Recollections, breakfast, and suitemates

As you follow your Housemistress through the door, a little thump against your bosom reminds you of the extra copy of the spellbook you made for yourself. A miniature copy, transformed down and easy to hide, tucked into a little pouch of necessaries that any self-respecting witch would carry. Be prepared had been the watchword of the Beguines who had fostered you while you studied for the Boarbristle examinations under the sponsorship of the Red-Headed League, after your time with the Witch had ended.

Even now you rarely think of the Witch's name, since she rarely used it with you. She rarely used your own. When it was just the two of you, it was more often "Girl!" than it was "Tess".

You want to touch your breast, to seek the pouch, to reassure yourself that the oblong firmness under your fingertips like a pack of cards, is the little spellbook, still there, still real. You'd prepared the extra copy especially to form a magical link with the study copies, so that when a scholar was touching it, reading it, paying close attention, that would give you a taste of them, learn a little bit from young witches and wizards who had had proper families. What did they think? What were they feeling? Were their obsessions like yours? Did they have any? Did they have friends?

Your own "friends" had all been elders in the craft of one sort or another, from your foster mother to the Beguines to the instructors of Boarbristle college. House Minerval's cook Rackman was the person you most felt as a sort of peer, neither higher nor lower, neither more inside or outside than yourself. You had been Rackman's pet, in a small way, the person he turned to who would appreciate his work in making food more than mere fuel. And once you knew the flavors that the Librarian craved, Rackman would provide. An image jumps to mind, Miss Caldwell with her head straining back in climax, chained glasses askew, delicately scented biscuit crumbs upon her chin. Your cheeks bloom with warmth, remembering.

"Tut tut, Tess," Bertha Beeblossom says, "Nothing to be embarrassed about." She squeezes your hand. "Sit. Eat. Celebrate. You are truly one of us now."

Truly?

"Thank you, Housemistress," you say. "Thank you." Her smile lights you up inside. Is that her special magic, more than those full moons jiggling inside her flatteringly-cut robes?

"Let me serve you, Tess," the Housemistress says. You nod and murmur thanks and affirmatives as Mistress Beeblossom reaches for the serving spoons, the tongs, and the teapot. You can't look away from Bertha Beeblossom's carefully displayed, softly bouncing hills of flesh and the deep valley between them. Deep, warm, perhaps bottomless.

"Would you serve me, Tess?" she asks.

You startle, breaking your hypnotized gaze into the warm and welcoming abyss between Mistress Beeblossom's breasts. One of your tablemates laughs aloud. Your shoulders tighten with shame.

"Y-yes, Housemistress!" you reply. Another smile blooms on her lips, sending a wave of happiness through you. You feel your pulse throbbing in the pearl between your thighs, a swelling and a melting. You fill Bertha Beeblossom's plate and mug and bowl until she raises a hand and laughs.

"Too much!" she protests. "I insist you take this one back." She takes the last slice of fruit between finger and thumb and holds it to your lips. A thread of juice runs down your chin.
"Please?" Your lips part and she tucks the fruit within. Sweet. Cool. Her forefinger presses your lower lip before she withdraws.

Little sounds of surprise come from your tablemates.

"Dear dear, I see I can't be seen to play favorites," Mistress Beeblossom says. "All shall have a taste, then."

The Housemistress goes round the table, and like a proper love feast, feeds each of your tablemates a slice of fruit from her fingers.

Three of them are your fellow witches from the suite you were assigned. Then a more advanced scholar, third- or fourth-year, with a prefect's pin on his House robe, black hair in a monkish cut without the tonsure - a bowl cut? - and, incongruously, a pair of round-lensed spectacles smoked to black opacity.

Lupa, her hair falling over her face as it always does, takes the slice of fruit like a favored pet, licking the Housemistress' fingertips and sighing as she savors the sweetness. "Thank you, Housemistress," she says. "You are most welcome, Lupa," Mistress Beeblossom says.

Florio, awkward and pale with a puff of golden hair atop a soft-featured face, takes the fruit in with two quick bites and mumbles thanks. A ghostly presence, rarely speaking, it wasn't until one late night in the baths that you discovered the delicate, dangling member that tilted the balance toward he. Although at Boarbristle, such things were mutable. Quite mutable.

You give yourself a severe caution on that point. Tess the Transformer, Terror of Minerval, was not to be Tess, Boor of Beavertail. Not to Florio's harm. You've wondered in idle flashes between your copying what might loosen Florio's tongue, or what might have it tied up. Florio was a first-year, and you yourself were quiet, hiding behind your glasses or a book. Yearning, until Miss Caldwell pried your shell wide open. You catch a sidelong glance from Mistress Beeblossom as she proffers a slice of fruit to your third suite-mate.

Fluvia Locksley, a whimsical chit with an unreliable talent for wind and water conjurations, blinks as Mistress Beeblossom offers her a slice of fruit. She swallows a half-chewed mouthful of breadcake, nods, coughs, and accepts her slice with a "Yes'm!" and a quick nibble.

One night you had returned from copying, shoulders and fingers cramped, just as Fluvia was pleasuring herself. Her bed creaked, she let out a long, low sigh, and a flash from her mind jumped into yours. Her climax plucked a note on your own cunt-strings, but her climactic imagining left you confused. Who would climax to a masturbation fantasy about water-driven millwheels? Miss Fluvia Locksley would. You'd caught a little of her itch, finding yourself musing about the grinding, grinding, grinding of stones, the inrush of grain into the feed channel, the outwash of meal, transformed.

The little flash granted you from your unpurged Minerval initiation had laid Fluvia open like a book, her extra hours working with Master Elbegast and her House Service kneading bread like facing pages of a single spread, whose central binding channel was the churning power of mechanosexuality.

From your hours in the Library, assisting Miss Caldwell in sorting, shelving, and lulling the half-living books into a proper doze, you're acquainted with a few books that would wind Fluvia up to quite a high pitch. Perhaps if she stays for summer term, you'll give her a slip to take to Miss Caldwell.

The black-spectacled Prefect declines. "No thank you, Mistress Beeblossom," he says. "I have a meditation watch with the Warden and must not take food. I begin to have a glimmer for Warden Burl's depth of feeling for the House Wards. But I will take more tea."

"With pleasure, Guillaume," the Housemistress says. She pops the last slice of fruit into her own mouth, blots her fingertips with one of the big table napkins -- Minerval's table settings were scanty, and people often wiped their hands upon their black House robes -- and takes up the pot of fragrant tea, pouring it into Guillaume's mug until the rising tea touches his fingertip.

"Merci, Maîtresse," he says. He sips from the cup and turns in your direction. "Would you introduce me to your guest, Mistress?"

You try and hold an open, even face to mask your suspicion. Who was this at the table?

"Miss Lectura," the Housemistress begins, "I give you Guillaume D'Onofrio. He is a rare prize to our house, and to the Academy, for his Gift bloomed late, as a lightning-flash while he meditated on the Divine Feminine, and his Inner Eyes were opened."

Guillaume laughs. "Alas, to my wonder, I could see the souls of my fellows as flames of joy, of courage, of fear. But I could no longer sew a seam, scribe a book, stitch a wound. I wandered, not knowing what I would do, making a poor living from begging and singing for my supper, until Mistress Beeblossom found me upon her travels, and straightaway said I should come with her and be a wizard. How could I refuse Her?"

Did Guillaume see you as Iris Amethystine had showed you yourself reflected in the picnic plate conjured into a looking-glass? A cauldron of roiling flames behind a pair of glasses?

"But I am slow to the work," Guillaume continues. "Reading is, ah, tres difficile. Beyond difficult. I have taken two years for the first-year studies, and again, this is my second year in the second-year studies. But next year, I am promised, I shall have a familiar to be my reading eyes, and a new world shall be revealed."

Bertha Beeblossom coughs, breaking through your woolgathering stare.

"M. D'Onofrio," the Housemistress says. "I present to you Tess Lectura, the sun to your moon, perhaps. Miss Lectura is Beavertail's newest scholar, a gift to us from House Minerval, a prodigy of transformative magics, a reader and a writer, and I have whisked her straight from the copying-desk where she has been making up the spellbooks for the junior scholars."

Mistress Beeblossom said such nice things about you, but as soon as she mentions spellbooks, your pulse quickens, beating against the miniature volume tucked under the front of your collar, a poppet-twin to the other volumes you scribed. One book to bring them all, one book to find them, one book to read them all, word and will and mind then.

"P-pleased!" you blurt out. Pleased is a thing people say when they're introduced. You're starting to learn what people do, what they say and when. Some people were so quick with words, like Fay Applebum, with effortless wit, and some people so deep and measured, like the Librarian.

"I am pleased to meet you, Miss Lectura," Guillaume says, bowing his head. "You are a young lady of care and discernment. And a hunger to know."

"Y-yes," you say. "Thank you, Guilliaume."

And just as your breath and heartbeat are settling down again after the burden of close attention from your Housemistress and her strange adopted scholar, a mundane struck by divine fortune to become a soul-seer, another person arrives at the table.

"Ah, very good," Mistress Beeblossom says. "Tess, your new suitemate has come to join us."

Someone had come to fill the empty bed, to sit in the chair beside Mistress Beeblossom.