The Graces (12 page)

‘I don’t care.’

Summer raised her hands in a helpless gesture. ‘Well, what do you want to do? Sit around and wait for things to get worse, like everyone else?’

‘Maybe if you just talked to Marcus—’ I offered.

‘Jesus,’ Fenrin snapped. ‘Don’t you think we tried that? This was a problem long before you came on the scene.’

‘Hey,’ said Summer sharply. ‘Don’t be an asshole.’

Fenrin sighed and tipped his head back. ‘I’m sorry. I will start again. I tried. He won’t hear it. It’s my fault.
I bitched about my family once too often to him. Now he thinks we’re all toxic and evil and that we hate his guts. He’s really lost it. Nothing we say makes any difference.’

‘So we have only River’s option left,’ said Wolf, softly. ‘If you don’t believe in the curse, what harm could trying to break it do? And if it works, and the curse is broken, you could be free to be with whoever you want.’

I watched Fenrin’s gaze fall on Wolf, his expression dark, and then travel to the rest of us.

‘Thalia won’t let us do it,’ he said, finally.

Summer spread her hands. ‘So we don’t involve her. There are four of us, right here. One for each element, four to complete the circle. It’s perfect.’

‘You want to do this behind her back.’

‘Fen, she will freak out if we tell her, and she’ll probably even tell Esther. She’s all high on guilt and fear, like this is her fault. You know she thinks messing with the curse might make it worse, even though there’s no evidence of that. She can’t think straight about this.’

He sighed shortly. ‘Fine. I must be desperate. Let’s try it.’

A tense quiet settled over the room.

Summer raised an eyebrow. ‘Shall we set a date?’

It was decided.

We would try to break the curse on midsummer’s eve, in just over a week’s time.

Midsummer was all about driving away bad energy – it would be perfect. But most of all, Thalia wouldn’t be around. Midsummer was next Friday – she was staying at a family friend’s house until that Sunday night. We’d have to go to the woods straight after school, all four of us, and Fenrin had a few days to come up with an excuse as to why Thalia wouldn’t see any of us that evening.

They were a family of secret keepers, but Summer once told me that the three siblings had always sworn to never keep secrets from one another, at least. Fenrin brooded, and everyone around him at school caught his mood and talked over his head, making uneasy jokes, waiting for the moment he would shake it off
with a laugh and be himself again.

Wolf was back in the city the rest of the week, as always, but he would meet us outside school on Friday. In the meantime, we had to get on with our lives as if this plan,
my
plan, didn’t weigh round our necks, shade our eyes like scuffed sunglasses, making everything else hard to focus on.

We hung out together over the next few days, mostly with other people. When it was just us we didn’t talk about the plan, as if we’d jinx it by saying it out loud. Even in a crowd of others it felt like we were bound together by invisible threads. I couldn’t get the woods out of my mind, and I didn’t think the others could, either. I didn’t even care when Niral spent one lunchtime talking to Summer with her back deliberately to me, shielding me from view, so I spent a good half an hour sitting in silence. It didn’t matter any more. Niral was on the outside now.

I was officially in.

I spent one furtive lunchtime of that week in the computer lab, combing Marcus’s website for anything relevant, anything I might have missed.

I looked again at the witch types:

Fire
– Protectors. Confident. Powerful.

Water
– Charmers. Restless. Persuasive.

Air
– Seers. Truth tellers. Sensitive.

Earth
– Leaders. Grounded. Calm.

Wolf had hinted that he was fire. From what I knew of him, it seemed to fit. Summer – I was now sure she was air. Fenrin was water, the charmer, through and through. That meant, for this to work, I had to become earth.

I was no leader. I was not grounded. I knew no herb lore, and I couldn’t make anything practical to save my life. But I could learn, if that was what it took. I had determination. That had to count for a lot.

I came across the story of the Four Bells again, tucked away in the resources section of Marcus’s site. In my previous searching, I’d found the tale described as an anonymous local myth, but here it said that the story was attributed directly to the Grace family, way back in the dark ages of the local history. One commenter remarked that it was as if the land around here had spat them up when it was still forming.

The widely accepted version of the story was this:

One day a handsome stranger came to town, and the local girls fell in love with him, but only one caught his particular attention. The man was really the devil in disguise, and people could give him devil stones in return for wishes, which he willingly granted. But his wishes always ended badly, with the moral of the ‘nice,
official version of the story’ (as the site said with what seemed like a sneer) being a literal take on
be careful what you wish for.

The virtuous girl the devil fell in love with was the only one who resisted him. He tried to tempt her, but she wanted for nothing, and having come up against a pure soul he could not break, he flew into a rage. While he was incapacitated by his anger, she and her three sisters, who had positioned themselves in the bell towers of the four town churches, began ringing the bells at the same time. The pure sound was too much for the devil, who fled the town howling.

The site went on to say that local folklore offered an older, less hideously insipid version of the story.

In the older version, a wish demon disguised as a beautiful and mysterious boy ran riot over the town, granting everyone’s most horrible desires. Half the population were dead by the time he took the girl he wanted for himself – and that would have been that, except that she was part of a coven of witches who were understandably upset at the loss of their sister, so they banded together and defeated him with their combined strengths.

The coven was made up of four witches, each with a different power – the air witch, the girl he fell in love with, could see what the demon really was; the water
witch persuaded him not to hurt them; the earth witch made a potion that boosted their powers; and the fire witch fought him and won.

It was a great story.

It was a neat story. The reality was probably messier – surely magic was tricky, more elusive than that. It could punish you for daring to use it. Maybe one of them had died as a consequence of what they’d tried to do. Maybe they hadn’t won, not really.

Magic didn’t seem to make things easier.

Friday arrived, and with it my guts were churned to sour butter, my insides greasy and strange.

A note in my locker that morning on parchment paper in Summer’s sprawling scribble outlined the plan. We would meet at the Malan Tor, a huge standing stone that rode the top of a hill outside of town, inland from the sea. It was unmistakable, clenched like a fist on the horizon, the note said, and it detailed which bus to take and where to get off. We were to leave separately after school and meet there to avoid suspicion.

Fenrin had told Thalia he would be with a girl for the evening, which was apparently enough to make her eyes roll and question him no further. Thalia once said that she never took the trouble to learn whichever one he was dallying with at any given time as they changed so often. I remembered this because she used the word ‘dallying’, whose pretty prissiness had stuck in
my head. Esther and Gwydion were joining Thalia at their friend’s house for the evening, and Summer had weaselled out of going as well by complaining loudly that she had end-of-year coursework to hand in on Monday that she had barely started, something she did so often with homework that she was notorious for it.

They weren’t even aware that Wolf was in town and not in the city, but he came down so often no one would bat an eyelid to find him in the house on Saturday morning.

They used truths to tell lies, and they were very good at it.

On my way out of school, I passed Summer in the hallway laughing with a couple of friends. For one awful, treacherous moment I imagined that the whole thing was a setup, that I’d get to the tor and no one would be there. But when I glanced up at her, she dropped me a wink. My fears fell away. I walked on.

The bus was filled with people from school, laughing and nudging and swapping phones, chatty and rowdy. I felt a couple of curious gazes light on me. I even thought I heard a whisper or two. I was best friends with the Graces, the gazes and the whispers said. What was special about me?

I wouldn’t have been able to explain it to them even if they’d had the courage to ask.

By the time I got to the bus stop nearest to the Malan Tor, the bus was almost empty. I stood, looking up at the hill we were to meet on, marvelling how it jutted into the sky like it wanted to break it. It was hot and bright out, and my battered black-and-purple rucksack already weighed heavy on my back, sweat running a trickling stream down the dip of my spine. I had butterflies, an army of ants, a bucket of feathers tickling my insides.

I crested the hill. It was bare. They weren’t here yet.

The Malan felt dark and enormous this close up. I shrugged off my rucksack and let it slump to the ground as I stood and stared upward, wondering what this rock had seen. Maybe they used to sacrifice animals against it. Maybe even people, when things were going badly enough. Crops failing. Enemies attacking. If I let myself drift, I could see it all. Arms held back, muscles straining. Mouths open in silent screams. Blood running down the stone, a little of it soaking in every time. This rock might have ancient blood on its hands.

I stretched out a hand, and my fingers traced the stone’s dark veins twisting through its surface. Then I dropped my hand hastily when I heard movement from behind. Their voices scouted ahead of them before they came into view, tramping across the dry ground, brown
grass blades flickering under their heels. Summer, Wolf and Fenrin.

Four of us, for the four elements. Earth, air, fire and water.

‘Let’s go. Come on,’ said Fenrin, as soon as he saw me. ‘I don’t know why you wanted us to meet here.’

‘It’s on the way,’ said Summer mildly. ‘Besides, River doesn’t know where our spot is. She had to meet us somewhere obvious.’

He walked past us. His bad mood hung off him in ribbons.

‘Ignore him,’ said Summer to me.

‘What happened?’

She shrugged. ‘This stuff always puts him on edge.’

We walked on, down the other side of the hill and towards the woods that hugged this part of the land. It took only a few minutes to be enveloped by the cool calm of the trees.

‘I love woods,’ said Summer. ‘When you’re in them, you feel like the world has disappeared on you. Like you could step into a different reality if you could just find the right path.’

‘It’s not Narnia,’ I joked, but she turned serious eyes on me.

‘You don’t have any places that do that to you?’

Your house,
I thought.

‘I guess,’ I said vaguely, and let it drop.

Fenrin was walking behind us alongside Wolf. At one point they’d been talking to each other in voices too low for me to hear. It made me happy to see that they could get on. Something had obviously happened between them in the past to make them act so cagey around each other. I wondered if either of them would ever tell me, or if one day soon I would dare to ask. Wolf might tell me. We might sit in the garden together again, just the two of us, and talk secrets in the sunlight.

‘So where are we going?’ I said.

‘We’re going precisely here.’ Summer had stopped in a clearing. ‘This is our place. We’ve been coming here forever. It has a feel to it.’ She lifted her arms over her head, as if about to dance. Then she stretched, her eyes half-closed and a sliver of her flat belly showing.

‘How do you even know this is it?’ I said, dropping my rucksack to the ground. ‘It looks like any old clearing.’

‘Look up.’

I did.

It took a moment, but then I saw them. Dangling from the branches were thin twine ropes with different objects swaying gently on their ends. There were shells: purple-blue mussel shells, curled winkles and whelks, pink tellins, corrugated cockles, razor clams, otters
and sand gapers. There were feathers, long and glossy black, or stubby white fluff, or thick white and grey and shaped like knives. Glossy chestnuts. Pine cones. A big piece of bark shaped like a hand.

‘We tie a few more every time we come,’ said Summer.

‘Where do you get the shells from?’

‘The cove. Always the cove. We bring them with us. It makes it feel like it’s our place.’

I peered upward. Some of those ropes were tied really high. ‘How the hell did you get them all up there?’

‘Summer is a freakish climber.’ Fenrin was crouched, sorting through the bags they’d brought.

Summer took a bow. Then she tilted her head back, opened her mouth and howled like a dog. To my astonishment, Wolf did the same. And then Fenrin joined in.

I stood, listening to them howl, voices wavering up and down, shrinking into myself. It went on just a little too long. I didn’t know where to look. Should I watch them? Ignore them? Join in?

Before I could do anything, it was over.

‘Sorry,’ said Summer. ‘It’s just something we do. It’s very freeing. Want to try?’

‘Maybe later,’ I said with a laugh. Was it a good laugh, an easy laugh? I felt too embarrassed to tell.

We hadn’t bothered to bring tents. Summer had said we needed to be close to the stars, not shielded from them. It wasn’t supposed to rain, but I didn’t think I’d mind if it did. Rain might feel significant, like a dark adventure. Rain made me think of Summer, laughing through the wet strings of her hair. Asking me to come to her house.

We built up a pile of wood to make a fire. I had no idea what I was doing, so I took directions and watched, fascinated, as the pile grew as tall as our waists. Snatching glances at Fenrin, I saw him relax and laugh, wrestling with Summer. Wolf had abandoned his usual careful reserve for a teasing, playful kind of mood that made me want to hug him. Despite the trees, it got hot as we worked, and both boys took their shirts off to our claps and whoops.

We broke for food, chattering. Summer bumped shoulders with me. I looked around the clearing, suddenly alive with our noise and our life. This was what people meant when they talked about their friends with shining eyes. This was what they meant when they talked about things I’d always thought were impossible clichés from films, those hazy summer scenes where beautiful people laughed and shoved each other and spent hours together just being who they were. The appeal of it filled me up to the brim. This was my life.
This was a perfect life, and I was finally getting to live it.

We waited until the light started to turn. As the woods darkened, Fenrin lit the fire. He fiddled, his arms in the teepee of branches up to the elbow. Then he crouched back and stood up beside me as flames rolled up the wood.

I watched it catch and grow, and I felt its rushing warmth. It spat, and Fenrin put his hand on my arm. ‘Careful,’ he said. ‘It’s probably moss, but we should stand back.’

He pressed with his fingers, moving me. When he let go, I scrabbled for something to make the moment stretch out.

‘Are you all right?’ I said. ‘You seem kind of tense about this whole thing.’

He shrugged. ‘Thalia is the one who takes all this more seriously. She can be a bit Queen of Nature about it. It winds me up, that’s all.’

My heart sank. I watched him. ‘You don’t believe in it at all, do you.’

He sighed. ‘All it’s ever brought my family is misery. Why would I want to believe in something like that?’

‘You’ve never …’ I hesitated. ‘You’ve never seen it do good?’

‘I’ve never seen it
do
anything. I mean, I’ve never seen evidence. Like, x equals y – do
this
spell and you
get
this
effect. So I stopped doing them.’

‘Maybe it doesn’t work like that. Maybe it’s not as easy as that.’

‘Oh yes,’ he replied with a grim smile, ‘now you sound just like a Grace.’

It wasn’t a compliment.

‘Thanks?’ I said with a frown.

‘Look, I’m just pissed off at Thalia. I keep telling her to stop believing in the curse. It’s only when you believe in a thing that you give it power over you. But she won’t see it. Sometimes I think she
wants
to be miserable.’ His voice dropped. ‘Like she thinks she deserves it. And sometimes I want to punish her for being so stupid. Let it get so bad it teaches her a lesson. Let there be consequences.’

‘Wow.’

He paused. ‘I didn’t mean any of that. Ignore me.’

I folded my arms, trying not to sound irritated. ‘If you don’t think it will do anything, why are you even here?’

He tried to grin, tried to shake it off. ‘Ah, it makes Summer feel like she’s helping. She goes crazy when she can’t fix things. And it’s better than doing nothing, isn’t it?’

He walked over to the others, leaving me with an ever growing sense of doubt.

Was he going to wreck this because he didn’t believe?

We sat round the fire, quieting our hearts in the dusk.

I watched Summer take out a taped-up bundle and unwrap it to reveal a square glass jar with a stopper shaped like a lightbulb. Dark, thick red liquid sloshed inside it.

She unstoppered the jar, lifted the base with one hand and upended some into her mouth.

‘What’s that?’ I asked.

‘Liquid courage,’ said Fenrin, taking the jar from her and doing the same. I was the last to receive it. I took the jar from Summer. It was a heavy crystal, the base weighting my palm down. I sniffed the liquid.

‘It’s homemade wine,’ said Summer. ‘Herbs from the garden, fruit from the grove.’

I lifted the jar up and took a swig.

It tasted like the dark; sweet and thick.

‘More,’ said Summer.

I took another swig.

‘More.’

I took one more swig. My throat started to burn. She took the jar off me and drank. We passed it round until it was empty. The wine spread through me, warming and fuzzing as it went.

We talked, laughed. I felt my head swim slow, lazy strokes as the light fled us.

We began.

Fenrin had a glass jar of water in front of him. He sat with the shell necklace he always wore clutched in one fist, the leather thong trailing out beyond his fingers.

Summer had her amber bird. I didn’t understand what she’d do for the air element until I saw her chest rise and fall and realised – it was all around her.

Wolf’s hand was pressed against his stomach. The salamander tattoo. His object. And fire was right in front of him – all he had to do was let himself feel it.

I had a small cup I dug into the ground in front of me, filling it with dry earth and crumbling leaves. I was sitting on my coat, and from the pocket I wrested out a black doughnut stone from the bowl in my temporary Grace bedroom. It was my witch object. My connection to them and their power. I curled my hand tight around it.

The fire cracked. We sat with darkness at our backs.

Summer said, ‘What is our intent?’

‘To break the curse,’ I offered. My voice came out clear and precise. It was the opposite of how I felt.

Focus
, I told myself.
They need you. They need your will.

‘To break Marcus’s—’ – Fenrin began and caught Summer’s eye – ‘obsession.’

‘To break the curse, Fen,’ Summer told him, and she was calm, very calm. I’d come to think of it as her witch voice. That calm, that surety that what we were about to do was right and correct and would absolutely work, and there was no other way.

‘To break the curse,’ he said, and for a moment I could almost think he believed his own words.

‘To break the curse,’ echoed Wolf, staring into the fire.

‘Marcus and Thalia will part as friends,’ said Summer. ‘He won’t visit any more. He won’t talk to her any more. She’ll be nothing to him. And there’ll be no more curse.’

I pictured Marcus and Thalia passing each other in a shadowy corridor. Vague smiles on their faces. A polite ‘hi’ on their lips. Friends, that was all. Marcus could get his life back. Thalia could stop being afraid. Fenrin could stop being angry. Summer could stop fighting with him.

And maybe. Just maybe. I could be a Grace.

This was the real test. All I had to do was will it to be so.

I saw Marcus leaning over Thalia in her bedroom, pleading with her. Trying to grab her hand. Pushing her down. Forcing his mouth on hers.

Fenrin’s voice was in my head:
Sometimes I want to
punish her for being so stupid. Let it get so bad it teaches her a lesson.