The door clicks shut on their kindly, disinterested gazes.
I throw myself down on the mattress. Toe out the bedpan and kick it away in disgust. I’m not that desperate. Fill the tumbler from the tap and down it in one, though that’ll be no help on the bedpan front.
The water tastes different. Not wrong-different, but not like the tap water back in Sanctuary or Redhaven. Am I no longer in Connecticut or Maine? The accent of the woman at the door was no help – she spoke non-native but near-fluent English with an East Asian inflection I’m not sophisticated enough to pinpoint. I could have been transported anywhere while I was out cold.
Should I take her advice and try to sleep? Drugged unconsciousness surely isn’t restorative, so true sleep would mean I’m fresher for whatever morning brings. Or is my time better spent trying to adapt and push back at this awful deadness that weighs me down, mind, body and magic?
Cross-legged on the bed, back upright, I contemplate the dull metallic strip around the wall. The handcuffs that trapped my Gift inside me.
Imagine if mundanes have found a way to neutralise magic, no longer relying on witches and the Moot to do the job for them. Or rather, I don’t have to imagine – I appear to be living the reality of it. What did Ortiz say?She’s not the test subject we agreed.Then Barr:Perfect it on her, so we’ll know it works when we get hold of her father.That must be what this is. A research facility, where they’re perfecting non-magical means of suppressing our ability. The idea sends a shudder down my spine so violent my skull knocks the wall.
They don’t have the Gift, so don’t want us to have it either. Mean children in the playground, jealous of their friend’s toy, who snatch and stamp on it. How small they are. How spiteful. Ortiz’s vicious platitudes abouthelping end bigotry, bymaking sure no mundane need ever fear a witch.
I see it now, all laid out in a horrible, efficient line, like railway tracks leading somewhere unspeakable. Scientists will have been working on this for years –decades. Of course they have. Sometimes when I discussed my school History classes with Mom, she’d share magical perspectives on the same events. Not often, because she thought I was Giftless and hurting, but I remember when we covered the 1950s and 60s, and the Cold War. Mom explained how alongside the nuclear race and the space race, America and Russia both conducted scientific research into replicating or triggering magical ability in mundanes.They wanted to build a race of super-soldiers, she said.And to achieve it they tried things you wouldn’t believe. Brainwashing. Psychoactive drugs. But most of all they wanted witches. Gramma Serafina said that was when public opinion took a sharp turn against magicals. We’dbeen legalised, but hadn’t shown our gratitude by lining up to hex the Soviet Union en masse.
And if the state failed either to harness or to manufacture magical ability? The least desirable, but still useful option, would be to know how to shut it down. To contain it.
To destroy it.
I buck off the bed in horror. They can contain it already. The handcuffs, this room both prove that. For whatmoream I a test subject?
I hammer on the door again. I have to get out of here, and the night-shift staff will be a lot easier to evade than whoever’s on-site during the day. The guard, Koa, seemed gentle despite his massive size. The young researcher I’ll take down with a punch if I must, because she’ll never see that coming. When my pounding doesn’t bring a crack of light around my opening door, I switch tactic.
‘Please,’ I shout. ‘It hurts so bad. Please, I need help!’
But no one comes. They’re wise to me. That door won’t be opening till morning.
Just myself to rely on, then. Well, Harper Fenn, it’s not like you’ve not been in this position before.
If they want to try andtakemy magic, I plainly stillhavemy magic. It’s in me somewhere. I’m a lidded container. How to pop the lid?
Settling into the armchair, closing my eyes, I send all my attention inward. We know magic isn’t as simple as glowing particles in the blood, but that’s how the really old texts imagined it, back when people still thought of women as ovens that cooked up babies in their wombs. There’s a lovely and bizarre illustration in Starcross, ‘YeAnatomie of a Witche’, that shows her heart as a sun, irradiating her blood with magic. In the darkness, desperately, I search for the spangles in my blood. My Gift. My witchery.
Time passes, I’ve no idea how much, and brightness flickers against my eyelids. Flickers – then steadies – then glows – then brightens some more. My eyelids throb redly. I’m an unhatched chick whose translucent egg lies beneath a heat-lamp. There is light and warmth.
I hear (how?) laughter.
And when I open my eyes I’m looking (how?) not at the blank, magic-proofed walls of my room, but at grass, sunlight, apple trees, and a rectangular shadow that as I blink, resolves into a farmhouse. It’s the one I saw before, no less busy, with children hurtling around screaming gaily. The air is hazy and shimmers with power. It’s not Lachlan’s farmstead, but as I think of that, I recognise its contours in the space between the tall stand of pines at the back and the orchard’s generous curve.
For a moment, the two superimpose. Tavi striding across the yard. Greggory fitting a new handle to an axe. Yara and Bo drinking coffee under the eaves. The folksily dressed children giggling as they race around the yard. Eugene asleep in an Adirondack in the shade. The ceaseless whack and whoosh of Joan’s loom upon the veranda. Then the modern world passes back into shadow. And I know, for sure, for the first time, what I’m looking at.
Redhaven-that-was.
42
SUSANNA
Spring, 1865
You shade your eyes against the thin sunshine of the first fine day of the year – down South, they say, General Sherman marched to the sea through raging storms, and here in Maine it’s rained every day for months. Finally liberated from the weather, the children of Haven are racing around outdoors. Your son is the youngest and he’s all puffed out already. You see he’s worried he won’t be able to keep up. You reach toward a blossom and beneath the power of your magic it blooms, falls, then reveals its tiny fruit, which swells, ripens, reddens. The apple loosens as you twist it and drops into your palm. A few swift charms later, a red ball rests there instead.
‘Howabout catch?’ you say, wandering over to where Redhaven’s children have piled like puppies into a writhing heap.
‘Catch is boring,’ says the eldest girl, Constance, who you’ve never much liked. Her mother’s a prig, too.
‘Only if boring people play it,’ you say. ‘Here, Tommy, catch!’
Your boy pulls himself out from the bottom of the heap. He’s red-cheeked and flushed, freckles spattered across his nose like molasses on drop scones. His da was a handsome one, though you can scarce remember the man’s name, now. Nate? Niall? Asummer’s dalliance for a springtime reward.
