Back in a Spell (The Witches of Thistle Grove, #3)(42)

With an answering roil in my own stomach, I knew just how he felt; the humiliation and the instinctual fear our mother could instill in both of us just by taking that frigid tone. The unpredictable precursor to anything from a flaying-by-emotional-scalpel to a full-fledged explosion.

Gareth sometimes referred to this experience, only half jokingly, as playing Lyonesse Roulette.

“Of course you were, son. When has Gareth Aurelius had anything of particular import to say for himself, scion or no?” she mused, each word dripping contempt, those piercing blue eyes shifting to me. “Not in recent memory, anyway.”

I could practically feel my brother cave in on himself, that inner shrivel Lyonesse was so deft at provoking. While we were growing up, Gareth had been the relatively cossetted eldest; the one who’d always had it the easiest out of the three of us, often told how handsome he was, how talented and special. At the time, the difference in treatment had stung, but I’d learned what he hadn’t: how to manage expectations and set boundaries, how rules would protect me.

And it was much easier to see now, as an adult, that he hadn’t emerged from the familial battleground anything like unscathed.

“Why don’t we start with you instead, Nineve?” our mother said, sliding that heavy gaze onto me. I could practically feel it land on my shoulders, like a millstone around my neck. “I have to imagine that whatever bloody disaster you just brought down upon both your heads—perhaps all of ours—you were the likelier mastermind. The much more competent, at the very least.”

I gritted my teeth, swallowing my annoyance at the anglicized phrasing that the entire older generation of our family affected for no good reason. It wasn’t enough that Tintagel looked like the American Horror Story version of Downton Abbey, all loomingly ornate wooden paneling; overwrought gilding; art featuring fox hunts and sallow, prissy aristocrats; and ceilings coffered, frescoed, or vaulted to within an inch of their unfortunate lives. Unlike Castle Camelot, which I’d always loved for its endearingly intentional kitsch and whimsy, I’d hated our family demesne and its overbearing decadence my whole life. And then on top of it, the boomers all had to sound like ersatz peerage, too.

For a wild moment, I debated lying to my mother, but what would I have said? What possible explanation could I have come up with in the spur of the moment, for why and how my brother and I had managed to level a centuries-old structure that was not only a wonder of Blackmoore magic, but had been created to withstand magical assaults?

So I told her and Igraine the truth, beginning with my night at the lake. Lyonesse’s platinum eyebrows only barely flicked up at the revelation of a goddess statue at the bottom of Lady’s Lake; so exactly our mother’s blasé way, as if news of an underwater deity hit the bottom of her list of priorities when she had adult children to berate. I walked them through my waking with the coin clutched in my hand, the way my own spells were now superpowered even when I didn’t intend them to be.

But I left out my witch bond with Morty. It didn’t seem directly relevant to what had happened, and I had the absurd impulse to protect it—to protect him—from their scrutiny.

“And it seems to be my emotional state that triggers the additional fluctuation. The unpredictable influx of power into someone else’s otherwise normal spell,” I explained, something I’d only just realized myself at the Cell. “My temper flaring, specifically. That’s what happened with Gawain’s snow spell at Castle Camelot, the one he uses in Yvain. When the ice wraiths manifested, I’d been feeling angry at one of the tourists, for . . . touching things he shouldn’t have been.”

“Oh, impertinence, of course. As fine a reason as any to conjure up a pack of elemental creatures on a Sunday afternoon,” my mother remarked, rolling her eyes with extravagant scorn. “And what were you feeling angry about this afternoon, that deserved wreaking fiery cataclysm on our own estate?”

“The coin wouldn’t melt,” I said shortly, my own sooty cheeks flaming. Because when she put it that way, it sounded impossibly stupid, beyond mortifying to have lost control over myself for something like that. “We were attempting to destroy it; it’s clearly a talisman, a locus point tied to the spell itself. I’d tried throwing it back into the lake already, but that failed to make an observable impact.”

“The true question is, why didn’t you come to us with all this immediately?” Igraine broke in for the first time, her aquiline nose flaring with aggrieved disdain. “A sleeping goddess statue in the lake—the heretofore unknown root of this town’s power—and one whose notice you somehow warrant? A deity who has made you the focus of a divine spell? Oh, you absolute idiot child, what could you have been thinking? We should have been your very first port of call!”

Gareth twitched beside me, his knee jerking in secondhand reaction to the harshness of the reprimand. Sometimes our grandmother made our mother seem downright benevolent.

It was, at least, helpful for maintaining perspective.

“We . . . thought you might feel obligated to go to Emmeline Harlow with it immediately,” I said, improvising. “Which, Gareth and I both agreed, would be unwise. Considering our family’s current standing, our precarious position with the other families.”

“So you have managed to demonstrate some modicum of sense,” Lyonesse replied, Igraine giving an austere nod of agreement beside her. A tiny bubble of relief expanded in my throat; I had been right to think this might be the (appealingly treacherous) tack to take. “Of course the Victor shouldn’t be told, given the way it implicates us. Though why in the triple goddess’s name would you have thought I would go to her with this news, put us all at risk like that?”