No sooner had Isobel returned inside than two customers entered. Isobel grimaced. Like her, they wore the green uniform of Ilvernath Prep.
“Hi, Oliver,” Isobel said. “Hi, Hassan.”
“Oh, it’s you,” Hassan said. “I didn’t know you still worked for your mum. Aren’t you too famous for that now?”
Like all her other friends and classmates, Hassan and Oliver had stopped talking to Isobel after A Tradition of Tragedy came out and Isobel was declared champion eleven months early. Despite knowing her for years, they’d decided the media attention made her fake.
“Nope. I still work part-time,” she said flatly.
“Well, I have a spellstone I’d like to return,” Oliver said. “It’s broken or something.”
Isobel’s mother didn’t sell broken spellstones.
“Let me look at it,” Isobel said, and a funny expression crossed his face. “What?”
“It’s broken, all right? I want to return—”
“If there is something wrong with it,” which Isobel doubted, “then I’ll fix it.”
Reluctantly, Oliver glanced at Hassan, who was inspecting a rack of T-shirts that said SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL INDIE SPELLMAKER. Then Oliver slid the crystal across the counter. It pulsed faintly with white light, so there was clearly magick inside it.
“What sort of spell is it?” Isobel asked.
“A Longer Locks,” Oliver answered quietly.
Isobel frowned at Oliver’s buzzcut. He didn’t look like he’d used a hair-growth spell. Maybe it really was broken.
Isobel pulled out a spellboard and set the stone at the center of the septogram. Then she grabbed another Longer Locks stone from their display basket and compared the two.
“You’re right. There’s something wrong with this one,” Isobel admitted bitterly. “It’s strange. It’s almost as if an eighth ingredient was…”
She narrowed her eyes.
“Did you tamper with this?” she asked, making Hassan look up curiously.
“O-of course not,” Oliver grumbled.
“You did! You tried to adjust the spell. Once an enchantment is in a stone, it’s done. You can only change it by removing the enchantment and starting over, and … What kind of growth spell did you think you were making?”
“Things are that bad with Mei?” Hassan smirked and even shot Isobel a friendly smile, which made hope swell in her chest. The three of them had never been close, but they’d gone to the same parties. Maybe after all this fame she’d never wanted, there was a chance she could go back to her old self again, after the tournament was over.
Oliver’s ears burned red. “Look, just fix it, all right? I told my dad it was busted.”
“Don’t worry,” Isobel said. “I won’t tell anyone. But you should be more careful next time. You could’ve hurt yourself. And severed appendages are hard to reattach. Especially such … delicate ones.”
While Hassan roared with laughter, Isobel got to work on the spell. She grabbed one of her mother’s grimoires and found the Longer Locks recipe. If she could simply repeat it, that should erase whatever nonsense Oliver had done to it.
“So you’re not the only named champion anymore,” Oliver said. “How does that feel?”
Clearly, Isobel’s and Hassan’s teasing had put him in a bad mood.
“I’d rather not talk about the tournament,” Isobel said uneasily.
“Did you hear what that Lowe kid did today? Blinded a man, and—”
“I heard he killed him,” Hassan interjected.
“Nah, my aunt’s a nurse at the hospital. Said he’s still alive. But apparently, it only took the Lowe kid one curse. Pretty wicked, right? Even if it was with high magick.”
Isobel had no idea what they were talking about. It sounded like the sort of wild rumor the cursechasers in town liked yelling about.
Oliver drummed his fingers on the counter and continued, “So you know that the only chance anyone has to beat him is to form an alliance. The Lowe won’t go down until it’s at least three against one.”
“I don’t get alliances,” Hassan said. “What’s the point if you just kill each other in the end anyway?”
“You survive longer,” Oliver said. “Didn’t you read the book?”
Hassan frowned in confusion, which Isobel shared. She’d never seen Oliver read a book in their eleven years of school together. “Did you?”