Morgana caught her balance. The brass buckles of her broom's stabilizing harness rattled against her ribs.

Above the archway, a gargoyle shook dust from its ears, glared down at the offending stones, and went still again.

“Oh, don't look at me,” she muttered. “I haven't broken anything yet.”

Through the white raven's eyes, the Middle Lands stretched beneath a sky that had never settled on a season. To the North, silver bells swung among the evergreens of the Eternal Eve of Gifts. To the South, All Hallows burned beneath its lanterns. The view tugged at Morgana's balance even while her boots remained planted in the courtyard.

The Well stood in that mist. Frost silvered one half of its ancient rim; moss darkened the other. Morgana knew the old tale: Comet had fallen against the Globe's glass and left a passage too fine to see from the academy grounds. Spirit grains slipped through it from Outside, where human children still hung stockings, carved pumpkins, and believed. The Well gathered that magic for everyone inside. Nice and Mean, divided so neatly it was almost insulting, depended on the same supply.

Morella dipped toward the Well, her wings trailing spirit-fog. Morgana's left eye clouded white as the raven banked. The courtyard tilted across her other eye: two landscapes occupying the same instant, and her stomach objecting to both.

“Easy, Morella.” Morgana pressed her palm against the courtyard wall until the stone stopped seeming to move. “One sky at a time.”

The raven turned south over the Hollow Wood. Crooked branches hooked around pumpkin lanterns, and something moved among the roots without bothering to cast a shadow. At least the South had the decency to look like itself.

Morella came back in a sweep of pale mist and landed on Morgana's raised arm. She weighed nothing. A chill brushed Morgana's neck, and the borrowed view released her. Her eye cleared to amber.

The white streak in Morgana’s dark hair fell across her cheek. Her grandmother called it a Gravestone inheritance, the same way she spoke of the old Salem branch of their family: Morigan Gravestone, the witch who had died without children; Morigan’s sister, whose daughter carried the bloodline forward; and all the Gravestone women who came after. Morella had been with them for generations. A white spirit raven was harder to dismiss than an old family story.

Morgana tucked the strand behind her ear. Her grandmother had told her enough to know that the Salem witch trials had burned people, not the magic out of their descendants. Whether Morgana’s troublesome Flicker had anything to do with those old flames was a question her grandmother still refused to answer plainly.

The flagstones shuddered again. A pebble bounced across the courtyard and struck the toe of her boot.

Heat surged into Morgana's fingertips. Orange fire snapped between two fingers, catching the edge of her leather glove before she could smother it.

She crushed the flame in her fist. When she opened her hand, a blackened crescent curled away from the glove, leaving rough leather against her palm.

“Tell me you felt that.”

Morella cocked her head, looking entirely too pleased with herself for a bird who had offered no assistance.

Cloven hoofbeats sounded beneath the archway. Slow. Deliberate. No one at Casket Hallow mistook them for anybody else's.

“You're late,” Morgana called. “Unless the ground has started keeping appointments without us.”

Headmaster Krampus filled the archway in a tailored black coat, its broad collar lined with deep violet fur. An embroidered waistcoat and dark cravat gave him the severe elegance of an old aristocrat. His face was almost human, angular and handsome in a forbidding way, with pointed ears, black hair swept back from his brow, and enormous ridged ram's horns curving outward and down beside his head. Violet caught in the grooves of the horns. He held a long staff crowned with a silver ram's head. Beneath the hem of his coat, cloven hooves struck the stone. Morgana knew better than to mistake the human shape for his only one; Krampus could glamour himself into a wholly human appearance when it suited him.

Morgana tucked her scorched hand behind her back. If Krampus wanted a confession, he could stand there until the next solstice.

The Penitent Box waited behind the locked door of Krampus's office, an iron cage with birch switches lashed to its frame. Morgana had seen enough of those switches to know when to hide a scorched glove.

“Gnash. Patch.”

Two figures came forward. Gnash Gallows, an enormous ogre built like a fortress wall, ducked beneath the arch. His green-gray skin was rough around the knuckles, his lower tusks curved past his lip, and his broad shoulders barely cleared the stone. Patch followed him: a towering stitched-born man pieced together in the old Frankenstein fashion, with mismatched skin at his wrists, heavy seams climbing his neck, and metal bolts set beneath his jaw. One bolt gave its familiar little snap when he glanced toward Morella. He was quieter than Gnash, though hardly less conspicuous.

“Anything strange at the border?” Patch asked.

Morgana showed him the blackened edge of her glove. “Besides the ground trying to throw us into the sky? Be specific.”

“Krampus wants a report.”

“Tell him the trees are standing, the Well hasn't wandered off, and I haven't burned down a single building.” She examined her glove. “Today.”

Patch's mouth twitched.

“Careful,” she told Patch. “Someone might mistake that for a personality.”

Krampus pointed toward the Hollow Wood. “Go.”