Antebellum Awakening (14 page)

“Or worse,” Leda called.

Camille stood on tiptoe and pulled a leaf fragment out of my hair. “She’s right, Henrietta,” Camille said. “Bianca’s a mess.”

Henrietta acted as if she hadn’t heard and pointed to my leather shoes, shooting a glance at the red-haired maid. The girl seized my ankle and removed the shoes immediately.

“Hey!” I clambered after her, nearly falling off the chair, but Henrietta pushed me back into place. “Those are mine! Papa made them for me.”

Henrietta cast a revolted look at the slippers. “Although I think they should be destroyed, I won’t throw them away. We’re just taking them off for the fitting so we can get a proper hem. The High Priestess chose this particular fabric from her stores just for you. You’ll wear it, and you’ll like it.”

“I’ll destroy it.”

“It’s a hardy material. Don’t worry. You’ll not get it so dirty that I can’t clean it up.”

Just you wait.

The maids continued to pin and re-pin the hem, tailed by the cloud of needles. When they poked me again near the ankle I let out a yelp, then growled at them.

“Abbee, the mirror, please,” Henrietta said.

One of the seamstresses left and reappeared with a long mirror drifting in behind her. Henrietta turned me toward it with a self-satisfied smirk.

“See?”

When I looked into the mirror to see the dress, the girl in the reflection startled me. The dress’s elegant sapphire color blended magnificently with my dark hair and gray eyes. Though unfinished, the curves of the unfinished material set off my girlish figure to give me an older, matured bearing.

Camille beamed.

“It’s not even done yet and you look beautiful, Bianca!” she cried, grabbing my hair and twisting it onto my head in various positions. “We could curl your hair and put it here, like this. Ooh, or this! It would be so pretty.”

“With a little work on that wild mane you should clean up well enough for the ball,” Henrietta murmured.

Their words slipped through my mind with all the permanence of a gust of wind. Whatever they said, I didn’t care. All I could see was my reflection, and what I saw made my heart’s dragon stir with a little cry of pain. I didn’t know why the powers started building when I ran my hand along the high waistline, enjoying the fabric’s silky touch. Not even I, the girl with blisters on her hands who loved to run in pants, could dispute the grace that a dress of this caliber lent to a forest-child like me.

Mama’s gray eyes whirred through my mind, seizing my chest in a sudden rush of angst. I gazed at myself in the mirror again, staring hard.

Just like Mama. I look just like Mama.

In a breath, the magic slipped away from my heart for just a second, leaving with a faint tingle before I reined it back in a moment later. The mirror split with a loud
crack
, creating an intricate web of edges from top to bottom. Only pieces of my hair and dress remained visible, showing in glimpses of blue and black.

“Oh dear!” Henrietta cried, startled. “Oh dear, dear, dear. What happened? I don’t know what happened. My lovely mirror! Abbee, this is your fault!”

“No!” the small redhead cried. “I wasn’t even touching it.”

Both Camille and Leda shot me sharp looks.

“Quite strange,” I said quickly. “I’m sure we can find you another one, Miss Henrietta. The gown is gorgeous. Thank you for working on it. Would you like me to take it off now?”

“Yes, I suppose,” she said, shooting Abbee a dark look. “Let’s be on our way now, girls. We have a mirror to fix and a few more dresses to finish. I think I know an incantation to reverse this. Camille, we’ll have your ivory gown finished in just a week or two.”

The garment flew over my head in a violent flap, almost knocking me off the chair and leaving me standing in my undergarments. It gathered itself together and fell in a drape across Henrietta’s shoulder.

“Well, merry part,” Henrietta said, her troubled gaze lingering on the mirror as it floated out of the room ahead of them.

“Thank you, Miss Henrietta,” I called, feeling a twinge of guilt over her mirror. The three women disappeared down the stairs.

“Oh, Bianca,” Camille cried, collapsing onto the couch behind her. “That dress was beautiful! You looked lovely. But why would you break that mirror?”

“Can you toss me my clothes? I didn’t mean to. It just . . . it just happened. I don’t want to talk about it.”

Camille pitched the gray dress back to me, a dreamy gaze in her eyes. The comfortable smell of lavender washed over me when I put my own bland dress back on, but I couldn’t deny missing the soft, flowing feeling of linea on my skin.

Despite the heaviness in my heart, and the agitation left over from my burst of power, I felt the tension dissipate once Henrietta left with the broken mirror. There were no mirrors in the Witchery to remind me of whom I looked like.

Leda turned a page in her book.

“I think next time we should have a magnet ready,” she said without looking up. “Then we can suck all the pins away before they poke you to death with them. That’s probably why you broke the mirror.”

Camille and I looked at each other, then all of us burst into laughter, making me forget Mama’s quiet gray eyes.

Mildred’s Resistance

“D
o me a favor?” Papa asked the next afternoon as I walked out of my bedroom, still bleary-eyed from a nap. He gathered a couple scrolls from the table near the bay window. I shrugged, then grimaced. My neck and back muscles were sore from an intense hour of climbing up and down trees. Merrick had remained ahead of me, as usual, and dropped pinecones on my head. For every pinecone I didn’t catch, I had to do ten push-ups. He claimed it helped with my hand-eye reaction time and strength, but I suspected he just liked torture. Sap still clung to the bottom of my feet and my palms with sticky persistence.

“Sure,” I said, yawning.

“Will you take this to Council Member Stella?” he asked, waving a scroll at me from the other side of the table. “I want to make sure no else reads it.”

I grabbed it from the air. “Yes, Papa.”

“Thanks,” he called over his shoulder, rushing off to a meeting with the Protectors. “Love you, girl.”

I rubbed my face, pulled my hair from its ponytail, and headed out of the apartment.

It took a brave soul to lead the southern covens that flirted with the border of the Southern Network. Winter brushed that part of the world for much of the year, leaving them with a short growing season in the summer and fall. Ice, wind, and frost were the way of life down there, from what Michelle described.

Fortunately, Stella was just such a brave and bold soul, ready to lead and eager to work.

Her close friendship with the High Priestess and love of outlandish scarves set her apart from the other Council Members. Her warm personality always drew people to her; it was rare to see Stella alone or unhappy, despite those around her. I envied her ability to do and feel whatever she wanted without restraint. Sometimes when I watched her I felt like a caged bird.

A dark purple door came into sight halfway down Council Hall. Sparkling jewels dotted the front of the door, accompanied by a golden pattern of swirls and whirls across the edges to give the impression of a snow shower of diamonds. Singular, just like Stella. The handle shimmered with purple gems and swung to admit me before I could knock.

“Come in, Bianca,” she called in a friendly voice. “I’ll be with you in just a second.”

Stella stood at her desk, while an assistant with limp blonde hair and red-rimmed eyes hovered nearby. I stepped just inside the door, running my eyes over the comfortable room. The cherry wood desk and bookshelves gave a warmth to the stone, even though snowy paintings of the south decorated the walls. Blue-green plants crawled along the windows in little fountains of color, and an expansive purple rug lined with white and blue thread covered most of the floor.

“Send a message to the villages on the Southern Network border,” Stella instructed her faded, hunched assistant. “They must wear those bracelet charms I sent. The Southern Network has assembled their army and those charms will help protect our witches if there are skirmishes”

Stella’s graying auburn hair tapered back in an elegant, coiffed bun at her neck. An outlandish pink and yellow scarf draped her shoulders and chest in plumes of gauzy chiffon.

“Come in, Bianca,” she said again, looking over the top of her glasses with a warm smile. “Dyana and I just finished.”

Her assistant slinked by me without making eye contact. If she could get a job as an assistant, surely Leda could find some kind of place in the political realm.

“What can I help you with today?” Stella asked.

“I came with a scroll from my father,” I said, extending it to her. “He asked me to bring it over.”

Stella smiled and took the scroll.

“That’s very kind. Thank you.”

I smiled, curtsied, and turned to leave.

“You look like your mother in that gray dress,” she added. “It matches your eyes.”

I stopped. I wanted to walk away, to pretend like I hadn’t heard, but my heart wouldn’t let me. Against my better judgment, I circled back around.

“You knew her?” I asked. She smiled, the wrinkles around her eyes creasing.

“Yes. I knew Marie and your grandmother Hazel. Hazel was quite young when I first met her in one of the Resistance meetings. Her father, William, was the local leader and a very good man. You’re a lot like him, but you look like Lily, his wife. She had rich, beautiful hair just like yours.”

“Really?”

“Indeed. Both you and your grandfather have shown great amounts of courage in frightening situations.”

“I didn’t know you were part of the Resistance,” I said, eager to bleed information from her. Perhaps she knew something about Miss Mabel.

“Indeed,” Stella said. “Mildred and I were best friends before she overthrew Evelyn. We started working together in our early twenties, a couple of years after I graduated from Miss Mabel’s.”

My jaw dropped. “You went to Miss Mabel’s?”

“Yes, but that was when the elder Mabel ran it, not the Miss Mabel you’ve been unfortunate to know.”

All my terrible memories of Miss Mabel ran through my mind in a blur. I suspected that her grandmother Mabel, the woman who started the school, couldn’t have been much less frightening.

“What was Mabel like?” I asked.

“She was very proper and put together,” Stella said in a distant tone. “Her dresses were always new, and her hair perfect. Pleasing her was a futile task. She expected perfection from all her students and was a surly old girl, really.” Stella laughed quietly to herself. “It was a difficult three years to say the least. Mabel made extraordinary demands of her pupils, but she got the best of us.”

“Sounds familiar.”

“Yes,” she agreed, matching my wry tone with another little laugh. “Very familiar. Miss Mabel is a lot like Mabel in more ways than one.” She tapped her chin in thought. “In fact, I think I have something that you may be interested in. It's not a book I've ever lent out. You may be one of the only witches I trust to read and keep the secrets therein safe. Follow me.”

She led me to a bookshelf on the other side of the room, ran her fingers along the edge and finally pulled a book away.

“Here it is!” she cried, brushing the dust from it. “Goodness. All this dust. The maids aren’t very thorough, are they?”

I accepted it from her. It was heavy and broad, with thick pages and a neat, slanted writing inside.

Mildred’s Resistance.

“It’s written by an anonymous historian and accurately details most of what went on between Mildred and Evelyn. They were, at one point, friends. All three of us were.”

“Friends? With Evelyn?”

I couldn’t picture a woman like Stella, so friendly and good, close with Evelyn, the tyrant who would have destroyed the Central Network if Mildred hadn’t taken over.

“A tremendously arrogant lot we were,” Stella said, laughing. “We worked together as assistants here at Chatham. A little like you, Camille, and Leda, only we were older. All of us set out to change the world.”

“And the world did change.”

“Mildred succeeded in changing it,” Stella said in a sad tone. “I guess you could say that Evelyn did as well, except not for the better. She didn’t start out as a monster, you know. She chose her path through a complicated twist of bad decisions. Despite what she became, I don’t think anyone really sets out to betray her friends or her Network. Mildred thinks differently, of course. I tend to believe better of people than she does.”

“Did Evelyn try to get you on her side?” I asked.

“Oh, yes,” she said, her expression souring. “Very much so. But in the end I stayed with Mildred because I knew she had chosen the better path. Losing Evelyn was a terrible loss.”

“I’m sorry that happened to you,” I said, unsure of how to continue. She squeezed my arm with the sweet, gentle touch of a friend. A little wave of peace ran through me like a sigh of wind. I craved more of the kind touch, which made me realize how much I missed Mama’s frequent hugs. It amazed me how easily disoriented I got without Mama’s stability to cling to. Little moments, like a sympathetic gesture, suddenly meant so much more.