Chapter 21
Chapter 21
Monday came, and Fern counted down the minutes until four thirty, when the bookmobile would arrive. It came twice this week, collecting all the girls’ books before shutting down for the rest of August, and then lessons with Mrs. Conradi began again at the end of the month. It was Fern’s last chance.
Her leg jiggled, Charlie Brown kicked, and she could barely swallow water. By the time the bus rumbled into the drive, Fern needed all her willpower to wait until the last of the girls were coming back. Fortunately, Mrs. Deckle wasn’t about to leave her air-conditioned office to supervise. Fern had the bookmobile all to herself.
She stepped through the door. The last time she’d been here it had been Miss Parcae’s nighttime lair, glowing with candles, shimmering with the smell of smoke and pine needles and spice. Now it was brightly lit, smelling like a conveyor belt, no trace remaining of its other life. Miss Parcae sat behind her desk and Fern walked over and held out her copy of A Wizard of Earthsea .
When Miss Parcae reached for it her hand trembled. Standing this close to her, Fern smelled something stale. Sweat beaded the librarian’s upper lip. Her skin looked waxy.
“Are you all right?” Fern asked.
“I seem to have more low days than high this summer,” Miss Parcae said. “Please excuse me if I don’t get up.”
“The powder Rose gave Miss Wellwood?” Fern said, diving right in. “What did it do? Did we poison her?”
Miss Parcae looked past Fern to the door.
“She’s in the office,” Fern said, and panic crept into her voice. “Miss Wellwood’s out sick. She’s never been sick a day in her life.”
“You gave her the powder?” Miss Parcae asked. “You finished the spell? You tied it up in a bow?”
“Yes,” Fern said, and dropped her voice to a whisper. “Did I kill her?”
Miss Parcae smiled. Her gums looked white. Under her lipstick, her lips were chapped. The whites of her eyes had a yellow tinge.
“Don’t start anything you can’t finish,” she said. “Every spell must be seen through to the end or it will metastasize and grow into something terrible. But if you finished the spell there’s nothing to worry about.”
Fern had been so scared for so long that a pat answer like that wasn’t going to satisfy her.
“What did it do?” she asked.
“Rose showed her what it was like to be her,” Miss Parcae said. “Nothing more, nothing less. Did Rose die?”
“No,” Fern said.
“Then neither will Miss Wellwood,” the librarian said.
Fern suddenly felt exhausted. She had been boiling with worry all week, and now it swirled away, leaving her empty. Then a fresh question bubbled to the top of her mind.
“Is that you on the cover?” she asked. “Of the book?”
Miss Parcae smiled. It took effort.
“You’re the first girl to recognize me through my glamour,” she said. “We’ve given that book to so many girls but you’re the first to ever look so close.”
Fern felt flattered that she’d done something no one else had, but she didn’t like being one of dozens of girls who’d been given the book.
“How many people have you given it to?” she asked.
“Oh, a few here and there,” Miss Wellwood said, and coughed into a tissue. Her lungs sounded wet. “We wanted to see how far they would take it. You’ve taken it very far, my girl.”
“That was Rose,” Fern corrected.
Rose was the one who did the spell. Rose was the one who made them fly.
Miss Parcae’s face went slack.
“Rose went in her own direction,” she said, then she brightened as if she’d remembered good news. “But you’re the one who actually read the book, you’re the one who saw me through my spell. Most girls don’t want to take it. The ones who do try a few charms, read a few pages, and give up. But not you, my poppet. You dove in. You were called to it, weren’t you?”
Fern tried to be honest.
“I think so,” she said. “It’s like I can’t stop reading it, even when I want to.”
Miss Parcae nodded.
“I remember that feeling,” she said, smiling. “It means you could travel with us, if you wished.”
“You’d let me come?” Fern asked.
“Now is the time of the furnaces,” Miss Parcae said. “And only light shall be seen. The enemy is distracted by his many battles and he’s loosened the noose from our necks. They’ve forgotten about us for the moment and left our cell door unlocked. We have a few years before Dolores sees another Burning Time arriving. A few years to practice our Craft and increase our numbers and prepare to survive the next harrowing.”
“Will it be bad?” Fern asked.
Miss Parcae kept talking like she hadn’t heard.
“We take women who need us,” she said. “They all have their reasons. Maybe they’ve had enough of this world and its heartbreak. Maybe they wish to live far from the laws of men. But they must be strong enough to turn their backs on this world, strong enough to live as we do. We don’t lead comfortable lives, Fern, but we find our pleasures where we can. We live in the margins, the in-between places, and push back against this world as the opportunities arise.”
She broke off into another coughing fit. Fern waited for it to stop but it went on and on, getting wetter. Miss Parcae pawed at her purse and Fern helped her get it open. Miss Parcae pulled out a silver flask and Fern unscrewed the top for her. Miss Parcae drank, gratefully.
“I’m dying, Fern,” she said, her lips wet and shining. “You see, we can cure so many things—blindness, clubfoot, diseases of the heart, fever, warts—but we never got around to liver cancer. They say there’s a witch in Hokkaido who knows something about it, but try finding a witch in Japan—they make us look like absolute blabbermouths.”
Fern didn’t know what to say. She didn’t know death. All her grandparents were still alive.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“So am I,” Miss Parcae said. “One shouldn’t fear change, but this body has been my home for more than ninety years. I shouldn’t be so frightened to leave it behind, but I’m only human.”
“Your coven said you were a library,” Fern said. “How can a library die?”
“In me lives my mother and her mother before her and on, back and back,” Miss Parcae said. “Not always bound by blood, sometimes bound by affection. I contain the memories of mothers, and mentors, and teachers who were like mothers to me. We pass along our memories to another when the time comes for us to walk into that eternal wood that knows no winter. We pass along memories and lives in an unbroken string reaching all the way back to that temple on the hill, looking down over the river, where they came and left us offerings under the cypress-scented breeze. I am the last of the long, long line of Hecate, and now it’s time for someone else to carry the flame. I’m not dying, Fern, I’m simply becoming part of something new. Someone new.”
“Who?” Fern asked.
“I have an idea,” Miss Parcae said.
So did Fern. It streaked across her mind like a meteor. She didn’t want to live with the witches, sleeping in campers, sleeping in the woods. She didn’t want to see a Burning Time. She wanted to go home, back to a house with a refrigerator and a TV and air conditioning. Back to a world that had rules and you always knew what to do, where everything wasn’t a riddle all the time. But Holly didn’t want any of that.
“Miss Parcae,” Fern asked. “Could Holly come with you?”
“Holly?” Miss Parcae asked.
“Could she join your coven? And travel with you? Could she be the one who took the memories?”
“The little one?” Miss Parcae asked, putting it together. “With the star-kissed face? She could, under certain conditions.”
“She could come?” Fern said, so excited she talked right over Miss Parcae. How could Zinnia be mad at her if she’d figured out a way to save Holly? This was what she needed to make everything okay again. “Her life at home isn’t any good. She wants to run away.”
“That’s sweet of you, my dear,” Miss Parcae said. “But there are women who need us, and women we need. Show me that we need her, show me she’s strong enough, and of course she can come.”
“How?” Fern asked.
“She hasn’t performed a working,” Miss Parcae said. “Show me she can. Show me her strength.”
“She did turnabout with Zinnia,” Fern said.
“Pishposh,” Miss Parcae said. “A hedgewitch charm.”
“We flew,” Fern said.
“That was Rose’s spell,” Miss Parcae said. “You helped and the child helped, but it was Rose’s will. Show me her strength, Fern. Show me she has the will.”
“What can she do?” Fern asked.
Miss Parcae smiled.
“I’m very parched,” she said. “Why don’t you ask her to break this heat? Why don’t you ask her to make it rain?”
***
That night, Fern waited until Holly went to the bathroom before she told Zinnia. She knew Zinnia would be excited she’d found a solution to Holly’s problem.
“They’re lying,” Zinnia said.
Fern felt the rug snatched out from under her.
“How are they lying?” she asked. “They’ll take Holly with them. You haven’t seen their camp. They travel all over the country. They said she could come.”
“We got rid of my morning sickness and almost killed Dr. Vincent,” Zinnia said. “Rose poisoned Miss Wellwood and even though she only got half the dose she’s out sick. All they do is hurt people.”
She pulled her nightgown on and started taking her elastics out of her hair.
“But he didn’t die,” Fern pointed out, and then, because Zinnia’s know-it-all dismissal of her solution pricked her pride, she said, “And I gave Miss Wellwood both doses and she’s fine. Miss Parcae said she’s just going to be sick but she’ll be back soon.”
Zinnia stopped unwrapping an elastic and stared at Fern.
“You lied to me?” she asked.
The hurt on Zinnia’s face made Fern realize she’d done the wrong thing again.
“But she’s going to be fine,” she said.
“You told me you didn’t do it and you lied to me,” Zinnia said, and Fern couldn’t tell if she had started to cry or was sweating.
“I had to,” Fern said. “I had to finish the spell for Rose. Miss Parcae said—”
“You believe a word that woman says?” Zinnia cut her off, her voice furious. “They lie. I bet she said Holly had to do something to come?”
Fern didn’t want to admit Zinnia was right.
“No,” she said.
“Of course not,” Zinnia said, pulling out her second elastic. “She’s a liar and you’re lying for her now. She’ll say anything to get what she wants from you.”
“She doesn’t want anything from me,” Fern protested.
Couldn’t Zinnia see that this was Holly’s way out?
“Of course she does,” Zinnia said. “Do you think witches are a charity? She’s probably already told you what she wants and you were too excited about magic to hear.”
Holly came in the room and Zinnia stopped talking. She wouldn’t talk to Fern again, even after lights out. Fern knew Zinnia was wrong, but Zinnia was too stubborn to admit it. There was only one way to help Holly and Fern had found it: Holly had to run away with the witches.