“C’mon, Christine. Come on. Once it’s out of the oven, we’ve only got a couple of minutes till it’s on a tray up to their rooms.”

“All you have to do is ask and I bet one of the cooks would make all the mudpie you want.”

“But it’s never as good as when Sally does it!”

“How do you know?”

“She made it last year for the Darklight Fest! We only got some because the Vedouci and Druhy were both out.”

“What difference does it make who made the pie?” Christine asked, scrubbing at her paper furiously with her pencil, covering it in black smudge.

“I dunno. If I did, I’d be in the kitchens. It’s just…better. She uses more chocolate or something. And the gravy on top is smoother.”

“You mean sauce.”

“I don’t know! I don’t work in the kitchen!” EJ turned his head face down, groaning against his desktop. “Come on.”

“I want to finish this.”

EJ flopped back in his seat suddenly, sighing. “It’s too late. Don’t bother. It’s already on the tray, in the dumbwaiter, on the way up. All that crispy, flaky crust and juicy chocolate, steaming and melting all over the plate…”

Christine reached across the aisle with one hand and shoved EJ hard in the chest. “Don’t be stupid.”

EJ shrugged, his nonchalance almost convincing himself. “Why not? Never tried being stupid. It might be fun. Always looks like it when Pochet does.”

“You’re mean.” There was no heat in it, but there never was. Christine said it several times a day, so it was probably automatic.

“Well I’m gonna go see if there’s any left, now. You can come or stay here with the little babies and learn numbers or something.” EJ shoved his chair back.

“No, stop!” Christine hissed. “Just…wait for me.”

“Hurry up, then.”

Christine bit her lip, scowling fiercely at her paper. Śe Sophia was crouched beside Amy, helping her draw. With the teacher’s attention focused elsewhere, Christine pushed her hand flat against the blank page, pressing as hard as she could until as much of the page as possible was in contact with her hand. Then she snapped her hand back pulled, yanking dark black lines into place. It wasn’t quite what she had in mind. She’d wanted a ship with lots of sails and ropes and rigging and nets and flags and masts, but trying to picture all of it at once was a lot harder than drawing it a bit at a time, making sure all the lines were straight, seeing if the sails were wide enough, if she could fit one more in. The image she’d pulled into place had crooked masts with sails that were just white squares that overlapped. The flag at the top of the tallest mast was just a bunch of lines. The sea that she’d already drawn put the ship to shame, but it was good enough when weighed against the potential loss of chocolate.

“Śe Sophia? I’m done,” Christine announced, dropping the picture into the bag next to her desk. “May we go to the library?”

The teacher looked up at her with piercing green eyes, then flicked her gaze across to EJ. “We?”

“Yes, Śe,” EJ said politely. “She’s going to help me find a book on mice.”

“Why do you want a book on mice?” Sophia demanded, straightening and crossing the room in three long strides, dodging desks that were little more than knee-high to her to get to the taller ones at the back.

“I read all the books on helephants and foxes and weasels and their kin, I’ve read three on rabbits, ten on horses, five on lizards, seven on frogs—”

“I didn’t ask which books you have read,” Sophia sighed, propping her fists on her hips. “Why mice?”

“Because they’re brilliant!” EJ burst out. “They learn all kinds of things, and they can get through a hole you can barely see, and they talk with smells, and they have feelings and get happy and sad for each other and they’ll tell you that, you just have to—”

“EJ! I understand!” Sophia waved off his excitement. “It seems to me you already know a great deal on the subject of mice.”

“Oh but there’s so much more!” EJ said earnestly. “I wanna know how many kinds there are, and if they can all talk to each other or if they have languages like people do, and if they learn each others’ languages, and do they have accents? Do they all learn stuff the same way? Like if I give one a puzzle will he figure it out the same way as a mouse from Nine Bridges Over Grass? And can they teach each other? And do they all live as long or do some live longer? Can they figure out how to help each other live longer, like is there mouse medicine? What kinds of magic can they do—”

“Mice doing magic?” Sophia asked in alarm.

“Sure, Śe! Why not? If they can learn the sigils and run around them, why wouldn’t it work?”

“Śe Sophia? Can we get pet mice?” asked a small boy in the front pair of desks.

“Christine, take EJ to the library and see if you can find him a book on why mice make very bad pets,” Sophia sighed, waving the pair of them toward the door. “Pochet, my darling, let’s see first if you can draw one. What kind of mouse do you think would live in a desert?…”

EJ grabbed Christine’s hand as they sprinted down the hallway. “Come on! Maybe we can steal the gravy pot!”

“It’s sauce, EJ, and you can’t because you’re too short and can’t levitate things yet.”

“Neither can you!”

“I don’t need to because I’m tall enough and I climb better. And I know how to stack thing so they don’t tip over!”

“See? This is why we’re a good team!”

“Because I could sneak the pie out without you?” she asked, and dashed past him, laughing.

“Because you wouldn’t think to steal it!” EJ called, stretching his legs to try to catch up.

Ten minutes later, the pair were sitting in a corner of the kitchen with red knuckles, tear tracks down their cheeks, and small bowls with broken chunks of flaky pastry covered in gooey chocolate. Sally harrumphed and walked away from them, muttering.

“Library after though, yeah?” EJ whispered.

“You mean you don’t already know all that about your mice? I thought now you had one from every country in your box!”

“I do,” EJ insisted, setting down his spoon for a moment to slide the matchbox out of his pocket and nudge the lid back just far enough for dozens of tiny pink noses like grains of sand to poke up at him over the edge of the box. He picked off a crumb of pastry for them and dropped it into the box, feeling the balance tip as the magically-shrunken animals scampered over to begin nibbling on a flake big enough for two of them to hide under.

“Can I see them?” Christine asked, bending closer. She waved at the box by barely moving the tip of her finger, unable to hide a grin at the soft chorus of squeaks in response.

“They always like you,” EJ said, dropping in a few more crumbs.

“D’you think you could shrink a horse to something tiny enough to fit in a pocket?”

“Reckon I could. Problem is finding a horse that no one would notice was missing.”

“I’ll ask Tom,” Christine decided. “Next time he comes for Amy’s pile. He doesn’t like them.”

“If he doesn’t like the piles, why does he come to them? And isn’t he more likely to say no, then?” Ej asked, finally getting more of his attention focused on the broken bits of pie in front of him.

“No, he doesn’t like horses,” Christine told him, industriously cramming chocolate into her mouth. “Don’t be stupid.”

“Maybe I like being stupid.”