I threw my hands up in frustration. “Xiomara, I haven’t so much as spoken to Asteria since I was ten years old. She’s said more to me since she died than she did in the last six years of her life, and I have no idea what the hell it means!” The tears won out now, and I let my head flop down onto my arms onXiomara’s table. Xiomara didn’t coddle me or try to placate me while I cried. She got up, made me a cup of tea, put it down in front of me, and waited quietly until I’d cried myself out. Finally, I raised my head, took a sip of the tea, and tested my voice. It was hoarse, but it sounded steady again.
“Sorry about that. I’m okay now.”
“You have nothing to apologize for, Wren. Sitting with your feelings is strength, not weakness. You have been heaped with the troubles of your ancestors. That is a heavy burden.”
“You know a little something about that, don’t you?” I asked, thinking again of Bea’s drawing of her grandmother.
Xiomara smirked knowingly. “Perhaps. But there are degrees of troubles, are there not?”
I took a sip of tea to fend off another wave of tears. Yes, there were.
“I admit I am troubled,” Xiomara went on. She tapped her stubby fingertips on the tabletop as she spoke. “Not about the girl and the book. No, I believe they will reveal themselves in time. My worry is about the source.”
The hot tea scalded my throat all the way down as I swallowed it too quickly. “Asteria said the girl was connected to the source. That she understands it.”
“Yes. In many ways, I wish I could say the same of myself,” Xiomara said. She pressed her palms flat against the table, spreading her fingers wide like she was bracing herself against her own words. “We went there, you know. Last night, after you had gone back home to Lightkeep Cottage. The Conclave went down to the playhouse, and we saw it for ourselves.”
I hadn’t known this. I wondered if my mother or my aunts knew. Maybe that was what they’d been whispering about in the kitchen while I’d slept.
“I believe,” Xiomara said, “that the source is tied somehow to the element of spirit. I say this because I am the only one of myfellow Conclave members who felt deeply drawn to it, and I am the only spirit witch among us. I felt presences there. Whispers.”
“I felt it, too,” I murmured, my breath scattering the swirling tendrils of steam rising off my mug. “And Veronica… she sensed something. She must be a spirit witch, too.”
“Does that not worry you?” Xiomara asked.
I laughed, though nothing felt particularly funny. “Everything about the source worries me. I’m worried that we know where it is. I’m worried that people like Veronica will continue to seek it. I’m worried someone will learn how to tap into it. I’m worried the Darkness will gain access. But probably most of all, I’m worried that we don’t understand it. We’re trying to protect something we don’t understand.”
“But that has always been the case, from the earliest days of witchcraft on this shore. The source has always been a mystery to us,” Xiomara said. “We have never known exactly why this place has such an effect on our magic, and most of us have accepted that we may not be meant to know. We only know that it must be protected, never sought, never exploited.”
“But now someone is coming who does understand it. Someone who is connected to it, somehow,” I said.
“So Asteria has warned us.”
“And Asteria also said we should trust this girl, whoever she is.”
“She did.”
“So then… maybe we won’t have to do all of this in the dark, you know? Maybe this girl, whoever she is, will be able to help us—to help me—so that I know what I’m facing.”
Xiomara looked at me long and hard. It was an appraising look, one that brought a flush of self-conscious pink to my cheeks, but I didn’t let myself look away.
“If it is true, Wren. If you are the pentamaleficus the Darkness seeks, it means that, in some way, you are the key tothat door. And if there is someone who can tell us what’s behind that door… well, then let us hope she’s already on her way.”
Epilogue
Iwas so sure, as I laid down in the pre-dawn light of the morning, that Veronica would return for me within hours. That the Gray Man would be standing beneath my window, within days. That Sarah Claire would haunt my waking steps, before a week had passed.
But the hours passed. The days passed. The weeks passed. Nothing.
Well, I really shouldn’t say nothing. After all, that would be doing a serious injustice to the best summer of my life.
I worked at Shadowkeep, mostly dealing with the tourists downstairs. But on those little lulls and breaks, I could sneak upstairs, where the real magic lived. I began to learn every nook and cranny of the shop. I learned to differentiate the dried herbs and flowers, first by sight and then by smell, when Persi declared she would blindfold me. Soon, I knew what each and every apothecary drawer contained without reading the labels.
Back home at Lightkeep, I divided my time between the gardens, the kitchen, and the library. I read every book I could find on elemental magic, on the pentamaleficus, on the moon, and the witch’s calendar. I learned the properties of the plants in our gardens, helped Rhi dry and crush them,and wrote little labels on them, before storing them carefully in one of our pantries. It made my heart happy to see my slightly messy handwriting alongside Rhi’s neat square hand, Persi’s languorous scrawl, and Asteria’s flowing script. It felt like completing a family photograph; I was finally in the frame.
I started to get the hang of baking—not to say it would ever be my forte, but I learned my way around the kitchen, learned to listen to myself, to what I needed, and incorporate it into my cooking. I learned to observe my aunts and my mom, to read their moods, and adjust my recipes to nurture their needs—a bit of vanilla for tranquility. A pinch of allspice to soothe sore muscles after a day of weeding. A bit of cardamom for courage after a hard day. I would never be a true kitchen witch, but I could do my part. I was finally starting to understand intention. I knew now that when I took the focus off myself and onto others, intention wasn’t so hard after all. I learned to get out of my own way… most of the time.
I spent time with my new friends and my old ones, too. I went back to Portland for the 4th of July, and had a blast at Charlie’s block party barbeque, and down by the water eating ice cream and cotton candy while watching the fireworks over the bay. I invited Poe and Charlie for the weekend in August, and took them all around Sedgwick Cove. I even took them to the playhouse to see the summer’s flagship production, a revival of Sweeney Todd, during which Poe required physical restraint to keep her in her seat at the end of each musical number. They met my aunts, who kept the full extent of their witchiness under wraps, and we walked the beach to the lighthouse and ate lunch at Xiomara’s Cafe. It meant a lot to share the parts of my life that I could with them—the secrets didn’t feel so heavy when I knew they could picture my house, the inside of Shadowkeep, or the faces of my new friends.
