Chapter 23 #2
Magic moved here like the currents, deep and ancient.
Only now could I sense it, and with that sense came the realization that I was always fighting against it.
No wonder it felt combative. My fingers absently brushed the scars on the backs of my thighs.
They felt foreign and strange, as if it wasn’t my body at all.
I turned my thoughts back to the forest, and stood to continue—this time, trying to find my way along its ebbs and flows, rather than fighting.
Not long after that, I found myself at the edge of the grove, sweaty and disgruntled.
Today, I did not have to cross through the abyss and light the fire, for Perchta was already there, bent over and tending to her gardens.
Where things grew in a tight, ordered way in the chateau gardens, here, everything grew wild and wonderful, entangled in a lush chaos, but she knew exactly where everything was and where it should be.
The sun was high, lighting the grove in thick beams of hazy, green sunshine.
“Perchta,” I called, stepping into the grove.
She lifted her head. Her hair was pulled off her face and sweat glistened on her brow, and for a moment, she did not seem so ancient. In fact she seemed beautiful, with a strangely captivating face and quick, knowing eyes, and I could not look away from her.
“Come here,” she answered.
I stepped forward, picking my way through the vegetation and the small footpath she had made.
“You can’t call for me right now,” she said. “So I have been waiting for you. Where have you been?”
I shook my head. “I’ve been busy.”
“Busy doing what?” Her white-streaked hair was pulled back underneath a plain veil, and the air smelled sharp and hot and green.
I was both unable and unwilling to explain and instead pulled a stalk of grass through the tips of my fingers, until my silence was clear. “You remind me of the woman who raised me,” I said finally. “She was our village midwife.”
“Yes.” Perchta nodded. “Valerie.”
I startled. Was that why she was so familiar? Had she been with Valerie, some time when I was young? Did some part of me hold a memory of her? I straightened, my heart racing nervously. “You knew her.”
Perchta smiled to herself and slung the hoe into the ground. “Yes. I know all the wise women and witches.”
“I was so young when she … died.” My stomach turned, as it always did to remember her death.
Perchta kept working and did not respond.
Did she know how Valerie died? Did she know I was responsible?
I swallowed, remembering how the bandits appeared when I was with Dacia and the girls.
“When I first met you, you said darkness was following me like a blood trail because I was bleeding magic. Am I still?”
“Yes,” she said without even needing to consider. “It’s lessened some, as you’ve learned the difference between yourself and everything else.”
“How can I stop it? How can anyone be safe around me?”
“No one will ever be safe around you. Not like you hope. Magic is not safe.”
“Oh.” I had wanted a different answer, but it was a foolish question.
Hadn’t Death himself even told me I was not safe, not even for him?
I remembered his speech still, on that high mountain meadow, and a flush that had nothing to do with the heat washed over my cheeks.
I poked at a stalk of betony, stroking the purple petals with the tip of my fingers.
“Sit child,” she said. “Rest a minute. Your grief is heavy.”
With a defeated sigh, I sat in a grassy section in the middle of her garden and crossed my legs, tucking my skirt underneath me in the hopes of keeping bugs out.
Perchta swung her hoe, and it hit the ground with a thud.
There was something about the air in the grove; it was rich with magic, but I could not tell where it came from.
It seemed, if she chose, she could shake off the skin of an old woman and stand straight-backed and ageless.
Then it seemed, even as I watched, that she did.
“He has you under his spell,” she said. “You need to understand that no one can separate you from yourself. That’s why it’s so important you know your edges. What is you and what is not. He is trying to make you a vessel, but you can only be filled by someone else if you are emptied of yourself.”
But she knew nothing of how it felt to be under his care, the stroke of his hands to hurt and heal, the dizzying euphoria of sitting beside him late into the night. “He’s not trying to make me anything except a good magician.”
“And what has he taught you about being a good magician?”
“I don’t want to talk about him. You don’t understand.”
“Well, this isn’t about him anyway. This is about you.” Perchta sighed and stopped working. The light caught in the darkness of her eyes. They were the opposite of Renaud’s—they held an uncomfortable sort of all-knowing, too close, too sharp. “Close your eyes,” she said.
It took a minute for me to do it. I trusted her.
Of course I did. But since the meadow with Renaud, since leaving and returning, a stubborn streak had grown in me, holding the entire world at arm’s length, and I eyed Perchta with a new wariness.
I did not want to be vulnerable in the middle of her grove.
But eventually, I closed my eyes and took a deep breath to settle myself.
“What do you feel?” she asked. “Tell me everything.”
“I feel nothing.”
She didn’t answer. I sighed, and a breeze stirred the grove, causing the wild plants around me to bend their stems and graze my arms. “I feel the flowers,” I said. “I feel the ground I’m sitting on.”
“Find the line between you and the ground. Where you end and the wildflowers begin. It may not be where you think it is. It’s easy to miss.”
At first it seemed obvious, the flowers were the flowers, I was me.
But it could not be so obvious, so physical, so I turned my attention deeper, in that space between everything where magic tended to run.
My mind flitted from the ground, to the flowers, the air, and then to the curve of my legs, my backside, my face in the breeze.
It wasn’t until my inner gaze softened that I felt something like that golden thread on the road to the shrine, like the one tangled between me and Dacia.
I traced it with my mind. A line of pure light …
a seam? It wound through and around, and I had to follow it like I had with the shrine, careful not to lose it in the tangle of itself separating me from the air.
It felt like a spiderweb being cast out and blowing in the wind, delicate and easily broken, yet many times stronger than it should be.
I kept tracing the shape of myself, so much bigger, more expansive than I thought, but then suddenly the threads twisted into the tender new scars against the dirt and my stomach convulsed.
My eyes flew open, and the thread was lost. Perchta’s eyes were on me, and I suddenly could not meet her gaze. “I could not find it,” I lied.
“No. You had it. For a moment at least.” Her hoe hit the dirt with a thwack. “You must continue, or he will destroy you.”
I pressed my lips tight.
“He has destroyed women more powerful than you.”
I stared at my feet in the dirt for a long time, and then because I was warm and restless and frustrated with talking about Renaud and her judgment of my ability, I thought the incantation for the being of light.
In a moment, I transformed, my dress white, my body glowing.
I stood and filled the grove as if I were a star dropped from heaven.
“More powerful than me?” I demanded in my shining voice.
I expected her to take a step back. To be surprised. To act like the bandits had in my presence. But all she did was drag her hoe through the dirt. “Yes, child,” she said, her voice even and steady. “You have learned some tricks.”
How was she not affected? Not even a flinch of surprise? I turned myself back to normal and looked around at the quiet grove. “Why can I not go back through the abyss?”
“You have lost the way.”
“It’s right here.” I gestured around me. “You’re blocking me.”
“I’m not blocking you. You’ve lost the way into the otherworld. The way in yourself.”
“How can that be?”
“The way is always there. You do not have to venture to this grove to find it. But the more you let him …”
I didn’t hear what she said next. I was sick of hearing her warnings about him. She knew nothing about him. She couldn’t! The heat felt like sharp prickles on the back of my neck. “Are you jealous?” I asked. I did not know what other word to use.
She snorted. “When you chose him over yourself, you surrendered the way.”
I could not bear the idea that I had become so desperate for power that I might have traded even my very soul.
I hated the sickening lurch of my stomach knowing that, at this point, my scars could not be undone.
But even more so, I could not bear that Perchta might see what I refused to.
After all, there was nowhere in the world for someone such as me—nowhere except by his side.
Anger surged up my spine. This was a fight I wasn’t willing to fight.
Renaud and I were making something powerful together. Something different.
Valerie had not held the power to keep us safe. Neither had I, the night Rochelle was taken from me. But it could be different now. I understood now what Renaud had meant when he spoke of peddlers and witches and the kind of magic he was trying to teach me. He’d been right all along.
Without a word, I stood and turned and stalked into the forest.
Perchta did not try to stop me, and before I’d even left the grove, I heard the swing and thump of her hoe into the ground as she resumed her work, which made me even more irritated. Was I not even worth fighting for?