Chapter 62
SUSANNA
Elora is waiting on the veranda when you get home.
The odor of smoke is still in your hair – you try to forget the rancid, bacon-grease undernote to all the soot.
At your back the twins are breathy with excitement.
The thrill in your blood bubbles in theirs, too.
You think this is the first time they have ever truly felt their power.
Fattening marrows and popping out peas early is no way for a witch to use her magical ability.
Casting the Old Signs is.
This is the true inheritance of witchcraft – power. And yet you’re instructed always to make your talent meek and humble. To spend it on domestic activities. Weaving. Mending. Growing. Healing. To serve with magic. When really you should be ruling.
Your grandmother enforces that lesson. Despite her vision, her defiance in creating Haven at all, she preaches moderation. Modesty. But there is nothing modest about what you have done. Nor about what more you might be capable of.
She says nothing as you approach. Simply sits alone on the veranda.
And only now does it strike you how unusual this is.
She must have sent all the others away, or inside.
Your greeting is her cue as she rises to her feet, the wool cape embroidered by her Giftless mother falling from her shoulders, her clogs loud against the creaking boards.
Birds fly up squawking reproachfully as she bellows in a voice too large for her small, bent frame.
‘I felt it from here! Bad enough that you used magic to take lives. The folk hereabouts won’t forget that.
Worse, that you used one of the forbidden signs.
Worst of all that you shared magic with these innocents here, corrupting them with your own dark lusts.
Don’t think I haven’t seen you whispering to them in the garden, the orchards, the fields.
You’d spread your contagion as a caterpillar does mildew. ’
‘Why shouldn’t we share magic?’ you cry, indignant, mounting the steps to the veranda two at a time.
The hobnails in your boot-soles hit like hammers.
‘Aren’t we halfway to that, living as we do here in Haven – your creation?
And who forebade the signs? Why should any part of our Gift be judged beyond use by those who don’t even have magic? ’
Your grandmother’s open palm, the same one you have cut with your knife to bleed into a dish, connects so violently with your cheek your neck snaps back. You reel and stagger, misplace your footing on the steps, and only the twins, reaching out, prevent you hitting the ground.
‘Stupid girl!’ Elora Fenn looks down on you as from a great height.
‘It wasn’t mundanes who outlawed the Old Signs.
They should never have been included in Starcross.
The community that compiled it realised that soon enough.
It’s why so many copies were destroyed. Why the government has banned and confiscated it.
Oh Susanna, beware. Ruin was well named.
Those who seek to ruin others end up ruined themselves. ’
You cradle your smarting cheek. You can no longer tell if the tingling in your fingertips is your power or your humiliation.
Your grandmother has made a terrible mistake.