Legacy (35 page)

“Gracious!” my great-grandmother exclaimed. “What were the two of you—”

“Yes!” I remembered. “In the compartment under the floorboards.”

“Here it is.” Looking at the screen, he read, “
The wise and Crafty know rightly where to look . . .”

“That’s it,” Agnes said.

“Camera phones,” Peter said, tapping the phone with a triumphant grin. “The biggest advance in witchcraft in a thousand years.”

Gram dashed over to him and pinched his cheeks. “Darling boy,” she said. “You didn’t really plan to kill yourself, did you?” she asked softly.

Peter shook his head. “It was just all I could think of to do. I don’t have much magic. The Darkness wanted my life. The only way I could keep him from getting it was . . .” He looked down at his bandaged wrists.

“We understand, dear. But you need to stay among us.”

“Mrs. Ainsworth . . .” He was frowning in concentration. “My wrists.”

“What is it, Peter?”

“They’re . . . That is, I can feel . . .” He yanked off the adhesive tape on one arm and began to unravel the gauze.

“Peter!” Hattie shouted. “What in blazes . . .”

As the last of the wrapping fell away, he held out his bare wrist for all of us to see. The wound had healed completely. There was not even a scar to indicate that the skin had ever been broken.

“Good heavens,” Gram said.

“What do you mean, ‘good heavens’?” Hattie demanded. “You’re the one who did it, Elizabeth.”

“Did what?” The old woman looked confused. “Do you think I healed the cut on that wrist?”

“And this one,” Peter said, displaying his other arm.

“I . . . well, I don’t know. I suppose I may have.” She raised her eyebrows. “I wasn’t conscious of it, though.”

“That’s all right,” Agnes said, putting her arm around her grandmother. “One of the perks of age is that you don’t have to remember all your good deeds.”

“I suppose,” Gram conceded. “That’s quite a good job, though. If I do say so myself.”

Hattie harrumphed. “Never could toot your own horn worth spit,” she said. “I’ll go get Eric.”

The rest of us looked up in horror. What if Eric became possessed by the Darkness in the Meadow?

“I can’t leave him alone again,” Hattie explained.

No one moved.

“The doctor gave me a sedative in a filled hypodermic in case he gets too agitated,” she added quietly.

I saw Agnes look to her grandmother.

“I’m sure you won’t need to use it, dear,” Gram said. She always had the right words.

Hattie took the kit, enclosed in a small case, out of her handbag and tucked it into Peter’s shirt pocket. “I’ll let you know if I need it,” she told him.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll help you get him ready,” The two of them bounded up the squeaky steps.

“To the Meadow, then,” Gram said. “Have Penelope meet us,” she told Agnes. “She ought to be safe there. And you might perhaps alert a few others, as well.” Her gaze drifted up the stairs, where Eric was being dressed. “One never knows when one may be in need of friends.”

To avoid notice, Agnes put Gram’s Caddy back in the garage and the three of us walked to the Meadow, where we met Peter and Hattie, who carried Eric between them. We all tried to make our way as inconspicuously as possible past the
DO
NOT
ENTER
signs posted all around the Wonderland construction site. As it appeared that night, it certainly didn’t look much like a sacred sanctuary for witches.

Apparently, work had ceased when the fog began to roll in. Caught off guard as usual, the workmen had simply put down their tools and supplies—even their lunches—and groped their way out of the Meadow, which would lie fallow and unreachable until the fog lifted in a day or two.

It was one of many complaints about the work site. Aside from the on-again, off-again incidence of sinkholes, fires, dead birds that seemingly appeared out of nowhere to litter the place with their ghoulish carcasses, and groundwater leaks that forced the men to work in specially designed rubber gear,
the fog—which appeared to cowen to occur at random—was too impenetrable to work in. Just completing the construction, regardless of schedule, was getting to be a real problem, according to local gossip.

But none of that affected us, I told myself as we picked our way through the darkness. The moment we stepped into the fog, the filthy, obstacle-covered floor gave way to green grass on a woodland grave. This was the Meadow as it was in Serenity’s time, and had been preserved through magic. It would never change, not for us. Not unless we ourselves changed it through magic.

“It’s somewhere around here, isn’t it?” Gram asked.

“Five paces from the oak tree, facing the west boulder,” Hattie answered impatiently, setting Eric down on a blanket near a moss-covered rock. I helped Hattie get him settled, then gave him a juice box. He was asleep within five minutes.

“Hurry up, Katy,” Agnes called. “We don’t want this to take forever.”

“Oh, dear,” Gram said. “I wonder what the others would say? It is supposed to be a community spell, you know. Quite formal.”

“Well, it’ll have to be informal this time,” Miss P said, emerging out of the fog. Mr. Haversall was with her, and Dingo the dog, who went straight to Eric and sat beside him. A few others joined the circle.

Hattie stood beside Miss P. “If anything happens . . .” She looked pointedly at Peter, who nodded and patted the syringe in his shirt pocket.

“It won’t,” Miss P said reassuringly. “We’re in the safest place on the planet.”

I wasn’t so sure.

“Quickly,” Agnes said, calling everyone together. We all held hands. Peter was beside me, and the touch of his hand was like liquid velvet, cool and dry.

“
In the alban field, the circling mists twist low
,” Agnes began. My great-grandmother and a couple of the others joined her.

“Kith and kin draw the rock on Crafted bow.
Arise, great Arrow, swift as sparrow, sprung from below.”

We stood in silence for a long time. I wondered if the other people here were making more sense of the words than I did, because I still didn’t have the slightest idea what they meant. Actually, I was beginning to think the spell was a dud, when Dingo started barking.

The air in the center of the circle shimmered, as if we were enclosing some powerful heat source. Then the ground began to tremble.

“Oh, man, it’s a sinkhole,” I whispered, remembering the horrible scene at the school earlier.

“Shh,” Peter said.

The air in the circle got thicker and thicker until it looked like gelatin, and the earth swayed in a gentle wave that was nothing like the eruption on the street outside the school. All the trees shimmered so that their leaves turned backward and shone like silver. Then Dingo stopped barking and, staring up at the full moon, pointed his nose straight up and howled.

No, not howled, exactly . . . It was more like singing. It was beautiful. Everything was beautiful then. For a moment—and
I have no idea how long that moment lasted in real time—the whole Meadow seemed to be in sync. The wind, the trees, the rocks and water and grass, the night clouds and the moon. All of it went together perfectly, making its own music. Above it Dingo’s voice—and it really was a voice, not a howl—floated like a soloist in front of an orchestra.

The music grew louder as the earth shuddered and trembled, until finally it thrust from its depths a rock the size of a car and four times as tall, black as basalt and pointed near the top like the “arrow” in the conjuring verse.

We all stood there dumbstruck, as into the silence came Hattie’s smooth low voice, intoning the second verse of the spell from memory:

The kindred wave gathers to loose what is hidden.
Cast line and hook to split the stony mizzen.
One door wakes one thousand more when Craftily bidden.

Immediately, the huge stone seemed to fly apart with a tremendous noise like the origin of thunder. The rock shimmered and shook, its surface crazing into sinuous lines that made it look like some gigantic, three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle.

And then, with an awesome elegance, the cracks in the rock segmented, the sections flew apart, and the puzzle box opened, revealing a thousand separate closed compartments.

“A botte,” I whispered, feeling gooseflesh traveling throughout the length of my body.

“Fantastic,” Peter said.

“Peter, now!” It was Hattie, gesturing at him animatedly with her chin.

“What? Oh.” Quickly he took his cell phone out of his hip pocket. By its eerie light he read the final verse of the spell.

The wise and Crafty know rightly where to look.
O Word! Spring forth from out thy secret nook.
Ferree Ferraugh diten al blosun na tibuk!

He struggled through the unfamiliar words, and didn’t employ a lot of dramatic expression, but it worked.

The drawers and cabinets all shifted around again, forming and reforming into impossible combinations as the shape of the botte changed slightly with each small movement. It was a bizarre display, moving faster and faster until the whole process seemed to be a blur.

While it was in motion, Hattie stepped forward and intoned: “Attend me, ye greater and lesser spirits!” She lifted her arms into the air. “Bring into being the ‘Song of Unmaking’!”

And then suddenly, abruptly, absolutely, the botte came to a dead stop.

One drawer, situated in its direct center, snapped open with perfect precision to reveal the only object it contained: An ancient, gilt-edged book bound in frayed leather. There were no words on its cover, only the image of a crescent moon stamped in silver. When struck by the moonlight in the sky above the Meadow, it gleamed with an almost living luster.

“The
Great Book of Secrets
,” my great-grandmother said. A responsive murmur rose from everyone assembled. After the wild motion of the botte, the
Great Book of Secrets
exuded a deep gravity, seeming almost to breathe in time to the cosmic music that still permeated the copse where we stood.

Hattie touched the book with the tips of her fingers and spoke: “It is our deepest desire to harm none while protecting our own from the Darkness,” she said. “Therefore, with humility and respect, we seek the meaning of the ‘Song of Unmaking’, and ask to be shown its right use.”

The music grew louder as the book opened by itself and its pages turned rapidly, as if blown by a strong wind. When it finally fell still, the music rose all around us, beautiful and hypnotic. Dingo the dog sat up again, reverentially, and crooned his own wild song that went perfectly with the rest of the strange earth-music around us. That was the meaning of harmony, I realized: Everything fitting together, belonging, being exactly where the universe wanted all its pieces.

So it was strange and . . . well,
shocking
, really, when Hattie and Agnes and just about everyone else in the circle started singing this other weird song that didn’t fit at all with the earth-music I was hearing.

Dingo didn’t like it either. He stopped singing and laid his head down on his paws, but apparently we were the only ones it bothered. Even Peter started to sing the ugly song.

I poked him with my elbow. “What the heck are you singing?” I hissed.

He shrugged. “It’s what everybody’s taught in kindergarten,” he whispered back. “The ‘Song of Unmaking’ is pretty basic witchcraft.”

“But it’s . . .” I saw Hattie giving us the stink eye, so I shut up. But there was something jarring about it all. The leaves on the trees turned right-side up again. The air around the botte lost its thick, shimmering quality and, at least for me, the music—the
real
music—diminished to nothing.

Suddenly I wasn’t comfortable in that circle, as if my skin were too tight for me. As if, after being in heaven for a few minutes, I’d been tossed into hell. More than anything I wanted to let go of the hands holding mine and run away, breathe some other air, hide. The skin on the back of my neck prickled. I felt
danger
.

I looked over at Eric, but he was still asleep on his blanket, his angelic face undisturbed.

Then what . . .

“What are you doing here?” a woman asked, her clear, loud voice bringing the so-called singing to a halt.

It was Livia Fowler, followed by her daughter, Becca.

“You are no longer high priestess,” Mrs. Fowler said to Hattie. “I am. All rituals in the Meadow are conducted by me, exclusively.” She turned toward the botte. “And what is this thing?” She scrutinized all of us in the group, one by one. “Well?”

Hattie squared her shoulders. “It is the
Great Book of Secrets
,” she said.

“
What
?” I could tell Mrs. Fowler couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “Just you? You few? Without informing the rest of the community? Or
me
? Are you mad?”

“We needed to find a spell,” Gram offered.

Livia Fowler examined the book. “The ‘Song of Unmaking’?” Her eyes narrowed. “Is one of you infected with the Darkness?”

“No, Livia,” Gram waffled. “We only wanted—”

“Who is she?” Livia demanded.

“She’s not here,” Miss P said decisively. And she wasn’t lying. Mrs. Fowler had assumed that the witch in question was a woman.

“Then you must bring her,” Mrs. Fowler said imperiously. “The rules are clear.” She sang the song from the book, using the same cacophonous tune the others had been singing.

“Through Love’s unbreaking tie
Unmake the Darkness, do not die
No death shall come, good soul, to thee
For by the sacred Fire set thou free.”

When she was done, she pointed a finger at the big oak tree beside the botte, and it burst into flames.

“Oh, dear,” Gram murmured, dismayed.

So that was Livia Fowler’s talent. She was a firestarter. It figured that her gift would be one of destruction.

“That tree is over four hundred years old,” my great-grandmother pointed out indignantly.

“Get the others,” Mrs. Fowler ordered.