“How can I stop it? How can anyone be safe around me?”
“No one will ever be safe around you. Not like you hope. Magic is not safe.”
“Oh.” I had wanted a different answer, but it was a foolish question. Hadn’t Death himself even told me I was not safe, not even for him? I remembered his speech still, on that high mountain meadow, and a flush that had nothing to do with the heat washed over my cheeks. I poked at a stalk of betony, stroking the purple petals with the tip of my fingers.
“Sit child,” she said. “Rest a minute. Your grief is heavy.”
With a defeated sigh, I sat in a grassy section in the middle of her garden and crossed my legs, tucking my skirt underneath me in the hopes of keeping bugs out.
Perchta swung her hoe, and it hit the ground with a thud. There was something about the air in the grove; it was rich with magic, butI could not tell where it came from. It seemed, if she chose, she could shake off the skin of an old woman and stand straight-backed and ageless. Then it seemed, even as I watched, that she did.
“He has you under his spell,” she said. “You need to understand that no one can separate you from yourself. That’s why it’s so important you know your edges. What is you and what is not. He is trying to make you a vessel, but you can only be filled by someone else if you are emptied of yourself.”
But she knew nothing of how it felt to be under his care, the stroke of his hands to hurt and heal, the dizzying euphoria of sitting beside him late into the night. “He’s not trying to make me anything except a good magician.”
“And what has he taught you about being a good magician?”
“I don’t want to talk about him. You don’t understand.”
“Well, this isn’t about him anyway. This is about you.” Perchta sighed and stopped working. The light caught in the darkness of her eyes. They were the opposite of Renaud’s—they held an uncomfortable sort of all-knowing, too close, too sharp. “Close your eyes,” she said.
It took a minute for me to do it. I trusted her. Of course I did. But since the meadow with Renaud, since leaving and returning, a stubborn streak had grown in me, holding the entire world at arm’s length, and I eyed Perchta with a new wariness. I did not want to be vulnerable in the middle of her grove. But eventually, I closed my eyes and took a deep breath to settle myself.
“What do you feel?” she asked. “Tell me everything.”
“I feel nothing.”
She didn’t answer. I sighed, and a breeze stirred the grove, causing the wild plants around me to bend their stems and graze my arms. “I feel the flowers,” I said. “I feel the ground I’m sitting on.”
“Find the line between you and the ground. Where you end and the wildflowers begin. It may not be where you think it is. It’s easy to miss.”
At first it seemed obvious, the flowers were the flowers, I was me.But it could not be so obvious, so physical, so I turned my attention deeper, in that space between everything where magic tended to run. My mind flitted from the ground, to the flowers, the air, and then to the curve of my legs, my backside, my face in the breeze. It wasn’t until my inner gaze softened that I felt something like that golden thread on the road to the shrine, like the one tangled between me and Dacia. I traced it with my mind. A line of pure light …a seam? It wound through and around, and I had to follow it like I had with the shrine, careful not to lose it in the tangle of itself separating me from the air. It felt like a spiderweb being cast out and blowing in the wind, delicate and easily broken, yet many times stronger than it should be. I kept tracing the shape of myself, so much bigger, more expansive than I thought, but then suddenly the threads twisted into the tender new scars against the dirt and my stomach convulsed. My eyes flew open, and the thread was lost. Perchta’s eyes were on me, and I suddenly could not meet her gaze. “I could not find it,” I lied.
“No. You had it. For a moment at least.” Her hoe hit the dirt with a thwack. “You must continue, or he will destroy you.”
I pressed my lips tight.
“He has destroyed women more powerful than you.”
I stared at my feet in the dirt for a long time, and then because I was warm and restless and frustrated with talking about Renaud and her judgment of my ability, I thought the incantation for the being of light. In a moment, I transformed, my dress white, my body glowing. I stood and filled the grove as if I were a star dropped from heaven. “More powerful than me?” I demanded in my shining voice.
I expected her to take a step back. To be surprised. To act like the bandits had in my presence. But all she did was drag her hoe through the dirt. “Yes, child,” she said, her voice even and steady. “You have learned some tricks.”
How was she not affected? Not even a flinch of surprise? I turned myself back to normal and looked around at the quiet grove. “Why can I not go back through the abyss?”
“You have lost the way.”
“It’s right here.” I gestured around me. “You’re blocking me.”
“I’m not blocking you. You’ve lost the way into the otherworld. The way in yourself.”
“How can that be?”
“The way is always there. You do not have to venture to this grove to find it. But the more you let him …”
I didn’t hear what she said next. I was sick of hearing her warnings about him. She knew nothing about him. She couldn’t! The heat felt like sharp prickles on the back of my neck. “Are you jealous?” I asked. I did not know what other word to use.
She snorted. “When you chose him over yourself, you surrendered the way.”
