A torrent of noise spun into the corridor before Elise even passed inside. She would've clapped her hands over her ears if they weren't on the wheels of her chair. No one inside noticed her entry. People sat at a long table in the middle of the L-shaped room, three of the four faces from the photograph Ian had shown her earlier. A girl with pale blue hair that could've been mistaken for an unearthly shade of blond sat at the center, surrounded by a whorl of paper butterflies that occasionally strayed off. They sounded like a hundred books being flipped through at once. The half a dozen pens scribbling over half a dozen papers, with no hand to hold them, nearly met that noise in strength.

At the far left of the table, a boy of twenty or so snatched one of the butterflies out of the air, and crushed it in his hand. "Stella," he said, to the blue-haired girl, "it's impossible to work like this."

Eyes on the paper she corrected with a blue pen, Stella said, "If it's impossible, then how am I working like this?"

"You're abnormal, that's how."

"You should consider abnormality. Then you might be on time with your assignments." She delivered this lightly, as if giving an admonition had been the last thing on her mind.

His forehead furrowed beneath his stylish pompadour of dark blond hair. "Really?" he said. "Would that make me work as quickly as you do? Because all I can see from here is miles of unanswered advice columns."

She pursed her lips as she began to read what looked like a very long paragraph. "I'll get to them when I get to them."

He threw the crushed paper butterfly onto the table, groaning. It twitched weakly where it'd landed. "We need another writer to handle things."

Stella crossed out several sentences. "No one does the work of Miss Answering except for Miss Answering."

"Forget Miss Answering. We're short on writers and long on work."

Willow, who sat on the far right of the table, balled up several pieces of paper, then pitched them behind her without looking. They fell straight down from the far wall into a small waste bin, bounced off the lid, and hit the floor to join an impressive mound of yet more paper. "I swear, if I see one more letter from that 'Lady Thorne' girl," she said, "the Herald might soon be down three writers instead of just two."

"Lady what?" said the boy.

"You know, the gal who's obsessed with that Tarian Marek." Willow's nose wrinkled in distaste. "He's all right to look at, I guess, if you don't mind the hair, but he's weird beneath the smiles and politeness." She leant back in her chair, stretching out her arms. "Doesn't look twice at girls. Doesn't look twice at guys, either, so he doesn't seem inverted or anything. But what kind of fella doesn't care for anyone?"

Stella said, "A bachelor."

"Count on you to answer the unanswerable, darling."

Tapping her blue pen against her chin, Stella looked deep in thought. "Answering the unanswerable," she mused. "Say, that's a good one. Maybe Miss Answering could use it as a catchphrase."

"Miss Answering could use a lot of things," Willow said, with a mischievous look, but her friendly barb went seemingly unnoticed. She folded her arms behind her head, stretching her neck this time. "Of course, Lady Thorne's nothing compared to the work I've got in my future — Jack brought up my dance idea at the last Underseers' meeting, and everyone liked it."

"I thought you wanted everyone to like it?"

Willow signed, then finished stretching. "I do, but not when we're so darned busy. And that's not even counting the end-of-the-year ordeal ..."

"Lady Thorne." The blond-haired boy nibbled on the end of his pen. "Was she that nutty gal who tried to have us publish that anonymous marriage proposal to Marek last year?"

"No, she's the one who wanted us to publish that wretched poem about his eyes." Willow looked sick to her stomach. "Who rhymes 'jade' with 'jade,' anyway?"

He flung his pen onto the table. "People with no taste, that's who." Turning his head side to side, he popped his neck. "I say we get rid of whatever she sends us."

Ian edged around Elise's wheelchair, then plucked the basket off her lap. He set it down carefully on a table near the door. The conversation seemed to interest him as much as it interested her. They had a good view of the show, too; the entryway they stood in formed the small leg of the L-shaped room and kept them somewhat out of sight.

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"We can't just throw out what we're sent, Ash," Willow said, smoothing out the letter she had set in front of her. "There are rules. As a publication dedicated to serious journalism, we mus —"

The boy Ash lifted a hand, then flicked his fingers at the letter. Little green shoots sprung out of it, unfurling skyward with green leaves. They grew several inches high before stopping. Branches spiked out of their browning trunks, bursting with green needles. The miniature forest grew dense and lovely in its field of paper. "There," he said, lowering his hand, "we haven't thrown it out, but it's gone."

"My hero," she said, with half-mocking praise.

A smile emerged in his olive-toned face. "Yours and everyone else's, too."

Ian took up the camera around his neck, aimed, and pressed the shutter. The click drew the attention of everyone at the table, even through the sound of the butterflies. But it was the sight of Elise that pushed them out of their chairs. They stared wide-eyed at her, as if they'd never seen her before.

"Hello," she said, her voice coming out smaller than she'd intended.

Willow got around the table, hugging Elise before anyone else could beat her to it. "You're back!" she said. "Why didn't you tell anyone you'd be back?"

"The clinic let her go just this morning," Ian said, passing behind Willow with the basket once more on his arm. "Gerver sent someone by with a note while all of you were having that argument about headline sizes, and I went to find her downstairs." He noticed Elise's pleading look and set the basket onto the big table. "Might want to stop squeezing, Will. Wouldn't want to send her back to the clinic so soon."

The arms around Elise loosened without dropping. Ash pressed in next, not for a hug, but to set a hand briefly on her shoulder. "Glad you're back, Ellie," he said. "We've had a hard time of things with you gone."

She didn't know him from Adam, but it didn't take a genius to interpret the warmth in his voice. Another face swam into view on the other side of Willow, one that came with a set of wide blue eyes that stared at Elise without blinking. "It's good to see you again," Stella said. "I tried to send you a bouquet of cookies while you were in the clinic, but the nurses said it wasn't sanitary." She blinked, finally. "They said we couldn't visit you, either, and became especially insistent on that point when they caught me trying to sneak in." She whispered, "They confiscated the cookies."

Gratefulness inundated Elise. She hadn't been abandoned, at least not by these people she'd once called friends. They'd cared for her, worried over her, wanted her back among them. "Thank you," she said, finally looping her arms around Willow. Hugging someone and being hugged at the same time felt so nice. "Thank you, all of you, for being so kind."

The boys looked embarrassed over that praise, but Willow didn't. Stella frowned, however. "Friends are supposed to be kind," she said, as if explaining a very difficult concept to a small child. Her expression turned thoughtful. "Unless they've been having an argument, then they might be mean."

Elise leaned back a bit from Willow to take a better look at Stella. The other girl was a bit odder than she'd appeared a first sight — not only for the color of her hair, but the faint blue shapes patterning her pinkish skin. These designs appeared to swirl and shift like smoke. It was difficult to decide if they were fascinating or unnerving. Both, perhaps. "Um, I suppose that's true," Elise said, since Stella kept staring at her.

"Okay, let's get to breakfast before we scare Ellie off," Willow said. "What did you two dig up, anyway?"

"Sandwiches, potato salad, and pie," Ian answered. "Nothing to drink, though; I figured we could have coffee. We need it."

"A feast fit for royalty!"

"How could it be anything else, with Queen Willow presiding over the court?"

This sort of banter seemed normal, and Elise found herself relaxing. No one treated anyone with formality, coldness, or cruelty here. They were equals even after having disagreements. Willow told her to sit the table while everyone else prepared the meal. Elise protested, saying that she could help. The others brushed off her offer as nonsense, leaving her to watch while Stella and Ian cleared and set the table. Ash and Willow brought mugs and the coffee pot from the far side of the room, bringing over sugar and a brown glass jar of ... something.

"Homemade coffee creamer," Willow explained, upon seeing Elise's look. "It's powdered."

That certainly hadn't been on the tables in the Refectory, and while Elise had heard of cream or milk going in coffee she'd never heard of anything called creamer. She probably had her memory to blame for that. "How does it taste?"

"Better than that junk they sell at the market. Just some nonfat dry milk, a smidge of oil, and a little vanilla sugar." Willow shook the jar. "I make that last one myself, with vanilla pods and everything."

Elise's stomach betrayed her with a hungry gurgle. She had no idea how vanilla sugar tasted, but it sounded delicious. The food was finally freed from the picnic basket. She ate this new breakfast with more gusto than the first one in the Refectory, eating double portions of everything, except for the hand pies. Four of those disappeared thanks to her. Her stomach finally quieted over her third cup of coffee. She took a sip. The creamer tasted good, and she'd used plenty of it. "Has this room always been a disaster?"she said.

Yet another mistake. She cringed, waiting for the inevitable ire to show on the faces around her. Speaking before thinking had become a bad habit of hers. Maybe she'd always had it.

The fear proved unwarranted. No one looked bothered by what she'd said.

"Yeah," Ash said, "and it can't be anything except a disaster thanks to our workload." He took a long drink of his coffee, to which he'd liberally added creamer, too. "You're back, though, and that means I don't have to do the boring stuff anymore."

Willow made a face at him. A very disapproving one.

"What?" he said. "It's true. I'm no editor, not like Elise is, or ... or, uh ..." He drank hastily from his mug. "Anyway, the point is that I'm no good at doing that line by line stuff. But even with Elise back, we still need to talk about a replacement. There's another empty spot at this table, after all."

Only Elise looked at that empty chair. It sat straight across from another empty chair that had a piece of yellowed paper with her name pasted onto the top of the wooden backrest. The other chair had a different name on it, an unsurprisingly unfamiliar one.

"Who's Charlotte Cooke?" she said.