Chapter 67
SARAH
‘Gramma Serafina always told me it was a printer’s error,’ I say. ‘The ink ran out, or the press jammed on the way down then righted itself for the next impression. We never detected any magical signature off those pages.’
Lachlan bares his teeth, a wolf from the shadowed Scandinavian forests, and I remember his own affinity for dark magics.
‘Maybe it wasn’t detecting the right magical signature off you.’
‘Now’s not the time for being enigmatic, Dad,’ Harper says. ‘What are you saying?’
‘Have you ever heard of a palimpsest, Harper?’
Our daughter looks uncertain. She’ll recognise the word, but it’s a high-level magical technique so I never explained palimpsests when she was a child, before her Determination.
After it, once I believed her Giftless, we never spoke of magic again.
I’ve had little opportunity to teach her since we fled from Sanctuary – and palimpsests certainly aren’t where I’d start.
‘Something written on top of something else?’ she ventures. ‘Layers?’
‘Pretty close. When we use the term in the context of grimoires, it means a spell sealed away inside visible pages of text. Now Starcross is, famously, the first printed grimoire, though individual copies were customised by the families that owned them. When I was researching surviving copies, that’s what I was interested in rather than the printed content.
All those annotations that show us the evolution of magical practice, capturing in real-time witches thinking, experimenting, innovating … ’
‘I get it,’ our daughter says, impatient. ‘Don’t go all starry-eyed scholar on us. If this is related to me, to these things I’ve been seeing, just tell me plainly.’
‘Right.’ Lachlan visibly pulls himself together.
‘Sorry. A palimpsest is a spell sealed inside the pages of a book. Because it’s essentially an act of hiding, it is most often used for those magics which society might judge harshly.
Curses. Love spells. Personal, powerful things.
And so palimpsests are generally locked tight – blood-sealed, or bloodline-bound, or closed up with an incantation, or any combination of such techniques. ’
‘I just said Serafina and I examined those pages,’ I interrupt, ‘and we’re both Fenns. If there’s a bloodline-bound palimpsest in these pages, why didn’t it open for us?’
‘Examined, yes.’ Lachlan sighs, and I wonder if he used that sigh on students in his long and duplicitous academic career, when his scholarly pursuits masked his revolutionary ambitions. ‘But did you appeal to it? Sacrifice to it? Spill blood upon it?’
‘Lachlan,’ – and if he’s cracked out his professor voice, he’s getting my no-bullshit mom-voice in return – ‘one does not simply spill blood on blank pages of ancient magical texts.’
And somehow, that gets us all smiling. ‘Goddess, you two,’ Harper moans, reaching an arm around us as we huddle before the open grimoire. ‘So annoying yet also so cute.’ We share an uneasy, comforting moment of togetherness.
‘This is pure speculation,’ Lachlan continues. ‘But the thing hidden in this book could be from the time of the original Redhaven, and Harper, you accidentally … accessed it.’
‘But I didn’t have Starcross when the first vision came.’
‘No. I think you unsealed the palimpset much earlier than that, otherwise you’d have a clearer memory of doing so.
My theory is this happened near the time your magic came in.
You told me how in the days after the Whitman boy died for the first time and your mom did …
whatever she did … to bring him back, you searched Starcross desperately for ways to hide your magic.
Perhaps your fingers were bloody, because you’d attempted some other rite.
Perhaps you were pleading, Help me, help me, I need a way through this.
Even then, it’d take an incredibly powerful witch to open a palimpsest. They’re usually sealed with an incantation, which acts like a key.
If you don’t know the incantation, the only option is to effectively smash the lock.
Only someone of great magical strength could do that. ’
‘Yeah,’ our daughter agrees, and I love her for owning her power. ‘Someone who was a child of two incredible witches.’
‘But if this is a palimpsest, what was locked inside?’ I ask.
‘I think I know,’ Harper says, slowly. She sounds hesitant, almost protective? ‘I think it’s someone’s … memories.’
And she tells us a strange, haunting tale of flashes of another life, obtruding into her own. A world ravaged by civil war and false peace. A grandmother. A child. A community. Apprentices.
Expectation. Demands. Danger.
Death and destruction. Command and Ruin.
‘Whose memories?’ I ask, though the answer seems clear, now. Lachlan’s nodding like he knows it, too.
‘Susanna Fenn,’ my daughter says. ‘Let me show you both. Mom, Dad, is there any way we can share magics?’
‘We’re family,’ I tell her, noticing the way Lachlan’s blue gaze lifts to mine in tender surprise. ‘It’s what we’re designed to do.’