Chapter 13
Cora
Seventy Years Earlier
“You must understand, girls, this book is not a toy.”
Cora watches as her mother carefully turns the pages, showing her and Ivy the looping writing inside. She is consumed by it, by the sketched illustrations, the titles for each story, the added observations from different Morgan women, the annotated notes in the margins. The history is layered in the Morgan Compendium, a book containing multitudes, containing whole worlds. Containing, she believes, real magic. Cora leans in closer, sure that her mother is finally sharing the secrets she knows are just beyond her fingertips. Where the mountains touch the sky, where the trees lean together, whispering and hiding the old ways beneath them.
Grandmother Tabitha has died, aged one hundred and a day, on All Hallows’ Eve no less, and the book will now pass from grandmother to granddaughter. It will pass to ten-year-old Cora or twelve-year-old Ivy, and Cora cannot contain the excitement in her chest.
But Ivy is fidgeting beside her.
“Stop that,”
Cora murmurs to her sister, digging her elbow into Ivy’s side. She doesn’t want Ivy to ruin this. Not this too, when she ruins everything else.
Ivy sighs, twirling a strand of fair hair like a ribbon around her finger. She lets it unwind, a faint corkscrew shape bending it into a loop, before shaking it back to pin her gaze on their mother. “It’s just a book,”
she says. “It’s the one Grandma Tabitha kept on her nightstand, with all the old stories and recipes in it.”
“It is. Well observed.”
Her mother beams. Her eyes glitter, sharp little chips of blue that always seem to see the best in Ivy, even when Cora can see all her faults in plain sight. Her mother’s approval nettles her, drawing out the sour blood between them. Drawing out the spite in Cora that seems to rise out of nowhere.
“I can look after it, Mother,”
she says, licking her lips. “Will you let us read it now? If we’re careful?”
Cora’s mother blinks, her expression shifting. She snaps the book shut, lips tightly pinched. “It passes from grandmother to oldest granddaughter. Ivy will have the book.”
“What? That’s not fair!”
Cora says before she can contain the words. “Ivy doesn’t care about anything, she makes a constant mess, she’ll ruin it, or lose it, it isn’t fair—”
“Sorry, Cora,”
Ivy cuts in quietly. She raises her hands slowly, and their mother beams at her as she passes the book into Ivy’s outstretched hands. “Maybe we can read the stories together?”
Cora sits, fuming, as Ivy eyes her quietly like she’s a lit match sparked by every argument, every fight she ever had with Ivy. Cora wonders what would happen if she pushed her, just gave her a good, hard shove—
“Cora, go to the step.”
Cora takes a great trembling breath. The step. The place she has been banished to more times than she can count this week. The back-door step, beside the compost heap, where the chickens peck and cluck in inane, slow circles. Where she will be utterly, horribly alone. And Ivy will have the book all to herself. She hesitates.
“Go to the step.”
Cora lets her eyes rest for one beautiful, full heartbeat on the book Ivy now clutches in her hands. The book that should be in her hands. The Morgan Compendium. The collected stories of the mountains, of generation after generation of Morgan women. She heaves a trembling sigh, stands with leaden bones, and drags herself out of the room, toward the back of the house, the lonely part. As she walks, she hears her mother slide off her chair to sit beside Ivy. She hears the excited lilt in the cadence of her voice as she shows Ivy the first story, telling her that it is all real, that every secret revealed in the book should be guarded now by her.
Cora makes a vow while sitting on the back step that day. She stares up at the mountains, looming like God above her, and promises that she will get that book.
It isn’t Ivy’s, it isn’t mother’s. It’s hers.