‘Keep going,’ she says. ‘Trust your moose.’
Sceptical, I put the car back into drive and as we roll forward slowly Harper puts a hand on my shoulder. A shudder runs through me and there’s an ache behind my eyes that sets me blinking. When my vision clears, there’s no more barrier. No more dirt trail, but a gritted track.
‘How?’ I gasp.
‘A nice old guy called Eugene,’ Harper says cheerfully. ‘Face like a crochety grandpa, but he’s really great at this sort of thing.’
This sort of thing. As if she was talking about painting a picket fence or weeding the driveway.
‘Take your hand away,’ I tell her.
She does, and immediately I’m back on the overgrown dirt trail, forest pressing in close all around and a barrier ahead. My stomach flips and I let out a long exhale. Harper looks tolerantly amused.
‘Queasy?’
‘Struggling to adjust to the fact that my eyes, my senses – you know, all I’ve got to understand the world with – can’t be trusted. Can you see how messed up that is?’
She grimaces and mouthssorry, but I’ve learned a lesson. I’ve gotten so used to seeing Harper as someone who needs protecting and rescuing, I’ve forgetten how powerful she is – and what magic can do. I’ve stopped myself from thinking too hard about Abigail Whitman’s death at the Sanctuary stadium, how she threw herself joyfully into the fire imagining she saw her dead son. My official conclusion was derangement from grief, but what if it was another time witchcraft scrambled someone’s sense of what’s real and what isn’t? Okoye isn’t the Fenns’ favourite person right now, but is he so wrong in urging witches to toe the line, because the rest of us would utterlyfreakif we knew what they could really do?
Harper puts her hand back on my shoulder as I continue to drive, and there are no more dislocating shifts in reality. Up ahead, a house comes distantly into view, and moments later my skin tingles all over.Wards, Harper confirms. Casting deep shadow beneath the midday sun is a large, handsome homestead with outbuildings. A group of kids chase each other around outside, and it could be any hipster communal living project, were it not that as I watch, one of the kids jumps into the air – and stays there a little too long before she lands, giggling. (Yeah, there’s a reason witches are banned from sporting competitions, too.) A trio of women are sitting round an honest-to-goodness cauldron. The air is all wavy above a bursting market garden, and I can’t tell if I’m seeing magic or simply heat-haze. It looks so Instagram influencer-wholesome. But I can’t shake my unease, because I must be looking at …
‘Redhaven,’ Harper announces. ‘A.k.a. my dad’s place. Pull in here.’
‘What the heck?’ I hear, as Harper jumps out. She’s looking at a parked vehicle all aggrieved, like it rolled over her foot. ‘Mom?’
Is this where Sarah Fenn headed in such a hurry this morning? I guess she needed to talk to Lachlan about how the Moot and his outfit are going to work together – or not – going forward. Someone won’t be winning a Best Babysitter badge when she finds out you’ve driven her convalescing daughter all this way, Margaret Knight.
I can hardly keep up as Harper hurtles towards the farmhouse. But I’m close enough to catch her when, right by the porch, she staggers and collapses.
62
SUSANNA
Late Summer, 1866
Elora is waiting on the veranda when you get home. The odor of smoke is still in your hair – you try to forget the rancid, bacon-grease undernote to all the soot. At your back the twins are breathy with excitement. The thrill in your blood bubbles in theirs, too. You think this is the first time they have ever truly felt their power. Fattening marrows and popping out peas early is no way for a witch to use her magical ability.
Casting the Old Signs is.
This is the true inheritance of witchcraft – power. And yet you’re instructed always to make your talent meek and humble. To spend it on domestic activities. Weaving. Mending. Growing. Healing. To serve with magic. When really you should be ruling.
Your grandmother enforces that lesson. Despite her vision, her defiance in creating Haven at all, she preaches moderation. Modesty. But there is nothing modest about what you have done. Nor about what more you might be capable of.
She says nothing as you approach. Simply sits alone on the veranda. And only now does it strike you how unusual this is. She must have sent all the others away, or inside. Your greeting is her cue as she rises to her feet, the wool cape embroideredby her Giftless mother falling from her shoulders, her clogs loud against the creaking boards. Birds fly up squawking reproachfully as she bellows in a voice too large for her small, bent frame.
‘I felt it from here! Bad enough that you used magic to take lives. The folk hereabouts won’t forget that. Worse, that you used one of the forbidden signs. Worst of all that you shared magic with these innocents here, corrupting them with your own dark lusts. Don’t think I haven’t seen you whispering to them in the garden, the orchards, the fields. You’d spread your contagion as a caterpillar does mildew.’
‘Why shouldn’t we share magic?’ you cry, indignant, mounting the steps to the veranda two at a time. The hobnails in your boot-soles hit like hammers. ‘Aren’t we halfway to that, living as we do here in Haven – your creation? And who forebade the signs? Why should any part of our Gift be judged beyond use by those who don’t even have magic?’
Your grandmother’s open palm, the same one you have cut with your knife to bleed into a dish, connects so violently with your cheek your neck snaps back. You reel and stagger, misplace your footing on the steps, and only the twins, reaching out, prevent you hitting the ground.
‘Stupid girl!’ Elora Fenn looks down on you as from a great height. ‘It wasn’tmundaneswho outlawed the Old Signs. They should never have been included in Starcross. The community that compiled it realised that soon enough. It’s why so many copies were destroyed. Why the government has banned and confiscated it. Oh Susanna, beware. Ruin was well named. Those who seek to ruin others end up ruined themselves.’
You cradle your smarting cheek. You can no longer tell if the tingling in your fingertips is your power or your humiliation.
Your grandmother has made a terrible mistake.
63
