Museum of Magic, page 8
“What are you staring at?” Puck asked.
Emmi ignored him. Something was drawing her to the cabinet, something that felt like a physical tug leading her forward.
“I’ll, uh,” Puck said. “I’ll guard the door, I suppose.”
Emmi didn’t even look at him. No doubt it was a violation of every historical law—and perhaps the literal law of Great Britain—to touch this cabinet, but she couldn’t help herself. She knocked aside the little rope that was supposed to prevent tourists from getting too close, went straight to the cabinet, and yanked the doors open.
The inside of the cabinet was just as elaborately decorated as the outside, with two more small doors and a plethora of tiny drawers, all inlaid with the same red material. But that wasn’t what caught Emmi’s eye.
No—it was the book made of glowing light that enraptured her.
It was propped up on the inside of the cabinet. Emmi reached for it, intending to pick up the book, but her hands went right through it. It truly was made of light, no substance at all.
“What do you see?” Puck called from the door.
Emmi finally spared a glance at him. “Can’t you see this?” she asked, gesturing to the glowing book.
Puck shrugged. Nothing there—not that he could see.
Emmi’s heartbeat spiked up. This was her magic—to see. And she did see. A book—surely that meant something. Desperately, she turned around, but there was nothing else unusual in the room, glowing or not. Nothing else called to her.
The paper! Emmi dug her hand into her pocket, pulling out the torn and burnt piece of paper that she had discovered in the remains of the broken witch bottle. It had come from a book.
Daemonologie, Emmi thought.
The letters DAEMONOLOGIE glowed in gold across the ghostly book in the cabinet.
Her hand shaking, Emmi pressed the paper from the bottle into the glowing book. It burst out in blinding beams of brilliant, shimmering light, and Emmi flinched away. When she was able to look at it again, the book was—
Real.
Breathless, Emmi picked it up. Her fingers didn’t go through the book. It was solid.
“Oh,” Puck said. “Now I see it. Also, you should know that the bubble broke.”
It took Emmi a minute to realize what Puck meant. Her eyes darted to the window across from the bed. Sure enough, there was no longer a protective spell around the palace.
Greybeard was able to come inside.
He has to find us first, Emmi thought, hoping against hope that he’d gone the wrong direction in the vast palace grounds.
She had the book in her hands, but there was still no ghost witch, much less a name to call her by. Emmi ran to the table, slamming the book down. Much like her torn piece of paper, this book seemed to be written by hand.
James wrote this, she thought. She looked around the room. He wrote it here. That’s why the book was here, why she was called to this spot.
But where was the witch that begged for her to name her?
“I hear footsteps,” Puck said urgently. He’d closed the heavy wooden door that led to Mary’s bedroom, but that would not be enough to keep the Hunter away.
Emmi opened the book, rifling through the pages. Her heartbeat thundered in her ears, the same heavy thudding of boots on the stone spiral steps. Greybeard was heading right to them—but the steps were long, and maybe he’d be distracted by Lord Darnley’s bedroom first—
Emmi sucked in her breath.
At the end of the book, in the section called “Newes From Scotland,” King James wrote about the trials he’d personally witnessed. Each witch was listed by name. Emmi skimmed over them, reading through the Scottish-influenced writing that was both old, riddled with non-standard spellings, and scribbled in nearly indecipherable handwriting.
“Help,” Emmi muttered, her eyes blurring. The thundering in her ears was definitely not just her heartbeat—Greybeard would be at the door any second. Emmi looked up to see Puck bracing himself against the heavy wooden door, pressing it closed with his weight.
Emmi looked back to the book, her only clue.
“‘The elder witch,’” she muttered aloud, her eyes bouncing over the words. “‘...stood stiffly in denial of all that was laid to her charge.” A poor, old widow woman, one who helped birth the babies in the village, known for being a healer. She had little money and little support, and when she’d been accused, she’d tried her best to prove her innocence.
Emmi’s heart clenched as she read the torture put to the poor woman’s body. Imprisoned, beaten, pricked with needles, “examined.” Emmi shuddered. The poor grandmother denied being a witch through it all.
But then they stripped her bare and shaved her head, all to find a so-called devil’s mark. Probably an innocent birthmark or freckle, Emmi thought. It didn’t matter what it was—they just needed an excuse to say that the woman was claimed by the devil and therefore a witch.
She sucked in a breath. Stripped and shaved.
The ghost she’d seen in the scrying mirror—she had been wearing nothing but her undergarments, and she’d been roughly shorn of all her hair.
Emmi’s eyes flew over the passage, looking for a name—
BOOM.
The blow to the door was enough to make Emmi scream in surprise. She glanced at Puck, his face pale, his mouth narrowed in a grim line.
Greybeard had arrived.
“Hurry!” Puck said.
Emmi nodded, her eyes back on the page. She read the name out loud, her voice strong and clear:
“Agnes Sampson.”
Greybeard pushed against the door, and Puck struggled to drop the heavy wooden latch to secure it into place. It wouldn’t hold for long—if nothing else, all the noise they were making was sure to draw guards.
But they didn’t need more time.
The ghost of Agnes Sampson appeared before them.
She looked just as she had in the mirror, except instead of screaming in furious desperation, silent silver tears tracked down her face. She wasn’t old enough to be a grandmother, Emmi thought, but then again she had likely been a mother by the time she was Emmi’s age. Women who were thirty were often enough grandmothers in the seventeenth century.
“You are Agnes Sampson,” Emmi said, and the woman nodded, tears still flowing.
It wasn’t fair. Emmi knew this on a bone-deep level. Some rich, powerful men got scared—of the weather of all things—and blamed witches on it. But Agnes Sampson was just a woman who’d birthed a lot of babies—her own and others’. She knew herbs. She would have been revered as a Cunning Woman, save for a frightened king with a grudge.
“You are not a witch,” Emmi said, looking right into the ghost’s silver eyes.
Because that, Emmi knew from the bottom of her heart, was true. Agnes Sampson had been poor. A widow with no husband to protect her. An easy target. A woman in a world where women were not valued.
But not a witch.
Glimmering light flared around the ghost of Agnes, each pulse bursting bright, then fading, fading, fading, until she was gone.
Puck raced to the table. Emmi wasn’t sure how much he’d seen, but he saw the book in front of her. “We have to go,” he said, snapping his fingers. Licks of yellow-red flames burst over his palms, and Puck slammed them onto the open pages of the book.
“Hey!” Emmi shouted, grabbing the page with Agnes’s name on it. She shook cinders off the edge.
Puck yanked the burning book up and waved it in the pattern of a sigil. There must have been enough powdery ash from the quickly-incinerating pages for the magic to work—Emmi’s hearth back at the museum glimmered.
“We have to go,” Puck said just as the door banged open.
But Greybeard was too late.
Emmi and Puck were gone, nothing but smoke and ash as evidence they had ever been there at all.
The Chariot
imminent success, a focus on the path ahead, and pursuing an old ambition with new intensity
Emmi stepped from the portal in Queen Mary’s bedchamber back into her home. Her foot caught on one of the hearthstones as she stumbled through, and she fell, her left palm and right elbow smashing into the sooty ash, her knees painfully crashing onto the stones.
Puck stepped over her, brushing an invisible speck from his shoulder.
“Thanks for the help,” Emmi muttered as she pulled herself up, glaring at him.
Although she ached thanks to both her new bruises and the strenuous flight from and race against the Hunter she called Greybeard, Emmi still held the paper she’d ripped from the book before Puck had burned it. She’d snatched it up almost without thinking. Her only intent had been to preserve Agnes Sampson’s name. The poor woman had gone through such torture and had been all but forgotten in history. Her ghost had wanted nothing more than to be named.
A thought occurred to Emmi. “Was Agnes a ghost? She looked like a ghost. There were rumors of the tower being haunted. But…” That label didn’t seem to fit.
Puck blinked at her blearily. They were both exhausted, Emmi realized. Puck may have blithely ignored her when she fell in the hearth, but Emmi suspected that he was far more injured than he was willing to show, plagued by pains from the repeated attacks from Greybeard, which always seemed to draw his blood, green though it was. “I’m not sure, to be honest,” he said. “The mystic doesn’t like labels.”
Emmi’s mind tried to figure out what that meant, but she was so tired, she was finding it hard to concentrate. “What do you mean—labels?”
Puck hauled himself up, his eyes resting on the scrying mirror where Emmi had first seen the specter of Agnes. “Just because you see something doesn’t mean it has a name, Emmi Castor,” he said finally. “It’s you humans who use words all the time. Some of the fae love that, but…”
Emmi had heard stories about the way the fae targeted artists and poets and storytellers. She had always assumed that was because the dreamers were the ones who made up the legends about the fae, but now she wondered if it was through a different connection.
A little mewing noise at her feet made Emmi pause. Sabrina wove herself around Emmi’s ankles. Emmi bent to pet her cat, but Sabrina’s soft steps reminded her of the Cat Sìth they had seen in the Abbey, fur like smoke and eyes like ember.
The fae, Emmi supposed, were a bit like cats. Independent and unconcerned. Emmi seriously doubted her cat would speak even if she could. She didn’t need words. Things just were. Sabrina had no idea what catnip was called; she just liked it.
Maybe Agnes had been a ghost, and saying her name had freed her. Maybe Agnes had been an afterimage, like the church in North Berwick, the lingering remains of a traumatic experience. Did it matter what she was called?
She was free now.
That would have to be enough.
Emmi looked down at the paper in her hands, her thumb moving over the rough scratches made by the pen as it scrawled Agnes’s name. The history-loving part of Emmi knew this should be analyzed. If it was, somehow, actually King James’s handwriting, it wasn’t just financially valuable but also an artifact to be studied. But the growing magical side of her knew what this piece of paper really was:
An ingredient.
“The first item for our new witch bottle to protect everyone,” Emmi said. It wasn’t lost on her that it was torn and burnt on the edges just like the original. She hadn’t meant to purposefully pluck out a near-exact replica of her ancestor’s page, but she had.
Emmi shifted her gaze to Puck, who was watching her quietly in the mirror, his reflected eyes scrutinizing her in a serious way.
“What do I do with this?” she asked, feeling suddenly helpless.
When Puck turned, that intense gaze was gone. His real eyes held that same indifferent-yet-mischievous spark Emmi had come to expect. “What do you think we should do with it?”
Emmi’s heart skipped a beat. We. He said it casually, as if it were assumed, but she still wasn’t sure how much she could trust him.
Even so, it wasn’t as if the Castor house had a safe, and if Puck truly wanted to do harm to the paper, he could. Emmi only needed a place to store it in the house where Sabrina couldn’t get to it. A drawer or—
Her eyes rested on the cauldron across from the hearth, hung up on iron rails. That certainly seemed fitting. “‘Double, double, toil and trouble,” Emmi muttered as she passed Puck on her way to the other side of the room. “‘Fire burn and cauldron bubble.’”
Emmi dropped the paper into the dark, shadowy depths of the black iron cauldron. For a moment, she thought she saw the golden glowing light that she had seen when she had found the book in the cabinet. When she looked again, it was just a piece of paper, resting on the black iron.
With the paper safely stowed away, Emmi turned back to Puck, catching him mid-yawn. “We need sleep,” she said.
“This body is so annoying,” Puck muttered.
Emmi paused. Puck said that as if he wasn’t used to a human form, and Emmi was absolutely unprepared to think about what that meant.
“We can do nothing without sleep,” Emmi said. “You can stay in my grandfather’s room. In the morning, we need to discuss what to do next.”
They had one item, but they needed more. The Hunters were hot on their trail, and while Emmi felt mostly safe in the Castor house, she didn’t like the way the Hunters always seemed to show up when she wasn’t ready for them. Greybeard had been waiting for them at the train station. The Hunters were always a step ahead.
After Emmi got Puck to her grandfather’s room, she went inside her own room, shutting—and locking—the door.
Her phone was very nearly dead, so Emmi plugged it in to charge and scrolled through her apps—email, social media, text messages—to see if Grandfather had responded to her.
She took a deep breath. After her parents had died and Emmi lived fully with Grandfather, the two of them had worked out a code for emergencies. It started when Emmi had been old enough to go out on her own. If Grandfather texted Emmi the word “baclava,” then she was to call or come home immediately. Emmi didn’t always pay attention to the time, but as soon Grandfather sent the secret word, she knew it was time to go or face dire consequences. “I made fresh baclava for when you come home,” meant Come home NOW, young lady, or else.
The same went with her. She had once gone to a party with her friends, and without her knowledge, a boy she had thought she might like had spiked her drink. As soon as she realized the loose feeling in her body was due to alcohol and not having fun—about the same time the boy she’d thought she’d liked had started trying to talk her into going out in the woods with him alone—Emmi had texted Grandfather the word, and he’d come so fast to pick her up that she knew he had to have broken the speed limit and ran every stop sign.
“Baclava” was as powerful as a magical spell in the Castor family. It meant “emergency,” and it meant that no matter what, the recipient responded.
Emmi typed the letters carefully in her phone, first as a text message, then as a direct message in Grandfather’s social media, then to his email.
But just as she had suspected, there was no response.
When Emmi woke the next morning, her eyes still itchy and red from crying, Puck was not in the attic apartment at all. There was evidence he’d been there—a messed-up bed with pillows and the comforter strewn about as if he was a little kid, a ripped-up box of cereal that Emmi suspected he’d eaten from without the aid of a bowl, and the swinging door leading downstairs wide open.
She found him in the hearth room, curled up on the floor around Sabrina, chatting away. Emmi looked down at him, temporarily forgetting her troubled thoughts about Grandfather. He seemed to be having a conversation with the cat, pausing as if listening for answers. But then Emmi realized that she didn’t understand any of his words.
“What are you saying?” she asked. She couldn’t even place what the language was, other than not-English and not-Spanish, which she took in high school. Puck’s language was at times soft and lyrical, but there were trills and guttural noises that didn’t seem to make a word at all, just a sound.
“Told you so,” Puck said to Sabrina, and he stood up.
“What did you tell my cat?” Emmi asked.
Puck blinked at her as if affronted. “It was a private conversation.”
“Well, excuse the heck out of me.”
Puck straightened his clothes—now without the stains of battle. Puck looked fresh as a daisy, and despite having showered and changed, Emmi felt as if she were slumming it beside him.
“We have to figure out the next item needed for your witch bottle,” Puck said.
He had lined up the things she’d collected from the fireplace along the stony edge of the hearth. A stained pottery shard, a pale gray stone, a coin, a clod of dirt. One of them would take her on their next adventure.
But Emmi didn’t move. She felt weighed down by sorrow and worry. “Will this save my grandfather?” she asked in a small voice. She wasn’t sure she could trust Puck in any capacity. Whatever he said could be a lie. He obviously had an agenda of his own.
But he bent down, forcing Emmi to meet his eyes. “I promise it will,” he stated, and even if it was a lie, Emmi wanted to believe it.
She picked up the earthen clod, carefully holding it in the palm of her hand so it wouldn’t crumble. Somehow, she hoped, this palm-sized clump of dirt would bring her only remaining family back to her.
Nine of Swords, Transposed
acceptance, facing fears, and looking forward after leaving grief behind
Emmi looked down at the lump of earth in her hands. She could almost feel her hopes draining from her like water through a sieve. “It’s just dirt,” she said.
Puck crossed over to her, folding her fingers over the clod. “To everyone else, it’s just dirt,” he said. “But you’re a Castor witch. You can see it for what it really is.”
“It really is dirt.”
