by Lily Velez
“Lucas.”
He reclined into the booth, draping an arm over its back, and smiled at me. “It’s a process. Most of us begin our witching journey straight out the crib. While Sightless children are learning nursery rhymes, we’re learning verses of protection. We’re surrounded by magic at all times. It’s as much a part of us as the air in our lungs.”
My shoulders wilted. If I’d missed such formative years, what hope did I have of awakening the magic in me so late in the game? Assuming there was any magic in me at all.
“The way they teach it is like this. All witches have kindling in their hearts that has to be ignited before they can come into their magic. So from a young age, we’re encouraged to spend time in nature to get the first sparks going.”
“Nature?”
“Sure. Witches recognize every living thing as inherently magical. The leaves on a tree, the petals of a single flower, the deer that drinks from a forest stream—all of it contains magic. When we tap into any of those things and feel the connection that binds all life, it rouses the magic in us. What’s wrong?”
My eyes had gone distant, my attention drifting. “I’m thinking about how I started to spend more and more time outdoors as of a few years ago, how working with plants has always felt restorative to me.”
“Ah, see? That’s the witch in you craving communion with nature. Now once we’ve got that connection going, which is typically enough to summon the four Quarters and move things with our mind, the fun really takes off as we begin our studies in sigils and spellcraft. Most of what we learn during this time hails from the grimoires in our own family libraries.”
“Those are spell books, right?”
“They contain more than just spellcraft. The books are typically hundreds of years old, passed down from generation to generation. Their pages are filled with our bloodline’s history, Sabbat rituals, and the family deities—written right alongside crystal uses, incantations, and the medicinal and metaphysical properties of herbs and plants. Every family has their own grimoire, but each witch is encouraged to create their own book eventually, since spellcraft can be highly personal.”
“Do you and your brothers have your own books?”
“We do, though Jack’s is the most involved. He’s always been the more studious among us, always reading and learning as much as he can. Me? Not so much. I rely mostly on the abilities we all have. And on my Mastery as well.”
Right. Masteries. I’d almost completely forgotten about that part. “And what is your Mastery?”
He put his hand to his heart. “I’m scandalized, Scarlet Ibis. It’s considered rather uncouth to ask a witch what their Mastery is, you know.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
He winked at me, his eyes sparkling. “Ah, I’m only slagging you. I’ve never been one to follow the rules. I’m a Wayfarer. I can cast myself to any destination I please, provided I’ve been there before.”
“Like teleportation.”
“A handy trick to have in your back pocket should you ever find yourself between a rock and a hard place.”
Considering Lucas’s penchant for playing pranks at St. Andrew’s, I could see how such a Mastery worked to his benefit. It was hard to get caught red-handed when you could simply vanish into thin air and appear somewhere else.
“Rory here,” he said, nodding to the youngest Connelly, who hadn’t spoken a single word to me yet and was presently sketching away on a napkin, “is a Binder. He can bind himself to someone’s or something’s life force. It’s a rare Mastery but an extremely helpful one. Binders in the past have typically worked with Healers. They could hold onto a person’s or animal’s life force to keep them alive while the Healer worked, letting the injured party borrow some of their energy, so to speak.”
“What about Connor?”
“Connor’s a Revisionist. He can read a person’s memories and revise them as he sees fit. Or steal them straight out of your mind altogether.”
“That’s horrible.”
Lucas laughed. “And yet it makes me think of all the things I could get away with if I were a Revisionist. Mastery envy: it’s a real thing.” He smiled, gathering the deck of cards and tucking them into a pocket of his jacket. “Don’t even get me started on my uncle’s Mastery. He’s a Shapeshifter. He can assume any man or woman’s likeness just by thinking it. The fun I’d have with an ability like that.”
With all his talk about family in the past few minutes alone, Lucas had made no mention of his mother or father once. At Crowmarsh, I hadn’t seen any pictures of the boys with their parents either, though I’d happened upon an oil painting with the name Maurice engraved on a gold plate at the bottom of the frame. The painting had rendered him as a tall, slender, and dignified elderly man. But what had become of Mr. and Mrs. Connelly? Had tragedy struck them, giving the rumor mill more coal for its fire?
“And Jack?” I asked.
The light in Lucas’s eyes dimmed the slightest bit. “Jack has more than one Mastery actually.”
“Is that common?”
Lucas shrugged. “It’s not uncommon. Sometimes a witch might stumble upon a second or third Mastery later on in life. But Jack has more Masteries than anyone living or dead has ever had, making him the most powerful witch to ever be born into one of the seven clans of Ireland.
“Of course, it’s helped he’s been nurturing his magic since he was yea high.” He brought his palm to a height of about two or three feet. “He and Maurice were two peas in a pod. They’d spend hours talking magic together. It’s one of the reasons Maurice’s death has hit him so hard. When the rest of us returned to St. Andrew’s after our leave of bereavement, Jack couldn’t bring himself to do the same. He was still a bit of a mess. We offered to hang back with him—I certainly wasn’t going to object to getting to bunk off school a few more days—but it was clear he wanted to process everything on his own.”
I watched Jack, imagining the relationship he must’ve had with his grandfather, how much he’d still had left to learn about magic from the man. Unfortunately, he hadn’t been able to protect Maurice with a spelled tea the way he had for my dad. He’d known nothing about the sluagh attacks until he’d begun looking further into his grandfather’s death. I was sure that had to weigh on him.
“Nonetheless,” Lucas continued, “Jack isn’t overly fond of discussing his Masteries, so I’d better stop while I’m ahead.”
“Why does he feel that way?”
“Shame, I suppose.”
My forehead wrinkled. “He’s ashamed of being so powerful?”
“Ironic, isn’t it? You’d think someone as powerful as Jack would have admirers far and wide among witch-kind. Unfortunately, he’s experienced quite the opposite. For Jack, the world couldn’t be any more of a lonely place.”
It was nearly dusk as we hiked through a forest twenty minutes outside of Killarney. From the moment I’d stepped out of the car, the unmistakable odor of burning wood invaded my nostrils. Because we were flanked on either side by soaring trees, I couldn’t see any actual smoke.
“Where’s that smell coming from?”
“There’s a lumber mill a few miles from here,” Jack had explained. “It must be them.”
As we continued our trek, the mesquite-like smell stayed with us, hanging heavily in the air. The surrounding nature was mostly quiet, save for the occasional chirping of insects or the distant call of an owl. Now and then, something stirred in the underbrush as we passed, and I found myself staring at the duffel bag Connor carried, hoping the boys had packed something with which to fend off predators.
We followed a stream that curved this way and that between the trees like a string of blue thread. The deeper into the forest we journeyed, the darker and cooler it became. I pulled my cardigan closer, shivering. The smell was even more pervasive now. I guessed we were getting closer to the lumber mill. I coughed once, twice. I couldn’t imagine how The Wise Ones made this place their home.
“How much farther
away is the…temple, is it?” I couldn’t imagine what else would be tucked away so deep in a forest like this.
Jack and Connor exchanged a look.
My heart stalled. “What is it?”
“The Wise Ones aren’t going to be what you’re expecting,” Jack said. “They don’t live in a brick-and-mortar temple. They live in what we refer to as a sacred grove. In ancient times, it was a place in the forest where druids could perform holy ceremonies and rituals.”
So The Wise Ones were basically off-the-grid holy people who lived off the land. It didn’t sound too crazy. I imagined what their non-temple might look like. A giant treehouse perhaps? A cave?
We finally cleared a thick wall of trees and stepped into a clearing.
And then we froze.
Up ahead, there was smoke everywhere, its long, dark fingers curling around trees as if to strangle them. Just beyond the smoke was a glimmer of red, yellow, and orange.
Fire.
Jack broke off at a run, the others right on his heels. I did my best to keep pace with them, covering my nose and mouth to guard against the smoke.
Finally, we reached another clearing, this one much bigger than the one before. A circle of trees took up the majority of the space, an outer band of massive stones similar to the menhirs encircling them. At the center of the ring of trees was a giant oak that had to be over a thousand years old. Something about it gave you the distinct impression it had quietly observed more history than anyone could ever know. As had the trees surrounding it, each ancient looking and otherworldly in their own way.
And that’s when I realized it.
These were the The Wise Ones.
And they were on fire.
18
Jack and his brothers tried to control the fire, but it wouldn’t heed their demands. Then they summoned water from the neighboring stream and cast it upon the trees in a rushing tidal wave, but the flames were impossibly unresponsive. Again and again, Jack sent one crash of water after another, and every time, the fire hissed but refused to be extinguished.
There was nothing we could do but watch in horror as the fire raged on. Its flames were blinding, brilliant, and scorching hot as they rose skyward like so many yellow tongues, devouring the trees completely with an insatiable appetite. The smoke was thickest here, and I choked on its fumes, coughs sputtering out of me.
I was about to tell the boys we needed to flee before the fire spread, but then I noticed the flames were contained within the ring of stones and touched nothing else in the forest, as if they’d been intended for The Wise Ones alone. Seconds later, the flames abated, steadily shrinking back until they disappeared altogether as if snuffed out by an invisible force. The remaining embers glowed brightly, and then dimmed, and then went black. The smoke cleared. All around us, the forest stilled.
The Wise Ones.
Jack had spoken of them with such reverence. Now they were nothing but charred fragments reaching deep into a scorched earth. They had the look of trees that had been struck by lightning. Black and dead. It was like staring at a forest of charcoal.
Jack staggered forward a few steps and then fell to his knees, unable to take his eyes off The Wise Ones. The sight pinched my heart. This fire, to Jack and his brothers, was the equivalent of someone burning down a place of worship, a most holy temple.
There was a deep sadness in the air that was inescapable. It was heavy and thick, like moving through molasses. I strayed to the remains of an ash tree, pressing my palm to its blackened, still-warm bark. Then I closed my eyes, trying to focus on connecting with the tree the way Lucas had talked about in the tavern.
I wanted to provide it with some kind of solace. I wanted it to know it wasn’t alone in these final moments, that while we’d come in search of truth, we’d now be paying our respects. I furrowed my brow, focusing harder and harder until I gave myself a headache. I thought there was a prickle along my fingers, a faint buzz, but I could’ve just as easily imagined it.
Sighing, I studied the other blackened trees, reaching out to them with my heart. There was a willow tree across the way. Beside it, a birch. A rowan tree, an alder tree, a hawthorn tree.
My lips must’ve been silently counting the trees because from beside me, a light and satiny voice said, “Thirteen.”
My shoulders jumped. Rory. I hadn’t heard him speak once since first meeting him in pre-calculus. “What?”
“The Wise Ones. There were thirteen of them. The Celtic year is broken into thirteen months. A month for each tree.”
Even though he was mere steps away, I had to strain to hear him, so softly did he speak. His words were like a whisper in the wind. “Can you still feel them?” I asked. If Rory could bind his life force to that of another living thing’s, perhaps he could yet sense something from the trees.
Rory’s eyes were distant, his face vacuumed of any and all emotion. The face of numbness. I knew it well. I’d seen it plenty of times in the mirror in the wake of my mom’s death.
“They’re already fading,” he said, so gently that I wasn’t sure if he was only speaking to himself. His eyes stared at nothing in particular, blank and unfocused. “There wasn’t enough for me to hold on to.”
“I found something!” Lucas called out then. He was a few yards west of the sacred grove.
When we gathered around him and looked down at the spot in the ground he was pointing to, my heart seized up as a chill touched every bone in my body from head to toe. Someone had burned a symbol into the earth. Six feet long and four feet wide, the last of its embers were still glimmering like sinister eyes.
“A demon’s mark,” I said, unable to hide the tremor in my voice. The symbol was similar to the one on Jack’s wrist, though within this one’s circle, there was an inverted triangle with a Greek cross drawn over it.
“Someone summoned a demon to burn down The Wise Ones,” Connor said.
“Why wouldn’t they just do it themselves?” I asked.
“The grove is filled with immense supernatural power. Only a supernatural creature with an equal amount of power would be able to overcome it.”
“But how would the hunters know about this place?” As soon as the words left my lips, though, the answer came to me. Back in Crowmarsh, Seamus had mentioned only a witch could summon and control supernatural creatures. “The witch who’s working with them. But why remove The Wise Ones from the equation?”
“They must’ve known someone would eventually come here or go to The Council for answers. They want to leave us in the dark so that we’re not able to recover the stolen souls in time.”
“So what do we do now?”
All eyes switched to Jack, but Jack looked every bit as helpless and lost as the rest of us. After a moment, he opened his mouth to respond, but before he could get a word out, there came a moan from somewhere in the forest, from the mouth of a creature that seemed to be in pain.
I stilled, scanning the nearby trees and underbrush. The last remaining daylight had faded quickly. It wouldn’t be long before we could barely see a few feet in front of us.
“We should head back to the car,” I suggested.
The moan came again, this time louder.
Then a body zipped past me at the same time Connor called out, “Jack, wait!”
Jack, of course, didn’t wait. We charged after him, following his flight across the cold stream, a series of splashes filling the air one after another, and then through hanging vines that got tangled in my hair and thickets that scratched my arms and face until we cleared a wall of shrubs and stumbled upon a most peculiar sight.
The pale moonlight illuminated a haggard and disheveled old man sitting against a tree in a threadbare, brown cloak. He was pale, almost ashen, with hollow cheeks, sunken eyes, and a gaping, toothless mouth. He looked like a walking corpse, his skin spotted with signs of age. I wasn’t even entirely sure he was human. He had matted and thinning white hair and a coarse beard that fell to his bare chest, the skin there pulled as t
aut as violin strings against his exposed ribs. His fingernails were so long they curved in on themselves. They were yellow and caked with dust.
Jack moved quickly, striding to Connor to relieve him of the duffel bag. He rummaged through its contents frantically before finally pulling out a leather pouch that clinked in his hands. He poured a handful of ancient-looking, gold coins onto his palm. Then he knelt in front of the old man as if genuflecting before royalty and transferred the coins into a rusty tin cup the man was holding. Jack was paying him alms.
At first, nothing happened. I looked between Jack’s brothers, but their gazes were steady on the beggar in anticipation. The old man closed his eyes then, and I was sure he’d fallen asleep.
Except he hadn’t. He was murmuring something. And when he finished, he stretched out a trembling arm and touched the top of Jack’s bowed head, like a king granting favor to a newly dubbed knight. Then he brought his hand to the mouth of the tin cup, murmuring again in a language I couldn’t place.
As he slowly raised that hand, the coins within the cup levitated as if he were pulling them upward on invisible strings. Though the skies above were darkening, the coins shone brilliantly, pirouetting in the air in dazzling sparks. The old man rotated his hand so that his palm was facing up, and the coins gathered above it in a mini cyclone of gold until they merged into a radiant ball of light. The light intensified and became so bright I had to momentarily shield my eyes as it flared like a sunburst.
Then the light vanished, and I uncovered my eyes. The coins were gone, and in their place was a seed. The old man shoveled away some dirt in the ground and buried the seed deep within the earth. He cupped his hands around the newly turned soil and whispered, as if speaking directly to the seed, coaxing it. As he did this, a vein of blue slid across the earth, heading straight for the seed. It was a branch off the main stream, seemingly summoned by the old man, who sat back against his tree, saying no more.
