Chapter 59
SARAH
It’s still there. Despite what they gave her in that clinic, Harper’s magic isn’t lost. At least, not entirely. It’s faint but fluttering beneath my fingertips. A bird’s heartbeat of magic.
After I laid my daughter on the backseat and cradled her head in my lap, Naomi’s Moot colleagues hit the gas for Salem.
My first instinct was to take Harper back to Sanctuary, but Moot HQ offers the best concentration of witching talent in the world.
Not to mention I’m Moot President now, and we’ve surely just unleashed the biggest magical political storm in living memory.
Harper is swimming in and out of consciousness, but making no sense. Once she opened her eyes and lifted her palms, inspecting them wonderingly. A little later, she laughed, and the sound of it chilled me to the bone.
Despite my vigil, my head droops. Our drivers swap halfway.
None of us have slept since our pre-dawn departure for Montreal.
We reach Salem mid-afternoon, and a bright-eyed Moot staffer takes one look and escorts us to a guest suite used to house visiting magical dignitaries.
I refuse all help carrying Harper and lay her on the coverlet, asking for food to be brought and that we be left alone for an hour.
I jump out of my skin when my girl sits bolt upright, eyes open.
‘Starcross,’ she demands. ‘Give it to me!’
‘It’s not here,’ I tell her. It’s still at Lachlan’s base, where she took it when she went to him.
Harper looks stricken and my heart twists with guilt, but then her eyelids droop, her chest gives up another heave, and she slumps back onto the bed.
I try asking more questions, shaking her gently.
People with concussion are supposed to be kept conscious and talking, though I know this isn’t concussion.
Some magical equivalent, maybe? What has Delacourt’s drug done to her?
Damaged her magic? Scrambled it? How is it not destroyed entirely?
Perhaps multiple shots are required, or this trial dose was simply too weak.
Whichever, I’m thanking the goddess for keeping the heart of her intact.
The cardigan I’m wearing is the same one I had on when I fled from our burning house.
A survivor of the moment I finally realised how much the world could hate us.
I press it into Harper’s arms and she curls around it before lapsing back into whatever uneasy sleep or waking has her in its grip.
It’s an improvement from the drugged unconsciousness of this morning, but I wish she’d come fully back to me, so I can tell her everything’s going to be okay and see her nod and know she understands.
Dragging an armchair from the suite, I settle down beside her to watch. And as I sit, I think.
I think of Pierre, who rebuilt that house for us from its ashes.
Who even remade Serafina’s rocking chair in an act of pure love.
The future we could have had together, that I was too hesitant to explore.
The future that Harper and I, and Izzy and Bridget face now, without him in it.
I miss him horrifically. Bury my face into a cushion as I try both to remember and to forget, because remembering feels too hard.
And I think of Lachlan, my daughter’s father, powerful or clever enough to break his binding bracelets.
Likely both. Once my lover, with whom I fell back into bed as easily as I had twenty years ago the moment we reunited.
A spark reignited but dampened down by me, too guilty about Pierre, too concerned for Harper, too traumatised by what my daughter and I went through, too suspicious of his witch supremacist activities.
His cult of Redhaven. One of the witches in the car had been playing his livestream even as we sped away from Montreal.
I heard it all. His ruthless cry of love and vengeance for our girl.
His destruction of that goddess-cursed clinic.
He was magnificent. He’s dangerous. Where does he fit into my and Harper’s lives now?
And I think of the Moot, of which I’ve unexpectedly become leader. We need to issue a statement about what Lachlan did. Or rather, what Ortiz and her unethical pet scientists did, and how Simeon Barr was bought off to implicate the Moot in it all.
Just as I’m thinking my time at Harper’s bedside is up because the clock is ticking on that Moot response, a knock on the door reveals Maggie Knight, back from Montreal with Naomi.
I brief them about Harper and ask Maggie to stay and watch over her.
The cop readily agrees while I go with Naomi to the Moot Council chamber.
It’s time to thrash out where we stand, given what we now know about these scientific attacks upon our magic.
There’s no time for a full Council, with deputies from every state and spokespersons of the few witching traditions that have organised into formal associations.
But the heart of the Moot’s governance is a Small Council of nine who, while drawn from across the country, all reside in or near Salem during their term of office.
I’m now one, as President, and Naomi another, as Head of Security.
On her way back from Montreal she summoned the remaining seven to assemble, and they’ve plainly been cloistered in discussion ever since.
The once-famous enchanted clock in the Small Council room (when asked, its dial moves to the time in any city you name, so no more useful than a smartphone these days) shows almost five in the afternoon as Naomi and I take the only spaces left at the table.
The faces turned toward us display every kind of reaction to this morning’s events: frank appraisal, apprehension, admiration.
However did Naomi corral this lot into appointing me?
Well, you wanted a Fenn as leader, I think to myself. This is what you get.
But the first questions on all their lips are about Harper’s welfare.
There’s a surge of concern for my girl in this room that lifts us above any differences of opinion.
On this we’re agreed – if the world is attacking our magic, and even our children are targets, we must stand shoulder to shoulder.
The first resolution and statement is drafted easily enough.
The Moot condemns all research aimed at curbing, restraining and destroying magical ability.
It specifically cries out against the unethical and covert research being conducted in Montreal.
Emphasising that magical ability is a protected characteristic, it calls upon the government to suspend and review any such work ongoing, and to create an open register of witchcraft-related applied research of any kind.
Barr, we cut loose. Naomi’s evidence about his compromised finances, and how he was bought off, is plain for all to see. The Moot repudiates him and condemns any attempt to use him to imply Moot consent or approval for such work.
Okoye is more difficult. His Council members see him variously, as I hear at length, as na?ve, optimistic, technocratic, and unduly under Barr’s influence.
On learning of his ousting as Moot President he came straight back to Salem, found his access rights to the Moot building had been revoked, and spent this morning calling all the Council members to argue his case – essentially that it was better to be on the inside of discussions with Ortiz, than on the outside – and to deny all knowledge of the research at Montreal.
‘His involvement in stripping the Ortiz boy of his magic is bad, though. Very bad,’ says one Council member, their elegant, androgynous features pinched in disgust.
‘It was a pragmatic solution,’ says an older man. ‘It headed off months of controversy that would have kept the idea of the state punishing a witch firmly in the public’s minds.’
‘Compassionate for the boy, in a way,’ suggests a bright-eyed, birdlike woman. ‘We all know this was the inevitable outcome. It spared him months of uncertainty and futile hope.’
‘Perhaps both those things,’ concedes the first speaker. ‘But it was still unethical, and that’s a line our kind can never cross.’
No public statement about Charles Okoye will be made, for the moment. He wasn’t present for Lachlan’s livestream. The Moot needs more information.
‘And what do we say about Lachlan Frey?’ asks the man who called Okoye pragmatic.
Their eyes all turn to me.
‘Lachlan is my daughter’s father,’ I tell them, ‘but he hasn’t been a part of our lives. Please speak freely.’
And they do. While the Moot is still protective of Okoye, to a degree, Lachlan rouses all their ire.
The old guy who considered the stripping of Luka Ortiz’s magic pragmatic doesn’t hold back, saying the Moot should issue a strongly-worded condemnation.
The youngest Council member, a keen-eyed fast-talker named Ashley, says Frey is big on social media and obviously loves the attention.
‘To be clear,’ I say, more irritated than I expected by what I’m hearing, ‘Lachlan didn’t destroy that clinic for shares and likes.
He did it because researchers kidnapped our daughter, drugged her and performed experimental medical procedures on her.
They’re seeking ways to make the stripping of magic no longer something we do ourselves in the most grievous cases, but rather something any mundane can do to us with a simple injection. ’
‘So you’re taking his side?’ says the young woman, tartly. ‘After what he did to you, I find that surprising.’
‘What he did to me?’
Is she talking about Bittershore – how Lachlan’s alleged influence on Luka Ortiz got me suspected of the murders? But a second council member looks pointedly at Naomi, and when she turns to me there’s apology on her face.
‘Let’s all take a comfort break,’ Naomi says, ‘then vote on resolutions and wording. Sarah, I’ll show you where the coffee machines are.’
‘What Lachlan did to me?’ I demand, as soon as we’re in small room by ourselves. ‘What does that mean? What do your colleagues in there know that I don’t?’
‘Yeah, there’s not been a great time to tell you.
You know the Council has been checking up on Redhaven-related searches in the archive.
Well, Ashley was looking at Lachlan’s access history more generally.
It felt like a legitimate security enquiry once the attacks on the Registration centers began.
Most of it was restricted but rarified magical theory – on palimpsests, for example, the art of concealment within magical texts.
And obviously a lot of history, anything Redhaven-related.
He called up every copy of Starcross the Moot owns. And …’
‘Spit it out.’
‘And the Fenns, Sarah. He studied your family in detail.’
Whatever I was expecting, it wasn’t that. I rest a hand against the wall. Lift my coffee to conceal my shock. Then a shudder of relief goes through me as I figure out the timeline.
‘But he wasn’t bound when we met and when Harper was conceived, and you’re talking about research he did after his binding. It doesn’t seem unreasonable for him to be interested in my family after meeting me, even if he never knew I’d gotten pregnant.’
‘We went through his entire reading history,’ Naomi says, and I hope I’m imagining the tinge of pity in her voice. ‘Some of the material on your family is open access and was therefore available to him before his binding.’
‘And he was reading it then?’
‘Since he was a university freshman, Sarah.’
It’s a gut-punch. Lachlan, who I thought was just a roaming young witch doing his Wandering, like me, coincidentally breezing through the same small town where I was nurturing my plant skills, had studied my family before he ever met me.
If I’d known that, would I have listened to his charming flirtations?
Have been so won over by his clever talk?
Would I have permitted what occurred between us that summer?
I can’t regret it, because it gave me Harper.
And it was a long time ago. But did he ever want me? Or did he only want Sarah Fenn?
And if I didn’t know what his motivation was when he approached me back then, can I trust his reappearance in my life now?
Have I made a terrible mistake allowing Harper to get close to him?
There’s only one way to find out.