Elora sleeps. You’re spacing your visits carefully, so neither she, nor Missus Kilpatrick, nor anyone else suspects her attacks of drowsiness are anything more than the effects of old age. After that first time you crept about for days, heart in your throat, lest Elora challenge or accuse you. But nothing.
You’ve kept to the full-moon cycles, so this is your fourth night with Starcross. You’re ready.
Checking your grandmother’s thin chest is still rising and falling beneath the extra quilts piled on for winter, you cast one more stupefying hex. The magical intensity of what you’re about to do might disturb her, and you mustn’t be interrupted. Mustn’t be prevented. You’ve cast a deadening spell around the walls as well. This won’t be your first time shaping one of the Old Signs, but you’re going a step further tonight.
No, along wayfurther.
You’re cross-legged upon the rag rug on the floor. Starcross is open beside you, though you no longer need to look at it. Your hands move in the air, as they have done many times by now, to shape Ruin.
It hangs there, suffused by its own inward light – or rather, shadow which sucks at the light around it and so reveals itself.It drifts like smoke, yet repudiating the nature of smoke it also holds a form. It is beautiful, to you. Yet you can hardly bear to look at it.
Ruin.
Power to destroy a house. A farmstead. A man.
Rising, you circle the sigil. Your gaze grows bolder. Now past the initial urge to recoil, you find beauty in Ruin’s sinuous, furious form. It allures you.
The heavy shawl falls from your shoulders. (Your mother was weaving it for your sixteenth birthday when the typhus took her. She was always so proud of your witching. Said she couldn’t have coped with the Gift, but you were made for it. After she died, Elora completed the shawl in a colour neither of you liked, but you’d both stopped caring for a while, Elora bereaved of both her children and you with no mother or uncle.) The room is so cold you can see your fast breath by the sigil’s shadowlight, but you don’t even notice the dropped shawl, so intent are you on the Old Sign hanging in the air. It is constantly dissipating, like sand running through an hourglass or smoke blown by the wind. Yet is also constantly replenished, drawing new substance to itself from wherever magic abides.
You’d like to see that, the place magic comes from. You imagine it as an immense volcano, boiling with power – enough to evaporate anyone straying too close, like those poor souls in the buried Italian city you’ve heard tell of. It wouldn’t evaporate you, though, because you’ve got magma in your veins. Or soon will have.
You lift your knife, grit your teeth, cut diagonally across your palm both ways. Blood wells until it’s dripping between your fingers, as if you were squeezing a raw human heart. You remember the shawl and kick it into place to soak up the gory overflow. Flexing opens the wound wider, and you smile at the pain. It feels like an offering.
Then carefully, so carefully, and still not wholly believing it will work – you find one trailing filament in the pulsing sigil, and …
… pull.
It comes away like silk spun from nightmares. You wrap it about your hand, as if winding a yarn ball, thread upon thread. The hollow of it, where your hand is, and your wound, throbs with heat. You are bandaging up your gaping flesh with pure power. Every part of you trembles. How foolish you are! How brave! How daring! This is surely the only way of proving one’s worthiness to wield a sigil – by claiming it.
Your hand is gloved in shifting fire. You hold a red-hot coal of power in your palm. The sigil is all unwound.
Coniungere!you cry.
A momentary searing pain. The opposite of a flash of light – an implosion of darkness too intense to look at. And with it the thread sinks into your flesh. Vanishes.
Wonderingly, you lift your palm to the cat’s-whisker of moonlight between the shutters, and tilt it this way and that. A livid scar is there, but even as you watch it dims and fades.
It doesn’t disappear entirely, though. A faint scar remains, so silvery fine you’d have to know to look for it. In the shape of Ruin. And in your blood, the press and tickle of power waiting to be released.
46
SUSANNA
Spring, 1866
You’ve been watching the Swinson twins. Magical daughters of two magical parents, Greggory and Joan, who were the first to join Elora at the foundation of Haven. Their marriage was already perilous – they would have been separated and the union declared void had their magic been discovered. Once children came along, the risk grew manyfold. An accidental act of childhood magic could have given them all away. Jail for the parents. Adoption for the girls. And so they took a chance on a charismatic old witch who’d told them she was building a place of safety where they could live among others of their kind, beneath collective protections.
You’ve seen the girls grow up. They were toddlers when they arrived – snowdrop pale, dandelion-haired, clingy like ivy. By the time of their Determination, for which they lay side by side, hands clasped, as your grandmother performed the ritual, it was obvious what they were. Greenwitches, like your ancestor Tobias.
It’s a valuable magical art. The girls were put to work in Haven’s vegetable gardens before they knew what work was. Before their Determination, even. They’re doing it now. One of them – you still find them interchangeable, even at seventeenyears old – loves roses, so the other each week conjures one stem into bloom for her sister’s delight. The other relishes the taste of fresh peas, hard from the pod and brilliant green, and so her twin ensures there is a year-round supply just for her. Always a single flower, a few pods.It’s important not to push too hard,they say.To work in harmony with the earth and the green things, not against their nature.
You flex your palms. A second sigil is scarred into your right palm.Command.You’re working in harmony with your nature, too.
Today, they’re absorbed by the rhubarb. They exclaim over its ripened colours the way worldly girls might delight in gems and jewels. Garnet-dark at the base. A ruby stem. Emerald leaves.
‘Oh, hello Susanna,’ one says, putting her head up, startled, as you go to them. They gaze at you warily, rabbits in the cabbage patch surprised by a weasel. They don’t return your smile.
‘I’d like to ask you some questions,’ you say. ‘Then I’ll help you gather today’s crop so you don’t lose any time.’
