Otherworldly Discipline: A Witch's Lesson Read Online Free Page B

correct.
    But she couldn’t help herself. Every time she saw a boy she liked growing up, she would scramble to sabotage the relationship before it had enough solid grounding to survive her. She knew she didn’t go out of her way to do it—it just happened. There was some horrible, rotten piece of her that seemed to come out around men, as if it was simply her nature to sting everyone in her path with uncalled-for retaliation.
    She had poured proverbial sand over Ashcroft’s head, and she knew it. She was only waiting for the moment that he would crawl, sputtering and a shell of himself, away from her. After all, that was the general pattern.
    Instead, he did something she did not expect: Ashcroft poured the sand right back onto her.
    She didn’t much care for it.
    While her friends were buying things they were planning to put in their college dorms, she was getting everything she owned into a couple of suitcases to get sent to Cambridge… And not for the college. No, she didn’t have the luxury to sit around wondering what she was going to do with the rest of her life. She didn’t get to choose her major, it was chosen for her.
    Her life had been chosen for her at birth: to ally herself with Ashcroft Medwin, the famously good Archivist Wizard, to be his apprentice, and to possess as much knowledge of the Byndian Craft as she could get out of him.
    She had a feeling by the time they brought her to England, and then into the Otherworld to sign the contract under Ashcroft, that she was going to be hosed. She knew quite well that if she didn’t sign her name to the (admittedly non-lethal) apprenticeship contract, her foster mother, Peggy, was going to cry her eyes out… Peggy was supposedly her mother’s best friend, and she was always wailing that she’d ‘failed’ Charlotte’s mother in raising her.
    Ah, a witch’s guilt and a mother’s love. That’s what led to this.
    Although, when she’d first met Ashcroft , Charlotte was actually excited… And then she realized that he was doomed before she even wanted him to be. She wondered if she’d ever blushed so hard as the first time he looked at her, riveting his eyes on her like she was the most appallingly curious thing he had ever seen.
    Because of the way her parents revered Ashcroft as a living-legend, she had already built the imagery of Ashcroft being an old wizard with a long white beard and a pointy hat, just like a human girl might imagine a wizard to be. But in actuality, Ashcroft looked more like a warrior with his brawny arms and strong chest and shoulders… And she had a thing for strong-looking guys.
    He looked like he wasn’t too old, either. Oh, well—older than her . He looked like he was a hard thirty , and of course he did. He was an immortal wizard , after all. They stopped aging after they ‘reached immortality’, when their appearance stopped in time. Charlotte knew she would stop aging, too, when she reached her own age of immortality.
    Her parents had tried to assure her that Ashcroft would be hard to look at because of the dark gashes on his face.  And the dark, visible gashes were certainly there, looking like he had been in a very serious fight with a very wild animal before he’d reached his immortality and could not heal from the scars. But they weren’t as bad as she’d imagined , either. They were just as interesting as the sun wrinkles around the corners of his eyes or the way it looked like he had worked hard in the elements as a mortal.  The tan in his skin only made his light grey eyes seem even smokier.
    She had distantly wondered how their relationship could come undone, but the answer to her question had appeared with clarity after the first week of her apprenticeship.
    They couldn’t be more different. Ashcroft was a tutor , a scholar, despite his rough, roguish looks. There were supposedly many types of sorcerers, and he was an Archivist—a race of wizards who got their powers through grueling study and