by Cari Thomas
All of the questions she’d been trying to bury inside her began to spill out. Aunt says my magic is cursed by love, but what is the curse? Why won’t she tell me still? Anna recalled Selene’s hushed words – that she had to be in love with Attis for the curse to work. Why did she create him? For me to fall in love with him? Did she betray my mother too? How are the betrayals connected? Is Effie in on it too? Have she and Attis both been laughing behind my back while I fell for him?
Anna shook her head, trying to block the questions out. It didn’t matter any longer. She had decided. Even if Aunt still had her secrets she was the only one who truly loved her …
Then what’s in the third-floor room? No! I don’t care! I don’t care!
Anna banged her fist on the front of the book in frustration. Its image shimmered on the cover, catching the moonlight from her window. A tree above and a tree below. A perfect mirror.
Nana Yaganov’s words returned with sudden force: The truth is within the leaves. The mirror within the mirror. The mirror is the key.
Leaves … what if Nana had not been referring to the leaves of a tree, but the leaves of a book? A book with a mirror on the front? The book in her hands. If the riddle was referring to the book and the truth was within its pages – was a mirror hiding inside the fairy tales? The mirror is the key.
Anna opened the book to the first tale: ‘The Eyeless Maiden’, who sought the truth and had her eyes pecked out for it. She read it again and again and again. The maiden created a lake in the forest which became a mirror. The mirror? There were three keys – one silver, one water, one blood. How can that help me? Perhaps Nana wants me to end up with my eyes pecked out …
She turned to the second fairy tale, ‘Little Red Cap’. Despite the grandmother’s grisly death, it was a happier tale, not quite so lashed with punishment. This girl wandered off the path too but managed to defeat the wolf in the end with her little bag containing twig, needle, coin and thimble … each becoming wind, a mountain of earth, a raging fire and a river.
A tune rose up in her mind:
Needle is the dagger, commanding smoke and fire.
Twig is the wand, stirring wind and air.
Coin is the pentacle, in tune with soil and earth.
Thimble is the chalice, containing water’s breath.
It was the nursery rhyme Rowan sometimes sang.
Anna tightened her grip on the book. The fairy tale was hiding a simple truth. Needle, twig, coin, thimble … they represented the elemental tools: dagger, wand, pentacle and chalice. What if there’s more to the fairy tales than little warning stories for children? What if they contain buried knowledge? Hidden spells? Is ‘Little Red Cap’ really the instructions for an elemental spell?
Anna flicked back to the first fairy tale and read it again, her mind racing. As she read it, it was as if the spell mapped itself out for her, the words arrows pointing her in one direction. Three keys: one silver, one water, one blood. The maiden throws them together and they become a lake. When the moonlight touches it – a mirror.
One last spell can’t hurt.
Anna barely knew what she was doing but she rose from her bed. She walked to her dressing table and picked up the silver mirror from the antique set. She wrapped a jumper around her hand and smashed the glass with her fist. She pulled the shards away until there was nothing left but an empty silver shell. She took her glass of water from her bedside table and the needle from her embroidery. She went to the balcony, opened it and stepped out into the moonlight.
She placed the silver shell on the floor. A silver key.
She poured the water into it. A water key.
She pricked her finger with the needle and squeezed a drop of blood into the water. A blood key.
She waited for the moon to come back out from behind the clouds.
She repeated Nana’s words as if they were a spell: The truth is within the leaves. The mirror within the mirror. The mirror is the key. She plucked at the threads of magic: silver, water, blood, moonlight, stitching them together.
The moon revealed itself above. Anna watched with fascination as the water in the silver frame froze over – turned hard – became a mirror. A brilliant, silver, magic mirror. A mirror made of moonlight. She picked it up and looked into it.
Effie’s face stared back at her.
‘What is my curse?’ she asked.
Effie smiled.
Anna couldn’t say how, but she knew the mirror had all the answers she needed. She could feel them, beating their wings against the glass, struggling to get out. Effie continued to smile serenely. It was not a smile Anna recognized on her, it was so serene. That smile, her black hair, reminded Anna of someone. My mother.
Effie’s face and her mother’s almost seemed to interchange in the mirror as she looked at it. Anna blinked and the face was Effie’s once more. She reached for the photograph of her parents and held it up against the mirror. How had she not seen it? The similarity between her mother and Effie. She turned the photo to the mirror and saw, for the first time, the true picture beneath and not the chimera. There was not one baby in her mum’s arms, but two. Anna stared at the photo for several minutes and then turned to the mirror again.
‘Are you my sister?’
Effie nodded, her smile all Effie’s now, menacing and mesmerizing, exploding her life into shards of glass.
There was no time to pick up the pieces. ‘Should I go to the room on the third floor?’
Effie nodded again and Anna nodded with her.
She looked back at the photograph, at her mother’s smile. She owed her this much. Anna stood up and walked to her door, mirror in hand.
There was no one left to trust now. She had to find out what was in the third-floor room …
The mirror is the key.
She crept downstairs and took the ninth key from the rack. Aunt’s key. The end of it began to move and shift in her hands like a puzzle that would never be solved. She made her way up silently to the room on the third floor. She looked upon the door that was the dead end of her life.
She turned around so she was facing away from it and held the mirror up so the keyhole was reflected. She took the key and inserted it into the mirrored keyhole. It passed into the glass of the mirror without resistance, only a gentle ripple, like a pebble dropped in a lake. In any other circumstance Anna would have marvelled at the magic but now she held the mirror steady and turned the key …
She heard the door unlock behind her. She turned back around and tried the handle.
It opened.
The room was larger than she’d expected. There was a huge four-poster bed in its centre below the window, moonlight spilling onto tangled red sheets. A dressing table stood opposite, a small rose bush perched on it alongside several picture frames. There was a cupboard against the far wall. Nothing stirred. Except for the unmade bed the room was unremarkable.
Anna picked up one of the frames on the dressing table: her father was in the photograph – not with her mother – but with Aunt. She looked at the others. All of the pictures were of Aunt and her father. They were young, Aunt’s hair bright as her own.
She walked to the cupboard and opened it, releasing a cold, chilled air.
She screamed silently.
Inside it was full of hospital blood bags and jars – jars containing hearts. She picked up one of the bags and held it to the moonlight. Printed on it was ‘King’s College London Hospital’ – Aunt’s hospital. The hearts began to beat, all of them, all at once, pulsing against the glass, bulging and bleeding. Anna backed away and the roses on the dressing table opened, meeting her silent scream with their own. She heard a noise behind her. She spun around – a shadow was standing behind the door. It must have been in there with her the whole time.
It stepped forward, its face suddenly revealed in the moonlight. Anna couldn’t breathe. Her world ceased to make sense. It was a man. A face she knew from a photograph: her father. The word had no meaning as she thought it.
Father. My father.
He stared back at her, unmoving. The hair dark and curly, longer than in the photograph, the eyes slightly downturned as if they would crinkle when he smiled, the jaw square and dusted with five o’clock shadow. A handsome face. There’s something wrong with it. There’s something very wrong. The eyes – like the eyes in a painting – they followed you, but they weren’t alive.
This isn’t my father. This isn’t human!
The fear came all at once, unleashed by an involuntary revulsion. Anna tried to dart past him but he moved towards her. She dropped the mirror and it shattered. She tried to duck and run out of the room, but the man pushed her back and then his hands were on her neck – strong – the face before her unchanging as he tightened his grip, eyes flashing in moonlight, but there was nothing behind them for the light to find.
She kicked against him and somehow managed to rip free of his grip. She fell on the floor, reaching for the mirror and the shards of glass. She curled her fingers around one but he was on her. She thrust it into him; he did not cry out, but pushed her down. His hands found her neck. Tightened around it. Anna struggled for breath.
‘Let her go.’
Anna gasped as he released her neck.
Aunt was in the doorway. ‘Take her to her bedroom.’
Aunt moved aside and the man forced Anna downstairs. He threw her into her room. Aunt followed her in and slammed the door behind them. The man stood in the corner watching.
‘Are you going to make me bind your free will again? I’ll do it. I don’t need a cord. I could bind you right now without batting an eyelid.’
Anna could not speak. She could not think. Her horror was too great, her fear greater than any she had ever known. She would have faced a thousand dark cupboards over the creature that stood in the shadows.
‘Sit down.’
Anna’s legs gave way.
She’d always been surprised by how in control Aunt was when she was angry – until now. Now Aunt’s silent seething erupted in a high and desperate howl, the veins of her neck pinging free. ‘You’ve ruined everything! Why didn’t you trust me? Sixteen years of meticulous work and you had to go through your teenage rebellion tonight.’ She laughed, running clawed fingers through her hair.
‘Effie is my sister,’ said Anna, hardly believing the words.
Aunt moved towards her; she slapped her face, hard. ‘How do you know that? How did you get into the room?’
‘Tell me the truth.’
‘The truth?’ Aunt repeated and Anna knew her question was absurd. Aunt didn’t deal in the truth. She believed her own lies. She laughed again and then breathed in, trying to control herself. ‘Yes. The truth is all that may work now.’ She sat down on the bed next to Anna. ‘You will see then that I was right all along.’
‘Tell me.’
‘So impatient!’ she snarled. ‘Do you know how patient I’ve had to be? Oh yes, Effie is your sister. Your twin sister, in fact. Your mother and I were twins too, of course, and all of us are cursed. The great family curse: One womb, one breath, sisters of blood, bound by love, so bound by death.’ She laughed again, shuddering and broken. ‘You know what our silly little curse is? Love. Nothing but love. That we’ll fall in love with the same man and it will tear us apart. Generation after generation for hundreds of years – nothing but love and pain and death.’
Anna tried to process Aunt’s words. She and Effie were twins. Were both cursed. She recalled the occasions when the curse mark had appeared. Effie had always been there too – Rowan’s fall, the salt circle, the static, the blood. The symbol wasn’t just for me, it was for both of us!
‘Does Effie know? Does she know that we’re twins? That we’re cursed?’
‘Oh no.’ Aunt smiled with satisfaction. ‘Effie doesn’t know anything. She’s as unaware of the curse and your connection as you are, but she was still drawn to you and she still ruined your life, as I knew she would. She will kill you in the end. It’s how it always ends, our curse.’
‘It’s how it always ends …’ Anna repeated Aunt’s words, trying to understand them. If that was the curse then Selene wasn’t the other woman – Aunt was. ‘What do you mean?’ But Anna knew; she knew already. ‘My father never killed my mother, did he? You did.’
‘Your mother betrayed me, Anna, tried to kill me! Your father loved me; we were happy together.’ Aunt’s expression turned to a grimace, her wrinkles contracted with pain. ‘She took him away from me, seduced him with love magic and potions from Selene no doubt. Got herself pregnant like a whore. I came to rescue you but she hated that your father still loved me and she tried to kill me. She stabbed him and attacked me, but I was the stronger witch.’ Anna wasn’t sure if the noise Aunt was making now was laughter or sobbing. ‘I had no choice …’
Anna couldn’t help imagining what Aunt had described in her head, but she didn’t believe it. Not any more. She was sure there were grains of truth in it, just enough truth to be plausible, but it would be bound together with lies.
‘Your precious Selene helped me though.’
Anna looked up.
‘Oh yes. We formulated a plan. Fortunately, your mother had kept you both as her dirty little secret. She hadn’t wanted me to find her out and so no one knew she’d had one baby, let alone two. Selene would take Effie and I would take you. I held you in my arms and I knew even then that you and I, we were meant to be together. We would raise you apart and at sixteen bring you back together and let the curse unfold – where we could watch you, where it could be controlled, before you could hurt each other. We made it out to be a murder. Selene planted the message on your father’s phone pretending to be a lover: Carmenta. We took Effie away and left you there. The police swallowed the whole story hook, line and sinker.’
Aunt, Selene, Attis … they’d all known. Everyone but Effie. Anna could take little solace in that – Effie was her curse.
‘I’m glad your little plan worked,’ said Anna, wondering if she could smash her water glass over Aunt’s head. Perhaps I’ll have time – but then – She looked at the man in the shadows.
‘It was the best thing for you, for both of you,’ Aunt snapped. ‘If you’d grown up together, it would only be worse now. I never wanted you to feel the pain I felt when your mother betrayed me. The Binders helped with it all, of course, to protect us, to protect all witches.’
‘What the hell do the Binders have to do with this? How does this help anyone?’
‘You think your curse can just be left to run riot? Curses are the sin above all sins – the dirtiest, most rotten form of magic. It must be bound. You’ll be free then – I’ll be free.’ Aunt’s eyes were desperate. ‘But it’s greater than that, don’t you see? The Binders understand the bigger picture. They always knew the Hunters would return one day and it’s happening, it’s happening now as we speak—’
‘I don’t believe a word the Binders say.’
‘Oh, but you will. Magic has lured the Hunters back out of hiding. We warned them all, but no one listened and now they are back – back and hunting out powerful magic – and there is no magic as powerful as a curse, Anna. The stench of it will bring their darkness to our door.’ Aunt’s face twisted with disgust. ‘We are marked and we must be bound.’
Anna thought of the Eye sewn into Aunt’s flesh. Marred. Marked. Nana had said the cursed were at risk too. She’d spoken of a prophecy …
Anna looked up. ‘What’s the prophecy?’
Aunt’s disgust twisted tighter, into a smile. ‘You really have been doing your research, haven’t you? The Binders pay no attention to the claims of fate. We are bound only by our own desires, not some outside force. But the power of a prophecy cannot be denied. It can be used against us.’
‘What is it?’
‘That the Hunters will rise again when a curse is born – a curse that will bring the downfall of the whole world.’
‘The whole world,’ Anna repeated. It was as dramatic and apocalyptic as a prophecy ought
to be.
‘I don’t believe a word of it, but others will and it only adds to the urgency of our cause. Curses must be silenced, they must be bound, everywhere, and you and Effie are to be the first. If it’s possible, it will be a great victory. Do you see how important you are now?’
‘The first? How can we be the first? You have the same curse and you were bound.’
Aunt froze, her mouth still half-open – mid-battle.
‘Weren’t you?’
‘My magic was never officially Knotted. No.’
Anna started to laugh. Aunt snapped her mouth shut and Anna tasted blood.
‘Don’t think I’ve had it easy. I’ve been through endless trials and untold pains and it hurts me to practise magic just the same, but it was too late for me – I was already lost. We decided to wait until the curse was new again, until we had built enough power to bind it.’
‘How convenient for you. Fresh guinea pigs for your madness. It’s all for the greater good then? The punishments, the cruelty – it’s all so you can protect witches from a threat that no longer exists. How very heroic.’
Aunt looked as if she would bind Anna there and then. ‘The threat is already here, Anna, and everything I do, everything I have done, is to keep you safe. The Knotting will go ahead tomorrow and you will not resist.’
‘I won’t do it.’
‘Why? Because I lied? It doesn’t change the curse. It doesn’t change love. I brought you and Effie back together, but I didn’t make her betray you – she did that all by herself. I always knew she would, just as your mother betrayed me.’
Anna had enough anger for both of them. Aunt and Effie.
‘You think I haven’t known what you’ve been up to this year? I know how the mind of a sixteen-year-old works. If I forbid it, oh, you’ll do it! And I know you. I allowed you little freedoms and rebellions – your lies and secrets – your magic. Oh yes, I was allowing that too. Reducing your amount of bindweed, giving the curse room to flourish – enough for you to grow close to Effie, enough for you to fall for Peter, enough to see your heart break tonight. It broke my heart too, all over again.’