Her mother's woodland manor stood without the beams of moonlight, or scorched birch.

"You were never good at telling dad jokes." Penelope complained to the sparkling emerald, distant starlight filtering through it, giving me just enough light to read by. Cory cawed that he agreed.

"What sort of dad joke would I tell?" I asked her.

"What did he say?" Cory asked Penelope.

"He says he doesn't know any jokes." Penelope stuck her tongue out at my crow.

"My Lord would not claim that. He tells the best jokes to me." Cory hopped and then flew to a branch for the night.

"I'm sleeping out here, on the ground." Penelope whispered to me. I continued my work, studying the book of evil, searching my memories for the passage that might free me from the clutches of the device of the emerald.

Penelope's eyes shone in the starlight as she watched fireflies and mosquitoes. Her left eye, purple, her right eye, gold. The fey folk would be jealous of her beauty. Too bad no such creatures remained. She looked around, wishing she could see one.

Silverbell didn't count.

"What's a spell to summon fairies?" Penelope asked me.

"Dangerous, if there was one. Suppose the Fen and the Fell knew such a spell, or if an ettercap learned it. Magic must be cautious, used with consideration, for there are always consequences that balance out the conveniences of enchantment." I explained to her. "Just me teaching you any such spell would begin the transference of my soul and yours, our existences reversed, if I teach you enough of my magic. It is all very dangerous."

"I wish you to teach me when I ask, and I will remember what you have said." Penelope stared into the emerald at me.

"Very well. I shall do so, but I love you very much and it might pain me to see this undertaking of yours." I said.

"Just help me, don't try to stop me. Let me go to Circe and learn her magic. I must also know my own, don't you see? She will expect this, and challenge me so that you and I are compromised. It is the way it must be. For a bond as deep and secure as ours, the challenge must be terrible." Penelope described.

I then taught her a spell to summon fairies.

I closed my senses when she did it, for I was not yet able to tolerate seeing my daughter cast such spells. There are certain horrors even I could not endure. She did it quite well, she wrote she had cast this spell, a summoning, 'furiously'. I could not be too revolted by her enthusiasm. It was a spell I knew, after all.

Penelope had learned how to record her spells in her own code, in her book of shadows, because Circe had enchanted her pupil with such talent. Circe could easily read any such coded spells, but the measure wasn't intended to prevent Circe from keeping surveillance on her student, it was to keep outsiders out.

Under the cabbages, upon the ground, a twisted bundle, somehow a kind of thorny ankh, a kind of boat shape. Penelope claimed this and explained it was surely the result of her spellcasting. She kept it, taking an old dream catcher I'd made for her and burning it. Her smudging took her into her mother's home, blessing it as she went.

When she reached the room where her sister, Isidore and Dr. Leidenfrost were all sleeping, she smudged it while they slept, purifying their dreams of the lingering memory of me.

"What is it you do, little one?" Silverbell flitted through the smoke, appearing for an instant to me as a blue-skinned fairy wearing only a white hat lined with dandelion seeds for a brim, the whole hat made of dandelion seeds braided together with those long fingers, warped into bogey claws. Her eyes shone like drops of fresh blood, red and bulging and wet. Then it was Silverbell, our fairy, and the malevolent pixie was gone, its needle-like teeth forgotten.

"I bless, I sing to the hours before sunrise. I was out in the garden earlier casting a certain spell. Did you notice it?" Penelope asked, allowing the glamoured creature to alight on her finger.

"Yes, little sister. Now cast another spell. Let me teach it to you quickly. Where is your master?" Silverbell asked quickly, without her usual laughter and melody in her voice. In fact, we had not once heard her merry tinkling of silver bells that was her namesake.

"Sylvia?" Penelope held the fairy a little further from her face. The creature leaned towards her, predatory-like.

"Where is Sylvia?" Silverbell asked.

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"A good question." Cory swooped into the room, through the shadows of the manor that he knew by heart, upon dusty drafts that he could glide through in his sleep.

"Ah, you have disguised yourself as a crow. A clever spell. I know a better one. I've just learned it. Quickly, child, repeat my spell. It will complete the one you've mentioned." Silverbell piped weirdly.

"Tell it then." Penelope opened her book of shadows and scrawled it in her lyrical shorthand. When the creature had revealed it, she hopped up and down impatiently urging Penelope to try and cast it. Penelope blushed. "I am but a maiden. Have some decency. I'd never cast such a spell, not even if I wasn't embarrassed by the technique. Blowing kisses - like raspberries! I have self-respect."

"You rancid twit. I'll be sure you pay for it somehow!" Silverbell's glamour fell away and the creature shone its true form, an overgrown pixie, mutated into some kind of boggart. She was enraged and bore claws that she raked at Penelope's eyes with jealous fury. "I'll have your beauty one way or another!"

"I am not the sorceress, I'm Stormcrow!" Cory came up behind the creature and pecked and clawed and divebombed it and found the impish fey-mutant to be a deadly adversary, brandishing a spear tipped with a shrike's thorn, blooded to a calcified blade. "Surrender villain, you have no name!"

"White Nettle was her name, now I stab thee too, Stormcrow!" White Nettle gave Cory a few good scratches before he retreated. By then, Penelope had escaped with her book in one hand and pen in the other.

Suddenly Castini Ishbaal was in the room, a shotgun in his hands.

Dr. Leidenfrost had turned on the light and closed her purple nightgown at the intrusion, although the slowness of her movements betrayed my woman's immodest disposition.

Isidore and Persephone were also awake, of course, and hiding behind the bed.

Castini Ishbaal was locked onto the creature, ready to eliminate it. First, he monologued:

"White Nettle, huh? Is this where the paradox of the missing key to fairyland comes in? I paid attention, there was talk of another key at one point, and it accounts for the destruction of the Glade, and all the evils that came before, including the loss of my son to you monsters!"

Castini Ishbaal had already lived his fate twice, and after the experiments done to him at Dellfriar, perhaps he thought he was Samual Monica.

White Nettle spit a dart into his nose. He sneezed, laughed, put the shotgun to his head. He was about to blow his own head off, the wicked fairy dart effectively making him kill himself, except the real Silverbell entered the fray and plucked the dart free, flying between the barrel and the man's face to do it.

"You're not me. Shame!" Silverbell chimed like the beginning of a song in a musical. During the pause, Castini Ishbaal lowered the shotgun, broke it open and emptied the unspent shells onto the carpet. He backed away, realizing he'd made a mistake in his approach to White Nettle.

"I know you, fairy killer." White Nettle produced a teardrop in her claws and looked into it. "I see how you die, it is quite funny. Would you care to look?" And then she threw the teardrop into Castini Ishbaal's open eyeball. He blinked and looked startled. He screamed in terror, staggering backward until he hit the railing and toppled over it.

There he dangled over the great hall, at the height of the chandelier. Penelope had caught his hand, holding him to the railing. She grunted and strained, unable to hold him. And then he fell, landing leg first below with a sickening crunch.

He called out in agony for a moment and then he bit down on something, going quiet.

"You monster!" Our Sylvia tackled the diabolical pixie midair and they fought, slap boxing and squeaking and emitting little puffs of their dust as they landed punishing blows on each other. After awhile, White Nettle was too beaten up and flew away in retreat.

Dr. Leidenfrost tried to help Castini Ishbaal, but his injuries were too severe.

"Did we, did we get that evil fairy?" He asked.

"I got her for you. She won't be evil long, and she'll forever mourn thee, her honored opponent." Sylvia explained.

"Oh." Castini Ishbaal said. He frowned a little and thought about it, while he was laying there dying in agony. Then he said: "That's not so bad. I kinda like it. Tell her she scared me good, not usually scared of fairies. It -it's funny, get it?" And then he grunted and died.

We buried him near the north wall, where we had a family plot going already.

That evening, Penelope went and found Circe and said:

"I know two parts of the same spell, both the innocent version and the corrupt version. I have made my own, and it works just fine. Mine even transcends the limitations of fate. Is this true magic, master, or am I still on the same level?"

"You are not still on the same level. You have grown in wisdom and power. You are no longer a scrawler, you are now a true apprentice. What you learn, you shall retain without needing a book to write in. Magic will be apparent to you in all forms, and when you cannot see magic, you will still suspect it, sense it, with my uncanny gift. Take this." Circe offered her true apprentice a token, a salve for the scratches around her eyes. It left an uncanny mark in the form of glitter that never quite left the edges of my daughter's eyes. It was as though it was in her skin, just below the surface there, healing into the scars of the pixie scratches.

"It tingles." Penelope said.

"That's how you know it's working." Circe assured her.

"And suppose I see and suspect nothing?" Penelope asked.

"Then the danger in front of you is greater than me." Circe looked at her strangely. Then she smiled. "I never thought you would ask a question like that. Well, I did, it is why I chose you for my apprentice, it just surprises me and pleases me. It is good to hear you ask of things I do not consider. I am learning too, as I teach you."

"Sometimes I am glad this is happening. It is like learning how to bake pies from my grandmother, just sometimes. That's when I like the feeling I get from you, Master." Penelope replied.

"If that is the case, you do know I am technically your grandmother, a great grandmother's great grandmother, but who is counting? I'd like it if you called me Grandma instead of 'Master'." Circe determined, melting from the constant vibe of joy and goodwill Penelope liked to exert and exude.

"I love my Grandma." Penelope hugged Circe. I thought I'd be ill, but there was no way to vomit within the stasis of the emerald.

"I love you too." Circe said back, her evil eyes closed with sincerity.

I realized it was a good time for me to look the other way and keep my mouth shut.