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Go to school like Millie in the Millie books
Apparently, a chest full of diamonds was enough to give Millie her pick of boarding schools, with enough set aside to cover Swiss finishing school. Millie spent days poring over pamphlets and catalogues for different schools, trying to tell which would be the best.
No matter what Gabriel de Witt said about all of her Goddess powers being her own magic, Millie rather thought that if she’d been back in the temple with the Gift of Asheth still inside her, she would have known which school to choose. Here in Chrestomanci Castle, though, she had to resort to other measures.
Christopher taught her “Eeny, meeny, miney, mo.”
As summer faded into autumn, Millie found herself enrolled at Prendernost Academy for Girls, registered as Millie de Witt. She knew school was going to be just as jolly in real life as it was in her books.
There were so many things she couldn’t wait to try.
Eat stodge
The food disagreed with her for weeks. Even once she could stomach it, it took years for Millie to actually like most of it. Roasts and puddings and potatoes - they'd sounded so delicious in her books, but in real life, they were just bland and heavy. Some days she yearned so hard for the spiced meats, grilled vegetables, and light flatbreads she'd grown up with that she dreamed about them and woke up salivating.
It was a great comfort when Millie finally realized that not all of Series 12 ate this sort of food – that it was merely a regional peculiarity. Edith, one of the girls in her dormitory, had lived in India for several years, and they spent many a cold evening huddled near the fire, bemoaning the damp chill and reminiscing to one another about foods they missed.
An even greater comfort was learning to cook for herself. Millie spent one summer holiday almost entirely in the kitchen of Chrestomanci Castle, learning to chop and simmer and sauté, swatting at Christopher's hands with wooden spoons when he tried to sneak a taste. It made her feel strong and in control to know that she could make something delicious and comforting and right for herself to eat when the mild sameness of the refectory’s stodge became too much.
Learn French
Millie loved French. She loved the sounds and the rhythms and the way the words looked under her pen. She labored over her vocabulary and pronunciation until she was one of the top students in her French lessons. She felt herself quite mistress of the language … until she went to France.
It was over a home weekend the year Christopher was fifteen. (Millie was never quite sure how old she was, herself, so she tended to use Christopher’s age as her standard of measurement.) Millie was in her final term at Prendernost, and would be off to Switzerland in the autumn. Christopher had said it was stupid to go off to school in a place where people actually spoke French, without ever speaking it herself outside of a classroom.
Christopher said he had permission to take her on the day trip, and since he had never really got into the habit of lying, Millie believed him. Since they were alone, they were able to skip over the tedium of travel and just transport themselves, something they were never allowed to do when grown-ups accompanied them.
Millie felt a rush in her stomach as she and Christopher walked down an out of the way corridor behind the school library. Christopher gave her a sharp nod, and between one step and the next, they shifted and were suddenly in a narrow alleyway off a bustling street.
”Well,” Christopher said, suddenly seeming at a loss, “here we are.”
Millie swallowed down her nervous excitement. “Here we are,” she agreed.
Christopher lifted his chin in the way that looked so arrogant to most people and held out his arm. “Shall we?”
Millie smiled and wrapped her hand into the crook of his elbow. “We shall.”
For a few moments, it was splendid. The street was bathed in warm, gentle sunlight, which glinted off shop windows and shone on little café tables. Millie breathed it in along with the sound of her beloved French … right up until she noticed that she couldn’t understand a word of that beloved French.
”What’s wrong?” Christopher asked. Millie hadn’t even noticed that she’d stopped walking and was standing startled and sad in the middle of the pavement.
She should her head. ”They don’t sound like my French teacher at school,” she said helplessly. There was something about being surrounded by people chattering and arguing and mumbling in a language she could not understand that felt like the weight all of her homesickness, all of the oddity of 12A, was pressing down on her at once.
”Is your French teacher from France?” Christopher asked awkwardly. Millie shook her head, and he made a harrumphing noise. “Well, that makes sense, then.”
They stood there for another minute, and then Christopher said, “Do you want to go back?”
Millie pursed her lips. She’d shivered her way through years that still felt too cold, wore clothes that were too tight and binding, walked every day in shoes that were too stiff. And none of those things – not a single one of them – had ever made her regret her decisions or cast aside her dreams. She refused to allow a stupid little language to thwart her now.
”Let’s find a café and point at things on the menu,” she said. “It’ll be an adventure to find out what we’ve ordered.”
Christopher relaxed in a way that made Millie realize he’d been holding himself tight. “Wonderful,” he said. “It’s been ages since we’ve had an adventure.”
They continued on down the pavement, Christopher with his head held high and Millie with her eyes wide. One thing they were good at was adventuring.
Play hockey
There was a class in ‘Active Sport,’ and Millie had signed up for it at once. It turned out, though, that she was abysmal at athletics. Keeping cooped up in a temple alone for years on end wasn’t conducive to team sport. Who knew?
Millie tried hard. She tried to support her team, she tried to make goals … but it didn’t go well. Most of the time, she could barely even keep up – chugging her way down the pitch with little hope of ever getting near the ball. Worse, on the very rare occasion that the ball somehow came her way, Millie forgot all about teamwork. The ball was hers, and she guarded it as zealously from her own teammates as from her opponents.
Her friend Agnetha came to her after one particularly trying Active Sport lesson, in which Millie had not only managed to score on her own goal, but had also tripped three different girls with her stick. Millie was sitting sullenly on the grass glaring at her stick, and she didn’t move nor raise her eyes when Agnetha settled down beside her.
”Being bad at sport isn’t the end of the world,” Agnetha said placidly. It made Millie wish that she’d been one of the girls who got tripped. After a long moment of silent glaring on Millie’s part, Agnetha went on, “Have you considered asking to try out goalkeeper? If nothing else, it would keep you from bashing everyone with your stick.”
”What good would that do? I’ll still be me, even in a different position.”
”Well, it’s either find a position you can play or give it up altogether,” Agnetha said. “You can’t go on this way, or you’ll lame half the school.”
Agnetha had a point. Millie spoke with the coach before their next lesson and got permission to try playing goalkeeper. Millie pretended she didn’t see the relief in Coach Witham-Exbridge's eyes at the idea of Millie being kept away from her teammates.
To Millie’s surprise - and everyone else’s, surely – she turned out to be a rather brilliant goalkeeper. She wasn’t well suited to running up and down the pitch, but she was excellent at settling in to protect the goal. Her inability to share the ball was actually a good thing as goalkeeper. And more importantly, she simply had a talent for smacking the ball out of the air.
Millie was good enough, in fact, that she made her house team in her third year at Prendernost. A whole group from Chrestomanci Castle came up to watch her last game, and Millie thought she might burst from pride. She beamed up at Christopher, who was sitting in the stands looking so vague and disinterested that she knew he was concentrating on her completely.
Write lines
It was in Maths, of all lessons, that Millie was caught out. Professor Ellis had meant it to be a fun moment, asking the girls to share their plans for the Winter hols. Unfortunately, he asked Millie first.
She blinked at him and said honestly, “I’m not sure. I understand that Christmas is quite important, but I never studied heathen traditions much, so I don’t know what to expect.”
Well, it was chaos after that. Girls babbling and Professor Ellis puffing himself up and huffing his chest out quite large. Millie wasn’t sure what she’d done wrong, so she put on her very stupid face and blinked at him some more.
“Christmas,” Professor Ellis breathed, his beard puffing up and down, “is not a heathen tradition. Please see me after class, Miss de Witt.”
And so Millie found herself writing “Christmas is not a heathen tradition,” two hundred times after dinner. At the very end, after she’d written all two hundred lines, Millie couldn’t stop herself from adding, “What counts as heathen depends very much on perspective,” to the bottom of the page.
She never knew if Professor Ellis understood her little postscript.
Cheek the Prefects
Millie's first (but by no means last) conflict with a Prefect was about her cat. She had special dispensation from the Headmistress to keep Proudfoot in the dormitory, and Millie was too new to this world and this school (and too used to special treatment) to realize how jealously privileges were guarded.
The Prefect was a serious girl named Meredith. She was a tall girl in her final year, with curly hair that refused to be tamed into the bun she tried to pull it into. She wore a small, round pair of spectacles, which Millie would later learn that the younger girls believed to be an affectation to make Meredith seem more intelligent and authoritative. All Millie knew at the time was that she hated the way Meredith was watching her judgingly over the edge of the frames.
"I do hope," Meredith said cuttingly, "That you can control that creature. If it can't remember to use the sandbox and keep out from underfoot, not all the powerful sponsors in the world will keep it from being shut up in the groundskeeper's shed."
Millie raised her chin and gave Meredith her best Goddess stare. "I have no doubt that Proudfoot is quite as clean and intelligent as you are. Of course," she let her eyes rake down Meredith's dress as though the other girl were a novice priestess who didn't measure up, "that may not be much of an accomplishment."
At Millie's feet, Proudfoot lifted her chin and fixed Meredith with a glare that was quite as critical as Millie's. She didn't like being spoken of as if she were simply a dumb animal.
Meredith went slowly red. All she said, though, was, "See that the creature behaves." At the time, Millie thought she was just that intimidating, possibly a side effect from a life of Goddess-hood. Later, she would realize that, despite Meredith's strong words, having a sponsor as powerful as Gabriel de Witt really did matter in unexpected ways.
Regardless of the reason, Millie and Proudfoot both counted it as a victory.
Cheat at Geography tests
Millie never would have had to cheat on her Geography test if Series 12 geography made any sense at all. But the fact was, this entire world had developed in simply the silliest ways. Asheth never would have allowed it. There were mere channels where Millie knew there should have been wide oceans and huge lakes that ought to have been plains. Boundary lines between nations often seemed to have been drawn on a whim, and the names of the nations ranged from just slightly off to completely, barking mad.
Really, Millie had no choice.
The idea of cheating didn’t even occur to her until the night before she had to sit the final Geography test of the term. Susan, who was occupying the cubicle next to Millie’s in the study hall, dropped her book to her desk with a dramatic whump.
“It’s useless!” she declared dramatically. “I’ll never understand Shakespeare well enough to pass. I should just stop revising and spend the time making a crib sheet.” She banged her head against the desk and sighed loudly several times before she settled back into her revising.
But Millie couldn’t help remembering her words. Wouldn’t it be better to spend her time in a way that made her more likely to pass the test? Because Millie was in the habit of being honest with herself, and she knew that no matter how hard she swotted away, there was really no chance that she would pass on her own.
Millie glared down at her books and notes, her forehead furrowed as she considered the possibilities. No. There was nothing for it. She would have to cheat.
Because Millie had Enchantress-level magic, cheating was a bit easier for her than it was for most of the girls. There were very few people at the school, even among the professors, who had witch sight or who came close to her level of power. That made it less terrifying and more guiltily exciting to consult her selectively-invisible crib sheet throughout her Geography test.
In the end, she passed the test with high marks and felt incredibly guilty. She confessed her sins in a letter to Christopher, hoping he would have advice. Instead, he wrote back, “Well, I don’t suppose it matters much that you know about this world right now, but you will need to eventually. It’s your home now, after all.”
It was a simple sentiment, but it sent Millie into an unexpected tizzy. She wasn’t even a tizzying sort of girl. But the truth was, she hadn’t really, really accepted that 12A was her home now. It still felt uncomfortable, like a new dress with a different neckline than all her old dresses. But Christopher was right. She could never go back.
Millie didn’t fess up to the cheating, though her conscience continued to plague her. But she did start spending 15 minutes a day learning about her new home.
Sneak on my friends
Agnetha had a secret. Millie and Edith had been watching her for days as she shifted between joyful and woebegone, sometimes by the hour. Whenever they asked Agnetha what was going on, though, she insisted that everything was fine.
Clearly, this called for some investigation. Millie and Edith made themselves a little rota and took it in turn to lurk in Agnetha’s general vicinity, hoping to overhear something. But she went to lessons and revised for exams, ate and slept right along with the other girls. Aside from her wild shifts in mood, everything about Agnetha seemed downright ordinary.
It was time to step up their methods. Millie kept watch while Edith looked through Agnetha’s books and footlocker one afternoon when they should have been at tea. She found a hidden cache of caramels, a battered old cloth doll, and a horribly misspelled essay on The War of the Roses. Nothing helpful.
”Maybe she’s in love,” Edith suggested later. She and Millie were sitting on a stone bench, watching Agnetha pretend to read across the courtyard. She hadn’t remembered to turn a page in over ten minutes.
”Maybe her mother is ill. Maybe Agnetha is ill,” Millie countered.
”You’re cheery,” Edith said critically. “Maybe she’s up for Head Girl.”
”Do you really think they’d make a girl who can’t spell ‘Tudor’ the Head Girl?” Millie cocked her head and thought. “Maybe she’s haunted.”
”You read too many ridiculous novels,” Edith said.
”There is no such thing as too many ridiculous novels,” Millie protested. Novels were practically an article of faith for her, especially here in a place where she didn’t feel Asheth’s presence.
”Maybe she’s inherited a vast sum of money, and she feels guilty about being happy because someone has died,” Edith said.
”Maybe we’ll never know,” Millie said with a sigh. That was a supremely unsatisfying idea. Not only was she just purely curious, but she was also concerned about her friend. She wanted to help Agnetha if something was wrong and celebrate with her is something was right. As long as Agnetha insisted everything was fine, she could do neither.
Three days later, when Millie had almost resigned herself to ignorance, Agnetha came rushing up to Millie and Edith, who were in adjoining cubicles in the study hall. “I got the scholarship,” she gasped, obviously fighting to keep her voice down. “I thought that surely I would, but then I thought that my marks aren’t good enough, and then I thought that Mama went to school here, so they would give it to me for her sake, but then I thought that there were so many other applicants, and then –“ she cut herself off and clapped her hands. “But they did. I can keep going to school here!”
Millie clapped her own hands as well, overcome both with the excitement of Agnetha’s announcement and relief from the stress of not knowing. “But why didn’t you tell us?” she demanded. “We asked and asked.”
”It was a bit that I didn’t want you to know I needed a scholarship.” Edith opened her mouth to protest, and Agnetha quelled her with a glance. “I didn’t think you’d drop me or anything, but I thought maybe you might try to pay my fees yourselves. Or storm into the Headmistress’ office and demand that she give it to me. Or … I don’t know, magic me into the scholarship somehow.” She gave them a fond look. “You two can be a bit much sometimes.”
Millie and Edith shared a look. “We have no idea what you mean.”
Be bad
In Michaelmas term of her second year, Millie ran away from school. Well, she didn’t actually run. It would be more accurate to say that she walked purposefully away from school, a letter clutched in her fist and a small reticule hung over one arm. She didn’t tell any of the prefects or teachers that she was leaving. She’d jotted a quick note for Agnetha and Edith so that they wouldn’t worry, and she was pleased with herself for remembering to do that much.
She would have greatly preferred to transport herself, but she scarcely trusted herself to do it in her state of mind. As well, she was headed to the Castle, and even though Gabriel de Witt was away, she knew that the other adults would have sharp words for her if they found out that she’d done it. So she entrusted herself to the railway and spent the entire trip staring blindly out the window.
It was a school day, and there wouldn’t be a home weekend until next month, but no one at the Castle seemed surprised to see her. Miss Rosalie greeted her at the door and took her straight up to Christopher’s room.
Millie knew Christopher better than she knew anyone else in this whole world. She probably knew him better than anyone else in the world knew him, too. She still barely recognized him. His black hair, usually carefully combed, clung to his forehead with sweat. His eyes were dull, with dark circles under them. Millie paused in the doorway for a moment, taking him in. Then she squared her shoulders and stepped inside.
”Well, you look horrid,” Millie said, bustling over to the bed. “What have you been doing to yourself?” Because Christopher didn’t get ill. He simply didn’t.
”I have no idea,” Christopher replied, blinking wearily up at her.
”That makes it harder to fix,” Millie said severely. “But we’ll manage somehow.”
Everyone in the Castle seemed confident that Christopher would get better now that she was back. While there were many more qualified nurses here, there was no one else who tolerated Christopher as well as Millie did. Beryl told her that he’d already driven the whole Castle away with his temper and sulks, even on his sickbed. Only a few housemaids would even enter to shovel broth down his throat.
Millie saw what the problem was pretty quickly. Christopher’s magic was obviously blocked. It only took a few hours sitting with him to see that clearly. Usually the magic surged all through him, but right now it barely flickered in a few stagnant pools. He was weak and ill, as well. Taken altogether, it was clear that he was suffering from silver.
She just couldn’t find any silver anywhere near him.
Millie searched his whole room and his bedclothes, but found nothing. She called in Flavian and had him strip Christopher down to search his body. (She would have done it herself, but her teachers at school had been adamantly instructing her in modesty.) Every search turned up nothing, and Christopher stayed ill and magic-less.
Frustration finally drove Millie to the kitchen late that evening. If she was going to be anxious over Christopher, she wasn’t going to eat sausage and potatoes while she did it. She chose peppers and onions from the pantry and beef to slice thin and sizzle with them. After the stress and strain of trying to help Christopher, the chopping and cooking soothed her.
It was only because she was relaxed, senses open, and because she’d been so focused on silver for the last several hours that she noticed it. It was the slightest tracery, but there was silver laced through half of the food in the kitchen. It was in all of the meat, so it would have been in all of the broth that Christopher had been eating. It wasn’t enough to give the rest of the Castle people silver poisoning, but it was certainly enough to take Christopher down.
Millie very nearly shouted the house down, lessons on demure modesty be hanged. But then it occurred to her that if the food was poisoned, that meant someone had been poisoning it. She didn’t want to tip her hand. So she calmly and quietly packed her ingredients into a basket and took them to Flavian.
Millie didn’t pay as much attention to the search for and apprehension of the poisoner as she ought to have. She was busy going to the village for uncontaminated food, and then cooking it afresh and forcing it upon Christopher. She also made him drink water by the pitcher, flushing the silver from his system.
In the end, after all the fuss and drama, Millie was back on the train to school the very next day. The poisoner had been some sort of criminal mage plotting to use up one of Christopher’s last lives. Apparently, being the future Chrestomanci could be dangerous. The Castle was installing a new assistant cook with magic sense and witchsight, to prevent any such thing from happening again in the future. And Christopher was nearly back to himself, arrogant and odd and her best friend in the world.
The Headmistress didn’t seem quite as satisfied with the way the situation played out as Millie was. “You left this school without permission. You showed no respect for the staff, not even seeing fit to inform us of your whereabouts. And moreover,” she breathed hard, “moreover, the entire escapade was so that you could run off to some boy’s bedside.”
Millie thought she was meant to feel chastised, but instead she looked calmly back at the Headmistress and nodded.
”Good girls,” the Headmistress said repressively, “do not behave this way. You have detention for the rest of the term, and you’ll stay in your dormitory on the next home weekend. Now go to bed and think about what you’ve done.”
Millie did go to bed and think about what she’d done. What she’d done was save Christopher. Maybe good girls didn’t act that way. Perhaps that meant Millie wasn’t good.
She felt fine with that.
Stop being the Living Asheth
Technically, technically, Millie stopped being the Living Asheth as soon as she left Series 10. But on the inside she still felt like the Goddess, no matter how much she called herself Millie.
Once she had cried to Christopher and poured out a list of things she wanted to do. As the years went by, she did all of them, but they didn’t make her feel more like Millie. She still felt like the Living Asheth, acting out her dreams.
When she left Prendernost, she looked around at the friends she loved, the teachers she admired or hated or tolerated, and the familiar buildings she would never see again. Her list was done. She took a deep breath and realized she would have to make a new list. One that the Goddess could never have thought of, sheltered in the temple with only priestesses and cats for company. She had been living out what the Goddess had wanted to do, but now it was time to dream for Millie.
She smiled and left the school. There were so many things she couldn’t wait to try.