“And driving that pole into the ground would have taken some strength. A man like Togers doesn’t have it in him. Plus he doesn’t seem the type to bite the hand that feeds him. Did you tell anyone about the fireworks?” Gordon asked her. “Beforehand?”
Again, Cordelia shook her head. “Not a soul,” she said, biting a nail. “They had to have known about the timing, but how? And the fox—no one knew about her but you and me and Eustace.”
“You don’t think the fox was a victim of opportunity?” Gordon asked.
“The first time, sure. But I think they knew exactly what they were doing when they killed her last night,” she said. “I think she was just another message.”
“What do you think it means?” he asked her now. “The intestines were—”
“Don’t remind me,” Cordelia told him. “I can’t stop seeing them.”
“Did you recognize the runes?”
“No, but I spent some time looking into it last night while I was sitting up with Eustace. I found some of her notes and books. It’s calledThurisaz.It meansthorn.Which is exactly as unpleasant as it sounds.”
Gordon crossed his arms. “Why three of them in a row?”
“It’s a way to curse,” she said. “Or bless—to stack the runes in multiples, usually of three. The whole thing is a curse, in fact. I looked it up. It’s called a nithing pole. It’s an ancient Viking tradition, a way of directing malice. Typically, they used horses to make one.”
“Like a Norse version of an upside-down cross?” Gordon asked.
“Black magic,” Cordelia whispered, stretching her fingers toher throat, feeling for the runes they’d painted there that had failed them. “A supernatural way to cause harm.”
Someone wanted to hurt them, to chase them off. Maybe someone bearing ill will from town. But Cordelia had heard different kinds of stories last night about her family, stories of kindness and vulnerability tucked in among the whispers of strange and illicit activity. The people of Bellwick might have been suspicious, but they came for the party just the same. She didn’t think they were malicious.
She recalled again the old woman she’d seen in the fog, her gem-colored dress, her shining staff. Her appearance on the same day as the nithing pole couldn’t have been a coincidence.
“What kind of harm?” Gordon asked specifically. “Did it have a certain method, like illness or starvation?”
“Disempowerment,” Cordelia told him. “It desecrates the land, renders it spiritually or energetically dead.”
Gordon leaned forward. “That’s it then. You said something about the land protects you. And thatthingout there is meant to destroy the land. They cut you off from your source, whatever it is, when they erected the pole.”
“They’re trying to weaken us,” Cordelia whispered, her eyes finding his. “They’re trying to weaken us for the final blow.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINETHESEERESS
CORDELIA KNEW WHATshe had to do. She stared down at her sister’s motionless body, brushing the ringlets of hair away from her face and clutching her hand. “You’re going to wake up,” she whispered. “You’re going to wake up, and we’re going to make things right.”
The words in their aunt Augusta’s letter clung to her—There are many wrongs to right.
Cordelia called for Gordon. When he entered the room, she told him, “Stay with her.”
“Wait. Where are you going?” he asked.
“I can’t answer that.” She turned for the door.
“Cordelia!”
“I have to help her,” she tried to explain. “Dr. Mabee said her recovery is up to her, but he’s wrong. She can’t do it alone. Neither of us can.”
Gordon looked at her with pinched, worried eyes. “I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I,” she told him. “But I’m beginning to.”
She strode into the hall and climbed the stairs. The morning light was streaming through the stained-glass window, playing tricks with the snake’s coils of blue and purple glass, the twistsand turns of the tree’s golden roots. The colored rays hit the floor below, shifting like a kaleidoscope across the inlaid medallion. Such a simple but peculiar star, she thought, like a snowflake. The longer Cordelia stared, the more the pieces of the design seemed to disconnect and reconnect before her.
It was so plain. How had she ever missed it? Their mother’s tattoo. The scratches their aunt made in the wall. The symbol written on the cover of the book Augusta had left them.
