An Enigmatic Witch, page 18
My mind flashed back through the years, to the last time it had been opened. Dad in his rage, with the hammer in his hand just like Mom, only he had been closing the small nook up, hoping it was forever.
‘I didn’t know you had put it there,’ I said softly. ‘I guess he didn’t tell you.’
Her shoulders slumped and she lay the hammer on the mantelpiece. The dust rose again in little eddies, magnifying the movement.
‘Were you planning to use it?’ I thought for a moment. ‘Again?’ I added.
Mom shook her head. ‘No,’ she answered in a quiet voice. ‘I wanted to burn it.’
‘I think it’s time you told me. The whole story, of how you managed to get yourself stuck in the Ice Kingdom. And how you got the Book. And how the hell you were able to do anything with it.’
Despite my words, I wasn’t angry. No, I was filled with wonder that my mother, who I’d always believed was Normal, had somehow tapped into the magic in that ancient book.
She looked up at me and nodded, a rueful smile on her face. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘It’s time you found out your true heritage. On the Martin side.’
19
She drew her dusty arm around me into a hug, then reached up and removed the kerchief from around her head. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘This requires good coffee, none of that drip stuff, and fresh croissants. Fortunately, I’m prepared.’
I made a couple of cappuccinos from the shiny new machine Dad had temporarily installed in the butler’s pantry, pending the kitchen renos, then made to sit at the table but she shook her head.
‘Let’s go out somewhere, into the fresh air and away from the house. I don’t want us to be interrupted.’
She loaded up a wooden tray with our oversize cups and matching plates for the croissants and led me past the formal garden outside the front and down the hill a bit. We sat on the grass with our backs against the low stone wall which was sun warmed in this sheltered spot. The barely budded branches of the chestnuts created a dappled light. We couldn’t see Topsail Road below us, the shrubs of the property shielded us from view of anyone.
Mom sighed as she looked ahead of us, gazing off into the past. ‘Not sure where to begin,’ she said with her cup held close to her mouth with both hands.
I knew what she meant, I myself had so many questions that begged to be answered that I could hardly pick out which was the most pressing.
‘The Book,’ I said finally. ‘I don’t understand how it could have been of any use to you.’
She laughed then, and drank a swallow of coffee. She lay the cup back down on the tray and wiped the foam from her mouth, then idly picked up a pastry.
‘This whole story about me being Normal?’ She glanced over at me. ‘Not quite true.’
I sat up straight. ‘What? But you’re not Kin, I mean, surely to God I would have heard if you were,’ I said. ‘Even if you were half-blood, someone would have brought this up before!’
She shook her head. ‘No, not Kin at all,’ she replied. ‘But, and this was kept very quiet, we do have witch blood running through our veins.’
I shook my head to clear it. Yeah, that information had been kept hidden alright. It was a huge secret. ‘But why? What’s the big deal? And ...’
‘Your great-grandmother Martin,’ she said, cutting through all the new questions she had now raised. ‘She came from Bonavista Bay.’
I nodded. I’d heard the story, about how Elsie White, the wife of Mom’s grandfather, had been a fisherman’s daughter and had come to the city to find work. She’d been hired as a seamstress in the Martin clothing factory, had met the owner, the two had fallen crazy in love and, defying all the class conventions of the time, had married and lived happily ever after.
She glanced over at me. ‘You know us Martins,’ she said wryly. ‘We act from the heart, not the brain. Things haven’t changed much through the generations.
‘Their marriage was scandalous enough in itself,’ Mom continued with a smile. ‘All the St. John’s society ladies were horrified, and would have cut the whole family off except that Grand-dad was rich and didn’t care a hoot what they thought. He wasn't Kin, but her half-blood witch status though... even Art Martin couldn’t have carried off that one. Not back then.
‘Those were very different times, remember,’ she cautioned before I could lay judgement.
I sat and thought a while, trying to adjust to this new definition of myself. Mom was part witch? But how could this have happened?
Mom shrugged. ‘The story that’s whispered is that two or three hundred years ago, during one of the Scourges, the witch hunts in the old country, a group of Irish half-bloods fled on a fishing vessel, and jumped ship in a tiny cove out in the Bonavista Bay area. They settled there illegally, built homes and farms. I say illegally, because they were officially Catholic in their persuasion and Irish to boot, and back then neither were allowed to become permanent residents of the island, which was an English and Protestant colony.’
I’d never heard this aspect of my maternal grandmother’s history, that had been a well-kept secret indeed.
‘They kept quiet about the witch blood in their line, but eventually the White’s became known for being healers and midwives, even wart charmers,’ Mom continued. ‘Hedge witches, sort of.’
‘Are you saying there are a lot of people out that way with witch blood in them?’
She shrugged again. ‘The magic tends to skip around, and pop up unexpectedly,’ she said. ‘Sort of like red hair, it must be a recessive gene. Depends if both parents have it.’
‘Of course, no one talked about it, mostly through fear and shame because after all, people were being killed for being half-bloods. But yes, that was the story my grandmother whispered to me.’
‘Wait a moment,’ I said as the thought occurred to me. ‘Is this why you were able to use the Grimoire? Because of some line of magic coming from her?’
Mom nodded. ‘Yeah. It’s a different strain of magic, of course, than the Kin’s, and those with the power have never been formally trained in any way, but it’s powerful just the same.’
‘So there’s an Irish version of the Kin?’
She laughed. ‘Not officially. They don’t make the same distinctions. Everyone’s equal in their society, some have more magic than others, just as some have brown eyes versus blue. They’re not like the Kin at all.’
‘So that makes me, what? A double half-blood? A three-quarter blood?’
‘Yeah, something like that,’ she said, nodding slowly. ‘You are.’
‘How absolutely cool.’ I turned to her. ‘And no wonder all the Kin were surprised I had so much power, when they thought the magic should have been more diluted. Do the Kin know about the Bonavista Bay witch line?’
‘They’ve never acknowledged it, snobs that they are.’
We munched on the fresh croissants and sipped our cappuccinos in silence for another while. A single fresh crunchy pastry was a wondrous thing. To eat two of the concoctions at a single setting was just plain greed, but I managed it anyway.
‘This is all very interesting,’ I said as I picked the large flaky crumbs off my t-shirt and popped them into my mouth. ‘But the Book. Where’d it come from?’
‘Yeah.’ Mom dragged the word out then heaved a sigh. ‘The Book. Well, what I’m going to tell you doesn’t paint me in a good light, okay?’
And thus began the story of love and jealousy. ‘Your Dad and I, we fell in love. I knew right from the start that he was married and there was little chance he’d leave his wife, but I got stupid. After you were getting older and started going to school and asking why your Dad didn’t live with us, I began to resent his ties to Cate, and well, she kept on having kids, so I knew full well what that meant about their relationship.’
She gave a laugh that was still bitter through the dust of the intervening years. ‘Looking back, I can’t believe I was so jealous of Cate. Sure, she had the marriage, the estate, Christmas Day, yet I had the most important thing, his heart.
‘It didn’t help that I became ‘friends’ with Cate,’ she said, as her fingers made air quotes. ‘And Jon encouraged that, thinking this would keep things on a civilised keel. He’s always been such a dreamer.’
Mom munched on the last of her pastry, licking her fingers before she continued. ‘That woman is insidious,’ she remarked. ‘She really screwed with my mind. She found out about my magic, which was actually latent, and she encouraged me to dabble.’
I shifted uncomfortably. Despite the warmth of the day, the grass was damp under my shorts and soaking through. ‘Is that where the Book came from?’ It hadn’t been an ancient Irish text, that was for certain. It had been written in a mixture of old English which was closer to modern German, and Latin.
She nodded, still looking off into the distant past. ‘Hind sight is everything, they say. And I’ve had plenty of time to look back on the events of that summer. I had the one thing that witch wanted and would never get, but I never realized my good fortune, and I thought I wanted more, and that I could use her.’
I felt the deep sigh come from her. ‘She tutored me, taught me enough to give me confidence in magic, all of course without telling Jon. Cate convinced me not to say a word, that it would be a secret between us girls, because it would upset his masculinity or some such nonsense. And I fell for it.’
‘I don’t remember Cate ever being here,’ I said.
‘No, she would wait till all you kids were at school, or summer camp. You remember the summer you went to the day camp?’ I nodded slowly. Yes, I did. The one year I’d ever attended such a thing, we had swimming and camping and all sorts of outside activities, every day had been filled. The best summer of my life, right up until the day Mom had disappeared.
‘Cate left the grimoire behind one day, now I know she did it on purpose. She knew full well that I wouldn’t be able to hold back and start reading it,’ Mom continued. ‘It fell open on a page to banish your enemy.’
‘But weren’t you two friends by then?’
She shook her head. ‘On the surface, perhaps, but I still wanted her out of his life.’ She took a deep breath. ‘So I tried the spell, just to see if it worked. Took some of her hair cuttings, some of my own, did everything it said to do. I even used the medallion she’d given me... Such a huge mistake. She had hexed it, so that any spell worked would reverse, would backfire onto the caster.’
I caught my breath. The medallion, the one that had screamed my mother’s name when I held it in Zeta’s witch store, was it only last year? It had marked the start of my journey, my search for that piece of magicked metal had led me into the clutches of Willem and to the Crystal Charm Stone. Where was it now? The last time I’d seen it was when the Elder in Scarp, Johanna, had removed it from me. She must have recognized the evil intent inside it. I hoped she’d destroyed the wretched object.
‘I always believed Cate was behind your disappearance,’ I said softly. ‘Did Dad not understand?’
She turned to me, her blue eyes flashing in the sun and her mouth set grimly. ‘Oh, we have discussed this matter, believe me.
‘He suspected it too, but he couldn’t do anything,’ she said. ‘He didn’t know where I’d gone, and if he pissed her off anymore, he would lose all hope of finding me, ever. He had to suck it up, and act like everything was normal all those years while he was secretly searching for me.’
She became very still. ‘So while I was stuck in my prison, he was in a prison of his own, despite the appearance of freedom. I guess... I guess when he found you with the Book, he must have known then that Cate was behind it all. He didn’t tell me about that.’
Possibly because he was embarrassed at his own actions that day, but I kept that thought to myself. There was a special little hole inside me that I crawled into whenever I remembered, an afternoon much like this when he had come upon me and the grimoire and he’d screamed at me and torn it from my hands, forbidding me ever to practice magic again.
All those years I’d thought he hated me, blamed me somehow for Mom’s disappearance, when in actuality he had understood right away what had happened. And blamed himself.
Mom stood up, brushing the crumbs from her jeans. ‘Well, I guess we don’t need lunch anymore. But how about we stroll downtown and look for those summer dresses?’ Her tone was as light and airy as that summer’s day.
I looked up, disbelieving. No. She’d just dropped this bombshell in my lap and thought everything was all okay? Thought we could go out and frivolously shop for fun sundresses and cute sandals? I opened my mouth to express my feelings, but immediately shut it again, once I realized what was really bothering me.
‘Maybe tomorrow, Mom?’ I said. ‘I need a little time to digest all this.’
‘Oh, sure,’ she said, her big eyes contrite with understanding. ‘I sort of dumped all this on you, didn’t I?’
She reached out her hand to help me up. ‘Well, how about I make a nice blueberry pie for dessert tonight? We have all those berries Alice’s mom gave you last year, we need to make room in the freezer.’
‘Sure,’ I agreed, still dazed, as if blueberry pie would help sort out the mess in my head. ‘Blueberry pie.’
20
I went on a long walk that afternoon. It was too warm for the bike, so instead I found the old railway track trail, the one that went straight on across the whole island if I chose to walk the thousand kilometers to Port aux Basques. I didn’t of course, Mount Pearl was about my limit before I turned around and retraced my steps.
The whole trailway, I didn’t really pay attention to the pleasantness of walking in the dappled shade of the trees as the path meandered along the river’s bank. I didn’t notice any of it because my mind was working too furiously.
Mom’s story had blown me away. All of it, from the Irish half witch blood flowing in my veins to her so-called friendship with Cate and her belief that Cate had set her up to fail in order to remove the competition for Jon’s affections. Yes, I’d had my differences with Dad’s wife, and I’d also suspected for a long time that she was responsible for Mom’s disappearance, but things were different now. Now that I’d gotten to know Cate personally.
And now Cate had taken me under her wing. I couldn’t deal with that line of thinking, not just yet, for I had an uncomfortable feeling right in the back of my mind that I could end up betraying my mother.
Instead, I forcibly brought my thoughts toward the ley lines and the Veil. Dad said the cleansing ceremony was necessary in order to flush the system, and if they didn’t use the excess energy, it would just dissipate like the water let loose from the fire hydrants by the city crews. He claimed the Veil had to be brought down slowly or else society wouldn’t be able to handle the change, that neither Normals nor the super natural element would be able to adjust without major upset and possibly bloodshed on both sides.
Yet Eldric claimed, rightly, that the Kin were siphoning off the excess to further their own agenda. He had hinted that individuals were actually drinking from the lines to empower themselves, a thing which Dad had vehemently denied. But Eldric also wanted to work to remove the Veil entirely, and he was planning to bring this about. Somehow.
What would the outcome be if the division between Alt and Normal disappeared? Would it be such a terrible thing? I thought about the super naturals I had known, the local ones here in town and the surrounding areas, and the poverty and wretchedness I’d seen lurking in the corners and the dark alleyways. And then I remembered walking through the streets of Edinburgh, where they had no Veil separating the worlds. They lived in peace, both Normals and super naturals going about their daily businesses without impinging on the others. No bloodshed, no violence, no confusion.
Who was right? Eldric or my father? Or both?
On the home stretch of my walk, cutting up under the canopy of trees in the ancient Protestant Cemetery, my thoughts inevitably returned to Cate. Straddling both camps, playing the game against the Dark Elf king while working for the Kin. I could only trust her, and it wasn’t just because she was giving me what I’d craved all these years. No...
My phone let loose with its old-fashioned ring tone and I was glad for the distraction.
‘Hey there.’ He could probably hear the smile in my voice, and would have thought it was for him. ‘Where’ve you been all day?’
‘I have the bike fired up,’ Hugh said. The enthusiasm in his voice was catching. ‘Ready to share the first ride of the summer? I thought perhaps a drive, a burger and then go watch the sunset over the ocean.’
He’d put the barfing incident behind him by the sounds of it, which was a relief.
Mindless driving around, protected from the wind by his strong back, the roar of the motor as it outpaced the racing thoughts in my head? Yes, I was definitely up for that. ‘Got an extra helmet?’
‘Packed and ready.’
‘I’ll meet you at the house in five minutes.’
I sprinted up the last bit of hill to our home and quickly exchanged my shorts and t-shirt for jeans and a hoody and the leather jacket of Mom’s which I had claimed for myself a couple of years ago.
‘That looks familiar,’ she was saying to me right when Hugh walked in.
I shoved my arms into it and flashed her a grin. ‘You weren’t using it.’
She rolled her eyes and flicked me with the dish cloth. ‘Go on, get out of here. And have fun, you two!’
I was to remember her last words later, many hours later once the dust had cleared. The events that followed that evening were many things, but definitely not what I would call fun.
It started off very innocently. We drove down the Southern Shore on his Harley, stopping to eat burgers, fries and milkshakes at a little place right on the water’s edge in one of the many tiny communities dotted along the coastline. I was starving. The fresh air always had that effect on me. Not to mention my long walk and the fact that I’d only eaten a couple of croissants for lunch.
