Page 114 of The Book of Magic

When Ian reached out his hand, she took it, and they were both discreet enough not to exchange a glance.

Look ahead into the trees where a crow has settled, such a wild and beautiful creature. Look up, look away, and if you still see him then you will know. This is the way it happens, on an ordinary day, this is the way the future is revealed.

They were a mess when they reached solid ground and Sally’s breathing was shallow in her chest. She was disoriented and the sun on her shoulders seemed to be burning her; her hand in his was aflame as well, but when she turned back, there was the shade once more. She kept thinking about that kiss. She kept feeling it as if it were happening all over again in a loop of time that failed to stop.

The dark-haired girl had been out in the marshes, in a coil of time in which she made her escape before Hannah Owens’s house was set on fire by the first Thomas Lockland. Perhaps Sally could spy the shade because she was stunned by grief, raw and open to the world in a way she’d never been before. She, who believed her heart to be cold, who had been married twice but had feared committing to anyone, who expected the worst and got it, who’d made a vow when she was not more than ten years old that she would never fall in love, was standing in a muddy dress, barefoot and burning, who instead of walking away did something rash, kissing Ian so deeply they might have vanished into the bog where many had disappeared in the past, but fortunately fate had seen to it that they had reached dry land.

II.

From a distance, Kylie could detect smoke from the fireplace as it spiraled through the trees. Her sister’s voice echoed in her head and, indeed, she considered turning around. Antonia was so often right, turning to logic when other people might panic. Kylie could run back to the village and grab the taxi she’d seen idling outside the inn, but she’d left the book behind, and the curse was still unbroken. She went on, through the ivy and the ferns, the scent of clover filling her head. She was dizzy, she was all alone, she had already made one mistake after another. Everything seemed spun from a dream, and she was a sleepwalker wanting one thing, to undo time and go back to the afternoon on the Cambridge Common before the storm struck. For all she knew, Gideon might be having the very same dream. He wanted to reach her but he couldn’t get to the door. In his dream he saw a shadow just as Kylie observed the very same thing; it was Tom Lockland standing there outside the manor house, waiting, frustrated that Kylie had taken so very long just to go to the market and back.

“About time,” he said.

She saw something inside him then, what he’d been hiding, a dark line, the sort that appears when there is a crack in a china plate.

“I got lost,” Kylie said simply.

“Well, follow me then.”

They went along a path behind the house down to a stream, where they shared their picnic, eating from the packages Kylie had picked up at the shop, cheese and bread and pickles. She found she could eat only a bite or two. Her stomach was a nest of nerves. There was so much power in the curse and it had lasted so long, she feared what disaster a single mistake might cause. There was always a price to pay, although what the price might be was unclear.

“There’s got to be a way to open this damn thing,” Tom muttered.

He leafed through The Book of the Raven as he drank one of the beers, the other bottles kept cooling in the stream. He’d been studying the text while Kylie was off on her errand and had realized that its purpose was to grant the reader their deepest wish, the one desire at the core of someone’s being, worth the price to be paid. He wasn’t interested in ending a curse. It was creating one that was his fervent desire. It was payback to everyone who had ignored him and belittled him. A curse for a curse. He’d brought along the ingredients most often needed to invoke dark magic, and before Kylie had returned, he’d found what he wanted under the section “How to Seek Revenge.” It was possible to summon the Red Death, a plague set upon the town. He wasn’t strong enough to call down so great a curse. This was why he’d brought Kylie over to the dark side. He had a witch with real power. So much the better that she had no real sense of her own capabilities, for he intended to use her skill for his own purposes.

There had been a great deal of rain that spring and the rushing water was high. The banks were slick with heaps of last autumn’s falling leaves, as they dissolved into mulch. It was a warm, still evening and when Tom was done with his beer he pitched the empty bottle into the ferns, then stood and ambled down to the bank, where he stripped off his clothes. He had brought the book with him and tossed it into the tall grass. It was said that whoever carried a fern seed could become invisible as promised by the villain in Henry IV, Part I when a highwayman assures his accomplice, We have the receipt of the fern-seed; we walk invisible. But ferns could also allow a practitioner to find answers, understand birds and animals, discover a treasure. If you have the sight, you can see more clearly wherever there are ferns.

“Afraid?” Tom called to Kylie, teasing her about her inability to swim.

There was, indeed, a twist of fear in her chest. It was the way he threw the book down so carelessly, as if it belonged to him. Still, she couldn’t be waylaid by her fears. Kylie stripped off her jeans and shirt, leaving on her undergarments and shivering despite the warm air. She had a stab of panic. How had she gotten here, so far from home, a black-haired girl in the woods with a man she barely knew?

Tom had plunged into the water and when he arose he shook the drops from his hair. “See what you’ve been missing?” he called. “Nothing to fear.”

She made her way through the reeds into the water, which streamed around her legs, cold as ice. Water calls to water, like calls to like. Kylie went deeper, but when she tried to dive it was impossible, it was as if the surface of the water was a solid wall, and she could only float. This was the proof Tom wanted. This was the reason her mother had never allowed her to swim. Witches couldn’t drown, that was the test that was always used against them, their strength turned into weakness.

Tom was watching her, and she thought she saw a flicker of resentment in his eyes.

“It’s too cold,” she told him, making her way back to the muddy bank, more confused than ever. Who had she been before? Certainly not the person she was now. Or was it only that her true self had always been hidden? As she stepped out, shivering and panicked, she slipped on the wet leaves, and as she lurched to steady herself, The Book of the Raven tumbled into the shallows. She dodged after it, and grabbed it as it floated there. Tom came racing toward her. “What have you done?” He tried to seize the book from her, but she grasped it even more tightly. Before her eyes the paste Jet had used on the last two pages dissolved. All she had needed was water, the element they were drawn to and was most dangerous to them. The last page opened and “How to Break a Curse” was revealed. Tom came to the bank and pulled his clothes on over his wet body as Kylie read the last page. It was what she suspected, a terrible bargain, but the only way to break the curse once her beloved had been afflicted. Someone had to die, and if it wasn’t to be him, the only way to change fate was to take his place.

Tom grabbed the book away, a wary look in his eyes. “Get dressed,” he said, for Kylie was in her sopping underclothes, her black hair streaming water. “You’ll freeze to death before we get anything accomplished.”

Kylie dressed quickly, but while her back was turned, Tom stalked up toward the manor with the book. Kylie ran after him, her heart pounding. Who you trust is everything. Who you trust can save you or ruin your life. Never give your words away. She tracked him to the manor house, following his wet footprints. He had already begun to set out a circle of red madder root around them, mixing in the poison he had used in the robbery in London.

“I want the book,” Kylie said. “It’s mine.”

“It was,” Tom said. “And now it’s mine.”

He used a match to spark the flame and as the first billows of smoke flooded the room, there was the sound of fluttering, birds’ wingbeats, perhaps, or bats that had taken up residence in the chimney now flickering through the treetops as they fled the smoke and fire. Bees flew out from behind the mantel, where the walls were thick with honey. Kylie had heard that bees driven from their hive portend disaster. The smoke drew upward and the fire flamed orange and blue until Tom threw on a handful of russet madder root, which turned the blaze red. Red for magic and for love and for a curse returned. Revenge had taken the place where his heart used to be, coiling and uncoiling, turning darker with every breath.

He couldn’t care less that the first rule of magic was to do no harm. The curse of Red Death would blanket the village of Thornfield, affecting residents before they knew it was upon them. It would slip under doors and find its way through windows and hop from person to person; the more you loved the more you would spread it with a touch or a kiss. Breathe in and it had you, breathe out and you passed it on. Tom Lockland liked the irony of the curse. The closer you were to people, the more likely you were to become ill.

He opened The Book of the Raven to the page upon which the Red Death had been written in blood and ink and spoke the first words of the malediction.

The rain will rise and fall. It will undo you and all who you love. Their souls, their hearts, their livers, their lungs. Use with caution and with care, use only in the most dire circumstances.

There were field mice living in the house, but they had all fled. Nothing living dared to be near. The bats in the rafters were gone as well, out into the darkening net of the sky. Tom brought out a handful of grass poppets bound with black thread meant to represent the people in town. He took a knife and slit his skin so that he might sketch a map with his own blood on the floorboards. There was the church, there was the inn, and the library and the school, the market and the dress shop, and the teahouse. And there were the people, those who had dismissed him, defied him, ignored him. They would get what they deserved, each and every one. Mud and earth, belladonna, lords and ladies, straw and grass, and black thread and horse nettle, so poisonous a user had to wear gloves when handling the herb to make a tincture that would produce the hex. He tore his clothes, then threw the poppets into the fire. It should rage, it should bloom as if it were blood, causing the clouds above to fill with illness.

Kylie stood by in shock at all he was willing to do to hurt others. She had been enchanted, she had been a fool; it had happened to other young women, and would happen again. “You said you would help me break the curse!”