Free Ordinary Magic by Caitlen Rubino-Bradway

perfect garnet that the very first queen, Samira, discovered deep in the earth. Queen Samira wanted anice place where she could host official guests for parties and hold those endless political meetings that don’t really accomplish anything, as opposed to the house she had by the sea, where she could run around barefoot with her kids. It’s a beautiful castle, gleaming red in the sunshine and black in the moonlight. We have been up to Rothermere a lot—Olivia went to school in the city, and later for Gil’s book events. I have taken the official castle tour five times, which never gets old because the structure changes from day to day.
    Of course, if you’re going to have a political centerpiece, you’re going to need a lot of support, and no sooner had Queen Samira opened the doors than the rest of the city exploded around it.
    We arrived just after noon, when the sky was clear and the sun was soft and the city glowed like a pearl without the oyster. Dad kept us hovering above the crazy local traffic until we got close to the school, then brought us down so fast even Frances was shocked into smiling. The climate was more humid here than in Lennox, the air hot and heavy with the scent of people and clay, incense, and sausages. The streets were swamped, people jostling each other as they rushed past, checking out store windows, and vendors selling charms or incense or jewelry or—oh, pretzels, those looked good. And the
noise
—voices and shouting and music and every so often there were sirens.
    Following Alexa’s directions, Dad parked the carpet right in front of a large building on an unusually empty street. Well, only half-empty. The opposite side was just as busy as every other place we had seen, but the sidewalk in front of the school?Nothing. Nobody. Carved into the paving stones was ward upon spell upon curse, until they all curled in on each other and it was impossible to pick one from another. Jeremy could probably tell the difference, but then, Jeremy was memorizing the entire spell catalog, front to back, for fun. When we climbed off the carpet, Mom winced from the force of the entry spells, and Dad took a moment to brace himself.
    This was it. This was where I was going to spend the next eight years of my life. I took a good long look at the school, taking a couple steps back to see it all.
    The school was square, and built out of dark-brown bricks. It was smaller than the buildings around it, only four stories tall, with a glass structure on top that gleamed so brightly under the sun it hurt to look. There was a fence all the way around the building, with bars on the first-floor windows and thick, strong shutters on the upper windows. The main entrance was barred by a sturdy gate that stretched above our heads, then arched into a short tunnel, revealing a courtyard beyond. The window bars, shutters, and front gate were all made from the same rough dark metal with a strange, muted sheen, almost like sunlight on frost. Cold iron, I realized. But that much must have cost a fortune. The most iron anybody ever needed was a few sprinklings of iron dust in the corners, to keep the fairies out. If someone had spent that much money on that much iron, then that someone had to be serious about this school.
    See, cold iron isn’t just cold, or hard or strong. It feeds off magic, sucks it in. It drains a normal person’s magic to get even stronger and leaves you empty. It’s got, well, not a mind of itsown, but an awareness. I have heard that cold iron works best on things like night fey, and Red Ladies, and all those scary creatures that are just supposed to be in bedtime tales, that kids aren’t supposed to know are real.
    Flowering vines climbed up the stone walls, bursting with bright, hot color. But they gave the iron a wide berth as they crawled up one side of the entrance and curved over the arch, leaves dripping down. To the right, the flowers politely arced around a shiny engraved plaque, which