“And there are Marauders out there,” Bowser finished. “You girls are going to have to do the Buttoning yourselves.”
“We don’t know how,” said Anna. “And anyway we have more important things to worry about. Mrs. Warthall is going to sell everyone!”
Chantel stroked Japheth and thought. “I wonder . . . Those searchers who came here. Mrs. Warthall said they were looking for a spell.”
“You think they were looking for the Buttoning?”
“If they were, and if we could find it—” said Chantel.
There was a sound of bare feet pattering along the hall. Chantel looked up to see Daisy, a little girl with beetle-black eyes and hair that hung over her ears in two shaggy braids.
Daisy reached out a finger to stroke Japheth, who flicked his tongue at her. “Chantel, when is Miss Ellicott coming back?”
“I don’t know,” said Chantel.
“Are you going to go look for her?”
“I—”
Chantel thought how frightened the younger girls would be if they knew that all the sorceresses were missing. They must already be scared. They still had Miss Flivvers, of course, but Miss Flivvers was proving woefully inadequate, no protection at all from Mrs. Warthall and her ladle.
Daisy was looking up at Chantel trustingly, big eyes in a hungry face. Miss Ellicott was not exactly loving, but there had always been a certain thereness to her. With Miss Ellicott around, you never doubted that someone was in charge, and that any bad thing that was going to happen was going to have to get through Miss Ellicott first.
Well, now it had gotten through Miss Ellicott.
“Yes. We’re going to look for her,” said Chantel. “Don’t worry.”
“Come on, Daisy,” said Anna, and led the child away. Chantel heard them going up the stairs.
“We’ll find the spell for the patriarchs,” Chantel told Bowser. “And when we do—we’re going to ask them to take Mrs. Warthall away before we give it to them.”
5
IN WHICH CHANTEL CONSIDERS GUTS AS GARTERS
The searchers had already torn the school apart looking for the Buttoning. But the searchers couldn’t do magic.
Chantel and Anna did summoning spells. They did them up in the attic, away from Mrs. Warthall’s suspicious gaze. For Chantel this was easy; summonings were her thing.
They did the spell again and again, holding in their minds pictures of things the Buttoning spell might be written on. Clean white sheets of paper, and yellowed old parchment scrolls, and much-blurred palimpsests of sheepskin. All sorts of documents came flying through the air: recipes, and bills, and homework, and something that appeared to be a deathbed confession, although to what, Chantel couldn’t tell.
Then the spells stopped working. They had summoned every loose bit of paper in the school. So Chantel, Anna, Bowser, and the younger girls searched the school by hand. (Leila couldn’t be bothered.)
They looked under the carpet of the wide mahogany front stairs, and in every corner of the dark twisty back stairs. They climbed on chairs and felt behind the carved dragons atop the doors and windows, and they scaled bookshelves and peered at the dusty tops. They poked into the oddly-shaped closets and cupboards that filled in the crooked corners of the school. They searched the ceilings.
Anna and Chantel took a hammer and pried up the attic steps, one by one, to see if there was anything written on the back of them.
They searched the sloped attic walls where the nails from the slates stuck through. Bats hung in ranks from the rough wood, and opened their tiny pink mouths and squeaked in protest at the intrusion.
“Maybe it’s hidden under the bats,” said Chantel.
“I’m sure those searchers looked under the bats already,” said Anna.
Nonetheless the girls went back in the night, when the bats were gone, and searched the walls again.
They looked through all the trunks and boxes in the attic. Old school robes. Winter coats. Dishes. There had been books, but the searchers had pried them to pieces looking for messages hidden in the bindings. They had burned most of the pages looking for invisible ink. Chantel felt no particular sadness about this, because she had never found any secrets or mysteries in books. She had never in her life read a book that hadn’t been sniffed over carefully by others, checked and rechecked, and stamped with approval as perfectly safe and unlikely to give her ideas.
There was a sudden storm of mad flapping all around them. Chantel and Anna hit the floor—the bats were coming home. The girls clamped their hands protectively over their hair. They both knew, in their brains, that bats have a spell that keeps them from bumping into people or getting tangled in anyone’s hair. But their hair refused to believe it.
The bats hung themselves up on the sloping wall. There were a few more rustlings and flappings, then quiet.
The girls stood up, cautiously.
Chantel looked at the bats. She looked around the attic. There was nowhere else to search.
“It’s almost dawn,” said Anna. “I have to go up to the roof.”
“Why?” said Chantel.
“I always do.”
Chantel had been Anna’s friend for years and years, and she had never known this. “I thought you were just an early riser.”
“Yes. Because I have to get to the roof.”
If you knew Anna well, you knew she had a rock-solid firmness that she hid from most people. You could see it now. Chantel followed her up the ladder.
The girls emerged into the cold gray dawn. There was a small platform on top, surrounded by an ornamental paling. Below that were the steep slated sides of the roof.
Birds were twittering and screeching in the trees down below.
Anna fixed her gaze to the east, where the sky was brightening into splashes of pink and orange.
“What—” Chantel began.
“Shh. Wait.” Anna’s mouth was a thin hard line. The sun appeared, a sliver of red on the horizon that grew to an arc and then a semicircle. Abruptly Anna spun on her heel and faced west. “You should turn too.”
Chantel obeyed. “Why are we doing this?”
“Because Miss Ellicott told us to,” said Anna. “Or at least, she told me. I’m surprised she didn’t tell you.”
“Well, she didn’t,” said Chantel, feeling annoyed. She’d been up all night and she was tired, stiff, and no closer to finding the spell than before. “And it seems pretty silly.”
“I have to do it because I’m the Chosen One,” said Anna. “It’s what she told me.”
“She told me I was the Chosen One too,” Chantel reminded her. “But she never said anything about coming up on the roof and spinning around.”
“She told me always to remember,” said Anna. “‘At the dawning of the day/Face the sun and turn away.’”
“Why?” Chantel said.
“How should I know? She just did,” said Anna. “Maybe it’s some kind of spell.”
They looked at each other in surprise.
“What she told me,” said Chantel, “was ‘Speak the words that Haywith spoke/And keep the vow that Haywith broke.’”