“Jeez, she’s scary,” said Asa, breaking the silence that had fallen between us. “I’m so nervous. I keep going over the list over and over.”
“I barely slept last night,” I told him. “I just went over all the spells.”
“Can’t be too well-practiced, eh?” Asa said. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. “I almost wish it would start just so I could get out of here. I feel hot under the collar.…” Then he squinted out the window. “What are those guards doing?”
The other guards—the real guards—were getting into their leather harnesses. One by one, they were raised to dangle beneath the lip of the wall, just out of sight, their guns in their hands. I saw one of them give Mr. Jameson a thumbs-up.
“Extra security,” I told Asa. “In case the thieves try anything.”
“It looks almost like you expect them to,” Asa said.
“You can’t be too prepared.”
I tried to sound nonchalant, but the fact is that the trap made me nervous. It had been my idea, but now, seeing the guards with their rifles in hand, I wondered if it had been the right thing to propose. If it was the right thing to do. They had only been coming in for medicine last time, after all.…
The door opened, and Mother Morevna came back inside.
“It will begin in just a moment,” she said. “Wait until I introduce the two of you.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Last but not least,” she said, “here.”
At first, I wasn’t sure what she had given me. Then I nearly gasped.
It was one of the white stones for her trapdoor spells, like the one the thieves had triggered, and the ones she’d laid around the base of the wall to catch them today. If she was giving me one of these, did that mean that, finally, she trusted me as a witch? As her Successor?
“If something goes wrong today,” she said. “If the thieves manage to get past Jameson, the guards, and myself, and you find yourself needing to undo one of my trapdoor spells, all you must do is smear the stone with your own blood and command it: ‘Set it right.’ Or, more accurately, ‘Setzen Sie es richtig.’ I find that my spells respond best to my family’s original language.”
“Setzen Sie es richtig,” I said.
“Good,” she said. “Now keep that in your pouches where no one can bother with it.”
The people were all here now, all gathered outside the church. Everyone in Elysium: Black, white, brown, young, old, fat and thin. They stood together in front of the church, all around the circle of salt, looking on eagerly. One man even had a bag of peanuts. From under the nearest guard tower, behind the audience, Mr. Jameson pulled a white handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose. The signal.
Mother Morevna opened the door and took the stage. The oil lamps around the circle lit themselves, and in the light that came dancing up at her, she looked mystical and ancient.
“Friends, it is so good to see you all here tonight,” she said, her voice magically amplified. “I have the privilege now to open tonight’s ceremonies and to introduce two of the finest young witches in Elysium.”
The crowd applauded like people used to at football games or basketball games back before the walls went up. Like we were the event of the season. Mother Morevna raised her hands to quiet them.
“It will be a riveting event, I’m sure,” she said, her eyes flickering up to the dark place on the northwestern wall, where the thieves would surely come. “But before we get to that, let’s hear from Elysium’s Mexican heritage dancing troupe, Las Mariposas!”
Seven little girls in yellow dresses took the stage, and their mothers pushed their way to the front of the crowd. The white-haired guitar teacher, Mr. Ramirez, strummed once, twice on the guitar, then launched into a fast, thumping song as the little girls flounced here and there, vibrant and smiling in their layers of fabric.
Suddenly, Asa leaned over and said, “You wouldn’t happen to know who this belongs to, would you?”
He opened his pocket and something small and golden winked out at me from the bottom. A cricket suspended in amber.
“I… er… found this a while back, and I think somebody may have dropped it,” he said. “It… uh… looks like it might be valuable.”
“To a little boy who collects marbles or something, maybe,” I said.