LUKE
Chloe had been gone from the room for less than a minute but when she returned I knew everything had changed.
The old man was still deep in the meditative state that he had entered moments before Chloe vanished.
“Spill,” Janice said, racing to Chloe’s side. “Where did you go? What did you see?”
Chloe had the dazed look of someone who had seen things the rest of us could only imagine.
“Give her a break, Jan. She just got here.”
Chloe looked at Janice then at me. I could see her struggling to focus in on us, the room, this dimension of reality.
“Aerynn,” she said in a hushed voice. “I saw Aerynn.” She described the woman in detail, right down to the yarn she had been spinning at her wheel.
“Holy shit!” Janice exclaimed. “Blue-faced Leicester! Are you serious?”
The two knitters burst into laughter and I saw some of the nervous tension leave Chloe’s body.
“There’s more,” Chloe said, and told us about Isadora’s ancestor, Da’Elle, and the beginning of the feud that ultimately shaped Sugar Maple.
Janice peppered her with questions about Da’Elle’s hair and clothes and knitting skills but Chloe’s focus was on other things.
“They loved each other,” she said, referring to Aerynn and the old man who was now dozing in the rocking chair. “Deeply, honestly loved each other.”
“That surprises you?” I wasn’t sure where she was going with it.
“Aerynn and Samuel loved each other and still ended up apart. My parents loved each other and my mother chose human death to be with my father.” The look of sorrow in her eyes hit me like a punch to the gut. “Looks like we’re fresh out of happy endings, MacKenzie. The Hobbs girls really are congenitally unable to get it right.”
“I don’t scare easy.”
Her eyes welled with tears. “Maybe you should.”
“Chloe is right.” The old man was awake and taking it all in. “There is reason to be scared.”
“There are always reasons to be scared,” I said, meeting his eyes. “It’s the human condition. You learn to work around it.”
He nodded. I would have given my bank account to know what he was thinking. It wasn’t every day a man went eye to eye with a wizard.
“I will tell you what I know about your situation.” His voice had the resonance of an old-time radio announcer. “Then I will tell you what you need to do to recover Sugar Maple.”
“Not now you won’t!” Elspeth spun up the staircase like a bright yellow dervish. “Rest!” she cried. “You need rest! They made their bed, let them sleep in it. ’Tis no concern of yours now.”
“Elspeth is my oldest and dearest friend,” he told us as the crone touched the back of her wrinkled hand to his forehead. “She’s a healer who has brought great comfort to me while I wait for my time.”
“And it’s well past his time,” Elspeth clucked. “If you hadn’t kept him waiting all these years, he would have pierced the veil long ago.”
“Sounds a little harsh,” I said. “Don’t you want him around anymore?”
Elspeth ignored me. Apparently humans were beneath her notice.
“Janice is a healer, too,” Chloe said to the crone. “The most powerful healer in Sugar Maple.”
“Like that be something special,” Elspeth muttered. She turned her gimlet-eyed gaze on Janice. “You descend from my sister Rebecca’s line.”
Janice’s jaw dropped open. “Get out!”
“I’ll do no such thing,” Elspeth snapped.
“That’s an expression of surprise,” Samuel said, his blue eyes twinkling.
Janice stared at the old woman with a mixture of horror and excitement. “Are you saying we’re related?”
“What is wrong with your people?” Elspeth said with a shake of her bright yellow head. “Did they teach you nothing? A child should know her lineage to the last fourth cousin three times removed before her seventh birthday.”
I had to hand it to Janice. She didn’t give the old woman an inch. “Maybe they were embarrassed by some of the branches in our family tree.”
Elspeth considered Janice carefully.
“Is your magick serviceable?” she asked.
“Depends what you have in mind,” Janice said.
The two women eyed each other speculatively. There was no family resemblance that I could see but in spirit they were cut from the same bolt of cloth.
“Hold my apron,” Elspeth commanded, and they were gone.
“Should I worry?” Chloe asked Samuel.
“Elspeth’s heart is tender. She values family above all. Janice will not come to harm.”
Chloe nodded. “Tell me about the talisman.”
“What talisman?” I asked.
She recounted the conversation between Samuel’s younger self and Aerynn.
Samuel’s eyes never left us. “The talisman is at the heart of our clan and the New England Fae clan as well.”
I knew that the magick clock and the human clock operated independently of one another but no matter how you looked at it, time was running out. Back in Vermont, the snow was going to melt and all hell would break loose. The one thing we didn’t have time for was a walk down paranormal memory lane.
“Our first home, millennia ago, was in northern Wales. Where we were before that is lost to history but it was in Wales that we grew together and formed a community.”
“Including the Fae?” Chloe asked.
“We were as one,” he said.
They were also the keepers of a gold mine that was discovered somewhere near the midpoint of the European Bronze Age.
“There’s gold in Wales? I thought they only mined coal.”
“Our gold was legendary for its beauty and scarcity,” Samuel said. “Traders came from faraway lands to barter their goods for our treasure. The Romans, however, had other ideas. They marched in with their armies and their legions of slaves and before long our peaceful, prosperous community was driven out. The world was changing. The old religions were being replaced by the new. Magick was viewed with suspicion. We traveled the length and breadth of the British Isles in search of sanctuary. We settled in town after town, only to be driven out again by humans who feared what they could not understand. But through it all, we stayed together.”
“The talisman,” Chloe prompted. “What does any of this have to do with the talisman you and Aerynn talked about?”
“Each member of our community carried away a small nugget of gold from our ancestral home in Wales. During a long treacherous winter in Sweden, one of our artisans melted down the nuggets then fashioned the ore into a disk that featured our two clans, magick and Fae, connected by an over-arching canopy of sky. A symbol, if you will, of the special bond we shared and would always share.”
“No magick?” I asked.
“There is always magick,” he said.
“So what’s the problem?” Chloe asked. “You had the disk. The disk had magick. Every single one of you had powers that mortals couldn’t imagine. Why did you ever leave the Old World for the New?”
“At first our powers weren’t strong enough to defeat the humans.”
“Not even with the disk?” I asked.
He shook his head. “In time our clan came to the realization that the human race was evolving into a more tolerant, adaptable species and would continue to evolve. So they refused to fight.”
“But they still left the Old World for the New,” Chloe said.
“Their world was ablaze with fervor for the new ways. Those accused of witchcraft were being burned at the stake across the continent. Our elders, fearing the worst, left the talisman with my parents for safekeeping and either chose to pierce the veil or slip beyond the mist.”
“And their wisdom went with them,” Chloe said.
Samuel nodded. “Without the wisdom or an heir apparent, our clan lacked the leadership we needed to survive.”
“How did they escape?” I asked, pulled into the story despite the ticking clock. “Did they use their remaining powers?”
“Their powers at that time were not up to the task of transporting the clan across the ocean,” he said with a rueful shake of his head. “They bartered their way on board a ship headed to the New World and put their destiny in the hands of the winds and sea.”
Which turned out to be the right choice.
The years in the Massachusetts Bay Colony were good ones. The two clans lived and worked in harmony and they grew prosperous. The artisans among them turned their talents to the fiber-related pursuits favored by the locals. They became spinners and weavers and spawned knitters who turned out the fisherman’s sweaters Chloe loved so much.
Chloe cautiously leaned forward and touched the old man’s sweatered arm. “Did—did Aerynn knit this for you?”
His laugh was surprisingly full and hearty. “She spun the yarn but I knitted the sweater.”
I was surprised to see Chloe’s golden eyes fill with tears. “It’s beautiful.”
He pointed to an intricate cable that ran down the center of the sweater. “This represents the braiding of the Hobbs clan with the Bramfords.”
Chloe zeroed in on the design. “A panel of eighteen stitches flanked by two panels of six.” She looked up at him and smiled for the first time since they’d met. “You’re crazy.”
“I was young and my hands were more flexible,” he said with an answering smile. “Your skills far surpass mine.”
Chloe blushed and shook her head. “Not even close.”
I was all about family bonding but we had a town to recover. I steered the conversation away from knitting and back to why we were there in the first place.
“When did things start to change?” I asked.
Bramford looked over at me and again I had the feeling he knew my thoughts before I thought them. “Like human families, we had our disagreements but our commitment to the greater good of the community always took precedence.”
The Royal Charter of Massachusetts had been canceled in 1684 and the future was cast in shadow. Not that anyone had much time to worry about things like charters: the native Indian tribes had erupted into violence that spread to the coast of Maine.
But things would get quickly worse when the daughter and niece of Reverend Parris showed signs of what the Puritans claimed was demonic possession and the hideous era of the Witch Trials was under way.
Nothing new here,
I thought. I could have recited the information in my sleep.
“Instead of uniting us even closer, the old mistrust of humans drove us further apart. Aerynn wanted to pick up stakes and move north into the wilderness while most of Da’Elle’s Fae wanted to pull our community beyond the mist into their realm.” He sighed deeply. “And then there were the ones who believed that Salem was our home and as such was worth fighting for.”
“And you?” Chloe asked.
“I understood their feelings but my heart was Aerynn’s and always will be. I had made my peace with the fact that I would leave this place behind and together we would build an oasis for our band of magickal outcasts.”
I don’t know how it happened but suddenly his words had color and dimension. I saw a woman, who looked enough like Chloe to be her twin, in the arms of a man who was clearly a younger Samuel Bramford. Their love was real. It was palpable. He felt about her the way I felt about Chloe, an emotion that went so deep it scared the hell out of me.
He had been willing to follow Aerynn into the unknown for the same reason I was sitting in a wizard’s lighthouse: love.
“What went wrong?” I asked. I knew he hadn’t changed his mind. His love for Chloe’s ancestor was as constant as the tides beyond the lighthouse.
His eyes closed again and around him the colors deepened. The sound grew more resonant. Once more his words came to life and I could smell the fear as Aerynn and her followers and Da’Elle and most of hers waited in the shadows for Samuel. Finally, just before first light, she gave a signal and they blended into the fog and headed on their way north.
And then I saw Samuel suspended over acrid flames that licked the soles of his feet and made him cry out in pain. Bone thin, semiconscious, but still he resisted his captors’ demands.
“I know nothing about it,” he said as they pressed for information about Chloe’s disappearance with the talisman and over fifty followers. “My life is here in Salem.
I
am here in Salem.”
“Where is the talisman?” The flames rose higher, up his calves and winding around his knees in an attempt to destroy flesh and spirit.
His high, keening cry filled my head. But he still told them nothing. The orange and red and black flames enveloped him. The stench of sulfur made my head spin. “Tell us!” they cried. “Tell us now!”
The images faded then disappeared. I doubted the memory ever would. The human race had done terrible things to the magical creatures but what the creatures had done to themselves deserved equally harsh judgment.
“You saw the worst of those who were my friends but the truth of their actions was far from simple,” Samuel said, opening his eyes again and meeting mine. “The Witch Trials did terrible things to everyone in this town, turning friend against friend, parent against child. We were not immune to the insanity that fear and suspicion can generate.”
“Why didn’t you use your magick against the Fae?” Chloe asked. “Fight fire with fire.”
“For me it was still early days. Aerynn was by far the most powerful of our clan. Without the talisman my magick was not strong enough to fight on the night I was captured.”
“What about later?” Chloe persisted. “Obviously the damage wasn’t permanent. Why didn’t you reach out to the talisman and use it to find where Aerynn had settled?”
“I was filled with the pride of youth and burgeoning powers,” he said after a long silence. “When I gave the talisman to Aerynn, I made no provision to communicate with it.”
If he had tried to locate the talisman, he would have revealed its whereabouts to those who had chosen to stay behind and by doing so compromised Aerynn’s control.
“Home and family,” I said. “The only two things worth fighting for.”