A single step carried Alexandra away from the Invisible Bridge, through the woods, and past the Confederation Regiment to Charmbridge Academy.

She paused for a moment on the front steps, long enough to wipe the tears from her eyes.

Not all the Regimental Officers had mustered on the other side of the woods to fight the MACUSA. There were uniformed wizards on Charmbridge's lawn, along with a few grounded hippogriffs, who were agitated by the battle that was loud and visible even through the trees. ROC wizards wounded from the earlier skirmish in the air were gathering near the school's entrance, while the dead lay scattered on the ground.

Someone yelled. One of the officers threw a hex at her. Alexandra wanted to turn and fight them all. But that would be foolish, and it wasn't why she was here. She conjured something black and angry to match her thoughts, a cloud of stinging flies that buzzed and swarmed around the hippogriffs. She hoped it drove them mad. She hoped they mauled their handlers.

She leaped to Charmbridge's still-open front doors and ran through them. A curse shattered a door behind her.

Follow me, she thought. Follow me and see what happens.

They'd killed Innocence. Like they'd killed Dylan, and Shen, and Mrs. Wilborough and Mr. Mudd and so very many others.

The hallways were empty. The portraits had been stripped off the walls. No students, or teachers, or elves. Not even Clockworks were in sight. Alexandra had never imagined Charmbridge could be so empty and silent.

On an impulse, she took two steps which carried her all the way to the administrative offices. Here was where she had been sent more times than she could count to see the Dean. The front office was always empty—Charmbridge had never actually needed an office staff. Except for the life-sized portrait that still hung there, scowling disapprovingly down at her.

"Hello, Miss Marmsley," Alexandra said.

"You are all supposed to evacuate," Miss Marmsley said. She sat in the chair just like the real Miss Marmsley had sat for her portrait, many, many years ago, as if she were still alive and the portrait were fresh.

"Dean Grimm wanted to take you with her," Alexandra said.

"I belong with the school. I have always hung here."

"Then you'll perish with the school," Alexandra said.

From the front entrance came a banging sound, and voices.

"You should leave, Miss Quick. It's not safe for you here," Miss Marmsley said.

She was just a portrait. She was a copy of the original, frozen in time and unable to learn or change or feel anything that the original Miss Marmsley hadn't felt. She wasn't really a person. A portrait was little more than a Clockwork with a personality. Still, Alexandra couldn't help feeling that this was one more life she couldn't save, and she felt bad about it.

"Good-bye, Miss Marmsley," she said.

She exited the office and saw uniformed wizards down the far end of the hallway. She conjured thick acidic clouds to block herself from view, and ran down a cross-corridor where she knew there was a stairwell leading to the basement.

She found a procession of Clockworks in the main basement, carrying books, bottles, chests and trunks, furniture, carpets, picture frames, and sheafs of paper and parchment. Apparently they had been set to work before the evacuation gathering all the salvageable materials and equipment in the school. It was a pointless exercise.

Alexandra watched a chrome Clockwork march past her without registering her presence. It was as mindless as a Doomguard, but much less dangerous.

I can make them dangerous, she thought, hearing a noise from upstairs.

Lucilla and Drucilla had taught her artificing, and Clockworks were just artifacts. In some ways, they were very complicated. In other ways, they were very simple constructs, mechanical golems animated with no brains.

She tested an enchantment spell on the nearest one. It dropped what it was carrying and halted, half bent-over, its arms swinging loosely, awaiting new instructions.

It would take time and care to enchant a Clockwork properly. But she could command them all, crudely. It wouldn't stick, it would be easy to undo. But she had done it when she was a sixth-grader, and she knew so much more now.

Raising her wand, she composed a verse:

"Mindless works of wires and gears,
Eyeless faces with no ears,
Bodies without heart or soul,
You're just things: do as you're told.
You have no feelings; I'll give you mine.
Let all my anger now be thine.
Rise, my Clockwork army, go,
Leave me in this floor below.
Rush upstairs, and who doesn't flee—"

She swept her wand in an arc. Sparks flew from it, dozens of them, each one zipping through the air to settle on a Clockwork and make it spasm, drop what it was carrying, and grind to a halt. Her face turned into something frightening reflected in the empty gleaming faces of a hundred Clockworks, and she finished her verse:

"Kill every living thing you see."

As one, the Clockworks jerked stiffly erect, turned around, and went running upstairs with clanking steps.

They weren't Doomguards. They wouldn't be much of a threat to wizards. But there were a lot of them. They'd scared her and almost killed her when she was eleven. She hoped they scared the Regimental Officers.

She knew she wasn't just hoping the Clockworks would scare them.

In front of her was a stairwell going down. Behind her was the corridor the Clockworks had filled with junk—books, furniture, pictures, jars and cauldrons and pots and sacks.

Alexandra pointed her wand, and conjured Fiendfyre. It roared from the end of her wand in a blossoming orange explosion of stag antlers and boar tusks and bear claws and snake fangs and cock talons, touching and igniting everything they swept over. In seconds the corridor was an inferno, completely impassible, and the Fiendfyre was rushing up the stairs.

Let the Deathies chase her now, she thought.

She calmly descended the steps to the lower basements. She kept going past the first level, where the groundskeeper's office was, and then wound her way through the second, with its labyrinthine passages that she once found difficult and scary to navigate. Usually elves would stop students who got this far. Now there were no elves. Alexandra was wary of Boggarts or other things that might have infiltrated these lowest levels of the Charmbridge basements, the levels even most of the teachers didn't know about, but she encountered nothing before she reached a cavern that was hewn roughly out of subterranean rock, more ancient than Charmbridge. Its stone clay floor was plain and not obviously sinister, but all the memories, old and recent, that had been burning inside her now felt like fire in her guts.

This was where she and Maximilian had fought Darla Dearborn and John Manuelito. It was where she'd first given an obol to Em and compelled the poor elf to open the gateway to the Lands Below. She could see now what she'd been unable to see then, an ominous dark blue crack in the world. The Confederation had sealed away the Lands Below, but they couldn't make the World Away disappear.

"What are you going to do, Starshine?" asked Ben Journey.

Alexandra turned to face Journey's ghost one more time. Ghosts were much like portraits, perpetually trapped in a single moment in time—in a ghost's case, the moment of their death—and Ben Journey would still look like a friendly long-haired hippie in a leather jacket if not for the bleeding bullet wound in his chest. But his expression was sad and frightened.

"You already know," Alexandra said. "I'm going to destroy Charmbridge."

Journey nodded up at the ceiling. "Haven't you already done that? Fiendfyre? Merlin's teeth, Starshine, Fiendfyre is outlawed in all civilized countries."

"Uh huh. So are Unforgivable Curses and murdering children. And yet." She shook her head. "We both know that destroying the building isn't enough. I'm sure the septagon was built for a reason. It probably has something to do with containing what lies beneath. If Anna were here she might be able to explain the geomancy behind it. There are only a few places I've seen cracks as big as Charmbridge's. Chicago. New Amsterdam. The Ozarks. This was once a really powerful place, and the Confederation made a deal to close it."

"The Indians knew how to deal with the critters who came from the Lands Below," Journey said. "They just accepted them as part of the magical world. It might have been a more dangerous world, but they didn't treat the wizard world as separate."

"Is that why you joined the Thorn Circle? Because you believed we should go back to the good old days, when monsters were free to roam the world and there wasn't any magical secrecy?"

"I believed a lot of things," Journey sighed. "I was young and idealistic and I didn't even know all the evils your father suspected the Confederation was hiding."

"Whatever. It's time for me to set it all free."

"What do you mean by that?"

"I don't have an obol to open the Lands Below. But I can open the World Away."

"Is that how you plan to get out of here?" Journey asked. "Because you sure aren't leaving through the stairs back up."

"Maybe I'll get out of here, maybe I won't," Alexandra said. "That depends on whether I can actually talk to Powers."

"What are you going on about, Starshine?"

"Have I told you that I hate being called Starshine? I'm pretty sure I have." Alexandra pointed her wand at the ghost. "I don't suppose you'd enlighten me about this mess I supposedly made on the other side? Is it to do with my geas, or opening up the Lands Below, or what?"

Ben Journey's face was hollow and gray. "I don't know what you did, Starshine. Maybe you need to go to the Lands Beyond and fix it."

"Right. I'll think about that, after I do what I need to do here. In the meantime, I told you to STOP CALLING ME STARSHINE!" She slashed an 'X' in the air and said, "Spiritu Anathema!" and Benedict Journey screamed as the Banishing Spell hurled him to the Lands Beyond.

"Maybe ask around while you're there and tell me something useful next time," she said, as he dissipated out of sight.

She turned back to the ancient clay floor. Not far from here, the Mors Mortis Society had once held its meetings. Maybe that had been the start of everything. It had been where she'd learned the truth about Max, and where Darla had been turned Dark by John Manuelito.

That wasn't the start of everything, though, she thought. Even her prophecy hadn't been the start of everything. It had started long before she was born. Whatever had happened between her father and Elias Hucksteen had begun long ago. And the Deathly Regiment had begun long before that.

Remembering the Mors Mortis Society reminded her of their "Brazier of Visions"; probably not Mayan at all like John Manuelito and Sue Fox had claimed, but it had caused visions. She had seen flying monsters and four-legged beasts.

She closed her eyes and saw the blue crack in the world with her Witch's Sight even through her eyelids. She let it tear through the world, and didn't look to see what happened around her as the World Away opened up beneath Charmbridge. Keeping her eyes closed, she pushed harder and reached higher. She wanted to split the world open, and she wanted it to reach the sky.

It was Typhon who'd told her that even Powers noticed when the World Away was opened. She'd met the Most Deathly Power in the Lands Beyond, and when she and the Alexandra Committee had summoned the Parliament of Stars, they had answered. It was ridiculous to think a group of ninth-graders could summon Powers. Yet she had. She had attracted Typhon's attention when she walked into the World Away. She had called Thunderbirds.

She didn't know if it was as simple as opening cracks in the world, or if there was some reason she was able to get Powers to notice her, but now she hoped she wasn't delusional or mad. With her eyes still closed, she turned her face upwards, where high above, through the ground and Charmbridge's burning floors and the rainclouds, the sky was still bright. She raised her hickory wand in both hands.

In preparing for this, she'd tried composing rhymes, like the one she'd used to call upon the Stars Above, but nothing sounded right. Her "doggerel verse" had done so much more than her teachers told her it could, but she thought this called for a different kind of verse.

She still remembered the words she'd heard years ago, and now she took them, changed them, and used them, and hoped they would be heard, not from the Lands Below, but from where she stood.

"Father sun,
Mother moon,
Brother wind,
Your daughters miss you,
Your sisters miss you.
They fell through a crack,
Those lonely and forgotten ones.
"

Her eyes were still closed. She felt a stir of wind. Was it getting brighter?

"Where is the sun? Do you hear me?
Where is the moon? Do you hear me?
Where is the wind? Do you hear me?
I am here.
I speak for the lonely and forgotten ones.
"

It was brighter. She felt her hair blowing in a wind that shouldn't be possible in a basement.

"Father Sun," she said. "Brother Wind."

YOU ARE NOT MY DAUGHTER.

Suddenly it was bright, so very bright that her eyes hurt even when she held them closed. She didn't dare open them. She was sure she would be blinded. She felt her feet leave the ground as she was lifted into the air. Wind howled around her so she could hear nothing else—nothing except a voice that pierced the howling wind clearly.

YOU ARE A HUMAN GIRL.

"Yes," Alexandra said. "I—"

SO RUDE. SO AUDACIOUS.

"I know where your daughters are!" Alexandra shouted. There was a tension in the wind holding her aloft, and a sudden increase in the intensity of the light threatening to burn through her eyelids.

She lies.

This was a different voice, a hiss that surrounded her and filled the air.

Mortals lie.
Mortal girl.
I will throw her back.
I will throw her on the rocks.

"Wait!" Alexandra said, but she was spinning, head over heels and around and around. She could barely hold onto her wand.

WAIT.

Alexandra thought the first voice was echoing her, possibly mocking her, but the spinning and buffeting ceased momentarily. She gulped for air, as it had almost been sucked out of her lungs. And she felt her torn shirt flapping open at the shoulder, and sudden heat there, reminding her of her close encounter with dragon fire not long ago.

RAVEN.

Brother Raven.

Even tattooed on her shoulder, Charlie had saved her.

"Yes!" she said. "My raven! A wise raven, who found your daughters!"

WHERE ARE MY DAUGHTERS?

"They fell through a crack," Alexandra said. "There's no sun, and no moon, and no wind, and nobody brings them pollen or even a drop of water."

The first voice now spoke with grief that could fill the sky.

WHERE ARE MY DAUGHTERS?

"In the Lands Below," Alexandra said. "They said you would free them. They said you would crack the earth and split the sky."

YES. I WILL CRACK THE EARTH AND SPLIT THE SKY.

The wind released her and Alexandra tumbled to the ground. She felt cold hard clay beneath her. Searing heat shone down on her, and the earth shook.

WHERE ARE MY DAUGHTERS?

Alexandra squeezed her eyes shut, and considered just curling up there on the clay floor, but she had called upon the Sun, and the Power of the Sun would not be denied. If anything happened to Charlie, she and Charlie would perish together. She released her familiar. Charlie cawed and Alexandra forced her eyes open, knowing if Charlie could bear the light, she had to as well. Charlie was a black silhouette and the only thing she could see other than the white-hot brilliance around her.

"In the Lands Below," she said. "Your daughters are there, lonely and forgotten, and Charlie is my raven. Open the way, and Charlie will lead you to them. Crack the earth and split the sky so that Charlie can return to me, oh Sun."

I WILL CRACK THE EARTH AND SPLIT THE SKY, AND ALL THE LANDS BELOW WILL OPEN TO ME.

Alexandra's mouth curled into a grimace, as she squinted against the light and squeezed tears from her eyes.

"Good."


Let Sonja surrender to her fate; Alexandra would not be commanded by the Stars Above. She couldn't command Powers, but she could call them. She had acted on intuition, because it felt right, and that seemed to be the best and only way to deal with Powers.

After that came only acceptance, and waiting, and doubting her decision to send Charlie into the Lands Below.

Charlie was her familiar, her pretty, clever bird, but still just a raven. But here at the mouth of the Lands Below, where the world was cracked and the World Away was just on the other side, with the Sun above and Charmbridge Academy burning, Alexandra felt like she herself was something more than the mortal girl the Powers had so dismissively called her. Perhaps she was Troublesome. And Charlie was Brother Raven, and time in the Lands Below was not the same as it was here. She knew that from her trip with Maximilian.

It was all feelings and conjecture, like all dealings with Powers. Her friends would say foolishness. Her father, her aunts, her sisters, they would say madness.

The Sun and the Wind did not speak to her. She had struggled to her feet, because she would not remain on her hands and knees, even before Powers, but the light and the wind both burned her. Her tears had run dry, and she swayed on her feet, and prayed that Charlie would return soon. That Charlie would return. That the battle outside hadn't ended in defeat, that the Confederation had not destroyed the MACUSA, that her friends were all safe on the other side of the valley. That her father was still alive, and Julia and Constance weren't dead.

"Troublesome vexes," she whispered. "Troublesome woes."

"Troublesome!"

The voice that echoed her words was Charlie's. Alexandra opened her eyes, to see the raven once more the only shape her seared vision could make out, and she laughed and held out her hands, and Charlie landed on them.

"Charlie," she said, and kissed the top of the raven's head. "My clever, pretty, wise bird."

"Alexandra," said Charlie. Maybe it was her imagination, but Charlie sounded older.

The earth shook. Alexandra had thought the light was blinding before, but now it shone down with even greater intensity, so that she couldn't even see Charlie in front of her. She wanted Charlie to return to her shoulder, but Charlie objected, and she thought if they were going to perish together, she didn't want Charlie to be a tattoo, so she cradled the raven in her arms and lowered her head, as if her hair could shield her familiar from the power of the Sun.

The earth cracked. The clay floor and the stone walls and ceiling around her cracked apart. The light of the Sun still shone down on her, right through the earth, but it no longer filled the universe and she was standing back in the world proper, but the ground trembled as if from an earthquake. She backed away quickly as the clay turned smoky and black, and by the time she had pressed herself against the edge of the cavern it was gone, replaced by a black pit leading down, down, into the Lands Below, a black pit she knew led to a great pool of water, underground lakes and rivers, and—

The sky split, like a tear in the world, like the cracks she opened to the World Away, but if she opened cracks, this was a gaping chasm, a great, yawning canyon and through it she could see the entire Lands Below as if she were looking down with the eyes of the Sun or the Stars Above, seeing everything, its cracked red landscape, its cliffs and buttes and dry riverbeds, its lifeless plains and deserts, and the hunting grounds of the Lagaru, the ceilings where vast colonies of bat-like flying things swarmed in multitudes.

The vision was impossible and Alexandra didn't know how her eyes could see with such a perspective, but she saw from the Thorn Circle's magically-raised bailey to the far end of the Lands Below, where the Generous Ones huddled in their dark canyons around the Gift Place. Alexandra wished she could reach out and smite them. She was tempted to ask the Sun for a boon, but she was sure the Sun would not hear her petty plea.

"Did you find them, Charlie?" she whispered to her raven. "Did you find the corn maidens?"

As if in answer, she heard a sing-song chant, as the world continued to shake and the sky continued to open up above her even as the Lands Below opened up below her. She could see daylight now, not just the burning Sun glaring down at her through the earth, but naked sky. She could also see trees and flying creatures and two wizard armies exchanging spells. All of them were thrown into disarray by the sudden cracking of the earth between the burning seven-sided building and the Invisible Bridge. Trees shook and fell, men were thrown off their feet, hippogriffs and dragons flew in circles, flapping erratically, blinded by the sudden glare of the sun.

Into the chaos and confusion, a column of brown-skinned women emerged, walking out of the Lands Below. Despite no longer being rooted in the ground and sheathed like plants in withered husks, Alexandra recognized the corn maidens, whom she and Maximilian had discovered years ago. They were full-sized now, nearly as tall as her, and beautiful, and naked.

They were singing an eerie chant. Alexandra couldn't understand the words, but it was less mournful than when she had met them, lonely and abandoned in the Lands Below. They raised their hands towards the sun.

The Confederation Officers nearest them stared, and then simply stopped fighting. Alexandra thought maybe they'd been distracted by a sudden procession of naked women appearing in their midst, but the MACUSA wizards were still throwing curses at them, so surely not. Indeed, the curses themselves dissipated, as if even they were entranced by the corn maidens. The maidens kept walking through the battlefield, and the nearest MACUSA wizards also seemed to fall under their spell.

Alexandra, still standing on the other side of the forest, with the unnatural vision she'd been gifted in the moment that the Sun had cracked the earth and split the sky, was not entranced, and so she saw the massive golden beasts that emerged from the Lands Below next.

An underwater panther as large as the one she had faced off Eerie Island leaped into the air with a roar, spitting flames, and sank its teeth into the neck of a dragon that was flying just above the treetops. The two beasts both fell back to the ground and smashed trees around them as they thrashed about. Five more underwater panthers, only slightly smaller than the first one, followed and roared challenges. One snapped a hippogriff out of the air as if it were a passing fly—the hippogriff and its rider both disappeared. The dragons went into a frenzy; any riders who weren't able to leap free or Apparate were crushed as dragons and underwater panthers flew at each other in a flurry of claws and fangs and jets of flame, crashing to the ground and flattening the forest around them.

Alexandra watched with awe and horror as both wizard armies scattered in panic. The corn maidens ran from the panthers and dragons, disappearing into the deeper woods around Charmbridge. Large bat-winged things came flapping out of the rift in the earth, and immediately disappeared back into the Lands Below, uttering shrill screeches that were almost above Alexandra's ability to hear. She thought she saw a couple of small figures hopping off into the woods in the opposite direction from the battling monsters. The hippogriffs and remaining wizards on brooms streamed away in all directions.

Alexandra wanted Charlie back on her skin. Charlie was reluctant, but the chaos and violence around them, the mythic scene in which they were but minor figures, had unnerved even the raven. Alexandra didn't have to pull her shirt away, as it still hung loose from her shoulder with torn edges revealing her bare shoulder. Once Charlie was a tattoo again, she took a step with her Seven-League Boots back to the Invisible Bridge.

The Charmbridge Bus had appeared from somewhere, but it wasn't nearly large enough to carry all the students. It looked as if the teachers were taking over the mountainside on the other side of the bridge, closing off the highway, diverting any Muggle traffic who knows where. There was still skirmishing between MACUSA and Confederation forces, but the Confederation seemed to be in full retreat, while the MACUSA were in too much disarray to pursue them.

Alexandra looked back, and saw flames rising high above the trees in a glorious, terrible conflagration, clawing and biting at the air. Fiendfyre was still consuming Charmbridge Academy, but it was the Sun who had cracked the earth and split the sky and forever broken the seal to the Lands Below. She looked upward, but the sun looked like its normal self, and indeed, was beginning to hide again behind reforming dark clouds.

She could not shake the sense of being like a tiny detail in one of those paintings she'd seen once by the weird medieval guy who painted deranged, hellish scenes full of monsters and devils and deformed people, in landscapes out of a nightmare with perspectives and angles that didn't make sense. She had unleashed all of this, and had no control over what happened next. Perhaps she had only ever imagined she had any control over anything.

Thunder rumbled in the sky, and the rain, which had tapered off before, began beating down again. Dragons and underwater panthers continued to roar and scream and shake the forest as they battled. Alexandra wondered if Thunderbirds would join the fray.

She set one foot on the Invisible Bridge, not entirely certain it was still there. It was. She walked across the bridge to join the students and teachers on the other side.


It wasn't clear to anyone who'd won the battle. Everyone was fleeing the woods and meadows around Charmbridge, through a downpour that was now so heavy that Alexandra could barely recognize faces. They still heard fearsome screams and roars and splintering trees, and Charmbridge continued to burn brightly.

MACUSA and Mojakai wizards arrived on the other side of the valley, fleeing the chaos and regrouping. MACUSA officers began conjuring tents, while the Majokai cast a spell that repelled rain from the impromptu refugee camp.

Ms. Shirtliffe found Alexandra standing on the bluff in front of the Charmbridge bus, staring at the blaze, almost a mile away through the downpour.

"This was the Thorn Circle's doing?" Shirtliffe asked.

Alexandra didn't look at her. "Who else?"

"I didn't see your father make an appearance. In fact, I never saw anyone but you."

"Maybe I did it all by myself," Alexandra said.

Ms. Shirtliffe grimaced as a dragon rose above the trees, on a pair of battered, shredded wings, and then was pulled down by two golden panthers.

"We're going to try to get everyone home, as best we can," Shirtliffe said. "I hope the MACUSA will take on the task of keeping creatures on that side of the valley. Supposedly, underwater panthers stay near their underwater lairs. But I doubt we can stop them if they decide to roam."

Alexandra doubted that too.

"So what is the Thorn Circle going to do now?" Shirtliffe asked.

"If I knew, I couldn't tell you," Alexandra said. "What are you going to do now?"

"After getting everyone home?" The teacher shrugged. "I was once a Witch-Colonel. Maybe the MACUSA will at least make me an NCO."

Alexandra nodded. "Better late than never, Ms. Shirtliffe."

She went looking for David and the Pritchards.


Alexandra didn't have to walk very far down the road. MACUSA wizards had conjured a medical tent right in the middle of the highway. Although the Majokai's spell kept rain off the growing, makeshift camp, thunderclouds had turned the sky dark, and the pounding of the rain in the wooded hillsides on either side of the highway drowned out conversations.

A pair of elves stood outside the white tent with the attitude of watchguards, though Alexandra didn't know what they were guarding against. They eyed the passing students and officers, and the wounded wizards in MACUSA Regimental uniforms who were being carried or floated into the tent. Their eyes widened when they saw Alexandra. Neither one tried to stop her from entering.

The medical tent was larger on the inside than the outside and already looked like a cross between a field hospital and the Charmbridge infirmary. Mrs. Murphy and half a dozen other Healers were busy. Elves bustled everywhere, carrying bandages and potions and moving beds. Alexandra was relieved to see no Charmbridge students among the casualties.

Except Constance. She lay in a cot near some of the most grievously wounded of the MACUSA wizards. An officer whose arms had been turned boneless, black, and gangrenous. Someone who looked like a hippogriff had taken off half his face. Alexandra smelled burnt flesh and an unpleasant mix of acid and rot. Somewhere, someone was trying to stifle a scream. This was a terrible place and she didn't want her friends to be forced to linger here, but of course it was exactly where Constance needed to be.

Constance's torso was wrapped in bandages, and her hair was as well, but while a blanket covered the lower half of her body, her shoulders and arms were bare. Forbearance and David sat on either side of her, and Sonja stood over them.

Forbearance's face was red and streaked with tears. Constance's eyes were closed, but tears ran down her cheeks as well. David's head was bowed. Sonja sniffled and wiped her nose. They all noted Alexandra's arrival, but no one said anything.

"Constance. Forbearance." Alexandra's voice came out dry and raspy. She thought she had shed all the tears she could, but her eyes stung once more. "I'm so sorry."

Could she have saved Innocence? She should have made sure the foolish girl went ahead of the older students like she was supposed to. Of course she was only dead because Alexandra had forced an evacuation of Charmbridge in the first place—

"I was so feared for Connie, I din't mind that girl like I was meant to," Forbearance said. Her shoulders shook. "I dunno what we'uns'll tell Ma 'n Pa. I ought ne'er go back—"

"Wasn't your fault," David said. "Wasn't anyone's fault, 'cept the Deathie who threw that curse."

Sonja was watching Alexandra with an expression of such wisdom and compassion that Alexandra wanted to slap her. Sonja shook her head, as if she knew what Alexandra was thinking.

An elf approached the little group, and said, "Students who wants to leave on Charmbridge bus should board soon, Mrs. Speaks says."

Everyone looked at each other. Then everyone looked at Sonja.

Sonja shook her head. "Not me."

"You oughter go, Sonja," Forbearance said. "I'm sure your folks will want to… I mean, that is… owin' to your…"

"I'm not going home," Sonja said, and now she looked both stubborn and sad.

Alexandra kept her voice low, though she wanted to shout. "You aren't seriously going back to the Ozarks, and…?"

Sonja shrugged. "We'll see about that." She sounded very unconvincing, Alexandra thought, for someone with an Inner Eye. "But I won't be going home. My parents…" She closed her eyes. "They're very traditional."

"Traditional?" Sonja had told Alexandra about her Old Colonial pureblood family on their trip to the Ozarks. But it hadn't occurred to Alexandra that Sonja's family were the sort of traditionalists who might kick out their pregnant teenage daughter.

Sonja sighed. "Not about this." She put a hand on her belly. "Well, yes, about this too. But I mean about… the Deathly Regiment." She opened her eyes. "Do you know what my father said when he found out about it?" Her face turned ugly. "He said, 'We could stand to reduce the Muggle population by a good deal more.'"

David looked up for the first time. "That's messed up," he said.

Sonja looked away. "Everyone in my family is still loyal to the Confederation. I felt like I was going crazy over the summer. I knew when I came to Charmbridge this year I wouldn't be returning home."

Forbearance cleared her throat, but seemed at a loss for words.

"You never told me any of that," Alexandra said.

Sonja shrugged. "It's just the way things are, and the way things were meant to be."

Alexandra bit her tongue, then looked around. "Um, has anyone seen Anna?"

"With her old man, ain't she?" David said. "Geming Chu's probably with the other MACUSA brass."

"Go find her, Alex," Forbearance said. "We'uns'd welcome more of our friends to… to sit with us." Her voice broke and she began crying again.

Alexandra walked outside. The Charmbridge bus was parked just down the road. At least a hundred students were lined up in front of the tiny orange schoolbus. Having ridden Charmbridge's "short bus" many times, Alexandra knew how large it was on the inside, but even it would be crowded carrying this many students at once.

It was difficult to make out people in the heavy rain. Alexandra looked skyward, but could not see any Thunderbirds in the lowering clouds. No more sounds echoed from across the valley. There was only a distant glow visible where Charmbridge had been blazing not long ago.

Someone in a JROC uniform was standing in front of the Invisible Bridge, as if guarding it. From what, Alexandra did not know. She doubted anyone would try to go back across, and no one was going to stop a dragon or an underwater panther if it decided to come across the bridge.

A few paces closer, and she recognized the broad-shouldered, stocky figure. She also realized there were a couple of elves standing on a rock she had once stood on to look down at the valley below.

"What are you doing, William?" she asked, raising her voice to be heard over the thunder and rain.

William Killmond turned to look at her. They were outside the range of the Majokai rain-warding spell, and water soaked him, plastering his blond hair to his head and running down his face.

"You should be getting on the bus," she said.

He shook his head.

"William," she said. "Don't your parents want to see you again?"

"They still think the wizard world is some kind of magic theme park," he said. "I haven't really explained the war and the Deathly Regiment to them."

"Maybe you should," Alexandra said.

"Maybe."

Alexandra sighed. "You won't bring her back this way. I'm pretty sure Innocence would tell you to go home."

"Yeah, well, Innocence was always sticking her nose where it didn't belong and being where she didn't belong. If she'd listened to me—" His voice choked.

Alexandra bowed her head. She didn't know what to say that wouldn't sound hypocritical.

"Alexandra Quick is right," said one of the elves. Both of them had been so silent that it was easy to forget they were there.

"All childrens should go home," said the other elf. "Charmbridge is no more. This is no more a safe place."

"Nowhere is a safe place until the Confederation is defeated," William said.

Something screeched in the woods, so uncomfortably close that it made all of them jump.

Maybe not even then, Alexandra thought. "You are all free now, right?" she asked the elves. They still flinched a little at the word, but it seemed more like a reflex. "What about you? Where will you go that's safe?"

"We doesn't know," said the first elf.

"Dean Grimm said she will help those who wants it find… employment," said the second elf, pronouncing the last word with obvious distaste.

"Lucky elveses will find a wizard household that needs them," said the first.

Alexandra frowned. Did that mean they would just enslave themselves to new owners? She was very conscious of the fact that she had done things she didn't really understand. She'd have to talk about it with David… later.

"Come with me and help me find Geming Chu, William," she said. "I think the elves can keep any idiots off the bridge, or warn everyone if something's coming." The elves nodded, and Alexandra conjured a pair of small umbrellas, which she handed to each of them.

While William might want to join the MACUSA Regiments, Alexandra was hoping Geming Chu and his officers would tell him he was too young. They made their way through the crowd. Most students had been herded off to the area near the bus, and the adults here were mostly MACUSA wizards. A bright flash of color in the rain marked the Majokai contingent in their brighter robes, and Alexandra heard drumming, the beats low and slow, casting some new ritual the nature of which she couldn't guess.

She almost ran into Seimei Kamo, tall and bedraggled in a yellow kimono beneath an overcoat made of scaly leather. He was uninjured but his eyes were wild and unfocused; for a moment he didn't even seem to recognize Alexandra. Then they narrowed and he frowned at her.

"You're here," he said. "Of course you are."

"Of course I am." Alexandra was glad her friends were back in the medical tent, except for William. She hoped Seimei wouldn't start making cracks about Mudbloods. But to her surprise, he hung his head and seemed spent with that last bit of belligerence.

"We lost as many here as we did at Mahomachi," he said. "At this rate there will be nothing left of us by the end of this war."

"I'm sorry," Alexandra said. "Is… is Tomo here?"

Seimei snorted and shook his head. "The other clan heads forbade her to come. As the sole surviving Matsuzaka, she has responsibilities, which do not include putting herself in any more unnecessary danger."

Alexandra was glad of that. She nodded to Seimei and continued towards what appeared to be the largest assembly of MACUSA officers, beneath a red pavilion with hastily-created pennants that hung limply in the rain.

"Sole surviving Matsuzaka?" William asked, once they were out of earshot of Seimei.

"Everyone's lost people, William. Some more than others." Alexandra let him mull over that, while she confronted two Chinese wizards with finely-worked hard black leather carapaces covering their chests and arms over long red robes. They backed away when someone spoke in Chinese behind them, and Alexandra found herself facing Geming Chu and half a dozen generals and other officials.

"Alexandra," said Mr. Chu. "Anna is not with you?"

Alexandra felt an icy needle of dread. "I thought she'd be with you."

"We were separated during the battle. Our entire Regiment came under attack by the Confederation Air Force, just before the earth and sky… erupted. Many are still making their way back across the valley. We have sent out rescue parties to retrieve the wounded and…" His face looked pale even in the rain.

"I'll help," Alexandra said.

"Perhaps you've helped enough already," said Mr. Dean, the man with the sea lion Patronus. "I'd like to debrief you on just what the Thorn Circle did here."

"Yeah, sure, let's debrief, after we find Anna," Alexandra said.

"I have a broom," said William, whom Alexandra had almost forgotten was by her side.

"Fine, join the search parties," Mr. Dean said, barely glancing at him.

Alexandra watched as William ran to get his broom, then unslung her pack, not to retrieve her broom, but a small silver bracelet with a charm on it: the Chinese character for raven.

Geming Chu and the others had turned away from her. They were discussing the golden cats, the burning Charmbridge building, and the path taken by the remains of the Confederation Air Force. Apparently the Enemy's daughter was no longer of much importance. Alexandra was fine with that. When she tried to cast a sympathy charm on her bracelet, nothing happened, and her dread deepened.

She was about to mount her own broom and join the search, when a black bird came flapping out of the sky. Several wizards tracked it with their wands, but nobody hexed it. It was a black owl, and as it descended to the ground, it transformed. With an agility Alexandra could only admire, Diana Grimm landed in a crouch, and slowly stood up.

"Ms. Grimm," said Geming Chu. "Did you find the Confederation Mage-General?"

"I did," she said. Her face seemed grimmer than usual, though it might have been the rain. "He was struck down, as you suspected, in that great aerial skirmish before the world split open. I found where he fell from the sky."

Some of Chu's retinue cheered at this, but Diana Grimm still looked as grim as her name. "There were others." She pointed. "It's a mile from here." Her eyes rested on Alexandra for a moment, and the sudden softening of her expression was much worse than her usual coldness. "You should come." She was addressing both Geming Chu and Alexandra.

She led them to another part of the river valley that separated Charmbridge from the Muggle world. Alexandra recognized it as one of the places she and Maximilian and Martin and Beatrice had once flown, technically outside of school bounds. It was not far from where John Manuelito had tried to escape after nearly killing her deep beneath Charmbridge.

One cliffside was dented with the impact of a massive creature. A fallen dragon lay steaming in the water below, and there were bodies scattered around it.

Diana Grimm led them onward, just a little further. First they saw the broom, sticking up out of the mud as if someone had deliberately thrust it there. Then they found Anna's body.