I leaned closer, captivated despite myself.
“Soon, people from foreign lands learned of their magic and came to take it from them. But the three daughters had grown and worked on this land, and their neighbors had come to love them. They vowed to protect the daughters—to hide them. These men and women called themselves ‘the Stewards.’?”
My ears pricked. A word I’d heard before. The ramblings of a street corner preacher on Pewter Lane who spoke of Stewards. There was a song they sang in the schoolyard:
Hide, hide the witch,
The stewards, they hid three.
Two in the parish,
One by the sea.
Catch, catch the witch,
Never let her flee.
Put her to the post, The devil’s slave, is she.
Ma continued. “But the enemy were relentless, and so of course, eventually the daughters were found, and their magic was stolen.”
I saw it in my mind, those daughters holding their magic against their chests, kicking the shins of those who wanted to take it.
“Why didn’t God help ’em?” I asked. But if my mother had an answer, it was stuck between her lips. She pressed them together tightly.
“Perhaps it was their turn to suffer,” she said.
I looked to my shoelaces and pondered a God that would give his daughters magic, then punish them for it.
“They say if you visit their graves and make a wish, the three daughters will grant it,” Ma said now, bumping her shoulder against mine.
“Have you seen ’em?” I frowned. “Their graves.”
Ma looked to the ceiling. “No. But one day we both will.”
“And we’ll make a wish?”
“We’ll make as many wishes as we can manage,” she said.
Warmth gathered in. I mashed my nose into the sides of her ribs. “And Dad as well?”
She sighed, all the breath in her lungs escaping. “No, darlin’. That’s a trip meant for you and me.”
And she turned enough that I could see the bruise shadowing the left side of her face, creeping in from her hairline, swelling her eye near closed, and I thought it was just as well that we left him behind.
Those three daughters had seen enough suffering. Hadn’t they?
CHAPTER ONEPATRICK
Kenton Hill miners were made of songs, one sung most often.
This was saved for the weary hours just before the whistle sounded and the men were hauled back up the shaft. In Patrick’s first years belowground, his father would whisper it to him when Patrick’s knees buckled, when his bones protested, when mud weighed him down.
Till the light comes, Patty, he’d say.Till the lights come on up top, down we go.
On the days when the second-shift miners were deathly tired, the song became just one murmured verse, repeated like a vow.Till the light comes.
It moved their feet to the end of each shift, tempted unwilling bodies into the shafts, and indeed, light found them. Morning breaking. They spilled out into the day.
