Legacy (19 page)

It happened in about five seconds. The toads vanished into the shrinking hole, then the eel slithered in, and the place was bone dry again, without so much as a dent in the ground. Mim’s shovel lay on top, unused.

When Miss P turned around to leave, I caught her eye. She blushed, embarrassed, and moved past me without a word.

Agnes, who had been talking with Gram, motioned for me to join them.

“It wasn’t a sinkhole,” I said breathlessly.

“Of course not,” Gram said. “That was all a prank.”

“A prank that nearly got badly out of hand,” Agnes said tartly.

I looked back at the site. The construction guys were gathered in a circle around where the mudhole had been, scratching their heads.

“Did you hear Miss P?” I asked.

“What did she say?”

“I think she said ‘That’s enough,’ or something like that.”

“Oh. Yes, of course. Everyone heard her. That’s why they left.”

“What?” I thought I’d heard wrong. “Are you saying she
. . . commanded
them?”

Agnes and Gram exchanged a glance. Gram nodded once, then cleared her throat. “Penelope Bean is a djinn,” she said. “We are fortunate to have her in our community. Djinns are among the rarest of all witches.”

“A djinn?” I repeated stupidly. For some reason, the word conjured images of half-naked male genies materializing out of bottles.

“She willed those people to stop tormenting that dreadful woman,” she went on, her eyes darting around secretively. “But you mustn’t tell anyone. Most of the people who were here don’t even know what caused them to leave.” She smiled sweetly. “It’s better that way, you know.”

“Miss P, a djinn,” I marveled over tea. “I never would have thought. I mean, she seems so . . .
harmless
.”

“That’s exactly the sort of person a djinn ought to be,” Agnes said. “The ability to bend others’ will to one’s own can be very dangerous in the wrong hands. People can be easily corrupted by such power.”

“When Mabel Bean discovered what her Penelope could do, she enlisted the help of all the most powerful witches in Whitfield to train her.”

“Train her for what?”

“Mostly, to use her gift as infrequently as possible,” Agnes said. “So try not to speak of it, Katy. Not only does Miss P find public attention extremely unwelcome, but you can imagine
how badly she could be misused if her gift were known, especially to cowen.”

“Gracious!” Gram fell back in her chair, as if the thought were too much to bear.

I thought about it. I’d heard about djinn, but they were so unusual that I never thought I’d ever even meet one, let alone attend a school where a djinn worked as assistant headmistress. “What happens if . . .” I simply couldn’t refer to her as a “djinn” without picturing her in harem pants and a veil and sliding out of a lamp shaped like a neti pot. “. . . if people like Miss P aren’t trained?”

“Exactly what you think would happen when people discover that they have complete power over nearly everyone on earth,” Agnes said. “They become monsters.”

I had a sudden vision of Miss P mind-controlling the Muffies at Ainsworth School so that they all wore sensible shoes and sweatshirts with appliquéd bunnies. “I mean, what do we do with them?”

Gram answered. “We send them away, to live among cowen,” she said with a definitive nod. “Serves them right.”

“Since they aren’t trained, they can’t really use their gift effectively, anyway,” Agnes said. “But they do very well in the military. Also, unfortunately, in gangs, organized crime, politics, and in many religions. Anything that demands unquestioning obedience. They make excellent leaders, as you may expect. However, it is nearly impossible for them not to be corrupted by the power they are accorded.”

“But that won’t happen with Penelope Bean,” Gram said, recovering herself. “She may not look it, but she is our strongest defense.”

“Against what?” I asked.

She opened her mouth to speak, then thought better of it. But Agnes looked straight at me. “Against what we all know is coming,” she said.

By May, the Meadow had become a moonscape. There were problems at every turn—subterranean boulders the size of automobiles, pockets of natural gas, rainstorms that halted work for hours on end—but the methodical destruction of the spiritual center of our community went on. As my aunt Agnes said, there were some things that even magic couldn’t stop, and Wonderland was one of them.

Oh, people tried. Every time I walked past the Meadow I’d see someone shooting five fingers at it, causing a backhoe to break down or a swarm of bees to materialize. Most of the magic was pretty low-level, though. You had to be a witch to live in Old Town, but you didn’t have to be a great witch.

Fortunately, the really powerful witches in town weren’t particularly worried about Wonderland. Their attitude was that, in the big scheme of things, discount department stores come and go, but magic (that is, the old school, genuine, capital M Magick that created the Meadow in the first place) was forever.

So, despite the presence of bulldozers and the horrible smear
that marked the place where the 350-year-old foundation of Hattie’s home had been extracted from the ground, on May the second, Beltane, the impenetrable Whitfield fog rolled into the Meadow like clockwork to herald the witches’ Rite of Spring.

It was a busy day at the Ainsworths. Agnes and Jonathan were to be handfasted that evening. Handfasting is the witch version of an engagement party. The couple declares themselves to each other. They can use traditional words—this is a very old ritual—or they can make up their own. But whatever they say, it can’t include words like
forever
or
till death
or anything like that, because handfasting is not marriage. It lasts for exactly a year and a day. If at the end of that time the couple decide that they really can spend the rest of their lives together, then they marry or, if they’re really indecisive, just get handfasted again. If not, they go their separate ways. I think it’s a pretty intelligent system, personally. Witches don’t divorce nearly as often as cowen.

Gram and I were changing curtains while Agnes got ready for her big night. I don’t know why she bothered, since all of the curtains in the house looked the same, anyway. I had been released from house arrest after two weeks and allowed to move back into my dorm room. Unfortunately, Peter hadn’t. He hadn’t been back in his dorm since before the fire in the Shaw mansion.

A question occurred to me: “Was Serenity Ainsworth a djinn?” I asked.

My great-grandmother appeared to be taken aback. “Good heavens, what an odd question!” she chuckled. “It’s like asking if one of your relatives was the king of France. Quite unlikely, I’d say. Why do you ask?”

I waffled. Now that I was finally out of the doghouse, I didn’t want to get into trouble again. “It’s just that she mentioned
something about using her will to keep the settlers at Salem from burning . . .” She was staring at me. “. . . someone. . .”

“Dorothea Lyttel,” she said somberly. “You opened the brooch.”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry you had to come upon that memory. Serenity had a long life, and so much has been written about it. You might have tuned in at any number of places in it.” She dropped the curtain she was carrying and came over to hug me. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have given it to you.”

“No, it was all right. I think I’m getting better at handling things like that. But I found out something. Something terrible, Gram.”

“What was it, dear? Whatever it was, you can tell me.”

This was hard. “It was about the witches. I think . . . I think they were the ones who started the Burning Times.”

“What? Oh, certainly not. You’ve misunderstood something, Katy.”

“They did it themselves, Gram. They burned their own kind. I—that is,
she
saw it, Serenity. And in the end she approved of it, although it made her feel rotten.”

Gram took a handkerchief from her sleeve and dabbed at her face with it. “Very well, then. Now you know the worst of it.” She sat down heavily. “There was no other way, child. There
is
no other way. If the Darkness takes any one of us—anyone, no matter how valuable or beloved—that person must be destroyed. Even today.”

“By fire.”

“Yes, by fire. That is what is written in the
Great Book of Secrets
.”

“Excuse me? The great book of . . .”

“Secrets,” she repeated. “You’ve certainly heard of a book of secrets, haven’t you?”

“Er, no, I can’t say I have.”

She tutted. “There are so many holes in your education, I don’t even know if we can fill them all before you come of age,” she said, shaking her head. She took my hand and led me to the sofa. “Every witch has a book of secrets. It’s like a recipe book, with spells one has learned and other things—potions, remedies, even keepsakes and stories to share with our descendents. Everything we know and dream about and wonder. Everything, in short, about who we are.”

“Like a magical diary?”

“Exactly. So by extension, the
Great Book
. . .”

“Is about Whitfield.”

She nodded. “Very good. It contains every spell the community has performed together since Whitfield’s founding. It also details every significant news item and biography of those most influential to our world, including Serenity Ainsworth. That, plus our own family’s Book of Secrets, would have told us if she were a djinn.”

“And that’s where it says that witches have to burn themselves at the stake, just because Dorothea Lyttel did?”

“Oh, my dear,” Gram said sadly. “The unfortunate Mrs. Lyttel was the only person to have suffered that fate. That is, until much later.”

I sighed. “How much later?”

“In 1929,” she said. “Seven witches were infected then. The high priestess was pressured to burn them, but she refused.”

At least there had been one sensible person in the history of my people
, I thought.

“Her compassion did no good, however. Infected people always die anyway, and then the Darkness moves into someone
else. In that case, it moved into the high priestess herself.”

I gasped. “What did she . . .”

Gram swallowed. “Like Dorothea Lyttel, she lit her own fire. She took her life to save what was left of us.” Gram dabbed at her eyes. “She was a very brave woman.”

“And the Darkness. . . .”

“The Darkness moved on after that. It had gained so much power through our witches that it went on to destroy the world economy and with it, the lives of millions.”

I thought of something that might make a little sense out of things. “Gram, was my mother ever high priestess?” I asked.

She smiled. “No, although it’s interesting that you should ask. She was offered, but she turned it down.”

“Why?”

She looked at the floor. “She wished to marry outside the community,” she said.

“Oh. Right.”

“When she . . . moved out of Old Town, Agatha relinquished her right to enter the Meadow.”

I nodded in resignation. “I get it,” I said. “I just thought that maybe that was why she died the way she did. The burning, I mean. I thought that if she was the high priestess, maybe that was something she did to stop the Darkness.”

Gram regarded me sadly. “I wish I could say that was true, Katy,” she said. “But even if she had been high priestess, what she did would still have been incomprehensible. Ten years ago there was no indication that the Darkness was anywhere near Whitfield, even among cowen. There were no harbingers, no warnings. No.” She sighed. “I’m afraid that the reasons for my granddaughter’s actions will never be understood.”

At night, all the witches of Whitfield walked through the fog to the center of the Meadow. It was comforting, being in that procession. I felt as if I were a part of something older than written history, something that might never be understood by cowen, but would still remain forever.

On the plane we occupied, none of the earth-moving equipment that littered the area during the day was visible, or even existed. As we neared the clearing that Hattie, as high priestess, had created, the mist thinned until we found ourselves surrounded by lush forest. The deer appeared again, as they had at Halloween, but this time they were accompanied by dappled fawns. The ground, bare clay on the earthly plane, was covered with thick grass and wildflowers here, in this inviolate place where nothing ever changed. No one even died in this realm, but remained among us as spirits. This was where Magic ruled.

The crowd parted and Hattie walked through, wearing a magnificent African
boubou,
a wide-sleeved caftan made of some material that looked like liquid gold, and a necklace of long rectangular stones as blue as a summer lagoon. On her head was a kind of truncated cone, resembling the crown on the famous carved head of Nefertiti. It too was gold, and painted with sigils and other magical symbols.

Displayed thus, she was no longer Hattie Scott, but the high priestess of Whitfield.

As she glided past me, leaving a wake of amber incense behind her, one of the blue stones from her necklace broke loose and fell near where I was standing. When I picked it up I staggered backward, hearing the ocean roar in my ears.

Keep conscious, keep conscious,
I willed myself, feeling the overpowering vibrations of the stone in my hand. For a moment I held it out at arm’s length, thinking I would return it to Hattie, but she was surrounded.

And I didn’t want to give it back. Not yet. The feeling I was getting from the smooth blue stone was delicious, soothing, irresistible. I fell back through the crowd to sit on a moss-covered boulder at the edge of the forest, clutching the stone, breathing in its magic.

The stone was infused with magic, that I knew. Magic and something else. Something that felt almost like music.

Someone was playing the kalimba. It was a simple one, seven tines carved of bamboo. They’d had to leave the larger instruments—the akadina, the kudu horn—back at the village. There had been no time to take anything, even food, when the Europeans had come to take them captive.