‘I know your views on unnaturalness, Deborah. And I’ve my own path to tread. You’ll see no more of me.’
‘And it’s …true? What you just said?’
‘Susanna Fenn has no Gift,’ I say. Unspoken are the wordsNot anymore.
For the first time, I feel it, as I turn and hobble away. Elora’s emotions and thoughts are bleeding more freely into my awareness, the longer I spend in this body. I understand her regret, her shame at what she did to her granddaughter – the Fenn whose magic was too dangerous and whose spirit was too wild for these already volatile times.
I limp down the Cobb, pack on my back, our precious Starcross swaddled within it – and what will happen to that, now the line of instruction has been broken? One of Thomas’s children will have the Gift, but Susanna, having forgotten she was ever a witch, will be unable to teach them. My hands won’t stop twisting and knotting. I wonder at first if it’s palsy, for these events have exacted a physical toll, but it feels more like handwashing, or a lathe’s repeated paring away of a rough grain that needs smoothing. Our fingertips prickle and the memory comes to me, clear and cold.
Elora has only cast an Old Sign once in her long life – and then, only because she could see no other way. Not once she’d excised Susanna’s magic and, because she couldn’t bear to destroy it entirely, sealed it away in Starcross.
That sign was her second crime against her granddaughter.Obscurity.
71
HARPER
I shudder, only to discover that I don’t have a body to do it with. The sensation is so unnatural I begin to panic – but that, too, has nowhere to go. No heart-rate to spike, no breathing to speed up, no skull to throb. I’m a shadow having an existential crisis.
This last experience in Susanna’s body has been horrific and disorienting. Betrayed. Magicless. Even stripped of memory. I know what Elora Fenn did. A tiny part of me even understood why she did it. But what an unforgivable crime against a witch. Her own granddaughter. What must it have felt like for Mom? I send a prayer to the goddess that she wasn’t inhabiting Elora as intensely as I’ve been sharing Susanna.
But how are these events still unspooling, if this isn’t Susanna’s memory?
As if in answer, the darkness around me takes shape and I see upon a desk, Starcross. Susanna may not be here, but her ripped away, pent-up magic is. Dawn casts light through threadbare curtains, and in its veiled radiance a seated figure is writing. Elora, her gnarled fingers barely able to curl around a slender dip-pen. The nib’s rasp and catch are loud as it drags across the page.
I want to bend over her shoulder to read it, and even asI’m wondering how to do that without a body I find that I’m there, part of the shadows. There’s a warmth in the darkness alongside me, steadying and reassuring, and I realise it’s my dad. I’m merely an observing presence here now, but he has been throughout. I bet even Lachlan Frey, with all his years of arcane research, has never been part of something as weird and strange as this. He’ll never shut up about it.
Amusement pulses at me from the Lachlan-shaped dark, before the moving pen and rapidly-filling page draw back our attention. Elora looks haggard and I’m viciously pleased at her suffering, although anxious for Mom experiencing her decrepit body. Little time appears to have passed. How is Susanna faring, with her small son, in her sister’s house? Does Deborah still needle at her, unable to believe she’s Giftless?
‘You are a witch,’Elora writes,‘as generations of Fenns have been before you. Our names are written in this book, and you will add yours to them. Go to the house of Prudence Marloe in Amherst and take this volume with you. She will instruct you faithfully.Never speak of this to your grandmother Susanna or her sister Deborah, if they still live. Your heart and conscience must decide what you tell your father Thomas, but I swear truly that sometimes silence is the greater kindness.’
There’s barely room at the bottom to scratch out a parting, ‘Your loving foremother in the craft, E. F.’
Elora sands the paper to dry the ink, then folds it, bony fingertips smoothing each crease with the same precision with which she excised her granddaughter’s magic.Grandmother Susanna.It’s impossible for us to have jumped so far ahead in time that the boy, Thomas, has grown up and has a daughter old enough for her Determination. Elora must have written this in hopefulness, thinking of a future descendant. The next Fenn witch – one she’ll never meet.
Redhaven’s first Adept (and last, until Dad came along)tucks the letter inside the front cover of Starcross then bundles the grimoire in oilcloth. Fastening a cloak with arthritic fingers less dextrous than twigs, she heads into the streets of Sanctuary. Familiar ways are made strange by their distance in time. A small girl bowls a hoop along the cobbled camber; a youth in patched trousers leads a mule laden with crates of produce; dogs and chickens run underfoot; a man in a tattered uniform rattles a tin cup in which only two coins clatter; a woman carries a basket of eggs; one fellow steadies a ladder for another who is painting a shop sign. It’s a dry-goods merchant now, but I know it as Crafty Lizzie, a tourist-trap souvenir store. The waters of the Accontic stream silty and deep beneath the several iron bridges.
Elora stops outside what is, in my time, an overpriced ‘English tearoom’ named At The Black Cat. A neat brass plaque tells me it’s currently occupied by a scrivener’s office. I’m not one-hundred-per-cent sure what a scrivener is, but a bell tinkles as Elora steps inside and a moustached man with sleeve-garters on his pressed shirt comes to the counter.
‘Who’s it for?’ he asks gruffly, when she places the anonymously wrapped spellbook before him and asks to deposit a legacy for future collection.
‘Maia Fenn, the eldest child of Master Thomas Fenn of the Cobb, Sanctuary, on her thirteenth birthday.’
Maia! How does Elora know the name? Her scrying must be truly something special. Then I wonder if she foresaw all of this. Knew what Susanna would do; understood how her haven for magicals would end. And she went ahead and founded it anyway. I can’t imagine the courage or the heartbreak.
The scrivener nods as he notes the information. ‘And on what date should we notify Miss Fenn to collect the item?’
‘March eleventh,’ Elora says. ‘Eighteen ninety-four.’
The whiskered face comes up sharply. ‘That’s twenty-eight years away.’
‘Yes.’
‘But how – her thirteenth – she isn’t born yet …?’
‘Call it an old woman’s intuition,’ Elora says, with a smile as unreassuring as Susanna’s always were.
The scrivener doesn’t look happy, plainly suspecting something uncanny about this elderly customer. He names a sumfor acceptance and annual storageso high he plainly hopes she won’t be able to afford it. But Elora counts out the coins upon the polished countertop, and with a sour expression he carries the money to a hidden safe, only then returning for Starcross. Elora watches him go, an expression on her face like that the families of the first pilgrims must have worn waving their relatives off at Harwich and Southampton. Sorrowful parting, and uncertain hope for the future.
