Chapter Twelve
F inally, it was late enough to carry out my task. I’d tied the linens into the largest sheet and stuffed a tote bag with salt, matches, lighter fluid, and my volume of Grimm’s Fairy Tales . It barely spoke to me now, but it contained all the magic I had left.
I set out quietly into the night. Both Big House and the caretaker’s cottage were dark, and it was late enough that the air had cooled and the crickets ceased their chirping. Only the whoosh of the wind in the cottonwoods on the river’s bank broke the complete silence.
Then I heard it: the faraway caw of a crow.
My breath quickened, but nothing would get in the way of what I had to do now. Rodney on my heels, I circled the library and followed the path along the river until I could turn off to a less-used trail going into the woods. Here, sure no one could see me, I flicked on my flashlight.
The dark of the forest nearly swallowed the shaft of light, and the moon, now just a sliver, was little help.
“Slow down, kitty,” I urged Rodney.
He knew where we were headed: to the witch’s circle.
Most often when I wanted to practice magic best carried out outdoors, I went to the abandoned stacking house on the other side of the retreat center, near the millpond.
The concrete stacking house’s roof had long fallen in, and its windows and doors had rotted decades ago.
Trees sprang up in its crevices, and it had the feeling of a plein air cathedral. I loved it.
However, the stacking house was too close to the retreat center for me to burn anything larger than a taper. The last thing I needed was the volunteer fire department showing up as I was setting fire to a pile of cotton and linen. I shook my head, trying to imagine explaining that.
An owl hooted from somewhere near. At least it wasn’t a crow.
Something rustled in the underbrush, and I shivered.
Besides these noises, all I heard was my own breath as I steadily made my way over roots and through the knee-high ferns to the witch’s circle.
A few minutes later, I thought I’d made a wrong turn and veered too far west, but soon I found the opening in the trees.
Here I was at last. I dropped my tote to my feet and caught my breath. The witch’s circle was a meadow the size of a suburban backyard, but it was large enough that moonlight, as thin as it was, iced the grass and mossy logs. Fir trees surrounded us like mammoth sentries.
I’d accidentally stumbled upon the circle the summer before, when I was gathering mushrooms with a friend who was in Wilfred as part of a team to film an interview with Roz about her bestseller, The Whippoorwill Cries Love .
The friend, Leo, was also researching a documentary on folk magic.
He’d pointed out the clearing and told me they were considered magical places, both feared and venerated.
I cared less about that and more about the fact that I was far enough from the trail that I wouldn’t be seen.
I clicked off my flashlight. Within twenty minutes, I’d gathered enough rocks to construct a rough fire pit.
I inhaled deeply to center myself, then pulled out my salt canister—no fancy silk pouch of sea salt, but it would do—and poured a circle a few feet outside the rocks.
This would be my sphere of protection. As the salt’s trail disappeared into the earth, I whispered a spell of safety, and my birthmark burned with the spark of magic.
No dark forces would reach me here. Nothing that wasn’t already here, that was.
The pile of linens now rested in a crumpled heap in the fire circle’s center.
“Here goes, Rodney.”
Rodney mewed a long meow that stretched into the night. He wasn’t often a vocal cat, espousing the view that actions spoke louder than words, but he had something to say now.
I laid the kindling over the sheet-wrapped bundle of linens, dumped lighter fluid on it, and lit a match.
The flame tightened into a black spiral, like a tiny tornado, and for a moment I feared it wouldn’t catch.
The night was completely silent—I knew it was—yet the screaming of crows pierced my eardrums. I covered them with my hands and screwed my eyes shut.
Then I felt the birds in my hair, pulling, pecking, screeching, but when I went to swat them away, nothing was there.
I pulled Grimm’s Fairy Tales to my chest and willed whatever magic I had left to come to me.
Through the deafening shrieks of the crows, the book dared a few words, “Our Lady’s Little Glass.
” This was one of my favorite stories and only a paragraph long.
When I was a little girl, I begged my mother to read it to me again and again—its simple ending soothed me.
I recited the story’s closing lines by heart:
Then Our Lady plucked a little white flower with red stripes, called bindweed, which looks very like a glass, and gave it to the wagoneer. He filled it with wine, and then Our Lady drank it, and in the self-same instant the cart was set free and the wagoneer could drive onwards.
The crows’ crying fell away. At the same time, the bundle caught, and flames leapt high. The linens were burning, blue sparks dancing above them. With each second that passed, I felt as if chiffon-thick layers of oppression were lifting and dissolving, drifting up with the smoke.
I woke to the night at last. The air smelled of dried pine needles and earth, and patches of warmth from the fire and chill from under the protective boughs of the fir trees drifted over me.
I was lighter. The shackles on my magic burned away with the fabric, and I smiled, then laughed, when I realized I could hear books again.
Grimm’s Fairy Tales was positively chatty.
Rumpelstiltskin, Sleeping Beauty, and Hansel and Gretel all clamored for my attention.
“I hear you,” I told them, so happy I could barely choke out the words.
The fire burned strong. Beyond the smoke, the stars shone crisp. Two shooting stars, one right after the other, sailed over me like flaming arrows, vanishing into the night.
Babe Hamilton. She had come to Wilfred and set up shop, waiting, because she wanted to use me. She watched me through crows. She used glamour to shield her identity. My grandmother had warned me about Beata, and here she was.
As the linens burned to ashes, my magic poured back into me.
I felt it in my body as a thrumming current, but I also knew it from the intensity of the colors and smells suffusing the night woods.
I was free. My magic had been restored. Whatever it was Beata wanted, I felt more than ready to face it head-on.