Ola’ea fixed her sorceress’ eyes on the whip and moved her fingers in a circle. The whip obeyed, curving in the air, changing direction, doubling back in its graceful dance until it wound, faster, faster, under the armpit of the screaming overseer until, with a final click of the steel tip, the man’s arm severed and fell with a gush of pumping blood to the ground.
He dropped to his knees, his eyes bulging in shock, his mouth open wide, the sound coming out of it an animal cry. Ola’ea looked at him, and then at the house where she had sent her vegetables to be eaten by the weak-armed whitefaces who had bought her, and she knew what she had to do.
Raising her arms to her sides, she called forth all the anger that had been stored within her since she had been forced from her village, and sent it out the tips of her fingers. It crackled and ignited, shooting sparks. The dry grass caught fire, as did the trees, the shrubs, the ground plants, the house. The overseer screamed one last time as his heart cooked in the volcanic flames of Ola’ea’s wrath.
That was the fourth lesson of her journey here to paradise:
Take the bitter with the sweet. This was a hard lesson, the lesson of fire. Destruction and death were necessary to the wheel of life, and a sorceress must be prepared both to kill, if necessary, and to die.
Her soul clean now and devoid of hatred, Ola’ea turned away from the flames and walked once more toward the sea. In her wake, the entire plantation burned to the ground, with the exception of the kitchen garden, which fed all the rabbits and birds and goats that came into it seeking shelter.
At the dock, she surveyed the ships at anchor.
That one, said the voice of Olokun.
Ola’ea climbed the gangplank. “’Ere, you,” the ship’s boatswain said, grabbing her arm. “What do you think you’re doing aboard this here cargo ship?”
“I must cross the ocean,” she said. “I will be your cook.”
“Cook?” the man repeated. Just what he needed to make sail. “You’re a cook, you say?”
“I am.”
He studied her face. The young woman was strange and beautiful. But a woman. That was the worst part. The men, he knew, must never see her, because she would fill them with fear and lust. “All right, Cook,” he said. “But you must dress like a man, and sleep alone in the galley. And you must speak to no one.”
She nodded her assent. She did not speak another word during the voyage.
Ola’ea fulfilled her part of the bargain, preparing the crew’s meals in silence, and sleeping next to the ship’s stove. She kept her voluminous hair braided and tied at the top of her head like a cat-o’-nine-tails.
The men, believing her to be the Captain’s private slavey boy, did not bother her.
But during the voyage she fell sick. It was, perhaps, the putrid, algae-covered water that she had been forced to drink for lack of any other. She worked as long as she could, but just as she smelled land on the breeze, she slumped to the floor in a fever.
The foretopman found her lying unconscious on the slimy galley deck and summoned the ship’s surgeon, who discovered that not only was the cook a woman, but that she was infected with yellow fever. Amid a chorus of curses and oaths, imprecations and sailors’ prayers, she was hastily hauled onto the deck and thrown overboard.
If it had not been for the shock of the water against her fevered body, she might never have regained consciousness.
If the month had not been August, she could have frozen in those Atlantic waters.
If she had remained on the ship, she would have docked with it at Shaw Island, where an official of the trading company would have had her jailed as a runaway slave.
But none of this occurred. Hanging on to a plank from a recent wreck, Ola’ea floated past the island and into the warm, shallow waters along the coastline of Whitfield Bay. She was found by Serenity Ainsworth, who was counting dead birds, Cory’s shearwaters, fallen by the dozens. And among them, a young woman dressed in men’s clothes, with hair like a pirate corsair, skin like teak wood, and the same witch’s eyes that Serenity herself saw every time she looked into a glass.
Ola’ea came to in Serenity’s arms. “Olokun,” she said with great surprise before fainting again.
She had never even entertained the possibility that the goddess of the sea would be an old white woman.
But then, Olokun was full of surprises.
CHAPTER
•
TWENTY-FOUR
BELTANE
“Katy?” Cheswick passed a hand in front of my face. “Earth calling.”
“Are you okay?” Verity looked worried.
“I’m fine,” I said numbly. It always took me a while to come out of these psychometric states. In this case, I didn’t even know I was going into one, let alone coming out of one. No images, I told myself. No more images. “I wasn’t talking, was I?”
“No,” Cheswick said. “You just looked . . . zoned.”
Verity looked me levelly in the eye. “Have you been tested for epilepsy?” she asked.
“Verity, I’m fine.”
“Okay, okay. We were just trying to get closer to the bonfire, and then we saw you looking weird,” Cheswick said. Verity poked him in the ribs. “Well, not weird, exactly, but—”
“It’s all right,” I said. “Psychometry,” I said, holding up the blue stone. “I was picking up on someone’s life.”
“Awesome,” Cheswick said. “I wish I could do that.”
“I have an aunt who’s a psychometrist,” Verity said. “Sometimes she actually becomes the person. Especially if they’re dead.”
“Amazing. Can I?” Cheswick took the stone and closed his eyes. “Nope, nothing,” he said, handing it back after a moment. “Say, can you do that, Katy? What Verity said about becoming the person?”
“Sometimes. Not always. I didn’t just now. I only kind of saw what was happening. And it took place over a long span of time, four or five years. Sometimes I only get an incident, or just a thought. Once—”
“I think it’s almost time for the handfasting.” Cheswick said, standing up. “Want to join us? We’re going to try to get a spot up front.”
“Uh, no thanks,” I said, mortified. “I’m fine here.”
“Cheswick and I are going to be handfasted next year,” Verity said coyly, taking his hand.
“Hey, great,” I said. “Congratulations.”
“He got me a locket.” She moved closer to me so that I could see the heart-shaped pendant dangling from a chain around her neck.
“Have you . . . have you seen Peter?” I asked.
“I think he’s still grounded. Sorry.” Verity said. Of course everyone knew about the fire in the Shaw mansion and our subsequent punishment, but I’d heard rumors that Peter hadn’t been confined to quarters the way I’d thought. I hadn’t seen much of him at school, either.
She and Cheswick ran off toward the bonfire, their silhouettes stark against the bright cobalt blue of falling night. The men were carrying slabs of meat out of the bonfire, which was just about at the right level for the ritual. Around it stood the couples, the women with flowers in their hair, the men with belts of vine or with small horns glued to their heads. I stood on the rock I’d been sitting on to get a better look at the proceedings. I could see Agnes, for once unguarded and smiling. I’d never seen her look so pretty. That must have been how my mother looked, I thought.
Then I realized that she could never have been handfasted to my father, because he wouldn’t have been able to enter the Meadow. She’d never walked among her people with flowers in her hair, or jumped over the bonfire in a three-thousand-year-old ritual. She could have been high priestess; instead, she’d settled for living among cowen who believed that her people were supernaturally evil, if they believed we existed at all.
She must have loved him so much. So terribly much.
My eyes filled with tears as I watched the couples begin to line up on the far side of the bonfire. The intendeds spoke their true names.
“Lucrezia Penrose,” announced the first woman to be handfasted.
“Atherton Bell.”
Holding hands, they raced toward the fire and then leapt over it like deer while the crowd roared its approval. A number of men clanked their tankards and drained the contents, a practice they would repeat in honor of each couple until they either lost consciousness or were dragged home.
Agnes and Jonathan were next. He’d given her a ring that morning, even though engagement rings were a cowen practice and not at all necessary for a handfasting. Jonathan had given it to her because it had belonged to his great-great-grandmother, who had had it fashioned into a ring during the Civil War. Before that, it had been the handle of a spoon made by Paul Revere. People in Old Town had deep roots.
“Agnes Ainsworth.”
“Jonathan Carr.”
Jonathan was a popular guy, and the best carpenter in town. Maybe his coming into the Ainsworth family would help mend the rift between my relatives and the people who still blamed them for what my mother did to Eric Shaw.
But would they ever forgive me?
It was even harder for me to pretend that I was one of the Old Town gang since I’d discovered a new talent I was developing: It seemed that the longer I lived in Whitfield, the more sensitive I was becoming to people’s emotional states. Every object I touched had some sort of emotional signature that I could read. Fortunately, most of the time I had to concentrate on the object in order to feel anything.
But people—that was something new, another branch of my particular gift that was just beginning to show up. I’d always been able to read people’s emotions pretty well, but lately I’d been able to see more deeply into what they were really feeling, even if they couldn’t admit it to themselves.
I’d talked with Miss P about it after Becca Fowler tripped me in the hall at school. She’d been all apologetic, helping me retrieve my books and insisting on walking me to the nurse’s office, but I knew she’d done it on purpose.
That didn’t take any special gift—Becca had been shooting poisonous looks at me ever since the day Peter saved me from falling down the stairs. But what bothered me was what I felt when she took my arm to help me up. It was anger, anger of such scope that it was hard for me to feel it, even secondhand.
It went beyond simple jealousy, although that was the first level of the anger in her. Past that was something colder and broader and far more confusing. It was about my mother and my relations, and the Ainsworth women in general. At the moment when I came in contact with her bare skin, her emotions were so strong that I could almost hear the exact words of her thoughts: You’re bringing the Darkness again, the way your people always do.
“That sounds as if it were part of a collective memory, I’m afraid,” Miss P said. “Becca couldn’t really help it, if that makes you feel any better.”
“She couldn’t help it?” I asked. “She was practically boiling over.” That made me think. “Unless I misread her. Maybe I was just being paranoid because . . .” I was going to say because of Peter, but I didn’t want to get into that whole complicated relationship, at least not with the assistant headmistress, djinn or not. “. . . because she’s not usually friendly to me,” I fudged.
“It’s always hard to tell the difference between what we really perceive and what we want to see,” she said. “It’s doubly hard when one is dealing with a psychic gift. How do you know whether it’s the gift informing you, or your own desires and fears?”
“Right,” I agreed eagerly. “How do you know?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know.”
Great. A really, really helpful answer, Miss P. So glad I confided in you. “But . . . you said that Becca was involved in some kind of collective memory,” I said.
“Yes.” She smiled sweetly. I wondered how many people Miss P had driven insane.
“What was that memory?” I prodded.
“That whenever the Darkness comes, the Ainsworth women are somehow involved.”
“What? Is that true?”
She held her hands palm-out in front of her. “That is the common talk, Katy,” she said. “It would be remiss of me to tell you otherwise. However, it has nothing to do with the truth, which is that the Ainsworths are such an old and direct line that they have, in fact, been involved with everything that has occurred in Whitfield ever since—”
“Excuse me, Miss P, but how are they—we—involved with the Darkness?”
“Well, let’s see,” she said, as if she were reciting the cafeteria lunch menu. “First there was Serenity, of course, who experienced two instances of the Darkness during the span of her long life. The first was when one of her friends . . .”
“Dorothea Lyttel,” I put in, hoping to get her moving a little faster.
“Ah, you know about that.”
“Serenity didn’t want it to happen,” I said trying to defend my ancestor.
“Quite. Many of the families, including the Fowlers, felt that Serenity used her considerable influence in the community to delay the inevitable.”
“Mrs. Lyttel’s murder,” I clarified.
Miss P looked at me levelly. “Now, Mrs. Lyttel lit the fire herself, Katy,” she said.
She was right. “But how do you know?” I asked. “How do you know all of this?”
She blushed. “Do you know what a Book of Secrets is?” she asked.
“Oh, right,” I said. “Mrs. Ainsworth told me about them. And I guess you’d know about everyone, being a . . .” I cleared my throat. Miss P blushed furiously. “. . . school official,” I finished lamely.
“For the record, the Beans were on Serenity’s side on that matter,” she said softly. “That is how I know about the dispute. From my own family’s Book of Secrets.”
“Oh,” I said. And now Katy will attempt to extract her foot from her gigantic mouth. “Of course.”
“The second occasion was, naturally, when she and Ola’ea Olokun created the Meadow to protect the community from the insanity of the Darkness-infested cowen raiders.”
“But how could anyone say that was Serenity’s fault?” I demanded. “She saved all of Old Town.”
“A lot of people felt that the cowen wouldn’t have come after them at all if Serenity hadn’t been living with Ola’ea.”
“They were living together?”
“After her arrival in Whitfield, Ola’ea became a kind of adopted daughter to Serenity, whose own children had grown and married, and who was long since a widow. This didn’t sit well with the other settlers, as you may appreciate. They might have accepted Ola’ea as a servant, but not as their equal. However, neither Serenity nor Ola’ea would permit anything other than the truth to be believed. Nor would Ola’ea accept less than equal status in the community.”
“So what happened?”
“They remained friends, steadfastly and without excuses. As a result, though, the two of them were obliged to spend many years as outcasts. It says a lot for both of them that when the witch-hunters came, they allowed the whole town into their meadow.”
“All the witches, anyway,” I said.
“Yes. And because of their good works—the establishment of the school, the creation of the Meadow as a place to celebrate the holidays in the witches’ Wheel of the Year—the Ainsworths and Ola’ea’s descendents always held a place of prominence in Old Town. But they were never really part of the gang, if you know what I mean. And then there was Constance Ainsworth, who naturally—”
“Constance?”
“A cousin of your great-grandmother’s. She was high priestess of the community during another reappearance of the Darkness just before the Great Depression in 1929. She . . .”
“Burned herself at the stake,” I finished. “So I’m related to her, too.”
“Constance took her life after the Darkness had claimed a number of other women. The families of those women blamed her, as high priestess, for not having acted sooner.”
“But she was trying to
save them.”
“I know,” Miss P said kindly. “But they almost couldn’t help it, the way Becca Fowler almost couldn’t help blaming you for the fear spreading around Old Town now. I say almost because people can become bigger than themselves, their habits, their families.” She gave me a half-smile that left her eyes sad. “They can, but they rarely do.”
“And then there was my mother,” I said. “The monster of Whitfield.”
She took my hand. A sensation like warm ginger ale spread slowly through me. “Just because we don’t understand something doesn’t mean it’s evil. Or even wrong,” she said.
She was trying to be kind, but honestly, how could anyone who knew what my mother did to Eric Shaw not believe she was evil? “And now here I come, just in time for the Darkness to make its next appearance,” I said.
Miss P nodded. “So you understand the fear underlying Becca’s anger.”
“Are there a lot of people who feel that way about me?” I asked quietly.
She smiled. “There are a lot of people who don’t,” she said. “Let’s see it that way.”
“And my . . . this gift . . .”
“Try not to use it,” Miss P said, suddenly hard. “For your own sake, for your sanity, don’t give in to it, or you’ll find it’s not a gift at all, but a curse you’ll wish you’d never heard of.”
Everyone in Old Town expected Eric to die from his head injury. It was as if they were waiting for it to happen, for the tragedy to be complete. And now it seemed that the time was coming, along with the harbingers of the Darkness.
I’d tried to see Eric, but Hattie wouldn’t let me. She said that he needed rest and quiet. Maybe she was beginning to feel like the rest of them. Maybe she was afraid that I’d go crazy one day and harm Eric the way my mother did.
I didn’t believe that Hattie would turn against me like that, but I had to admit that if she did, no one—probably not even I—could blame her.
As the crowd shouted and applauded for Agnes and Jonathan, I walked toward the woods.
Legacy Page 16