Since my Ascension ceremony at the very end of summer, my relationship with the magical House had drastically deepened. Previously I had to guess how it was feeling and what it wanted—which wasn’t too much of a problem since it was very clear on speaking its mind. If it was mad, it might express this by taking away all hot water from me, or by sending a raccoon down a chimney, which it had done once when I was a kid and broke a window but blamed it on the next-door neighbors. (Let me tell you, after that I was an extremely honest child. Nothing traumatizes you quite like taking an angry, sooty
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