The owls were all gone? And so was Machiavelli! That was why their rooms had been ransacked--these goons had removed anything that would let them communicate with the outside world. Violet pondered on how this would be received by her dictatorial grandfather, who had charged her on pain of his extreme displeasure to write him once a week, without fail. After she'd run off to New York during what should have been her second hear, her family had kept her on a tight rein. If they didn't hear from her, they would immediately assume something was wrong. And Violet wouldn't want to be the one to have to deal with her angry grandfather. Sure, these intruders were scary, but Ignatius Blackthorne was rather frightening, too, and not just to his underage niece. Violet wasn't sure what all he'd been up to in his life, but from the way he changed the subject when certain topics were introduced, she suspected he had not always been a gentleman in retirement.

Violet was roused out of her broodings by the raised voice of a younger student and looked up. Ah, favorite stuffed toy destroyed, yes, that was a hard one. She tried to distract herself from the fear that her very real and living magpie might also been torn up by trying to do something.

"It's okay, we can probably fix it," she said to the younger girl. Violet was pretty good at repairing things, after years of potions experiments gone awry. "Mind if I take a look?" she said, holding out her hand. You could always distract yourself from bad thoughts by doing something useful, Violet had found. She was still wary of the other students, but surely it couldn't hurt to try to fix a kid's toy.