Magic Lessons (Practical Magic #0.1)(79)

“I’ll take a minute, if you don’t mind.”

Finny nodded and walked back toward the wagon. Faith stayed there beside the creek while he hoisted himself back on the carriage bench and took up the reins. It was then that Martha spit out some water, which trickled into the rising tide. Faith didn’t move or shout out. She had been told lies for so many years: why they had to leave on the ship to New York, how evil would find her if her hair was red, how her mother had never cared for her. Standing in the shallows, she closed her eyes and let the person she’d been forced to be go, that obedient girl Jane she’d pretended to be, who did as she was told. She breathed in the chill morning air, the salt stinging her lungs, and she might have forgiven Martha her wrongdoings, but she could not forget that she had been robbed of five years of her life. She would not allow another minute to be stolen. Inside Faith’s mind Martha Chase disappeared, a shadow growing smaller until it was the size of a wasp, then a stinging ant, and then no size at all, a spirit vanished. A death wish can be a powerful spell, by witch or mortal alike, and Faith shook with the bitterness she felt and her willingness to ignore the rules of magic. If Martha wasn’t quite dead yet, she would be by the time she was found, her eyes open, looking at the flat blue sky. And if she was aware of her surroundings at the very last moments of her life, if the black beetle crawled out from the folds of her clothing, if she called out Faith’s name, no one would have heard, for the seabirds were screaming like mad and circling above and the tide was rising quickly, the way it does in the marshes, so that one moment it was possible to see a figure of a woman, and the next it seemed that a long gray dress was floating in the deepening water.

Faith climbed up the embankment, then hopped into Finney’s carriage. The soles of her boots were covered with muck and her stockings were soaked. The lines on her left hand were changing before her eyes and she noticed a red splotch in the palm of her hand, as if Martha’s death had marked her. She paid it no mind. The past was behind her now and the future lay ahead. And yet she blinked back tears, not for Martha, but for all the years that woman had cost her. Finney wasn’t the kind of man to speak about such matters. Anyway, the likely cause was the bright Brooklyn sunlight.

“Where are we going?” he asked, practical as ever.

Faith’s mouth was set. She might be eleven, but she was extremely sure of herself. “To look for my mother.”

Finney might well have argued against that notion. Brooklyn was a big place, but since this girl had shown herself to know more than most, he decided to do as she said. He found that he was suddenly more curious about the future, nearly hopeful, which was something he hadn’t felt for many years.

“And what happens when we find her?” he asked.

“Then I’ll be where I’m meant to be,” Faith said. “And you’ll be rich.”



* * *



When they stopped for the night, Faith looked through the cart until she found a handsaw, which she quickly handed over to Finney. She nodded to the iron bracelets.

“Work away,” she told him.

Finney took a step back when he realized that she wished him to saw through the iron bracelets she wore, fitted tightly to her wrists. He didn’t have great confidence in the steadiness of his own hands. He often drank to forget, and had tremors, along with a lack of faith in himself. And he was a gentle man, who hated to cause anyone pain. He shook his head and put down the saw. “I might hurt you.”

“I couldn’t be any more hurt than I already am,” Faith replied. “I lost everything. You’re just helping me find it again. When we get to where we’re going, you’ll be rewarded. You’ll have more than you’ve ever dreamed of.”

“So you say.” Finney laughed. “I assume you have hidden riches?”

“I assure you,” Faith said, sounding insulted. “My mother will see that you’re repaid.”

When she stared at him so pitifully, he had no choice in the matter. Faith sat perfectly still, and if the handsaw nicked her now and again, she didn’t wail or complain, not even when there was a line of blood, which was black and sticky and burned through the floor of the wagon. She had grown up drinking Courage Tea, and the effects of that brew had lasted. When the bracelets came off, blue marks circled her wrists, and where the skin had been pinched for so long there were deep indentations in her flesh. She would have these marks all her life, and they would serve to remind her of what some people were willing to do for what they told themselves was love.

Faith could feel her power increasing immediately. A breath, a sigh, and she was herself again. She glanced at the sky and knew it would rain if she wished it to. She gazed at Jack Finney and with the sight was able to see through him to the young man he’d been when he lost his wife and child; she saw the grief he carried with him in a tight web that sat beside his heart. When they stopped to rest, she spied the souls of the murdered Lenape, the original people who had lived in the marshes, for their spirits had gathered in the blue dusk and their weeping sounded like the cry of the seabirds. Faith was overcome with emotion, and if she’d been another girl she might have wept, but instead she walked out to where Finney couldn’t spy her and she danced as the moon rose. She was herself again, it was true, but she had also been changed. Inside there was a line of bitterness that reached directly to her heart, so strong it brought her to the brink of tears. This is who she was: the girl who had climbed through the window to save her own life.