Our Crooked Hearts(65)
“Siphon?” Ivy’s smooth little forehead furrowed.
“Steal. Borrow, if you’re trying to make excuses for it. But you’re not. When you’re older we can dig more into what’s ours. For now let’s stick with the stuff that’s universal.”
I’d thought the well I drew my magic from had been permanently tainted by Astrid’s gift. That if you X-rayed me you’d still see her shadow cast over my bones. But the magic that came back when I worked with Ivy felt so pure. It ran through and out of me like clean sweat.
Magic was friendly to Ivy from the start. Fee and I started with softballs: healing tinctures, cleansing rituals, the guideposts of the tarot. Luck tokens, memory charms, energy manipulations that had her screeching with delight, making fingersnaps of firelight hop from candle to candle.
Ivy was a good pupil. She didn’t approach working with Fee’s warmth or Marion’s skinlessness or my bubbling sense of agenda. Magic to her was a living book, full of stories and secrets and maddening contradictions. She liked the grind of it, the physical preparation that came before the bang.
The hard part was convincing her to hide it from Hank. She longed to bring him into our secret but Rob put his foot down hard. Rob, who only knew this much of my history: that I had a youthful fling with the supernatural, and a girl I knew had died because of it. That sometimes after a nightmare I went away from him, deep within my skin, until the poison was diluted enough for me to resurface.
Hank made hiding it easy on Ivy. He was a sunny kid who preferred to see the world in black and white; gray shades simply didn’t register. They were my fairy tale, my Day Boy and Night Girl, one sweet and thoughtless, the other curious and tart. As they grew up, one with magic and one without but both so good, I felt lucky. I was so lucky.
What if I was allowed to be lucky?
* * *
Following the night of the bounce house, Ivy promised never to pull me into her dreams without my permission. After that she didn’t really talk about her dreaming, and I figured it was something she’d outgrown. Until the midwinter morning she woke me, frantic, having dreamed of a strangled tree.
I remember the white smoke of our breath, the tamp of our boots over snow. Her small shape in Hank’s hand-me-down coat with the corduroy collar, leading me through the forest preserve. Our search ended at a leafless hazel tree wound around with a mass of sticky, spiky vines, the only green thing we could see. There was a circle of empty ground around the tree, not quite a clearing. Within that circle was a feeling of wrongness so thick and physical you could almost scratch your nails across it.
We cleared the vines, yanked and salted the roots, and burned everything we could carry. It didn’t cross my mind until we were done that interfering with the tree could’ve been dangerous. In the pale blue snow light, working beside my determined daughter, I’d been unafraid.
“What exactly did you dream?” I asked her later.
She shrugged. “I told you. I saw the tree, and I knew where to find it.”
“Have you had dreams like that before?”
Another shrug, and a nonanswer. “I don’t remember all my dreams.”
There was something so solemn, almost druidical, in Ivy’s hearing the call of a suffering tree. Thinking about her accessing magic that ancient gave me the feeling of a swimmer drifting past the place where the seafloor gives way to the deep.
That night I couldn’t sleep. Ivy wasn’t even ten and I could no longer fathom the contours of her abilities. Nor did I trust her to tell me the whole truth if asked. Where did the borders of her lucid dreaming lie? Could she spy on other people’s dreams? Walk through them? Shape them the way she did her own?
She wouldn’t, of course. I knew she wouldn’t. So did it really matter if she could?
The question kept me up until morning.
* * *
“I could just do it.”
Ivy at ten, fists balled in frustration because I’d told her she would not, under any circumstances, hex a classmate.
“But you won’t.”
“How do you know?”
“Because,” I said, willing my words to be a protective net, an ordinary kind of mother’s magic. “I trust you, and you trust me. And I’m telling you what you already know: hexes are dark magic. They don’t come free.”
“Of course she wants to curse her enemies,” Fee told me later. “What ten-year-old wouldn’t?”
“And she wants to scry,” I said sourly. “Or as she puts it, ‘spy on people to see what they really think of me.’”
I knew what Fee was gonna say before she said it. “You have to tell her about Marion. Give her a chance to understand why. Right now she thinks you’re holding her back for the hell of it. Don’t let her set you up as an adversary, not with this.”
She’d said it a dozen times before. And I replied like I always did.
“Of course I’ll tell her. When she’s a little older, we’ll tell her everything.”
It was my shame that was really stopping me. Fee and I both knew it.
* * *
She’s a good kid.
I repeated it to myself like it was gospel. And it was true, but that didn’t alter the fact that Ivy was drawn to morally questionable magic like a bee to the lip of a Coke can. She was curious, heedless, troublingly fearless. And she was stronger than me. Corralling her abilities into small workings felt increasingly like trying to direct divine fire through the claustrophobic tunnels of an ant farm.