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is grossly misunderstood, for you have no doubt heard of the dabbler who plays with her mirror in hopes of entrancing a man. (Such foolery is likely to attract only the sort of men who are not worth having.) The most useful glamour is the inverse of that: to render oneself completely inconspicuous, to blend, all but literally, into the wallpaper. It was never a terribly exciting prospect when we were young, but the older we got, the more useful we found it.
    The fourth option is, of course, my favorite: making yourself appear younger (or older) than your natural age. It’s a simple matter, like moving the cursor up or down a slide rule.
    The last involves wearing somebody else’s face, and that takes the most oomph of all. Once the kiddies realize they fool no one when they don their sisters’ faces hoping to evade punishment for their mischief, this option generally falls by the wayside. I’ve only used it a couple of times myself, and only when necessitated by the most dangerous of circumstances. You can change someone else’s face as well, or turn an ordinary man into a wee furry thing, but that kind of trick can knock you out for days.
    Even more important than knowing how to change yourself is knowing which of the five options best serves the situation at hand, and that’s where our aunties took over. The magi shared in our exhilarated laughter as we grew scales and tails and vanished into the hedgerows, but it was the aunties who tempered our glee with cautionary tales of beldames killed in foxhunts. It was the aunties who subjected us to frequent lectures on the difference between wisdom and cunning and informed us time and again that it doesn’t matter where you are or what age you’re living in, the sad truth is that looks are everything.
    And yet mirrors are ordinary objects, quicksilver painted on a sheet of glass, and are easily fooled. The only hitch is this: if you’re working a glamour and another beldame catches sight of you in a mirror, she can see you as you really are.
    But in the beginning I had no notion of tricking mirrors and stealing secrets. Morven and I had grown up romanticizing the brave exploits of those medical pioneers of the gentler sex, Clara Barton and Flo Nightingale, and so we decided to devote our lives to that noble profession. We trained at the New York Infirmary, but because of our unchanging visages we could never work at any one hospital for very long.
    Later on, we served in the Army Nurse Corps from May 1917 until the Armistice. There were several of us extraordinary nurses at that field hospital at Ypres, and we each had our specialty. Morven’s was mustard gas burns, and mine was gangrene. Have you ever seen a man suffering from gangrene? They call it necrosis because death takes him nibble by nibble. Even the boys coming in with their limbs blown off wouldn’t turn your bile quite so much as a case of gangrene.
    I’ll tell you how I did it. A soldier would be brought in and he’d be so bad off the doctor would plan for an amputation early the next morning. Late that night I would kneel by the bed, lift the sheet, remove the bandages, and sprinkle a bit of sulfa powder onto the rot. This was part of the standard treatment, of course, and so far the infection would have shown no sign of retreat; but I would murmur a few words under my breath and tuck a calendula flower under his pillow, and in the morning the doctor would be astounded to find the patient’s foot on the mend. I could never heal it outright, of course, or somebody might have suspected.
    No sense denying I was a lousy nurse, though, at least in the eyes of the doctors. You couldn’t expect an ordinary doctor to understand that keeping a soldier entertained was just as important—nay, more so—than sterilizing his bandages or administering the correct level of morphine. The convalescents were sometimes in an even more precarious position than the freshly wounded, particularly if they had lost a limb, so