world and an arcane spell of indeterminate origins…
“The blood of the World,” I say, horrified. “My mother’s blood, passed to me. My blood. Once he has that, along with the Arcana objects and some old spell, he can take control of magick forever.”
“It would be months before she began to understand the magnitude of what she’d done,” Trello says. “But by then, you’d already been born. And as predicted, she was in love with you. Both of your parents were. But she was also losing her mind, channeling prophecies day and night, searching always for a way to break her oath, even knowing that she couldn’t. Everything that would come to pass—your lives in Tres Búhos, the decades-long murders of witches and mages, your coming to the Academy, the rise of the Dark Arcana, the trouble arriving on our very doorstep—she foresaw. She knew there would be no altering your fate, and ultimately, that is what drove her to the brink.”
“But… I don’t understand. If you were her friend—and from everything I’ve seen, I believe she trusted you—why did you drive my parents out of the Academy?”
Trello turns over another card—the Six of Swords. In it, a young couple sits with six swords at the front of a small boat, a cloaked man standing at back, ferrying them to safer shores.
“An escape,” I say, the message coming through. “They had to leave. It… It was her choice?”
“I was the only one who knew of her deal with the Dark Magician. Not even your father knew—he believed your mother had finally crafted an effective fertility spell, nothing more. Once again, soon after your birth, her need for secrecy drove her to my door. She insisted that we create an elaborate ruse. It needed to be so convincing, she said, that even your father would believe it.”
The memory filters through, and I listen in as my mother convinces Trello to begin spreading rumors to undermine her reputation, to convince other faculty members and advisors to break ties, to discredit my mother’s research, and to ultimately banish my parents from the Academy altogether.
Give us a convincing reason to turn our backs on magick forever, Anna, my mother implores. She holds me in her arms, a baby no more than a few weeks old, pink and wrinkly in my white blanket. Her life depends on it. We have to protect her, no matter what. Promise me! Promise me you’ll do whatever it takes, tonight and always…
“Your mother believed—she wanted to believe—that if it looked like she and your father were breaking ties with magick, they might have a chance at cutting off the Magician’s connection to her magick, and more importantly—at hiding you. At pretending you were a natural child born of natural means, raised in a life of normalcy where the Magician couldn’t reach you.”
“But… but I am natural.” I blink away the vision, meeting Trello’s eyes again. “I’m a natural-born witch, daughter of Connor and Melissa Milan.”
“A witch—of course. Born to Melissa Milan—yes. But Connor…” Her eyes soften, filling with a sympathy that makes my blood run cold.
“Wait. You’re telling me he’s not my real father?” I ask. And then—dark, cold, horrifying—another realization dawns. “Holy shit. Is my father… Is the Magician… Is he?”
“No, of course not. Your father is Connor Milan, the man who raised you. The man you’ve always called father.”
I let out a sigh of relief, but Trello shakes her head, the pity in her eyes intensifying. “But biologically speaking… Well, biologically speaking, I suppose the only way to describe it…”
She spreads the rest of the cards across the table, revealing every one of them, the minors and majors of the Tarot, all the suits, all the symbols and imagery that make our magick possible.
“Your father is Magick itself, Starla.”
“That’s… not possible,” Doc says, his voice startling me after holding silence for so long. He reaches for my hand across the table, squeezing it tightly.
“So much about her seems impossible,” Trello tells him. Then, turning back to me, “Yet here you are. You can heal yourself. You’re a Spirit-blessed emanation of the Major Arcana, further blessed by the four princesses of the Tarot. You can dreamcast, dream share, dream retrieve. You’ve already developed a bond with your familiar that most witches spend decades developing. You located the Arcana objects. Is it really so hard to believe?”
I blink away fresh tears, my brain threatening to shut down. This is crazy. This is bananas. This is so far out of the