Chapter 10

CHAPTER TEN

Upon returning to the farmhouse, I almost didn't recognize it. The outside was the same with its white planks and black shutters, all enlivened by the magical boost we'd infused it with earlier that day, but the inside…

Mom and Aunt Eranthis had been busy.

Someone had found my cache of apple seeds in its jar in the hearth room and improvements had been grown . Extra chairs, an extension to the dining room table so it could now easily sit ten, supple hammocks hanging in both the den and the spare bedroom upstairs, additional shelving to keep the spell ingredients and potions needed for the summoning separate from my bulk stocks, and various odds and ends that would make the Hawthornes' stay in Redbud that much more comfortable. Or at least acceptable.

Charlie Lancaster had indeed delivered the keg of beer Otter had ordered, and it sat in the corner of the dining room in a grown kegerator, which was basically just a seamless barrel filled with ice. The tap at the top had been crowned with a flourish in the shape of the letter H .

The dining room table was now Aunt Eranthis's personal workspace to tailor all the clothes we'd acquired at the Barn Market. She had no less than three pins sticking out of the corner of her coral-colored mouth and her glasses teetering on the very edge of her nose as she squinted her kohl-lined eyes as her magic needle whizzed back and forth.

There was no sign of Otter, so either Dad had enlisted him on the hunt for the fiáin or he was out patrolling the property.

Inside the tiny kitchen, Aunt Peony bustled back and forth between the stove—having finally relented—and the counter by the sink where she would look over Dale's shoulder as he stood on a stool to see if he was chopping the potatoes to her liking. From the way she hovered and he briskly chopped, it was evident they'd formed some kind of semi-reluctant/semi-congenial working environment. Aunt Peony's dandelion helpers were literally everywhere else, scattering out of range of their mistress's bustling footfalls, lest they be squashed. She still used the hearth, but she had to compete for its power with her sister, my mother.

Mom knelt on the slate hearth stones, hands flat on her knees, flanked by Dutch ovens that were bubbling away with goodness knew what. I dumped my first load of Cedar Haven paraphernalia by the back door and craned over my mother's shoulder. The twin fires were subdued, more a wall of light than flickering flames, and entirely purple. I'd never seen that color before.

I'd also never seen a face in the flames before, like some sort of magical video call. "Boar!" I cried.

My cousin's face split into a smile, but then he quickly wiped it from his face after a glance at my mother. Clearly he wasn't sure whether or not he should be happy to see me, given the circumstances.

"It's alright, Boar," Mom assured.

"Heya, Cuz," my favorite cousin greeted, smiling once more. "Auntie's been filling us all in at home. You're gonna be grounded for eternity, you know that?"

"Boar," Mom chastised.

"I'm twenty-five, Boar," I said sourly. "I'm not sure ‘grounding' me would have the same effect as it did when I was fourteen."

Boar's face was suddenly shoved aside, and Rose's appeared in the flames. Even with her features in purple monochrome, I could tell she was flushed with excitement. There a bit of jostling as Rose pulled her sister Lilac into view, their two faces squished together.

"Meadow! Aunt Forsythia mentioned a bear ." Rose pinched Lilac's cheek. "Sis is so jeal—"

"Put Boar back on," Mom said sharply, and just like that, my hopes were dashed about talking to Lilac about shifters. At least right now. Tonight might be another story. "Boar, clear everyone out of the kitchen except for Hare and Buck."

Then Mom rose from her kneeling position, took hold of my elbow, and ushered me from the hearth room. I snatched up my paper birch-bound notebook from the workbench shelf on the way out and shoved it into my foraging bag. If I wanted to keep my family from snooping through everything I owned, I needed to keep all my personals literally on my person at all times.

As we squeezed through the cluttered kitchen, Mom told Grandmother, "They're ready for you."

Grandmother nodded and went to kneel on the hearth stones, and we all suddenly found something else to do elsewhere. Even Aunt Peony turned down the flames on the stove and made herself scarce, taking her bowl of half-made biscuits with her and sending Dale out to help Aunt Hyacinth finish unloading the sedan.

While I chafed to be ousted from my own hearth room, and no doubt a conversation I had every right to be a part of, I didn't get a chance to voice my complaint, because Mom—who still had a hand on my elbow—gave me a push towards the stairs.

I'd had enough of being pushed and hustled in my own house and was about to unleash the tirade of my life on my mother when her ivy-green eyes gleamed in warning.

"I'm going to finish setting up the guest room," she said loudly to anyone who was listening. "Meet me upstairs," she mouthed. Something told me we weren't going to stuff pillows into pillowcase or organize all the toothbrushes.

Aunt Eranthis only nodded absently, her concentration on her enchanted needle, and Aunt Peony gave a noncommittal yet chipper, "Uh-huh!" as she focused on not getting any flour on her cousin's tailoring as she finished rubbing the butter into the biscuit dough.

"C'mon, Sawyer," I told my cat as we headed for the front door. "We gotta get that stuff inside before it gets totally soaked."

"Oh, yeah," he said, hot on my heels. "The stuff."

When I gave him the stink eye for his failure to sound convincing, he wrinkled his nose at me. Yet no one protested, obviously assuming we'd gone to help Aunt Hyacinth.

But instead of helping her and Dale unload the car, we skirted around to the east side of the wraparound porch. I dug the vial of apple seeds out of my foraging bag, tossed one over the railing, and chased after it with a zap of green magic. No sooner had the seed disappeared beneath the creeping myrtle vines did a sapling sprout, rising up fast like a beanstalk. Hooking a hand under Sawyer's belly, I latched ahold of the sapling in my other hand and swung into its branches. It grew tall enough for me to reach my bedroom window, and a moment later, a rain-dampened witch and a dewy cat snuck inside.

We padded into the hallway to find Mom already at the attic port, the pull-down ladder extended. She was up the ladder by the time I set my foot on the first rung, and I held my breath as I climbed, hoping it wouldn't creak under my weight and alert the family downstairs that something sneaky was afoot.

"Not you, tomcat," Mom said. After I'd finished the climb into the attic, her wiry frame had moved quickly to block the entrance, Sawyer poised on a rung right below the trap door.

"That's my witch, lady," he replied tartly. "I don't leave her side."

"Exactly. Which is why you must go elsewhere so everyone thinks she's not with me up here."

Sawyer flicked his amber eyes to me, questioning.

"The spare bedroom," I said quickly, picking up on my mother's urgency. "Lock the door behind you and make a bunch a noise like we're moving stuff around in there."

Sawyer started down the rungs, pausing halfway down to send me a sour look. "I don't have thumbs, remember? There will be no locking of doors. And so far, they've forgotten about collaring me, and I don't want to remind them by ‘misbehaving.' So don't dawdle."

When he was on the ground, Mom hauled up the ladder with the help of a glowing green whip, then lowered the trap door and straightened quickly. "We don't have much time," she whispered, sweeping first to the left and then to the right to check the vents on either side of the attic for eavesdroppers. Her bare feet didn't even whisper over the dusty floorboards she walked so silently. She paused at the full-length mirror and the protection barrier I'd made to contain the shadowman I suspected to be lurking in the grimoire. "Did you layer this? It's quite ingenious."

"Mom, what's going on?" I asked, redirecting her focus.

After adjusting the swivel on the mirror so it faced the ground, she returned quickly, taking ahold of my hands and giving them a squeeze.

"Your grandmother is not the villain you think she is, honey," she began. When I started to pull away, her fingers tightened on mine. "We all took the vow willingly, just as I told you in the woods. At the time, it was a good idea, but…"

"What did it take from you?" I asked, echoing the question one of them had posed to Grandmother.

"You were right to call it a curse, because that's what it became. The fae… their bargains are tricky, full of loopholes and nuances. We had to supply the half-heart with magic in order to keep it alive and the protection spell active. It got greedy." Mom released me to rub at her center of her chest as if it ached. "That's one of the potions your aunt Peony has bubbling on the hearth—a restorative. We'll be fine."

"You could've just told me," I pressed. "You can tell me."

Mom shook her head, but she didn't protest when I took a step back.

"Why not? Don't you trust me?"

"Oh, I do, honey. Trust has nothing to do with this. And… maybe you're even ready for the truth. Your tenacity, your flexibility of mind… You've handled everything beautifully since you left." She smiled softly. "I guess we didn't know the real you at the manor."

"Neither did I." Well, perhaps that wasn't true. Maybe I'd just been a seed at Hawthorne Manor waiting for the right time and conditions to grow.

Suddenly nervous, I wet my lips. "Am I really Violet's heir?" I had seen her in my hallucinations brought on by Flora's moonflower milk bath, but that's all I'd thought it was, a hallucination. Not an echo of the past.

Mom cast a furtive glance at the trap door, propped open only by the little wedge I kept up here for that exact purpose. There was a reason why we were up here and not in front of the family.

"Mom, what is it?"

Her sudden inhale sounded wobbly, like she was stifling a sob. "I'm forbidden from speaking about—" She shook her head, her springy curls bouncing. "But I'll do the best I can. I'll not have you unprepared. Not again.

"The Hawthornes are not hearth witches by birth. We're green witches, through and through, and our ancestors only learned hearth witchery to disguise ourselves. To hide from him ."

When I opened my mouth, she gave me a miserable shake of her head—the gag order forbade her from speaking his name.

"There is an aspect of green magic," she whispered hurriedly, "what Violet had, that is beyond what is considered the norm. We Hawthornes have control over the Life and Death aspects of Nature's green magic, as is our birthright, but it is Violet's heir who will be like Violet herself: sister to Mother Nature, if the legends can be believed. She is a primal force, Meadow, able to control not just the earth and all growing things, but aspects of water, fire, and air."

Dread like a poisonous vine sprouted in my stomach and constricted against my heart. I had summoned true fire less than twenty-four hours ago, encircling the fiáin in a ring of green flames to prevent its escape. And air magic before that, on the outcropping of the Tussock woods when we'd made the Hunting Spell. I'd thought that was just me maturing into some latent bloodline abilities, but now I wasn't so sure.

"It is that ability that makes Violet's heir a target," she said. "It's been our job, the robed elders of the coven's mission, to make that target as small as possible. Do you remember what I told you about horoscopes?"

I found the abrupt change in topic distracting and squeaked out a noncommittal noise as I wracked my brain for an answer.

While astrology was an honored pastime among witches and other supes, the humans of our day had made it a laughingstock. Us youngsters at the manor had always enjoyed reading our horoscopes in the daily newspaper, one of few "outside world" things Grandmother allowed us access to. Hawthorne Manor was our haven, our own microcosm of safety and harmony, but she didn't want us oblivious to the wider world around us. Mostly.

"Yeah," I said brightly, remembering. "You said never to read them at the beginning of the day, otherwise we might influence our own actions just to make them come true. It's better to read the horoscope after your day is complete to really see if its predictions were accurate. But what—"

"The same can be said about prophecy. That simply knowing about it will make it manifest, like some sort of magical theory of relativity. Because knowing would influence your actions, consciously or subconsciously, all of which would expose you. That's one of the things we were preventing by taking that vow. The less you knew, and the more you were hidden, all decreased the chances of that prophecy ever coming about."

"How can that be? It's about Violet being reborn, or at least her power, or whatever. Y'all been pretty sketchy about the details. Either way, it sounds like a sure thing to me."

"The prophecy was not just about Violet's heir." She held my hands once again in a pleading grip, her ivy-green eyes intense. Burning with a need for me to understand. "But the one who seeks her. And the choice she will make when he finds her."

This master Grandmother keeps talking about. "Who?" I demanded, fingers tightening. "What choice?"

Mom's mouth formed soundless words, then she released my hands in frustration. "I cannot speak of it," she spat, her anger not directed at me. Then she gave me a rueful sideways glance. "You'll have to teach me how you broke that spell I had on your cuffs. Normally it's impossible for one witch to break a spell already so thoroughly entrapping her."

"I did a lot of growing up here in Redbud," I replied.

She came close and smoothed a roguish wisp of rain-dampened hair away from my face, adjusted my ponytail to drop down my back instead of smear wetly against my shoulder. "Yes, you have."

The touch brought back the memory of Arthur doing the same thing under the maple tree, and I pulled away, flushing. "Mom, this protection spell, it seems it shrouded me from detection, but did it have any other effects? Any… dampening effects?"

She gave me a quizzical look.

I touched my chest, at the top of my left breast where my heart was. "I have this… connection with Arthur. It was just like a thread, or a tether, before—almost magnetic—but when I stabbed the half-heart and broke the curse, it became so much more substantial. So much stronger. It's like a chain now, and I don't understand it. Do you?"

Mom shook her head. Then she said, almost reluctantly, "I know nothing of that, but it is within the realm of possibility that the protection spell shielded you from everything you might be fated to interact with, not just him . It was very strong."

"Forsythia," Aunt Hyacinth called suddenly.

Though it was her cousin's voice, we both knew it was Grandmother who was summoning her.

Mom seized my shoulders. "The Circle of Nine does not have the strength to cast the kind of protection spell needed to keep you hidden. You must be careful, Meadow. You must be prepared for anything. The legends we told you at Hawthorne Manor are true. The elders are spelled to silence; no one but Grandmother can give you the whole story. But… it might very well be your ignorance of the prophecy that saves you."

"My ignorance got us here in the first place," I hissed.

"Forsythia!" Aunt Hyacinth shrilled.

"Hide in plain sight, Meadow," Mom told me, opening the trap door. She checked that the coast was clear, then lowered the ladder. "If you don't know what you are, neither will he."