Legacy (12 page)

It’s true what they say about time being a great healer. I
wasn’t over Peter—I didn’t think I ever really would be—but the edges of the wound I felt in my heart weren’t so raw anymore. And inside that wound was still the memory of his kiss. Nothing would ever take that away. Sometimes just the thought of his touch would be enough to make me feel weak. The memory was so powerful, so immediate, that it was as if I were right back in the Meadow with him, holding him, being held.

One day Gram, Agnes, and I went to Hattie’s to bake pies for the local nursing home. I could just imagine what that was like, an old folks’ home for witches. Miss P showed up too. Even though Miss P was a few years younger than my aunt, the two of them got along famously.

I was stirring pastry cream in the twenty-gallon mixer when Peter came into the kitchen.

I stopped breathing.

“Excuse me,” he said. He was heading toward Hattie when he saw me.

In that instant time ceased to exist. His eyes, gray and deep and full of a pain I didn’t understand, searched inside mine until they found my soul. And I gave it to him, there, across the noisy, bright kitchen.

I’m yours,
it called to him.

You’re mine
, his called back.
From the beginning, you were meant to be mine.

“Peter!” Hattie shouted. “What do you want?”

“It . . . it’s Eric,” he stammered. “I think he needs his medicine.”

“I’ll be right up,” Hattie said, wiping her hands on her apron.

The spell was broken. Spell? Who was I kidding? That was nothing but wishful thinking.

I’m yours.
Geez, how corny could you get? I went back to stirring my pastry cream.

“Peter!” Hattie called again. When I looked up, a strong brown arm was snaking around the door, grabbing Peter’s shirt and yanking him out of the room.

He was still looking at me.

The kitchen was weirdly quiet. “What?” I snapped crankily, irritated at the nosy women who were so interested in my nonexistent love life that they’d all dropped what they were doing and stood gawking at me.

Wishful thinking. That was all it was.

On the night of the Winter Solstice we lit all the candles in the windows and on the tree, too. They filled the room with warm, flickering light. Sitting on an old horsehair sofa between my aunt and my great-grandmother, with no television or recorded music in the background, I felt as if I’d been transported back in time.

“Yule teaches us a great lesson,” Gram said. “It is the darkest time of the year, with the shortest day and the longest night.”

“Mmm,” I murmured as noncommittally as I could.

“It means that things have gotten as bad as they can,” Agnes said. “One tick after the moment of darkest night, the light begins to grow.”

“We call it the birth of the infant light,” the old woman said. “Another word for hope.”

I sat up straighter. Hope, yes. No matter how bad things were, hope was possible. Maybe even with Peter. “I’ll try to remember that,” I said.

“Very good. Now, shall we try a cone of power?” Gram asked. “And then perhaps a cup of tea?”

“A cone of what?”

“We’ll make a wish,” she said.

“For power?”

“For whatever you’d like, dear,” she said.

“Like world peace.” That seemed like a safe bet.

The two of them looked at one another. “Certainly, dear, if that is what you want. Or power, if—”

“No, no,” I amended quickly. “I didn’t mean—that is, world peace would be fine.”

“It doesn’t have to be an unselfish wish,” Agnes said.

I was confused. “But then . . . well, it wouldn’t be
good
, would it?”

“Do we always have to be good?” That sounded strange, coming from an 80-something-year-old woman.

“Grandmother!” Agnes admonished. “She means, Katy, that it’s all right to be kind to yourself. Always doing for others is a sure path to resentment.”

I’d never thought of things in quite that way before. Yes, I could be kind to myself, I supposed. Now, what did I want?

Peter’s face came to mind. His beautiful face, his soft lips . . .

No, not
that.
I couldn’t wish for
that.

World peace. That was safer.

We held hands. Agnes began a sort of wordless chant, a low singing sound deep in her throat. Then Gram joined her, her own voice high and warbly, sounding a lot like Glinda, the Good Witch of the North in
The Wizard of Oz
. I almost laughed out loud. Then both of them squeezed my hands and I realized that they were waiting for me to chant, too.

I panicked. What was I supposed to say? Or worse yet,
sing
?

I decided just to hum. Humming for world peace was okay.

Hmm. Hmmm.

The air in the space between us began to vibrate, then to move in a circle like a tornado in reverse. It rose slowly off the ground, tapering to a point as it grew.

I’ve done this,
I thought. It was how I’d arranged Mim’s papers in her apartment before I’d pushed them out the window. That had been pretty juvenile, I had to admit. My thoughts at the time hadn’t exactly been on world peace.

Which I really should have been concentrating on now. World peace. Yes.

Only something kept getting in the way. Try as I might to see ethnically diverse hands clasping one another in friendship across an ocean, all I could really see was . . .

Peter. Peter’s eyes, filled with the suffering of a thousand years . . . Peter . . . oh, Peter . . .

The cone whirled, almost too strong for our arms to contain it. I felt my hair flying out behind me. My breath came in ragged gasps.
Peter, my love, my true, my only love . . .

With an audible
whoosh
the energy in the cone shot through the ceiling. Crap, I thought. What a time to be daydreaming. “World Pete!” I shouted. “I mean
peach
! That is . . .”

Agnes held up her hand for me to be quiet. I hung my head.

Afterward, everything was still. “What were you saying, Katy?” she asked, raising her eyebrows.

“Peace,” I whispered. I knew I’d probably blown the whole spell. “I ruined it, didn’t I,” I said.

Gram straightened her doily, which had gone askew during
the proceedings and now hung over one eye. “No one ever knows if a spell will work or not,” she said. “We just send out our intentions, and hope for the best.”

I felt bad. Even my intentions had gotten screwed up. There would be no world peace now, thanks to me.

“What did you wish for, dear?” she asked Agnes.

“That’s no one’s business but mine.”

“That means it was about Jonathan,” Gram said with a wicked grin. “Although you needn’t waste a spell on that. Anyone can see he couldn’t be more crazy about you.”

“I know nothing of the kind,” Agnes said, walking away. Her hair had fallen out of its usual neat chignon and hung in pretty tendrils around her face. She was fanning herself with the electric bill as she left the room.

“The Ainsworth women are famous for their love spells,” Gram said. “We are artists in the field.”

“Is . . . is that what you wished for, then?” I asked, not sure if I wanted to hear the answer.

“Me? Oh, good heavens, no. I wished that blasted Wonderland didn’t get built on the Meadow. I wished hard, too.”

“The Meadow?” I asked, shocked. “Is that where it’s supposed to be built?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“But . . . but . . .”

“It doesn’t bear thinking about,” she said, closing her eyes to the prospect. “Although I’ve heard they’re very close to an agreement with Jeremiah Shaw.”

“Who?”

“Naturally, a cowen Shaw would own the deed.”

“He owns no such thing,” Agnes said, coming back into
the room with three glasses of apple cider and a plate of sandwiches. “Everyone knows that the Meadow has been public land since Whitfield was founded.”

“Nevertheless, the Shaws have paid the taxes on it.” The old woman shook her head. “We always said it was a waste of money, paying taxes on property they didn’t own. We never thought that even a Shaw would try to
sell
it.”

“Or buy it,” Agnes added. “Only something as soulless as the Wonderland Corporation would even think of disregarding the Meadow’s magic.”

“Madam Mim,” I said.

“Who?”

“The soulless something at the heart of Wonderland,” I said. “My father’s girlfriend.”

No one spoke for a while. Finally Gram said, “Well, maybe the negotiations won’t go through. The Meadow has strong magic.”

Aunt Agnes took my stocking from its place over the fireplace and brought it to me. “I don’t know,” she said. “There are some forces even magic can’t stop, and Wonderland may be one of them.”

We exchanged gifts. I gave Agnes some tortoiseshell hair combs that I’d bought in an antique store with my earnings from Hattie’s. For Gram, I had a big box of English toffees I’d made at night while she was asleep. I’d cooked them using sugar and butter and vanilla, then cooled them and cut them and coated them with the best dark chocolate I could find. Then I’d put them in a pretty box that I covered with handmade paper and silk ribbon. I think she liked them.

In my stocking were two treasures. From Agnes, a handwritten book of spells on a level I’d never known about before.

“Time travel?” I asked, reading through the table of contents.

“Very advanced,” Agnes said gravely. “You won’t be able to perform any of these for years, but they’re worth looking at, all the same.”

“Thank you,” I said. And I meant it.

I loved Whitfield.

My great-grandmother gave me a brooch that had belonged to Serenity Ainsworth. It was a carved ivory cameo on a background of reddish stone.

“Carnelian,” Gram said. “It is the stone of warriors, for that was what Serenity was, in her own way. She was not cowed by adversity, nor influenced by the opinions of others. She was your namesake, and I hope that you make of your life as much as she made of hers.”

“Thank . . .” I was having a hard time pulling off the thick plastic that encased it.

“I had it shrink wrapped,” Agnes added. “We know about your psychometric abilities. That was why we changed all the furniture in your mother’s room. You may not be ready to explore Serenity’s inner being so late in the evening.”

“Oh. Yes,” I said, “that was thoughtful. I’ll choose the right time to . . . explore.”

By then, the fire was dimming to embers, and the candles were guttering. Agnes passed around the glasses of cider she’d brought in, then raised her own glass in a toast.

“To world peach,” she said.

The next big witch holiday was Imbolc, a.k.a. Groundhog Day. I know, you wouldn’t think that Groundhog Day was a cause for celebration, but in the magical community, it is a huge deal.

Back in the day, before the birth of Punxsutawney Phil, the men of the village would gather together on February second to take someone’s pet snake and put it in a hole in the ground. Then they’d hang around chewing the fat and drinking tankards of ale until the snake came out again.

When the snake found its way out of the hole, it either turned around and crawled back underground, meaning that six more weeks of winter were on the way, or else it slithered away to freedom, in which case the village elders had to chase it through the woods and put it back into its cage until next year.

Personally, my theory is that most of the time the snake got away, but the elders (who had probably chewed more fat and drunk more ale than they should to be in prime snake-chasing
condition) lied and said more winter was coming, because any fool would have known that spring wasn’t about to burst forth on February 2. This annual ritual was known as
Imbolc,
possibly because “Snake Day” would have sounded sketchy, even then.

No one bothered with the snake thing anymore, although judging from the noises coming from the local bars, I think the tradition of drinking ale in the morning was still in force. It was all symbolic, anyway. In some weird Celtic language, Imbolc means “in the belly,” as in the beginning of the beginning. It’s the
I-think-we-might-make-it-after-all
moment when spring starts to become an actual possibility.

As a major holiday Imbolc is entitled to fog. That is, Fog. The Meadow was covered in it, the tour buses marveled at it, and lost cowen were graciously led out of it by Mr. Haversall and the trusty Dingo. But the witches just stomped through it until they reached the plane of magic.

For the occasion, the Meadow was transformed (as it turned out, by Hattie, who was Whitfield’s current high priestess for ceremonial events) into a gigantic labyrinth. Not a maze, mind you, but a winding kind of meditative path, where everyone takes a minute—actually, an hour or so—to figure out their lives.

I stayed overnight with the Ainsworths so that we could get an early start. Did I say
early
? I was shaken awake at an obscene hour, before there were even streaks of dark blue mixed in with the black of night.

“Why?
Why
?” I’d begged to know as I was being dragged out of bed by my cheerfully sadistic relatives.

“So that you can get to school on time afterward,” Agnes said.

Gram opened my window, letting in a blast of arctic air. “Bracing,” she said, taking a deep breath. “Dress warmly, Katy.”

New Englanders were extraterrestrials.

To my astonishment, there were actually a few people ahead of us. Wanted to beat the big rush, I guess.

“Now, this is a silent walking meditation,” Gram warned me, as if she was worried that I would start clapping and shouting “Amen.”

Frankly, in my opinion, Imbolc was one of the least interesting of the witch holidays. I mean, you’d have to have an even tamer life than I did to get a charge out of waiting for spring in the beginning of February.

“Go on,” Agnes said, nudging me forward behind my great-grandmother. I supposed there was finally enough space between the first labyrinth walkers and us that no one would bother anyone else’s meditating. It all seemed silly to me, anyway.