Chapter 65
SUSANNA
Grandmother Elora was right, you’re realising.
They’ve turned. The very people you helped three months ago by Ruining the runaway Confederate criminals have come back asking for ever greater feats.
Their conduct toward you is both more demanding and more fearful each time you demonstrate Haven’s power.
Your power – and that of your acolytes. The greenwitches have been repeatedly asked for assistance in the fields and the girls are exhausted.
Mountbron’s parish council has suggested you could magically compel the state governor’s representative, who’s come to assess the town and determine how much tax it should pay, so he levies no tax at all.
Some men of the next town accost you in the street one day.
They’ve heard what you did to Johnny Reb and want you to do the same for an encampment of Black settlers who’ve come to Maine after fighting for the Union.
They’re undercutting honest folk’s wages, their leader had said, his face too close to your own. We fought alongside ’em, but it doesn’t mean we want ’em here. Disgusted, you’d thrust him away, whereupon he’d threatened to report you to the authorities for the ungodly things you’ve already done.
Your fingers itched to show him exactly why that would be a bad idea. You settled for merely telling him.
You’ve started refusing even the smaller requests.
The taken-for-granted ones. Your greenwitch girls, though – your coven, your pupils – have softer hearts.
They’re out now on a mission you’ve made clear will be their last. You told them to be back by sundown, and now you’re pacing the veranda in frustration, wondering where they are.
Elora sits in her rocking chair, watching you.
All around, the folk of Haven are making the most of the fading light on what might be the last mild evening of the year.
Two of the older women have patchwork hexagons spread across their skirts, debating the best colour combinations for a new quilt.
Tommy and his friends race each other at the edge of the field.
Abner is whittling for pure pleasure – perhaps a toy for your son, or one of the other young ones.
He always crafts a horse or ship for the boys, dolls for a girl, no matter how much you tell him girls like ships and horses, too.
And as ever, the clack-whoosh-clack of Joan’s loom beats a quiet rhythm to the work.
Suddenly, there’s commotion at the boundary line.
You’ve always felt secure here at Haven, safe behind Elora’s mighty wards.
And outside, no man would venture now to lay a hand on you.
But it seems the townsfolk have found a way past the wards.
As you watch, appalled, a huge crowd – some two dozen, at your reckoning – surges out of the orchard.
They snatch at your startled, surprised companions, and in their confusion the witches of Haven dart to and fro, children shrill, and your heart thuds out of your chest as Tommy ducks beneath a man’s flailing arms that grab instead at one of his friends.
Women shriek. A man cries. The invaders bellow obscenities, slurs commonly used for your kind, though no one has ever dared use them to your face.
You hurtle down the steps and gather Tommy, sobbing, against your skirts, screeching like an owl—
‘Stop! How dare you?’
But the chaos continues. Beside you, the mother of your son’s friend falls to her knees, begging and sobbing.
Connie Kilpatrick is calling out desperately Mom!
Mom! and you see her mother held fast in the arms of the town miller, the same one who asked if you could enchant the mill to work on its own, to save him wages, his smirk giving the lie even as he offered the false promise that after, he’d sell flour cheaper to all the poor of the district.
Abner is struggling in the grip of two men whose eyes are almost lascivious with cruelty.
His cheeks are frantic red daubs on a face gone waxy like a poppet.
And there are the twins, pinned motionless at the centre of the threatening array like butterflies on a board, a knife at the throat of one betraying exactly how the townsfolk were able to get through the wards.
You’d taught the girls a few defensive hexes, enough to deter unwanted attention.
But such spells don’t work readily with their Greenmagic, and they have so little sense of self-preservation.
Of a sudden, silence falls, as it did not at your cry, when Elora rises from her rocking chair and hobbles down the few steps toward the rabble. She goes straight to the miller and the thick-armed man beside him, and begins to speak in a low, courteous voice.
Surely, you think, she cannot be reasoning with them?
Or worse, begging? Not these bestial men and the few coarse women who have trooped after.
(You recognise one of the women. She asked you a few weeks ago if you could cure her young son’s sickness.
You’d told her you were a witch, not a miracle-worker, and her eyes had dulled with lost hope and resentment. There’s a spark in them again now.)
Rage boils up inside you, a curdled potion, half poison and good for nothing. Rage at these expectant-eyed women and their bottomless demands; the greedy, covetous men whose wants are even more debased; your grandmother, who with her craven negotiations is undoing all the awe you have instilled.
It’s her you address, pushed to breaking point.
‘If you won’t, grandmother, then I must. You may be the Adept of Haven, but if you won’t protect it, I will.’
You can’t Ruin the townsfolk, not with the hostages they hold, so you stretch out your palm to Command – but even as the sigil takes shape mid-air, the screaming begins.
You stare with horror as every hostage has their throat slashed, hot red blood sheeting and spraying, even the two children – all except your greenwitch girls.
Your hands tremble as you realise the Mountbron folk agreed this in advance.
At the first sign of magic, one of them had probably told the rest, we kill the ones we’ve taken.
You know from the terrible, grieving, furious look that Elora turns on you that she had intuited this, when you did not.
That blood’s on your hands, now. Missus Kilpatrick’s blood.
Thomas’s friend. The lifeblood of people you’ve dwelled with, sat down at table with.
Who wove cloth you’ve worn, prepared meals you’ve eaten.
You feel your son pressed, trembling, against the back of your legs. Hear him whimper.
‘What?’ asks the miller. ‘You thought we’d give you the chance to use your filthy art on us and make us let them go? You and old Ma here cooked that up, did you – her to distract us while you cursed us?’
Command is insidious. It takes time to build. Not a sigil to use in a fight, but one to cast unseen from corners, to bind your enemy without their knowing.
But Ruin is swift.
‘Now, we’ve still got two of your most valuable ones,’ the man continues. ‘And their magic is the kind that can’t hurt us. So we’ll be keeping this pair as security against your co-operation. Doesn’t hurt that they’re pretty, too.’
He strokes the cheek of one girl, who gasps and struggles. Her sister’s gaze locks with yours. And there’s no timidity in her now. Not anymore. Only determination. She nods.
It’s all the permission you need.
Ruin surges from you fast as a flash-flood in thaw season. It drowns the trespassers, the murderers, the greedy, stupid, hateful townsfolk who thought they could use you and control you.
And when you blink once and see what you’ve done, every person gathered before Haven lies dead. Every one – except your grandmother, who looks at you with an expression you can’t decipher, as you shake with the force of your spell and your own triumphant power.