The walk into town on Saturday is long, but pleasant.

Elsa and Annie had both been woken in the morning to the sound of Mr. Granger whistling over a pot of thick porridge while Miss Granger handled the morning milking.

“Eat up,” he told them both, ladling the porridge into bowls for them.

“Market day, so lots of walking ahead, got to keep up your strength.”

Elsa smiles as she eats her porridge. She can’t imagine her father cooking anything at home, he could barely make his own tea. She pictures him burning an egg. But it suits Mr. Granger, he’s even wearing a short apron over his shirt and braces. Annie tells her he does this every weekend.

“He makes us breakfast and Miss Granger cooks Sunday dinner. I wonder if they’ll let me in the kitchen at all now that he’s not going to be teaching during the week!”

The ground from the farmhouse slopes downward, but not to a terribly steep degree. Elsa’s swapped her regular shoes for her plimsoles so the rocks don’t bother her quite as much.

While they’re still somewhat high up, Miss Granger points across the valley to two large structures on the horizon.

“The bigger building is the academy. You’ll get to see that on Monday when we all go for the end-of-term celebration. The other is the ancestral estate of the Wylde’s. Lady Sylvia and her family have lived there for hundreds of years.”

Elsa is intrigued, but does not give it a great deal of thought. Country estates were so far from the world she knew. From where she is, they are merely blurs of white and brown buildings.

The tenant from the next farm over rides past them on a horse. Miss Granger had told her that the next farm bred horses, and Elsa tried to hide her disappointment that the Grangers didn’t have any.

“I saw a horse out by the forest the other night,” she tells her, “It was silver.”

“Don’t think that was a horse,” Mr Granger tells her, “Silver’s more a color typical of a unicorn, normally an older mare. That was probably Old Bertha, she comes out of the forest on nice nights now and then.”

Elsa tries to wrap her mind around a unicorn named Bertha.

The village comes into sight alongside a road that runs perpendicular to a wide stream. Walking in proper, the road forms a bridge that crosses over.

Elsa stares at the buildings around here. There’s lots of whitewash and polished wood and cobblestone, and most of the buildings are hung with oil lanterns outside. It almost looks like something out of a storybook. There’s even a clocktower off in the distance on the far side of the market.

When they reach the road, it’s dotted with people. A few are on horses, or in simple carriages. More still are on bicycles, but mostly they walk. The signs hang from shops, proclaiming their wares. There’s an occasional bell and sometimes people yelling out to each other, and there’s the smell of stone and flowers and a hint of hot tea on the air.

At the end of the street, they pause in front of a building with a big glass window.

“Once they light the lanterns, we’ll all meet back here to have tea,” Mr. Granger tells them. Miss Granger hands them both envelopes with coins inside. “In case you need anything,” she tells them.

And with those words, Elsa is alone. Even Annie has scampered off, no doubt more familiar with the village than her.

Elsa walks slowly, tilting her head trying to take everything in. Signs dot the shops. There are many that look much like the shops in London, a grocery, a chemist (the sign calls it an apothecary), and a sweetshop. Some of the others are less familiar, a shop with cats on the window display, another with a lineup of brooms and pots and little wheels and gears. At the end of the street, there is something that the sign only describes as “Bits and bobbles and books.” She’ll check that one out later.

Out in the streets are carts and stands, full of produce and creations. There are jars of honey and jam, bars of soap that smell of herbs and flowers and even a cart with hot drinks (that’s where the smell of tea had been coming from and the elderly woman standing it even has chocolate and coffee too.)

Elsa decides to get her hairpins first, so she won’t forget them.

She steps into the chemist, and is immediately assaulted by smells. Vinegar, cleaning chemicals and something strangely spicy all enter Elsa’s nose, making her wince.

“Hello?” she asks. She looks around. The shop is dim, only a little sunlight filtering through the windows. There are a few shelves full of bottles and boxes that look like a normal chemist, but the majority of the floor space is full of trays and drawers full of vials of brightly colored liquids, bits and pieces Elsa doesn’t recognize. Next to the entrance is a tray of what looks to her, somehow, like eyeballs.

“Can I help you?” a voice calls out from the back of the store. A man stands behind a counter there, a cash machine on one side, a jar of newts on the other.

The man is tall, with long hair pulled back. In fact, much about him is long, his face and fingers are as well. His voice is polite, but there’s something in his tone that makes Elsa question if he knows she’s a person, or if he thinks she’s a lizard he’s studying.

“Hello,” she starts, nervously polite, “I was wondering if you sold hairpins here?”

The tall man pauses, and when he answers, his voice is a great deal plainer than it had been before.

“I’m afraid I cannot help you, items such as that are likely found at Practicals around the corner.”

Feeling a strange tension, Elsa nods and quickly exits the apothecary.

“I wonder if that man has studied any medicine at all!” she thinks to herself, incredulously.

Around the corner, she finds Practicals quite easily. A queer name for a shop, but very descriptive. It is a plain gray building with modern lighting, and it’s shelves are piled with various necessary but awfully unexciting things. While seeking her hairpins, Elsa finds bowls and plates, balls of twine, toilet plungers and razor blades. Next to the hairpins are three different types of hair curlers.

She pays the girl at the counter for the pins, tucks them in her jumper pocket, and leaves the shop.

She’s tempted by the sweetshop and her few remaining coins, but decides to take a look inside “Bits and Bobbles and Books” first.

The shop itself is rather ramshackle, the window in the front is dark. When Elsa opens the door, the smell of dust hits her.

The shelves are all dark wood, and laden with…

Books. Books and newspapers, magazines. School books and pulp novels and funny books and clippings, Elsa steps closer and realizes they all appear to be in different languages.

Further up front, there’s a counter with a selection of cosmetics on one side, pots and jars in pale, feminine colors. The other side is brightly wrapped sweets and chocolate bars Elsa doesn’t recognize.

She’s begun to peruse the shelves, when she notices the quiet woman who has entered and sat at the counter.

“Hello,” the woman calls out in a rather mouselike voice, “I’m afraid I’ve never seen you before.”

Elsa turns to face her. The woman is rather plain, with brown hair and eyes under a pair of spectacles. She’s not terribly old, perhaps twenty, certainly no older than twenty-five. Her voice sounds unusual, but not in any way that Elsa can place.

“I’m Elsa Green,” she tells her.

The woman frowns.

“Well you’re not a student. I’ve been up to campus a few times this year, and you wouldn’t have arrived at the end of term. So how did you wind up in Moonrise, Elsa Green?”

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Elsa picks up a bit of newsprint and looks through it. It’s mostly funny papers, ones she doesn’t recognize. American perhaps, or Canadian.

“I was evacuated from London, because of the war. I’m staying at the Granger’s farm.”

The woman smiles grimly.

“They’re evacuating people again. That’s good I suppose. Better than the alternative.”

There’s a pause, and Elsa feels like she must ask.

“Your accent-”

The woman smiles again, almost sadly this time.

“Before I became a student at the academy up the hill, I was born in the Basque country.”

Elsa frowns a bit, thinking.

“Basque country....that’s in Spain isn’t it?”

There’s something else about it, but she can’t quite remember…

The woman stands. She’s quite tall for a woman.

“I am Ana Guittierez. I chose to stay here once I finished school. I was never much as a witch, though I did ace my winking exam-”

Elsa finally can’t help herself.

“What’s ‘winking’?”

Miss Ana nods in understanding.

“‘Winking’ is a witch’s term for autonomous transport to specific points in the world. There’s a whole book up at the academy of places set with their latitudes and longitudes, it’s bigger than any other book I’ve seen beside a dictionary. It takes much practice, but I always had a knack for it. I use it mostly to make my living-”

She gestures to the whole shop around her.

“By procuring things from around the continent to help students feel at home more. I remember in school all I wanted sometimes was to read something printed in Spanish for once.”

She smiles down at the sweets and cosmetics.

“Though these do seem to be my bestsellers. I used to get a bigger cut with things like shampoo and other things a student might forget to bring, but then Practicals opened up and undercut me…”

Elsa politely steps back from the counter and carefully begins to go through the papers on the shelves. She finds a collection of interesting looking cartoons. The girl in the first batch of panels has a pilot’s helmet, and she’s never seen something like that before. She folds it up, then moves to the counter.

Picking her sweets is easy, because Elsa recognizes absolutely nothing on the rack and so picks one at random in a shiny silver wrapper. She counts out her coins and asks Miss Ana if it’s enough. She looks, nods, and hands Elsa a single pence back.

When she exits the shop, Elsa gazes up at the sky to try and judge the time, before she remembers that the village has a clocktower.

She unwraps the sweet she’d picked. It’s a layer of chocolate around a fluffy pink strawberry center. The sweetness flows over her tongue as she wanders the market square just looking at things.

She pokes her face into nearly all the shop windows. Other than the ones she saw earlier, there’s a tool shop and a blacksmith off down another side road. Elsa’s never seen a real blacksmith before, but she imagines someplace with lots of farms might need one more than London. There’s a feed store on the other side of that street, and Elsa thinks she sees Miss Granger’s ginger streaked head in the window. She’s not too interested, so she turns back to the main street.

Further in the center of town sits a fountain. The rim is thick enough to sit on. Elsa does so, though the stone is a bit cold. There’s an inscription on a plaque that Elsa leans over to read, licking the last bit of her chocolate from her lips.

Much of the writing has been worn down, but what Elsa can read says that the fountain sits over the mouth of a sacred spring.

After sitting a bit, Elsa yawns. The sun is high today, and it’s beams are making her feel rather sleepy. Eventually, fighting its power, Elsa rises to her feet, and stretches.

Walking, still a bit out of it, she bumps into Annie. Literally, as they both fall to the sidewalk.

“Sorry,” Elsa apologizes, rubbing her head. She looks Annie up and down, and notes the wrapped bundle in her arms.

“What have you got?”

Annie grins.

“Bit of lace to finish a dress I made for the end of term celebration on Monday.”

Oh, Elsa had forgotten about that. Well, she does have that one dress. She pauses, squeezing that last penny in her pocket. She only has white stockings and her dress is dark blue and black. Oh well, she’ll just have to look goofy.

“What are you going to wear to it?”

Elsa stares up at the sky.

“I hadn’t really thought about it. I only have one dress, I guess it will have to be that.”

Annie doesn’t pay her any mind, just keeps skipping, fingering the lace in the package.

“Did you already spend your pocket money?”

Elsa nods, then jerks her head upright.

“I needed hair pins,” she starts, then reaches in under the side of her jumper, removing the folded stack of funny papers. She hands them to Annie.

“I got these for you. They’re much better reading than those awful moral school readers.”

Annie turns a little red, but smiles when she takes the papers. She only glances at them before tucking them away.

“So I guess you met Miss Ana?”

Elsa looks at her curiously.

“Her shop didn’t exactly look like your sort of place. How did you meet her?”

Annie pauses, and sort of looks around before answering.

“Apparently Lady Wylde doesn’t like people leaving the valley. She didn’t even like it when Practicals opened because almost everything there has to be manufactured outside and shipped here.”

That made sense. Elsa had sort of gotten the feeling that the place was very isolated, and Miss Granger has said it was quite self sufficient.

“So she-”

Annie gazes around the street they’re on.

“She’s good at winking- did she tell you what that was?”

Elsa nods.

“So if anyone needs something from outside, they go to her.”

She tilts her eyes upward to the bakery, which shares space with the sweet shop. Elsa spies two women inside, both with warm brown skin and curls, who look as though they could be sisters.

“Charlotte and Claudette use her to supply their chocolate.”

A broad, jolly faced man carrying a cart loaded with an anvil goes past.

“Jacob, the smith, goes to her when he needs fresh ores.”

Elsa frowns.

“And no one says anything? If it’s against the rules-”

“I don’t know if Lady Wylde even knows. She pretty much never comes into town, she’s always at the school or her estate. I’ve only seen her from afar once. Besides, I don’t think they’re real rules, just things people here don’t do.”

Elsa shakes the description off. She doesn’t want to make Lady Wylde a mysterious figure in her mind.

Annie tilts her head up to one of the lanterns in along the street, which is now lit in the early dusk’s disappearing light.

“You’ve got another surprise coming, courtesy of Miss Ana,” Annie says.

When Elsa looks at her quizzically, she grins.

“We’re so far from the coast, I wouldn’t have expected to have any fish at all, but every Saturday morning, Miss Ana winks out to Blackpool so Mr. and Mrs. Stebbens can fry up fish and chips at the pub.”

Elsa’s stomach growls. There was a chippie just down the road from the shop in London, Fred and Thomas had brought it back to the boarding house nearly every Friday night. She hadn’t expected to be able to eat it again for years.

They meet the Grangers at the pub easily. It seems like almost the entire street is here, lining up for their meal before taking spots on the leather bar stools that seem to already be picked out.

Elsa pays only a little attention as they eat. Annie’s got the funny papers she’d given her, and she helps her parse the words. Flyin’ Jenny’s a pretty good read, and Elsa hopes she’ll beat those saboteurs.

The deep fried batter smells like home. And thankfully, it’s not too heavy, since they still have to walk back to the farm. Elsa’s wondering about the darkness, when Mr. Granger lifts his wand from his coat pocket, and the tip illuminates, lighting their way.

Elsa’s glad that she chose her plimsoles that day. The darkness risks more rocks and animal holes. When they return, it’s dark enough that she swears she sees Luz eyeing one of the fairy mice near the barn.

She hadn’t realized how tired she was, until she made it to her room and pulled off her shoes. She tries the wireless one more time, and stares out the window only for a few moments, before falling face first into bed.

She jerks awake in the morning, disoriented and feeling like she has definitely overslept. She makes her way downstairs, still in her nightdress. It’s Sunday, she thinks, will she be expected to go to church with them?

Annie’s at the kitchen table, still examining the funny papers, over her bowl of porridge. There’s another one across the table.

“They both left already. Miss Granger wondered if you were ill, but I said you were probably just tired.”

Elsa sits down carefully, and begins to eat her porridge. There’s a light, meaty smell in the air, and Elsa realizes Miss Granger’s probably already put the roast on.

“They don’t make you go to church?”

Annie laughs.

“They offered, and I went the first time. We never went in London, Mum had some very unkind things to say about our vicar, so I was curious. It was really dull, and because there’s always town meetings after that I can’t go to and I don’t like walking back to the farm by myself.”

Town meetings? Huh.

“Besides,” Annie continues, “I like having time to myself. That I definitely never got at home.”

Elsa frowns.

“Back in London...do you have brothers and sisters?”

Annie nods.

“Six sisters. I’m the oldest. Me, Mary, Ellen, Dot, Maggie, Ruth, Anna. Mum couldn’t even get creative on the baby’s name.”

Elsa’s surprised.

“How on earth did your mum get anything done?”

Annie snorts.

“By passing it off to me mostly. I’ve been filling bottles and changing nappies as long as I’ve been able. Every moment there was someone hurt or crying or lost. I mean, I miss my sisters-”

There’s a tone in her voice, and Elsa wonders if she really does.

“But I’ve never only had to take care of me before.”

There’s a bit of silence, and Elsa doesn’t want to pry.

“I’m an only child,” she admits, “I always wanted a brother or sister. I’m older than you,” she points out, “I could be your older sister while we’re here.”

Annie smiles softly, almost sadly.

“That would be nice.”

Later that morning, before the Grangers return to the farm, Annie insists Elsa put on her dress so she can see what to make of it.

“I’m glad you seem to enjoy sewing,” Elsa comments, “Domestic science was my worst subject in school.”

“I especially like only having to mend my own things,” Annie says as she fingers the fabric.

The dress is dark blue with small black dots. It fits even worse than Elsa remembered, The puffy sleeves are pulled tight around her upper arms and the skirt barely touches her kneecaps. She looks like she’s still in junior school.

Annie carefully uses her scissors to cut the ties in her sleeves, and pulls the string free.

“Is that better?” she asks.

Elsa nods, pulling at the sleeves. It is much nicer without them digging, and she hadn’t cared too much for the puff.

When she reaches the skirt, Annie’s touch is different. Her eyes seem to sparkle almost as she pulls at the fabric.

Once she’s done, the skirt now covers Elsa’s bony kneecaps.

Elsa stares, astonished.

“How did you do that?” she asks.

Annie purses her lips.

“It’s hard to describe. Miss Granger showed me how once, and it’s hard to put into words. It’s sort of, sort of like whispering to it. To the little fibers in the fabric. They used to be parts of something you see, this is wool, so they used to be parts of sheep, just like the Grangers sheep up on the hill.”

Elsa’s mind is turning a million miles a second.

“You mean to say that this-” her voice catches, “magic, is something that regular people like us can learn?”

Annie smiles, genuinely.

“Seems that way, though Miss Granger did say we were quite old. Most witch children start learning from their parents as soon as they can toddle. Mr Granger’s told me all the classes at the school, and I can’t even imagine doing half of them.”

Elsa’s so pleased with the changer to her dress that she twirls.

“Show me what you need to do to finish yours now,” Elsa insists. She pauses, before turning to scamper back up the stairs too.

“Wait, I’m the older sister now, I’ll read to you while you do it.”

When the Grangers return home and Miss Granger comes to check on the roast in the oven, Annie’s nearly done with her lace and Elsa’s gotten to the caucus race down the rabbit hole.