“You’re not to do magic on each other without a teacher present, as you all well know,” Sister Inez says. “As you can’t occupy yourselves properly, I’m assigning you three pages in your copybooks on the National Council’s progressively restrictive measures over the last fifty years. Perhaps you’d like to get started on that now, before I make it five.”
The girls scatter. “That was spectacular,” Rilla whispers, bouncing along next to me.
“The look on Alice’s face when you shut her up was brilliant,” Rory adds.
Pearl gives me a smile so big it shows her teeth.
“Pardon me. I’d like to speak with my sister for a moment.” Maura grabs my elbow and tows me across the hall into the empty literature classroom.
“How dare you,” she spits, whirling on me as she slams the door.
I collapse into a desk. All that spellwork in quick succession has left me exhausted, and frankly I’m in no mood to fight with her. “How dare I what? Disagree with you and Alice? She might be a harpy, but she thinks you really like her, you know.”
“You just can’t stand that I’m more popular than you!”
1em">Pe1em">Oh, not this again. “I don’t care if you have a hundred new friends. It’s the quality of them that concerns me. You haven’t shown the best judgment in the past.”
“You would throw that in my face.” Maura’s cheeks go pink. “Elena did care for me. She admitted it later. She lied to pacify you and get you to the Sisterhood, and to please her stupid precious Sister Cora.”
“I’m sorry,” I say truthfully. “I’m sorry she hurt you and that I was part of the reason why. But I don’t like the way you were acting in there. Lately it’s as though you’re a different person, Maura. Like you’ll do anything to prove yourself to Sister Inez.”
“Maybe I want to be a different person! I’m tired of being one of the Cahill girls—the silly romantic one, the pretty one, the one who needs looking after because she might do something rash.” Maura throws up her hands, exasperated. “What earthly good is being pretty if I don’t have any say in anything?”
I clench my jaw, stung despite myself. “I wouldn’t know. You’ve always been the pretty one.”
My sister paces up and down the aisles, weaving around the desks. “You did everything you could to discredit my ideas in there. And if that’s not bad enough, you went and said you’re the strongest witch in the room as though it’s a proven fact! I want to lead the Sisterhood when I come of age. You want marriage and babies and a pretty little house with a garden. Why are you fighting me for this?”
Because I don’t trust her to be careful with people the way she should. Because I’m starting to suspect that the only person I trust to lead the Sisterhood for Tess until she comes of age is me.
“Perhaps I could do both,” I say, my eyes falling to the scuffed wooden floor.
“You’re so damned selfish!” Maura shouts. She closes her eyes, struggling for control. “You won’t even take the mind-magic test. How will you govern without using compulsion?”
I think of Brother Ishida. Should I tell her about that? No, she’ll only throw it in my face that I did it because of Finn, as if I’m some love-muddled fool. “I can use it when I have to.”
“Could you? Or would you hem and haw about it until the time was past? Alice and I came up with an idea to get those girls out of Harwood, and because it wasn’t your idea and it doesn’t fit with your fine principles, you swayed everyone against it!”
“I wasn’t the only one who had doubts,” I protest, shivering. This room hasn’t been used today and the hearth is full of cold ashes.
Maura groans, throwing up her hands again. She’s already taken to wearing a thin silver ring on her right ring finger. Though it isn’t engraved with the Sisters’ motto yet, it’s a clear sign of her commitment. “If Brenna gets anyone else killed while you’re thinking, that will be on your head.”
I rise to my feet. “You haven’t been to Harwood, Maura. You haven’t seen what it’s like. If I do this, I’m going to do it right.”
“If you do this,” Maura mocks, leaning so close I can smell the lemon verbena she wears. “You’re too chicken to actually do anything, Cate. That’s the problem with you.”
“I will save them.” I plant my hands on my hips, linking my thumbs through the blue sash at my waist. “Just wait and see.”
“You wait. Soon Cora will be dead and Inez will be in charge. She’s going to make me her second-in-command, not you. She’s just using you to get information from Finn.”
I grab her arm, whirling her around, my fingers pressing into the cream taffeta at her wrist. “Can you trust her any more than Elena? Do you El from F honestly think if she succeeds Cora and deposes the Brotherhood, she’ll just step aside when you’re ready to lead?”
Maura gapes at me. “Inez believes in me.”
I shake my head. “I believe in you! I believe that you’re smarter than this.”
Anger flashes over Maura’s face, thinning her lips and narrowing her eyes, and then I’m flying backward a dozen feet. My back slams against the chalkboard, hard, and I slide onto the floor like a rag doll tossed by a giant. My gray skirts pool around me.
My sister looms over me, blue eyes glittering. “I intend to lead the Sisterhood, Cate. I’ll thank you not to get in my way. I’m done playing nice.”
I wince, struggling to my feet, clutching my elbow where it smacked into the chalk tray. That will leave a bruise. “That’s what you’ve been doing, humiliating me by telling everyone how I’ve been jilted, and how stupid I am, and what a coward? Trying to show me up at every turn?”
My sister rubs a hand over her heart-shaped face. “This would all be easier without you here,” she says simply, unsettlingly, and a shiver crawls up my spine.
Oh.
“What do you mean?” I whisper, heart pounding.
She backs away, moving to stand by Sister Gretchen’s desk. “You make me lose my temper and say stupid hurtful things I don’t mean, and—I can’t forget how you made Elena turn on me. She takes up for you, you know. She says she cares for me, but she thinks you’d be the better leader.” Maura gives a harsh laugh, and my eyes fly to hers. “If it weren’t for you, I would have everything I want.”
I’ve made mistakes, certainly. Perhaps I’ve been thoughtless, stubborn, but I was never unkind on purpose. I love Maura. I would do anything for her.
“I don’t want to fight you, Cate, truly,” she says. “But I’m not going to back down.”
“Neither am I.” I can’t. Not when the future of the Sisterhood and all the girls at Harwood is at stake.
I look at my sister, and even though she’s right here in front of me, in the very same room, she feels oceans away.
I don’t know how to reach her anymore.
• • •
Sister Sophia comes to fetch me during supper, drawing the stares of all the other girls.
“I’m sorry to interrupt your dinner, Cate,” she says, touching my shoulder. “Cora’s asked for you.”
The conversation at our table stutters and stops. Whispers dance through the dining room.
“Of course,” I say, folding my napkin and placing it on the table. Things must be truly dire if Sophia can no longer help.
“Should I bring the rest of your dinner up to your room?” Tess asks. She sits with Lucy and Rebekah and the younger girls at breakfast, but we always eat supper together.
“No, thank you.” I glance regretfully at the roasted sweet potatoes, butternut squash, and chicken on my plate. I won’t want it after a healing session, and it’s better not to do this with a full stomach.
There are five long oak tables in the dining room—four for students and one for teachers. After her fight with Alice this afternoon, Vi made a great show of sitting at our table tonight. Maud came with her, though she keeps looking anxiously toward Alice’s table.
I do, too. I catch Maura glaring at me and look away, fast.
She’s angry with me, and jealous. She’ll get past that. It’s the way of sisters; it’s hardly the first time that a rivalry has sprung up between us.
But this feels more important than who Tess crawled to first, or who goes to town with Mother, or whose turn it is for a new gownfor width="1e. This goes right to the heart of who we are, what we were made for.
Maura has never made any bones about being cleverer, prettier, more ambitious and interesting and talented than me. I used to ignore the stings.
I used to think she was right.
I stand up and walk away from the table, head held high, ignoring the whispers. I’m the one Sister Cora is asking for; I’m the only one who can do this. That’s got to count for something.
Sophia shows me into Cora’s sitting room, then flutters like a bright moth in the doorway. I take the flowered chair angled next to Cora’s. There’s a steaming pot of tea on the table between us. She’s already poured a cup for herself, and now she pours one for me.
“You may go, Sophia. Thank you,” she says.
Sophia slips out of the room, leaving us shrouded in shadows. The gas lamp on Cora’s desk throws a small circle of light that doesn’t quite reach us.
“Sophia said you’d offered to heal me, Catherine.” Cora’s wearing a cornflower-blue dressing gown with a white blanket draped across her lap. Her hair falls in a long plait over her right shoulder. “I thank you for it. Even a few hours to think more clearly would help.”
Panic bubbles through me. “I haven’t found the limit of my healing yet. Perhaps—”
Cora shakes her head. “Don’t push yourself past your limit for my sake. I’ve made my peace with dying, insofar as any woman can. All I hope for is a few hours without such pain, to get my affairs in order.” She sets her cup down and holds out her hand, palm facing up. It’s all very businesslike: tick-tock, no time to waste.
I clasp her hand, soft and still warm from her tea. My magic shudders back at the sickness in her.
I grip her hand harder and think of how we need Sister Cora.
I am not ready to lead. Tess is not ready to lead.
She needs time. We need time.
I cast, and the pain is immediate and blinding.
I gasp, curling into myself, my stomach twisting. My head swims; I feel hot and sick. But I keep pushing against the sickness in her. I think of girls—stuck-up ones like Alice, ambitious ones like Maura, sweet ones like Lucy, desperate ones like Rory. Sister Cora saves half a dozen girls each year from the Brothers. That is reason enough to fight for her, isn’t it?
It’s more than enough.
It feels like knives in my stomach, in my head.
It’s worse than the sharp awfulness of falling off the pigpen fence and twisting my ankle. Worse than any physical pain I’ve ever felt.
My vision blurs, darkness at the edges, but I hang on. I can feel the magic working, can feel the sickness slinking away, shrinking, receding into its dark hiding places.
Eventually I say it out loud: a gasp, a spell, a sob. She cannot die. Not yet.
The magic leaps from my body into hers, leaving me empty, sick, wrung out. My spine feels like an insubstantial, rubbery thing. I slump sideways, my hand slipping from hers. I stop fighting.
• • •
I wake up with my head lolling on the tea table. The first thing I see is a cup of tea. The second is Sister Cora’s silver rings catching the lamplight as she waves a vial of sharp smelling salts beneath my nose. I want to complain at the awful, pungent scent, but I’m afraid that if I open my mouth I’ll be ill, so I clamp my jaw shut and sit up in my chair.
Cora is kneeling next to me. Her cheeks have some color in them now. “Are you all right?” she asks.
I nod, holding up a hand, waiting for the wave of nausea to pass.
“That was extraordinary,” she says, rising. Her bare feg. sks.
I mustn’t give her false hope. Perhaps she can’t tell, but—
“I’m sorry, I couldn’t—”
“Don’t you dare apologize. You gave me precisely what I asked for, and—don’t let this go to your head, but I feel ten times better than after Sophia’s been to see me. I feel like I did two months ago.” Cora picks up the white blanket lying at her feet and folds it. “What you did was absolutely selfless.”
If I didn’t feel as though I’d been run over by a team of horses, I’d laugh. No one else has accused me of selflessness lately. Quite the opposite.
She hangs the blanket neatly over the back of her chair, then hands me my cup of tea. “This was made with grated ginger to help soothe your stomach. Sophia’s been brewing it for me.”
I feel too sick for subterfuge. “I couldn’t save you. I don’t think I can save anyone.”
Sister Cora laughs her loud, raucous laugh. It makes her seem young and full of life, when she is neither. “That is precisely why it should be you, Catherine.”
“Maura’s the one who wants it,” I admit. “She’s willing to do whatever it takes. I’m sure you’ve heard she compelled six girls.”
“I’d back you against your sister any day,” Cora says, sitting down, and a tiny part of me, new and greenly sprouting, thrills at her words. “If she were leading the Sisterhood, would she be able to put her own feelings aside and do what was best for our girls? Or would she be ruled by her emotions? By her pride?”
I lean my head against the soft green and white satin of the chair, thinking of all the accusations Maura hurled at me this afternoon. “I want to help. But what if it’s not enough? If I’m not enough?” I close my eyes, embarrassed by how pathetic I must sound. What if I am too plodding and careful; what if something awful happens because I didn’t get Brenna out in time?
I can hear the smile in Sister Cora’s voice. “Everyone worries about that. I doubt myself every single day. That’s where faith comes in. We must trust in the prophecy and in the rightness of our cause.”
“That’s a great deal of trust,” I say doubtfully, watching the flame flicker through the etched glass shade on her desk. “The prophecy says one of us will die before the turn of the century, too. I can’t place my faith in that. I prefer to believe we have some hand in our fates, that our choices matter as much as our stars.”
Cora leans forward in her chair. “Of course our choices matter, Catherine. They define us. You came here against your will, to protect your sisters and that young man of yours. That speaks to your selflessness, just as your healing does.”
“I don’t understand,” I admit, squinting at her.
Sister Cora puts her hand on my knee. She moves more freely now, as though every gesture no longer pains her. “I want you to trust yourself.”
As though it’s as simple as that.
“Even if you are not the prophesied one, Catherine, I would still choose you as my successor,” she says softly. “Inez is too ruthless, Maura too much like her, and Teresa too young. If the Sisters rise to power again, we must not repeat the mistakes of our past. We need a woman with scruples.”
I stare down into my tea. Am I mad to consider this? To stand up against Maura and Inez, to lead now that I don’t have to? Would it be so terrible to allow Inez control until Tess comes of age? Yes, my conscience says. What would Inez do with four years? Would she truly give up the Sisterhood after such a long taste of power, or would she find a way around it?
“But I still want to marry Finn,” I confess. “To havess.ter a family. I know it’s horrible and selfish, but I don’t want to give up my life for everyone else’s.”
Sister Cora smiles. “You may not have to. If things go our way—why, you could work openly as a nurse, and raise your own family, and help lead the Sisters. You wouldn’t have to choose.”
I imagine spending my days in a garden of my own, chasing freckled little girls with Finn’s unruly hair and my penchant for climbing trees. I picture us all snuggled onto a sofa in the evenings, while Finn reads us pirate stories. My daughters might be witches, but if the S
isterhood ruled New England, they wouldn’t have to live in fear of detection. They could learn to wield their magic wisely instead of in fear and shame.
It could be a blessing, not a curse.
Perhaps that is a gift I could give them.
arm am">To th
CHAPTER
13
THE NEXT MORNING, TESS HAS ANOTHER vision.
She and Mei and I are in the front parlor. I’m lounging on the thin brown carpet before the fire, reading Tess’s copy of The Metamorphoses. I’ve heard all the stories from Father, but I wanted to read it myself since it’s Finn’s favorite. Tess is leaning forward on the settee, picking up her tea, repeating a Chinese pronunciation, when her gray eyes go blank. She drops the cup onto the table, and it rolls onto the floor, spilling tea everywhere. It puddles on the table and drips down onto her leafy green skirts.
“Tess?” Tossing my book aside, I scramble across the carpet toward her.
Mei springs into action, sopping up the tea with her faded yellow handkerchief. Tess sits there, staring at nothing, until Mei shakes her arm. “Tess?”
“I’m sorry,” she gasps, coming back to herself. “I felt faint for a moment.”
Mei lays a hand on Tess’s brow. “You don’t feel feverish.”
I pick up the chipped cup, searching for a reasonable subterfuge. “Is it your monthly affliction?”
Tess flushes bright red. “Perhaps,” she squeaks.
“Do you want to go upstairs and lie down? I’ll bring you a hot water bottle for your back,” I suggest.
“Go on. I’ll clean things up here,” Mei offers.
“Thank you.” I toss her my own handkerchief, then lead Tess into the hall.
We’re quiet until we reach the bedroom she and Maura share, down the hall from mine. Maura’s stockings are scattered everywhere, and a lacy blue petticoat is draped over the stool at the dressing table. Tess has taken the bed by the window and hung the curtains Mrs. O’Hare sewed for her years ago. There’s a daguerreotype of Mother and Father on the sill, and her one-eyed teddy bear, Cyclops, occupies a place of honor on her pillow.
Star Cursed: The Cahill Witch Chronicles, Book Two Page 19