For the first Command, your own magic suffices. The more contrary to a person or thing’s nature the order you give, the more power is required. Here, your sigil pushes against the men’s will, and because they are weak – as all men are, and all mundanes – they capitulate without a murmur. The three with rifles turn like marionettes and toss their weapons to the ground before the astonished Mountbron townsfolk. You hear their approving murmurs,‘Nicely done, missy!’,and don’t miss the complaint that you forgot the leader’s revolver.
You didn’t forget.
Your next Command is more fiercely resisted, so you tap a little of the twins’ deep, slow, strong magical reserves. You hear them gasp in your ear, a gentle, pained, yielding sound that’s almost erotic. The ragged leader’s hand goes to his revolver.
‘Yeah, Pa, yeah!’ urges his son.
The puppeted man turns to face his boy. Raises the gun.
‘No!’, he gasps, and you permit him to say it, for the dark pleasure it brings.
‘Pa?’ the lad asks, not grinning now.
His father shoots him in the face. Then again, in the chest, as he falls. You walk the man across to stand over the body. Tears are streaming down his face. You know he wants to curse you, but you’re less inclined to hear that, so his mouth stays shut. You aim his hand downward. A final bullet enters his son’s skull.
‘Jesus!’ cries one of their two companions. ‘We’ll go! We’ll leave! He’s the one that shot the old fella. Take him for justice. We never wanted to follow him anyhow. He made us. Said there was safety in numbers. That if we had his back, he’d have ours.’
‘Your hands are innocent of Old Jericho’s blood,’ I agree. ‘But what about Mr Hempstall’s daughter? They say the manwho forced her was blond. Hair as yellow as Kentucky corn. I wonder who can have done that?’
‘It weren’t me.’ The man pulls his cap down low over dirty blond curls. ‘It was the boy that done it.’
‘Or the fellow who stole the Andersens’ pig – he carried it off marvellous well despite having only three fingers on one hand.’ The fourth man flinches beneath your gaze. Digs his stumpy hand into his pocket. ‘By my reckoning, you’re all guilty.’
The Mountbron men are liking this. They applaud and cheer. ‘Let us have ’em!’ one calls. The marshal promises they’ll be under lock and key tonight and for years to come, excepting their leader, who’ll hang. But you can give them all something better.
Using Command, you turn all three about, march them inside the tumbledown farmhouse. Everyone hears the bolt shoot from inside. You release your Command and the men within, who maybe have some inkling of what you intend, begin calling for mercy. Begging to be allowed to face trial.
‘Miss Fenn?’ the marshal asks you. ‘We need ’em out here, not in there. Let ’em back out, there’s a good lass.’
There’s a good lass?When you just Commanded a man to shoot his own child? The men of Mountbron still don’t understand. This is a lesson for them as much as for the vagabond gang.
You’ve practised with both your sigils. Command, easily, unobtrusively, on those you live with. Just nudging their will. Steering it. Nothing so as they’d notice. Occasionally Connie Kilpatrick looks startled at how readily she agrees to your request that she helps Abner clean the stable, or that the community’s undergarments could do with a rinse by hand, or the vegetable gardens would be helped along by a layer of fresh manure. But Connie knows herself to be an angel of helpfulness, so why wouldn’t she comply?
Practising Ruin has been more difficult. You’ve had to creep into the woods, and even then confined yourself only to dead trees. Searched the carcass-trunks for sheltering creatures to be shooed to safety, before incinerating the dead wood, exploding it. Truth be told, you’ve been itching for a chance to unleash this sigil fully.
How glorious you would have been in battle!
You ignore the marshal. Raise your left hand, palm out. Reach inside the twins again, for the pleasure of it, though your own magical reserves are more than enough. You want them to feel the same thrill you do.
You call upon Ruin.
The men inside the farmhouse haven’t a moment to cry out. But the men of Mountbron do. They cower. Arms fly up to protect faces, eyes. A couple have fallen to their knees. One makes the sign of the cross. You laugh at him. You laugh at the world, that calls womengood lassesand fails to see that a witch’s will can accomplish more than twenty men.
Where the farmhouse stood is now a reeking crater, like a cannon larger than any used in the war went off right here, on the outskirts of snivelling Mountbron, Maine. Three men are dead in there, but not a trace of them remains. Not a sliver of bone or gobbet of charred flesh. Nor a stick of the house that Old Jericho and his wife called home for half a century. That smoking rag fluttering down from the sky, ember-bright and already mostly ash, could have been a scrap of her prized lace. Or the remnants of a christening robe for a child born dead and followed by no others. Nothing else remains.
Your chest heaves like a warhorse’s, and you are equally exhausted and elated. You turn to the folk of Mountbron to collect your due adulation.
In their eyes is only fear.
You delight in that, too.
59
SARAH
It’s still there. Despite what they gave her in that clinic, Harper’s magic isn’t lost. At least, not entirely. It’s faint but fluttering beneath my fingertips. A bird’s heartbeat of magic.
After I laid my daughter on the backseat and cradled her head in my lap, Naomi’s Moot colleagues hit the gas for Salem. My first instinct was to take Harper back to Sanctuary, but Moot HQ offers the best concentration of witching talent in the world. Not to mention I’m Moot President now, and we’ve surely just unleashed the biggest magical political storm in living memory.
