In the mountains, a city, In the city, a mansion, In the mansion, a school, In the school, a hall, In the hall… … Witches! There were twenty of them, twenty witches between eleven and twelve years of age, hunched at wooden desks arranged in a perfect square. It was night-time, wintertime: half past six on the twentieth of December, and the final exam before Christmas. It was a very beautiful hall built for an especially beautiful mansion. The desks sat on a checkerboard floor beneath a ceiling lost halfway between the earth and the moon. Fixed to the walls were three dozen lanterns lit with flickering candles – enchanted candles, shining as brightly as electric lights. Too brightly. Sophie squinted at her paper. The letters danced across the page, and the air was thick with the worst kind of exam silence. She stole a glance at the clock. “Sophie!” barked Mr Wormstrum from the head of the square. “Head down. Eyes on your work.” Sophie’s stomach didn’t merely flip, but performed an entire routine which would have put top gymnasts to shame. As it happened, Bernice, the year’s top gymnast, was sat to Sophie’s right and dashing off her answers with confident ease. To Sophie’s left was Alice Davis, top of the year-group – Maths, English, French, Art, Magical Theory, Potions, DT, PE, History… only in Performance Magic did Sophie best her, and even then, only just. She too scowled in concentration, her face an inch from her paper. Whichever direction Sophie looked, her classmates were writing, and writing, and writing. Top marks all around. A-Plus, A-Star. [i]Outstanding.[/i] “Sophie Morgan! I won’t warn you again.” With a gulp, Sophie forced herself to stare at her own work, at the first question printed near the top of the page. [i]Describe three legal uses of animal transformation.[/i] Well, that was easy, even for a girl as uncertain of Magical Theory as herself. When rescue workers turn themselves into sniffer dogs; when performers transform for the stage and in movies; when doctors become mice for precision surgery. Sophie saw the answers in her head. She could touch them. Feel them. She couldn’t write them. Her pen weighed too heavy in her hand, her forehead was too sweaty, her gaze too blurry, her insides raged with fire. Scribble, scribble, went her classmates. Jot, jot, scrawl, scrawl. Next question. [i]Describe, with examples, what Sophie’s parents will do to her when she fails her exams.[/i] Sophie gasped and rubbed her eyes. When she looked again, the words had reformed themselves into a question on the proper use of Grand Mage Clancy’s Everlasting Fire. Yet the damage was done. Describe, with examples. [i]Describe how they’ll disown her, disavow her, never speak to her again. A waste of a witch. A total washout. “To think of all the time we spent on you,” they’d say, “only to be beaten in every test by Alice Davis. We expected better from you, Sophie Morgan. We expected results.”[/i] The scraping of her chair echoed in the hall. All eyes, for a moment, were drawn to her as she rose and said, “Sir? May I be excused for a moment?” Mr Wormstrum frowned. “Absolutely not, Sophie. This is an exam, not a—” “Sir, you don’t understand. I need to be excused.” The silence thickened, silence dredged up from the deepest black of the ocean. Her heart pounded in the enormous quiet. [i]Describe, with examples, how much trouble Sophie Morgan is going to be in.[/i] “Sit down, Sophie, and carry on with your work.” “No! I… I…” “Sir,” came a voice to Sophie’s right. It was Alice Davis, and her every word, every syllable, was proper and perfect. If the Oxford Dictionary could talk, it would have sounded like Alice. “Sir, I think Sophie needs a glass of water. She looks pale.” “What Sophie needs, Alice, is to sit down and—” “Nah, she’s right, sir,” Bernice added, and how Sophie wished she knew how to apply Viscount Henry’s Invisibility Theorem. “She don’t look too good. Ain’t that right, Soph? … Sophie?” Sophie didn’t answer, she couldn’t, she just couldn’t – the hall rocked back and forth and her exam laughed at her, cackled, and the words writhed on the paper like black maggots, worms of ink. She couldn’t stay there. She couldn’t stay in that hall with the checkerboard floor, with that yawning ceiling that reached to the stars, and with nineteen other witches sat in enchanted candlelight, passing their exams, passing with ease. “Sophie!” cried Mr Wormstrum. “Get back here!” She ran across that floor, those tiles. She flew in the candlelight. “Sophie!” Out the door— “Sophie Morgan!” Through the corridors of the cold, old mansion. Little witch, alone. Little witch, miniature failure— WHACK. Without pausing, she bashed open the door into the western grounds: a vast field bordered on three sides by towering trees, through which glimmered the lights of the city, orange stars tangled in the branches. The field was white as the pages of her exam paper. Snow was falling. A chill wind blew, and a new strain of silence wrapped around her, snakelike – though not the toxic hush of the exam hall nor the granite-heavy stillness of teacher’s glare. No, this was a quiet painted in snowflakes, and coloured by the breath of the wind. Sophie crouched against the wall. She was alone. She was astonishingly, breathtakingly alone, save for the thought of five generations of Morgans before her, looking down on her whilst shaking their heads and muttering, [i]“Atrocious. Simply atrocious. Awful, abysmal, appalling. After all the money our family has donated to this school, and this is how you repay us?”[/i] “I never even wanted to come here,” Sophie hissed to… her parents? Her grandparents, her great-great grandparents? The mansion, the snowfall, the stars in the trees? Regardless, it was Mother who replied in her head. [i]“You are a Morgan, Sophie, and Morgans keep cool under pressure. We are respectable. You running away reflects badly upon us all.”[/i] “No it doesn’t. It has nothing to do with you guys.” [i]“On the contrary, it has [/i]everything[i] to do with us. Failing here is just the beginning! Your results will define you, show the world who you truly are, and sculpt the path of your entire life. You should consider your next move very, very carefully, Sophie Morgan.”[/i] Sophie bit her tongue to supress a sob. When she looked back up, she had only the winter’s breeze for company, mocking her for her skirt, her thin sweater and prim tidy shoes. Her socks were soaked. Her cheeks were wet – though not from the snowfall – and her nose ran bitterly. To call her hair messy was to say that the night a trifle cold, or that the wind was a bit nippy. Despite all this, Sophie didn’t dare wander from her black corner in the western grounds of the mansion. Surely it was better to remain huddled in the dark then face Mr Wormstrum. How clearly she saw him in her mind! How vividly she heard him! [i]“Lazy, unexceptional, unfit to call herself a witch,”[/i] she imagined him saying to the headmistress. [i]“Can’t even sit through a simple Magical Theory exam without bursting into tears. Expel her. Send her to Performance Magic school and be done with it.” “Performance Magic?”[/i] said Sophie’s mother, slinking into the conversation. It was easy to picture her curled lip, along with the faint look of disgust that would have soured her face. Sophie hugged her knees against her chest. [i]“Mark my words, no daughter of mine will ever forge a career from Performance Magic of all things. The very idea of it! The cheek, the nerve! Scandalous.”[/i] Sophie breathed deeply in and deeply out, and there was fire in her blood. Actual fire: concentrated magic fuelled by her anger, powered by her heart. Who cared about some stupid Magical Theory exam? What use was it, who needed it? Not her. All her life, she had wanted to perform on stage. All her life, she had been denied this, from her cancelled ballet class when she had been four years old, all the way up to Father insisting that she sing in the choir in each and every nativity play. [i]“Studies first, play later,”[/i] he always said, though sometimes mother would scowl at him and add, [i]“No, Sophie, your father’s wrong. Study first and then study later. No time for play.”[/i] Sophie clenched her knees tighter. She didn’t notice, but the magic burned stronger in her, and the snow began to melt around her toes… Mother and Father didn’t understand, they didn’t get it, they [i]couldn’t[/i] get it. They couldn’t grasp that performance wasn’t just play to her, but as essential as breathing, as important as food and drink and sleep! No play? It was like telling her to choose between living, or ripping out her beating heart from her chest. It was as simple as that, and that was the truth. Life was a stage. She was simply a performer in it. Who else in her class – and the thought made smile a little – would have had the nerve to run out of an exam? “You’re wrong, Mother,” she whispered fiercely, because it felt important to say it out loud. “My exams don’t tell me who I am. I already know who I am, and the path I’m going to take.” Rage scorched through her bloodstream. She had… she had to do something, [i]anything[/i]. Anything but just sit there waiting to be caught. Something to remind herself of who she was. Something to remind herself that she was worth more than an F in an exam. So she reached down, and with the tip of her finger she drew a line in the snow. A line of [i]fire[/i]. Sophie’s eyes widened. There was magic she was good at and magic she was not: creating fresh flowing water came easily to her, for instance, as did making sunlight shine from her fingers, and conjuring up clouds of stardust, which would shimmer in the air for hours at a time. Primary school magic. Useful for performing – though of course, her usual audience consisted of her stuffed animals whilst locked in her bedroom. Otherwise, spells like these belonged firmly in the realm of four and five year olds learning how to control their powers, alongside their two times tables and how to write their own names. Baby magic. Fire eluded her. Fire was magical energy in its purest form, the spark of new life drawn from deep within the heart of the witch or wizard casting it. Fire was the mark of a true master! So no kid’s parlour trick was this, but something even most grown-ups struggled with – Sophie had never been able to produce so much as a puff of smoke, yet here it was, as real as any mouse or teacup Alice Davis had ever conjured up in class. A snake of flame burning in the snow, fed by the rage of her own heart… Sophie stood up, trembling. She hadn’t realised how hot she felt, how sweaty her jumper was. So although the wind blew chilly and the snow fell heavier, she yanked off the jumper, rolled up her shirt sleeves, then looked over the field. Except it was no longer a field. It was the blank back page of a forgotten exam paper. It was a sheet from a sketch book, a canvas, a screen, an empty space yearning, oh begging to be filled. It was a void overflowing with possibilities, a hundred thousand of them, a million, a billion-trillion! The field was a stage, and most of all, it was hers. For one night and one night only – and Sophie felt it with her bones – it belonged to herself and to nobody else. [i]Describe, with examples, how much more fun it is to laugh and dance and dash through the snow, than be stuck inside failing an exam.[/i] It wasn’t joy that burned through the young witch as she rushed across the field, laughing for the first time since summer. It wasn’t even relief, nor bliss, for with every jump and bound, her stomach churned with the terror that she might be expelled, and the thought of her parents sighing and shaking their heads. Already, she expected to find her bags packed and her bunk made. She pictured Mother and Father waiting in the Roles-Royce in front of the mansion. She imagined Mother tapping her foot, glancing at her watch. Let them wait. Let them fume in silence, because happy or not, scared, frightened, angry, fearful, Sophie had work to do and a whole world to make. A place where she wouldn’t waste time failing exams; where she had so many friends it became impossible to keep count; where her parents listened to her, understood her, respected the fires of her heart. Scooping a fistful of snow, Sophie tossed it high above her head and froze it in place. It hung suspended in mid-air, held up by nothing whatsoever, a magical, floating snowball. She grinned at it. Was it instinct that guided her? Somehow, she didn’t think so, for it felt… deeper. More complicated than primal, and more unexpected than simple instincts. Ever since nursery, levitation had given her trouble. But as with the fire, it was as though that, really, she had always known how to do it, yet that it had never clicked into place before now. The knowledge had been buried under the weight of parent’s wishes, and beneath a flood of exams, and tests, and lessons, and the frowns of a dozen teachers telling her that she was doing everything wrong, wrong, wrong. [i]“Not like that, Sophie Morgan, like this. Why don’t you listen for once? Why don’t you concentrate?”[/i] But she [i]had[/i] been listening. The problem was, sometimes, things moved too fast for her, and she wasn’t given the time to catch up. Not tonight. Tonight, the sky was cloudy but her mind was clear, and she knew exactly what to do and how to do it. Closing her eyes, Sophie stood still and took a huge breath, and then flames rose from her fingertips, wrapping around the suspended snowball until it became a miniature sun burning in the night. To begin with, it was the size of her fist, and then her head; by the time she was done, it was larger than her whole body. The white field turned golden. The tumbling snowflakes were caught in the light of the tiny sun, so that they resembled fireflies blown about in the solar wind. Sophie opened her eyes and laughed and beamed, and her smile was as bright as her makeshift star. “Hah!” she went, punching her fist in the air – a highly un-Morgan thing to do. “I did it!” But she wasn’t finished yet, for like the rising swell of an orchestra, Sophie felt she was merely getting started. This performance had been building inside of her for… for months, ever since her arrival here. For years. Ever since the day she had realised that being a Morgan carried certain responsibilities, and with a dark galaxy of expectations. Her worries melted away like the snow beneath her sun, leaving behind only laughter and dancing – for indeed, she [i]was[/i] dancing, to the music of her heart, the rhythm of her joy. She tossed more snowballs in the air, two, four, six of them, and as the dance continued, each one became a tiny planet orbiting her sun, each a tiny gesture of defiance against the wishes of her parents. The one closest to the sun, she coated in rock, which she summoned from out of thin air. Another she blanketed in water and clouds, and the furthest one out became a stardust planet, cloaked in the sparkling magic she had always been so fond of conjuring. However, it was the third planet, her Earth, to which she paid the most attention. First she covered the floating snowball in layer after layer of dirt, until for sheer size, the planet rivalled her sun – layer after layer, the dirt simply appeared with a wave of her hand, a flick of her wrist, a grin tugging at the corners of her mouth. Next came grass, followed by mounds of earth like the smallest mountains in existence, and trickles of water to represent streams and rivers. Trees came next – trees the size of matchsticks, with leaves so small that Sophie would have needed a microscope to make them out individually. Then with a twirl of her feet and a laugh and a giggle, she formed ice caps that she could cover with the palm of her hand; clouds like clumps of wool; oceans like puddles; bright yellow deserts; brilliant rainforests; plains, savannahs, the tundra; and towards the poles, ribbons of vivid green and red and crimson billowing in the sky, the miniscule auroras of her teeny tiny Earth! And then— “Sophie! What are you doing?!” Sophie yelped, almost tripping over herself in the snow. Steadying herself, she saw both Alice and Bernice running through the snowfall. Slowing, walking, then creeping… Then gazing open-mouthed at the solar system in the western grounds, with its baby sun and six petite planets, and lovingly crafted Second Earth. It was Bernice who spoke first. “Dude. Just… [i]dude.[/i]” “It’s ingenious,” Alice gasped, reaching a hand towards Sophie’s sun. “It’s a subset of Grand Mage Clancy’s Everlasting Fire! Except somehow you’ve contained it to burn within the confines of… I’m guessing it’s a variation on the Standard Cambridge Spell Nexus? Sophie, dear, however did you do it?” [i]I did what now?[/i] Sophie wanted to ask. But she bit her tongue, for suddenly it dawned on her how thick the snow was, how cold the wind blew. She was freezing. She was dressed in a skirt and school shirt, and this was coldness like she had never known – to be tossed into the North Sea in nothing but pyjamas would have been warmer! Thank goodness for Bernice taking off her sweater and wrapping it around her chest. And she was tired. Drained. Give her a blanket and pillow, and before having the chance to wish her goodnight, Sophie would have passed out, fast asleep. But worst of all was the slimy creeping feeling winding around her insides, chocking her stomach, making her heart beat and thump until it was painful. Sophie gulped, unsure of whether she wanted an answer to her question. “Um… sh-shouldn’t you two be in the exam?” “After the way Mr Wormstrum spoke to you?” said Bernice. She rolled her eyes. “Pur-leeease! Some things are more important than exams, Soph.” “You mean you just walked out?!” “In a word,” said Alice. “Mr Wormstrum was very reluctant to let us join the other teachers looking for you – they’re all over the place by the way. We won’t be alone for long, I shouldn’t wonder, not with that sun of yours shining. But then… well, it’s like Bernice said. I couldn’t have put it better myself.” Sophie wrapped Bernice’s sweater around herself as tightly as possible. Though right then, she suspected that the winter wind had little to do with how cold she felt. “Aren’t you worried you’ll fail?” Sophie almost missed it: for the briefest moment, Alice’s smile faltered, and such a wave of guilt and misery crashed into Sophie that her knees buckled, and she nearly collapsed in the snow again. Alice was worried. Top of the year-group, Year Seven’s genius in residence! Of course she was worried… yet here she was, standing in the snow on a freezing December night, all to help remind a girl she scarcely spoke to that she wasn’t alone, and that there was no shame in being a failure. In three months, Sophie had made the barest effort to get to know her classmates. For three months, she had tried to keep up in class, whilst dreaming of a life beyond the walls of the mansion, where she could be anything she wanted. Some things were more important than exams. Following her own path was one of those things. What else was there? Shivering, Sophie smiled at Alice Davis, and was strangely relieved when Alice Davis smiled back… Bernice, meanwhile, was less concerned with the prospect of failure. “Are you saying that I should’ve stayed inside and missed this?” she said, gesturing at the solar system. “And you were dancing and everything, it was wicked, Soph! We already knew you were good at Performance Magic, but we’ve been sharing a dorm for months, now. Why didn’t you tell us you were [i]this[/i] good?” “I… I didn’t know…” And that was the truth. She had buried it so deeply inside of herself that she hadn’t known what she was capable of, of what she could do, of how far she could push her imagination. Bernice grabbed her left hand; Alice grabbed her right. And as the snow fell, the three witches shared a smile, even as the door to the grounds bashed open behind them. They heard teachers call their names. They giggled as they heard Mr Wormstrum cry, “Fire! Fire in the grounds! Sound the alarm!” A few seconds later, the alarm rang, and Sophie, Alice, and Bernice turned around to face their fate. Meanwhile, six miniature planets orbited a tiny star in a field by a school… A school in a mansion… A mansion in a city… A city in the mountains… They were still there when Sophie’s parents picked her up the next morning. They were still there when she was allowed to return the following term, along with her two new friends and fresh hope blazing in her heart. Hope that, this year, she could choose her own path.