There. In the dew-dipped grass. The imprints of two bare feet. I reached down with trembling fingers and touched the indentations.
“Asteria,” I whispered once more into the silence.
She did not answer.
1
“I’m starting to think that maybe kitchen witchery isn’t my thing.”
I stood in the kitchen of Lightkeep Cottage, wearing an apron and looking like I’d just fought—and lost—against a sentient sack of flour. The counters were covered in dirty bowls, spilled ingredients, and sticky utensils. The window over the sink was open to coax out the remnants of smoke still wafting up in serpentine tendrils from the oven.
“Now, whatever would make you say that?” asked my aunt Rhi a bit breathlessly. She was sweating profusely and pulling oven mitts from her hands, like a pair of boxing gloves.
I pointed to the counter, where the results of my morning’s lesson were laid out on a cooling rack. “Just a hunch.”
We both walked over and looked at them. According to the recipe, they were meant to be strawberry thyme scones. According to the evidence in front of us, they were misshapen rocks of dubious origin.
“I’m not even sure they’re edible, let alone magical,” I grumbled.
“Oh, I’m sure they’re fine,” Rhi said, but I could hear the false note in her encouraging tone as she scooped up a dishtowel, and began flapping it to help clear the remainder of the smoke.
It was almost impossible to believe it had only been a couple of weeks since I’d first set foot in Sedgwick Cove, because I’d never had so much about my life change in such a short time. Two weeks ago, I was living in Portland, ME, finishing my sophomore year of high school, and looking forward to a summer hanging with my friends and scooping ice cream for minimum wage. Now, I was living in a cottage by the sea in a town populated almost entirely by witches, and was struggling my way through the first few days of my magical education.
Magical education. It still sounded completely unhinged when I said it out loud. In fact, everything that had happened to me in the two weeks since my grandmother had died sounded like fantasy fiction. But it wasn’t fiction. It was real. And it all came back to the woman I’d seen standing in the garden last night.
My grandmother Asteria Vesper had been a witch, a descendant of the First Daughters of Sedgwick Cove, who had created their magical community in mid-coastal Maine. A deep, ancient magic had drawn them there, but they were not the only ones. An entity known only as the Darkness had also settled here, feeding on the Cove’s inherent magic, and strengthening itself as it did so. Eventually, the Vespers had to come up with a way to bind the Darkness from accessing the deep magic of the Cove. So, they had created a powerful Binding spell, but the only way to seal it and ensure that it would continue to protect the Cove was a second spell called the Covenant. Every generation, three women of Vesper blood had to renew the Covenant, for only if all three of them remained in the Cove would the Binding hold. Asteria had kept that little tidbit of information from her three daughters, including my mother, who had fled SedgwickCove when I was just a baby. She’d thought she had time—time to bring her family back together, time to bring them around to their destiny so that they could step in freely and of their own volition. But then Asteria had died on my sixteenth birthday, and when we returned to Sedgwick Cove for the funeral, the truth came out.
My mother was a witch. Her sisters, Rhi and Persi, were witches too. And, despite my current culinary attempt to disprove it, so was I. We had to stay in Sedgwick Cove in order to preserve the Covenant. And honestly, that would have been enough change for anyone—moving to a new place, living with relatives I couldn’t remember ever having met, absorbing a new identity and family history—but Sedgwick Cove had more in store for me.
The thing about the Darkness was that it didn’t want to be Bound. It wanted to be free, and even more than that, it wanted me. My magic—a magic I wasn’t even convinced I possessed. It turned out that the Darkness had tried to claim me as a toddler, and that was why my mother had fled in the first place. Asteria had rescued me, but the damage had been done. It wasn’t until just a few days ago, when the Darkness tried to make a bargain with me—my mother’s life for mine—that I discovered exactly how much magic I truly possessed. Calling on the elements, I had banished the Darkness, though there was no telling for how long.
“I called on the elements,” I mumbled, staring at the scones again. “I commanded the freaking ocean. I made lightning appear from the sky! So why do I now seem incapable of commanding a simple baking recipe?”
“Because,” Rhi answered, coughing slightly, “they are two entirely different types of magic. Kitchen witchery is subtle. What you did was…” She paused, struggling for the right words.
“A fluke?” I suggested.
She scowled at me. “Of course not! No one could perform magic like that as a fluke! You just need to gain control over your magic.”
“You think I wasn’t in control that night on the beach?” I asked.
“In a way, yes. You were in a life-or-death situation. Your magic came to your rescue. But now you have to learn how to do the opposite of that. You need to learn to summon it yourself, and like any other skill, it takes a lot of practice.”
I sighed and picked up a scone. “I’m beginning to see that.”
“Now, come on, don’t get discouraged. I’m sure they’re not that bad,” Rhi said, tossing aside her dishtowel and picking up a scone. She took a bite and chewed slowly. Her face twitched into a momentary grimace she couldn’t quite control. “See? Not bad at all.”
I picked up a scone and bit into it. “Rhi, stop torturing yourself. These are disgusting.”
Rhi swallowed hard and put the rest of the scone back on the cooling rack. “Kitchen witchery is all about intention. You’re focusing too much on getting it right and not enough on imbuing it with your intentions. What were you thinking as you mixed and chopped?”
“Mostly, ‘Oh shit, I’m going to screw this up. I can’t cook. These are going to be awful,’” I admitted.
Rhi allowed herself a tiny snort of laughter before wrestling her face into a neutral expression. “Well, there you go. Self-fulfilling prophecy.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Are you saying they taste terrible because I assumed they would?”
“No, they taste terrible because you overcooked them and screwed up the recipe somehow,” Rhi said, patting me on the shoulder. She nibbled the scone again, thoughtfully. “Hmm. Too much salt. And overmixed. But even if you’d gotten it right andthey’d tasted delicious, they wouldn’t have had the effect that you’d intended.”
