The Raven Spell (Conspiracy of Magic #1)(16)

“I violated your privacy,” Edwina said as her sister pulled the cork from the bottle. “I know how you feel about your baubles. Each one unique and special. And yours.”

“You shouldn’t have taken it.” Mary poured the sweet wine into one of the petite glasses and offered it to Edwina. “But I understand why you did, even though I don’t know how you could have known the right spell to return the man’s memories.” She poured herself a glass and stuffed the cork back in the bottle.

They’d been through this sort of episode before, she reminded her sister, though how she could have forgotten was beyond belief. Despite their attempts at conformity, Mary’s unusual magic always seeped out into the open. Like static in the air, it raised the hairs on those who got too close. Boys were the worst. Always spying on them when their curiosity had been roused. First the boys in their home village. Then every village they’d lived in since. And now that awful nipper that kept hovering outside their shop door with his nose pressed to the glass. All she and Mary wanted was to be left alone, but to wear an air of strangeness in a crowd of sameness always found them out.

Edwina cradled her glass of sherry with two hands. “I was with Father that time you stole Billy Thisbury’s memory after he’d fallen off the roof and had the breath knocked out of him. You’d run down to the river to hide when you found out he wasn’t dead. I found you and convinced you to give me the orb, and then I held it for Father while he composed his spell to return the memories to the boy.”

“We were only thirteen. How could you have remembered the words of his spell ten years later? We didn’t even have proper grimoires yet.”

Edwina grinned mischievously. “Father sang the words.”

Mary nodded as if finally understanding something that had long been a mystery. “Ah, because he knew you’d have need of the spell one day. To protect some half-witted mortal from my fiendish habit. Because I’m too simple to control my impulses.”

Edwina denied her sister’s conclusions, though she’d often privately wondered the same, since their father knew she could remember any spell if it was sung in a tune. “You know he’s in awe of your gift, Mary. We all are. It’s a rare and beautiful talent.”

“Then why did we have to flee our home in the middle of the night with nothing but our luggage after that boy cried about it? He should have just died like the rest of them.”

“You know why,” Edwina said, letting her sister’s callous comment go. “And, anyway, it was a long time ago.” She took Mary’s hand in hers. “Am I forgiven?”

Mary made a show of thinking about it, but she’d already poured the glasses for the toast. “Forgiven,” she said.

It was not their habit to drink from their father’s cabinet. They rarely touched the stuff. There were times, however, when pacts were made or fences mended, that only the elixir of alcohol could provide the proper tribute required. And so they clinked their glasses and drank the sherry, feeling the alcohol settle softly in their stomachs.

With their quarrel drowned by sweet wine, they conferred with the constellations. Fixed but not rigid, the stars hung in the sky as true as any map consulted by the lost. All one needed was to know where they wanted to go, and the stars would tell them when and where to put their foot on the path. The art, though, was in the interpretation.

Mary drew her knees up and tucked her feet under the hem of her nightgown. “Do you think he’ll come back?”

“Ian? I patched his head and returned his memories. I don’t think he’ll bother us again. He won’t say anything, once the memories of his life get reabsorbed. We won’t have to run this time.” Edwina paused, letting a smile show in the corner of her mouth. “Though it is kind of a shame he won’t be back. He was rather easy to look at, wasn’t he?”

“No,” Mary corrected. “I meant Father. It’s been three months now.”

“Oh.” Edwina covered up the embarrassment of talking about Ian so plainly by sipping the last drop of her sherry and then cradling the rim of the glass against her lips as she thought. “There’s still been no word about where he’s gone. It’s impossible to say when or if he’ll return.”

“But he’s left.” Mary rested her head on her knees. “Just like Mum.”

“We don’t know that yet.”

But however much she wanted to disagree with her sister’s assumptions, it was the most likely outcome. Their mother had disappeared in much the same manner. A kiss, a wave, a promise to return, and then they never saw her again. A year later and they still didn’t know whether she was alive or dead. They hadn’t given up on her, but she no longer preoccupied their hearts with the hope of return.

They tilted their faces to the constellations again. With the century coming to an end, the sisters had been studying their star charts with more vigor and knew a disturbing Saturn-Pluto conjunction in Cancer was corkscrewing nearer each day. A sign of struggle to come. Long suffering. The kind one sees in prolonged war. The perfect conditions were ticking away in the cosmos, waiting for the constellations to revolve toward each other and ignite events into motion. It would come in their lifetimes, but not today.

“Do you think Mother and Father left because of me?” Mary asked. “Because of how I am?”