Magic Lessons (Practical Magic, #0.1)(6)

To study love with an expert is a great gift, and yet Maria wondered why, with access to so much power and magic, Hannah had spent her own life alone, without love.

“What makes you think I have?” Hannah didn’t look the girl in the eye when she spoke, perhaps for fear of what the sight would allow Maria to intuit, things that were best kept private. There are secrets that must be held close, and most of these have to do with the wounding of the human heart, for sorrow spoken aloud is sorrow lived through twice.

All the same, Maria didn’t let her questions go unanswered, and now she was even more curious. “Haven’t you? I’ve seen no man come near.”

“Did you think I had no life before you came along?”

This notion only caused Maria’s interest to pique. She pondered that statement, her mouth pursed, deep in thought. Contemplating her own personal history, she had begun to wonder who she’d been before she was left in Devotion Field on a snowy day. Who had given her life and loved her, only to have left her in the care of a crow? Did she resemble her mother or her father, for surely every individual who was born must have parents. She noticed then that Hannah’s eyes were damp, and not because of the sun’s glare. That was when she knew the truth about Hannah.

“You did know love,” Maria declared, quite convinced. She didn’t just presume such a thing, as much as she read it in the air, as if Hannah’s past was made up of letters set into a book and that book was the world they walked through.

They were deep in the forest where Hannah was schooling Maria on how to hide should the need arise. Ever since the days of the witch-finders, it had been necessary to plan an escape at all times. Birds lived in such a manner, settling into the thickets so deeply and with such complete silence not even a fox could spy them.

Hannah gave the girl a sharp look. “You’re not invisible if you talk.”

Maria crouched beneath the junipers, barely breathing, not far from the place where she’d first been found. She knew the value of silence. Cadin was perched in the branch above her, equally quiet. Perhaps he had the sight as well, as familiars are said to do. He had not spent a single night away from Maria from the time he’d found her in the field, and Maria always wore the blackened silver hairpin the crow had brought her as a special gift. Sometimes she imagined the pin in a woman’s long red hair; perhaps it was a vision of the original owner. Whatever its history, the hairpin was her most valued possession, and would be all her life, even when she was half a world away from these woods.

“Bring me something wonderful,” she always whispered to Cadin when he set off on a flight, and she patted the feathers of her beloved thief. “Just don’t be caught.”

On the day of invisibility, he went off when they were finished hiding, winging across the field. It was very warm and the leaves on the willows were unfolding in a haze of soft yellow-green color. The ground was marshy all around them and ferns covered the heathland. On the way back to the cottage Hannah said, “You’re right.” She looked straight ahead as she spoke, but she had an open expression on her face, as if she were young again. She was remembering something she had done her best to forget.

Maria hurried to keep up with her. “Am I?”

Being told she was right was a rare treat, for Hannah believed that character was built when it was assumed that a child was most often wrong and still had much to learn.

“He was a man like any other, an earl’s servant who had seven years to work off his debt. That is what poor men must do, and I didn’t fault him for it. I was willing to wait, for a year is only as long as you let it be, but then I was arrested. They said I used my skill at writing to send letters to the devil and that I had a tail and that all men were in danger when I walked by, not because I was beautiful, I wasn’t, even I knew that, but because I could cause their blood to boil or go ice cold. I suppose they made it worth his while to turn against me, for after my trial was over, he was a free man with coins in his purse. He was the one who said I had a tail, and that he’d chopped it off himself so that I might appear to be a woman rather than a witch. He gave them the tail of a shrew and vowed it was mine, and if a fool is believed then those who believe him are even bigger fools.”

Maria thought over this new information. “So that is love?”

Hannah glanced away, as she did when she didn’t wish to reveal her emotions. But she needn’t have bothered attempting to hide her sorrow, for Maria could sense what a person was feeling so strongly she might as well have been able to hear someone’s deepest fears and wishes spoken aloud.

“It can’t be,” Maria decided.

“It was for me,” Hannah told her.

“And for me?”

“You looked in the black mirror. What did you see?”

It was a private matter, but this was a time for truth rather than privacy. “I saw a daughter.”

“Did you now? Then you’ll be a fortunate woman.”

“And a man who brought me diamonds.”

Hannah laughed out loud. There they were in their ragged clothes, half a day’s walk from the nearest village, with nothing precious between them, save for their wits and Maria’s stolen hairpin, as far away from a man with diamonds as they could be.

“I wouldn’t be surprised by anything that happened to you, my girl,” Hannah told Maria. “But I believe you will be amazed at the turns of fate, as we all are when it comes to our own lives, even when we have the sight.”