by Libba Bray
She retrieves the arrow. “But I didn’t.” She regards Felicity, who is studying her, intrigued and undaunted. “You’re not afraid, I see.”
“No,” Felicity says, retrieving the arrow. She runs her fingers over the sharp point. “Merely curious.”
“Are you a huntress?”
Felicity hands the arrow back. “No. My father used to hunt. He said it was the sport he admired most.”
“But you did not accompany him?”
Felicity’s smile is bitter. “Only sons are allowed to hunt. Not daughters.”
The huntress clasps a hand around Felicity’s upper arm. “There is great strength in this arm. You might prove to be a very skilled huntress. Very powerful.” The word powerful brings a smile to Felicity’s face, and I know she’s going to get what she’s after. “Would you like to learn?”
In answer, Felicity takes the bow and arrow.
“There’s a snake coiled about the limb of that tree,” the huntress says.
Felicity closes one eye and pulls back on the bow with all her might. The arrow soars straight up, then bounces along the ground. Felicity’s cheeks flush with disappointment.
The huntress applauds. “A solid effort. You might be a huntress yet. But first, you must observe.”
Felicity, observe? Perish the thought. Huntress or not, she’s got a tough road ahead of her, teaching Felicity patience. But to my surprise, Felicity doesn’t scoff or argue. She follows the huntress and patiently allows her to demonstrate the proper technique over and over again.
“What did you wish for?” Mother asks me when it’s just the two of us.
“I have what I want. You’re here.”
She strokes my cheek. “Yes. For a little while longer.”
My good mood evaporates. “What do you mean?”
“Gemma, I cannot stay forever, else I could be trapped like one of those wretched lost spirits who never complete their soul’s task.”
“And what is yours?”
“I must set right what Mary and Sarah did so many years ago.”
“What did they do?”
Before Mother can answer, Pippa runs to me, nearly knocking me over in her gushing enthusiasm. She hugs me tightly. “Did you see him? Wasn’t he the most perfect gentleman? He pledged to be my champion! He actually pledged his life for mine! Have you ever heard of anything half so romantic? Can you bear it?”
“Barely,” Felicity says wryly. She’s just returned from her hunt, exhausted but happy. “That’s not as easy as it looks, I can tell you. My arm will ache for a week.”
She moves her shoulder in small circles, wincing a bit. But I know she’s grateful for that aching arm, grateful to have proof of her own hidden strengths.
Ann wanders over, her fine, lank hair curling about her shoulders in new ringlets. Even her perpetual runny nose seems to have cleared. She points to the tall, thin crystals arranged in a circle behind Mother. “What are those?”
“Those are the Runes of the Oracle, the heart of this realm,” Mother says. I stand beside one. “Don’t touch them,” Mother warns.
“Why not?” Felicity asks.
“You must understand how the magic of the realms works first, how to control it, before you can let it live in you and use it on the other side.”
“We can take this sort of power with us to our world?” Ann says.
“Yes, but not yet. Once the Order is reestablished they can teach you. It’s not safe until then.”
“Why not?” I ask.
“It’s been such a long time since the magic here has been used. There’s no telling what could happen. Something could get out. Or come in.”
“They’re humming,” Felicity says.
“Their energy is very powerful,” Mother says, making a cat’s cradle from a skein of golden yarn.
When I tilt my head one way, they seem almost to disappear. But when I turn my head another, I can see them rising up from the ground, more dazzling than diamonds. “How exactly does it work?” I ask.
She snakes her fingers in and out of the yarn. “When you touch the runes, it’s as if you become the magic itself. It flows through your veins. And then you are able to do in the other world what you can do here in the realms.”
Felicity brings her hand ever closer to a rune. “Strange. It stopped humming as I got near.”
I can’t resist. I hold out my hand, not touching it, but near it. I’m seized by a rush of energy. My eyes flutter. The urge to touch the rune is overwhelming.
“Gemma!” Mother barks.
I pull my hand back quickly. My amulet glows. “Wh-what was that?”
“You are the conduit,” Mother explains. “The magic flows through you.”
Felicity’s face clouds over. But an instant later, she’s wearing a ripe smile, thinking some naughty thought. She leans back on her elbows in the grass. “Can you imagine it? If we had this power at Spence?”
“We could do as we wish,” Ann adds.
“I’d have a closet filled with the latest fashions. And bushels of money.” Pippa giggles.
“I’d be invisible for a day,” Felicity adds.
“I wouldn’t be,” Ann says bitterly.
“I could ease Father’s pain.” I glance at Mother. Her eyes narrow.
“No,” she says, unraveling a Jacob’s ladder.
“Why not?” My cheeks are hot.
“We’d be careful,” Pippa adds.
“Yes, terribly careful,” Felicity chimes in, trying to charm Mother as if she were one of our impressionable teachers.
Mother crushes the yarn in her fist. Her eyes flash. “Tapping into this power is not a game. It is hard work. It takes preparation, not the wild curiosity of overeager schoolgirls.”
Felicity is taken aback. I bristle at this comment, at being chided in front of my friends. “We are not overeager.”
Mother places a palm on my arm, gives me a faint smile, and I feel churlish for having acted like such a child. “When it is time.”
Pippa peers carefully at the base of a rune. “What are these markings?”
“It’s an ancient language, older than Greek and Latin.”
“But what does it say?” Ann wants to know.
“‘I change the world; the world changes me.’”
Pippa shakes her head. “What does that mean?”
“Everything you do comes back to you. When you affect a situation, you are also affected.”
“M’lady!” The knight has returned. He’s brought out a lute. Soon, he’s serenading Pippa with a song about her beauty and virtue.
“Isn’t he perfection? I think I shall die from happiness. I want to dance—come with me!” Pippa pulls Ann after her toward the dashing knight, forgetting all about the runes.
Felicity brushes herself off and trails behind them. “Are you coming?”
“I’ll be there in a moment,” I call after her.
Mother resumes her meticulous yarn architecture. Her fingers fly, then stop. She closes her eyes and gasps, as if she’s been wounded.
“Mother, what’s the matter? Are you all right? Mother!”
When she opens her eyes, she’s breathing hard. “It takes so much to keep it away.”
“Keep what away?”
“The creature. It’s still looking for us.”
The dirty-faced girl peers out from behind a tree. She looks at my mother with wide eyes. Mother’s face softens. Her breathing returns to normal. She’s the commanding presence I remember bustling about our house, giving orders and changing place settings at the very last moment. “There is nothing to worry about. I can fool the beast for a while.”
Felicity calls to me. “Gemma, you’re missing out on all the sport.” She and the others are twirling each other about, dancing to the lute and the song.
Mother starts to build a cup and saucer from her yarn. Her hands tremble. “Why don’t you join them? I should like to see you dance. Go on, then, darling.”
Reluctantly, I amb
le toward my friends. Along the way, I spy the girl, still looking at my mother with her frightened eyes. There’s something compelling about the child. Something I feel I should know, though I can’t say what.
“It’s time to dance!” Felicity takes both my hands in hers, twirling me around. Mother applauds us in our jig. The knight strums the lute faster and faster, egging us on. We’re picking up speed, our hair flying, hands tight on each other’s wrists.
“Whatever you do, don’t let go!” Felicity shrieks, as our bodies lean back in defiance of gravity till we’re nothing more than a great blur of color on the landscape.
The sky is a softer shade of night by the time we return to our rooms. Dawn is mere hours away. Tomorrow we’ll have the devil to pay.
“Your mother is lovely,” Ann says as she slips under her covers.
“Thank you,” I whisper, running a brush through my hair. The dancing—and the subsequent fall in the grass—has left it tangled beyond hope, like my thoughts.
“I don’t remember my mother at all. Do you think that’s terrible?”
“No,” I say.
Ann is nearly asleep, her words a low mumble. “I wonder if she remembers me. . . .”
I start to answer but I don’t know what to say to that. And anyway, it doesn’t matter. She’s snoring already. I give up on the brushing and slide under my own blankets, only to feel something crackle beneath me. I feel around with my hand and discover a note hidden in the covers. I have to take it to the window to read it.
Miss Doyle,
You are playing a very dangerous game. If you do not stop now, I shall be forced to take action. I am asking you to stop while you can.
There’s another word scribbled hastily, then crossed out.
Please.
He hasn’t signed his name, but I know this is Kartik’s work. I tear the note into tiny pieces. Then I open the window and let the breeze take it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
FOR THREE DAYS, IT’S LIKE THIS. WE HOLD HANDS AND step into our own private paradise, where we are the mistresses of our own lives. Under the tutelage of the huntress, Felicity is becoming an accomplished archer, fleet and unstoppable. Ann’s voice grows stronger every day. And Pippa isn’t quite the pampered princess she was a week ago. She’s kinder, less shrill. The knight listens to her as no one else does. I’ve always been so irritated when Pippa opens her mouth, I haven’t stopped to think she may babble on because she’s afraid she won’t be heard. I vow to give her that chance from now on.
We’re not afraid to grow close to each other here. Our friendships take root and bloom. We wear garlands in our hair, tell naughty jokes, laugh and shout, confess our fears and our hopes. We even belch without restraint. There’s no one around to stifle us. No one to tell us that what we think and feel is wrong. It isn’t that we do what we want. It’s that we’re allowed to want at all.
“Watch this!” Felicity says. She closes her eyes and in a moment, a warm rain falls from that perpetual sunset. It wets us through to the skin, and it feels delicious.
“Not fair in the least!” Pippa screams, but she’s laughing.
I’ve never felt such lovely rain. Certainly I’ve never been allowed to wallow in it. I want to drink it up, lie in it.
“Aha!” Felicity shouts in triumph. “I made this! I did!”
We screech and run, slipping down into pools of mud and back up again. Coated in muck, we throw handfuls of it at each other. Each time one of us is hit with a great heaping mound of wet earth, we yelp and vow revenge. But truthfully, we’re in love with how it feels to be absolutely filthy, without a care in the world.
“I’m a bit soggy,” Pippa calls after we’ve thoroughly trounced her. She’s covered in mud from head to toe.
“All right, then.” I close my eyes, imagine the hot sun of India, and in seconds, the rain has gone. We’re clean, dry, and pressed, ready for vespers or a social call. Beyond the silver arch, inside their wide circle, the crystal runes stand, their power locked securely inside.
“Wouldn’t it be grand to show them all what we could do?” Ann muses aloud.
I take her hand, and when I do, I notice her wrist has no new marks, only the fading scars of past injuries.
“Yes, it would.”
We sprawl out in the grass, heads together, like a great windmill. And we lie like this for a very long time, I think, holding each other’s hands, feeling our friendship in thumbs and fingers, in the sure, solid warmth of skin, until someone gets the bright idea to make it rain again.
“Tell me again how the magic of the runes works.” I’m lying in the grass next to Mother, watching the clouds in their metamorphoses. A fat, puffy duck is losing the good fight, stretching into something else.
“It works through months and years of training,” Mother responds.
“I know that. But what happens? Do they chant? Speak in tongues? Do the runes sing ‘God Save the Queen’ first?” I’m being saucy, but she’s provoked me.
“Yes. In E flat.”
“Mother!”
“I believe I explained that part.”
“Tell me again.”
“You touch your hands to the runes and the power enters you. It lives inside you for a while.”
“That’s it?”
“The gist, yes. But you first have to know how to control it. It’s influenced by your state of mind, your purpose, your strength. It’s powerful magic. Not to be toyed with. Oh, look, I see an elephant.”
Overhead, the duck blob has become something resembling a blob with a trunk.
“It has only three legs.”
“No, there’s a fourth.”
“Where?”
“It’s right there. You’re just not looking.”
“I am so!” I say, indignant. But it doesn’t matter. The cloud is moving, changing into something else. “How long does the magic last?”
“Depends. For a day. Sometimes less.” She sits up and peers down at me. “But Gemma, you are—”
“Not to use the magic yet. Yes, I believe you mentioned that once or twice.”
Mother is quiet for a moment. “Do you really believe you’re ready?”
“Yes!” I practically shout.
“Take a look at that cloud up there. The one just above us. What do you see?”
I see the outline of ears and a tail. “A kitten.”
“You’re certain?”
She is taxing me. “I do know a kitten when I see one. That doesn’t require any magical powers.”
“Look again,” Mother says.
Above us, the sky is in turmoil. The clouds swirl and crackle with lightning. The kitten is gone and what emerges in its place is a menacing face from a nightmare. It shrieks down toward us till I have to bury my eyes behind my arm.
“Gemma!”
I take my arm away. The sky is calm. The kitten is now a large cat.
“What was that?” I whisper.
“A demonstration,” Mother says. “You have to be able to see what’s really there. Circe will try to make you see a monster when there is only a kitten, and vice versa.”
I’m still shaking. “But it seemed so real.”
She takes my hand in hers and we lie there, not moving. In the distance, Ann is singing an old folk song, something about a lady selling cockles and mussels. It’s a sad song and it makes me feel strange inside. As if I’m losing something but I don’t know what.
“Mother, what if I can’t do this? What if it turns out all wrong?”
The clouds bunch together and thin out. Nothing’s taking shape yet.
“That’s a chance we have to take. Look.”
Above us, the clouds have spread themselves into a wispy ring with no beginning, no end, and in the center is a perfect circle of absolute blue.
On Friday, I receive a surprise visit. My brother is waiting for me in the parlor. A gaggle of girls is inventing reasons to walk past so that they can peek in at him. I close the doors behind me,
cutting Tom off from his admiring flock before my nausea overtakes me.
“Well, if it isn’t my lady Dour!” Tom says, standing. “Have you managed to find me a suitable wife yet? I’m not picky—just someone pretty, quiet, with a small fortune and her own teeth. Actually, I am flexible on all points but the small fortune. Unless, of course, it’s a large one.”
For some reason, the sight of Tom, reliable, snobby, shallow Tom, fills me with good cheer. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed him. I throw my arms around him. He stiffens for a second, then hugs me back.
“Yes, well, they must be treating you like a dog if you’re glad to see me. I must say you’re looking well.”
“I feel well, Tom. Truly.” I want so much to tell him about Mother, but I know I can’t. Not yet. “Have you heard from Grandmother? How’s Father?”
Tom’s smile slips. “Oh, yes. They’re doing well.”
“Will he come for Assembly Day? I can’t wait to see him again, and introduce him to all my friends here.”
“Well, I wouldn’t get my hopes up yet, Gemma. He might not be able to get away just now.” Tom adjusts his cuffs. It’s a nervous habit. Something I’ve begun to realize he does only when he lies.
“I see,” I say quietly.
There’s a knock at the door and Ann pushes through, eyes wide. She’s shocked that I’m in the parlor alone with a man. She covers her eyes with her hand to block her view of us. “Oh, I’m terribly sorry. I only wanted to let Gemma, Miss Doyle, know that we’re ready to practice our waltzing.”
“I can’t just now. I have a visitor.”
Tom stands, relieved. “Don’t neglect your waltzing on my account. I say, are you all right?” He’s squinting at Ann, who is still averting her eyes.
“Oh, for heaven’s sakes,” I mutter under my breath. I make the necessary introductions. “Miss Ann Bradshaw, may I present Mr. Thomas Doyle? My brother. I’ll just show him out and then we can get to our infernal waltzing.”
“That was your brother?” Ann asks shyly while I’m gliding her around the ballroom.
“Yes. The beast himself.” I’m still a bit ruffled by the news about Father. I’d hoped by now he’d be on the mend.
