smooths the diary open and reads:
“Finally found the map room in the cellar of the house in P and it was simple from there. She loves that: mixing the extremely complex spells of the maps with a simple request to gain access to them. The map room is very much Ledger’s style: her idea of being clever. And her way of screening visitors—if you can find the map room, work out how to enter it and how to use the map, then you are worthy of visiting her. I’m not sure what would happen if you used the wrong map. I suspect you’d go to that place and be unable to get back, at least not without a long walk. The maps are impressive. Their magic is complex and Ledger is, I admit, powerful. Indeed, she has more power than I thought possible. But what is the point of having that power if she never uses it?
“Ledger and I talked for a while, though most of what she spouts is almost unbearable waffle. I asked her about the loss of Black territories and her concerns. She said, ‘I have none. All will come back to balance in the end.’ I replied, ‘How exactly will that happen when the Blacks are being wiped out?’ And she said, ‘Because it must be so. The nature of our Gifts means it will be so. The world will become more unbalanced but then . . . we have to believe that balance will return.’
“I was getting extremely bored with her at this stage and I said, ‘Well, I don’t see that happening. I see the Whites wiping everyone out. Everyone except me, you understand.’ And she looked at me for a long time and said, ‘No. I don’t see a White Witch wiping you out, Mercury.’
“At another point she asked me, ‘Who is your mother, Mercury? The wind or the rain?’
“I told her that my mother was Saffron, a fine Black Witch.
“Ledger said, ‘Isn’t your Gift like a parent to you now? Teaching, guiding, helping, and, even for you with all your power, a source of comfort?’
“It took a huge amount of self-control to resist the urge to freeze her jaw shut at that point.
“I asked her what her Gift was and if it was her mother. I wasn’t sure I wanted a reply as I was sure it would be more nonsense and I’d already had to put up with hours of it. She replied with a non-answer, as ever. She said, ‘I’m still learning about my Gift, Mercury, and still it eludes me.’
“Of course she was being ‘humble.’ She has learned many Gifts, and I am trying to copy her in that, I admit. She delights in disguise and shape-shifting. (I won’t bother to say what appearance she took on for me, except that it was extremely tiresome.) In any case, she is the most powerful witch I know of. The irony is that although she has learned to access many powers she has failed completely to be anything but tedious and absurd. She says things like ‘The Essence is our true home’ and that she is ‘merely climbing through a window to steal a few gems.’ To many questions she simply replies, ‘The Essence is the source of all Gifts.’
“At one stage she said, ‘Whoever can access the Essence, all power is theirs. There will be no limit to it.’ She knelt and touched the ground with the flat of both her hands (I had to stifle my laughter), saying, ‘It’s here somewhere.’ Then she looked up at me and said, ‘But perhaps, as your Gift is weather, you think it’s in the air?’ And for the first time I thought that she was genuinely interested in me, or rather in my Gift. That is her weakness: she is desperate for more knowledge.
“I replied, ‘Of course the air is the answer for me.’
“But now I’m back in my home and I press my hands to the walls of stone, I think that perhaps she is right and the earth is the answer.”
Nesbitt closes the diary and says something but I’m thinking about the earth holding the secret of witch powers. I feel that is true: the earth is the answer. It’s through the earth that I helped Gabriel get his Gift back. When we were in the trance and our hands were staked together, we were transported to Wales, at least in our minds we were. I’m not sure what happened