Chapter 64
SARAH
The joy of Harper – her presence, her Gift – wipes everything else from my mind.
It’s only when she prods and pushes and separates us, demanding answers, that the sick queasiness of why I’m here returns.
I came to Lachlan now, while she was resting – so I thought – precisely to spare her these ugly questions.
He gave me directions and welcomed me in through the wards not expecting to have this conversation.
But I need to know, and Harper deserves to know, if he sought me out all those years ago with ulterior motives.
And especially if there’s a reason behind his reappearance in our lives beyond the one he told me about seeing us both in the coverage of Sanctuary.
It’s better we know now, before Lachlan becomes a fixture in our lives. The bedrock of it, even, because the pull I feel toward him is stronger than ever after everything he did in Montreal. His fearlessness. His power. His evident, abundant love for my daughter. Our daughter.
If that’s to happen, there must be honesty and there must be truth. If our very first meeting was engineered by his ambition I can forgive it – but I won’t be lied to.
And so calmly, fairly, but without holding anything back, I explain to Harper what I was told at the Moot. She gasps, and it guts me, because if there’s one thing Harper has learned in her short life it’s to trust no one.
‘You researched us?’ she asks Lachlan, betrayal sheening her eyes. ‘And I was, what, some kind of graduation project?’
‘No!’
Lachlan’s explanation tumbles out so swiftly, so messily, I want to believe it’s the truth.
He was interested in Redhaven, he says, even as a young man smarting at the restrictions placed upon magicals.
He never believed it was simply a legend.
He couldn’t go to the Moot archive openly, or to others, asking about Redhaven.
He would never have been permitted. So instead he researched our community’s history during the years after Redhaven’s rumoured destruction.
That period when the first local magical associations were forming, from which the Moot sprang.
And he examined records of prominent magical families.
‘Yours was one of them. And there were two Fenn women who fitted the Redhaven timeframe – Elora and Susanna. Elora was strongly Gifted. For Susanna, the records varied. Some said she was a witch, others said she was Giftless.’
Harper’s brows draw in as he mentions them. Her fingernails pick at her lips. A mother recognises when her child’s troubled, though why at names familiar to us both from the front of our Starcross I can’t imagine.
‘But I still had nothing conclusive, so started searching mundane sources instead.
Came upon records from a settlement named Mountbron, that failed in the late 1860s, a few years after Redhaven supposedly burned.
It was nothing unusual for small towns to be abandoned back then.
The country was still in chaos after the war.
Menfolk had died fighting or never came home, and women moved away to live with relatives.
But the thing is, most of them declined over time. Mountbron failed fast.
‘I pulled in anything I could. Archaeological evidence. Magical clues. It was aerial surveying that finally pointed me to this place. Maps marked only unbroken wilderness here, but aerial photography indicated a few acres where the tree cover looked different. So I came on foot, and boom!’ Lachlan’s hands shape a blast cloud.
‘The place was magically radioactive. I’d found Redhaven.
After that, it was only a matter of acquiring the land.
I had help and patronage from a few like-minded witches by then.
Earned more funds by questionable means – one of which was a sideline in supplying Class-A prohibited plants to witches.
And that was how my path crossed with a remarkably skilful and extremely attractive young witch spending part of her Wandering apprenticed to a West Virginia horticulturist. As you’ll recall, Sarah, we hit it off pretty quickly. ’
‘Eww!’ Our daughter’s nose crinkles.
‘Thank you, Harper. Now think, Sarah. Did you ever tell me your surname? You know when you did – the day we parted. I recognised it, of course. But if I’d been that obsessed with your name I would have changed my plans, don’t you think?
Hung around. Only you were clear you were still Wandering, still learning, and believed that had to be done alone.
And I had a magical revolution to start.
An intelligence network to build. And so we went our separate ways, and that’s the honest truth.
Harper, you can Command me if you like. I’ll say exactly the same. ’
I can’t believe he’s suggesting our daughter use a forbidden sigil! So much for responsible parenting.
‘The Old Signs are not some kind of lie detector,’ I snap.
‘I’ll do it,’ Harper says. ‘We deserve to know – and Lachlan deserves to be believed if he is telling the truth. Don’t try and stop me Mom, or I’ll Command you, too.’
When she showed me and Lachlan her tattooed sigils that morning on the beach by Eafa’s Rock, I called them impressive, and her strong.
Said I loved her more than anything, even though I couldn’t love them.
It was a white lie. In truth, I hated the sight of them upon her body.
Felt crippling guilt, which never goes away, that my act of reviving Daniel Whitman from his first death was what drove her to take the Old Signs.
Lachlan called her sigils magnificent. I both envied and misliked the ease with which he was able to say it.
Still, he looks shocked as she lays Command upon him.
‘Tell us the truth,’ she says, as the revolting sigil swirls and pulses about him. It seems to know that this Command is for truth-telling, and reaches dark smoky tendrils to his face, wisping into his mouth, his nostrils. I close my eyes and focus on the words as Lachlan tells his story again.
Every word is the same.
‘Enough!’ I say when he’s halfway through his recitation. There’s something avid in Harper’s stare I don’t care for. She wouldn’t hurt her dad, ever – but the Old Signs have a will of their own. ‘Harper, stop.’
Except she doesn’t stop. The sigil’s darker-than-black smoke is twined around Lachlan’s throat, now.
Not hurting him, but grotesque to see. Harper turns her hand, assessingly, and the magic responds like it’s a snake and she the charmer.
But sometimes even the charmer gets bit.
So on instinct, I throw a hexbreaker toward the writhing sigil.
‘Stop this!’ I tell her. ‘You can’t do that.’
A counterhex isn’t powerful enough to destroy an Old Sign, but it should break my daughter’s enthralment with her own magic. When Harper staggers, at first I think I’ve succeeded. She blinks. Coughs.
But when she speaks, it’s in a voice both low and dangerous. It’s not her voice. And I’m certain they’re not her words.
‘If you won’t, grandmother, then I must,’ Harper says. ‘You may be the Adept of Haven, but if you won’t protect it, I will.’
Astonished, my gaze meets Lachlan’s. I can see what in anyone else would be pure panic, mastered by him to a tightly controlled tension.
A hyperawareness. I’m ready to cast a second, stronger hexbreaker, to snap Harper out of this.
Did she not make it out of Montreal unharmed after all?
My fingers pinch the air, plucking and pulling, ready to draw a net around my daughter – but Lachlan motions me to stop.
Harper’s swaying now, as if the venomous coiling sigil has succeeded in charming the charmer.
‘Starcross!’ Lachlan mouths at me frantically. ‘Starcross. Go. Hurry!’