Chapter 14

14

W hen I arrived back at Lightkeep Cottage later that afternoon, it was to find the house empty, except for Persi. She hadn’t returned to Shadowkeep, and Rhi had stayed behind to close up. Persi was sitting on the front steps as I pulled up on my bike.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey, yourself,” she replied, the words muffled by the clove cigarette dangling from her lips.

“Rhi told me you were… dealing with something,” I began, as I approached the stairs to sit next to her, “and I was just wondering if?—”

“If I ratted you out to the witchy powers that be?” Persi asked, raising an eyebrow. “No. But I did go to the Conclave and tell them about the Cleansing, minus your involvement.”

“What happened?” I asked. “I mean, you’re here, so at least they didn’t throw you in the Keep.”

Persi smiled and blew a smoke ring. “Not this time, at least.”

“Well?” I finally prompted when she showed no signs of going on.

“I thought they were furious at first,” Persi said. “I’d expected that. But it soon became obvious that what I was getting was fury from Ostara, and a show of fury for her benefit from the others.”

“Really? They didn’t vote to… I don’t know, excommunicate you or something?”

Persi chuckled. “Hardly. When I’d explained it all, Xiomara thanked me. Said I’d saved them all the trouble of having to go over Ostara’s head. Ostara didn’t like that at all, but what can she do about it now? It’s done with.”

“She should be happy, shouldn’t she? Or at least hopeful? Finding that Sarah had attached herself to Bernadette means there’s a chance Bernadette wasn’t acting of her own free will.”

“Ostara is never happy when she isn’t in complete control. But yes, I think, because of that, she let me off with only an official warning.” Persi looked at me and smiled her most winning smile. “I have a talent for getting out of trouble to match my talent for getting into it.”

“Useful.”

“Very.”

“Hey, you haven’t seen my mom around here anywhere, have you?” I asked. “I feel like I’ve barely seen her in the past couple days. It’s almost like she’s avoiding me.”

To my surprise, Persi looked uncomfortable. “Yeah, she’s around,” she said vaguely.

“Around… where?” I asked.

Persi sighed. “Ugh. I don’t want to… look, you’re partly right, okay? Your mom isn’t avoiding you, but she’s definitely avoiding something.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

Persi was literally squirming now. “It’s not my place, but… well, your mom is having a sort of witchy existential crisis. You know, being back here, dealing with her own magic. I think she’s struggling—not that she’s confided in me about it.”

“No offense, but you aren’t really the confiding type, are you?” I said.

Persi shrugged. “I can be. We used to be a lot closer, Kerri and me.”

I thought about my mom, and wondered if this return to Sedgwick Cove had driven a kind of wedge between us, me ready to embrace my magic and her…

“What kind of witch is my mom?” The question popped out before I could stop myself.

Persi looked at me, indecision all over her features. Then she said, “The walled garden.”

“I don’t… huh?”

“A minute ago, you asked where your mom is. The walled garden. I’m not the person you should be getting your answers from. Go talk to her.”

It wasn’t really a suggestion… more of a command, and one that I was more than willing to obey. I stood up and walked out into the garden, winding through the familiar sections that bordered the house, to find the lavender door set in the stone wall. I’d been in this part of the gardens only once before, when my mom and my aunts had used a spirit board to summon Asteria’s spirit. Asteria had left it for them, knowing they would need it to connect with them. Was that because none of them were elemental witches with a connection to spirit? And if that was the case, what did it mean that I’d seen Asteria twice now without using a spirit board? The first time, I’d practically written it off as a dream. But the second time, at Shadowkeep… there was no question of dreaming then. Did I have an affinity for spirit after all? Because if so, Rhi’s theory that I might be a pentamaleficus might just turn out to be true.

These questions carried me almost unconsciously to the lavender door in the garden wall. As it had been the last time I’d been here, the door was partially open. I slipped sideways through it, and into the garden beyond. Almost at once, I spotted her in the center of a clump of bushes.

“Mom?”

I’m not sure why I hesitated, like I wasn’t sure it was her. But for a second, it hadn’t seemed like her. Something about her felt different, or maybe it was several little things. Her hair, usually up in a messy bun on the top of her head, was falling in thick brown waves around her shoulders. Her usually ramrod straight posture had a relaxed droop to it. And her expression, which seemed permanently harried and stressed these days, was softer. She looked… well, maybe not happy, but peaceful somehow. Content.

The first time, the word had come out as little more than a whisper, easily carried off on the breeze. The second time, I made sure she would hear me.

“Mom!”

She peered up from the rose bush she was examining, looking almost guilty —like I was the parent, and I’d caught her doing something she knew she shouldn’t be doing. But then the expression softened again, and her lips curled into a rueful little smile.

“Wren. You found me,” she said. “I was… hiding.”

A sharp emotion shot through me, something with an edge of pain to it. “Oh. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to… I can go.”

“No, sweetie, don’t go. I just… I wasn’t sure how I’d feel, having you here.”

I frowned. “I’ve already been here, remember?”

“Yes, but you didn’t know what this place was then, and I didn’t tell you. A holdover from all those years of secrecy, I guess,” she said with an embarrassed little shrug. She pointed to a tree just to her left. There was a plaque affixed to it, one I hadn’t noticed the last time I was here, sneaking around and spying in the dark. It said, “Kerridwen’s Garden.”

“Oh. This… this is your space.”

“It used to be,” she said, her voice little more than a broken whisper.

“Mom, seriously, it’s fine. If you want to be alone, I totally get it,” I said, wanting to run from the vulnerability on her face. I didn’t want her to have to open up parts of herself she wasn’t ready to open, just so I could peer inside. She didn’t owe me that. Well, maybe she did, but I wouldn’t collect. I’d already forgiven her for lying to me.

“No,” she said, and the guilt was gone. She sounded a little more in control of herself. “No, it’s fine, Wren, honestly. I do want you to see this place. I’ve been working up the courage to ask you to come here with me— I guess that’s what I was trying to say. So, thank you for finding me here. If we’d waited for me to work up that courage, you might never have seen it.”

I’d been so focused on my mother that I’d barely glanced at our surroundings, other than the plaque. Now I took a long moment to gaze around me, and my mouth fell open.

The word “garden” could hardly do justice to the beauty of this place. Gardens were neat and orderly, trimmed and pruned and mowed. This place felt like the wild version of that kind of garden; a place where the plants themselves decided where they loved best to grow, and were just free to do it. Vines tangled up trees, and draped from their branches. Peonies were poking their fluffy heads up between the branches of rose bushes. Herbs seemed to spring from the ground in bouquets, a dozen fragrant plants all mingling happily.

And the colors… oh my goodness, the colors.

A memory shot to the surface of my mind. I was six years old, and my mother snuggled up with me on our worn sofa and introduced me to The Wizard of Oz. Now, I was a kid of the modern world: every video I’d ever seen was in color. But when Dorothy left the dull, dreary sepia tones of Kansas behind and stepped into the vibrant Land of the Munchkins, I was awestruck, like it was the first time I’d ever seen color on a screen.

That’s what I felt like in this moment: Dorothy stumbling into Technicolor.

“Does this mean that your magic is… that you’re a…”

“A green witch, like Asteria was? Yes. It seems, despite my best efforts, that is still true,” she said. There was the strangest tone in her voice, a searing combination of wonder and sadness. She reached out a tentative hand, and touched a rose that hovered an inch or two from her fingers. As she did, another layer of brilliant petals unfurled around it. It put a lump in my throat that I had to swallow against before I could speak again. But my mom continued before I had the chance to fully compose myself.

“I spent almost all my time in this garden, Wren. As a girl, I followed Asteria around her gardens, tending to the plants and my budding magic at the same time. I know Asteria was so happy that one of her daughters had finally inherited her gift. She would never have admitted it out loud, but I knew she was disappointed that Rhi and Persi had never shown any inclination for the garden. I couldn’t get enough of it. Sometimes, I would fall asleep under a bush or in a tree, and Asteria would have to come find me and carry me inside to bed. But when she woke in the morning, my bed would be empty, and I’d be snoozing in the branches somewhere. Eventually, she gave up trying to bring me inside, and just brought me a blanket instead.”

She smiled, and it wasn’t as sad now. I found I could smile back. It sounded like the kind of mad thing Asteria would do, letting a toddler sleep in the flowerbeds all night.

“When my gift began to emerge, Asteria decided I needed a garden of my own. The one next to the house—that was hers. It was full of her magic. There was no real way to know what I could do unless I could start with a blank canvas. And so she gave me one. She walled off this little patch of land for me, and set me free in it. There was instruction—it wasn’t complete chaos all the time, though probably more often than not. She let me experiment. She let me test and practice and plant and tend and dig up and try again. This place was… my little magical laboratory. All mine.”

I could see it in my mind, my mother as a wild, barefoot child with dirty fingernails and flushed cheeks, flowers tucked in her curls, vines wound around her limbs like living jewelry. I felt the smile spread across my face. My mother saw it, and smiled back, as though in acknowledgment of that same little girl she used to be.

“It went on that way for years, me and my garden, all wrapped up in each other. My sisters were older, already entangled in the deeply personal process of unraveling their own gifts. We had each other, but we were each, for a little while, consumed with ourselves; Rhi with her recipes and her ingredients, Persi with her potions and charms. It’s inherently selfish, this exploratory stage of magic.” She hesitated, biting her lip. “Maybe not selfish, that’s not quite it… self-involved? Self-centering? In any case, though we loved each other, and loved Asteria, our magic was the most important thing as we discovered it. The most important thing… until you came along.”

She smiled at me, a softer smile than the mischievous grin of a moment before. I returned it, eager for the smile to carry us into the next part of this story she was telling me.

“It was a gravitational shift, Wren. I can’t say that I had planned for you. You were a surprise, as you know… the best surprise. But when you arrived and the midwife laid you in my arms, the center of my universe moved outside of myself. My world no longer revolved around the magic in my veins. It revolved around you. The shift was instant and irreversible. You became the most important thing to me. I hadn’t expected it. Or at least, I hadn’t expected the force of it.” She smirked. “This is the part where you get to scoff and say I’m being dramatic and mushy.”

My eyes had filled with tears. The fact that I had to wipe them away made the exaggerated roll of my eyes slightly less effective. “Seriously pathetic, Mom,” I said, in the most sarcastic teenage tone I could muster under the circumstances. She smiled, appreciating my efforts.

“In any case, you became the new focus, Wren. My magic became… well, not unimportant, but secondary. My sisters underestimated that, but Asteria never did. I think she knew that you were more important to me than anything else, even more than my ties to this place. It’s why she tried to protect you herself that night. It’s why she didn’t tell me what had happened until I confronted her.”

My heart sped up. She was telling me so many things that I’d always wanted to know, but had been too afraid to ask.

“The night the Darkness came for you, I wasn’t with you at the house.” She said it like each individual word was being painfully ripped from inside her. “I was here, in this garden, trying to find a small portion of peace for myself. I’m not sure if anyone’s ever told you this, but being a mom is kind of hard, and no toddler is a picnic. I was tired and feeling a bit burnt out. I came here to… to be a little selfish again, I guess. To reconnect with myself. And in that couple of hours…” She shook her head, unable to continue.

I took a step toward her, wanting to comfort her. “It’s not your fault, Mom. The Darkness was waiting. If it hadn’t come that night, it would have come another night. And another after that. Even the most attentive parent can’t be watching 24/7.”

She sighed. “I think enough time has passed that I know that. Logically. But then? When it happened? Wren, you can’t begin to imagine the guilt, the horror I felt when I walked back in the house to find Asteria had you in that protective circle. I… think I lost my mind for a short time there, I really do. I held you all night in that circle. And only at dawn, when Rhi and Persi came to relieve me, to insist I eat something and get some sleep, only when they had you guarded between them did I leave that circle. But I didn’t go to the kitchen to eat, or to my bed to sleep. I came here. I came here, to the place I built entirely with my own magic, and I destroyed it.”

I must have looked skeptical. I glanced around me, but I couldn’t imagine a place more vibrant, more… alive.

My mom interpreted my expression perfectly. “Asteria,” she said, shaking her head. “She rebuilt it for me, during the years we were gone from Sedgwick Cove. I never asked her to. I never wanted to think about this place again. But she knew what I didn’t know, of course. She knew about the Covenant. She knew we’d have no choice but to come back one day, and when we did, she wanted this place to be waiting for me.” What started as a laugh ended in a sob. “I really didn’t deserve her. It wasn’t this place I was mad at. It was me. My magic.”

I realized I was holding my breath, and let it whoosh out of me. I felt almost dizzy with the weight of all she was telling me.

“The other thing I didn’t know then, Wren, was that the Darkness was after your magic. After all, we had no idea what your magical gifts would be. Vesper witches are traditionally powerful, but not always. One of Asteria’s cousins never really managed much magic at all, never developed a clear affinity. So, it does happen, even in families like ours. But even assuming you would someday be a witch of potent magical ability, my mind couldn’t fathom that the Darkness wanted you for you. I thought the Darkness wanted you to get to us. I thought it wanted the Vespers. And that meant that my magic had put you in danger.”

I pressed my lips together. Just because I thought I should respond didn’t mean I had any idea what to say.

“It wasn’t just that I wanted to run from this place, Wren. I wanted to run from myself. From my magic. I wanted to sever myself from the thing that put you in danger. It seems ridiculous now, but I was crazy with fear. I thought I could do it. I thought I could walk away from my magic. I thought if I never used it, if I let it wither on the vine, if you’ll pardon the plant analogy, that it would shrivel up and drop away. I wanted to starve my magic. So that’s what I did.”

“You moved us to a city, somewhere that didn’t have many trees or green spaces,” I said.

“That’s right. I never had plants in the house. Not even cut flowers. I told you it was because I was allergic, that I had a black thumb, that I was too busy or tired to take care of anything but you. But of course, the truth was that I didn’t want to tempt myself. I didn’t want to give my magic anything it could work on.”

“How did that make you feel?” I whispered. “Wasn’t it hard?”

“It was, harder than I ever could have imagined, but I didn’t allow myself to acknowledge it. I was a mourner who was completely burying her grief. It… wasn’t healthy. It’s one of the reasons I would get so angry when Asteria came to visit. It wasn’t just that I was worried that she’d let something slip to you. It was because she was the living embodiment of what I’d chosen to leave behind, and I… I resented her for it. I was jealous.”

My mother was revealing herself to me, layers of delicate petals peeling back to reveal what was in her heart; and though some of it made perfect sense, I never, in a million years, would have thought my mother jealous of Asteria. I couldn’t reconcile that emotion with what I’d seen pass between them, but then, I’d never understood any of it until Asteria was gone.

“I’m sorry you had to… to choose between me and who you are,” I finally managed to say.

My mother’s face crumpled. “Ah, shit. This is one of the reasons I kept putting this off, Wren. I knew you would find a way to blame yourself, and that’s the last thing I want. This whole mess is my fault, honey, not yours. These were my choices, and I… well, I wouldn’t say I don’t regret them. Let’s face it, this whole situation is messier than that.” My mom passed a hand over her face, and sighed deeply. “I regret running away from Sedgwick Cove because, in the end, it didn’t protect you. I should have known that it wouldn’t. Asteria certainly knew, but I couldn’t bring myself to listen to her. And now here we are without her. What I wouldn’t give to be able to take her advice now.”

My heartbeat stuttered. Should I tell her that I’d seen Asteria just this afternoon, standing in the garden of Shadowkeep? Surely not. What purpose could it serve? Asteria certainly wasn’t here now, and I had no idea if I would ever see her again. No. Best to keep my mouth shut, at least for now. If I saw Asteria again, then maybe… well, I would cross that bridge if I got to it.

“Thank you for telling me all this,” I said instead. “That was… you really didn’t have to.”

“Yes, I did,” my mom said. “I’ve owed you an explanation for a long time, Wren. You didn’t get the full story even after the lighthouse, and that’s inexcusable. And so, I’m offering you another apology as well. I know moms are supposed to have it all together or whatever, but… well, I hate to break it to you, but moms are just people stumbling through life like everyone else. We only pretend to have it all together so you’ll listen to us.”

“I’m gonna remind you that you said that,” I teased.

“Good. Maybe it will keep me humble, and help me stop and think before I do something else as monumentally stupid as abandoning this place,” she said, gesturing around her.

I followed the path of her hand through the air, taking in the garden again. “You said Asteria took care of this place for you?”

My mom nodded. “The most remarkable thing about it is that it still feels like mine. She fixed it but, magically speaking, she left hardly a fingerprint. Now that’s a skill I have yet to attain.”

“Maybe you should start practicing,” I suggested.

And then at last, my mother really smiled: a full, uncomplicated smile that lit up her face and made her look, for a moment, like the girl who had once brought life and color to this place. She reached a hand out for mine, and I took it.

“Maybe I should.”