“I’d have a closet filled with the latest fashions. And bushels of money.” Pippa giggles.
“I’d be invisible for a day,” Felicity adds.
“I wouldn’t be,” Ann says bitterly.
“I could ease Father’s pain.” I glance at Mother. Her eyes narrow.
“No,” she says, unraveling a Jacob’s ladder.
“Why not?” My cheeks are hot.
“We’d be careful,” Pippa adds.
“Yes, terribly careful,” Felicity chimes in, trying to charm Mother as if she were one of our impressionable teachers.
Mother crushes the yarn in her fist. Her eyes flash. “Tapping into this power is not a game. It is hard work. It takes preparation, not the wild curiosity of overeager schoolgirls.”
Felicity is taken aback. I bristle at this comment, at being chided in front of my friends. “We are not overeager.”
Mother places a palm on my arm, gives me a faint smile, and I feel churlish for having acted like such a child. “When it is time.”
Pippa peers carefully at the base of a rune. “What are these markings?”
“It’s an ancient language, older than Greek and Latin.”
“But what does it say?” Ann wants to know.
“‘I change the world; the world changes me.’”
Pippa shakes her head. “What does that mean?”
“Everything you do comes back to you. When you affect a situation, you are also affected.”
“M’lady!” The knight has returned. He’s brought out a lute. Soon, he’s serenading Pippa with a song about her beauty and virtue.
“Isn’t he perfection? I think I shall die from happiness. I want to dance—come with me!” Pippa pulls Ann after her toward the dashing knight, forgetting all about the runes.
Felicity brushes herself off and trails behind them. “Are you coming?”
“I’ll be there in a moment,” I call after her.
Mother resumes her meticulous yarn architecture. Her fingers fly, then stop. She closes her eyes and gasps, as if she’s been wounded.
“Mother, what’s the matter? Are you all right? Mother!”
When she opens her eyes, she’s breathing hard. “It takes so much to keep it away.”
“Keep what away?”
“The creature. It’s still looking for us.”
The dirty-faced girl peers out from behind a tree. She looks at my mother with wide eyes. Mother’s face softens. Her breathing returns to normal. She’s the commanding presence I remember bustling about our house, giving orders and changing place settings at the very last moment. “There is nothing to worry about. I can fool the beast for a while.”
Felicity calls to me. “Gemma, you’re missing out on all the sport.” She and the others are twirling each other about, dancing to the lute and the song.
Mother starts to build a cup and saucer from her yarn. Her hands tremble. “Why don’t you join them? I should like to see you dance. Go on, then, darling.”
Reluctantly, I amble toward my friends. Along the way, I spy the girl, still looking at my mother with her frightened eyes. There’s something compelling about the child. Something I feel I should know, though I can’t say what.
“It’s time to dance!” Felicity takes both my hands in hers, twirling me around. Mother applauds us in our jig. The knight strums the lute faster and faster, egging us on. We’re picking up speed, our hair flying, hands tight on each other’s wrists.
“Whatever you do, don’t let go!” Felicity shrieks, as our bodies lean back in defiance of gravity till we’re nothing more than a great blur of color on the landscape.
The sky is a softer shade of night by the time we return to our rooms. Dawn is mere hours away. Tomorrow we’ll have the devil to pay.
“Your mother is lovely,” Ann says as she slips under her covers.
“Thank you,” I whisper, running a brush through my hair. The dancing—and the subsequent fall in the grass—has left it tangled beyond hope, like my thoughts.
“I don’t remember my mother at all. Do you think that’s terrible?”
“No,” I say.
Ann is nearly asleep, her words a low mumble. “I wonder if she remembers me. . . .”
I start to answer but I don’t know what to say to that. And anyway, it doesn’t matter. She’s snoring already. I give up on the brushing and slide under my own blankets, only to feel something crackle beneath me. I feel around with my hand and discover a note hidden in the covers. I have to take it to the window to read it.
Miss Doyle,
You are playing a very dangerous game. If you do not stop now, I shall be forced to take action. I am asking you to stop while you can.
There’s another word scribbled hastily, then crossed out.
Please.
He hasn’t signed his name, but I know this is Kartik’s work. I tear the note into tiny pieces. Then I open the window and let the breeze take it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
FOR THREE DAYS, IT’S LIKE THIS. WE HOLD HANDS AND step into our own private paradise, where we are the mistresses of our own lives. Under the tutelage of the huntress, Felicity is becoming an accomplished archer, fleet and unstoppable. Ann’s voice grows stronger every day. And Pippa isn’t quite the pampered princess she was a week ago. She’s kinder, less shrill. The knight listens to her as no one else does. I’ve always been so irritated when Pippa opens her mouth, I haven’t stopped to think she may babble on because she’s afraid she won’t be heard. I vow to give her that chance from now on.
We’re not afraid to grow close to each other here. Our friendships take root and bloom. We wear garlands in our hair, tell naughty jokes, laugh and shout, confess our fears and our hopes. We even belch without restraint. There’s no one around to stifle us. No one to tell us that what we think and feel is wrong. It isn’t that we do what we want. It’s that we’re allowed to want at all.
“Watch this!” Felicity says. She closes her eyes and in a moment, a warm rain falls from that perpetual sunset. It wets us through to the skin, and it feels delicious.
“Not fair in the least!” Pippa screams, but she’s laughing.
I’ve never felt such lovely rain. Certainly I’ve never been allowed to wallow in it. I want to drink it up, lie in it.
“Aha!” Felicity shouts in triumph. “I made this! I did!”
We screech and run, slipping down into pools of mud and back up again. Coated in muck, we throw handfuls of it at each other. Each time one of us is hit with a great heaping mound of wet earth, we yelp and vow revenge. But truthfully, we’re in love with how it feels to be absolutely filthy, without a care in the world.
“I’m a bit soggy,” Pippa calls after we’ve thoroughly trounced her. She’s covered in mud from head to toe.
“All right, then.” I close my eyes, imagine the hot sun of India, and in seconds, the rain has gone. We’re clean, dry, and pressed, ready for vespers or a social call. Beyond the silver arch, inside their wide circle, the crystal runes stand, their power locked securely inside.
“Wouldn’t it be grand to show them all what we could do?” Ann muses aloud.
I take her hand, and when I do, I notice her wrist has no new marks, only the fading scars of past injuries.
“Yes, it would.”
We sprawl out in the grass, heads together, like a great windmill. And we lie like this for a very long time, I think, holding each other’s hands, feeling our friendship in thumbs and fingers, in the sure, solid warmth of skin, until someone gets the bright idea to make it rain again.
“Tell me again how the magic of the runes works.” I’m lying in the grass next to Mother, watching the clouds in their metamorphoses. A fat, puffy duck is losing the good fight, stretching into something else.
“It works through months and years of training,” Mother responds.
“I know that. But what happens? Do they chant? Speak in tongues? Do the runes sing ‘God Save the Queen’ first?” I’m being saucy, but she’s provoked me.
“Yes. In E flat.”
“Mother!”
“I believe I explained that part.”
“Tell me again.”
“You touch your hands to the runes and the power enters you. It lives inside you for a while.”