Chapter 71
HARPER
I shudder, only to discover that I don’t have a body to do it with. The sensation is so unnatural I begin to panic – but that, too, has nowhere to go. No heart-rate to spike, no breathing to speed up, no skull to throb. I’m a shadow having an existential crisis.
This last experience in Susanna’s body has been horrific and disorienting.
Betrayed. Magicless. Even stripped of memory.
I know what Elora Fenn did. A tiny part of me even understood why she did it.
But what an unforgivable crime against a witch.
Her own granddaughter. What must it have felt like for Mom?
I send a prayer to the goddess that she wasn’t inhabiting Elora as intensely as I’ve been sharing Susanna.
But how are these events still unspooling, if this isn’t Susanna’s memory?
As if in answer, the darkness around me takes shape and I see upon a desk, Starcross.
Susanna may not be here, but her ripped away, pent-up magic is.
Dawn casts light through threadbare curtains, and in its veiled radiance a seated figure is writing.
Elora, her gnarled fingers barely able to curl around a slender dip-pen.
The nib’s rasp and catch are loud as it drags across the page.
I want to bend over her shoulder to read it, and even as I’m wondering how to do that without a body I find that I’m there, part of the shadows.
There’s a warmth in the darkness alongside me, steadying and reassuring, and I realise it’s my dad.
I’m merely an observing presence here now, but he has been throughout.
I bet even Lachlan Frey, with all his years of arcane research, has never been part of something as weird and strange as this. He’ll never shut up about it.
Amusement pulses at me from the Lachlan-shaped dark, before the moving pen and rapidly-filling page draw back our attention.
Elora looks haggard and I’m viciously pleased at her suffering, although anxious for Mom experiencing her decrepit body.
Little time appears to have passed. How is Susanna faring, with her small son, in her sister’s house?
Does Deborah still needle at her, unable to believe she’s Giftless?
‘You are a witch,’ Elora writes, ‘as generations of Fenns have been before you. Our names are written in this book, and you will add yours to them. Go to the house of Prudence Marloe in Amherst and take this volume with you. She will instruct you faithfully. Never speak of this to your grandmother Susanna or her sister Deborah, if they still live. Your heart and conscience must decide what you tell your father Thomas, but I swear truly that sometimes silence is the greater kindness.’
There’s barely room at the bottom to scratch out a parting, ‘Your loving foremother in the craft, E. F.’
Elora sands the paper to dry the ink, then folds it, bony fingertips smoothing each crease with the same precision with which she excised her granddaughter’s magic.
Grandmother Susanna. It’s impossible for us to have jumped so far ahead in time that the boy, Thomas, has grown up and has a daughter old enough for her Determination.
Elora must have written this in hopefulness, thinking of a future descendant.
The next Fenn witch – one she’ll never meet.
Redhaven’s first Adept (and last, until Dad came along) tucks the letter inside the front cover of Starcross then bundles the grimoire in oilcloth.
Fastening a cloak with arthritic fingers less dextrous than twigs, she heads into the streets of Sanctuary.
Familiar ways are made strange by their distance in time.
A small girl bowls a hoop along the cobbled camber; a youth in patched trousers leads a mule laden with crates of produce; dogs and chickens run underfoot; a man in a tattered uniform rattles a tin cup in which only two coins clatter; a woman carries a basket of eggs; one fellow steadies a ladder for another who is painting a shop sign.
It’s a dry-goods merchant now, but I know it as Crafty Lizzie, a tourist-trap souvenir store.
The waters of the Accontic stream silty and deep beneath the several iron bridges.
Elora stops outside what is, in my time, an overpriced ‘English tearoom’ named At The Black Cat.
A neat brass plaque tells me it’s currently occupied by a scrivener’s office.
I’m not one-hundred-per-cent sure what a scrivener is, but a bell tinkles as Elora steps inside and a moustached man with sleeve-garters on his pressed shirt comes to the counter.
‘Who’s it for?’ he asks gruffly, when she places the anonymously wrapped spellbook before him and asks to deposit a legacy for future collection.
‘Maia Fenn, the eldest child of Master Thomas Fenn of the Cobb, Sanctuary, on her thirteenth birthday.’
Maia! How does Elora know the name? Her scrying must be truly something special. Then I wonder if she foresaw all of this. Knew what Susanna would do; understood how her haven for magicals would end. And she went ahead and founded it anyway. I can’t imagine the courage or the heartbreak.
The scrivener nods as he notes the information. ‘And on what date should we notify Miss Fenn to collect the item?’
‘March eleventh,’ Elora says. ‘Eighteen ninety-four.’
The whiskered face comes up sharply. ‘That’s twenty-eight years away.’
‘Yes.’
‘But how – her thirteenth – she isn’t born yet …?’
‘Call it an old woman’s intuition,’ Elora says, with a smile as unreassuring as Susanna’s always were.
The scrivener doesn’t look happy, plainly suspecting something uncanny about this elderly customer.
He names a sum for acceptance and annual storage so high he plainly hopes she won’t be able to afford it.
But Elora counts out the coins upon the polished countertop, and with a sour expression he carries the money to a hidden safe, only then returning for Starcross.
Elora watches him go, an expression on her face like that the families of the first pilgrims must have worn waving their relatives off at Harwich and Southampton.
Sorrowful parting, and uncertain hope for the future.
‘I’m sorry, Susanna,’ she whispers, her rheumy eyes following the scrivener’s shadow behind an etched glass screen as he places the grimoire into a deposit box.
The smooth mechanism of the lock’s tumblers click, sealing it away for nearly three decades.
‘I’m sorry I couldn’t build us all a refuge.
Perhaps Maia will succeed where we failed. ’
More disorienting darkness and I stagger, myself again, my body suddenly, shockingly solid.
Colours and sounds are too bright, too loud, and sensations overwhelming.
The soft plaid of my father’s sleeve chafes my cheek worse than sackcloth.
The faint scent of my mother’s ingredients – floral, acrid, herbal – hits like a beauty-store clerk sample-sprayed me in the face.
I recoil and steady myself with hands still braced upon Starcross.
Mom groans and stretches her arms above her head, twists her trunk, cracks her knuckles.
‘I feel a hundred years old,’ she mutters, to fill the silence, for we’re all half-stupefied by what we’ve been through.
Dad is patting himself like he’s checking for a lost wallet. ‘Nice to have a body again,’ he quips, when I raise an eyebrow.
Then quiet falls and there’s nothing, not even my parents, to shelter me from the truth of what just happened – and what it means. I press my hand to my chest, for it feels suddenly as though my heart’s been excavated from beneath my ribs.
My magic came from Susanna Fenn. I called it out of Starcross. Do I even have any ability of my own? After all, the Gift usually skips at least one generation, yet here I am, witch daughter of a witch mom.
And if my magic isn’t my own, am I really, entirely me? Don’t they say that when people receive donor organs, they take on characteristics of their donor? Or is that an urban legend …
‘Yes, you have your own magic,’ says my mother, fiercely, for I must have been thinking aloud.
‘I sensed it in you when you were very small. I always knew, the way parents know things about their child even from an early age, such as who their heart loves or how their brain works. I would never have encouraged you to spend so much time in my workroom, or look through Starcross, or accompany me foraging, if I’d for a moment thought otherwise.
Witches don’t expose their children to the riches of the goddess’s blessing unless they’re sure they have magic.
It’d be the cruellest thing imaginable to raise the hopes of a Giftless child. ’
‘And palimpsests are containers for magic,’ Lachlan says. ‘Not personalities. You’re all you.’
‘But that must be the reason you were drawn to the Old Signs,’ Mom races on.
‘What you’ve told me of the night your magic came in, when Dan Whitman went out the window and I …
did what Abigail begged me to. If you were searching Starcross for help and guidance on how to hide your magic, and unsealed Susanna’s Gift by accident, then it makes sense that afterwards you were drawn to Obscurity, and the rest of those sigils. ’
‘Maybe,’ I say. ‘Or perhaps that instinct was all me. I know you’re unhappy about my affinity with the Old Signs and I get it, they’re dark magic.
It’d be great for you to be able to blame my interest in them on Susanna’s influence.
But isn’t that rather convenient? In fact, what if her magic came to me because it sensed that I’m like her?
It somehow knew I’d be willing to use it? ’
‘Deep questions,’ says my dad. ‘Either is possible, and I’m not sure we’ll ever know.
But having the magic of two people explains a couple of things.
Why you’re so powerful – flattering though it is to think that good witching genes played a part.
And also how you escaped Montreal with your ability still intact.
Whatever magic-killer Delacourt developed in that disgusting laboratory, it was clearly unable to cope with magical resources like yours.
Your well of power must been too deep to drain, unlike those other poor souls she got to. ’
Wow. I hadn’t thought of that. Thank-you Susanna, from the bottom of my black little heart.
I think of her, living out her days in our house in Sanctuary, never remembering that she was a witch – and one so bold and fearless with her magic.
Who used it to kill men full of hate. Dangerous, yes.
But utterly unafraid. Who believed witches deserved better and more.
I picture her sitting by the fireside darning stockings; smashing ice off the water trough in the yard for laundry; laboriously kneading bread.
All tasks that magic could accomplish for her.
I imagine Susanna teaching her granddaughter her ABCs and how to stitch samplers, when she should have been taking young Maia through Starcross and demonstrating how to brew potions.
And slowly, I stop feeling quite so freaked out. It’s a privilege to give Susanna’s magic a second life. I touch my breastbone again. It doesn’t feel hollow, now, but as though another heart beats alongside my own in powerful, perfect sync.
Yet neither Susanna’s defiant strength, not Elora’s flinty determination, was enough to make Haven viable. Instead, it all ended in ruin. In blood-soaked Redhaven, a massacre of magicals and mundanes alike.
‘So what do we do now?’ I ask. ‘Feels to me things haven’t changed all that much since Susanna and Elora’s day.
When witches are simply trying to live our lives and do good – like you in Sanctuary, Mom – we’re more feared than trusted.
And when we bare our teeth, as you do, Dad, we’re vilified.
How do we show the world we’re neither saints nor monsters? ’