The mist within the stone swirled, eddying like water in a brook. It grew thinner and thinner, as if evaporating before its own energy, and when at last it cleared, the ametrine sparkled with a light all its own, as if it had been washed clean. It shone with an inner brightness Harriet felt on her cheeks, on her forehead and lips, as if a stray shaft of sunlight had found her.
An instant later she felt it in her body. Energy shot through her bones and flesh, a jolt of power that sometimes threw her off balance. She had once inadvertently touched a wire that carried electricity from the dynamo in the Dakota’s basement to a light fixture in her bedroom, and the feeling of working magic was much like that. The wire had stung her hand, and she had stumbled back, surprised by the unfamiliar bite of it. The power of a successful cantrip thrilled through her body in that same way, making her extremities tingle with a sense that was almost, but not quite, pain. She welcomed it as a sign she had achieved her intent.
Her tincture was ready. It would be thorough and effective, with a strength beyond that of any known medicine. It held power over life and death.
Harriet understood and honored the magnitude of her responsibility. Sometimes, as she whispered this cantrip or one of the others, she felt the presence of her predecessors, those wise women who had come before her. Often she felt Grandmother Beryl at her shoulder. Once she had sensed the shade of Bridget Bishop herself, and that one had unnerved her, a ghost still burning with resentment over her fate.
Harriet had been thirty when that happened, but twenty years had not diminished the impact of the memory. What had happened to Bridget was terrible, of course. She had been a simple hedge witch, pursued by the men in her town without mercy. They had convicted her as a demon and hanged her without remorse. Bridget Bishop had been different, odd, old, and alone. Her small ability was not enough to save her.
Still, Harriet considered that after two hundred years, Bridget’s anger should have abated.
It had not. It had lived on in her daughter Christian, and then in the women who followed her. For them the art was not a tool. It was a weapon. It was, as Beryl had taught, the maleficia. Frances was of Christian’s lineage, with all its dark practices, and though Harriet and Beryl had tried to prevent her from adopting dark magic for herself, they had not succeeded. The maleficia was in her blood. There had been nothing they could do about it.
Harriet’s memories faded gradually as the light faded from the ametrine, leaving it an ordinary, polished, pretty stone. She was just reaching for the vial of tincture when that other, unpredictable element of her practice struck.
The knowing.
It was uncomfortable in a different way from the effect of working magic. It burst into being inside her mind with a force that made her heart thud and her skin prickle, and there was no resisting it. When it came over her, she knew, whether she wanted to or not.
6
Annis
The park was warm, even at this early hour, and the unseasonable heat brought prickles of perspiration to Annis’s chest. She pulled off her hat to scratch an itchy spot on her head while Bits drank from the brimming fountain. It was too early for the carriages that used the concourse as a turnaround, and Annis thought she must be truly alone, a rare treat. She slid from the saddle, settled her boots on the edge of the bluestone basin, and steadied herself with a hand on Bits’s neck so she could look around her.
The crest of Cherry Hill was a wonderful vantage point. To the west the lake gleamed sapphire blue in the May sunshine. To the east and south cherry blossoms blazed white against the green landscape. Annis said, “I wish I owned all this, Bits. I could walk anywhere I wanted, ride however I wanted to, with no one telling me what to do!”
She was free of school now. She had planned to spend her spring and summer riding, researching for her breeding program, helping with the mares who would come. Instead Frances kept her busy choosing shoes and hats, looking at fabrics and trims and buttons, standing on a stool for hours for dress fittings.