Magic Lessons (Practical Magic) - Alice Hoffman Page 0,157

her knees beside her grieving mother, both coated with mud, weeds in the folds of their clothes, lake water dripping from their hair. Dias’s skin was pale and he was so very quiet. It was clear that he was gone. “You have to stop,” Faith told her mother. She knew death when she saw it. She’d seen it before. “Mother, he’s no longer with us.”

His spirit had left him and he was motionless. The beetle had stopped its clicking, for its work was done. Maria would not let this be their fate. She pounded on Samuel’s chest, again and again, in a fury. They had wasted time because of a curse; death was always possible, with or without magic. Her own mother had confided that there was an ancient bargain a person could make with the darkest powers, one that would bring back the dead to walk among the living. He will never be the same if you do. He will be a shadow self, a dark creature, but you will have him. Mothers had done this with children, only to have the rescued child run away into the woods, a feral creature with no memory of the past; wives had brought back husbands who had afterward left them for other women, or stolen from them, or murdered them in their sleep. Maria didn’t care. She was ready to make the bargain. She hit Samuel’s chest one last time, ready to take up a knife so that she might cut her arm to mix her blood with his, the beginning of this dreaded spell, but before she could, Samuel opened his eyes.

He had been dead until Maria forced his heart into beating. He’d returned from the dark water, from the darkness of the endless depth where he had seen his father sitting in a garden chair, waving him away. Don’t be a fool, Abraham Dias called to his son. She’s waiting for you, you stupid man.

Maria lay beside him in the grass, her arms around him. You cannot curse a man who has already died and come back. He has rid himself of one life and begun another, a life in which love is everything. He had been dead but now his eyes were open and the woman he loved was singing to him.

A ship there is and she sails the sea,

She’s loaded deep as deep can be,

But not so deep as the love I’m in

I know not if I sink or swim.

The water is wide, I cannot get o’er it

And neither have I wings to fly

Give me a boat that will carry two

And both shall row, my Love and I.

Samuel had to strain to hear Maria’s voice, but soon he understood she was saying she wanted to be with him no matter the cost.

“Are we ruined?” Samuel asked. The world was so bright and beautiful. Like his father before him, he had a new appreciation of the earth.

“No,” Maria said. She was as sure of this as she’d ever been of anything. “We’re just alive.”

While Samuel slept in the grass, Faith and Maria sat together in the falling dark. They had made a bonfire and sparks rose into the black sky. Faith gazed at her left palm. The line that had stopped when she found The Book of the Raven had begun again. She would live to be an old woman, she saw that now, but one who couldn’t work magic. That was the price she paid when she ignored the rules. She’d lost the sight and with it her bloodline gifts. She was ordinary now.

“If you don’t want me to be your daughter, I would understand,” Faith told her mother.

“You’ll always be my daughter.” Now and forever, in this life and the life to come, no matter what separated them or what brought them together.

At the first light, Faith would return to the field and bring Keeper back to the bonfire so that her loyal companion would be turned to ashes here in the woods, where he belonged. They watched the bonfire burn and remembered when they first saw fireflies and thought stars had dropped from the sky, when Keeper was a pup and drank goat’s milk, when Cadin brought gifts of buttons and keys, when they plucked apples from the trees, when the world of Essex County was brand-new.

Samuel Dias was asleep in the grass, his black coat still soaking wet. He was still dreaming when Maria Owens leaned in to tell him a story, one he