Chapter 15
SARAH
It’s many years since I’ve been to Salem.
My first stop, as always, is Proctor’s Ledge, to honour the women and men who died there.
The great irony is that only a very few, and perhaps even none, of those who first perished in Salem were witches.
They were non-magical victims of the fear and unreason that stalks our existence, and which snarls at us once again today.
The grove on Gallows Hill is always quiet and tranquil, the city bustle muffled by trees and by charms. It’s overspilling with flowers, and sunshine filters through the leaf canopy to splash brilliance across the names every witch in America knows, for they died for us.
I sit with my thoughts and watch a young witch braiding a daisy chain – the flowers here are no respecter of season, blooming year-round thanks to the Greenmagic.
When she’s done, she walks from memorial stone to memorial stone looping the chain around each one, saying the victim’s name and murmuring words of apology.
Vividly, the memory of a conversation with Lachlan from twenty years ago comes back to me.
Why should we kneel at that memorial and apologise? he’d demanded, rare anger breaking through his usual buoyancy. Was it witches that put the noose around their necks? That pressed them under a board and loaded rocks on top?
It’s only showing respect, I’d murmured, taken aback.
There’s not a year of human history our entire community hasn’t suffered. His sun-kissed skin was flushed beneath the dark stubble. We shouldn’t go to Salem and mouth ‘sorry’. We should look on that memorial and be enraged. Want to burn things to the ground.
Perhaps he’d sensed he was alarming me, for a moment later he’d laughed it off.
Run fingers through his thick hair and apologised for getting a little intense.
I didn’t mind. I loved the passion in him.
It proved he wasn’t only a scholar – he really cared about the lore and the lives he researched.
Should I have seen back then what he might be capable of? Do I know, even now?
Should I have given Harper our grimoire to help her find him?
But if I’m sure of one thing, it’s that Lachlan would burn everything down before letting our daughter come to harm. She’ll be safe with him.
‘Sarah,’ says a voice, as an iced green drink is put down on the bench beside me.
The speaker sits and takes a long suck on her own matcha latte.
‘If she weren’t cremated, my grandmother would turn in her grave to see me drinking an abomination like this, but the coffeeshop by the office makes them so good. ’
‘Hello Naomi,’ I say, with a smile in my voice if not on my face. ‘Thanks for the thought.’
We slurp in silence, ice rattling in the perspiring plastic cups.
I wonder again if I’ve done the right thing in coming to this woman, who is high up in the Moot’s security team and a few months ago was tasked with investigating whether I might, in fact, have done everything I was accused of in Sanctuary.
Who I, in turn, suspected of the Bittershore murders.
But while two wrongs never make a right, two misunderstandings can forge empathy.
I asked Naomi Yamakawa a favour, and here she is.
‘Thanks for tipping me off that he’s available,’ I say. ‘And for getting me in.’
‘If you’re here to tell President Okoye what I’m betting you are,’ she says, eyeing me sideways, ‘there’s plenty of folk at the Moot thinking it, too. Let’s go, before some chat show booker calls, or Congress hauls him back to rubber-stamp their latest bright idea.’
The Moot headquarters for its first few decades occupied the black clapboard house that had once belonged to Judge Corwin, the house where the Salem accused were brought for examination.
Only when witches were granted full legal recognition did the Moot get bold enough to build its own fancy headquarters.
Unfortunately, that was in the 1960s, when ‘fancy’ meant raw concrete.
By today’s standards, our national HQ resembles a prison.
That maybe gives the reassuring impression we’re all contained, but it sure as hell entrenches the idea that we need containment.
‘I saw the architects’ proposal for the new headquarters,’ Yamakawa says, with that unnerving intuition of hers. ‘All glass. Very bright, very modern, very open. We were doing well on the fundraising until Sanctuary happened, and now donations have dropped off a cliff as you can imagine.’
‘Sorry,’ I say automatically, then grimace.
Be more Lachlan, I tell myself. Fewer apologies, more anger.
The angers flows hot enough once I’m in front of Moot President Charles Okoye.
‘Why aren’t you standing up to this registration?
’ I all but shout at him. Okay, actually shout.
‘It’s not only fingerprints. They’re taking blood – we all know how magically potent that is.
And they’re gathering it from our kids whether they’re witches or not.
You had fighting words for Sandra Ortiz once upon a time.
Why are you rolling over and co-operating with this now? ’
Okoye’s a slim, elegant man wearing a painfully fashionable pair of glasses. He pushes them calmly up his nose when I’m done.
‘And who have you been co-operating with, Sarah Fenn? Is Lachlan Frey behind the attacks on the registration centres? Have you seen him work magic despite his Moot-administered binding – did you perhaps help him break those bindings? Is Dr Frey, in fact, the Adept of Redhaven?’
Momentarily, I’m speechless.
‘How should I know?’ I snap, a fraction too late for my hesitation to look anything but suspicious. ‘I hadn’t seen Lachlan for twenty years, until he paid a visit to Sanctuary, and I barely know a thing about Redhaven.’
‘Really? When one of your ancestors founded it?’
I did not know that. My pulse kicks up a beat. What’s going on here?
‘Redhaven was never spoken of in my family. And I thought the Moot’s official line is that it never even existed.’
‘Oh, evidence is thin.’ Okoye tips his head.
‘How Redhaven began. How it ended. But it was real. And now Lachlan Frey appears to have reinvented it as some kind of extremist group. It’s not a good look for us, Sarah.
It’s things like Redhaven, or the possibility that witches are getting around bindings imposed by the Moot, that spook secular authorities and lead to measures such as the Witchcraft Registration Act. ’
‘I can’t believe you consider any witch, or organisation of witches, more of a threat to our safety than Sandra Ortiz and her repulsive legislation. I’m sorry we’ve not been able to have a more productive talk, President Okoye.’
I turn on my heel and storm out. Is this how Okoye plans on building his shiny new headquarters – by getting into bed with the authorities? Can he really believe the line he’s holding, which is that co-operation is the best way to safeguard our safety?
‘Sarah, wait!’
Yamakawa seizes me by the elbow. Draws me into a stale-smelling side room piled with stationery boxes and shuts the door.
Pulls out her little poppet and rolls its head between two fingers.
A listening charm to ensure we’re not disturbed, or something more insidious?
A way to test if I’m telling the truth, perhaps.
In which case it’s listening in on the quickening of my breathing and the rousing of my heart rate.
‘You’re not alone,’ she says. ‘Many of us here – most, I reckon – aren’t happy.
We don’t think Okoye’s pushing back hard enough.
But the problem is my boss Simeon, our head of security, agrees with him.
He said the other day witches have only survived by walking a line, and everything Redhaven stands for crosses that line. ’
‘What’s this obsession with Redhaven?’ I ask. ‘It’s obscure. Half a legend. Have most witches even heard of it? I couldn’t even remember the name the last time we talked and it came up.’
Naomi shifts, so her eyes are looking into mine. They’re so dark and glossy I could use them as a scrying surface. But it’s her trying to get a read on me right now.
‘It’s one of the Moot’s alert-words,’ she says.
‘Any witch talking or sharing information about Redhaven goes on an informal watchlist. After our conversation, it was one more thing I had to factor into my surveillance of you. Makes sense, right? It was reputedly founded by a Fenn, so perhaps the powers of its Adept are passed down lineally in your family. But Lachlan Frey’s pretty much outed himself as the ringleader, now – even though he’s supposed to be bound.
Simeon and Okoye think he’s a loose cannon who’s going to blow up in our community’s face right when things are most precarious.
Sarah, what was he doing around Sanctuary earlier this year?
Could he be involved with the Ortiz case? ’
This conversation feels too dangerous to have.
Lachlan isn’t registered anywhere as Harper’s father, but the clues are in both their faces.
If that connection is made, the Moot is going to start asking questions about her too, because the chances of our child not being magical suddenly plummet.
Not to mention that not long ago I practically packed her sandwiches and waved her off to be with her dad.
I don’t want to lie to Naomi. I must measure out my truth as carefully as potion ingredients.
‘I encountered Lachlan Frey years ago,’ I tell her. ‘Our paths crossed when I was doing my Wandering and he was intrigued to meet a Fenn. He came to Sanctuary to find me, because I had something he wanted to see.’
Our daughter. I don’t allow myself even to think it. I’m about to say Our Starcross when I remember I told Naomi I don’t have one of those either.
‘There are some texts that have been in my family a long time,’ I offer. ‘He’s a scholar – at least that’s what he told me.’
Naomi nods. ‘Figures. Restricted areas of the Moot archives are among those he was given access to after his binding. There’s a lot Frey has read that would be extremely dangerous if he was still in possession of his powers. But you never saw him perform magic?’
‘No.’
It’s only the truth.
‘I have to go,’ I tell her. ‘But please keep in touch. Okoye and your boss are going to realise pretty soon that they’re handling this wrong. I’m ready to help when they do.’
Yamakawa sets her hand to the door. ‘Take care, Sarah. I and plenty of others here appreciate you coming today. The Fenns are still a name to be reckoned with in our community.’
A name to be reckoned with. Back home that night, I sit in the kitchen in my rocking chair, Aira pooled softly in my lap.
My fingers curl around the armrests like I’m trying to hold Pierre’s hands – or the ghost of them.
I run through the names and dates of Determination of all the bygone Fenns in the front of our Starcross.
It doesn’t matter that Harper has the grimoire; I know them as well as I know my own name.
Redhaven was supposedly destroyed the year after the Civil War ended, in 1866.
There were two magical Fenns of my direct family line alive at the time: Elora, Determined in 1804, and her granddaughter Susanna, Determined in 1847.
If each was in her early teens when their rituals were performed, then at the time Redhaven disappeared Elora would have been in her mid seventies, and Susanna her early-to-mid thirties.
Either could have been Redhaven’s founder, though Elora is the most likely.
I search my memory for anything I know of her, but it’s not much.
I’ve no pictures of either Elora or Susanna – witches aren’t a fan of photography generally, even when not running illegal covens on a remote homestead.
We know about the power of likenesses. It’s one more reason Registration is so sinister.
Every witch in the country is now captured through blood, through fingerprint, and through photos from every angle.
Aira yowls in complaint as I smack the chair with frustration.
Why am I wasting my time with this? Am I looking for distraction, to keep me from realising how alone I am?
No Harper. No Pierre. No Bridget. No memories that aren’t too painful to sit with.
Contrite, I pet my familiar with hands that would otherwise throw things and smash things.
What else can I find for them to do?