Escape to Witch City

by E. Latimer

  “Would we,” Maddie sat up straight. “Edgar’s been insisting on reading me poetry, and it’s almost as painful as my head was at first.”

  “Hey,” Edgar protested.

  “Now don’t go doing anything too wild. You’re still healing.” Lenore sounded stern, but her eyes were sparkling, and she set the basket and books down on the end of the mattress.

  “There you are. 101 Spells for Beginners and A Witch’s Almanac are particularly good. Of course, school isn’t for a few weeks yet, and you’ll be running wild through the streets of the city for the summer, I don’t doubt.”

  The aroma of fresh-baked bread was coming from the basket, and they wasted no time digging in. While their mouths were full of cheese and bread, and the sweetest apples Emma had ever tasted, Lenore brought them up to date with everything going on in the city.

  “The queen is in the cells now.” She folded her hands in her lap, scanning their faces as she said this, and stopping a little longer on Edgar than on the others. “She’ll remain there for a very long time, most likely. But perhaps not forever, because something very strange happened during the fight.”

  They all stared at her, waiting.

  “Her magic is gone.” Lenore looked straight at Emma. “Wiped out completely. She was quite powerful too, so that’s no small feat.”

  There was silence for a moment, and then Edgar spoke, his voice full of bitterness. “Good. After she gets out, she can go into the In-Between and keep company with the Witch of a Thousand Faces, because I never want to see her again.” He paused, and then shook his head, eyes fixed on the carpet. “Between her and Georgie, it seems like…”

  He let his words trail off, but Emma could guess what he was thinking: that everyone who’d had a hand in raising him had ended up betraying him.

  Beside him, Eliza reached up and wrapped an arm around him. “You’ve got us now, Ed.”

  “Yeah,” Maddie said around a mouthful of apple. “You’re stuck with us forever, whether you want us or not.”

  Emma smiled at the look of dismay Edgar gave her, along with his admonishment to “Chew with your mouth closed, Mads.” She turned her attention back to Lenore as Eliza asked a question.

  “What was it that drained her power? It wasn’t the blue fire, was it?”

  “No,” Lenore said slowly, and her expression became very solemn. “The blue fire should have just continued filling her. She would have exploded and taken all of with us, but she didn’t…”

  Slowly, they began to catch on, and soon her friends were all staring at her. Emma felt her face begin to glow, and she admitted, “I drained the magic out of her heart. All of it.” She hesitated, and Lenore nodded. “I’m sorry if that was wrong.”

  “No, Emma, it’s a good thing you did,” Lenore said. “I think we’d all be in a lot of trouble if you hadn’t. But Emma, that’s a lot of power for one person—the power to take away power. I hope you’ll understand when I ask you to never do that again, unless you absolutely have to. A situation like the one you were in should be the only time.”

  Emma nodded slowly. “I understand.”

  She did. There was something unnerving about the way the queen had reacted when Emma had drained the last of the power out of her. She’d been in shock at first, and then there was all the screaming about how something was gone. It made Emma’s stomach turn just to think about it. The magic was a part of you. To have someone drain that away…

  No, it wasn’t something to be taken lightly.

  All the same, she hesitated, and Lenore seemed to guess that another question was coming, because she paused by the bed and looked at Emma, brows raised. “When you told her that you’d made a mistake…I mean, when I saw the vision at the library, the history lesson…” She stopped, afraid that Lenore would shut down again, or worse, that the haunted look would come back into her eyes.

  But Lenore just smiled gently. “We all have mistakes we have to make up for, which is why I was hoping my sister might be reasoned with, that she might take a second chance if I offered one.” She sighed. “My mistake was being too young and idealistic, believing I was on the right side of history when I was, in fact, decidedly not.”

  “But you turned on the rebel witches.” Emma remembered what she’d heard in the lecture note visions, what Alexandria had said about Lenore betraying the witches. “You betrayed them to save your family.” When Lenore nodded, Emma pressed on. “And then…they still did that to you. They almost killed you.”

  She tried not to think about Lenore lying helpless on the mattress, surrounded by toxic thistle. It made her angry all over again, that her mother could have walked away from something like that.

  “They never did forgive me.” Lenore smoothed a hand over the bedspread, over the bumps in the patchwork quilt, lashes flickering as she looked down. “But to be honest, I’m not sure I fault them for that. I was young and foolish, and the witches I fell in with weren’t calling themselves rebels anymore. They spoke of banding together with the non-magical, of becoming one instead of making them our enemy. I convinced myself they were different, but their rhetoric was much the same, and it became more radical the deeper you were drawn in.” She pressed her lips together hard, and then looked back up, gaze shifting from Emma’s face to Edgar’s. “We had grown up learning that everything about our magic was evil, and I was desperate to find a way not to hate myself. For the next six years we were in hiding, living in one village and then the next. At one point, I got a job at the palace, in disguise. When my sisters learned that, they kicked me out, which only served to fan the flames of my discontent.”

  Lenore gave a rueful laugh. “It was easy to fall in with the wrong sort of witches then. They were everywhere. I confess that I ended up getting in deep with them, deep enough to learn the secret of thistle. But when I learned that ‘becoming one’ with the non-magical would be achieved by any means, violence included, I got out. I told my sisters, hoping for forgiveness. But by then it was too late. To Isolde and Alexandria, I was the enemy.”

  It was a lot to take in, but Emma thought she understood. She knew all about being afraid of your magic. Or really, of yourself.

  Edgar’s eyes were distant, as if he’d been deep in thought this whole time. “My mother said she would never be a witch. That all witches are filthy and evil, but when her power was gone…”

  Emma flinched, remembering the screaming, the threats. Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I thought she’d be happy.”

  Edgar nodded.

  Lenore’s face was grave. “It’s strange, isn’t it? You can be so opposed to something that you spend your entire life fighting it, only to realize it truly is a piece of you. My sister learned that only after losing it, when it was too late.” She smiled at them. “But not all of us must learn that way, thankfully.”

  There was a moment of silence in which Emma looked over at her cousin. Edgar bit his lip, gaze drifting to the window, where a single glossy raven perched. His expression was a strange mix of anticipation and dread; Emma knew exactly how he felt.

  Her power was something she was only just learning to accept. The thought of accepting it completely, of embracing it completely, was intimidating. But it was also exciting, because who knew what else she was capable of? What they were all capable of.

  She leaned over, bumping her shoulder into his. When he looked up, startled, she grinned at him. It was slightly strained maybe, barely a half-smile, but he seemed to understand the spirit of it, because he smiled back.

  They might have a lot to unravel together—learning their magic, unlearning the ever-present fear, adjusting to this newfound knowledge—but at least they would be doing it together.

  Lenore plucked one of the dinner rolls from the basket. “I’ll leave you lot to it.” Her smile stretched wider. “And Maddie, if you get bored while you’re laid up, there’s a particularly wonderful spe
ll for beginners on invisibility, on page thirty-three. When I was your age, I managed to vanish my left foot entirely. It was very amusing.”

  Maddie looked delighted at this, and she was already paging through one of the books as Lenore swept out of the room.

  On the armchair, Edgar and Eliza had begun arguing almost the moment Lenore had gone, and were now going back and forth about who had eaten more candied almonds. Eliza was poking Edgar in the armpit to emphasize her points, much to his dismay. Emma leaned back, watching her friends, and let herself relax for the first time in what felt like forever.

  Out the window, she could see the faint firefly flicker of lanterns on the rooftops, and the silver-blue glitter of Find-Me-Heres floating above the peaks and chimneys of the shops and houses. A half-moon was hanging just over the red bricks of the walls, illuminating Witch City in a display of shadows and silver as witches skimmed over the cobblestone streets.

  Emma could picture herself here over the summer, she and her friends roaming the city in search of carts of baked goods. Dreamy mornings spent on the porch of Charlie’s Chocolaterie, cups of hot cocoa steaming in front of them; nights spent searching the midnight market for sparkling crystals, and colorful ribbons and chains. Learning to fly—properly this time—chasing one another through the air over the bustling streets.

  Somewhere far out in the distance, through the velvet stretch of night, through the darkness punctuated by twinkling blue light, Emma could make out a familiar sound. It was deeper and slower now. A gentle, steady noise she found strangely soothing with its familiar rhythm. The pulse of the city’s core.

  It wasn’t just Noise anymore, she realized, and it didn’t scare her. It sounded…right.

  It sounded like home.

  Seven Years. That’s how long it’s taken to get Emmaline Black and her friends from my head, to the page, to the shelves. No doubt to many writers, this is a reasonable length of time. Time in which they craft beautiful literary work, full of meaning, and long passages of gorgeous prose that will leave a lasting impression on the world and go down in history. For me, it just meant the story was being stubborn.

  It’s been a long journey, and there are so many people over the past seven years who have helped with previous versions of this manuscript, that I have no doubt forgotten some of you. For that I apologize. Thank you, whoever you are, for being a part of this process, which has helped me grow so much as a writer. I’m sorry I cannot mention you all by name, partly because it would take up several pages, but mostly because I have the memory of a goldfish.

  Now on to everyone that helped with this version. The final rebirth. The book that lived.

  A big thank you to Silvia Molteni, my amazing agent. Not only for doggedly championing my work, but for always providing valuable creative notes along the way.

  And to Lynne and Peter, my PRH superheroes. Thank you for believing in this book, even when I sometimes didn’t. Thank you for tirelessly working with me to make this a better story.

  Also, to my writer friends IRL, Rebecca, Tiffany, Kayla, and Whitney, for listening when I needed a good writing-related rant. And to Kayla for letting me come over and drink tea and panic about deadlines.

  And last but not least, a huge thanks to the Word Nerds. This book is dedicated to you because it’s been evolving and changing for the exact same length of time our vlog channel has been growing, and you guys have been with me through every step of the process. So thank you to all the Word Nerds, both past and present: Kellie, Meghan, Emma, Erica, Calyn, Rachel, Desiraye, Helen, and Kyra.

  And thank you to my writer’s group, also made up of Word Nerds (of course). You’ve helped me brainstorm so many plot problems and talked me through so many creative dilemmas that I can no longer count them.

  Also, to Kellie, because Escape to Witch City would not be here in its final form without you. I still count that brainstorming session in the lobby of a Toronto hotel while it poured with rain outside as one of my favorite moments in the creative journey thus far. Thank you for rekindling my excitement in the story. It felt like we re-injected the magic that day.