A Discovery of Witches: A Novel (All Souls Trilogy)

by Deborah Harkness

  “Later,” he said, leaning into me. I leaned toward him, pressing our shoulders closer.

  “No amount of coffee is going to keep Sarah from freaking out when she hears.” I put my hand on the banister and levered myself to my feet with a sigh. “Let’s try this again.”

  In the family room, Em brought me my first cup of tea. I sipped it on the couch while Matthew and Marcus headed off for their walk with my silent blessing. They should spend as much time as possible together before we left.

  After my tea Sarah made me her famous scrambled eggs. They were laden with onions, mushrooms, and cheese and topped with a spoonful of salsa. She put a steaming plate before me.

  “Thanks, Sarah.” I dove in without further ceremony.

  “It’s not just Matthew who needs food and rest.” She glanced out the window to the orchard, where the two vampires were walking.

  “I feel much better today,” I said, crunching a bite of toast.

  “Your appetite seems to have recovered, at least.” There was already a sizable dent in the mountain of eggs.

  When Matthew and Marcus returned, I was on my second plate of food. They both appeared grim, but Matthew shook his head at my curious look.

  Apparently they hadn’t been talking about our plans to timewalk. Something else had put them into a sour mood. Matthew pulled up a stool, flapped open the paper, and concentrated on the news. I ate my eggs and toast, made more tea, and bided my time while Sarah washed and put away the dishes.

  At last Matthew folded his paper and set it aside.

  “I’d like to go to the woods. To where Juliette died,” I announced.

  He got to his feet. “I’ll pull the Range Rover to the door.”

  “This is madness, Matthew. It’s too soon.” Marcus turned to Sarah for support.

  “Let them go,” Sarah said. “Diana should put on warmer clothes first, though. It’s chilly outside.”

  Em appeared, a puzzled expression on her face. “Are we expecting visitors? The house thinks we are.”

  “You’re joking!” I said. “The house hasn’t added a room since the last family reunion. Where is it?”

  “Between the bathroom and the junk room.” Em pointed at the ceiling. I told you this wasn’t just about you and Matthew, she said silently to me as we trooped upstairs to view the transformation. My premonitions are seldom wrong.

  The newly materialized room held an ancient brass bed with enormous polished balls capping each corner, tatty red gingham curtains that Em insisted were coming down immediately, a hooked rug in clashing shades of maroon and plum, and a battered washstand with a chipped pink bowl and pitcher. None of us recognized a single item.

  “Where did it all come from?” Miriam asked in amazement.

  “Who knows where the house keeps this stuff?” Sarah sat on the bed and bounced on it vigorously. It responded with a series of outraged squeaks.

  “The house’s most legendary feats happened around my thirteenth birthday,” I remembered with a grin. “It came up with a record four bedrooms and a Victorian parlor set.”

  “And twenty-four place settings of Blue Willow china,” Em recalled. “We’ve still got some of the teacups, although most of the bigger pieces disappeared again once the family left.”

  After everybody had inspected the new room and the now considerably smaller storage room next door, I changed and made my halting way downstairs and into the Range Rover. When we drew close to the spot where Juliette had met her end, Matthew stopped. The heavy tires sank into the soft ground.

  “Shall we walk the rest of the way?” he suggested. “We can take it slowly.”

  He was different this morning. He wasn’t coddling me or telling me what to do.

  “What’s changed?” I asked as we approached the ancient oak tree.

  “I’ve seen you fight,” he said quietly. “On the battlefield the bravest men collapse in fear. They simply can’t fight, even to save themselves.”

  “But I froze.” My hair tumbled forward to conceal my face.

  Matthew stopped in his tracks, his fingers tightening on my arm to make me stop, too. “Of course you did. You were about to take a life. But you don’t fear death.”

  “No.” I’d lived with death—sometimes longed for it—since I was seven.

  He swung me around to face him. “After La Pierre, Satu left you broken and uncertain. All your life you’ve hidden from your fears. I wasn’t sure you would be able to fight if you had to. Now all I have to do is keep you from taking unnecessary risks.” His eyes drifted to my neck.

  Matthew moved forward, towing me gently along. A smudge of blackened grass told me we’d arrived at the clearing. I stiffened, and he released my arm.

  The marks left by the fire led to the dead patch where Juliette had fallen. The forest was eerily quiet, without birdcalls or other sounds of life. I gathered a bit of charred wood from the ground. It crumbled to soot in my fingers.

  “I didn’t know Juliette, but at that moment I hated her enough to kill her.” Her brown-and-green eyes would always haunt me from shadows under the trees.

  I traced the line left by the arc of conjured fire to where the maiden and the crone had agreed to help me save Matthew. I looked up into the oak tree and gasped.

  “It began yesterday.” Matthew followed my gaze. “Sarah says you pulled the life out of it.”

  Above me the branches of the tree were cracked and withered. Bare limbs forked and forked again into shapes reminiscent of a stag’s horns. Brown leaves swirled at my feet. Matthew had survived because I’d pushed its vitality through my veins and into his body. The oak’s rough bark had exuded such permanence, yet there was nothing now but hollowness.

  “Power always exacts a price,” Matthew said.

  “What have I done?” The death of a tree was not going to settle my debt to the goddess. For the first time, I was afraid of the deal I’d struck.

  Matthew crossed the clearing and caught me up in his arms. We hugged each other, fierce with the knowledge of all we’d almost lost.

  “You promised me you would be less reckless.” There was anger in his voice.

  I was angry with him, too. “You were supposed to be indestructible.”

  He rested his forehead against mine. “I should have told you about Juliette.”

  “Yes, you should have. She almost took you from me.” My pulse throbbed behind the bandage on my neck. Matthew’s thumb settled against the spot where he’d bitten through flesh and muscle, his touch unexpectedly warm.

  “It was far too close.” His fingers were wrapped in my hair, and his mouth was hard on mine. Then we stood, hearts pressed together, in the quiet.

  “When I took Juliette’s life, it made her part of mine—forever.”

  Matthew stroked my hair against my skull. “Death is its own powerful magic.”

  Calm again, I said a silent word of thanks to the goddess, not only for Matthew’s life but for my own.

  We walked toward the Range Rover, but halfway there I stumbled with fatigue. Matthew swung me onto his back and carried me the rest of the way.

  Sarah was bent over her desk in the office when we arrived at the house. She flew outside and pulled open the car door with speed a vampire might envy.

  “Damn it, Matthew,” she said, looking at my exhausted face.

  Together they got me inside and back onto the family-room couch, where I rested my head in Matthew’s lap. I was lulled to sleep by the quiet sounds of activity all around, and the last thing I remembered clearly was the smell of vanilla and the sound of Em’s battered KitchenAid mixer.

  Matthew woke me for lunch, which turned out to be vegetable soup. The look on his face suggested that I would shortly need sustenance. He was about to tell our families the plan.

  “Ready, mon coeur?” Matthew asked. I nodded, scraping up the last of my meal. Marcus’s head swiveled in our direction. “We have something to share with you,” he announced.

  The new household tradition
was to proceed to the dining room whenever something important needed to be discussed. Once we were assembled, all eyes turned to Matthew.

  “What have you decided?” Marcus asked without preamble.

  Matthew took a deliberate breath and began. “We need to go where it won’t be easy for the Congregation to follow, where Diana will have time and teachers who can help her master her magic.”

  Sarah laughed under her breath. “Where is this place, where there are powerful, patient witches who don’t mind having a vampire hanging around?”

  “It’s not a particular place I have in mind,” Matthew said cryptically. “We’re going to hide Diana in time.”

  Everyone started shouting at once. Matthew took my hand in his.

  “Courage,” I murmured in French, repeating his advice when I met Ysabeau.

  He snorted and gave me a grim smile.

  I had some sympathy for their amazed disbelief. Last night, while I was lying in bed, my own reaction had been much the same. First I’d insisted that it was impossible, and then I’d asked for a thousand details about precisely when and where we were going.

  He’d explained what he could—which wasn’t much.

  “You want to use your magic, but now it’s using you. You need a teacher, one who is more adept than Sarah or Emily. It’s not their fault they can’t help you. Witches in the past were different. So much of their knowledge has been lost.”

  “Where? When?” I’d whispered in the dark.

  “Nothing too distant—though the more recent past has its own risks—but back far enough that we’ll find a witch to train you. First we have to talk to Sarah about whether it can be done safely. And then we need to locate three items to steer us to the right time.”

  “We?” I’d asked in surprise. “Won’t I just meet you there?”

  “Not unless there’s no alternative. I wasn’t the same creature then, and I wouldn’t entirely trust my past selves with you.”

  His mouth had softened with relief after I nodded in agreement. A few days ago, he’d rejected the idea of timewalking. Apparently the risks of staying put were even worse.

  “What will the others do?”

  His thumb traveled slowly over the veins on the back of my hand. “Miriam and Marcus will go back to Oxford. The Congregation will look for you here first. It would be best if Sarah and Emily went away, at least for a little while. Would they go to Ysabeau?” Matthew wondered.

  On the surface it had sounded like a ridiculous idea. Sarah and Ysabeau under the same roof? The more I’d considered it, though, the less implausible it seemed.

  “I don’t know,” I’d mused. Then a new worry had surfaced. “Marcus.” I didn’t fully understand the intricacies of the Knights of Lazarus, but with Matthew gone he would have to shoulder even more responsibility.

  “There’s no other way,” Matthew had said in the darkness, quieting me with a kiss.

  This was precisely the point that Em now wanted to argue.

  “There must be another way,” she protested.

  “I tried to think of one, Emily,” Matthew said apologetically.

  “Where—or should I say when—are you planning on going? Diana won’t exactly blend into the background. She’s too tall.” Miriam looked down at her own tiny hands.

  “Regardless of whether Diana could fit in, it’s too dangerous,” Marcus said firmly. “You might end up in the middle of a war. Or an epidemic.”

  “Or a witch-hunt.” Miriam didn’t say it maliciously, but three heads swung around in indignation nonetheless.

  “Sarah, what do you think?” asked Matthew.

  Of all the creatures in the room, she was the calmest. “You’ll take her to a time when she’ll be with witches who will help her?”

  “Yes.”

  Sarah closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them. “You two aren’t safe here. Juliette Durand proved that. And if you aren’t safe in Madison, you aren’t safe anywhere.”

  “Thank you.” Matthew opened his mouth to say something else, and Sarah held up her hand.

  “Don’t promise me anything,” she said, voice tight. “You’ll be careful for her sake, if not for your own.”

  “Now all we have to worry about is the timewalking.” Matthew turned businesslike. “Diana will need three items from a particular time and place in order to move safely.”

  Sarah nodded.

  “Do I count as a thing?” he asked her.

  “Do you have a pulse? Of course you’re not a thing!” It was one of the most positive statements Sarah had ever made about vampires.

  “If you need old stuff to guide your way, you’re welcome to these.” Marcus pulled a thin leather cord from the neck of his shirt and lifted it over his head. It was festooned with a bizarre assortment of items, including a tooth, a coin, a lump of something that shone black and gold, and a battered silver whistle. He tossed it to Matthew.

  “Didn’t you get this off a yellow-fever victim?” Matthew asked, fingering the tooth.

  “In New Orleans,” Marcus replied. “The epidemic of 1819.”

  “New Orleans is out of the question,” Matthew said sharply.

  “I suppose so.” Marcus slid a glance my way, then returned his attention to his father. “How about Paris? One of Fanny’s earbobs is on there.”

  Matthew’s fingers touched a tiny red stone set in gold filigree. “Philippe and I sent you away from Paris, and Fanny, too. They called it the Terror, remember? It’s no place for Diana.”

  “The two of you fussed over me like old women. I’d been in one revolution already. Besides, if you’re looking for a safe place in the past, you’ll have a hell of a time finding one,” Marcus grumbled. His face brightened. “Philadelphia?”

  “I wasn’t in Philadelphia with you, or in California,” Matthew said hastily before his son could speak. “It would be best if we head for a time and place I know.”

  “Even if you know where we’re going, Matthew, I’m not sure I can pull this off.” My decision to stay clear of magic had caught up with me again.

  “I think you can,” Sarah said bluntly, “you have been doing it your whole life. When you were a baby, as a child when you played hide-and-seek with Stephen, and as an adolescent, too. Remember all those mornings we dragged you out of the woods and had to clean you up in time for school? What do you imagine you were doing then?”

  “Certainly not timewalking,” I said truthfully. “The science of this still worries me. Where does this body go when I’m somewhere else?”

  “Who knows? But don’t worry. It’s happened to everybody. You drive to work and don’t remember how you got there. Or the whole afternoon passes and you don’t have a clue what you did. Whenever something like that happens, you can bet there’s a timewalker nearby,” explained Sarah. She was remarkably unfazed at the prospect.

  Matthew sensed my apprehension and took my hand in his. “Einstein said that all physicists were aware that the distinctions between past, present, and future were only what he called ‘a stubbornly persistent illusion.’ Not only did he believe in marvels and wonders, he also believed in the elasticity of time.”

  There was a tentative knock at the door.

  “I didn’t hear a car,” Miriam said warily, rising to her feet.

  “It’s just Sammy collecting the newspaper money.” Em slid from her chair.

  We waited silently while she crossed the hall, the floorboards protesting under her feet. From the way their hands were pressed flat against the table’s wooden surface, Matthew and Marcus were both ready to fly to the door, too.

  Cold air swept into the dining room.

  “Yes?” Em asked in a puzzled voice. In an instant, Marcus and Matthew rose and joined her, accompanied by Tabitha, who was intent on supporting the leader of the pack in his important business.

  “Not the paperboy,” Sarah said unnecessarily, looking at the empty chair next to me.

  “Are you Diana Bishop?” asked a deep male voice with a
familiar foreign accent of flat vowels accompanied by a slight drawl.

  “No, I’m her aunt,” Em replied.

  “Is there something we can do for you?” Matthew sounded cold, though polite.

  “My name is Nathaniel Wilson, and this is my wife, Sophie. We were told we might find Diana Bishop here.”

  “Who told you that?” Matthew asked softly.

  “His mother—Agatha.” I stood, moving to the door.

  His voice reminded me of the daemon from Blackwell’s, the fashion designer from Australia with the beautiful brown eyes.

  Miriam tried to bar my way into the hall but stepped aside when she saw my expression. Marcus was not so easily dealt with. He grabbed my arm and held me in the shadows by the staircase.

  Nathaniel’s eyes nudged gently against my face. He was in his early twenties and had familiar fair hair and chocolate-colored eyes, as well as his mother’s wide mouth and fine features. Where Agatha had been compact and trim, however, he was nearly as tall as Matthew, with the broad shoulders and narrow hips of a swimmer. An enormous backpack was slung over one shoulder.

  “Are you Diana Bishop?” he asked.

  A woman’s face peeped out from Nathaniel’s side. It was sweet and round, with intelligent brown eyes and a dimpled chin. She was in her early twenties as well, and the gentle, insidious pressure of her glance indicated she, too, was a daemon.

  As she studied me, a long, brown braid tumbled over her shoulder. “That’s her,” the young woman said, her soft accent betraying that she was born in the South. “She looks just as she did in my dreams.”

  “It’s all right, Matthew,” I said. These two daemons posed no more danger to me than did Marthe or Ysabeau.

  “So you’re the vampire,” Nathaniel said, giving Matthew an appraising look. “My mother warned me about you.”

  “You should listen to her,” Matthew suggested, his voice dangerously soft.

  Nathaniel seemed unimpressed. “She told me you wouldn’t welcome the son of a Congregation member. But I’m not here on their behalf. I’m here because of Sophie.” He drew his wife under his arm in a protective gesture, and she shivered and crept closer. Neither was dressed for autumn in New York. Nathaniel was wearing an old barn jacket, and Sophie had on nothing warmer than a turtleneck and a hand-knit cardigan that brushed her knees.