Tuesday, after breakfast and before work, she cast the muscle control spell, and continued her voice training by talking to herself about the books she was cataloguing. Cassie overheard her as she got up and walked past Eliza’s office to the kitchen.

“Wow, you’re making good progress already,” she said. “You sound way better than I did after just a day or so of practice.”

“Yeah, this muscle control spell feels like it’s helping a lot. I need to do more research before I try to adjust my hormones, though. Do you remember seeing any other books about human anatomy, particularly endocrinology, other than this one?” She gestured to the 1970s anatomy textbook she’d been using.

“Uh, no. Some general biology books, but I think they’re mostly oriented toward animals and plants… You can find out a lot online, but I guess an up-to-date endocrinology book might be more reliable than Wikipedia or WebMD or whatever. But, uh, I could go look at my own blood test results? I think they show my actual estradiol level as well as what the ‘normal’ range is supposed to be.”

“Oh, cool… I don’t really need to pry into your medical records, though. Maybe you could write down the normal range numbers and show me them, not your actual blood levels?”

“Eh, it’s no big deal, but sure.”

After breakfast, and poking around in her office for a while, Cassie came into the guest bedroom where Eliza was shelving books and said, “Well, I’ve got some numbers here, but the clinic kind of… didn’t print any units. Just raw numbers.”

“Oh. That’s not gonna be helpful.”

“Let’s check online, and if we can’t get a definitive answer, we’ll order an endocrinology book and see what we can figure out.”

So they did some poking around online, and found that the unmarked units on Cassie’s blood test results were probably supposed to be picograms per milliliter. And that the “normal” range was, of course, supposed to vary over the course of a month, due to the menstrual cycle of a cis woman, and that HRT was normally supposed to roughly replicate that cycle.

“Okay,” Eliza said, taking some notes. “So I guess I need to set up a schedule, and cast the hormone balance spell with different amounts of the different hormones in mind at different times of month?”

“Yeah. This just gives the estradiol levels, though, and apparently there’s like two or three other forms of estrogen the body produces, plus progesterone, plus testosterone – women need less of it than men, but not none.”

“So I think we need to order an endocrinology textbook or reference book to get the meaty details.”

“Yeah. I’ll pay for it, I know textbooks can be expensive and this’ll benefit both of us.”

“Thanks! While we’re waiting for it to get here, I’ll work on figuring out an other-directed version of the hormone balance spell so I can cast it on you, too.”

“Awesome. Well, I’m gonna go code obsessively until I notice I’m hungry; talk to you later.”

During Eliza’s lunch break, she called a couple of auto body shops in the area to describe the damage to her car and ask for an estimate to get it repainted. As she’d suspected, they wanted to see the damage before offering a firm estimate, but said the car would probably have to be entirely repainted so that the touch-up paint on the hood wouldn’t stand out. She refrained from calling her insurance company just yet, as she hoped she could pay for the paint job with the collection the church was taking up for her and wouldn’t need to file a claim.

And maybe she could convince Douglas and Holly Glockner to pay for her paint job and let the rest of that collection go to somebody else in need.

After work, she cast the muscle control spell again and continued her voice training for a while, watching the rest of the videos Cassie had sent her and adding more exercises. She kept thinking about what she’d seen when she cast the scrying spell and debating whether calling the Glockners would do any good. Finally, she went and got the church directory, looked up their number, and called them.

“Hello?” Douglas’ voice answered.

“Good evening,” she said. She realized her voice still sounded… sort of feminine, from the practice she’d been doing. Certainly different from usual; Douglas probably wouldn’t recognize her voice. The feeling of anonymity filled her with unaccustomed confidence. “I know that your son is the one who vandalized Eliza Hudnall’s car. I just want to let you know that he and you should contribute as much as you can to the collection for repainting it, or I’ll tell everyone.”

“I was already planning to do that,” Douglas replied. “We’ve grounded Connor for three months and I’ve taken the money for the collection out of his college savings – I checked how much it costs to get a typical sedan repainted, I don’t know if it’ll be the exact amount he needs but it should be close. Please don’t tell the police and ruin Connor’s life. He made a mistake, but we’re working on correcting it.”

“That is acceptable,” Eliza said, shocked at her own bravado. “I will call back if I find out you’re lying.” She hung up, and her hands started trembling.

At supper (Cassie had cooked beef stroganoff), her employer told her that she’d ordered what seemed to be the best-reviewed recent textbook on endocrinology, as well as a specialist manual particularly for doctors prescribing HRT, whether for cis people with hormone deficiencies or for trans people. The books should arrive within a couple of days.

After supper, they sat around in the living room and chatted, practicing their voice training. Cassie got out Mr. Taggart’s copy of The Best-Loved Poems of the American People and they took turns reading some of the maudlin poems from the early twentieth century, and giggled till they were near bursting.

Wednesday, she continued the routine of practicing her muscle control spell and voice training during work. By midday, she was singing, and was pleasantly surprised with the sound of her voice when she recorded herself on her phone and played it back. She wasn’t quite where she wanted to be yet, but she’d come farther than she could have hoped in just a few days. After work, she practiced the scrying spell, focusing on random recent days and times, watching her past self catalogue books or read or eat. Then she and Cassie watched another movie, sitting on Cassie’s bed. This time she wasn’t so sleepy, and they sat and talked about the movie for a while afterward before Eliza got up and went to her own bed.

Thursday, after she had been cataloguing for about an hour and before Cassie had woken up, a FedEx driver came with the endocrinology books. Eliza eagerly opened the box and took a short break from work to look through them and see what she could figure out. It was kind of overwhelming, though, and she soon realized she wasn’t going to get quick answers by looking up a couple of hormones in the index and skimming the relevant passages.

After work that day, she figured out other-directed versions of the muscle control spell and the hormone balancing spell and cast the muscle control spell on both Cassie and herself. She and Cassie spent the next couple of hours doing voice training together, having fun imitating the accents of British and Australian actresses they liked and singing along with female vocalists from Cassie’s enormous music collection.

Saturday, she knuckled down and studied the endocrinology textbook for hours, but finally had to confess herself stymied for the moment. She didn’t have the biological or medical background to understand all the terminology. She didn’t want to have to get a medical degree to simply figure out what hormone levels she was supposed to have, but it looked like she was going to have to do some background study in order to understand what she was reading. After the hard mental labor of the morning, she spent the rest of the day reading a couple of short romance novels from the 1960s, of which Mr. Taggart had owned a surprising number.

Sunday, she met up with Sarah at the house near the university where she lived along with a couple of other grad students. From there, they drove in Sarah’s car to the Episcopal church just in time for the service. It was different from what either of them were used to, more formal, but not in a bad way, Eliza thought. And the people she and Sarah chatted with after the service were friendly. If they noticed she was trans, they didn’t say anything about it.

Afterward, she and Sarah went out to eat again, and Eliza told her how her week had gone, with practicing the new spells and cataloguing books and hanging out with Cassie. Sarah told her about TA’ing for Dr. Warren’s Psych 101 class over the summer semester and about some relationship drama between her housemates.

While they were eating, Brother Greg called to tell her how much money the collection for getting her car repainted had collected. It was going to be more than enough to cover the likely expense the body shops had quoted her.

“More than half of it was donated by one person,” Brother Greg said, “but they asked to remain anonymous.”

“That’s good. Probably the vandal trying to make restitution without making a public apology and getting in legal trouble.”

“It’s possible. I wouldn’t want to speculate. If so, I wouldn’t consider it sufficient restitution unless they apologize in person, but it’s a good start.”

“I’ll be glad to just put it behind me.”

Just a few minutes later, Eliza’s mom called. She was about to answer the phone when she remembered she’d been using her best approximation of a feminine voice all day.

“Testing, testing, testing…” she mumbled, trying to get back to the voice her mom would expect, while the phone kept ringing in her hand and Sarah looked at her worriedly. Finally, she decided she was close enough and swiped to pick up the call.

“Hey, Mom,” she said.

“Hey, Elijah, how are you doing? Any better?”

“Yeah… not much to tell.” Nothing I want to tell you over the phone, anyway. “I’m slowly getting over Monica. Oh, and I went to another church today.”

“Oh? Tell me about it.”

Eliza paused, not sure what to say. She couldn’t exactly say she’d picked the Episcopal church because it was one of the only local churches of a denomination that was cool with trans people. “Well, it’s more formal in some ways than Crossway. Not necessarily clothes-wise, people wore all sorts of formal and casual clothes, but in terms of the service, like I think they have scripture readings set by the denomination instead of chosen by the pastor based on what he wants to preach about…”

She answered a few of her mom’s questions about it, then said, “I’d better let you go. I’m having lunch with someone from Crossway who tried out this Episcopal church with me.”

“Well, I won’t keep you,” her mom said, then prolonged the call by asking, “Who is it? Anyone I met when I visited you back in April?”

“Um, maybe? – Sarah, did you meet my mom when she came to visit a while back?”

“I don’t think so,” Sarah said.

“Sarah, hmm?” her mom said. “Well, I definitely won’t keep you, but I want to hear more about her later.”

Eliza blushed, feeling mortified as she realized the conclusion her mom had just jumped to. “I’ll talk to you later. Love you… Bye.”

Sarah giggled. “Did your mom think we’re dating?”

“I think so,” Eliza mumbled, still in boy-voice. Sarah giggled louder.

After lunch, they drove back to Sarah’s house. Her housemates being away for the afternoon, she asked Eliza to show her some more of her magic. She wound up casting the levitation spell again, as well as the lost object spell, finding several items Sarah and her housemates had mislaid, and the complexion improvement spell, which she cast on Sarah’s face, arms and legs. She apologized and said she would have done more, but she was getting tired. After resting and chatting with Sarah for half an hour more, she drove back to Cassie’s house and took a nap.

After she woke up, she hung out with Cassie and helped her chop vegetables for the soup she was making for supper. It turned out delicious; they both ate multiple servings, and there was enough left to eat on Monday.

Monday morning, after Eliza had catalogued books for a couple of hours and Cassie had time to wake up, have breakfast and so forth, they drove into Boone in separate cars. Eliza picked up a check from the church office, deposited it at her bank, and then drove to a body shop to drop off her car to be repainted. Cassie met her at the body shop and drove her back to the house afterward.

In Cassie’s car on the way back, she checked the spellbook and found that chapter six had unlocked. “Oh, hey, new spells!”

“You unlocked the next chapter? Cool! What did you get this time?”

“Hang on a minute.” Eliza read through the chapter, pausing to tell Cassie about each spell or technique as she came to it. First was an information magic spell to let her absorb the knowledge from a book. It wouldn’t let her memorize the contents of a book permanently, but for two or three hours she’d know everything in the book backwards and forwards. And repeated castings on the same book would let her retain more and more information after the spell wore off, as would actually using the temporary knowledge while she had it. That was an amazing game-changer, and probably helped explain why Eugene Taggart owned books in so many languages.

“Wow, this is going to make figuring out the right hormone levels so much easier.”

“I’ll say. I wish I’d had that spell back in college.”

“Yeah. Let’s see… There’s also a spell to grow or shrink body parts, and, um… I guess that would make it easier to wear tight pants without showing or being too uncomfortable.”

“Oh, yeah,” Cassie said, nodding and blushing a little. “That’s really cool. It, uh, eventually shrinks a lot for some people after being on HRT for a good while, but yet again your magic lets you speedrun transition. And you said it lets you expand things too?”

“Yeah… I’m mostly satisfied with how big my breasts are, but they’re all fat and no milk glands, and I think once I’ve been casting the hormone balance spell on myself for a while and I have something to work with, I can fix that? I can probably expand the milk glands and shrink the fat until they’re the right, um, consistency or whatever.”

“Do me next,” Cassie said. “Oh, and you could shrink your vocal cords and speedrun voice training. Better be careful not to shrink them too much, though. I wonder if too much might keep you from breathing or something? You’d want to do research on the actual average lengths of male and female vocal cords…”

The last was not a spell per se, but a meta-magic technique for adding an intermediate target to a spell that linked oneself with another entity.

“How would that work?” Cassie asked.

“I’m not sure yet, let me read a little more… Oh, I think it’s supposed to work with the one for absorbing knowledge from a book. And maybe for those spells that search for specific information in one book or a whole library? Like with this I can modify it so I can cast them on you and a book, rather than just on a book?”

“Awesome.”

When they got back to the house, Eliza firmly told herself she had to get a few hours of work done before she could start practicing the knowledge-absorbing spell on the endocrinology books. She managed to keep plugging away at cataloguing for all of two hours before her impatience got the better of her and she started practicing the spell. It took nine tries, but she got it, and soon knew as much about endocrinology as… well, probably a medical student with perfect grades but no practical experience yet. She also had a mild headache that went away after a few minutes. Nonetheless, after a few minutes’ thought, she felt confident in casting the hormone balance spell on herself. It only took five tries, and she still had a couple of hours until the knowledge-absorbing spell would wear off.

So she knocked on the door of Cassie’s office.

“Hey, what’s up?”

“I was, uh, taking a break from work and practicing the new spells…” Cassie nodded. “And I think I’ve got what I need. Are you ready for me to cast the hormone balance spell on you?”

“Yeah, I’m probably pretty close to what I need to be based on my last blood tests, but being exactly right couldn’t hurt. Might feel nice, though I probably won’t notice anything.”

“Um… I kind of need to know how much you weigh. So I can do the math and know what to focus on when I cast the spell.”

“Oh…” After a moment’s hesitation, Cassie told her. Eliza got out her phone, opened the calculator app and did some quick math, then started casting the other-directed hormone balance spell. After only three tries, she felt it work.

Eliza got back to cataloguing and reshelving until supper. After supper, she decided to practice the knowledge-absorbing spell some more. She cast it on the 1956 edition of Teach Yourself Finnish and then, not sure if it would work on two targets at once, on a hefty Finnish-English dictionary. It worked, though stuffing two books full of knowledge in her head at once gave her a headache that persisted longer than the one she’d gotten from the endocrinology textbook.

She then tried reading one of the dozen or so novels in Finnish that Mr. Taggart had owned. The spell hadn’t made her fully fluent in Finnish, but she felt she was able to understand the book a bit better than she’d been able to understand Spanish prose after her first two semesters of Spanish in high school. She had to stop and think about how to parse the more complex sentences, and some nonce compound words that weren’t in the dictionary, but she never had to look things up. It was exhilarating fun, and she couldn’t wait to try this on the other languages Mr. Taggart owned textbooks and dictionaries for. By the time the knowledge started wearing off and the words on the page slowly became harder to parse or outright incomprehensible, she decided it was time for bed.

The next morning, after her shower and before she got dressed, Eliza started trying to cast the body part shrinking spell. After eight tries, she got it to work, and found that her panties fit much more comfortably over her reduced privates. Once dressed, she ate breakfast and worked until Cassie got up.

“Do you want me to cast the shrinking spell on you, like I did for myself?” she asked her uncertainly.

“Yeah… you can cast it by tracing the spell on my belly, like you did before with the hair removal spell, right?”

“Yeah, that should work, although it will probably take more tries.”

So Cassie pulled up her shirt, and Eliza cast the shrinking spell on Cassie’s privates. It took twelve tries before it worked, which was discouraging at first, but Eliza remembered she hadn’t fully mastered the self-directed version yet.

“Could you do it the other way now, and make my breasts bigger?” Cassie asked when she was done.

“Sure,” she said. “I need the practice.” Cassie went to her bedroom and removed her bra, then put her shirt back on and returned to the dining room. Eliza worked on one breast at a time, growing the left one after four tries and the right one on the second try.

“Another shopping trip coming up,” Cassie said gleefully. “You want to grow yours some more, too?”

“I guess I probably will, if only for the sake of practicing the shrinking/growing spell. But I kind of like the way they are now, so I’ll probably shrink them back afterward.”

“Cool, it’s your body. What about the knowledge-absorbing spell? Can you cast that on me, too?”

“I haven’t worked out a version I can cast on other people yet. Do you want me to prioritize that over cataloguing?”

Cassie dithered for a moment, then said, “Yeah, go ahead and do that.”

So Eliza spent the next hour and a half figuring out a ditransitive version of the knowledge-absorbing spell and double-checking her work. Then she returned to Cassie’s office and said, “What book do you want me to dump into your head?”

“This.” Cassie swiveled in her chair and scooted over to one of the shelves, where she took down a reference manual for something called Lisp. “I’ve been meaning to start learning this,” she said. “It sounds interesting.” Eliza cast the modified spell on her and the book, succeeding on the third try.

“Whoa,” Cassie said, her eyes focusing on a distant point. “This is so awesome! Not as awesome as your transition spells, but I wish I’d had this back when I was in school. How long did you say it lasts?”

“Around two or three hours. It says the knowledge is supposed to stick better if you use it while the spell lasts, and if you cast it repeatedly on the same book.”

“I’ll get coding, then. See whether I can build a small fun project before the spell wears off, and whether I can understand what I wrote afterward.”

Eliza got back to cataloguing and reshelving until a reminder on her phone told her it had been twenty-four hours since she’d cast the hormone-balancing spell on herself and Cassie. She was about to cast it when she realized she couldn’t remember what hormone levels she was supposed to have – the knowledge from the book had mostly worn off, and she hadn’t taken any notes while she’d had it. So she cast the knowledge-absorbing spell on the endocrinology books again, and then worked out how much of each different sex hormone she and Cassie needed at different points of their cycle, and made sure to type it all up in a document. Then she cast the hormone balancing spell on herself and went to Cassie’s office.

“Hey, you want me to cast the hormone spell on you now or wait a bit?”

“Go ahead,” Cassie said distractedly, but didn’t look up from her monitor, where some sort of Lisp program was presumably taking shape. There seemed to be a lot of parentheses?

“Um… you want to hold out your arm for me?”

“Busy. Can you trace it on the back of my neck?”

“Sure.”

So she did that, and Cassie kept typing the whole time. Eliza left her office and went back to cataloguing.

An hour or so later, Cassie came to her and asked her to cast the knowledge-absorbing spell on her again. She had gotten frustratingly close to finishing the project she’d started under the influence and wanted to finish it up. The second casting lasted until after their usual suppertime, so Eliza ate alone while Cassie continued obsessively coding. Once the second casting wore off, Cassie came to the kitchen to eat just as Eliza was about finished.

“That was amazing,” she said. “I feel like I’ve learned a lot even though only a fraction of the knowledge stuck with me. What all have you tried it on so far? Just the endocrinology books?”

“And an introductory Finnish book and a Finnish-English dictionary. And I cast it on a couple of other interesting books while I was cataloguing, an eastern North American bird guide and a book on snail biology. I am still an expert on snails for about another forty-five minutes.”

“Neat!”

Eliza continued sitting at the table and chatting with Cassie as she ate her belated supper. Afterward, they went for a walk; it wasn’t sunset yet, but it was late enough to be getting cooler.

“I should give you a raise,” Cassie announced as they were getting close to the house. “You’re doing so much more than we anticipated when I proposed the internship to your department head.”

“Yeah, I’m your court wizard as well as your librarian,” Eliza joked.

“Hmm, is ‘wizard’ too gendered? I know I’ve read stories where men and women can both be wizards and both be witches, and the differences is in what kind of magic they do, but that’s not the majority.”

“I could be a sorceress, like Glinda,” Eliza said.

“Yeah, I like that better. Court sorceress. ’Course that means I’ve got to be some kind of noblewoman, and most of them were assholes, if not quite as pervasively as the noblemen.”

“You could be a princess, like Ozma.”

“Yeah, that fits. Princess Cassie and her royal sorceress Eliza, how’s that?”

They giggled as they walked in the back door and scuffed off their shoes on the mat.