire. If the boredom currently pacing his bedroom wanted a prank war, I could oblige.
Not now, however. I had come up here to retrieve a book and a thicker blanket, and while the book was among the missing, that blanket made an easy carrysack for the many things I now needed to take back downstairs. Several minutes carefully piled everything in and folded the corners, and a moment’s debate skipped the cane in favor of the banister.
“Watson?”
Which Holmes must have heard. Rhythmic pacing paused, then footsteps hurried out of his bedroom just in time to watch me slip.
“Watson!”
He darted up the stairs so quickly that Nicolas would have accused him of taking the fast route, but I caught myself on the banister and waved him off.
“I’m fine.”
He ignored me, naturally, though he did not insert himself between me and the banister as I had half expected. The barest moment confirmed my balance before he stole the blanket instead. I merely rolled my eyes as he darted down the stairs.
“Leave the blanket on the settee, please.”
A quiet harrumph protested the lack of reaction, but whatever retort he intended to voice died when he opened the “bag.” Heavy silence reigned for several seconds before he crossed the sitting room once more to peer at me around the doorframe.
“Why are my things in your room?”
“You tell me.” I cleared another stair. “I expected you to wait longer than a month before repeating a prank. Unless you were hoping I would repeat my own?”
He quickly shook his head, though a confused frown ignored the ribbing. He had hated that prank—only partly because Mrs. Hudson had decided to help me—but something about my reply had clearly changed some base deduction. I finally reached the landing when he found the words.
“Then why were your things in my room?”
My…what now? I glanced at him in silent question, but he shook his head without reply, a gesture drawing my attention to the second pile on the settee. The books, manuscripts, and journals stacked neatly on the cushion, with my pen and a few other things I had not yet missed on the table beside them. I had expected him to make me find them myself.
I had also expected him to have had a hand in hiding them, however, but his evident confusion denied that. Mrs. Hudson would not have moved our things around, and even the sitting room had not hosted a visitor in over a week.
So then who had done this?
And why did several things from his wardrobe decorate the sitting room bookshelf?
“Watson?”
“You didn’t exchange our things?”
He shook his head. “I started going through my room when I noticed a book out of place. Nothing is missing, but if you did not switch anything, then…”
Wait. Switch. The word struck a memory, and I tuned out the rest of his sentence to follow the trail. Nicolas and I had discussed a magical involved with “switching” once, which I recalled far more clearly than the passing meeting a few years later.
And the amulet on the mantle pulsed with the muted glow of a hidden magical inside Nicolas’ protective boundary.
“Watson?”
I waved off the question in a silent request to let me think. That had been in the first years of our friendship, only a year or two after I had first visited him at the Pole, so I had still lived with my parents. Several seconds backtracked through the memory until I could picture Nicolas sitting in my bedroom, shimmering magic over the door ensuring my parents did not hear me with a midnight visitor, then walked forward until a name came to mind.
“Morgana?”
Gentle, carefree laughter carried from the corner, where a previously empty wall shivered then fell away to reveal the pointed hat and vibrant flowing gown of a witch. The Switch Witch, to be precise. A young woman of about twenty-five peered at me from beneath the hat, her kind expression doing nothing to taper the magic swirling around her. With her concealment lifted, my amulet’s warning finally grew more defined.
“Faster than I gave you credit for,” she told me, long strides almost gliding over the floor. “I suppose I gave myself away again?”
I smiled a greeting. “By picking rooms no one else could have entered,” I agreed as if she had not purposely left the clues. Morgana wanted to be discovered…eventually. “I did not connect everything until Holmes mentioned ‘switching,’ though. What brings you here?”
“Boredom.” Self-confident poise seated herself like royalty, though inherent grace still somehow conveyed a desire to flop onto our settee like Holmes at his most petulant. “The Pole is ramping up in preparation for Christmas, Jack is still on his rounds with Wind, and I will never go back to King Winter again. Bitter old man. So few know about me that I had barely anything to do on All Hallow’s, so…” She trailed off with a shrug. “I came here. Our paths have not crossed since you were a childing, and I have not yet met your friend.”
I could not stifle a laugh at the “mischief is my everything” hidden under that reply. Morgana would not have come to London if anyone in the magical realm had interested her, and she did not care about meeting a nonmagical human any more than the rest of the magical population did. She had seen an opportunity to prank me and confuse a human and jumped on it.
“It is good to see you again,” I replied honestly, claiming my chair to make Holmes take a seat in his own. “Holmes, Morgana is the Switch Witch. Her story revolves around All Hallow’s Eve and Samhain somehow, but aside from trading—or switching—one item for another, Nicolas knew very few details.”
“Some areas in the Americas observe a variant of the All Soul’s Day that started in Ireland,” Morgana supplied. “Children dress up to go guising as a way to acknowledge the family members lost to death, but they also acquire sweets as the evening goes on. Since parents never want the hyper munchkins to have even more energy, the little terrors keep some of the haul and put the rest out for me. I buy the sweets from them with an age-appropriate toy, and with the food other cultures leave on headstones, create a plentiful harvest in areas where food has been scarce the previous year.”
I grinned at the additional information. “Were you able to track down your original myth?”
Nicolas had known only that her “duties” revolved around All Hallow’s Eve, and our passing introduction so many years ago had lasted barely five minutes. I had always wondered if All Saint’s Day, Samhain, and the harvest festivals had all taken pieces of her original myth, but even Nicolas had not remembered anything the first time I had asked. If she had located the old tale, however…
She shook her head in silent negative. “Most cultures combine a ‘gratitude for harvest’ holiday with ‘remembering the dead’ at the end of October, but the history is so piecemeal, even Mr. Kringle doesn’t know much. He’s the one that pointed out the similarities between cultures, though, so he might find more eventually.”
With any luck. While he and Jack traveled the furthest, Jack Frost spent most of his journey outside of the population centers. Nicolas would have the greatest opportunity to run across more information, but one night a year—a large portion of which he spent in my sitting room—did not provide very much time to look. I strongly suspected that he used scattered minutes to copy promising library books instead of truly searching on his travels.
Not that I saw a reason to voice the distinction. Holmes asked a question that led into some more magical history, and the afternoon I had intended to waste dozing on the settee became an interesting conversation with a unique perspective. Morgana wandered areas Nicolas did not always explore in depth, after all. I thoroughly enjoyed her visit.
As did Holmes, if his many questions meant anything. I caught him thinking deeply several times over the next week, but not until our next case on the continent, when I caught him perusing our host’s extensive library, did I realize just what he had sought that day.
If a scribbled packet of notes rode the next mail route of the Polar Line, well, maybe his efforts would help Morgana discover more of her history.