Magic Lessons (Practical Magic #0.1)(102)

Faith found her way across the meadows and headed into the woods, allowing memory to lead her. The town had grown, but there was still plenty of wild land and acres filled with pine and oak, old chestnuts and elms, witch hazel and fragrant wild cherry, with its delicious fruit and poisonous seed. At last, Faith came to a muddy clearing where Maria had made a path. When she scraped at the ground with her boot heel, the blue stones Maria had carried from the ledge of the lake were still there. The roughly made slatted fence ringing the garden had tumbled down and was covered by wild ivy. There was the tiny tilted house, a neglected hunting shack her mother had worked so hard to make into a home. The windows had been covered with thick translucent paper, but that was torn apart now, for raccoons and weasels had taken up residence inside, and one year a bear had made its home in the cabin through summer and the last smoldering blaze of autumn. The seeds of the grapes he had eaten had sprouted and there were now wild grapevines growing over the roof, with wide green leaves unfolding. And there was something Faith didn’t recognize, the tree Samuel Dias had brought here from a thousand miles away, planted in the hours before Maria Owens left Massachusetts. People in town said that if you stood beneath the magnolia, your beloved would come to you, no matter the season or the time, and when its flowers bloomed those who passed by became confused, imagining there had been snow in May, or that stars had fallen from the sky.

Even a bitter, hard-hearted girl could feel wistful upon re turning to the first real home she’d known. Faith climbed over the broken-down fence and cleared away the ivy. There she discovered what she was looking for, the apothecary garden. It had gone wild, and there were jumbled weeds abounding, but there were still stalks of belladonna, along with the root that took the shape of a man and was said to scream when plucked from the ground. Faith filled the basket with the ingredients she needed, then noticed that a small sparrow had tumbled from its nest. One more ingredient, fallen into her lap. She took it in her hands for it was what she needed for her dark spell, the bones and heart and liver. She closed her eyes as she wrung its neck, and as she did so she could feel the wrongness of her deed pulsing as if a hive of stinging bees were under her skin. Whoever was charmed by this spell would feel the pain he had caused others; his deeds would be pulled out of him and bite him, as if all his wrongdoings were sharp teeth, and he would feel the stab of remorse.

As Faith took the life of the sparrow, Keeper threw back his head and howled, overcome by loss, as if Faith had been stolen from him once again. The sound sent shivers along her spine but she didn’t stop. Her blood was on fire. When she opened her eyes the bird was lifeless in the palm of her hand, and Keeper was gone. He was done with her. She was not the person that he had been attached to, the one he’d come to of his own accord, for a familiar can never be called, he must make his own choice, and Keeper had made the choice to leave her.

Faith wrapped the bird in a bit of flannel cloth and placed it in the basket of herbs, then went to search for Keeper. There were muddy footprints that led past the lake where she had fed handfuls of bread to a huge eel, but when she searched the cliffs and caves, Keeper was nowhere to be found. Faith cried out for him, she whistled and clapped her hands; still there was no sign of the wolf. Her most loyal friend had deserted her, and for good reason. She was not the girl he knew. It is easy to become what your actions have made of you.

“Go ahead,” she called in a broken voice. “If you leave me, then you were nothing to me anyway!”

Her face was burning as she ran through the fields. She went back to the house with the elm trees and began to simmer her cursed stew over the fire in the kitchen. When she cut up the bird, the lifeline on her left hand stopped. If she had glanced down that afternoon as she swept the Hathornes’ house and boiled their laundry with ashes and lye, she would have seen that she had made her own fate out of bitterness and spite. According to the rules of magic, she would have to pay a price for the actions she had taken that had been born of vengeance.



* * *



Samuel Dias had returned to New York to stand at Abraham’s gravesite, where he said the Kaddish to honor his father’s passing from the world. He had been gone to Jamaica and Brazil, and to islands that had no name and seas where there was no wind. He’d spied dozens of trees he might have brought back, beautiful, unusual specimens that had never been seen in New York, pink trumpet trees, blue jacarandas, rosewood trees with green and white flowers, but this time his only cargo had been barrels of dark rum. Samuel left the trees where they were, though each one had made him think of Maria Owens. All the same, a gift given to someone who wants nothing from you is worthless. He knew that now, though he still dreamed of the expression on Maria’s face when she looked out the window of the jail and declared the magnolia to be a miracle.

Samuel was growing tired of the sea and its loneliness, some thing he had always been grateful for as a younger man. At night he stood on the deck and watched the creatures beneath the water and thought of the first ship he’d ever sailed upon, when the navigator his father had enlisted took him under his wing and taught him to read the stars. Back then, he could still remember everything about his mother and sisters. Now it was difficult for him to bring up their faces, although there were certain things that he would never forget, his sisters singing as they walked up a hill, his mother telling him his first stories, the bonfire on her burning day, the white hood covered with stars that she was made to wear, how empty the world was without her.