Chapter 6

Chapter 6

I woke to a chilly late-spring morning, with bright blue skies and fluffy white clouds sailing past the sun. Pulling up the neck of my fleece jacket, I wended my way through the perennial borders that lined the paths between Orchard Farm and the barn.

From the vantage point of the farmhouse, most of the barn’s rectangular bulk was tucked into the thicket of surrounding shrubs, making it look smaller than it really was. The barn’s tall roofline was also masked by the lower branches of ancient hemlocks and chestnut trees that grew into a protective shell around the structure. A crumbling stone wall hid in a brambly hedge behind the barn, creating an impenetrable barrier of twining grapevines, barberries with their vicious thorns, and the rambling branches of wild roses. Nothing was in flower yet, but soon the hedge would be adorned with splashes of white, pink, red, and purple.

As I approached the barn, I had the uncanny sense I was being watched, but there was no witchy tingle to indicate it was Gwyneth. Drawing nearer to the barn’s stout wooden doors, I noticed hundreds of white eyeballs staring back at me. Each bobbed on a blood-red pedicel, a black spot like a pupil on the end. This was baneberry, the poisonous plant that Sarah had warned me never to touch or eat, though she kept a single specimen in her witch’s garden and used it in minute amounts for some of her charms and cures. No witch I’d ever encountered would plant a hedge of the dangerous stuff. And the berries didn’t usually appear until the end of summer. The shrubs, like the barn, must be covered with enchantments.

Gingerly, I touched the heavy handle on the barn’s sliding door, expecting opposition from the wards and bolts I’d felt around the place yesterday. Gwyneth must have lifted them in preparation for my visit, for there was no resistance now. I slid the door aside on its well-oiled tracks.

I gasped in wonder as the barn’s interior came into view. Magic had been used on the beams and clapboards so that there was more space inside than the building’s footprint suggested. It was crammed with a wizard’s workshop of magical objects and supplies. Bookshelves held more dusty tomes than John Dee’s Mortlake library, and Mary Sidney would have been thrilled to work in the laboratory located along the back wall, where two brick-faced charcoal stoves topped with gleaming distillation equipment flanked a potbellied wood-burner.

A worktable was centered in the middle of the room over a pentacle painted on the floor—the star surrounded by a circle that was so often included in human horror films and pulp novels about magic. A few old rocking chairs and the baskets, bottles, and boxes that filled the spaces between books completed the barn’s furnishings. High shelves extended up into the exposed roof beams. Drying racks laden with herbs were suspended from them on long ropes. A narrow range of clerestory windows just above the shelves let in the raking sunshine.

An old woman sat in one of the rocking chairs by the fire. She wore dark, simple clothing, and a woven blue-and-white blanket covered her legs. Her disordered silver hair was streaked with darker strands and one long tress extended over her shoulder and snaked across her lap.

Gwyneth hadn’t mentioned anyone would be joiningus.

Puzzled, I waved hello.

Merry meet, daughter, she said, puffing on the pipe that was held firmly in her worn and stained teeth. Gwyneth is on her way.

“Good morning,” I replied. “Are you a member of the Ipswich coven?”

The old woman rocked and wheezed, doubled over with laughter. She kept drawing on her tobacco while she did so, wreaths of smoke forming around her head.

A member of the coven, the strange woman repeated, gasping for breath. What need have I of covens?

“Are you family, then?” I’d only met Gwyneth and Julie, but I was confident that dozens more Proctors were in the wings.

“You should have waited like I asked, Granny Dorcas,” Gwyneth said from the threshold. “Suddenly appearing like that would frighten most people to death.”

I only frighten those who wish me ill, Granny Dorcas replied. Never family, Gwyneth.

“Morgana lost three years of her life when you appeared on her date with Bobby Williams,” Gwyneth said reprovingly.

Gwyneth was eighty-seven. She’d told me so yesterday. If this woman was her grandmother, then she would be well over a hundred years old. But Julie called Gwyneth’s grandmother Granny Elizabeth, not Granny Dorcas. Unless—

No. She couldn’t be a ghost. Ghosts were hazy and green, fading away at the edges and disappearing whenever you asked them a question. This woman was in full, albeit muted, color. Her edges, like her tongue, were sharp. And she hadn’t faded away when I quizzed her.

“Are you a ghost?” I whispered.

I prefer to be called a specter. Granny Dorcas let out another cackle. Spectral evidence. That’s what they claimed they had againstme in 1692.

“Granny Dorcas is your direct ancestor, back eleven generations,” Gwyneth said. She was carrying a scroll and waved it at Granny Dorcas. “I was going to show Diana the family tree before introducing you.”

My mouth dropped open in astonishment. Eleven generations?

Bah. Granny Dorcas removed her pipe long enough to direct a stream of spit at the woodstove. We’ve not got time for fripperies and paper fancies. Let’s get to business.

“This is my classroom, Dorcas.” Gwyneth had dropped the reverential designation of “Granny” to assert rank. “I told you last night, you’re welcome to join us, but only if you don’t interfere.”

Granny Dorcas responded by breathing smoke out of her nostrils like a firedrake.

“That’s better.” Gwyneth nodded. “I think tea and a tidy are in order.”

Aunt Gwyneth waved her hand and a barely audible hum filled the air. Brooms danced across the floorboards, whisking away some ashes that had fallen from the stove. A mop swirled in front of the chemistry bench. Water rushed into a dry sink near the distillation equipment from an old pump hanging in midair. A flame burst forth from the banked coals under a three-legged stand in the laboratory.

“The older I get, the more magic I use,” Gwyneth said with a sigh. She went to the sink and peered inside. “The kettle is full. Do you mind lifting it, Diana?”

I skirted by Dorcas and lifted the heavy kettle onto the tripod with care. I didn’t want to spill a drop and extinguish the flame. But I needn’t have worried. As soon as the kettle was in place the flames increased to boil the water.

“Let me give you the grand tour.” Gwyneth took me by the elbow. “I suppose we should start here, with the laboratory.”

“Who did these belong to?” I examined the delicate shapes of the pelicans and retorts, and the heavy crucibles and mortars that were arranged around the stove. This was not the apparatus of a modern chemist, but an alchemist.

“Me.” Gwyneth’s eyes twinkled. “Doesn’t the Bishop House have a stillroom?”

“It does,” I said, thinking of the small, cramped room off the kitchen. “But Sarah uses a Crock-Pot and a coffee maker to brew her concoctions.”

“We’re old-school at Ravenswood,” Gwyneth replied. “Besides, I haven’t found a Crock-Pot particularly useful when it comes to dissolution and conjunction. There’s no way to see the color changes.”

Gwyneth was talking about alchemy—not just making love potions and valerian tea.

“I’ve read your work, Diana,” Gwyneth said gently. “It must be something of a shock to learn that alchemy is a part of higher magic, despite your arguments to the contrary.”

My first book had presented painstaking evidence that alchemy was an early form of modern chemistry, and not the stuff of deadly poisons and life-extending elixirs. Working alongside Mary Sidney in her laboratory at Baynard’s Castle had confirmed this view. Gwyneth’s words were forcing me to reconsider.

“Potions, poisons, medicinal concoctions, the philosopher’s stone—I do it all.” Gwyneth gestured toward the nearby shelves, where jars of dried plants and roots were arranged in alphabetical order, along with brightly decorated earthenware apothecary jars whose Latin labels identified their contents. Scorpion oil, wolf oil, aconite, basil unguent, mercury, marshmallow root water—Gwyneth possessed an array of precious substances that John Hester would have been proud to display in his shop at Paul’s Wharf. I stepped closer, intrigued.

“You’ll be interested in the family’s scientific instruments, too.” Gwyneth led me to a display of brass, ivory, and wooden instruments.

It was an assortment that would have been familiar to any seventeenth-century practical mathematician: a tarnished Gunter’s chain, used to measure distances; a circumferentor to gauge horizontal angles to make a map or plan; a plane table compass, which might have been used to draw a chart of the Massachusetts coast; a mariner’s astrolabe for navigating the open seas and calculating the height of the stars; a compass to create the arcs and circles that were used in apotropaic marks like the hexafoils on the keeping room door.

“Our John Proctor was an expert geometer as well as a farmer, and interested in all kinds of science,” Gwyneth said with pride. “His passion was passed down in the family blood—through my veins and yours. You can see his brass sundial at the museum in Salem, but these items remained in the family, along with his books.”

Owning a brass sundial in Puritan New England would probably have been sufficient to get you accused of witchcraft in 1692.

“It was John Proctor who designed the first protective sigils for the Old Place,” Gwyneth continued. “He sketched them in the Boston gaol and passed them to the Proctors on the outside to make sure his mathematical legacy lived on after he was gone. His children taught their children how to cipher and sigil and draw the geometrical symbols we still use today in our wards and spells.”

“And was it really John Proctor’s ghost I saw walking toward Ravenswood?” Now that I knew the family ghosts were in Technicolor and substantial, Julie’s conviction that I’d seen our shared ancestor was more plausible.

“I don’t know,” Gwyneth mused. “He’s never appeared to me.”

I reckon it was John. That boy was always a wanderer. Granny Dorcas tapped the bowl of her pipe against the sole of her shoe, displaying a length of moth-eaten wool stocking that had seen better days. Tobacco rained down on the floor, some of it still alight. Dorcas rummaged in her skirts, found her stash of leaves, and packed the pipe with practiced swiftness. Then she set the tip of her finger aflame and touched it to the contents of the bowl.

“I’ve repeatedly told you not to smoke in here,” Gwyneth said, clicking her fingers. The fire shovel and broom clattered to attention and swept up the remnants of Granny Dorcas’s last smoke before they set the barn on fire.

“When were you born, Granny Dorcas?” As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I regretted it. My ancestor drew back, indignant.

Long ago, miss, when you didn’t ask for the age of your elders. Back then, birthdays were often followed by burials. So were weddings. Granny Dorcas’s flare of temper fizzled out. My mam told me I was born under a waning winter moon when Massachusetts Bay was filled with pox and hardship, when the first Charlie still had his head on his neck.

“Before 1649, then?” Granny Dorcas was a very old ghost indeed.

Granny Dorcas shrugged. I suppose. I know the day I died well enough—and it wasn’t September 1692 when the court killed me on paper.

“Dorcas…Hoare?” When I was ten and Sarah was trying to instill a sense of family responsibility in me, she’d made me memorize all the witches executed in the Salem panic. When I was thirteen, my aunt drew up a list of all the accused witches who had survived. Dorcas Hoare had been among them. She’d confessed and pointed an accusatory finger at some of her neighbors, which earned her a temporary reprieve. There had been no hint that she was connected to the Proctors.

Granny Dorcas will do. Dorcas fingered the lock of hair over her shoulder.

“This all would have been so much easier if you’d been patient, Dorcas.” Gwyneth produced a teapot and spooned loose leaves out of an apothecary jar that had once held dried bergamot but was now being used to store Earl Grey. She held the pot under the spout and invisible hands tilted the kettle, releasing steaming water that filled it to the brim.

I watched with curiosity, amazed that there was no spillage. How did it know when to stop?

“Overflow spell. Very useful when you live on the edge of a marsh, and cheaper than flood insurance.” My aunt poured the tea, then added a splash of milk from an apothecary jug labeled mallow syrup . I reached for one of the mugs, eager to get the restorative elixir into my body. Gwyneth looked pleased that I was not politely waiting to be served.

“That overflow spell could conserve gallons of water,” I said after taking a sip of my tea. It was excellent, just like every cup I’d had so far at Ravenswood. “It could save Yale thousands of dollars, given how distracted the students and faculty are.” Everywhere I went on campus, someone had left a tap running.

“Magic? At Yale?” Gwyneth’s eyebrows rose. “Dear me, Diana. It’s one thing for the faculty to cast a spell at one of the Seven Sisters—goddess knows it wouldn’t be the first time or the last—but I don’t imagine Elihu Yale or Increase Mather would approve of a witch doing so in their hallowed halls.”

“The faculty practice magic at Mount Holyoke?” How strange it must be to teach in a small liberal arts college surrounded by witches casting spells.

“Certainly,” Gwyneth said. “We had a real ghost problem until the class of 1900 decided to collect all the specters and deposit them in Wilder Hall’s attic as part of their class gift. And there’s a spot on the hill behind the Mandelles where Emily Dickinson left scraps of magic and poetry—some of it quite beautiful. Whenever there’s a storm one of the senior witches in English Lit goes out and gathers whatever the wind has brought to light. It counts toward her department service and is a lot more pleasant than serving on the curriculum revision committee.”

We both shuddered at the thought of such a thankless assignment.

“Let’s look at a file from the family archives,” Gwyneth suggested. “It should help you understand the Proctor family’s higher magic and give you a sense of our history with the Congregation.”

“And the family tree?” I said, taking another sip of tea as I followed her to the worktable.

Gwyneth laughed. “Yes, we’ll have a look at the family history, too. Are you coming, Granny?”

No need, Granny Dorcas replied. I am the family history.

“Suit yourself,” Gwyneth said with a shrug.

“What are those?” I pointed to a dozen carved wooden paddles. Each hung from a heavy nail pounded into the wall. They looked like enormous butter pats, except for the pieces of faded ribbon that clung to some of the frames.

“Spell-looms,” Gwyneth explained. “They’re the traditional way families in this part of the world preserve the power of their magic. We don’t rely solely on written spells. They—”

“Deteriorate over time.” This was why weavers like me were so essential in a magical community—and why their deliberate extermination centuries ago had led to a decline in our communities’ powers. “The old gramarye no longer has the same resonance it once did, and the spells fray and twist out of shape.”

“Exactly.” The skin between Gwyneth’s eyes puckered as she frowned. “Rebecca thought you might become a knotter, like Stephen. Who taught you to translate your newly knotted spells into words? Not Sarah.”

“A weaver called Goody Alsop.” I smiled at the memory of sitting in her London house and learning how to weave magic. “Matthew and I timewalked to London in 1590 to learn more about my powers. Thankfully Goody Alsop was still alive—one of the last of her kind.”

“And a great witch, too,” Gwyneth said. “I’m surprised she didn’t notice your predisposition for higher magic.”

“Perhaps she did.” I was not yet ready to tell Gwyneth about the tenth knot, which could be used to construct spells of creation—and destruction. I wondered whether my ability to tie the tenth knot was woven into my inheritance, along with higher, darker magic.

Gwyneth watched me closely. She knew that I was keeping something from her. After a long silence, she returned to the matter at hand.

“Right,” my aunt said briskly. “Where are the Congregation files, Granny Alice?”

I’d suspected there was an enchanted retrieval system to go with the tea-stirring and mop-swirling spells. I hadn’t anticipated it would involve another ghostly ancestor.

“Granny Alice’s shelving system is rather eccentric, I’m afraid,” Gwyneth apologized. “If you’re looking for something, you’d best ask for her help. She’s the one who devised the Byzantine classifications. It will save you hours of fruitless searching.”

A rolling ladder shot toward us, the wheels whooshing along the floor. When it reached the table, a middle-aged woman with an impressive bustline and brown hair knotted at the back of her skull climbed down the rungs. Based on her garments, Granny Alice was another great-grandmother—this one from the nineteenth century rather than the seventeenth. She held a clutch of manila folders, the edges brown.

Granny Alice slapped the files down, looking reproachfully at Gwyneth. The barn’s organization scheme is neither eccentric nor Byzantine. Melvil Dewey based his system on Francis Bacon’s Advancement of Learning. He thoroughly approved of my modifications toit.

“Modifications? You totally gutted the technology classification!” Gwyneth gathered the files closer.

Magic is an art, a science, and, yes, it is above all else a technology, Granny Alice retorted, swishing her mauve skirts in irritation. They were accented with black braid, as was the bodice. We can debate the merits of my interventions later. No doubt Diana will bring a fresh perspective to our argument, given her familiarity with Bacon’s ideas. Right now, you have more pressing concerns.

Granny Alice flounced back to the ladder and vanished on the third rung. Dorcas chuckled and Aunt Gwyneth sighed.

“Here. Have a look at these,” Gwyneth said, pushing a file towardme.

I opened the brittle folder. Inside were letters from the Congregation, most of them written in pen and ink on the paper that was still used on Isola della Stella. Their dates ranged from the 1870s to the present. Flipping through them, I encountered Proctors and Easteys, Dickinsons and—

“Mather?” I looked up from the letter dated 1925 that informed Jonathan Mather and his wife, Constance Proctor Mather, that their son, Putnam Mather, would have his magical talents assessed that summer. Sarah’s partner, Emily Mather, came from New York, not Massachusetts. Even so, the possibility that one of the women who had raised me might be a Proctor relative sent a chill up my arms and lifted the hair on the back of my neck.

“Your mother’s friend Emily descended from Cotton Mather’s son Creasy,” Gwyneth explained, once again seeming to read my thoughts, though I felt no intrusive touch in my mind.

Reverend Cotton Mather. Granny Dorcas spat and forked her fingers in the traditional gesture to ward off evil. He touched us all, you know, looking for places their devil might suckle. The minister’s son was just the same, lascivious and disordered.

“And the mother?” My witch’s third eye prickled in warning.

Tituba. Dorcas’s steely gaze locked with mine.

“Impossible. She was an old woman in 1692,” I protested.

Says who? Dorcas demanded. Tituba was still a girl when Reverend Parris bought her in Barbados, and just turned a woman when she arrived in Salem. By 1692 she had been laboring for wealthy men for more than a decade. That will age you, quick enough.

I knew that the old, haggard witch was a human stereotype, and that thirty was considered a ripe age in the seventeenth century, even though people could go on to live for decades more. Those few who reached the promised biblical age of seventy were considered very holy, very lucky, or both.

When Governor Phips shut down the trials, Tituba was free to leave the gaol—so long as Parris paid the colony what was owed for thirteen months of housing and feeding her. Dorcas’s puffing became agitated, and she rocked back and forth. That devil Parris refused the charges. It was Lady Mary who took pity on the poor creature and paid her fees. Then she took Tituba to Boston to serve in her household.

“The governor’s wife?” A pattern was beginning to emerge. “Wasn’t she accused of being a witch herself?”

Granny Dorcas nodded.

“Tituba was safe in Boston, for a time,” Gwyneth said, continuing the tale. “When Lady Mary died, the Phipses’ adopted son kept Tituba. According to Tituba’s story, Cotton Mather spotted her one day when she was out on family business. He followed her back to the Phips house and then returned to his own, afraid for his life. He babbled to his wife and children that there was a witch with the Phipses who wished him ill, and that he’d seen her devil’s teat with his own eyes. Creasy Mather was a curious, wayward boy desperate for his father’s approval. He decided he would examine this witch himself.”

Examination turned to rape, Dorcas said bitterly. Tituba was at the end of her child-bearing years, and the pregnancy put her poor body under great strain. Master Phips sent her to the family’s farm in Maine for the end of her confinement. She gave birth to a girl she named Grace Mather.

“That’s when Tituba became entangled in the life of the Proctors and the Hoares,” Gwyneth said. “William Proctor fled to Maine when he was released from prison, like others who had been touched by the hanging times. Granny Dorcas was there, too, along with some of her children. Soon there was a small community of Salem outcasts, bound together by shared tragedy.”

The Maine woods were full of magic then, Dorcas said. My Tabby used what spells she could to mend Will’s broken heart, but he longed for Ravenswood.

“William didn’t live to see the place again, but his wife, Tabitha, honored his last wish and returned here with their twin girls, Margaret and Mary.” Gwyneth unfurled the scroll she’d carried into the barn.

I bit back a gasp as I saw the Proctor family tree for the first time. The tree focused primarily on my direct lineage, rather than including detailed branches and leaves for every family member. Gwyneth directed my attention to the top of the scroll, where the names Dorcas Galley, John Proctor, and Tituba were enclosed in boxes with green borders. Next to each was the name of the father or mother of their children: William Hoare, Elizabeth Bassett, and Creasy Mather.

“Tituba and Grace traveled with them. Tituba died on the journey, and Tabitha raised her daughter as one of her own,” Gwyneth continued. “She was a gifted child, intelligent and quick like her grandfather Cotton Mather. Grace was determined to remind people of what had happened to Tituba during and after the hanging times. She never dropped the Mather name—not even after she married and had children of her own. Her eldest daughter was called Tituba Mather, after her mother.”

Below the three names at the top of the tree were the children from whom my branch of the family was descended: Tabitha Hoare, William Proctor, Grace Mather . I followed the line of descent until I reached a box at the bottom of the tree that was outlined in gold with my own name inside it. On the branches above were my parents, Rebecca Bishop and Stephen Proctor. Next to my mother’s box were two more boxes: one for Sarah, and one for her beloved Emily, a direct descendant of the enslaved Tituba.

Emily was doubly part of my family, and my eyes filled to see her and Sarah recognized alongside my parents. My ancestors had raised her ancestor, just as Emily had raisedme.

“As you see, you were always connected to the Proctors,” Gwyneth said, squeezing my arm in a reminder that I still had living family here, not just ghosts, “and to Ravenswood.”

I nodded, sniffing back the emotions that had stirred the branches of my family tree. Once I was in control of them, Gwyneth continued.

“What’s clear from the family history,” she said, “is that the Proctor family’s talent for higher magic came from Granny Dorcas. John Proctor was a knotter—a weaver, as you call it—and there had been others so blessed in his family line. No one understood why their powers manifested in strange, undisciplined ways. Back in John’s day, people believed that designing and casting your own spells was a sign of stubborn pride, bad blood, or some magical malformation in a witch’s character.”

The way Gwyneth explained it, the seventeenth-century attitude toward weaving was a bit like the vampires’ views on blood rage: It was a scourge that had to be stamped out and contained.

“To add to the mysteries of his magic, John worked geometrically, building sturdy spells shaped like Platonic solids, with intricate knots where the planes met that could withstand the ravages of time. He passed those spells on to William, who married Tabitha Hoare.” Gwyneth paused to gather her thoughts. “Something happened when the blood of the Hoares and the Proctors mixed, joining weavers who knotted new spells with witches who followed the Dark Path.”

My aunt pointed to two silver-filled boxes below the couple’s name. One was edged in black, the other in gold.

“Twins.” Their two girls, Mary and Margaret, had the same birth year.

Gwyneth nodded. “Since then, twins have appeared in every other generation of Proctors. One twin became a weaver, the other an adept in higher magic. It’s as though the goddess didn’t want too much power in any one witch’s hands, so she divided the ability to knot spells and the talent for higher magic between them.

“And then came you,” Gwyneth said, running her finger down the length of the page and touching each set of silver boxes in her path. “An only child, a single witch.”

But there were two witches insideme.

“I was a twin, too,” I confessed. “My brother’s embryo died in the womb. Mine absorbed it, along with his DNA. They call it vanishing twin syndrome. I’m a chimera, Gwyneth.”

Gwyneth let out a slow breath of understanding. “That would help explain why Rebecca’s first trimester was difficult. We worried she might miscarry.”

“Mom did miscarry, in utero.” I rested my head in my hands. “My brother was meant to be the timewalker—and the one to carry on the Proctor tradition of weaving new spells, it seems.”

And I must have been the twin destined for higher, darker magic. The call of the Dark Path came not just from my mother but from my Proctor heritage, too.

“Had Rebecca given birth to twins, she would have broken a centuries-old pattern in the Proctor bloodline,” Gwyneth said, understanding the significance of my being a chimera. “The goddess was forced to abandon one of her rules. She could repeat a set of twins in successive generations, or she could allow a single witch to possess dual powers. She chose the second option. The goddess chose you.”

“I never wanted to be chosen,” I said, anger flaring. “My family has given enough in the goddess’s service. My father—gone. My mother—gone. Emily—gone.”

And I am not done with you yet. The goddess’s eerie voice echoed through the barn.

Dorcas’s jaw dropped, the pipe falling from between her teeth. Gwyneth’s eyes swept heavenward, then gently closed. She nodded.

“So must it be,” Gwyneth replied. “Whether you want these blessings or not, Diana, is beside the point. The goddess has bestowed them on you, for some purpose of her own.”

Aye, Dorcas said, eyeing me through narrowed lids. It’s no wonder the oracles called you home. Besides, no witch should refuse the Dark Path of higher magic—not before she’s taken her first steps.

“What about your twins?” Gwyneth asked. “Do they exhibit a talent for weaving or higher magic?”

“Pip has a familiar,” I replied, “a weaver’s companion. When he was younger, he played with the strands of time. He hasn’t done so recently, however.” So far, Pip seemed to be following in the footsteps of my vanished brother.

“That must have been terrifying. And Rebecca?” Gwyneth was nudging me to admit something I couldn’t bear to say out loud.

“Becca talks to ravens,” I said shortly. “I don’t know enough about higher magic to know what that foretells. She’s always been more vampire than witch, and takes after Matthew, not me.” What happened with the ravens had planted a seed of doubt about which parent Rebecca favored, however. My head told me to run back to New Haven, but my instincts and heart insisted I remain at Ravenswood.

“I need to know everything you can teach me about higher magic,” I said, my decision clear, “and quickly, before the Congregation can examine Becca and Pip.”

“There’s nothing hurried about higher magic,” Gwyneth cautioned. “It’s not something you can bone up on in a few days. Higher magic requires patience and daily training. You have to follow a standard curriculum, and it takes years.”

But I was one of the impatient Proctors, and time was in short supply. I pressed my lips tight, not wanting to erupt into a panicked gush of molten resentment and fear over what had already happened, and what might occur in the future.

“You need a break before we go any further,” Gwyneth said, gauging my mood.

“I need to understand what is going to happen when the Congregation witches examine my daughter and son!” I cried.

“I suggest you go for a walk,” Gwyneth said, undeterred by my strong reaction. “The wood is cool on warm days like this.”

“I thought the woods were off-limits.”

“Ravenswood has had a chance to know you. You’ll be safe there now.” Gwyneth looked to Granny Dorcas for confirmation. She grunted in assent.

Class was dismissed.

—

After taking a few measured steps out of the barn, I ran across the warm meadow humming with dragonflies. As soon as I entered the wood, the sound quieted and a cool greenness enveloped me. A scrubby understory of pepperbush and blueberry surrounded stout trunks of oak, alder, white pine, hemlock, and rowan. Here and there I spotted greenbriers, a patch of ferns, a clump of starflowers, the twining branches of a wild rose. I stooped to pick up a fluffy gray feather left by one of the airborne inhabitants of the wood.

I drank in the green air, and with it some of Ravenswood’s steadying power. Here, among the towering trees and shrubby thickets, pulsed something ancient and sacred.

I wandered at a slower pace through a clearing with the remains of a fire and past a grove of tree houses, all of them ramshackle. A tattered Jolly Roger flew from one of the more robust structures.

Gradually, my frazzled brain found peace, and my heavy heart rose despite the burdens that had been placed on it this morning—the weight of my ancestors, the responsibility of new knowledge, my children’s unseeable future.

Canst thou remember a time before? The line from Shakespeare whispered through the wood once more.

“Mom?” I turned around, looking for her among the trees.

Canst thou remember, Diana?

My mother knew better than to ask me that.

“No!” I screamed, venting the hurt and anger that I was still not prepared to face. “You and Dad made sure of that. I’ve lost most of my childhood, thanks to you!”

I sobbed, the tears coursing down my cheeks, crying like my seven-year-old self had done when told that her mother and father were never coming back. I wiped the tears away from my clouded eyes.

My mother’s ghost stood before me, only a few feet away.

If you’ve lost something, and can’t find it, maybe you’re looking in the wrong place. Mom blew me a kiss.

I blinked at the surprising sensation of her lips pressing against my cheeks. When my eyes opened again, she had vanished.

My heart was a moth trapped in a cage, fluttering and banging against the bars of my ribs. Mom was trying to tell me something—something important. I racked my brain, looking for a hidden pocket of memory that I’d overlooked, but found none.

I retraced my steps to the Old Place, determined to learn all that I could about higher, darker magic and its place in my family’s past, present, and future—no matter how long it took.