“Betrothed to the butcher?” I repeat my father’s words in horror. I was hoping to be a teacher, not some stranger’s possession. “Why can’t I choose my own future?”

My brother Hamish smirks. “I wish you could attend a boarding school, if one would have you. You’d come crying home before the end of the first week and beg to marry the butcher. After the first day!”

A growl of thunder rattles the windowpanes.

I flinch. “Hamish! You know you shouldn’t say—”

Mother erupts into a coughing fit, distracting me from my brother’s thoughtless words. I thump her on her back with growing concern for a long moment before she’s able to regain her composure.

Hamish doesn’t even acknowledge the interruption.

“You wouldn’t survive an hour in one of my classes,” he says with a laugh. “Educate a girl? The headmaster would laugh you right out of—”

Lightning fills the room, and thunder shakes the windows again, matching the fury inside my heart.

I scramble to my feet. “Of all the ignorant, immature, mean-spirited things you’ve ever said—”

A knock shakes our front door.

We all fall silent, staring at one another. Who would be foolish enough to venture out-of-doors in a storm this violent?

Actually… I cock my head to listen. I can’t hear the rain anymore. The nails shivered in the timber seconds ago, but suddenly, it’s so quiet that I would almost believe the world outside these walls ceased to exist.

The knocking sounds again, louder this time. A draft slithers under the door, carrying the chill of damp earth.

“Don’t stand there, Catriona.” Father makes an impatient shooing gesture. “Go answer the door.”

Hamish leaps up from his armchair and races to beat me to the entryway. He is the one to turn the handle and fling open the door.

On the other side stands a tall, thin stranger with dark skin and a dry cloak and black eyes shadowed beneath the equally dry brim of a black top hat.

I glance over his shoulder. The storm is gone. It looks like it never happened at all. The ground is dry. No breeze rustles the leaves of the trees. Stars fill the cloudless sky.

Something is wrong.

Hamish puffs up his chest. “May I help you, Mr…?”

The stranger looks bored, in as much as his half-visible expression can be read. “Ross. Reporting to take Miss Catriona Cameron to school, as requested.”

I stare at him. “What did you say?”

“School?” Hamish repeats, flabbergasted. “No one requested that.”

“I’ve the papers right here.” Mr. Ross lifts a black-gloved hand. A sheet of tri-folded parchment pokes from his fingers.

Hamish snatches the paper from the stranger’s hand.

“I’m so sorry,” I tell Mr. Ross with embarrassment. “I’m Catriona Cameron. My brother—”

“It says you’re to report to boarding school,” Hamish exclaims. “On the Isle of Skye!”

“What? Let me see.” I pluck the paper from his fingers and scan the contents in confusion. Floodbane Academy? Never heard of it. “It says… they approved my application.”

Hamish goggles at me. “I didn’t know you’d applied.”

I didn’t.

Though as far as mistakes go, this is the best one that has ever happened to me. I hate that I must confess to Mr. Ross that I won’t be—

“Did it work?” murmurs my mother’s voice behind my ear.

I spin to ask her what on earth she’s talking about, but the urgency in her brown eyes gives me the answer. It’s the same expression she wears when passing down tales from my gran.

I wish you did attend a boarding school, my brother had snarled at me.

Without retracting his words.

Without begging God for protection.

And tonight, the fairies decided to grant a young boy his wish.

“It’s happening,” I whisper back in shock.

The fairies are trickster sprites. They love to grant wishes in the opposite way from how they were meant. My brother’s intention had been to shame me. To assert that girls neither deserved nor could qualify for the same advantages as boys.

Instead of shaming me as well, the fairies are offering me what I’ve always wanted. A path that didn’t even exist until Hamish opened his mouth.

But is this a wish come true, or the start of a new nightmare?