Star Cursed: The Cahill Witch Chronicles, Book Two

by Spotswood, Jessica

  Tess’s hands fly to her mouth, as though she’s trying not to be sick. “It’ll be a second Terror. They won’t know it was Inez and Maura, but they’ll find someone to blame. Just like those girls they arrested as oracles.” She turns to me. “We can’t let them do it, Cate!”

  “Harwood!” Rory shouts. We all turn to stare at her. “People won’t know the Sisters are responsible. They’ll only know it’s witchery. And if they want to punish witches, or women in general—”

  “The girls at Harwood are the easiest target,” I finish.

  Rory’s breath comes fast. “We have to get them out. Sachi and Brenna. Now.”

  I extricate myself froatest tarm Finn. “When is the meeting?”

  “Wednesday night,” he says.

  It’s Saturday. That’s only four days. Not much time to engineer a jailbreak.

  I cannot afford to panic. There isn’t any time to waste.

  “First I’m going to talk to Inez, and see if there’s any possibility of changing her mind. With or without magic.” I turn to Finn. I don’t want him anywhere near Inez, lest she use him as a bargaining chip against me. “You’ve got to leave. Right now.”

  “Wait,” Finn says, raking his hands through his already-messy hair. “What’s this about rescuing Sachi and Brenna?”

  “Not just them.” I smooth my peach-colored skirt. “All the girls at Harwood. We’ve got four days to contrive a way to get them out.”

  He doesn’t try to argue with me, to tell me that it’s mad or impossible. He just takes my hand. “What can I do to help?”

  My mind races. “You said they keep all kinds of files in the Archives. Would they have files on the girls in Harwood?” It would help to know which of the patients are witches, especially ones accused of mind-magic. If Inez is going to start a war, we’ll need to be able to fight back.

  “I’ll find out. Tomorrow I’ve got to be at services all day, but Monday I’ll pay a call on Brother Szymborska and do some snooping.”

  “That would be grand. Meet me Monday night at the usual spot?” I ask. Finn nods, his gaze darting to my mouth, and I want to kiss him, but not in front of Rory and Tess. I squeeze his hand instead. “Be careful.”

  His brow furrows as he slides on the cloak of the Brotherhood. “You, too.”

  • • •

  A few minutes later, I storm into Sister Inez’s classroom. She’s grading papers in the midafternoon gloom. When she hears me, she looks up, a sharp, wolfish smile flitting over her face. “Your sister can’t keep her mouth shut, can she? That girl needs to learn to control her temper.”

  I stop before her heavy oak desk. “I would have found out eventually.”

  “Fortunately, it wasn’t until after I had the information I needed from Brother Belastra.” She stresses the word Brother just a tad, and my temper rises, pulling my magic with it. Perhaps I shouldn’t bother with arguing; perhaps I ought to compel her to forget the time and location of the Head Council meeting now. It would be rectifying a mistake, because I should have compelled her in the first place, the night she caught me sneaking out to see Finn.

  I don’t know if my mind-magic is strong enough, but I’m willing to find out. I lean over the desk, narrowing my eyes at her.

  “Before you go to the trouble of compelling me, I ought to warn you that I’ve already taken precautions.” Inez clicks her tongue against her teeth reprovingly. “How do you ever tell a lie, child? You’re as transparent as glass.”

  I am not a child. I clench my hands into fists at her condescension. “What kind of precautions? How do I know you aren’t lying to me again?”

  “I never lied to you about my intentions,” she points out, maddeningly.

  She’s right. She said she wanted war; I didn’t ask questions. I wanted Finn to stay in New London, and having him spy for the Sisterhood was a noble reason, far less selfish than asking him to give up his job and his family to stay near me.

  “I’ve just posted a letter to a dear friend. She’s married a member of the Brotherhood, but she remains loyal to her former Sisters. I told her that I am in danger and gave very clear instructions: if she doesn’t hear about the success of my plan, she will post another letter for me. One that explains the Sisterhood is a coven of witches an oft myd that Brother Finn Belastra has known the truth of it all along. I daresay Brother Belastra wouldn’t fare well under charges of treason.”

  The smug expression on her face makes me want to slap her. I lean over her desk. “You’re bluffing. You would never write all that down.”

  “Perhaps. Or perhaps I wrote it all in code. You can’t know for sure.” Inez taps her pen against the desktop in a steady, maddening rhythm.

  I narrow my eyes at her, focusing all my anger into my magic. Tell me who she is.

  “I can feel that, Miss Cahill.” Inez’s dark brows slant down, almost touching in the middle. “I’m very good at compulsion myself, you know. I daresay we’re on the same level—though of course it’s hard to know. Feel free to keep trying, but you’ll only exhaust yourself. I’ve been training myself for years to be impervious to it.”

  “I won’t let you do this,” I hiss. A muscle in my right eye begins to twitch.

  “I don’t see how you can stop me.” She leans back in her wooden chair. “Not without sacrificing every girl in this convent—or starting an outright war between the Brotherhood and the Sisterhood.”

  Magic simmers beneath my skin, twitching my fingertips. I fight down the frustration, crossing my arms over my ruffled peach bodice. “What do you hope to accomplish? You have to know this will cause a new Terror.”

  Inez fingers the brooch at her throat. “We’re already halfway there, Miss Cahill. I will not stand by and do nothing while we are persecuted. I’ve spent the last twenty years watching Cora cower and cater to them. She’s content to let change come at a snail’s pace. I’m simply speeding things up.”

  My mouth falls open. “You want a new Terror. You want the Brothers to do their worst, so we look good in comparison! Don’t you care about all the girls they’ll hurt in the meantime? What about the girls at Harwood?” I remember the beautiful, bruised Indo girl in the uncooperative ward, and little Sarah Mae, who buries birds in the courtyard, and the girl who thinks she’s engaged to a prince. They will be the ones to bear the brunt of this.

  “There are casualties in every war.”

  I press my knuckles into my stinging eyes. How can she speak of it so callously? “There must be some witches there. You’d give them up?”

  “Cora’s already given up on those girls.” Inez shrugs a black-clad shoulder. “Your sister told me about your ill-advised plan to free them. I don’t think they’re worth the trouble. I have bigger fish to fry.”

  I don’t. Those girls are not expendable. Not to me.

  I throw my hands up in the air in a show of defeat and stalk toward the door.

  “Don’t do anything foolish, Miss Cahill,” Inez warns. “Or someone you love will wind up hurt.”

  • • •

  I go to Cora. Insist on seeing her. After a moment of studying me, Gretchen gives in, perhaps sensing my desperation. I don’t imagine I hide it well.

  “Just a few minutes,” she agrees, opening the door to Cora’s bedroom and taking up her sentry position outside.

  Cora lies propped up on pillows in her four-poster bed, her eyes sunken in shadows. She looks a decade older than she did just yesterday. Is this all the time my healing bought her?

  I saw death in my mother’s face, and seeing it now makes me feel twelve and frightened all over again. It makes me want to promise any number of reckless, impulsive things if only she will stay. I’ll listen and be a proper young lady, and I won’t fight with Maura. I’ll do anything. I am older now and know better, but the way it hits me, this childish urge to bargain death away, n d“Or somis so visceral. It hunches my shoulders and roots my feet to the hooked brown rug on the threshold.

  “Catherine,” Cora says, through
cracked and bloodless lips. Her shining white hair cascades down over her shoulders. The green coverlet is pulled up to her breast. “What is it?”

  “I—I just wanted to see you,” I lie.

  “Time to say our good-byes,” Cora says.

  I pull the green and white flowered chair close to her bed. Everything in me wants to protest that she may yet rally, that perhaps this isn’t the end. But that is the selfish thing, and a lie to boot. I bite back the words. She is in pain, and she has made her peace with going, and I must let her.

  “Inez won’t wait. My body will hardly be cold before she takes the Sisterhood, Cate.”

  It’s the first time she’s ever called me by my nickname.

  If this is our good-bye, I owe it to Cora to help settle her mind, not the other way around. “I’m going to fight her for it.”

  “Good girl.” Cora smiles. “Gretchen knows where my papers are hidden, and how to contact Brennan and our spies. She’s known all my secrets since I was a girl. I trust her implicitly. She’ll be a great help to you, as she has been to me.”

  My mind races. “Brennan—that’s your man on the Head Council?”

  Cora nods. “A good sort. Has daughters of his own and educates them in secret. You can trust him.”

  But I can’t go to him and warn him not to attend the council meeting. He would want to know why, and if he is a good man—and I trust Finn and Cora that he is—he would try to stop it. Even an anonymous letter would raise suspicion that might cancel the meeting and risk our exposure.

  “Who else among the staff?” I ask.

  “Sophia, but she doesn’t always have the stomach to do what must be done. The rest of them have allied themselves with Inez, except for Elena,” Sister Cora muses, twirling her ring of office around her finger. It’s loose from all the weight she’s lost, wrapped in string to keep it from falling off entirely. It’s the only one she wears now, and it’s strange seeing her hands unlined with silver. “You might ask her for counsel. She’s a very canny girl, you know, and I wouldn’t have sent her to Chatham unless I trusted her.”

  I wonder how much Cora knows about what happened between Elena and Maura. Ugh. I make a face. I hardly relish the notion of being civil to Elena, much less asking her for favors.

  There’s a sudden hoarse, choking sound, and I leap up in alarm, worried that this is it—that Cora is dying now, here, right in front of me—until I realize she is laughing.

  “What a lemon face,” she wheezes. “Like I told you to eat a worm.”

  “Are you—can I help you?” I ask as she struggles for breath. Her hand next to mine is paper-white and stark with blue veins, and it looks small and naked without all her rings. Unthinkingly, I put my hand over it.

  Her pain almost swallows me, its razor teeth nipping and tearing, and I snatch my hand back, chastened. “How do you bear it?”

  She manages a few deep, full breaths, sinking back against her pillows. “You can’t heal me, and I won’t have you wasting your strength,” she snaps, folding her hands across her chest. She closes her eyes for a moment, and without their vibrant blue, she looks dead already.

  I find that I will miss her.

  “I am sorry we didn’t get a chance to know each other better, Cate,” she says. “I’m tired now. Sophia insists on drugging my tea, though I told her I don’t want it. Will you send Gretchen in? And pull the curtains, please. The light makes my head ache.”

  “Of course.” I undo the tasseled gold ties thd g want iat hold the emerald curtains back.

  “May Persephone watch over you.” Sister Cora’s voice is softer now, already slurred with sleep. I turn back to her, my eyes adjusting to the dim room. “I have faith that you will do what is necessary, when it comes down to it.”

  “Thank you.” Knowing Cora, that’s the highest compliment she could give. She’s shaped her life around it.

  • • •

  That night after supper, there’s a commotion in the hall. I peer out my bedroom door and see Maura dragging her trunk down the hall. Her quilt and pillows are stacked neatly on top.

  Tess is following her. “Maura, this isn’t necessary.”

  Three doors down from me, Vi emerges from the room she and Alice share. She’s carrying a brown valise, with a handful of dresses draped over her other arm.

  Alice leans out the doorway. “Mustn’t forget Bunny,” she sneers, tossing a tattered stuffed rabbit at Vi. “I know you can’t sleep without him.”

  Flushing, Vi catches it. “Shut up, Alice.”

  I look down the hall to Tess. “What’s going on?”

  Vi hears me and whirls around. “I can’t stand living with this shrew one second longer, and as Maura seems to enjoy her company—”

  Maura straightens, an icy smile on her lips. “It will be a relief to room with someone my own age.”

  Tess stops in her tracks, all her apology fading to anger. “Well, perhaps it will be a relief to me to live with someone who hasn’t tried to drown me lately!”

  “I didn’t do that on purpose, and you know it!” Maura huffs, shoving the trunk another foot.

  Tess plants her hands on her hips. “Well, perhaps you ought to learn to control your temper. You wonder why people don’t trust you!”

  Alice appears at her door again. This time she tosses a lacy lavender petticoat down the hall. “Well, I’ll be glad to room with someone of my own station. Imagine me being friends with a coachman’s daughter! Just think of all the nice presents I gave you. All my charity was wasted.”

  “Charity!” Vi shrieks. She bends to s

  natch up the petticoat, and her dresses tumble to the green carpet. Tess darts past Maura to help her gather them up. Vi reaches into her valise and pulls out a pair of black satin gloves with purple buttons. She pelts them at Alice, who shrinks back against the wall. “Here! Take these back. I don’t want them anymore. I wouldn’t put up with you for one more day—not for all the diamonds in the world!”

  “Girls!” Sister Johanna, the mathematics and natural sciences teacher, storms down the hall. “What on earth is going on? Sister Cora is very ill. She doesn’t need all this screeching.”

  Maura shoves her trunk past Vi and Tess. “Sorry, Sister,” she says sweetly. “Vi and I are switching rooms. We’ll be finished in just a minute.”

  “Don’t do anything you’ll regret, Maura, please,” Tess says, and I think she’s talking about more than just their room.

  Maura straightens, flipping a red curl away from her face. “You don’t need to worry about me anymore, Tess. I’m none of your concern.”

  arm am">To th

  CHAPTER

  15

  WE ARE HALFWAY THROUGH OUR breakfast when the doorbell sounds. Sister Sophia slides a plate of steaming hotcakes onto our table and hurries away to answer it. Around the room, breakfast pauses. Is it the Brothers? Who else would be calling at such an early hour? Lucy and Rebekah are dueling with butter knives, practicing their animation; oft om, br the knives clatter to the table as they drop their spells. Girls transform their textbooks into Scriptures. Color slowly leeches from the room as we attire ourselves in drab, Sisterly dresses. Next to me, Rory’s dress goes from a bright mandarin orange cascading with lace to a somber black wool. Transformation accomplished, she takes a hotcake and slathers it in butter. I push my plate aside.

  “Mei?” Sister Sophia appears in the doorway. “Your brother’s here to see you. He’s waiting in the front parlor.”

  “I bet it’s news about Li and Hua.” Mei pushes her chair back, her round face worried. “Cate, will you come with me?”

  “Of course.” The chatter around the table picks up again, the room flooding with pink and violet and sapphire as girls release their glamours. Rilla drowns her hotcake in maple syrup.

  I hide a smile, locking eyes with Tess. Mei will be relieved to hear that her sisters are home, safe and sound. It’s one bright spot in an otherwise dreadful day.

  Only—I can tell from the minute
we see Yang standing before the cold fireplace in his patched brown coat that something is wrong. This isn’t the merry, mischievous brother whose clever pranks Mei loves to recount. His full mouth tilts down at the corners, and his dark eyes dart anxiously away from hers. Whatever news he’s got, he doesn’t relish the telling of it.

  Mei stops dead beside me, clenching my hand so tightly the bones crunch. She doesn’t bother with introductions. “What is it?”

  “Li and Hua were recaptured this morning.” Yang swallows, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “The guards came for them before dawn.”

  “Recaptured?” Mei blinks at him. “I—I don’t understand.”

  My stomach plummets. “Where did they take them?” I hope against hope that they’ll stand trial and be sent to Harwood. If it’s Harwood, I can save them. If it’s Harwood, we still changed Tess’s vision.

  “The prison ship,” Yang says, confirming my fears. “They broke out of prison yesterday. Or—someone broke them out. Witches, they said. All the prisoners escaped, except for two that were killed by the guards. We were going to send the girls to Cousin Ling, but Mama wanted them to get a good night’s sleep first. They were packing their things when the guards came. An hour later, and they would have been gone.” He pounds a fist into his palm.

  Mei presses her hand to her mouth. “There won’t be a trial?”

  “No. The guards said we were lucky they weren’t arresting the whole lot of us for harboring fugitives.” Yang shakes his head, his shaggy black hair falling over his forehead. “They had a whole wagon full of prisoners out front. They were rearresting anyone they found at home, I guess. Hopefully, most of them were smart enough to hide out somewhere else.”

  Mei sinks into the silk chair, her dress a sunny yellow against the ugly brown. I’d told her earlier that she looked like a daffodil. Now she’ll probably always associate the pretty dress with this dreadful news. I can tell she’s trying not to cry, but her lip wobbles.