A Discovery of Witches

by Deborah Harkness

  “The quicker you can do this, the better, Sarah. Not to rush you, of course,” he said hastily. I could easily imagine the look he’d received. “We can talk about Satu later.”

  Every bit of witchcraft Sarah used reminded me of Satu, and having two witches stand behind me made it impossible to keep my thoughts from returning to La Pierre. I burrowed more deeply inside myself for protection and let my mind go numb. Sarah worked more magic. But I could take no more and set my soul adrift.

  “Are you almost done?” Matthew said, his voice taut with concern.

  “There are two marks I can’t do much with. They’ll leave scars. Here,” Sarah said, tracing the lines of a star between my shoulder blades, “and here.” Her fingers moved down to my lower back, moving from rib to rib and scooping down to my waist in between.

  My mind was no longer blank but seared with a picture to match Sarah’s gestures.

  A star hanging above a crescent moon.

  “They suspect, Matthew!” I cried, frozen to the stool with terror. Matthew’s drawerful of seals swam through my memories. They had been hidden so completely, I knew instinctively that the order of knights must be just as deeply concealed. But Satu knew about them, which meant the other witches of the Congregation probably did, too.

  “My darling, what is it?” Matthew pulled me into his arms.

  I pushed against his chest, trying to make him listen. “When I refused to give you up, Satu marked me—with your seal.”

  He turned me inside his arms, protecting as much of my exposed flesh as he could. When he’d seen what was inscribed there, Matthew went still. “They no longer suspect. At last, they know.”

  “What are you talking about?” demanded Sarah.

  “May I have Diana’s shirt, please?”

  “I don’t think the scars will be too bad,” my aunt said somewhat defensively.

  “The shirt.” Matthew’s voice was icy.

  Em tossed it to him. Matthew pulled the sleeves gently over my arms, drawing the edges together in front. He was hiding his eyes, but the vein in his forehead was pulsing.

  “I’m so sorry,” I murmured.

  “You have nothing to be sorry for.” He took my face in his hands. “Any vampire would know you were mine—with or without this brand on your back. Satu wanted to make sure that every other creature knew who you belonged to, as well. When I was reborn, they used to shear the hair from the heads of women who gave their bodies to the enemy. It was a crude way of exposing traitors. This is no different.” He looked away. “Did Ysabeau tell you?”

  “No. I was looking for paper and found the drawer.”

  “What the hell is going on?” Sarah snapped.

  “I invaded your privacy. I shouldn’t have,” I whispered, clutching at his arms.

  He drew away and stared at me incredulously, then crushed me to his chest without any concern for my injuries. Mercifully, Sarah’s witchcraft meant that there was very little pain. “Christ, Diana. Satu told you what I did. I followed you home and broke in to your rooms. Besides, how can I blame you for finding out on your own what I should have told you myself?”

  A thunderclap echoed through the kitchen, setting the pots and pans clanging.

  When the sound had faded into silence, Sarah spoke. “If someone doesn’t tell us what is going on immediately, all hell is going to break loose.” A spell rose to her lips.

  My fingertips tingled, and winds circled my feet. “Back off, Sarah.” The wind roared through my veins, and I stepped between Sarah and Matthew. My aunt kept muttering, and my eyes narrowed.

  Em put her hand on Sarah’s arm in alarm. “Don’t push her. She’s not in control.”

  I could see a bow in my left hand, an arrow in my right. They felt heavy, yet strangely familiar. A few steps away, Sarah was in my sights. Without hesitation, my arms rose and drew apart in preparation to shoot.

  My aunt stopped muttering in midspell. “Holy shit,” she breathed, looking at Em in amazement.

  “Honey, put the fire down.” Em made a gesture of surrender.

  Confused, I reexamined my hands. There was no fire in them.

  “Not inside. If you want to unleash witchfire, we’ll go outside,” said Em.

  “Calm down, Diana.” Matthew pinned my elbows to my sides, and the heaviness associated with the bow and arrow dissolved.

  “I don’t like it when she threatens you.” My voice sounded echoing and strange.

  “Sarah wasn’t threatening me. She just wanted to know what we were talking about. We need to tell her.”

  “But it’s a secret,” I said, confused. We had to keep our secrets—from everyone—whether they involved my abilities or Matthew’s knights.

  “No more secrets,” he said firmly, his breath against my neck. “They’re not good for either of us.” When the winds died down, he spun me tightly against him.

  “Is she always like that? Wild and out of control?” Sarah asked.

  “Your niece did brilliantly,” Matthew retorted, continuing to hold me.

  Sarah and Matthew faced off across the kitchen floor.

  “I suppose,” she admitted with poor grace when their silent battle had concluded, “though you might have told us you could control witchfire, Diana. It’s not exactly a run-of-the-mill ability.”

  “I can’t control anything.” Suddenly I was exhausted and didn’t want to be standing up anymore. My legs agreed and began to buckle.

  “Upstairs,” he said, his tone brooking no argument. “We’ll finish this conversation there.”

  In my parents’ room, after giving me another dose of painkillers and antibiotics, Matthew tucked me into bed. Then he told my aunts more about Satu’s mark. Tabitha condescended to sit on my feet as he did so in order to be closer to the sound of Matthew’s voice.

  “The mark Satu left on Diana’s back belongs to an . . . organization that my family started many years ago. Most people have long forgotten it, and those who haven’t think it doesn’t exist anymore. We like to preserve that illusion. With the star and moon on her back, Satu marked your niece as my property and made it known that the witches had discovered my family’s secret.”

  “Does this secret organization have a name?” Sarah asked.

  “You don’t have to tell them everything, Matthew.” I reached for his hand. There was danger associated with disclosing too much about the Knights of Lazarus. I could feel it, seeping around me like a dark cloud, and I didn’t want it to enfold Sarah and Em, too.

  “The Knights of Lazarus of Bethany.” He said it quickly, as if afraid he’d lose his resolve. “It’s an old chivalric order.”

  Sarah snorted. “Never heard of them. Are they like the Knights of Columbus ? They’ve got a chapter in Oneida.”

  “Not really.” Matthew’s mouth twitched. “The Knights of Lazarus date back to the Crusades.”

  “Didn’t we watch a television program about the Crusades that had an order of knights in it?” Em asked Sarah.

  “The Templars. But all those conspiracy theories are nonsense. There’s no such thing as Templars now,” Sarah said decidedly.

  “There aren’t supposed to be witches and vampires either, Sarah,” I pointed out.

  Matthew reached for my wrist, his fingers cool against my pulse.

  “This conversation is over for the present,” he said firmly. “There’s plenty of time to talk about whether the Knights of Lazarus exist or not.”

  Matthew ushered out a reluctant Em and Sarah. Once my aunts were in the hall, the house took matters into its own hands and shut the door. The lock scraped in the frame.

  “I don’t have a key for that room,” Sarah called to Matthew.

  Unconcerned, Matthew climbed onto the bed, pulling me into the crook of his arm so that my head rested on his heart. Every time I tried to speak, he shushed me into silence.

  “Later,” he kept repeating.

  His heart pulsed once and then, several minutes later, pulsed again.

  Befo
re it could pulse a third time, I was sound asleep.

  Chapter 33

  A combination of exhaustion, medication, and the familiarity of home kept me in bed for hours. I woke on my stomach, one knee bent and arm outstretched, searching vainly for Matthew.

  Too groggy to sit up, I turned my head toward the door. A large key sat in the lock, and there were low voices on the other side. As the muzziness of sleep slowly gave way to awareness, the mumbling became clearer.

  “It’s appalling,” Matthew snapped. “How could you let her go on this way?”

  “We didn’t know about the extent of her power—not absolutely,” Sarah said, sounding equally furious. “She was bound to be different, given her parents. I never expected witchfire, though.”

  “How did you recognize she was trying to call it, Emily?” Matthew softened his voice.

  “A witch on Cape Cod summoned it when I was a child. She must have been seventy,” Em said. “I never forgot what she looked like or what it felt like to be near that kind of power.”

  “Witchfire is lethal. No spell can ward it off, and no witchcraft can heal the burns. My mother taught me to recognize the signs for my own protection—the smell of sulfur, the way a witch’s arms moved,” said Sarah. “She told me that the goddess is present when witchfire is called. I thought I’d go to my grave without witnessing it, and I certainly never expected my niece to unleash it on me in my own kitchen. Witchfire—and witchwater, too?”

  “I hoped the witchfire would be recessive,” Matthew confessed. “Tell me about Stephen Proctor.” Until recently, the authoritative tone he adopted in moments like this had seemed a vestige of his past life as a soldier. Now that I knew about the Knights of Lazarus, I understood it as part of his present, too.

  Sarah was not accustomed to having anyone use that tone with her, however, and she bristled. “Stephen was private. He didn’t flaunt his power.”

  “No wonder the witches went digging to discover it, then.”

  My eyes closed tightly against the sight of my father’s body, opened up from throat to groin so that other witches could understand his magic. His fate had nearly been mine.

  Matthew’s bulk shifted in the hall, and the house protested at the unusual weight. “He was an experienced wizard, but he was no match for them. Diana might have inherited his abilities—and Rebecca’s, too, God help her. But she doesn’t have their knowledge, and without it she’s helpless. She might as well have a target painted on her.”

  I continued eavesdropping shamelessly.

  “She’s not a transistor radio, Matthew,” Sarah said defensively. “Diana didn’t come to us with batteries and an instruction manual. We did the best we could. She became a different child after Rebecca and Stephen were killed, withdrawing so far that no one could reach her. What should we have done? Forced her to face what she was so determined to deny?”

  “I don’t know.” Matthew’s exasperation was audible. “But you shouldn’t have left her like this. That witch held her captive for more than twelve hours.”

  “We’ll teach her what she needs to know.”

  “For her sake, it had better not take too long.”

  “It will take her whole life,” Sarah snapped. “Magic isn’t macramé. It takes time.”

  “We don’t have time,” Matthew hissed. The creaking of the floorboards told me Sarah had taken an instinctive step away from him. “The Congregation has been playing cat-and-mouse games, but the mark on Diana’s back indicates those days are over.”

  “How dare you call what happened to my niece a game?” Sarah’s voice rose.

  “Shh,” Em said. “You’ll wake her.”

  “What might help us understand how Diana is spellbound, Emily?” Matthew was whispering now. “Can you remember anything about the days before Rebecca and Stephen left for Africa—small details, what they were worried about?”

  Spellbound.

  The word echoed in my mind as I slowly drew myself upright. Spellbinding was reserved for extreme circumstances—life-threatening danger, madness, pure and uncontrollable evil. Merely to threaten it earned you the censure of other witches.

  Spellbound?

  By the time I got to my feet, Matthew was at my side. He was frowning. “What do you need?”

  “I want to talk to Em.” My fingers were snapping and turning blue. So were my toes, sticking out of the bandages that protected my ankle. The gauze on my foot snagged an old nail head poking up from the floor’s pine boards as I pushed past him.

  Sarah and Em were waiting on the landing, trepidation on their faces.

  “What’s wrong with me?” I demanded.

  Emily crept into the crook of Sarah’s arm. “There’s nothing wrong with you.”

  “You said I’m spellbound. That my own mother did it.” I was some kind of monster. It was the only possible explanation.

  Emily heard my thoughts as if I’d spoken them aloud. “You’re not a monster, honey. Rebecca did it because she was afraid for you.”

  “She was afraid of me, you mean.” My blue fingers provided an excellent reason for someone to be terrified. I tried to hide them but didn’t want to singe Matthew’s shirt, and resting them on the old wooden stair rail risked setting the whole house on fire.

  Watch the rug, girl! The tall female ghost from the keeping room was peeking around Sarah and Em’s door and pointing urgently at the floor. I lifted my toes slightly.

  “No one is afraid of you.” Matthew stared with frosty intensity at my back, willing me to face him.

  “They are.” I pointed a sparkling finger at my aunts, eyes resolutely in their direction.

  So am I, confessed another dead Bishop, this one a teenage boy with slightly protruding teeth. He was carrying a berry basket and wore a pair of ripped britches.

  My aunts took a step backward as I continued to glare at them.

  “You have every right to be frustrated.” Matthew moved so that he was standing just behind me. The wind rose, and touches of snow from his glance glazed my thighs, too. “Now the witchwind has come because you feel trapped.” He crept closer, and the air around my lower legs increased slightly. “See?”

  Yes, that roiling feeling might be frustration rather than anger. Distracted from the issue of spellbinding, I turned to ask him more about his theories. The color in my fingers was already fading, and the snapping sound was gone.

  “You have to try to understand,” Em pleaded. “Rebecca and Stephen went to Africa to protect you. They spellbound you for the same reason. All they wanted was for you to be safe.”

  The house moaned through its timbers and held its breath, its old wooden joists creaking.

  Coldness spread through me from the inside out.

  “Is it my fault they died? They went to Africa and someone killed them—because of me?” I looked at Matthew in horror.

  Without waiting for an answer, I made my way blindly to the stairs, unconcerned with the pain in my ankle or anything else except fleeing.

  “No, Sarah. Let her go,” Matthew said sharply.

  The house opened all the doors before me and slammed them behind as I went through the front hall, the dining room, the family room, and into the kitchen. A pair of Sarah’s gardening boots slipped over my bare feet, their rubber surfaces cold and smooth. Once outside, I did what I’d always done when the family was too much for me and went into the woods.

  My feet didn’t slow until I had made it through the scraggy apple trees and into the shadows cast by the ancient white oaks and sugar maples. Out of breath and shaking with shock and exhaustion, I found myself at the foot of an enormous tree almost as wide as it was tall. Low, sprawling branches nearly touched the ground, their red and purple deeply lobed leaves standing out against the ashy bark.

  All through my childhood and adolescence, I’d poured out my heart-break and loneliness underneath its limbs. Generations of Bishops had found the same solace here and carved their initials into the tree. Mine were gouged with a penknife nex
t to the “RB” my mother had left before me, and I traced their curves before curling up in a ball near the rough trunk and rocking myself like a child.

  There was a cool touch on my hair before the blue parka settled over my shoulders. Matthew’s solid frame lowered to the ground, his back scraping against the tree’s bark.

  “Did they tell you what’s wrong with me?” My voice was muffled against my legs.

  “There’s nothing wrong with you, mon coeur.”

  “You have a lot to learn about witches.” I rested my chin on my knees but still wouldn’t look at him. “Witches don’t spellbind someone without a damn good reason.”

  Matthew was quiet. I slid a sidelong glance in his direction. His legs were just visible from the corner of my eye—one stretched forward and the other bent—as was a long, white hand. It was draped loosely over his knee.

  “Your parents had a damn good reason. They were saving their daughter’s life.” His voice was quiet and even, but there were stronger emotions underneath. “It’s what I would have done.”

  “Did you know I was spellbound, too?” It wasn’t possible for me to keep from sounding accusatory.

  “Marthe and Ysabeau figured it out. They told me just before we left for La Pierre. Emily confirmed their suspicions. I hadn’t had a chance to tell you.”

  “How could Em keep this from me?” I felt betrayed and alone, just as I had when Satu told me about what Matthew had done.

  “You must forgive your parents and Emily. They were doing what they thought was best—for you.”

  “You don’t understand, Matthew,” I said, shaking my head stubbornly. “My mother tied me up and went to Africa as if I were an evil, deranged creature who couldn’t be trusted.”

  “Your parents were worried about the Congregation.”

  “That’s nonsense.” My fingers tingled, and I pushed the feeling back toward my elbows, trying to control my temper. “Not everything is about the damn Congregation, Matthew.”

  “No, but this is. You don’t have to be a witch to see it.”

  My white table appeared before me without warning, events past and present scattered on its surface. The puzzle pieces began to arrange themselves: my mother chasing after me while I clapped my hands and flew over the linoleum floor of our kitchen in Cambridge, my father shouting at Peter Knox in his study at home, a bedtime story about a fairy godmother and magical ribbons, both my parents standing over my bed saying spells and working magic while I lay quietly on top of the quilt. The pieces clicked into place, and the pattern emerged.