‘Hey, I had to pose as one for years when I wore the bindings,’ Lachlan protests. ‘I wasoutstandinglymundane.’
‘Yeah, well, I want you back doing badass witchy shit.’
‘My child, I cannotwaitto be back doing badass witchy shit. It’s where your old pa really excels.’
Mom rolls her eyes, and yes, I guess we’re a family now.
Perhaps she senses my uncertainty at what I have to do next, because she reaches for my hand. Holds it tight andswings our arms, like when I was little and we walked along the beach.
‘You’ll be fine, Harper. Look how perfectly you managed the first part.’
I did. But what if that’s because ripping something out is more attuned to my Gift than putting it neatly back in place again? What if I fuck this up?
But I won’t, another, more confident voice reassures me. (Is it Susanna, whispering in my ear as she sometimes does ever since I learned I carry her magic within me?)I’m Harper Fenn, from a long line of Fenns. The daughter of Lachlan Frey. I won’t fuck this up.
I gulp down the coffee and run inside to fetch Starcross and my bag of instruments, then settle into a chair opposite my parents at the firepit. Stars stream thickly overhead, and I can hear the wash of the sea against the rocks at the end of our field. Laughter drifts from an open window nearby, the kids having taken their play indoors to the warmth. It’s a good night for putting magic back into the world.
The grimoire rests on my knees, its leather cover surprisingly warm against my bare skin. Magic beats inside it like blood and I half imagine I can feel the pulse of my parents’ Gifts. I rest the spine between my thighs and let the book fall open to two blank pages. As I look down at them, I have the eeriest sense they’re looking back at me.
It’s time.
It was my mother who first suggested we attempt this, that day at Redhaven when we sat in Lachlan’s study. I hadn’t realised she had such recklessness in her, and Dad looked as though he was seeing her for the first time, before immediately agreeing to give himself up. He’s the palimpsest expert, of course, from all his research, and was beginning to explain the process to Mom when I spoke up.
I’ll do it, I said.The grimoire knows me. I’ve already unlocked it once.
Each palimpsest is fresh, Harper. The enchantment is remade each time. It’s not like these pages are a box you simply put things into and take them out of,Lachlan had said.
No, she’s right,Mom told him.She has a bond with Starcross. Always did. It’s her true mother-in-the-craft, not me.She wore a sorrowful-proud look as she said it.
So Dad instructed me in the necessary steps. And there in his study at Redhaven, where a century and a half before Elora had excised Susanna’s magic and sealed it away, I pulled his Gift from him and fed it to our spellbook. Less than a week later, I did the same to Mom, in the president’s office at the Moot after we’d hatched the plan for the press conference that shocked the world. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. Like taking a knife to the most beautiful painting in the world, or stamping on the last surviving Stradivarius violin.
Mom’s final magical act had been to bind Naomi and Okoye to secrecy – we needed them in on it to pull off the display in that New York ballroom. When Mom worked those three requested pieces of magic? I took care of the roses using Greenmagic, but didn’t trust myself for any body spellwork, so Naomi dealt with those using her poppet.
Binding or no, I still wasn’t fully confident about Okoye. The guy is too smooth, too flexible. So, once I’d got Mom off the stage and resting in a hotel room, I paid him a quick visit. I had Elora to thank for the inspiration for that. My hands were trembling as I cast Oblivion, picturing Susanna’s bewildered, heart-struck expression as she denied ever being a witch. But the memory I was blotting from Okoye’s mind was far more peripheral. Nothing to do with himself, his identity or beliefs. When I was done, he simply blinked inmild confusion when I asked what he thought of Mom’s act, replying that she’d been very brave, and for a Fenn to give up her magic was almost unthinkable.
No, Okoye remembers nothing. Naomi knows what we did, but has our trust and agreed to a binding of secrecy. Maggie Knight doesn’t know exactly what we did – but she knows we didsomething, and that we’re gone from the States, building a new life for ourselves across the Atlantic. Like Dad said, he’s posed as a mundane before, and it didn’t stop him running Redhaven. He can pull off that deception again. Mom’s always preferred using her magic for the gentler arts of physical and emotional healing. The sort of things that can be explained away as herbal remedies, empathy, compassion, or the medical establishment getting it wrong. She’s thinking of opening a healing retreat here next year – exactly the sort of thing a magic-stripped witch might turn her hand to.
So yes, we’ll get along fine in this small village, on this small island, reachable only by a tiny ferry from Scotland’s west coast. Here where the beaches are white, the skies blue, and the winters apparently something hellish. Mom can brew, Dad study his books, and no one will raise an eyebrow at her using red thread and silver bowls in her therapies, or even notice him up to no good in the island’s scraggly woods or rushing streams.
And no one hides their magic better than me.
The sun’s almost gone. This far north, once it’s down, it slips away between one blink and the next. It’s time.
As I begin the incantation, the blank pages pulse and distort like a pregnant belly, as if something inside is straining to get out. I take up my silver knife to deliver it – by slashing the blade into my own palms. First one, then the other. My blood sprays across the pages, sinking in until no trace remains. It must have been something like this I did all thoseyears ago, a frightened, desperate child, turning to the most powerful magical artifact she knew for help.
In my life before Sanctuary lost its mind, I loved surfing at Green Point. Beneath the board, beneath your feet, you’d feel the whole impossible power of the sea and could let yourself become one with it. But this immense, straining power beneath my hands isn’t mine, it’s my parents’. I need to return it safely to them. I already have the magic of two people – I can’t permit myself the magic of four.
But I’d be lying if I didn’t say that just for a moment, I’m tempted.
As I begin chanting the words of release, I hold another memory in my mind. The three versions of my future self I saw through the arch Lachlan conjured in Serafina’s orchard. The whip-smart Ivy League witch my father’s daughter could be. The caring, compassionate witch that is my mother’s child. And then the third Harper, toward whom my heart had sung as she stood beneath a lilac sky and showed me her bloodied hands while the wind stirred her hair.
Well, here she is.Here I am.
My voice grows louder – and as the crescendo reaches a climax, I slam my gory palms onto the shuddering parchment.
Freed from the palimpsest into which I decanted it, my parents’ power streams back into them in two arcing columns of glittering fire. Mom’s is blazing gold. Embers raining from an ancient, goddess-blessed hearth. Lachlan’s is searing silver, old and cold. Crystalline ice from a cavern where gods sleep who are best forgotten. I pray that anyone glimpsing this from afar will simply think we’ve tossed a few too many dry logs onto the firepit and doused it over-generously with accelerant. Probably scorched our eyebrows off and definitely burned the marshmallows.
They’d be fuckingterrifiedif they knew.
