A Sword in the Sun

by Shannon Page

  And trying to move covertly. That too, of course. So, okay, yeah, I suppose I was avoiding witchkind.

  Messages filtered through the æther to me, along my way. Jeremy’s was first, followed in due course by one from Leonora, and then a message from my mom. Nothing from Gregorio, which I tried really hard not to worry about. One from Sebastian surprised me; he of all people knew what I was up to, and that I wasn’t likely to answer, but he sent me one all the same. I hope it’s going well. Everything’s fine here.

  I tried to parse that, turning it around looking for hidden meanings, secret messages. If there was one there, it was hidden from me too. Eventually I decided he must just have been telling me that, well, everything was fine there.

  I reached the east coast four days after I set out, exhausted and drained. I was already realizing that my “I’ll be back in two weeks” thought was hopelessly optimistic. Naïve. Well, I’d never traveled before; what did I know? I’d known that I was unusually powerful, and young and healthy. I’d assumed the regular rules didn’t apply to me.

  Story of my life. Ha. Ha.

  I sat in a little coffee shop in St. John’s, a town at the tip of Newfoundland and as close to the European continent as I could get without actually getting wet. Sadly, it was time to get wet.

  Not literally. But…now it was the time to choose my undersea ley line route.

  I sipped my tea (oh Canadian tea was so much better than American tea, must be their English influence) and pondered it. From what I understood, the usual route was to make the biggest jump at first, crossing from here to the Azores, then resting up a day or two, then making the rest of the journey to mainland Portugal and on up the continent.

  But what if I went north? Northern Canada to Greenland to Iceland (or maybe even Svalbard?), then a jump to Norway and through Finland and on down? Much shorter underwater distances that way. From where I sat to the Azores was almost 1,400 miles.

  Terrifying.

  The trouble was, it was November. Already the days were very short and very cold. The farther north I went, the worse that would get. I could save myself the stress and strain of undersea ley line travel only to perish from freezing to death. My pampered little California witch-body was not meant for these temperatures.

  I sighed and ordered another cup of tea. There was clearly a reason everyone took the southern route. I just needed to buckle down and do it.

  We ended up spending three nights in St. John’s, resting and preparing and building up as much strength as possible. I relaxed my guard a tiny bit and sought out the local witches. It was the only way I’d get access to their botanical resources—or even learn where their community garden was.

  A middle-aged witch named Elsie (it had to be a nickname for something, unless Canadian witches did things even more differently from us than I’d imagined) invited me to her coven’s evening meal on my second night. They fed me well, cooed over my baby and my cat (I’d left Petrana in the motel room), and asked me many polite yet pointed questions, while keeping the information they gave me to a bare (yet equally polite) minimum.

  When the meal was over, we lingered at the table, sipping a tea I didn’t recognize. It was delicious, and I could feel its magical potency. I wondered what it was and whether it would be rude to ask. In fact, the whole house was a bit like this: familiar but different, with so much unspoken. Even the latent magic in the air had an unusual “scent” to it. Their cats kept their distance from both me and Elnor. Politely, of course.

  “All right,” said the coven mother, a gentle woman referred to only as Mother Witch, “we would be pleased to share with you our Helena cucumber.”

  “Cucumber?” I asked, startled. “I mean, I appreciate any help you can give me, but—”

  Mother Witch smiled. “Yes, I know windrush is the more common approach, but it doesn’t grow well here. Most practitioners find the Helena cucumber to be at least as potent. We have of course hybridized the local strain to meet our needs, along with some…additional tweaks.” Her smile took on a quick note of mystery. “You should find it does the trick for you perfectly well.”

  “I’ll get you some from the storage shed,” one of the younger witches said, hopping up. She went by another nickname—Brick, I think. I’d been introduced very quickly to the whole table, and the unusual names were confusing. Also distracting were their varied appearances. Brick was something under five feet tall and perhaps of East Asian heritage, with copper skin and long dark hair that moved sinuously but subtly, staying neatly behind her back without any visible restraint. At least half the witches around the table were clearly non-white, non-European.

  It made me realize how homogenous San Francisco’s witchkind was—something I’d known intellectually, especially when compared with the city’s human population—but I’d never given it much thought. We had older witches and younger witches, dark-haired witches and blond witches…but we were all white witches.

  No wonder the magic felt different here.

  As Brick left the room, I glanced at Mother Witch with a question in my eyes. She explained, “We keep a supply on hand. You hadn’t imagined you were the only American witch to jump off from here to the Azores?” She chuckled. “We should probably just open a bed-and-breakfast.”

  “I’m happy to pay, of course,” I assured her.

  Which only made her laugh harder. “Nay, youngling. You know witchkind cannot go those human ways. Should a sister of our house ever find her way to San Francisco, we know you will return the hospitality, and be glad of it.”

  “Of course!”

  Brick came back with several brown paper bags tied with a red cord. “This should be plenty, for both the journey over and for your return.”

  “How long will it stay fresh?” I asked, taking the bags and giving them a sniff. It was pleasant enough, bland and innocuous. Like, well, cucumber.

  “How long are you planning to stay…overseas?” Mother Witch countered.

  I shrugged, jiggling Rose slightly. “Not more than a few weeks, I hope.” Of course, I really had no idea. But if I were delayed much longer than that, then finding herbs to help with my journey home would probably be among the smaller of my problems.

  She nodded. “You should be fine, then. Keep it out of direct sunlight, and as dry as possible—once you’re off the ley lines, of course.”

  “Right.” I smiled at her. “Thank you so much for all your help—for everything. Dinner was delicious, and it was marvelous to meet you all.”

  Mother Witch rose to her feet. “I would offer to have you stay and observe our midnight Circle, but I do understand that you are hoping to keep a lower profile, so instead, I will bid you a deep rest this evening and a pleasant journey tomorrow.”

  I got up too, hearing what she didn’t say: Our Circle is private. “Yes, it’s probably best if no one in the Beyond knows I’m here. Besides, you’re right. I should rest up as much as I can.” I looked around their long table—so different from our own dining room at home, yet so welcoming. “Thank you all, sisters. Thank you for everything.”

  They bade me goodnight, and—after everyone had tickled, cuddled, and made funny faces and silly noises at the baby—let me go my way into the bitter, dark night.

  Resting and building up one’s strength is dull.

  And I say this as someone who had just spent far too much time in confinement, to use Gregorio’s obnoxious old-fashioned word. Weeks, anyway, lying around the coven house being pregnant, and then at home recovering.

  I was ready to go.

  But I wasn’t so foolish as to attempt an under-ocean crossing without being fully prepared.

  So, much as it pained me to make the decision, I decided to spend an extra night in St. John’s, letting more of the Helena cucumber do its work in me (I could feel its strength and potency; these Canadian witches weren’t fooling around), and getting as much sleep as I could force my body to take.

  Elnor thought this was a fine turn of events, of c
ourse. Sleep all night and then sleep all day? Sign her up! By the middle of the last afternoon, though, I was about ready to climb the walls. It was too cold to go outside for anything other than the essentials. Elsie’s coven, friendly though they had been, had also rather pointedly sent me on my way; they had their own business to see to. They were not responsible for entertaining me. Rosemary had already nursed half a dozen times today. And there was nothing on TV, nothing, nothing.

  I sat on my bed rummaging through my rucksack one more time, wishing I’d brought a trashy paperback novel.

  Well, there were Logan’s tarot cards.

  I’d brought them along because I kept them with me always, as a way of keeping her with me. The feel of them in my hand brought her back to me, and made me feel sad and slightly spooked all at once. I didn’t understand their power (if they had any power), I didn’t believe in them (whatever that was even supposed to mean), I just…kept them with me.

  I never used them—for all the same reasons I kept them close.

  I almost tucked them away again, but the boredom made me open the box and dump the deck out onto the colorful quilt.

  The pictures, all primary colors and broad lines, clashed with the fussy, intricate floral of the quilt, so I sat up and carried the cards to the desk under the window.

  There, I spread them just as they fell, trying to let myself see the patterns that emerged. Logan sometimes did this, and when my mom was teaching me the cards, she made much of the wisdom of random chance.

  Nothing leapt out at me. Every card was a story; and, as always, pretty much every card could be interpreted to mean either something marvelous or something awful, depending on how you looked at it; and this was just as bad as all the nothing that was on television.

  I sighed, leaving the cards on the desk and returning to the bed. Maybe when I opened the room door to go get dinner, a gust of wind would blow in and arrange the cards in a meaningful pattern. Maybe they would spell out my name, or the name of the exact person in the Old Country who would answer all my questions and solve all the mysteries. I snickered as I told myself increasingly ridiculous stories of how I, a scientist, might get this wild magic to work for me: I would perform an assay on the cards and discover a previously unseen residue, which would lead to not only cracking open the mystery of the purposed “cat portal” in my closet at home, but would give me the definitive answer on what to do about my love life.

  Or, a polar bear would break into the room. As I defended my baby, my cat, and my golem, my only weapon was the sharp-edged cards; I used the whole of the Swords suit and defeated the bear, and my fortune was thus laid before me, cleverly arranged in spots of bear-blood.

  Or, Petrana suddenly developed divination powers, along with all her other recent accomplishments. These powers came straight from the Beyond, because it turned out that—utterly unbeknownst to me!—part of the soil from her making had come from the backyard grave of one of my long-departed coven sisters, and her soul resonated with the body of the golem, lending her extraordinary powers…

  I sniffled, giving up the game. Thinking about the Beyond, and stray souls, just brought me back to what I was doing here, and why.

  “Just nap already,” I told myself.

  Maybe I did.

  I don’t know if I was at my full strength or not, but by the next morning, I was so ready to go, I almost didn’t care.

  I packed up everything carefully, double-checking that I hadn’t forgotten anything, not even strands of hair in the sink or on the bedding. I’d been keeping my hair bound back during the whole journey, of course, and this morning in particular I made sure that my French braids were tight and straight. Witch’s hair has a mind of its own; it would be just like my hair to try and go leaving traces of itself everywhere I went.

  Then I checked out of the room and took us all to my favorite local diner, where I ordered two complete breakfasts and ate them both. I hardly even had to pretend that Petrana was eating; nobody paid any attention to me.

  Canadians are so polite.

  At last, at last, it was time. I stood on the edge of the pier I’d chosen, the one closest to the first underwater ley line.

  Ley lines are meridians of energy in the earth. When we talk about “ley line travel,” we don’t mean that we are literally flying through a tube in the ground or anything like that. It’s far more metaphoric. We are opening our energetic channels and aligning ourselves with the earth’s natural fluxes and flows, and following those pathways to where we want to go.

  Ley lines rarely change position, though they can.

  Ones under water can change much more readily than those on land.

  During ley line travel, our bodies are in a state of…I don’t want to say “suspended animation” because that gives a wrong (and far too science fictional) impression. It’s more akin to deep meditation, if the travel is longer than a moment or two. We move to a quieter plane of being, while the physical matter of our bodies—and whatever we are bringing with us—flows to where we want to go.

  It’s a very convenient mode of transportation, and I suspect it’s a large part of the reason why we haven’t done more research into figuring out how to make airplane travel easier for ourselves.

  Sadly, this is all much more challenging undersea. The lines exist in a network, and, as I mentioned, that network can shift. In San Francisco, if I’m traveling along a familiar line and come to an unexpected occlusion or dead end, I can just cast about and find another route. It’s the magical equivalent of glancing around and spotting something a few steps away. Water dampens all that.

  Despite what the humans of seventeenth-century Salem and the author of The Wizard of Oz may have believed, witches are not allergic to water and can’t be hurt by being dunked or splashed. But water does interfere with our magical senses, and it takes a lot of energy to overcome that.

  Standing on the edge of the dock, I felt at least as nervous as I was eager. “Just do it,” I whispered to myself, trying to muster up my courage.

  Petrana stood beside me, staring at the wide gray ocean. The wind whipped her thick hair about. Rosemary was strapped to my chest. She looked up at me with her big dark eyes. I could have sworn she was sending me encouragement, letting me know she believed in me, even though I still had received no actual mental communication from her.

  Elnor, of course, stood between my ankles. She was ready too. I could see it in the arch of her back, the way her fur stood on her spine.

  “Okay.”

  I took Petrana’s hand and we stepped onto the ley line.

  — CHAPTER FIFTEEN —

  The world swirled around us, and my vision switched to witch-sight. Now everything was washes of colors and feelings, without formal shape, without a strong sense of time passing. Sound became muffled, more than it did in straight earth-lines; the water must be covering any noise beyond my own heartbeat, and that of my baby against my breast.

  We flew, swam, floated—all and none of those things at once. The sensation was familiar and very strange. I took ley lines all the time at home, of course; and I’d just traveled across the country on them; but this was…well, it was about as different as I’d imagined, except now it was really happening, and it was nothing like my imagination.

  I let myself be carried by the energy, the force. I held onto Petrana’s mud hand and put my other hand on Rose in her carrier. Elnor still nestled between my ankles, because I wasn’t using my feet. They were along for the ride as much as the rest of me.

  Time passed. I’m sure it did.

  Breathing is different on the ley lines too. It’s a bit like being in a dream, the disembodied feeling that can come over you, even as you move and think and talk.

  What you don’t do on ley lines is eat or drink. Another reason why it’s so challenging…and why I’d stuffed myself so much before we’d left, and made sure Rosemary was topped up. Yet I could feel the hunger—hers and mine both—as we traveled.

  I twisted in t
he ley space, sending my energy forward as fast as I could. There was no way of knowing how far we’d come, or how long there was to go.

  Surely it was rare to just vanish into a ley line and never re-emerge…

  And then the sense changed. It felt a little bit like starting to wake up; when the dream is still fully in your mind, but you also realize you’re in your bed, there’s light coming in the window, and you have to pee. When you’re in two places at once, illogically clinging to the dream-place even though you want to wake up, to rejoin the living world, the “real” world.

  Whatever real means.

  I twisted again, struggling, trying to open my mouth. To say something, to check on those who accompanied me. Was Petrana’s hand still in mine? I couldn’t feel my hands.

  No, I did feel something…I felt my baby against my breast. She was moving against me, wriggling in her little harness. She was…was she punching me with her tiny fists?

  I gasped, coughed, and dragged in a huge breath.

  I heard the sound of sneezing—cat sneezing. It went on a long time.

  At last, I dragged my eyes open.

  We were in a small cave. It was raining, though not at all cold.

  We had reached the Azores.

  Hungry and thirsty as I was, I guess I must have fallen asleep, because suddenly I was blinking up into the face of a young warlock. He looked a little bit like Sebastian, though without the warm humor in his eyes.

  “Welcome, traveler,” he said, and gave a slight bow. There were traces of Jeremy’s accent in his words. He must be from the Old Country.

  “Thank you,” I said, sitting up. Still strapped to my chest, Rosemary looked over at the warlock, then back at me.

  “If you will come with me, we have sustenance and shelter just down the hill a ways.”