Magic Lessons (Practical Magic #0.1)(93)

Anyone who had the sight and the ability to see inside Faith to her core would see the damage there, the iron wound, the nights in a locked room, the open window, the cemetery in Gravesend, the salty land and the seabirds in the sky, the loneliness, the bitter taste in her mouth, the father who never showed himself, the mother who wished to believe that all was well with her daughter when there was a crack in everything and the world was coming apart. Faith would be ready for magic when she said she was ready, not when her mother allowed it. She had said yes to magic years ago in the flatlands, with the salt stinging her eyes so that she almost cried, not that she had the ability to do such a thing, not then and not now. Maria Owens could cry, but that was unusual for a witch, and was likely a sign of weakness in Faith’s opinion. Faith, herself, was nothing like that. Even if Maria had wanted to see inside her daughter, Faith had blocked her from doing so. It was a murky and solemn spell she had worked at the Minetta Stream, a fitting place for dark acts; she had used her own blood and hair and the bones of a small sparrow, and had thereby grown invisible to the person who loved her best in the world.

A part of her longed to be saved from the path she had taken, so that she could become the person she might have been if she hadn’t been a stolen child, if she hadn’t learned early on that there was evil in the world. What plunged her further into the dark was an ordinary day when she was cleaning out the barn after Finney moved out. She stumbled upon an old satchel, one that belonged to Samuel Dias. Inside was a rope, a book of maps, and a letter from Maria Owens, left for him when the Queen Esther docked in Boston after their trip together from Cura?ao. He had kept it all this time, though he could only tolerate reading it once, for once was more than enough.

I don’t know what might have happened between us. I am in search of a man named John Hathorne, he is my fate and the father of my child.

Faith sat back on her heels, her heart pounding. She had never known her father’s name. To her eyes the letters were sharp as glass. She could hear her mother calling to her from the garden, where she was planting rosemary and mint. Instead of answering, Faith lay in the straw. She paged through the book of maps until she reached Essex County. Navigators can never touch a map without plotting the journey ahead, and Samuel had marked the path with spots of ink. Faith thought of the unfurled paper that told her future, and how vengeance had settled inside her like a bird in a nest, fitted close to her heart. From the start, she had been ready to seek revenge.

That evening she had supper with her mother, a cod baked with spring onions and cream, then Faith went up to her room under the eaves. She had been trained to keep her feelings to herself. She set the lock and burned a black candle. Her father was the magistrate who had judged the women who stood before him with their wrists in iron chains and their legs bound by ropes. If she reached back inside of herself she could recall his appearance, a tall man who had stared as if willing her to disappear. When your father doesn’t love you, a stone forms inside of you, hard and sharp enough to pierce through bone. The dark was rising in her soul and she was glad of it. She was at the age when innocence seems like a flaw. Do what you must or do what you will. Adhere to the rules or break them in two. Faith would not be thirteen forever, but that’s what she was now. She had picked up her red boots at the cobbler and they fitted her perfectly. Before she left she wrote a note to her mother, folded it, and placed it upon her bedside table.

Faith had been stolen once before, and she wanted Maria to know that this time she was leaving of her own accord. She would stand before the magistrate and she would judge him, although she already knew she would find him guilty. She would see that he paid the price for all that he’d done.



* * *



On the day that Faith left New York, the air swirled with a cold mist that soon changed to a smattering of hail, for out at sea there was an unexpected storm that raced toward harbors and coastlines. Everything was white, air and sea and sky, but the weather and the high seas didn’t deter her. She had looked in the black mirror and had seen that it was her fate to go to Salem. She paid for her passage with coins earned from women in need of her talents, those who wished for revenge and escape and reprisal, and she silently thanked them as she stood on the dock, equally ready for revenge.

The ship’s purser thought the coins were false, for Faith was only a girl and how had a girl come into possession of such a sum? Then he rubbed one with his kerchief and found that it shone in his hands. “Go on, then,” he told Faith, though his gaze was on Keeper. “But that beast stays.”

Faith certainly didn’t intend to leave Keeper behind, for the loyal creature would have leapt into the freezing river to follow her if he must. When the purser went off to see to his other duties, Faith withdrew a figure made of hemlock bark. She held a match to it and recited an invocation from The Book of the Raven, watching as the wood melted into a black pool. Each time she recited a spell from the text she felt a change inside her, as if her blood burned more hotly and her bones became sharper. Her hair was so darkly red it looked black in the shadows, as if the person she once was and the child Martha had stolen had magicked into one being. She was made of blood and heart and soul, and it was blood magic that she practiced. She was no one’s little girl now. From a distance she appeared to be a full-grown woman and men were attracted to her; she seemed different than other girls. It was the manner in which she looked at the men who stared at her, so directly, as if to see who they truly were.