‘But they attacked us!’ I cry. ‘They outnumbered us. They killed children!’
‘And all the mundanes will see is that we killed two dozen of them in return – and did so without a single weapon,’ Elora says, grimly. ‘What do you think happens next? You think there’ll be justice for witches? There’s never justice for witches, Susanna. If there was, we’d have had no need of Haven in the first place.’
I writhe at those bleak words and turn to stare into the shadow where Lachlan is watching us. The light shifts a little. He feels their sting, too.
69
SARAH
That’s my daughter, is all I can think, as I look at the beautiful, strong, wild-eyed young woman standing before me. Yet in truth, she looks more like me. The Fenn colouring, rather than the black hair and blue eyes Lachlan gave to Harper. Then I blink, and in the flicker of my eyelids falling and rising, I see Harper as she truly is, slender and pale and raven-haired.
Susanna, that man called her. My ancestor Susanna Fenn. And I’m here as a shadow inside Elora Fenn, the matriarch of Haven. A haven no more, exactly as Sanctuary proved no sanctuary at all for me and my daughter. I’d laugh, if I could, at the way history walks in grim, numbing circles, fate holding our feet to the path.
I’m an observer here. The words Elora spoke, that harsh rebuke to her granddaughter, they didn’t come from me, only from my mouth. I try to take a step toward my girl, but as I suspected when I attempted to nod, find I have almost no control over this body. Is it the same for Harper? I’d presumed so, but when Susanna lifted her hands – flexed her fingers and brought a fearful cry from the folks of Haven – there was something tentative in the gesture. Almost experimental.
Is Harper more fully embodied here than I am? And if so, what does that mean?
I’m still turning over the question when the world around me lurches, and I stagger with it. Fear fizzes inside my skull like champagne drunk too quickly, disorienting, unsteadying. I reach for the porch beam – but it’s no longer there.
Instead, a small hand closes around mine. I blink and see my great-grandson, Thomas, clutching my hand and staring up with anxious concern. Beside him is a bundle of our possessions atop which sits the scraps-and-ribbons bunny Missus Kilpatrick stitched him from the cast-offs of dresses and shirts, all sun-rinsed stripes and faded florals. The boy had trouble sleeping at night, until he was given Bunny. I remember Susanna’s jealous fury that he slept better with a toy made by another woman’s hands tucked beneath his chin. She’d almost tossed it into the hearth one night. So I lied and told her I’d woven a safe-sleep charm into its drooping ears and cotton-teazle tail, and that was why he slept.
How many lies have I told my granddaughter? They were all for the best.
I shake my head.My daughter.AndI’vetried never to lie to Harper. Haven’t always succeeded, though.
This body aches through every limb. I run diagnostics on those who come to me for a pain-relieving talisman or draught. For those unable to describe their suffering, beyond a simple,It hurts, Miss Fenn. Please make it stop, I sometimes mirror my body to theirs, the better to understand what afflicts them. I’ve trained myself not to gasp at the first dull ache or sharp pain, but sometimes wonder how they are still walking around, still breathing, with a body so badly hurting. Those are the ones for whom I brew extra-strong elixirs. Elora Fenn would get my maximum safe dose, her body worn to the bone by old age. I can feel every crumbling vertebra of our spine.
Yet the greatest pain is in Elora’s heart, for something she’s about to do.
‘Go on then,’ she says to Susanna. ‘One last act.’
Beside me, Susanna is in tears, and I can’t bear the thought that Harper is experiencing her misery just as I am sharing Elora’s pain. I yearn to comfort her, but feel the firm press of my wrinkled lips. The clench of my remaining teeth.
One last act.Elora has a secret. I can feel it pulsing in the quickened beats of her old heart. But I can’t divine it – can’t warn either Harper or Susanna. And it’d change nothing even if I could. We’re here to relive history, not remake it.
Susanna raises her hands and I see sigils scarred in her palms, which hitherto she’s concealed with a cantrip. I remember that first glimpse of Harper’s sigils, on Green Point beach, when Tad Bolt’s thugs tore her clothes as they arrested us. The horror of them never lessens. Why did my child take them for her magic? Does the answer lie here, at Haven?
‘Ruin,’ Susanna-Harper says, though I know she need not mouth the word to enact the deed. The sigils course in her magic’s veins.
And in an instant, it’s gone. The farmhouse where we’d dreamt of a better life for witches. All the stories it contained, the humble treasures that lined its walls and shelves, from hand-stitched smocks for the babies born here, to Tobias Fenn’s framed botanical drawings, only his sketchbook saved in Elora’s bundle. I watch it all burn as Ruin plays its terrible tune – the crash of a falling roof beam, the roar of drapery devoured in a fiery gush, the crack and chime of exploding crockery and glass. An entire world that could have been, all gone up in smoke.
Susanna’s face is streaked with tears turned inky by soot and ash, and in her expression I see Harper, mascara running as she sobs for Pierre and another life-that-could-have-been.Surely my yearning to gather her up can overcome the constraints of Elora’s body! I struggle to lift my arms, to step forward and hold her tight. But these weak and aching limbs remain beyond my bidding.
‘What do we do now?’ Susanna asks, her voice hitching.
‘We go find your sister in Connecticut, and we live as mundanes.’
‘No!’
My granddaughter is defiant, as my daughter is defiant, and I feel Elora’s chest clench with what she’s about to do.
(What is she about to do?)
‘Take up your bundle. We’ve a long way to go.’
And as Susanna, grudgingly, stoops, my fingers defy their knotty age and draw a fine slender thread of magic from the air. Twisting off a loop, I throw it about Susanna’s neck and pull tight. Susanna gasps, twisting to face me and clawing at her throat as if I’m throttling her. I’m not. It’s only her magic Elora has choked off, with a binding.
But Susanna’s acting as though its air itself she’s starving for. My brow furrows and Elora’s fingers move again, dexterously. It’s a pacification charm – the very same I once used so unwisely on Mary-Anne Bolt in Sanctuary’s Main Street. Elora strengthens the charm, and as Susanna slumps she catches her grandaughter’s body, pain jolting down her spine and through her hips, and eases the young woman to the ground. I want to blink away the duality of Susanna’s auburn Fenn hair, and Harper’s unruly dark tresses, of my daughter’s presence in her ancestor’s body. What if she thinks I’m a willing participant in Elora’s actions? Will she ever trust or forgive me for this? Elora is breaking every rule I ever set myself about respecting my daughter’s person and her magic.
