Chapter Eighteen: The Two Headmistresses

Valerie spotted Simone and me leaving campus, but she said nothing. Her lip was still swollen from a collision with Tiffany's head after Marie von Schurr, in gorilla form, had bonked them together like ragdolls. She'd had it coming, but I still felt a bit bad for the mishap. I wasn't sure whether my magical stalemate with Doctor Sauvage was yet common knowledge, but she had plenty of reason to offer us a wide berth with or without that knowledge.

Simone and I headed out for the standing stones, plodding along the path between pristine fields of snow. As we walked, we reviewed the little ritual for making a ley passage (or 'witching passage') one last time and headed out.

"Why'd she leave the message with you and not me?" Simone asked. She huffed a gout of frosty air into the sky.

"I'm her favorite," I said. She huffed again. I held up my slim hand, displaying the Black Lily, which is what I'd decided to call the ring that Lily had given me. In addition to being an above-average focus for travel-related symbols, it was an invitation of sanctuary to... wherever it was that Lily called sanctuary. "I'm pretty sure she can only give one of these to a witch. We'll have her get you one next year."

"I'm almost a witch," Simone said. And, in truth, after a few short weeks of practice, she was already more advanced than many of the girls who'd been at it for a year or more and who already had their full witch names. Chalk it up to being a math prodigy.

We continued along the main road - ice-free like every path worth note - out past the edge of campus and toward the standing stones at the wood's edge. Clouds had rolled in that morning, and a gentle snow was filtering down, adding to the foot-and-change already there.

"It melts maybe half an inch every day," Simone observed. "But we get more than that, on average, so it adds up. When I first got here, the winter before last, we had two and a half feet."

I whistled. I wondered if I'd be able to trudge through that, as short as I was. Probably not. The lake was mostly-frozen, too. I could probably manage to walk across thinner ice than a lot of people, but I wasn't about to try. As we reached the end of the road, the magically-snow-free path ended and the snow deepened gradually, until I was trudging through knee-deep snow near the stones. Simone, with her long legs and broad strides, was having an easier time of it. She wasn't quite so spindly anymore, though.

"You're gaining weight," I observed. "You have your appetite back?"

"Boy do I," she said. "Good thing you showed me that trick with the sizing - otherwise, I'd be busting out of my uniforms. Somebody on the faculty is going to notice soon."

"They'll chalk it up to the books being missing. At least I hope they will..." If they didn't, we (and especially I, the confirmed witch of the group) might be in even more trouble. Actually, I had no idea how much trouble I was in - it was a day since my kerfuffle with Doctor Sauvage, and I'd experienced zero blowback from it, which was a lot less than the roughly one zillion metric fucktons I'd been expecting.

"The standing stones," Simone said. "Now we do the ritual?"

I nodded, and we started. It was a pretty easy ritual: six lumps of charcoal in a circle... hexagon, I suppose... with two of the lumps forming a little line in the direction of the ley line that marked the edge of campus. The markers didn't have to be coal, but black supposedly worked better and they were easy to see against the snow - and Emi had access to charcoal sticks in Ms. Sturm's supply closet. Then Simone traced the symbols of halepha-sigmus (the 'traveler's dyad') in the middle of the circle and then I touched my ring to inner line of coal. Whatever magical effect there had been, it was pretty weak.

"That's it?" she asked.

I shrugged. "Let's find out."

I took exactly three steps, and almost toppled over - the snow's resistance suddenly ended and we were on a sunny gravel road beneath a canopy of trees. I shimmied out of my coat and hung it atop one of the standing stones.

"You're just going to leave it there?" Simone asked.

"Do you think someone will steal it?"

"No." She shrugged and hung her own coat on the stone across the road from mine.

It was pleasantly warm, somewhere in the low seventies, and the air smelled of flowers and the musty soil of the forest. As we rounded the bend, it was easy to see why - a large garden lay before us: flower-spotted topiaries in the shape of zodiacal creatures, garden lattices dense with flowering vines, and row upon row of flowers, herbs, and vegetable plants. Somewhere behind all that vegetation was a red brick manse, its dark roof peeking above a nearby dogwood tree.

"I guess this is Lily's place," I said.

Sure enough, we found the (ex-?) headmistress soon enough. We followed the winding path past a copse of azaleas and almost bumped into Lily right around a sharp bend. She was bent over and tending to a vibrant red plant. She wore a black Misfits halter top, black cutoff jean shorts, black Converse sneakers, and a very-not-black floral print gardening apron.

"Um... Headmistress Lily?" Simone said.

She stood up, turned, and smiled... it wasn't Lily. Or at least wasn't the Lily I was familiar with. The woman's hair was the same glossy black with a silver-white shock as Lily's, but she was at least a decade younger than Lily's early-40s appearance, slim and toned and with smoky dark make-up.

"Are you... um, are you Lily's daughter?" Simone asked. I took a full step back in surprise. I'd been sure it was Lily, but this definitely wasn't her. Though there was a strong resemblance, indeed. Could you have a younger twin?

The woman chuckled and removed her gardening gloves, flashing a ring-studded hand. "Sorry, I don't have my school face on," she said. "I forgot that you've never seen me like this - I have to project authority at St. Circe's, but no need for that here. Oh... Natalie dear, watch your step. That vine likes virgins."

I looked to my foot and saw that what I'd first taken to be a matted spread of fern stalks was, in fact, a mass of radial vines, several of which now swiveled out and undulated up my boot and toward my shin. One of them probed at my leggings, and the whole mass of them reeled back as if stunned.

"No issue on that front," I said. "Not by any metric."

Lily blinked in surprise. Simone edged away as the vines probed in her virginal direction instead. "Oh. Really? Well... I'm not one to judge. If you ladies would care to join me, I'm about to head inside for tea."

"Tea sounds lovely," Simone said.

+++++

Tea was served in the parlor by a tea set that served without human help - through enchantment, Lily was quick to mention, and not spirit indenture (whatever that was). The manse was a stately Edwardian place - white plaster, neoclassical columns, and elaborate molding, all made strangely anachronistic by the small museum of rock paraphernalia she had on prominent display about the place, from a signed poster of the Runaways, complete with Joan Jett's lip print, to a mummified, headless bat in a case next to concert pictures of Black Sabbath. I would have never suspected that side of Lily - and I suppose that was the point. She'd erected a wall of professional separation between faculty and student.

"Did you really know Nina Simone?" Simone asked, running her fingers over an autographed microphone - I wondered if there was a name connection there.

"I did," Lily said her expression waxing nostalgic. "I don't know of any musicians who've sold their souls to the devil - I'm not sure how you'd even go about doing that. But more than a few have approached the coven for services, and I'm a sucker for talent." She clinked her tea cup down and made a serious face. "Case in point, you two."

Simone stopped her tea, mid-sip. I'd seen something like this coming - my suspicions had been correct. We were part of Lily's agenda. I just had no idea what that agenda might be.

"I didn't think you'd called us here just to save us from Doctor Sauvage," I said.

Lily laughed. "Prudence, what about her? What can she do to you two? Make your lives miserable, I'm sure, but even if she found the original books - well-hidden, mind you - your names aren't the same anymore. They hold no power over you..."

"She almost got us to agree to new behavior plans," I said.

"Two of the Advanced littles did agree," Simone added - that bit, I hadn't known. But that was relatively good news - that meant all the beginner littles had held out, plus two of the Advanced littles beyond Simone and myself.

Lily was unimpressed. "And if you were stupid enough to make a blood-pact signing your body and behavior away, what would that say about you? You girls are made of sterner stuff than that."

Were we made of sterner stuff? I'd been lucky to find Sauvage's pin at just the right moment to be able to fight back... "So you haven't brought us here to rescue us from the good doctor. Why, then?"

"You have my ring now, and you know the ritual, and now we know you can work it. That means you can come here for sanctuary at any time now, should you need it - but don't take my sanctuary lightly. Don't come here because Sauvage has you on miserable duty five days a week - don't come unless your physical or spiritual health is under threat. I've invited you here in the hope that knowing there's always a way out will make things a bit easier. This hardship will pass. And I've invited you here to give you gifts that will continue your training - things not found in the most advanced tomes of the St. Circe's library."

As far as I knew, the library was pretty comprehensive. Not so, I soon found out. Lily summoned a leather case from across the room - cream white and the size of a medium throw pillow, it danced about like a waltzing woman, lazily whirling along until it reached her hand. She pulled two books from it - very old books, bound in leather, their pages yellowed and worn by the decades: 'Seven Summonings' and 'The Lesser and Intermediate Artifices', only the latter of which I'd ever heard about.

"Tell no one of these books. No one. You and I would get in a great deal of trouble. These books begin a journey into realms we witches and our warlock brethren are forbidden to touch upon."

Simone was even unhappier about this revelation than I was - to quote the old hacker ethos, 'information wants to be free'. "What knowledge aren't witches allowed to learn?" she huffed.

Lily gestured around the circumference of her head. "The men with black hats - you remember the Commissar at the Winter Festival, tall and pale, hairless with a dry, dry voice?"

I had certainly recognized the type - after all, Doctor Heirophant was one of the bastards and he'd literally unmanned (or perhaps enwomaned) me what felt like a lifetime ago... though it was less than five months past. Those men were strange… inhuman in a way, as if their human-like bodies were raggedy disguises hiding something far stranger... and they had strange abilities that even witches didn't seem to possess. What did they have to do with anything?

"What do they have to do with anything?" I asked.

"Everything," Lily shrugged. She poured us more tea and retrieved a third and final book from the leather case: 'The Prophecies of Elisa Jasper, Annotated'. It was thick and old, bound in tan leather with gold filigree, and obviously well cared-for. Lily opened it carefully to a bookmarked page. "One hundred and fifteen years ago, the last great Prophetess of the Starry Sky assembled this collection, and one hundred twelve years ago, as predicted, the men arrived."

She cleared her throat and read: "'Gangling men, they come from the space between stars, pale, encircled with a dark halo, they flee the terrible light. They shall touch upon our shores and destroy our ways.' That's what she said about them and, as best we can estimate, they arrived in late June, 1908. That's a very early prophecy in the book... they're roughly, but not exactly chronological. The 'Gangling men' are exiles from some distant realm, I believe, and they arrived at a time when witches were fighting to escape from beneath the thumb of the warlocks, and when both... well, it's a long story. The point is, they came when we were destabilized and took over, allowing us to continue as their vassals. And, to our everlasting shame, we relented rather than risk utter destruction at their hands. But...

"'The Herald of the Stars shall overthrow the old order at the signal. She shall be known by her mark of corruption, her reputation shattered, laid low by false accusers.'" Lily recited.

"You... you think that's me?" I asked.

"I did," Lily said - her emphasis made it clear that she no longer thought it to be true. "But listen to this passage about the 'Twins' that the 'Herald of the Stars' precedes...

"'One born of woman, and one born of man; one in dark and one in light; one laid low by the Gangling men, one by the false prophet; they are the Storm that shall start the new age…'"

Simone gasped. "That's us!" She shook my shoulder hard enough that I knocked my tea cup over, the dregs dribbling into the saucer. "One born of woman - aren't we all? But you, Natalie, you were born 'of man' - you were born male, and it was a man that 'birthed' you into your new life. One in dark and one in light - obvious enough. I'm black, you're white. One laid low... you said the Gangling men are who changed you, and I was sent here by my televangelist father - the false prophet! And my..." she shot me a look. "Our name, apparently, is Storm."

I nodded to confirm it. "We have the same last (and most important) name. So... the Herald..."

"Is me, apparently," Lily said. "Though I haven't quite figured that one out..."

"Well... " I mused. Lily urged me to continue. "You overthrew the 'old order' of Bigs and littles when you inactivated all of our books, at the signal when you were put on leave. You're known for your long lock of white hair, 'corrupting' the sea of black... your reputation was damaged by the events of the Winter Festival, and the false accusers must be the board." I looked at them seriously. "Am I wrong?"

"You're not," Lily said eventually. "The problem with prophecy is in the interpretation - it's a plausible interpretation, but there may be others. Maybe it's foolish for me to think we can reach our old glory and beyond, that we can bring the knowledge of magic back to a world grown soulless and gray by the rule of the Gangling Men." She sipped at her tea. "So now you know. No pressure or anything."

"Thanks, mother," I said with a roll of my eyes.

Lily chuckled. "As long as you're in my house, you'll do as I say," she said in mock admonition. "But this is deadly serious - this is magic that the pale men cannot know we're practicing. It is forbidden, I assume, because it's a weakness or danger to them. So learn. Watch and wait. Come here for safety and, when the time comes, I hope we'll have the will and the power to act. So... thus concludes our light tea time conversation, I'm afraid."

+++++

I left Lily's not quite sure what to think. Though I hadn't given any indication of it, I didn't automatically buy the prognostications of Elisa Jasper, Prophetess. True, they were uncannily accurate - at least from one interpretive frame  - but so were the predictions of many wild-eyed visionaries, vague enough to have fifty possible interpretations and only one needed to come true. I wasn't convinced, but neither could I dismiss the prophecies out of hand.

"Pretty weird, right?" Simone said. Still in the sun of late springtime, we donned our coats and found ourselves trudging back through the snow in the cold winter wind not two minutes later.

I pondered what we'd heard, Lily's forbidden books in under my arm and looking out over the bleak winter snowscape. At least now I understood Lily's motivations - how she had become my greatest ally almost overnight. How she could risk losing her hard-won position and her reputation for two littles. I got a feeling that she disliked the whole institution of littles and Bigs almost as much as we all disliked the notion of magical thralls. It was an ugly bit of the school's history that she'd been willing to tolerate, though, right up to the point that it threatened her cherished prophecies, at which point she'd sprung into action. In a way, it was a self-fulfilling prophecy: Lily had overturned the old order in order to ensure that the 'Twins' could fulfill their destiny. Lily's motivations were self-serving, but there was also something noble about them. Plus, she had given us books of forbidden knowledge to peruse. She'd never be a saint, but ex-Headmistress Lily was a good ally.

Simone and I agreed to take one book apiece and swap after a week, repeating as necessary. I was first with 'Seven Summonings' - I felt that the artifice book was more along the lines of what I already knew and that Simone could ease into the material. So I sat cross-legged on the floor, sitting in a pool of sunlight and reading about summoning rituals - which I was absolutely forbidden to actually perform. Marie came in, glanced at me, and wordlessly started to clean the room.

"You don't have to clean my things," I said - I didn't want her touching my stuff, really, and I kept my side tidy.

She organized some of her bike parts and glanced to me. "Ever?"

"You don't have to clean my things ever," I agreed. "And I don't have to clean your things ever." After a minute, I looked up from my reading. "Did you hear about Doctor Sauvage and me?"

Marie managed a cautious nod. "One of the littles... um, Jessie... she said the two of you fought and that you beat Doctor Sauvage. Is that true?"

"It's not. But I didn't lose, either."

"Why are you even here anymore? If you're a no shit beast-mode witch, can't you just leave?"

I shrugged. "I could figure out how to escape, sure. And then what? If I have a duty to the coven, then I need to find a way to see the contract to the school completed. If I don't want to be on the run for my whole life, I have to keep my allies and beat my enemies. And if I turn the whole coven against me, I'm super fucked."

"That makes sense," Marie said eventually. Just then, a folded piece of paper slid under the door: a summons from Doctor Sauvage.

The Doctor was waiting in her office. She wore an iron-gray dress that matched her hair, her eyes only slightly darker than either. I wondered whether she might have a younger, livelier self away from St. Circe's like Lily did.  I couldn't think of her as anything but middle-aged and sturdily-built, but maybe she was young and still-godawful gray in the comfort of her own joyless home. As usual, the doctor's expression was unreadable - she might be reasonable here or she might be about to ambush me. The former, it turned out.

"We need to talk, you and I, away from the others."

"I agree," I said. I didn't sit, and neither did she indicate that I should. "I'm sorry I used your pin against you."

"That was a very fast reaction, and smart," she said eventually. "I'm sorry I struck you. I put myself in a bad situation - I must command respect from my students, and I must also respect the Creed, and I put myself into a situation where it made it very difficult to do both. And I have yet a third stricture: as headmistress, I must see that all of our contracts are brought to completion, yours included."

"I understand," I said. "I want my contract to be completed, as well. What, exactly, does that entail?"

Sauvage referred to her notes, scanning over several pages of documentation. "In this case, Mr. and Mrs. Bryce, Headmistress Lily, and I all have to sign off on the contract. Otherwise, the contract runs until you turn nineteen, at which point the two sides must decide upon recompense, if warranted. In my time here, it's never come to that - we always complete our plans on time or early. But you present a problem - the Bryces will never accept you, as you are, as an acceptable fulfillment of your contract..."

I looked down at myself - there wasn't much for Rowan Bryce to complain about. I was deceptively-strong and had tattoos that only a high collar, long sleeves, and covering past my ankles could conceal. Or I could hide them with self-transformation, which I was pretty good at. But with a little subterfuge, I could easily be the petite and curvy slice of delicate innocence that Rowan Bryce had, no doubt, demanded that I should embody. My tattoos and body tone I could disguise easily enough without resorting to magic.

"I'm guessing it's the mental component," I said.

"It is. You'll have to perform to Mr. Bryce's satisfaction, he's allowed up to half an hour to 'inspect' you however he likes, and he'll have to be convinced your changes are adequate before he'll sign off. At that point, I must surrender you to his authority. And if you present too much problem... well, he's utilized the pale men twice at great expense. Don't think he won't do it again. You understand?"

"I understand, headmistress," I said. "I promise to fulfill the school's contract and get the other littles to do likewise. Mind you, we can only make the parents think they're getting what they've paid for. We aren't giving up, but we'll play ball enough to keep the school from defaulting on the contracts and suffering magical mojo. In return, I hope, you'll let our little misunderstanding slide."

"That's not quite it..." She tapped the pile of behavior plan booklets next to her. "I need you to get the other littles to sign their new behavior plans."

I approached her desk and took the first of the booklets without asking. She made no move to stop me, looking on with her usual impassive gaze as I flipped through it. I flipped through the next one and the next. They were, so far as I could tell, the same ones she'd wanted the littles to agree to before. She wanted me to sell them out in order to save myself (or, rather, to sell myself to the Bryces on my own terms). I looked her in the eye and then back to the books.

"I can't do that," I said. I raised my small hand to halt her protest. It struck me how odd the scene must have looked, a tiny epitome-of-innocence teenager in her school uniform dictating terms to the school's stentorian headmistress. "I understand that you have a school to run and that your students need behavior plans. Believe it or not, I consider St. Circe's my home and my school now. But the contracts of littles, of all the littles, are made in bad faith - most of the other girls are happy, or even excited about the physical and mental advantages that a St. Circe's Academy education can provide. We littles, though, we cringe in fear that each week will carry us closer to a lifetime of miserable subservience."

"It's what their parents think best. It's not my place to judge."

"That's an abdication of moral responsibility, doctor, and a disservice to our second and third third laws: do not violate free will, and use your witchcraft in kindness. You are the doctor, you have seen thousands of girls along the pathway to becoming their best selves, and I expect you may know better than many of the parents what their children need to become that. They do not need to be shaped into maids, trophy wives, and..." I shuddered. "...fucking sex slaves against their will. Here's what I am willing to do for you - I'll go to each girl and make a new behavior plan with her. One that will pass muster with her parents without sacrificing the identities of the girls. We do away with the concept of 'littles' and 'Bigs' altogether and just have students with their behavior plans - behavior plans that they have signed off on. You can negotiate with us, bargain back and forth, until we can all sign the contracts with a clear conscience. I'll deliver this for you, bring every single student into compliance, if you can agree to that compromise."

Sauvage stood from her desk. She didn't look happy, and I was worried she might yell, strike at me, or unleash another magical attack. I didn't have a pin from her own body to defend myself this time, and so she'd probably overpower me in short order. I gathered that I was gifted in magic - prodigiously talented, even - but I wasn't yet a match for an inveterate witch among the coven's Thirteen, a formidable power in her own right. But Sauvage didn't attack me, nor did she yell. The quiet of her voice sent a chill down my spine.

"You're asking me to undo over seventy years of St. Circe's tradition - tradition that's been in place since we abolished thralldom after the last world war. I can't do that."

"Why not?" I asked. "It seems to me that you've got two choices: change the order or fail. You can defend tradition for tradition's sake, grasp the old ways past any reasonable defense, and be remembered as the shortest-serving failure of a headmistress in school history... or embrace a new and better way and be seen as the greatest reformer in two generations. Do you think quashing us will paint you favorably in posterity?"

Sauvage leaned into her desk, face drawn in, clearly considering the possibilities. She left without saying a word, leaving me waiting awkwardly in her office, and returned a moment later with a stack of blank green books. She tapped on the top book.

"Your first job as my chief assistant is to have these to me within the week. I expect that they'll contain plans that I can sign off on without looking like an incompetent fool. Neat, professional, no errors. Can you manage that?"

I never thought I'd want to hug Doctor Sauvage, but that's just what I did. Before I could even stop myself to ask what the hell I was doing, I wrapped my arms around her waist and leaned into her. The doctor tried to push me away, but apparently decided to just wait it out. In any case, she clearly wasn't very used to hugs.

"You won't regret this, Doctor Sauvage," I said. "You're really not a bad person."

"I am a pragmatist," she stated. "And if you are, too, you'll let go of me and get to work on those things - if I'm not happy, nobody will be happy."

+++++

I enlisted Cassie and Simone to co-head my 'Committee for Reform' and got started on the behavior plans as soon as I could, the three of us meeting up with the girls one at a time and discussing what they wanted for themselves and how we could make it work within the larger framework of what their parents would expect.

"Why does what the parents want even matter?" Cassie asked as we were setting our operation up. "I mean, I'm pretty pleased with how I'm turning out, but I don't think it's exactly what my father had in mind. Why should he get to weigh in?"

I shrugged. "It doesn't matter for one girl... but each of our parents are paying a million dollars a year to send each of us here, and the school needs new students. Plus, the school is still on the hook for all of the original blood pacts, even if Sauvage can't find the books. You can't just 'misplace' a blood pact - the physical contract is only symbolic. If the majority of those aren't completed, the school is F-U-C-K-E-D fucked, utterly at the magical mercy of the jilted contract-holders. Maybe I'm crazy, but I think we can make St. Circe's a force for good… and we can't say that about the other magical academies. The school's been shitty to some of us, but it doesn't have to be that way. We just have to help her be her best self. So let's make it work, ok? I mean... isn't there some part of your own behavior that you'd like to change that your father would also want you to change?"

"I could stand to be more organized, I guess..."

I nodded. "There you have it. We'd start with that - if we were doing your plan first. Which we aren't. I've told Sauvage we'll do all the littles, which is who we'll prioritize. And if the old behavior plans don't show up, which they won't, she'll want us to do the rest of the student body. Only then, after all that is complete, will the members of this committee get to their own plans."

Cassie frowned at that. "Wait... Natalie, what the fuck? You've got enough extra books… why not us? Call it a benefit of being on the committee…"

I held up two fingers. "First of all, I've only got the go-ahead to do the littles, and you ain't little ma chérie. And second, you've got it exactly backward. Wouldn't you say the average St. Circe's girl is uncommonly clever?"

Simone grasped my insinuation: "So you're saying we wait until we've heard everybody else's good ideas and get practice codifying them before we do our own."

I tapped the side of my nose. "Five points to House little!"

"Um… what's up?" Cassie said to the girl poking her head through the door.

Between Cassie, Simone, and even Doctor Sauvage, somebody must have spilled the beans about our committee, because there were at least a dozen girls milling about outside A012 where we'd made our temporary office. The run-down, dreary halls of the administration's basement weren't normally a hotbed of student activity, but we had excited chattering out in the hallway and more girls wandering down from upstairs. I popped my head out into the hall and scowled.

"This is a pilot program, girls - littles only until we get the headmistress's approval."

There was grumbling at that but, even better, there were rumors - soon everybody wanted to have a behavior plan done. We got to work with the littles' behavior plans, calling them down one at a time, and let the demand for new plans for everybody else simmer.

We made progress, too, soon discovering that we had two varieties of littles to work with: those who'd been so thoroughly cowed by their old behavior plans that they'd acquiesce to just about anything (these were usually the Advanced littles, several of them ground down by three or four years of servitude), and those with wholly unrealistic expectations that we had to tamp down: the girls would have to make concessions. For instance, in Michelle's case, we made a similar plan to her old revised one, but with two main caveats: her age would stay static for up to two years - until a parent-authorized magical command was triggered or the time elapsed. During that time, she was also weakly compelled against certain behaviors such as cursing - a practice her mother was adamantly against and that she thought she was probably better without anyway. She also conceded that it would help if she could be more studious, so we worked on ways to improve her attention span and focus. We couldn't directly touch her mind, but we came up with all sorts of little witch hacks, like giving her a little body high when she was on task. With improved study habits, maybe we could even get her started on witchcraft.

We did things like that for each girl - we crafted a plan that would benefit the girl and also please her parents, even if it wasn't the draconian change they'd initially ordered for her. For others, like Helena, there wasn't much we could do - her parents rejected her sexuality and, fundamentally, her very identity. We'd come up with ways that might help her pass muster, but we wouldn't encode anything that might harm her - and what her parents wanted definitely constituted harm. They didn't even care if she was miserable with who she became as long as they could show their friends and associates a well-behaved and conformist daughter.

"Do you think they'd be okay with this?" I asked. We'd front-loaded Helena's new plan with positive character traits that she didn't mind having more of and that ought to make 'traditional' parents proud: attentiveness, orderliness, and impeccable fashion sense. The latter of which, Helena assured us, she would use to start her own line of very-fashionable 'dykewear' (her word).

"I don't even care," Helena said. "I mean, fuck my father and his money."

"You realize he's not gonna give you money to start a 'dykewear' company," Simone observed.

"Maybe we should hook you up with my no-cursing package," Michelle suggested.

"Man, fuck that," Helena laughed, shaking the dark ringlets of her hair. She nudged me with her elbow. "I would like a dope-ass singing voice like you, though. I could start my music career and my old man would love if I sang in choir."

"I'm decent at best," I said. "But I bet we can manage that, too. You can only get good at singing with practice, but we can make your tune sensitivity better. That would be, um… cochlear attunement, I think."

So it went. It was a lot of work but, between the three of us, we managed to bang out decent behavior plans for all of the littles, myself included - Sauvage had insisted, so I took the hit. I wanted to get the damn pink streaks out of my hair, after all. I would have loved to be taller, too, but I needed to be able to fool the Bryces into thinking everything on my plan was hunky-dory, so everything else I might work on would have to be subtle or mental in nature, and I wasn’t about to start laying compulsions onto my fairly pristine mental state. I kept my clause for nerve conduction in and added a lot of nothingburger changes (like Helena's 'cochlear attunement' and 'fashion sense' changes that I'd devised) to make it look like I'd taken a bullet for the team. There were a lot of symbols there, but if you went through them with a fine-toothed comb, you'd find their changes pretty subtle.

When I handed the plans in to Doctor Sauvage at the end of a week, she skimmed them over and nodded. Then she jabbed her thumb with a hair-needle and started approving the plans without a second glance. She pressed a dot of blood onto the cover contract for each, the littles and I (minus Simone), having already submitted our drops to the contract blood-oath.

"Not exactly what I would have chosen, but good work overall," she said. "I won't send these back for my little quibbles - there isn't time. I'm meeting with the board tomorrow to present my plan."

"Your plan?"

"My plan," she reiterated. "I have to own it, regardless of whom I got my kick start from. And, if we're both fortunate, you won't be reporting to Headmistress Bishop next week. And, seeing as how you're such a big part of this, I insist that you accompany me to ply the board."

+++++

The board convened in the nicer, walnut-paneled meeting room in the upstairs of the administration building, the room with the nice big skylight, now giving view to gray and flurrying skies. I arrived two minutes early, divested myself of my coat, my boots, and my leggings - Sauvage had specified that I wear the vanilla school uniform, complete with blazer and pink ribbons for my ginormous twintails.

I arrived two minutes early, and everybody else was already there: Acting Headmistress Sauvage, Mrs. Bishop, Mother Dulcinea, Byron Bryce, and several others I didn't recognize. And Headmistress (ex-?) Lily - I hadn't expected that. She nodded in acknowledgment when I entered. I stood beside the only other seat in the room, a small wooden chair before the rather imposing panel of figures.

"Miss Bryce, thank you for coming," Doctor Sauvage said. "You may sit."

"Thank you, headmistress," I said in a small voice.

It was more than a little intimidating, sitting in front of the bigwigs like this. Here I thought I was hot shit, but now I was out of my element and sitting in front of seven, presumably high-level magic users with a broad array of dispositions toward me, from the very-favorable Lily to the perpetually-annoyed Byron Bryce. I smiled amiably, flashing my big emerald eyes at them and subtly dangling my feet, which didn't quite reach the floor: I'm just a kid, take it easy on me, I hoped I was conveying.

Doctor Sauvage offered the closest thing to a smile she was capable of, a kind of neutral pull at the edges of her mouth. "Natalie, I was explaining my new scheme for our behavior plans, and about how you were our first subject, on account of difficulties with your existing plan. You and I sat down and hashed out a new plan, didn't we?"

I wasn't sure where she was going with this, but I decided that honesty was the best policy - better to avoid falling into any story inconsistencies or traps in logic. The doctor had been comparatively rosy of late, but perhaps she was wilier than I gave her credit for. So I answered: "That's right. We made a new plan for me so that I could fulfill the contract between the school and the Bryces." I glanced at Byron Bryce.

"That's preposterous," he grumbled. "It pains me to see how far this school has fallen of late... you expect me to believe that you can satisfy a girl's contract by having her enter a pact of her free accord?"

Headmistress (ex-?) Lily cleared her throat. "Mr. Bryce, you know as well as I that a blood-pact made with a girl's own blood and of her own accord is several-fold stronger than one made by relatives, even by both of her blood-parents."

He rolled his eyes and glared back at me. "Of course I'm not questioning the basics of magecraft, Mrs. Lily... but I am questioning whether Sauvage's methods are, in fact, the product of a sane mind. I think that you, of all people, would want her to suffer spectacular failure..."

"Perhaps part of me does," Lily considered, tapping her panoply of rings against the table. "It pains me to see another woman in my spot. But, ultimately, my loyalty is to the coven. So I want what's best for St. Circe's above all. If workable, this plan would give us vastly greater flexibility, not to mention security against things like last month's debacle. Would it not?"

"It would," Doctor Sauvage said. She stood from her seat and strolled around to my side of the room, strolled around the psychological barrier between that dark and imposing boardroom table with all the board behind it and onto my lonely half of the meeting room. She squinted slightly, something akin to triumph flickering across her usually-neutral expression. She turned to face the panel.

"This, and I'll show you just how well. Miss Bryce has been one of our problem students - very little I've done has been able to rein in her poor behavior. But now I can custom-tailor every punishment, fine-tune to every infraction to neatly expunge those traits we deem unsuitable. In fact, she's made such progress so quickly that I'd like to graduate her this year - one year ahead of schedule - and I'll show you exactly how far along she's come presently..."

She held a small green booklet aloft for them to see: 'Natalie Bryce Behavior Plan'. She flipped it open to around the half-way mark and set it upon my lap. She handed me a silvery pin, the slightest hint of pale gold glinting in its surface.

"I've made an amendment to your plan, Natalie. Please sign it."

"What does it say, headmistress?" I asked. From a glance, I could tell that it was complex and quite rigorous, something akin to what she'd wanted to saddle me with before. A compulsion to obedience so strong that it might as well be brainwashing. Elsewhere in the book, the symbology would be translated into plain language, but I could discern well-enough what it said from the symbols alone. But I wasn't supposed to be able to read magical symbols, and I definitely wasn't supposed to be able to read them well enough to interpret a plan. I looked up, eyes uncertain.

"Don't you worry yourself about that, girl," Sauvage said. "It's your place to obey. Just sign it."

That left me in a hard spot: defy Sauvage, and it would make her look bad. She might well be demoted or even lose her job... and I'd be at the mercy of the board thereafter. They weren't bound by the same strictures as the school and might be every bit as nasty to me as Rowan Bryce had been all those months ago. Or I could submit to whatever Sauvage had added to the book (and it was a doozy), placate the board, and deal with the repercussions. And there would be repercussions - one didn't give Prudence Sauvage carte blanche access to their body and behavior lightly. Or was there another way?

I pricked my thumb with the needle, the flash of pain in doing so familiar by now, a bead of dark red blood welling above my skin. Hand wavering, I held the spot of blood up for them to see. Then I steadied my hand at the wrist with my other hand and pressed it into the book. The board, looking on, could not have helped but to feel the passage of magic as I sealed the contract. Then I lifted the book to show them the contents.

OvidLemma

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