“Persinette,” she says after a long silence. She so rarely uses my given name that I immediately become still and wary—the mouse sensing the hawk’s shadow.
“Yes?” I say, after she fails to continue.
She is looking at me very oddly.
“I require your help upstairs this afternoon,” she says. The formal note in her voice does nothing to soothe me.
“All right,” I say. This is unusual, but not unheard-of. Mother usually returns to her work after lunch and labors until late while I perform my duties or work on my embroiderybelow, but I occasionally have to stay up with her to hold a light if she needs both hands for her work, or to assist in some other way.
Why is she watching me so strangely?
She lets me climb up the ladder ahead of her so she can pass her heavy book up to me before following. Her room has such a particular smell—close and stale, pungent with some combination of sweat, incense, and the smell of magic itself, which I can only describe today as the air before a thunderstorm—charged, and somewhere between sweet and earthy.
The room may smell the same, but it looks quite different. Mother has taken her great spellbook, her life’s work, away from the stand where it has lived for so long, and placed it on a lectern in the center of the room. I have seen the lectern before, of course—our home is so small that I am intimately acquainted with every item of furniture within—but for as long as I can remember, it has been pushed against the far wall, doing nothing but gathering dust and providing a lavish home for our spiders.
Now it is right in the middle of the workroom, with a streak of clean floor trailing behind it, marking where it has been pulled from the wall. The book is open, with a long, slim knife that serves as Mother’s letter opener placed perfectly down its center, like a bookmark.
“Are you finished?” I ask. I cannot quite believe what I’m saying. For as long as I can remember, Mother has been working on this singular, almost sacred object. It is our little god, this book, and everything we do in the Tower is in service of it.Worshipof it.
“Almost,” she says, still with that strange thread of … something running through her voice. “Take a look.”
“I can’t …”
“I know. You don’t have to read it.”
There is a sense of ceremony as I approach the book—almost holiness. I make sure to take slow, careful steps. I liftmy hands to touch it with proper reverence, but hesitate. I look back at Mother. She nods encouragingly.
And then my Hairboilsfrom my head in an upwards-surging mass. I have never seen it so wild. I feel it tugging at my scalp every which way as it rises like flames. It startles me so, that I take a too-quick step backwards and trip, landing heavily on my tailbone on the stone flags.
Mother hurries forward with wide, angry strides, petting and stroking the book as if I have injured it in some way.
“What did you do?” she spits.
“Nothing!” I grab wildly at my Hair, which struggles against me like a cat in a bathtub. “I don’t know!”
She takes in a long, hissing breath between her teeth, then goes to her book wheel and spins it until she finds the volume she seeks. She licks her thumb and finger and flicks through the pages as I fight with my Hair, begging it to calm down. I try shushing it like a baby, stroking whichever strands I can get hold of, but it will not stop fighting against my hands in a wild panic.
Mother has found the page she sought. She mutters its words under her breath, tracing them with her finger as she speaks, but I can barely hear her at all with the Hair swooshing about my ears.
When she has finished, though, the effect is immediate. The Hair goes limp. It drops out of the air, suddenly heavy, weighing down my shoulders and pooling in my arms, slumped and peaceful as a sleeping child. I cradle it, gazing in disbelief as its red-gold shine tarnishes and dulls.
“What did you do?” I whisper, looking up from where I crouch on the floor. The light hits Mother’s face strangely from this angle, making her look all hollows and bones.
“It’s all right,” she says, with an approximation of a smile. The smile and attempt at comfort are what unnerve me the most, truthfully. If she had snapped at me to stop making a fuss and told me she had put my Hair to sleep for being anuisance, I wouldn’t have been overly surprised. The unfamiliar softness—or what passes for softness, with Mother—would make the Hair rise on the back of my neck, if it had been able to move.
Mother stretches out her hand to me. “Come.”
I do not move—not yet. “Why?”
“Just comealong, Netta.”
That sounds more like her. It is oddly reassuring. I get to my feet slowly, feeling the heft of my Hair pulling me down. I hadn’t realized how weightless it is usually—always floating and drifting a little, even when it appears to be still. Now I feel the full length of it; it is an encumbrance.
Mother leads me back to the book, and I follow obediently. She takes my hands and places them on it, one on either side, palms flat. The paper feels oddly un-paperlike beneath my fingers—warm and yielding.
“What is happening?” I whisper.
“What must,” she says briefly. She starts to read over my shoulder, voice rising and falling. She slides her hands from my wrists to my forearms, pressing them down, but does not pause in her recital. I start to feel sleepy; soothed. My eyelids are heavy. I could be a child again, listening to Mother tell me a fairytale until the events of the story become tangled with my dreams. I could be a babe again, in her arms.
