When Autumn Leaves: A Novel (31 page)

I
T TOOK AUTUMN ALL OF TWO SECONDS TO SURMISE that there would not be any rain today. Nor would there be sun. The clouds hung low over Avening, low enough to shelter the small town and gather it together so people would feel compelled to light fires, wear oversized clothing, watch old movies, and drink tea from cups that fit perfectly in their hands. She didn’t know what to think about the weather’s lack of ambition, today of all days. She also supposed it would have been rather tacky of nature to show off at her expense.

She glanced furtively over at her journal, lying open towards its middle on an old, high bookstand. There were so many mysteries inside, so many magical possibilities and riddles solved. But it was only because Autumn knew so very much that she could understand how little she really knew.

She was leaving today. Had to. Time had run out on her like a fickle husband. How appropriate that it should be today, Samhain. It was truly the end of summer and the beginning of winter, the end of one phase of her life and the beginning of a new one.

She knew there was no point in kvetching. She wasn’t sure she would have ever been ready. Still, for someone as organized and thorough as Autumn, she hadn’t done a single thing to prepare. Stupid, stupid. And she had an awful lot of life to gather up.

More than half a millennium ago she had been recruited by the Jaen. Six hundred years. The notion seemed preposterous to her, ridiculous even, like it didn’t even fit anymore. She wasn’t, of course, living in Avening when it began. Avening didn’t exist; even the first settlers, the First Peoples, hadn’t made their way over to the island until decades after. It was a time of kings (and perhaps a few queens). She had been born in what was now the United Kingdom, though it wasn’t united then at all. She was glad she’d lived through that savagery, glad she could bear witness to how far humanity had come—in certain respects. In many others, she wasn’t so sure that the human race had gotten that far along at all.

She had been all of twenty when the High Sister at Avesbury had come for her. Her name hadn’t been Autumn then, of course; it hadn’t even been Serafina yet. But that first name was the name that mattered the least, since it was the only name she’d had that she hadn’t picked for herself. Back then, she was the only daughter of a wealthy merchant. She largely spent her time resisting the suitors her father paraded in front of her; she was determined not to be married off to some old letch. Her parents tried to get her to capitulate, believing she was wrongheadedly waiting for true love. How wrong they were. She was waiting, all right, but not for a man.

When she was in her late teens, Autumn had started to dream of Sister Dori. She saw her face, her long, tapered fingers, and her skin, so milky and translucent she could have traced the blue of her veins. Autumn saw this woman behind her closed lids almost every night for a year before she actually came. The dreams weren’t sexual, but they were seductive. She knew that Dori would offer her something, though she didn’t know what, and she didn’t know when.

When Sister Dori finally arrived at her house, Autumn looked straight into her remarkable face and saw her future. She arrived in a retinue of Autumn’s mother’s extended family, and she was supposed to be some kind of a nun, but Autumn knew better. She never talked about Christ, let alone being his bride, and her behavior was far from pious, but no one seemed to notice her eccentricities. No one seemed to point her out or talk about her. Autumn wondered if anyone actually noticed she was there.

It wasn’t as if Dori came out right away and offered her place in the Jaen. She asked many questions over a period of days. Questions that, if overheard, would have been considered blasphemous, but between the two of them were just philosophical. It wasn’t until Dori’s very last evening there that she told Autumn the truth of what she was. She was one of the Jaen, an ancient order of women who dedicate their lives in the service of others. They train together in a cell of thirteen initiates at first, to learn the elemental basics. There were cells, which were called Khandas in the Jaen vernacular, all over the world, living, working, serving in absolute secrecy. Dori was the High Sister of her Khanda and now, after serving many lifetimes over, she was due for retirement.

The Jaen knew about Autumn, where to find her and what she was capable of (though at the time Autumn barely knew herself what that was). Dori wanted Autumn to take over as the High Sister of Avesbury. Dori warned Autumn how difficult it would be, how many years she would serve. She didn’t make it sound glamorous or even all that exciting. But Autumn got a sense, a taste of something in her mouth and a faint smell of something familiar. And so she accepted Dori’s offer with casual grace and a secret thrill inside her heart. Dori managed to convince Autumn’s parents quite easily that she should join her nunnery, and off they went.

Together, Dori and Autumn, her new protégé, spent weeks combing the countryside for the new talent Dori knew was there. Within a fifty-mile radius they managed to find every woman the Vedea, the Jaen oracle, wanted. As Dori explained to Autumn then, the Vedea is always right. Always, even if it takes a while for its righteousness to unfold. The centuries since Autumn’s first lessons had only proved this correct.

Autumn watched as women of all ages and social backgrounds joined their group. These women, once strangers, became her closest friends, Sisters in every sense of the word. Dori stayed with them a year, after each had been initiated formally into the Jaen. And then one day, she was gone.

As a High Sister, Autumn had many gifts and many talents; that was both her blessing and her curse, to be a jack-of-all-trades and a master of none. The rest of her Sisters specialized in one single ability. She could never be as good as they were, but she learned enough to do what was needed, when it was needed. Autumn’s role in the community was as a source of wisdom; theirs, sources of magic.

The initiates stayed together at Avesbury for almost twenty years before being called to apprentice in various places around the globe. Autumn remained behind, helping the local citizenry, central to the community, protected by her gifts. For some years, she wrote short, pleasant letters to her family, but eventually there was no one left to receive them. Time passed—it seemed like a few months, but it was more than a century. Then one day word came down from the Vedea that she was to leave Avesbury. She wasn’t sad, and that surprised her. Maybe because she’d always had a feeling that she would be called to do more.

The Jaen were shifting their presence to the New World, as it was being called. There were Jaen already among the First Nation peoples and among their distant cousins to the south—Autumn herself had met the spirit of a traveler from the far west, from the great body of water Europeans would call the Pacific. But, after all, the Jaen philosophy was a Eurasian magic, a grassroots movement born of the Celtic spread through Europe and Central Asia. That other hemisphere had its own very ancient and well-established magical traditions—several of them, in fact—and in spite of some overlap in theory, the Jaen had not made any formal alliance with their counterparts across the Atlantic. There was, of course, always both curiosity and resistance when one met another practitioner of a slightly different variety of magic.

But by the close of the sixteenth century, Autumn had heard of the decimated populations in those other continents—even earth magic cannot overwhelm the disease and violence of which humans are capable. The message from the Vedea was clear: if the Jaen did not reach out now, broaden their horizons and open their minds, an entire chapter of Sisterhood would be lost. The order needed to set out, and quickly, for the New World, learn what they could, and ally with the shamans and wisewomen of those distant provinces. However, what was quick for the Jaen was usually more like generations for civilians.

Autumn herself wasn’t sent across the world for another two hundred years, but eventually she was given a few months and a list of names. She needed to replace herself, and to recruit the experienced group of Sisters who would be making this huge move with her. She left Avesbury behind with affection but no regret, and boarded her well-provisioned ship with a very special collection of women who had been recruited from across the British Isles, and some from places as far as Anatolia, Bohemia, and the Arctic Circle. After a long, if largely charmed, journey over the stormy seas, Autumn and twelve other women were shipwrecked off the coast of a lush green island when a lightning storm split their hull clean in two. Autumn’s instructions from the Vedea had of course been very vague, but as she watched the beams of her ship split and sink into the Pacific, she was pretty sure this island was their final destination. And the place on the island they would eventually settle was called Avening, an homage to Autumn’s first Khanda in Avesbury.

She didn’t love this group of Sisters any more or less than her Sisters at Avesbury, but she loved Avening. There was a practical reason the Jaen wanted a presence there. It was a powerful place, working on a different frequency it seemed, pulsing a steady undercurrent of magic that made it more than special. And how many people get to design a community? Autumn instilled her most intrinsic morals, maintained higher ground. A town grew up around her guided almost entirely by her own dearest principles, where the people weren’t any better than people anywhere else, but where they wanted to be better, and were willing to work in order to get there.

Autumn was proud of what she had created nearly four hundred years ago, and even though it was now her turn to go, she understood why. Nature is a circle. It was somebody else’s turn. The question was whose.

Autumn was, in truth, a little bitter about how the Vedea handled this whole situation. Most High Sisters got much more notice. And most of them didn’t have to vet fifty different replacement candidates. But Autumn had done it—in one year, she’d narrowed down her list of fifty to twelve women she knew would become Avening’s new Jaen sisters. She was absolutely sure about these twelve. She just wasn’t so sure of the thirteenth, and had no idea which one could possibly be the High Sister.

Autumn thought on it this morning as, just like every morning before, she stood and squared her body on her purple yoga mat. In one fluid movement she began with the Sun Salutation. After all these years, yoga still hurt. But she breathed through the pain until her muscles let go and she was able to convince her body that, yes, it was meant to bend this way. Her body had been good to her, considering.

She appreciated her own reflection—she looked less than a tenth of her earthly age—but knew the years were bound to catch up. There had been a time or two when she had put a glamour on herself, to reverse those years, to remember and even to capture the attention of a young man so she could make the kind of vigorous love she had enjoyed before. But she wouldn’t have tried to keep up the glamour permanently, or to create the violent kind of spells that she could have to remain in a state of perpetual youth. The crone cannot be a sage or wisewoman until she reaches beyond the shallow confines of her skin. Children of the earth must also change, like the seasons do. Autumn had seen herself in all these transitions: the tentative buds of spring; the heavy sensuality of summer. And now, like the fall, she was colorful and majestic but right on the verge of winter, to be stripped down to what was really important, the bare branches of what was true.

When she finished her final pose she sat lotus-style on her mat. She lit a white fire inside her ribs and let it spill out of her torso. To Autumn, the light symbolized the Goddess’s love and protection. These quietest moments were a call to prayer: not for things, not even for direction. Rather, a call for acknowledgment of and gratitude for everything wonderful, and even things not-so-wonderful; for pain, too, because she understood that difficult times were ones in which she learned the most. This was the last time she would perform this exercise here, in her beloved house. But she knew it was only so hard to leave because the Goddess had given her something truly wonderful.

When she felt the weight of the impending day lift a little, she knew it was time to move. She needed to pack. Her successor would get not only the book, but also Demeter’s Grove, the apartment flat above, and the guesthouse behind. Of course no one knew this; no one knew that she was leaving for good. This was in part because in her pride she still wanted to appear enigmatic and mysterious. The other part was that she didn’t think she could bear to say good-bye to her friends. It was cowardly, and she bent a little with the knowledge of that.

Demeter’s Grove had been her vision, and she knew that the future owner would want to change it, make it her own. So she was leaving behind enough money in trust for the new owner to do whatever she wanted with the space. Whatever it became, she was sure, would be wonderful.

The yoga session had dehydrated her, so she went to the kitchen, flicked on the electric kettle, and prepared a cup for tea. On the wooden counter, which was clean but lined with cuts and age, was the pile of entries. The contest had been the smartest way to go. Entries had trickled in over the last twelve months, particularly after Autumn’s monthly announcements in the
Circle
, which always seemed to trigger a new crop of inspiration. Though the twelve she had settled on had all entered (some with a certain amount of prodding from Autumn herself), not all of them had been on the Vedea’s list. She wasn’t sure if this meant that the Vedea had, for the first time, been wrong, or if the vague nature of the list meant that it had only been a guideline anyways. She was, however, sure she had chosen correctly.

She flicked through the entries. She could almost feel each woman’s intention through the paper. Ellie Penhaligan, who was so in tune with the earth and the elements that she could disappear into them. Stella Darling, whose suitability was a real no-brainer, especially now that she had opened her own natural healing practice. Stella was the only other person in Avening with formal magical training, and once time had mellowed her, she would be a true mistress of the elements. Nina Bruno, one of the most powerful candidates on her list, a real Charm Sister whose hypnotic personal energy would turn anyone her way. Eve Pruitt, who had no particular powers to speak of, but whose loving and giving energy radiated from her, putting everyone at ease—people magic. Maggie Moreau, who passed so effortlessly between worlds, and she hadn’t even hit puberty yet. Her mother Mave—who would have thought Mave would have been interested? But she’d applied all on her own, and sure enough, Autumn had been forced to recognize her great untapped potential. Ana Beckwith, whom Autumn loved like a daughter born of her own womb, and who, whether she realized it or not, had already begun to tap into her ability to move through time. Ginny Emmerling, the lonely warrior who wanted to fight for a new piece of herself. Dottie Davis, the only applicant to understand the Book as a vehicle of spirituality. Charlie Solomon, that budding psychic reporter whom Autumn had all but coerced into settling down in Avening. Sylvie Shigeru, who was only just eighteen and had already made peace with her magic, and done so much to harness it. And last, her sister, Siobhan, who would be a prophet the likes of whom Autumn hadn’t seen in many generations. Age wasn’t a concern; Maggie and Siobhan wouldn’t initiate for another ten years at least, and as for the older women, Dottie and Eve, initiation would change them the way it had changed Autumn so many centuries ago.