Antebellum Awakening (11 page)

Camille sucked loudly on the sweet candy and moved farther down a fashion scroll she’d bought in Chatham City on her last weekly visit. The discarded wrappers of several caramels littered the floor around her.

“Aunt Bettina used to make me do extra homework on days it rained. She said that rain meant I had to be quiet since I couldn’t go outside and give her a break.”

Once I saw that the two of them were occupied, I grabbed my cape from a rack near the door, slipped into the turret staircase, and padded barefoot down the stone steps without them any wiser. Camille’s voice continued to drone on behind me. Out of sight, I closed my eyes, whispered the transportation spell, and fell into the waiting darkness. It whisked me away, bearing down on my chest and face, and dropped me in the middle of the forest.

The fading aftermath of rain choked the air when I struggled to my feet in a copse of trees far from Chatham Castle.

“Jikes,” I muttered, batting several tenacious branches away from my arms and making a mental note to talk with Papa about learning a more precise way to transport. Once I caught a glimpse of the trail off to the side, I battled my way through the thick, wet brush. Tendrils of hair flew around my head in a wild halo from the humidity, but I didn’t care. Bigger monsters than a poor hairstyle awaited me. I moved onto the nearby trail, hopping over mud puddles and moving from stone to stone.

Isadora’s little cottage soon appeared in the foliage, although nothing moved inside. Surely the old Watcher was home. Except to sort out the next first-years for Miss Mabel’s School for Girls, Isadora never left her cottage in the trees.

At least I didn’t think she did.

I didn’t know much about Isadora, not really. Not the way my friends did. Their interviews with Isadora were far different than mine. Every student that wanted to go to Miss Mabel’s School for Girls had to meet with her. She had the ability to see and understand a witch’s motivations and personality in ways that others could not. With such power and talent, she kept the school and the part of Letum Wood that surrounded it safe from the dangers of the forest.

Shaking off a little raindrop that dripped down my neck, I walked down the verdant path that led to her quaint residence. The wood groaned beneath my feet when I stepped onto the porch, surprised to find the door open.

“Come in, Bianca,” Isadora called with her creaky voice. “I’ve been expecting you.”

Of course you have,
I thought, stepping inside to find Isadora’s foggy, unsmiling eyes staring at me.

“Open the door,” she said. “Let the sweet smell of rain come in.”

I followed her directions, casting my eyes around the empty walls of her small home. A little bed was tucked into the corner, a table with two chairs stood in the middle of the floor, and potted plants filled three open windowsills.

“Where’s your china?” I asked, seeking the piles of plates and cups she used to display. They’d decorated every wall only a year ago, when I first came to her cottage. The house seemed barren without them.

“Put away,” she said and motioned me to the table. The bony ridges of her knuckles stuck out in sharp angles when she folded her hands on her lap. The skin looked soft and translucent, freckled with age spots. I wondered how long Isadora had been alive. “Sit down. We’ll have some tea.”

A plain set of white cups with steam rolling off the top waited. I glanced at them with an inward grimace. Hot tea sounded as welcoming as a boiling bath on this already humid spring day.

“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” she said with a sidelong glance at the cup. “It’s not what you think.”

To be polite, I lowered myself into the chair and raised the cup to my lips, pulling on a quick sip. It tasted ice cold and minty, and sent a cool shiver down my body.

“You’re here because you have questions about your binding with Miss Mabel,” she said before I could get a word out. The chilly swallow of tea nearly drowned me.

“W-what?” I asked, coughing. “You know about—”

The protective magic of the binding cut me off. I couldn’t even make reference to it or Miss Mabel in any way that may lead to the binding. While I had expected Isadora to know what was on my mind, I didn’t think she’d jump right into it. I fidgeted at the thought, wondering what else Isadora saw in my messy, bruised heart. Did she know what I saw when I ran, or how out of control my powers were now?

“Yes,” she said, lifting her eyebrows and taking a draw from her cup. “I do know about the binding.”

My friends told me Isadora had been kind to them during their interviews before she accepted them into Miss Mabel’s School for Girls. But she’d been nervous around me, maybe even frightened. Now she regarded me the way I’d look at a dangerous animal: with a healthy amount of uncertainty. Did she sense my simmering powers the same way Papa did? Being this close to the school again agitated the magic, like the turmoil of emotions in my chest had again become a dragon, only this time it paced back and forth.

“How do you know?”

“I know many things,” she said.

“Will you answer my questions?” I asked tentatively. Suddenly every word I spoke seemed to matter more than it did before. Although I couldn’t make reference to the binding out loud, Isadora would know what I wanted to ask.

“You can’t overpower the magic of a binding when it’s been sealed in blood,” she said, anticipating my first question. “Nor should you try. It would be foolish, don’t you think?”

It took me several moments to soak that in. “Yes,” I finally murmured. “It would be foolish.”

Overpowering magic was one way to take control, but I already knew I didn’t have enough strength to overcome Miss Mabel’s advanced skill. I ran my fingers along the saucer, enjoying the cool, polished sensation of the porcelain while I tried to figure out what question to ask next. I hadn’t expected this conversation to go so fast.

“Do I have options?” I asked, barely able to squeeze out the words before the cold magic crept up my throat.

“Perhaps.”

“I’m desperate, Isadora,” I whispered, thinking of the next High Priest. If the magic overpowered me then I could commit the heinous act of murder without knowing. My resolve to conquer the binding doubled. “I’ll do whatever I can.”

“I know,” she said.

“What if I—”

The magic stopped my question.
What if I could destroy the contract?

She stared at me again, but this time her eyes looked distant. She was rustling through my brain and heart, fleshing out all my insecurities and fears, finding the decisions I would make that could lead to bad ends. I wondered how close to the darkness in my heart she would go. She blinked twice, then shook her head.

“In answer to your question, yes. If the contract is destroyed, the binding will no longer exist.”

Hope, sweet and pure, surged through my soul.

“Yes?” I asked, breathless, needing verbal confirmation. It couldn’t be that easy.

Isadora paused.

“Remember that she’s quite cunning, Bianca,” she said quietly. “You’ve underestimated her before.”

What little confidence I still had in myself shattered. “Yes,” I heard myself whisper over the bellow of my powers. The reminder of my responsibility in Mama’s death struck a crippling blow, resurrecting my anger and despair all over again. “I know.”

You were weak.

“Miss Mabel knows the limitations and weaknesses of the magic. She knows that she must keep all her bindings near or risk losing them. Getting to your binding would be very difficult.”

The word
bindings
echoed in my head and I shuddered to think of all the other witches Miss Mabel held in her control. Was that how she had become so powerful? I recalled the protective way she held the book in the attic four months before, and again in the Western Network.

“It seems quite hopeless,” I said in a strangled voice. My life, and the future High Priest’s, hung in the balance. Even if the High Priestess found a way around my Inheritance Curse, what would it matter? I wouldn’t kill another witch for Miss Mabel, so the binding would claim my life.

The wrinkles around Isadora’s eyes softened for the first time. Her voice reminded me of my grandmother.

“You’ll never beat her with sheer power,” she said softly, “but there are strengths you possess that she does not. Every witch has a weakness. Those who seem to have none are often the most flawed of all of us.”

“What strengths?” I scoffed as the magic expanded in my chest with a painful lurch. Pretending that I wasn’t mourning Mama had leeched my strength. “Sarcasm? Running? I can’t even do that anymore.”

I leaned forward and put my head in my hands. Why wouldn’t this all just go away? The silence continued for several moments until I looked up.

“How is Miss Mabel doing all this evil?” I asked. “How is she so powerful? She—”

She transported me.

Isadora shifted in her chair. “She’s using Almorran magic,” she said with a troubled frown, and I knew she understood my thought.

“Almorran?” I murmured, recalling the Clavas in the painting.

“Yes. Dark Almorran magic like your binding is something Mabel has always been interested in. It would also allow her to transport you against your will because you aren’t powerful enough to block her, like the High Priestess or your father could.”

The idea of Miss Mabel resurrecting an ancient dark magic in order to gain control shook me. She would stop at nothing. But for what? What was her end goal? There had to be a reason.

So my only hope is to destroy the binding,
I concluded to myself in a grim thought, unable to speak it aloud. “There’s no way for me to combat Almorran magic right now,” I said instead. “I don’t know enough.”

Isadora’s expression didn’t change.

“The possibilities are always shifting, Bianca. One never knows what could happen when you least expect it.”

“Should that comfort me?” I asked, puzzled by her cryptic words.

“That should comfort all of us,” she said with a final sip of her tea. “No future is set in stone. Now, I have a few things to do this afternoon. Thank you for your visit.”

“Yes. Thank you for having me, Isadora,” I said, pushing away from the table.

She didn’t stop me. I wanted her to call after me, to tell me the secret behind saving myself. To say I was clever enough to steal a binding set by one of the most powerful witches in the world using a magic so old that some believed it had never really existed. I stopped at the doorway but didn’t turn around. Behind her cottage lay the beginning of the land owned by Miss Mabel’s School for Girls. I shivered, thinking of the painful memories. Letum Wood cast a long shadow on days like this.

“Are you going to tell the High Priestess what you know about me?” I asked, peering out the door to the dripping forest. It would be so much easier that way. Then I wouldn’t have to bear yet another secret, another burden on my strained heart. But would she? Isadora didn’t have to act on what she saw.

“Who said she doesn’t already know?” she asked.

I whirled around.

“Does she?”

Isadora peered into my eyes. “That’s not for me to say. Mildred knows many things that I do not.”

“She suspected that Miss Mabel would—”

The words stopped again, just short of hope.
She suspected that Miss Mabel would bind me into an agreement.
Maybe the High Priestess was already anticipating a traitorous action. If she knew, she certainly gave no sign of it.

“Regardless of whether Mildred knows or not,” Isadora said, “I will not be the one to tell her. Sometimes the most obvious courses are not always the safest.”

Disappointed but not surprised, I closed my eyes, took several breaths, and pressed forward into the gray fog that had settled in behind the rain. Isadora had her own reasons for her silence and I had to trust that it was for the best.

I ducked away from the little cottage and into the wispy fog, grateful to return to Letum’s expansive ceiling. The dragon inside cooled as I walked further away, my cape billowing out behind me.

Sanna

“W
e’re going far into Letum Wood for your lesson today,” Merrick said the next morning.

We stood in the middle of the Forgotten Gardens on the edge of the castle grounds. They surrounded a dilapidated stone building with no roof that had been crumbling into ruins for years. Ivy and vines from Letum Wood had slowly been pulling it into the forest. New leaves sprang from the dead, dried vines of last year, coating the decaying walls in a layer of fluttering green. Every now and then bluebirds peeked their heads out and chirped, dancing along the wall with the promise of spring.

“Far into Letum Wood?” I asked. “How is that any different from the other runs?”

“It will be much farther than we’ve gone before.”

The hope for an adventure ran through me like a little thrill. But then a nagging reminder of Mama’s ghost tugged on the moment, reminding me that running was no adventure anymore.

“You look quite refreshed today,” I said in a dry tone, elevating one eyebrow. “Sleep well?”