Chapter 54
Chapter
Edgar Murray watched his mother die.
“I was there, when she slipped away at last,” Edgar said now, and still-fresh pain flashed over his face. “It was a mercy, really. The tumor had hollowed her. Devoured her from the inside out.
“And my father—he sighed as he rose from her bedside, and said, ‘Now we can only pray that your sister proves stronger than her mother.’
“That was the first time I wished I was the witch, and not Lucy,” Edgar said, shaking his head. “Of course, it was because I wished to protect her—to save her from what I knew was to come. What did come, after. The cruelty at our father’s hands.
“But I suspect it was the first time I really understood that magic was power. My father was a powerful man, in every way that counts. Land, money, influence. Guns, and swords, men at his beck and call, and a backhand like a shovel. And he was terrified—petrified—of his ten-year-old daughter.”
“And what does that have to do with me?”
Henry picked up the thread. “Well, after you reanimated the trilobite, I told Edgar about it. I didn’t know what to do. I was afraid it was some kind of black sorcery. And Edgar was always reading those books about magic….” He shrugged.
After the trilobite. That was when Henry had pulled away from me. I’d always attributed that awkward period to the new, emerging desire between us. But apparently, he and Edgar had been scheming together, even then.
“I knew it wasn’t sorcery,” Edgar said. “I’d been studying theories of magic for years at that point. But it took Henry and me the whole rest of summer to work it out.”
“Work out what, exactly?” I managed to choke.
“We knew you weren’t a witch like Lucy, at least. You were like my mother.”
I caught my breath, my gaze darting to Lucy, but she was still asleep.
“My mother wasn’t always a witch, you know.
It came on her late in life. There was a great hailstorm.
It tore the roof off the manor’s south wing.
The roof was long repaired by the time I was born, but I remember the servants talking about how wild a storm it was.
” Edgar shook his head. “I wonder how long she managed to hide her powers, after that.”
My mouth fell open as I spun to Henry. “But this is your theory, isn’t it? About how witchery begins.”
“My theory,” Edgar interjected. “Mother could grow an oak from an acorn in half a day. But why couldn’t she mend our clothes, or warm the tea as Lucy could? Why couldn’t she save herself, once the illness began?”
His voice cracked, but he cleared his throat. “For purposes of taxonomy, we might say flora-witch now, but back then, Henry and I thought of her as a green-witch. I’m still fond of the title. Mother would have liked it.”
I refused to be distracted by his grief. I crossed my arms. “I’m very sorry about your mother, Edgar, but what does any of that have to do with—” I gestured at the Loom.
“You’re right,” he said. “I’ll get on with it. Henry and I didn’t know, back then, how it all fit together. You had a gift, and my mother had a gift, and we knew there was a connection.”
He laughed. “At first we actually thought it must be weather, in particular, that bestowed witchery powers. Yours from the lightning, my mother’s from the hailstorm. Henry’s map eventually disproved that hypothesis. You’ve seen the map, I assume?”
I remembered thinking Henry must have been working on it for years. Apparently I had no idea how accurate that was.
“Eventually, of course, we realized witchery could be caused by any number of natural disasters, but that was our starting theory.”
I looked between the two of them, boys I’d loved and men I felt like I didn’t know at all. “But—but why did you even care? Why does it even matter?”
Edgar cocked his head, like he couldn’t understand my question. “I told you, Mary. All we want is a better world. The same thing Lucy wants. Isn’t that what you want, too?”
I almost laughed. A better world? Elizabeth Buckland’s criticism from Kirtlington rang in my ears.
Now I understood. Henry, and Lucy, and Edgar had loved me. All three assumed I must be serving some higher purpose—freedom, or change, or truth, or even pure knowledge.
But it was Elizabeth Buckland who, in her jealousy, had seen me best of all. And what have you gained for others?
Nothing. That was the answer. Everything I’d done, I had done for Mary Anning.
“Don’t you understand? We want to give power to the powerless,” Henry was saying. His voice had a desperate, pleading edge. He does love me, I thought, and hated that it mattered. At least that hadn’t been a lie. Maybe I wished it had been.
“We poured all of our resources into the mill,” Edgar said, looking at the ceiling. “We were so sure that the manifold reliqs would be the key to everything. But they weren’t enough. Even the largest couldn’t provide enough magic for our purposes. We were stuck.”
“And then Buckland got your letter,” Henry said hoarsely. “I began this work because of you, Mary. And then—all these years later—there you were again. It was like a sign from God.”
His eyes were dark and pleading, and Edgar nodded sadly, and I wanted to launch myself at them both, shrieking and scratching. I’d like to claw Henry’s damnable, beautiful eyes right out.
But I couldn’t launch myself at him like an angry cat. I could only stare.
“And with a pterodactyl on your shoulder.” Henry laughed, and I ached. “The moment I saw Ajax, I knew.”
I caught my breath. “What does Ajax have to do with any of this?”
“Henry and I never understood how witches like you or Mother worked,” Edgar said. “Why did you need reliqs for some things, and not for others?”
“Ajax was the answer,” Henry said. “Because he’s a reliquary, Mary. Everything you resurrect becomes a reliq. And you draw from those reliqs when you use your power. That’s…I’m so sorry, darling…that’s why so many of them died.”
“No. No.” I shook my head. Shook it again. “No. That doesn’t make sense. Living things can’t be reliqs. That’s impossible.” I shook my head wildly now, as if I could shake out the fear that they might be telling the truth.
“Yes, they can,” Edgar said gently. “Even Lucy, and witches like her. We believe that she uses herself as a reliq, storing and drawing on her own life force—her spirit, maybe—to work her magic. She never needs a reliq, because she is one. Others, like you, with an affinity, turn things into reliqs when they work them. Water, or earth, or plants, or metal, or thread, or, yes, living creatures.”
My chest hitched with dread. What he described sounded awfully, dangerously, like the old witch stories of vampyrism.
“I had a theory,” Henry said quietly, “that your living reliqs were more powerful than others. Because they function like Lucy; they’re not simply storing life force. They’re generating it, too. Multiplying it.
“Well, I tested the theory. I brought one of your reanimated little sea snails here, and put it in the Loom. I ran the procedure and—” Henry blew out, lips puffing, eyes wide. “Mary, it was powerful enough to flatten a county.”
Edgar nodded eagerly. “Not just seventy times more powerful. The living manifold reliq’s was more like seven thousand times the standard. Just holding the thing, I felt like a god.”
His gaze drifted past my shoulder to settle on the wires and tubes and bubbling black of the Loom, the dark bones at its center, and I shivered, gooseflesh rising on my arms as I understood.
They wanted to make that monster a manifold reliq.
The experiment. I whirled to Henry. “Is this what you wanted to discuss after initiation? Turning that creature into a living manifold reliq?”
Henry nodded slowly, but he was looking past me to Edgar.
“But why?” I pressed. “What do you want to do with it? With that kind of power…”
“The bones aren’t the true experiment.” Edgar smiled softly. “I am.”