Chapter 44
SUSANNA
A scrape at the window turns your head. It’s only a shriveled leaf, battering the pane as it gusts to join the knee-deep copper, russet, and mouldy dun drifts piled up against the veranda. Fall has come early to Haven this year.
You look down at your grandmother, but nothing will wake Elora Fenn tonight.
Trust the witch to know their magic. It’s one of Elora’s little phrases.
She trots it out whenever the young ones are exploring what their Gift could be.
But she’s never trusted you. Never allowed you to study those pages of Starcross.
Yet this is your magic – you know it as instinctively as you know Tommy is your child.
She can’t keep the grimoire from you any longer.
Elora is in her seventies now. An unforgiving age for anyone, let alone a woman who has defied the law, gathered a community, held it together through war.
You respect her. You love her. But tonight you thank the goddess for her frail body and its susceptibility to the strong dose of monkshood and thornapple you mixed into her cup of autumn punch.
You sent Connie Kilpatrick over to deliver it.
Thieved the ingredients from her mother.
Made sure you were near to help Elora to bed when she first complained of tiredness.
Sat there as she fell asleep, then layered on a few more hexes to keep her down.
You’ve got at least twelve hours, by your reckoning.
A whetting charm hones the little silver knife she gave you for your Determination.
You’ve kept it clean and sharp through the years, despite the chaos of war and the chaos of motherhood which threatened to pull your attention away from your craft.
You asked the midwife to cut Tommy’s umbilical cord with it, even though you knew by then your child was a boy and unlikely to be magical.
How easy it was to accept your son’s Giftlessness, for to you he is perfect as he is.
And so how bitter that your grandmother has never accepted the shape of your Gift.
You’ve used this knife to cut your own skin.
Small bloodlettings and bright, piercing pains that bring calm and comfort.
Your arms and thighs are silvered with slender scars, like the pinions of a bird’s wing, that you didn’t heal magically because you wanted to remember each one, each time.
So you know how deep to cut, and where, to release Elora’s blood into the silver basin held ready in your trembling fingers.
Why didn’t you do this years ago?
‘Elora?’
A quiet knock. Missus Kilpatrick. Her hand goes to the doorknob.
Your heart jumps. Reply that your grandmother is sleeping and you’re watching, and so betray your presence in this room?
Or stay silent, and risk Kilpatrick coming in to check on Elora?
The woman’s a gossip, and you’re convinced she only specialised in medicines and herbals to give her a practitioner’s privilege to ask questions.
What would she make of finding you here, alone, in the dark, and Haven’s matriarch drugged unconscious?
Nothing good. You brush a healing charm over Elora’s arm, slide the basin beneath the bed and keep quiet. It’s the right choice.
‘Sleep it off then, dearie,’ Kilpatrick coos.
Your stilled body twitches with annoyance. She’d never dare speak that way to Elora’s face. It’s one more sign that your grandmother’s authority isn’t as strong as she believes. Another indication that greater strength – more awe – is needed.
As Kilpatrick’s steps die away, you reach for the necklace about Elora’s throat. The clasp unhinges easily, and you fasten it about your own neck. Carefully – not spilling a drop – you carry the bloody bowl across the room.
Most of Elora’s walls are a jumble of objects both personal and precious.
Here is an early collodion tintype showing her seated, Giftless son and daughter standing behind, and in pride of place at her side, you, newly turned thirteen and with ribbons in your hair.
It was made to commemorate your Determination in 1847, the year before your uncle died falling from his horse.
Three years before typhus took your mother and five years before your grandmother founded Haven.
There are three girlish needlecraft samplers, stitched in childhood by Elora, your mother, and yourself.
How you’d hated the tedium of it! Your mother had caught you using magic to manipulate the needle and thereafter made you sit in front of her to complete it by hand, even though she must have been as bored senseless as you were.
Along the always-shaded wall hangs a gallery of faded but beautifully observed botanical drawings by Elora’s great-great grandfather, the greenwitch Tobias.
And here is the only bare patch of wall. Such a tell-sign, dear grandmother. You shake your head reprovingly.
You’ve seen her do this. She doesn’t mistrust you that much.
But you’ll have to hope the still-warm blood will work even when applied by another.
If necessary, you’ll drag her body over here.
And so you follow the observance you’ve watched her enact all the years you’ve lived here – more than ten, now.
You’re not a child anymore, but a woman of thirty-two summers.
A mother. She should have trusted you with this long ago!
You trace the sigil for ‘opening’ onto the wall with a fingertip.
It’s always pleased you, this one, with dynamic spirals and an unmistakable slashed-slit oval at its centre.
Magic and femininity and birth and becoming.
Women and witches are creators, the power sources of the world, and still Giftless men demand they give, give, give while drafting laws to limit and control that power.
Well, not anymore. This moment, right now, as war concludes, is the perfect opportunity to rebuild America differently.
The Giftless men have fought themselves to exhaustion.
Those who were enslaved, and then emancipated, shall soon be altogether free – an amendment to the constitution has been drafted, the thirteenth, and word is it shall be ratified before year’s end.
Yet witchcraft remains illegal. Penalties especially harsh for those living and working in covens.
If it takes war to win freedom, then witches, too, must be prepared to go to war.
Freedom is never given. It must be taken by force. The past four years have shown that.
If you can master what Starcross holds, then teach it to others, no gun, no army in America will be able to withstand you.
The pendant heats between your fingers. And extruding from the wall, like bracket fungi from a tree trunk, slides the dark leathery hide of Starcross.
You know where the pages are – the ones that got this book outlawed.
That led to a national confiscation, witches’ doors kicked in, old women thrown to the floor and their houses pulled down about their ears.
That led defiant families to craft exactly such spells of concealment as Elora has used here.
Starcrosses are rarer and rarer these days.
Families who own one never speak of it. Even many of the witches here at Haven don’t know for sure that one exists within the walls that shelter them, although its existence is rumoured and gossiped about.
Elora never kept it from you, though. Not when you’re the next in line. Her magical heir.
You touch your name beneath the others on the flyleaf: Artemis, Tobias, Jennet, Elora.
Your son’s name won’t go there, and you doubt you’ll ever have a daughter.
The years ahead will be busy for you, and dangerous.
But one day, a granddaughter. A girl born into a different world, when witches can openly hold the power that belongs to them and all the old, rotten ways of doing things, of keeping people down, are done away with. You’re doing this for her.
Then you flip forward to the two pages that have called to you since you first laid eyes on them.
The room is dark. You can’t risk a candle betraying your presence to those outside, so you picked a full-moon night for this. Tipped back the shutters to let the silver in.
You don’t need it. The Old Signs glow with their own shadowy light.