Chapter 5
FIVE
Verna did not let them discuss their plans until Blaire and Joss had filled their plates twice.
The Carvers had shown up to welcome the new Witches of the Demesne, bringing out the best hot dishes, platters, and desserts they had to offer, and finally, Blaire saw a purpose for her loose-fitting robes.
It was a feast fit for a celebration, which, she supposed, this was.
A ritual of binding, to each other and to the land. What stronger magick could there be?
She grabbed Joss’s hand under the table and squeezed, winding their fingers together and enjoying the simple press of her warm skin.
“Geraldine won’t be happy about this,” Verna’s voice broke through Blaire’s food-hazy thoughts. “As much as we didn’t like it, the demesne has run smoothly under her stewardship.”
“The demesne was never hers.” Joss set her glass down hard. Water sloshed over the rim, spattering the lace runner. With a tap of her finger, the damp spots evaporated. “And for whatever reasons she may have had for hexing me, even if they’re good, none of them can erase what she did.”
“She’ll have felt the shift,” Uncle Ross added. He sat on Verna’s right, in a position of support for his sister at the head of the table. Carver-blue eyes flitted between Blaire and Joss. “We all did. Geraldine will be expecting you to come and challenge.”
“There is no challenge,” said Blaire. “Charlotte Braddox passed the title of Witch of the Demesne to Joss. She returned to step into her role and brought me into it in kind. This demesne is as much C.R.O.W. as it is Hedge Witch, and there’s nothing Geraldine can do to change that.”
“She could hex you both.”
Blaire turned her wrist. A wall of sunflowers shot up around the table.
A curl of her index finger sent ivy crawling up the legs as clover swallowed plates and cutlery.
Joss smirked, and the liquid in every glass bubbled.
A thick fog rose, purling over the rims to cascade onto the moss-eaten lace runner.
“I would really like to see her try,” Blaire answered with a sharp, terrible grin.
“That’s enough, ladies.” Verna waved her hands at the fog, shooing it away from her plate. “Point received.”
Blaire curled her forefinger, beckoning the sunflowers into the earth and retreating the spread of moss.
The ivy she kept for aesthetics. And to make a point.
Beside her, Joss did the same, dancing her fingers in a liquid movement.
Water, wine, and juice for the children stopped bubbling, and the fog faded.
When that was done, she quickly took Blaire’s hand, squeezing tight.
A faint tremble quaked her fingers, matching the flutter in Blaire’s belly and a dizziness in her head not unlike a low blood sugar spell.
The cost of their magick, one feeding off the other and fueled by the earth beneath their feet.
“So tell us your plan.” Verna prompted with a lazy wave of her hand. “And how we can help.”
Sun warmed the horizon, licking gold across the summit of Roan Mountain, by the time they had a plan in place.
It was simple and to the point, just the way Hedge Witches liked it.
As the hours stretched on, Blaire could feel Joss’s frustration as much as she saw it writ across her face.
Twin lines pinched between her eyebrows.
A tick of muscle twitched in her cheek, and she crossed her arms, back impossibly straight.
Her desire, fueled by C.R.O.W. and their laws and regulations, was to barge in on Geraldine unexpected and unannounced. To catch her mother by surprise and demand answers.
Answers that, if not given freely, Joss would take with magick, whether it be hers or Blaire’s.
Theirs now, she supposed, but the idea had left Blaire uneasy.
For as much as she wanted those same answers, and wanted Geraldine to be held accountable for hexing her daughter and stealing a demesne, the witch had been a good steward.
If there was a fire, Geraldine was there with a bucket of moon water.
If a child was sick, she brewed the remedy.
She had attended the birth of Blaire’s niece and poured the wine at her cousin Tina’s wedding.
For the last four years, Geraldine had lived and breathed Hexen Holler with the same steady determination she had when her mother, Charlotte, was the Witch of the Demesne.
That deserved respect as much as her actions deserved a reckoning, and Blaire was not the only Carver to argue so.
In the end, it was an email pinging to Joss’s fancy internet phone that settled things.
“She’s summoned me to my own house,” Joss said in a dull voice, reading the email silently. “I grew up in that house. You can’t summon someone to their own house.”
“Balls to that,” Uncle Ross slapped the table. “Who is she to summon the Witch—”
“Witches,” Verna corrected.
“Witches of the Demesne anywhere? You should reply on that doohickey that Miss Fancy Braddox can sashay herself on down from that castle you call a house and appear before you.”
“Or,” Blaire said, “we do as she says.”
It was a good idea, or so she thought, but it landed about as well as a cat in a pond.
“What?” Joss exploded, along with the rest of the elder Carvers at the table. All except Verna. She sat back, arms crossed tight as ever, and watched her daughter with a narrow-eyed, studious expression.
“Hear me out, alright?” Blaire rose and stood behind Joss, placing both hands on her shoulders to keep her seated. “Geraldine knows something happened, else she wouldn’t have sent that e-mail.”
“A proper witch would have sent a crow,” Uncle Ross muttered.
“It came from a C.R.O.W. email address, does that help?” Blaire waited for Uncle Ross to argue.
When he turned his grumbling to the apple crumble on his plate, she continued.
“As of right now, I don’t think Geraldine knows exactly what happened, other than her daughter performed a ritual on Roan Mountain and secured her place as Witch of the Demesne.
So I say, we go, and we meet her on her level.
It’ll be some awkward tea and stale cookies, but it will be civil and by the book. ”
“She hexed me.” Joss crossed her arms and glared, matching Verna’s intensity and body language.
“And she stole you from me,” Blaire said.
“She stole Hexen Holler away. If we run in hexes blazing, Horned God knows what she’ll do to defend herself.
But right now, we have the advantage of knowing the truth.
” Blaire brought her face beside Joss’s ear and lowered her voice.
“And a little help from your Way, the highly likely chance of being able to get more.”
“Oh.” Verna’s eyes widened. She rocked back in her chair, using the bottom of her unbuttoned flannel to pat her cheek. “I like that.”
“Like what?” Uncle Ross demanded.
“We do to Geraldine what she did to Joss, only we won’t take anything she doesn’t give to us.”
“But what would she give?”
Joss grinned at Blaire and raised her hand. Long, ring-bedecked fingers danced, and in a flash of dawn light, a tempered green-glass bottle appeared. Liquid sloshed within, clear as the pinkening, cloudless sky above. “The truth.”