Weather Witch (7 page)

Jordan clutched them to her and blushed.

“And, as I would not dream of doing anything but sharing such a delightful lady with all of her friends and family…” He towed her forward gently, lowering his face so his lips came level with her ear. “Be brave, Jordan,” he whispered, and swallowing, she held tight to the smile smeared across her face for the good of the guests. The crowd parted for her and, taking her hand, Rowen led them back inside, pausing in the main hall where three waiters held a large silver platter on which balanced a cake in three dramatic levels.

Seventeen candles burned in a fiery ring around the cake’s top tier and the waiters lowered it with aching care so the entire thing balanced just before Jordan’s smiling lips.

“A wish, a wish!” the crowd chanted.

Jordan blushed and nodded. She turned from the cake, clutching Rowen’s hands, closed her eyes and screwed her face up in her most thoughtful look before whipping around and blowing the candles out with a puff of breath that left her dizzy.

The guests burst into cheers and raucous clapping.

But everyone fell silent when the Wardens marched in.

Heavy boots slapped out an intimidating rhythm on the marble floor, drowning out every sound except the rush of blood filling people’s ears at sight of the Wardens invading their festivities.

Tall, broad, and dressed in hip-length charcoal-colored cloaks and sleek trousers tailored to slide over black boots, the Wardens were the most elite of guards. Unshakable, undaunted, and irreversibly silenced by a mysterious event rumored to be called “Lightning’s Kiss,” their faces were carved with crimson fern-shaped tattoos recalling their arcane path to power.

Behind the Wardens something else whispered with movement, things so tall they were more
long
than tall, more
sleek
than slender, and a more accurate description than saying that they
walked
would have been to say that they glided, they drifted, they
haunted
the space between the Wardens and the walls.

Until the Wardens parted and, black as a heartless sea, the Wraiths flowed forward.

Wearing relentless black, from their strange soft boots and long frock coats to their tall crowned top hats shrouded with mourner’s black, the Wraiths cut imposing figures against the backdrop of the crimson-and-bone hall. Still as stone they stood, faceless beneath the dark veils hanging along their hats’ brims; even their hands were robed in gloves the color of a moonless sky.

Deaf as doorstops, they were a sharp contrast to the Wardens. To many it seemed all they had in common was witchery. And the power of flight.

Everyone in the hall stood mute, their eyes fixed.

Everyone except Morgan Astraea—the man whose youngest daughter’s extravagant birthday party was being ruined.

“What is the meaning of this?” Jordan’s father stormed, his face purpling as a vein rose by his hairline.

The Ring shifted, the Wardens took one stomping step to the side, and Astraea immediately recognized the Councilman. Though a range of emotions slid across his face in rapid succession, surprise was not among them. But
rage
? It settled on his features and he thrust a pointing finger toward the foyer. “We shall speak. There.”

The Councilman nodded, following old Morgan Astraea, the Wardens marching behind, and after the Wardens drifted the Wraiths, every piece of them swallowed up in fabric and unimaginable. The crowd hissed, seeing one last person in their ranks.

A man so thin he seemed nearly skeletal, ceremonial robes hanging off him like draperies from a pole, slunk in amongst the Wardens, a slender cane wrapped tight in his gnarled hand, his other hand sheathed in metal—a contraption more mechanism than man. For a moment he turned, icy eyes scanning the crowd.

They gasped again. Although most had never seen one before, all the party’s attendees knew him by his manner as much as his clothing.

Tales of the Testers were not easily forgotten.

Holgate

After he’d returned to the library adjoining his laboratory and withdrawn the journal he kept hidden in the false-bottom drawer, he tucked it into his belt, then stoppered his ink bottle, picked up his pen, and laid them both into his travel bag. The bag had served his father well as a rifleman’s pouch, but as Bran benefited from the lessons his father had imparted as the Maker before him, so he also benefited from the scant remainders of the dangerous wartime exploits that helped make his father’s name immortal.

Taking a lantern from off his wall he walked to the Tanks more slowly now, no need to rush as the dead certainly didn’t.

With barely a moment’s hesitation, Bran slipped his arms around the child and carried her out of the compound, beyond the unassuming door beside the main gate, and down to the small slope where the dead were buried. She felt lighter in his arms than he’d expected, like something had left her—some heaviness connected to life. He set her on the grassy ground and, raising the lantern that now shown with a steady white light, looked around for a shovel.

Briefly.

Burying the dead was not his job.

But filling her spot in the Tanks
was
and as suddenly as the request for a Tester and a Ring of Wraiths had come into Holgate, he knew at least one Tank wouldn’t remain vacant long.

He pulled the journal out, sat down only a few feet from the body, and began to write.

The girl in Tank 5 has expired under strange circumstances. She was not in my care for long, showed strong potential and was most easily persuaded to work when introduced to the cat. Death was not fever-induced and yet she said the strangest thing and seemed quite convinced of the reality of her words. “They are coming and there is naught to be done for it.” It causes me to speculate on the cause of her untimely death. She was not broken to the point of d

The pen stilled in his grip, a breeze rallying and lifting off the water. It moved like a specter up the slope, slinking around the dead girl’s body and ruffling her dirty hair before stroking its cold, damp touch across the Maker’s face and dissipating.

He squinted at the corpse. Had she stirred? Setting aside his journal and pen he leaned across her, holding the lantern to her face. No breath moved within her. But the breeze came back, this time running icy fingers through his hair and stroking the back of his neck so its every hair stood straight up. Something slipped along his ears, chilling even the insides of them with what sounded distinctly like words. “Murrrrderrr.” He shuddered, tilting his head. “Murrrderr,” the wind sang again. Then something new followed and, heart racing, he listened. “They commmmme,” the wind hummed. He rubbed his ears. “Soooooonnnn they commmmme…” He pawed frantically at his ears and stood, the journal and pen falling into the grass, his gaze wary on the water.

Last summer’s cattails waved in the wind, whistling an eerie tune. Surely that was all it had been—the wind through the rushes. Still, he gathered his things and gave one last glance to the body before walking much faster to the compound than he’d walked on his way out.

His returning speed was not because he felt lighter being relieved of the burden of the body. It was rather because the wind chased him like a hound snapping at his heels.

Philadelphia

Pushing his way through the astonished party’s crowd, old Morgan Astraea addressed the uninvited men who now stood in his foyer. “What precisely are you doing here?”

Jordan’s mother stroked a careful hand down his back as they huddled as near the door as he could maneuver them.

“We’ve received reports of a potential Conductor being in your household.”

“Why would you presume a Witch is here?”

Thunder cracked so loud the huge house rattled.

Morgan Astraea nodded. “An unpredicted storm would raise questions, I suppose.” He groaned. “You discovered one just two years past—and we were as surprised as you,” Morgan assured. “We need no taint nor the blasphemy of magick in this household,” he assured. “Root the devil out!”

The Councilman smiled, signaling the Tester with a simple sweep of his fingers. “Signal the servants,” he suggested. “Such trouble is nearly always breeding in their ranks.”

The servants were gathered and although Rowen did a tremendous job keeping most of the guests focused on him—one of his more stellar abilities—Jordan could not help but slip from his grasp and make her way toward the staff that waited for the Tester’s verdict.

Behind her Rowen paused in the midst of telling some joke and she sensed the crowd breaking apart, watching her and watching him equally. Footsteps followed her—his boots covering the distance quickly, Catrina’s heels clopping in a harried fashion.

Jordan stood at the edge of the circle of Wraiths, Wardens, and servants, watching the Tester’s eyes rove in a strange, unceasing manner. Two years ago the Councilman had come and taken Marisca, Cook’s daughter. There was no Tester needed. And, much as her parents had adored her, no one dared hide her from the Council’s eyes. The punishment for Harboring was swift and sure.

They all heard tales of the posses that rode, rooting out anyone using magick or displaying magickal abilities. This was the New World. A world free of the taint and trouble magick brought.

A world unlike the one across the Western Ocean where magick tore dynasties apart and brought wars of epic proportions to crush commoners and nobles alike. Everyone knew the most dangerous of the magickers were Weather Witches. Well, nearly the most dangerous …

But all people, young and old, rich and poor, ranked and Witches, knew tales of Galeyn the Weather Witch and the way, at only eight, she saved an entire ship of colonists from a vicious Merrow attack. Compared to the multitude of Weather Witches, other magickers seemed only rumors.

The Tester’s eyes found hers and held them until no one else in the room dared speak, dared move, dared breathe …

His hand reached out, long and thin with fingers that curled more than bent, turned palm up, and slowly slid in the air before them like a hunting hound scenting the air.

Someone whispered, “He is preparing for the Touch Test,” and another voice behind her agreed, “Said to be as
simple as Salem
…”

His hand paused a moment, fingers twitching like they’d been tickled by some invisible feather … then his hand darted out, fast and sure.

Jordan jumped when he grabbed her arm and sparks flew between them, the scent of something in the air burning, and he yanked her forward with a rudeness no one would ever show a member of the Fifth of the Nine.

“No,” she yelped.

Most were no longer seeing her because they all—the best of the higher ranks of the Nine—watched as Morgan Astraea’s face crumpled and fell, realizing what it meant that his daughter was a Weather Witch. That magick ran in
her
blood and not his wife’s.

And certainly not in his own.

“No…” Lady Astraea whispered, her face twisting in a mirror of his agony. “No. It cannot be,” she protested. “He is wrong!” Her voice rose as she took a sudden step forward. “No,” she said again, regaining control of her voice. “The Tester is wrong. There is no chance that she is what he claims. My blood is without taint and Lord Morgan Astraea’s blood is without taint and…” She raised her head, tipping her chin up nobly, but her hands trembled at the unspoken accusation. “It is utterly impossible due to my spotless reputation.”

Lord Astraea was still frozen, pain etched deep in his features, when the Councilman puffed out his chest and announced to the assembled crowd, “The Tester is beyond reproach. But it appears her ladyship is not.”

“No,” Lady Astraea protested. “I would
never
…”

But her lord turned away, his face drawn and his attention fixed to a glowing wall sconce by the doors, and the Tester shoved Jordan into the waiting hands of a Warden.

The Wardens spread out, snapping the steel-ringed butts of their heavy-handled canes on the marble floor so the sound rang through the hall. The servants stepped back, eyes lowered—thankful it was not one among their number this time.

Standing in the foyer, the Warden’s grip tight on her, Jordan swallowed hard. The carefully framed paper cuttings of the previous Astraea family members’ profiles all seemed to be pointing at her, their sightless silhouettes weighing her. Her grandmother, quite the debutante of her time, peered down her aquiline nose at her grandchild while Great-grandmother Silicia tipped her head heavenward as if to avoid the distressing scene being playing out beside her picture. Jordan even imagined that the silhouettes of her sisters (who seldom cared a whit for her) looked away, aware Jordan’s profile would never hang beside theirs.

Wringing her hands, Lady Astraea repeated a single word: “No.” It ran from her mouth so fast and smooth, over and over again so that soon it was just a trilling noise somewhere between a choke and a cry.

Jordan’s gaze latched onto her mother and she swallowed hard, uttering the one word that held all her emotion in its two soft syllables. “Mother?”

“No,” Lady Astraea snapped, head shaking, the word firm. “No. You are mine and you are
his
. Have faith, Jordan. The truth will out,” Lady Astraea insisted. Her eyes were wide, wild, and she took an unsteady step forward. “Test her.”

The Tester’s head jerked up, his eyes glinting at the challenge. “Test her?” he asked. His lips twisted into a grim smile. “Test your child? Here?”

“Test. Her.”

Catrina and Rowen both stepped forward.

“Be brave, Jordan,” Catrina said. “Yes. If you are so certain—test her. Before us all. Prove you are correct or leave this house.”

Rowen’s head lowered, but he caught Jordan’s eyes.

It was the surest way to prove her innocence.

The Warden released her but when the Tester drew his blade, Jordan pulled back, “No” tumbling from her lips as well.

Catrina stomped forward and looked Jordan in the eyes.