Star Cursed: The Cahill Witch Chronicles, Book Two

by Spotswood, Jessica

  “Yes, sir.” Alice snatches up her basket from the floor and begins to gather up the food.

  Mei steps toward O’Shea. “Sir? What about the children?”

  O’Shea shrugs, and I cringe at his indifference. “We’ll take them to the orphanage if there’s no one else to look after them.”

  “There’s a neighbor,” I suggest. It’s the least I can do.

  I hope the neighbor will agree to take them. Two more mouths to feed isn’t an easy burden. If Lavinia is sentenced to hard labor on a prison ship, she might be home again in a few years—if she survives the backbreaking work and rampant disease. If she’s sent to Harwood Asylum, though, that’s a lifetime. She’ll never see her children again.

  “Mrs. Papadopoulos, two doors down,” Lavinia says quickly. “Henry, go with Sister Catherine. Don’t worry. I’ll be back soon.” She gives Henry a smile, smoothing his floppy brown hair, but her voice cracks on the lie. “I love you.”

  “Stop delaying.” Helmsley yanks Lavinia away from her son and out the door. I hear her stumble on the steps, and my breath catches. Could I have stopped this? Have I become as cruel and cowardly as the Brothers?

  “Come here, Henry,” Mei says, reaching for him, but he darts past her.

  “Mama! Come back!” He surges after Lavinia like a small, sobbing lion. Mei scampers after him, and I follow, cursing the steep stairs and my heeled boots.

  Outside, Henry runs to his mother and buries his face in her skirt. There’s a ragtag crowd gathered: the Spanish and Chinese boys who’d been playing stickball in the empty lot across the street. Above us, curtains twitch, and I wonder which of those nosy neighbors informed on Lavinia.

  “Don’t take my mama!” Henry begs.

  “Don’t you see he’s scared? Let me say a proper good-bye,” Lavinia pleads, reaching for him ineffectually with her bound hands.

  O’Shea’s thin face is hard. “He’s better off without a mother like you.”

  Helmsley shoves her toward the carriage, and LaviHege, andnia trips, falling to the sidewalk in a heap of black skirts and blond hair.

  “Take the boy inside,” O’Shea orders us, his pale eyes cold.

  “Mama!” Henry screams, fighting, kicking Mei as she tries to grab him.

  I see the crowd of boys stirring restlessly, grumbling among themselves. I cringe, remembering the last arrest I saw—Brenna Elliott’s—and the way onlookers called her a witch and threw stones at her.

  One tall boy draws his arm back, and I almost shout a warning as he lets it fly.

  The rock smacks O’Shea between the shoulders. O’Shea turns and glares at the group of boys, and I glance at Mei, suppressing a smile.

  I’ve never seen anyone fight back against the Brothers. It’s marvelous. Foolish, too—but then they are boys, not girls, and they’ve got less to lose.

  More rocks fly through the air, pelting O’Shea and Helmsley in the back and shoulders, accompanied by angry shouts in foreign languages. O’Shea spins around, bellowing something about respect, then gives up and sprints for the carriage like the coward he is. Helmsley yanks Lavinia to her feet, dragging her down the sidewalk.

  As Mei bends to grab Henry, a rock slams into the side of her head. She screams something at the boys in Chinese. I dart forward and nab Henry by the collar. The boy buries his tearstained face against my hip as the Brothers’ carriage rattles away with his mother sealed inside. The hailstorm of rocks stops as suddenly as it started. The crowd drifts away; the curtains flutter shut. It’s over—for everyone but Lavinia Anderson, whose nightmare has just begun.

  “Are you all right?” I ask Mei. Blood is gathering at her temple and trickling down her cheek.

  “Sure. One of them’s got terrible aim,” Mei jokes, but she looks a little unsteady.

  “Help Mei into the carriage. I’ll take Henry back upstairs and get our baskets,” Alice says, appearing behind me. “Mrs. Papadopoulos heard the fuss. She’s with the baby now.”

  Our coachman, Robert van Buren, is running down the street toward us, a newspaper tucked under his arm. He’s one of the few people who know the truth of the Sisterhood; his daughter Violet is a student there.

  “I saw the ruckus just as I was leaving that store on the corner. I’m sorry, Miss Zhang. I’ll get you home right away,” he says, handing Mei up into the carriage.

  “Does it look real bad?” Mei tilts her head at me, swaying dizzily, before sinking onto the leather bench.

  I swallow at the sight of a three-inch gash. “No. Sister Sophia will fix you up good as new.” I use my black satin glove to wipe away the trail of blood weaving across her round cheek.

  It’s a pity Mei can’t heal herself. Healing is her specialty; she’s one of three girls in Sister Sophia’s advanced class who go on nursing missions to Harwood and Richmond Hospital. In my six weeks at the convent, I’ve discovered that many witches have an affinity for a specific kind of magic: illusions, animations, healing, or memory modification. It’s another piece of our history that Mother never bothered to share before she died.

  Mei closes her eyes. “Maybe you could heal me,” she suggests, voice faint.

  “Me? I can barely cure a headache,” I protest.

  She opens her dark eyes and smiles. “I’ve got faith in you, Cate.”

  I don’t know why; I don’t have much faith in myself. But something snaps inside me. When did I become someone who hesitates instead of helping? Mei has been a good friend to me. Trying to stop her from swooning in a pool of her own blood seems the very least I can do in return.

  “All right, I’ll try.”

  I lean across the aisle, cupping my ink cuppinhand gently over hers. Healing is different from other sorts of magic; there has to be a physical connection. I pull on the threads of magic that coil in my chest, weaving through my body alongside nerves and muscles. I wish it weren’t there; I wish I weren’t a witch. But it is and I am, and if I can’t ever be rid of it, I might as well try and use it for something good.

  I think of how sweet Mei is, always the first to offer help. How I would take this pain from her now if I could.

  The magic rolls through me, powerful as an ocean wave, warm as a hot bath. It pours out my fingertips, and the unexpected strength of it leaves me limp and breathless. That felt—strong. Formidable.

  “Oh,” Mei gasps. She turns her head so I can see. Her black hair is still matted and bloody, but the cut is gone. Completely.

  “All fixed?” I try not to sound flabbergasted by my success.

  Mei searches with her fingertips. After a moment, she beams. “It’s not even sore. Thank you, Cate.”

  “You’re welcome. I’m glad to be of—” I’ve got to brace myself against the seat before I fall. My legs have gone weak and rubbery.

  Sister Sophia warned us about this. My stomach heaves, and I lurch for the door just in time. I’m sick right onto the cobblestones below.

  I wipe my mouth with my clean glove, then look over at Mei, embarrassed.

  “That’s a normal reaction to a healing spell,” she assures me, helping me back into the carriage and onto the leather seat across from her.

  I curl up on the bench, squeezing my eyes shut and resting my aching head on my arms. Heels hammer on the cobblestones outside, and Alice steps through the open carriage door, dropping the empty baskets at our feet. “What’s the matter with you? I didn’t take you for the type to be sick at a little blood, Cate.”

  I clench my jaw and breathe deeply through my nose.

  “She healed me,” Mei explains. “See?”

  Lord, but I wish I were at home in my own bed. Mrs. O’Hare, our housekeeper, would bring me a cold compress for my head and a cup of peppermint tea. I can picture it so clearly I can almost smell the tea; I can almost feel the worn, familiar cotton pillowcase against my face. Tears prick the corners of my eyes. I’m glad no one can see; Alice would laugh at me for acting like a homesick child.

  “Perhaps she’s not utterly useless, then.”<
br />
  I peer over at Alice as she slides onto the seat next to Mei, crossing her ankles primly as the carriage rocks forward. Her skirts are spotless, untouched by the dust and dirt of the street. I don’t know how she manages it.

  “Better than you.” Mei smooths her black fringe. Bangs are the new fashion; she had Violet cut them for her last week. I was afraid it would look a fright, but it actually suits her. “You can’t heal a paper cut.”

  Alice rolls her eyes. “Everyone knows healing is the least useful kind of magic there is. It figures that would be Cate’s affinity.”

  I sit up gingerly, ignoring her insults and peering out between the curtains, watching the crowds of people swarming down the sidewalk. The noise is deafening: horses and wagons clomping their way downtown, hammers pounding away on new buildings, men’s voices shouting in a dozen different languages, street vendors hawking food and clothing.

  I’m not a city girl. It overwhelms me. Maura would love the busy rush of it, the thrill of something always new. I miss the quiet of home, the birdsong and the buzz of cicadas. I am lonely here, surrounded by strangers. Without my sisters, without Finn and my flowers—who am I?

  I am not who the Sisterhood wants me to be.

  “Cate was too much of a coward to do mind-magic back there,” Alice scofMei Alicefs, toying with one of her onyx earrings. “Too afraid to stick her neck out to help people.”

  “Don’t pretend to care about helping Mrs. Anderson,” Mei snaps. “You just wanted an excuse to do mind-magic. Sisters are s’posed to be compassionate, you know. Don’t you think these people notice the snooty way you look at them?”

  “I don’t care what they notice,” Alice says, wrinkling her patrician nose. “I’m hardly going to pretend they’re my equals. They’re fools to come here in the first place, the way things are, and greater fools yet to keep having children when they can’t afford to feed them.”

  Mei is shocked into silence. Her father is a tailor; her mother takes in embroidery and raises Mei’s younger brother and four younger sisters. Mei said once that she feels guilty for coming to the Sisters instead of going out to work. Her family is proud of her supposed scholarship to the convent school, but they don’t know she’s a witch.

  “Everyone’s got troubles, Alice. It wouldn’t kill you to show a little sympathy,” I suggest.

  “Oh, yes, it must be so difficult being Cate Cahill. Lifted from obscurity in your backwater nowhere town. Told that you’re going to be our savior!” Alice rolls her eyes again. I hope they’ll get stuck in the back of her head someday. “I don’t see it, myself. A timid, mousy thing like you?”

  It’s true that I’m no great beauty—but timid? I almost laugh. I know how to keep my head down and stay out of trouble, and I don’t boast of my mind-magic and terrorize the other girls, if that’s what she means. In the six weeks I’ve been at school, I’ve kept mostly to myself. The Sisters have fallen over themselves to offer me tutoring, so I’m busy morning, noon, and night.

  Still, I can’t imagine anyone who knows me dubbing me timid.

  “That’s how you see me?” I arch an eyebrow at her.

  Alice fusses with the black rabbit fur at her cuffs. Even her Sisterly uniform has fancy touches, though the entire point of a uniform is uniformity. “Yes. Aside from your supposed mind-magic, you’re still a beginner. If war broke out tomorrow, what on earth could you do? I’m starting to think the whole prophecy is nonsense.”

  “I wish it were,” I admit, glancing out the window as the carriage turns away from the busy riverside streets toward the quiet residential neighborhood of the convent.

  One hundred and twenty years ago, the witches who ruled New England—the Daughters of Persephone—were overthrown by the priests of the Brotherhood. For fifty years, any woman suspected of witchery was drowned, hanged, or burnt alive. Anyone who escaped the Terror went into hiding. There are, at best guess, only a few hundred witches left in New England now. But just before the Terror, an oracle prophesied hope—three sisters, all witches, who would come of age before the dawn of the twentieth century. One, gifted with mind-magic, would be the most powerful witch in centuries. She would bring about the resurgence of magic—or, if captured by the Brothers, cause a second Terror.

  The Sisters think that it’s me. That I’m the prophesied witch.

  I’m not entirely convinced, myself. But they were willing to bargain my sisters’ freedom for mine, and I consider that a sacrifice well made.

  My mother didn’t fully trust the Sisterhood, so neither do I.

  Outside, the gas streetlamps flicker to life. We rattle past half a dozen large houses, each surrounded by a manicured lawn, before stopping in front of the convent. It’s a gargantuan three-story building of weathered gray stone and arched Gothic windows. White marble steps lead from the sidewalk up to the front door, but in the back, there’s a garden, hidden from prying eyes by a high stone wall, filled with thefilled flowers and red maples and Sister Sophia’s vegetable patch.

  “You don’t even want to be the prophesied witch, do you?” Alice demands, pulling her hood up over her golden pompadour.

  “I don’t want one of my sisters to die.”

  Even Alice doesn’t know what to say to that.

  That’s why Maura and Tess and I were separated: the oracle also predicted that one of the three witches wouldn’t live to see the twentieth century, because one of her sisters will murder her. The Sisterhood wasn’t confident that Maura was in control of her magic. Given the dreadful nature of the prophecy—and, frankly, the nature of Maura’s temper—they were afraid she might hurt me. And they aren’t willing to risk the safety of their prophesied witch.

  I tried to tell them the notion of Maura hurting me is impossible. Ludicrous.

  Since our mother died and Father became a shadow of his former self, Maura and Tess and I have only had each other. The Sisterhood doesn’t understand how strong our bond is. I would do anything for my sisters.

  But I still wake crying from nightmares

  where I stand helplessly over their bloody bodies.

  arm am">To th

  CHAPTER

  2

  “THERE YOU ARE!” RILLA STEPHENSON says, bouncing into the modest room we share.

  I look up in surprise, lying on my stomach on the narrow feather bed. I’ve been rereading letters from home. Letter, I should say; there’s been only the one, and I already know its contents by heart:

  Dear Cate,

  Father came home last week. He was terribly surprised to find you gone to New London, but he accepted your decision with good grace. He asked me to give you his blessing and convey his love. He seems thin, and his cough is worse than ever, but he has promised to stay at home with us until after the New Year—though he insists our lessons are best left to Sister Elena.

  After keeping to her room for a week, Maura is now quite recovered. She has funneled her energy into her studies, showing marked improvement. I worry that she is overexerting herself. I have urged her to write you, but she insists you must be having such grand adventures that you care nothing for what happens at home. I know she is wrong in that. I hope she will soon reconcile herself to her place here.

  We had an at-home afternoon last week, which was very well attended. I baked a splendid gingerbread, and everyone inquired after you. Mrs. Ishida says she cannot remember the last time a girl from Chatham joined the Sisterhood, and Miss Ishida asked me to convey her particular good wishes.

  I miss you dreadfully, Cate. Even with Father back, the house is dull and lonely without you. Penny had kittens in the hayloft, three white and one black, and Mrs. O’Hare keeps chiding me for climbing up to see them; that’s the sum of this week’s excitement.

  I hope that you are well and not too homesick for us. Write me as soon as you can.

  With love,

  Tess

  I picture my brilliant little sister—her blond curls, the gray eyes that don’t miss a thing—and a wave of homesickness wash
es over me. Until six weeks ago, I’d seen Tess every day since sbuthe was born. I remember hearing her first shriek—a relief, after a stillborn brother—and the moment I first saw her squalling red face. And Maura—we’re too close in age for me to remember a time without her; she’s simply always been there to battle me and make me laugh.

  I hate the Sisterhood for separating us. I hate the magic for giving them leverage to do it. If we were normal, ordinary girls—

  But we aren’t. It doesn’t do any good to think on that.

  “Why don’t you come down to the sitting room with me?” Rilla suggests.

  I always had my own room at home. It’s strange, sharing a bedroom with a stranger. There are two high, narrow beds, two armoires, one dressing table—and absolutely no privacy. Rilla knows I’m homesick, and she’s determined to cheer me up. She reads me passages from her frightful Gothic novels; she brings me cups of hot cocoa before bed; she shares the sticky maple candies her mother sends from their farm in Vermont.

  She means well, but none of those things can cure a broken heart.

  “No, thank you. I’ve got reading to do; I can’t concentrate with all the chattering down there.” I sit up, grabbing a history textbook from the foot of my bed.

  “Caaate,” Rilla groans, picking her way across the cluttered floor. Her bed is beneath the single, arched window; mine is along the wall perpendicular to it. “You can’t keep shutting yourself away like this. Don’t you want to get to know the other girls?”

  Not particularly, no. They’re always staring at me as though I’ll manifest some magnificent power at any second, and I always feel as though I’m disappointing them.

  “Maybe tomorrow?” I suggest.

  “You always say that.” Rilla jumps up onto her bed. “I know you don’t want to be here. Everyone knows you don’t want to be here. You hardly hide it. But it’s almost December—you’ve been in New London over a month now. Can’t you make the best of things?”