Chapter 70
SARAH
I didn’t have to witness it. I don’t think I could have borne it – not knowing that Harper is there inside Susanna, as I am within Elora, borne forward to wherever this story ends.
What more can there be left to see or show?
I’d hoped our time here would conclude with Elora’s desperate removal of her granddaughter’s dark and dangerous magic.
She would have wound it out onto the spindle, then cut the last shining thread loose with her silver sickle.
I’ve used that sickle all my life. It harvested my hazel switches when I was twelve years old and Serafina took me to the coppice and pressed it into my hand.
All that time I never knew it had carved away Susanna Fenn’s Gift.
I never knew our Starcross hid her severed magic.
Elora lifts age-heavy eyes and I recoil in surprise, for we stand before my house on the Cobb in Sanctuary.
Our house, for at my side Susanna looks at her grandmother and I’m certain I see Harper there, searching for me.
I can’t give her any sign of recognition or reassurance.
I hope she knows she’s not going through this awful re-enactment of the past alone.
The door opens to reveal a woman who looks a lot like Susanna. Around her age. The same heart-shape face and richly tinted hair. But the neat white apron of a respectable housewife is tied around her tightly-stayed waist. Like Susanna, yet very unlike her.
‘Grandmother,’ she says. Her mouth purses in distaste. ‘Sister.’
‘Deborah,’ Elora says, and again I feel that pinch of shame that comes to us magicals, from time to time, for the mundane forebears we’ve forgotten.
I never knew of a Deborah Fenn. Nor the name of Elora’s Giftless daughter, who birthed her and Susanna.
Harper’s children or grandchildren may never learn the name of my mother.
One more resentment my mom flung at me before she upped for Florida and left me behind.
‘Your sister’s been unwell,’ Elora tells this other, mundane granddaughter.
‘Took a knock to the head and lost some of her memories. But she’ll be right as rain with your care.
And here’s her lovely boy, Thomas. Twelve years married and you’ve no children of your own, Deborah.
You know you never will have. Help your sister raise this little lad as your own – your husband will be glad of it. ’
Thomas is pinned against Elora’s skirts by our clawed and tremorous fingers, a specimen on display. His mother holds his hand and gazes appealingly at her sister. Deborah looks them up and down, doubtfully. I see the moment she takes a half step backwards and palms the door.
‘I won’t have unnaturalness in my house,’ she says, and my heart aches for her, too, teaching herself not to want what she cannot have. Learning to hate what isn’t hers to love.
Susanna mounts the step, one hand on the doorpost. Eyes wounded. ‘I’m no more unnatural than you, sister! Please help us.’
Susanna doesn’t see the sharp, questioning look Deborah shoots Elora, confused why her proud witch sister is denying her magic.
But Elora nods our head in confirmation. ‘Your sister is no witch. She and her boy need you and you need them. This house has been too empty too long.’
‘And you?’
‘I know your views on unnaturalness, Deborah. And I’ve my own path to tread. You’ll see no more of me.’
‘And it’s … true? What you just said?’
‘Susanna Fenn has no Gift,’ I say. Unspoken are the words Not anymore.
For the first time, I feel it, as I turn and hobble away.
Elora’s emotions and thoughts are bleeding more freely into my awareness, the longer I spend in this body.
I understand her regret, her shame at what she did to her granddaughter – the Fenn whose magic was too dangerous and whose spirit was too wild for these already volatile times.
I limp down the Cobb, pack on my back, our precious Starcross swaddled within it – and what will happen to that, now the line of instruction has been broken?
One of Thomas’s children will have the Gift, but Susanna, having forgotten she was ever a witch, will be unable to teach them.
My hands won’t stop twisting and knotting.
I wonder at first if it’s palsy, for these events have exacted a physical toll, but it feels more like handwashing, or a lathe’s repeated paring away of a rough grain that needs smoothing.
Our fingertips prickle and the memory comes to me, clear and cold.
Elora has only cast an Old Sign once in her long life – and then, only because she could see no other way. Not once she’d excised Susanna’s magic and, because she couldn’t bear to destroy it entirely, sealed it away in Starcross.
That sign was her second crime against her granddaughter. Obscurity.