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A smile dawned on her face. “Ginny,” she said. “That’s what Alora—your mother—always called me. What pretty much everyone in the family calls me. And you’re obviously Rose.”
I didn’t know what to do with myself—with my hands, with my mouth. I stepped back to give Ginny room to come up the stairs. She sat down across from me, so I sat back down too, my pulse jittering.
“I’m sorry to drop into your life out of nowhere, and all the subterfuge—I didn’t want to create any trouble for you,” I said.
Ginny shook her head. “It’s fine. It’s— I’ve felt guilty for a long time that we weren’t able to find a better way to reach out to you, after Lora… My parents had a lot of suspicions about her death, you know. Whether the illness was completely natural. They’d already raised concerns about the speed of the consorting and marriage. When the Assembly ruled against them your father was able to file a no-contact order. None of us were to try to get in touch with him or you.”
So Dad had lied about that too. The lump in my throat hardened. He’d told me my whole life that my mother’s family had wanted nothing to do with us, when he’d forced them to stay away.
“I had no idea,” I said. “I mean, he told me that your family hadn’t approved of the marriage, but he made it sound as if you’d shut us out, not the other way around.”
“Well, of course. Why would he have wanted to admit why he’d done it?”
“Am I going to get you in trouble with the Assembly just by being here?” I asked. “I’m making you violate that order.”
She shrugged, her smile turning wry. “If they find out, I can always say in my defense that you came to me. But you seem to be going to a lot of work to make sure they don’t find out. What’s going on, Rose? What kind of trouble are you in?”
It was such a long story, and so much of it I wasn’t sure I could trust her or the rest of the family with yet. They might have wanted to be a part of my life, but I had no idea how they’d feel about the idea of taking an unsparked man as a consort, or taking multiple consorts, let alone both. They might decide I was some kind of deviant, corrupted by my father somehow, and send me back to the Assembly. So I had to tread carefully.
The root of it all, at least, didn’t reflect on me in any unpleasant ways. “It’s—it’s complicated. And telling you the whole thing might put you in danger, just knowing it. You shouldn’t tell anyone else, not even in the family, not yet. And I won’t tell you at all if you don’t want to take the risk. I’d totally understand—”
Aunt Ginny held up her hand to stop me. “I’ve spent more than twenty years holding my tongue and pretending I didn’t have a niece out there to avoid the Assembly coming down on me. I think it’s about time I stuck my neck out, now that you’ve come all this way.”
She said it so plainly and firmly that a little of the hesitation in me melted away.
“I was supposed to be consorted,” I said. “Just this month. But I found out that my father had made an arrangement with my consort-to-be that the ceremony would be distorted so that I wouldn’t be able to use my magic without his permission, and I’dhaveto use it if he ordered me to.” It was simpler not to mention my stepmother’s role in the whole thing, now that she was gone anyway.
Ginny’s face had turned sallow. “That’sawful.”
I twisted my hands together in my lap. “I… took measures to make sure that didn’t happen. But it turns out that Dad had backing from some faction in the Assembly. They want to prosecute me for what I did to defend myself, and they’d let him and my former fiancé get off free. I swear to you, I didn’t hurt anyone, or do anything that puts the witching community in danger. But they want to cover up what happened, I guess, and their own involvement. I’ve only uncovered a little, but it sounds like there are other witches they’ve trapped in similar ways.”
“Your mother,” my aunt said, her voice a little ragged. “We hadn’t heard from her in over a year. We thought your father had completely convinced her that we were the enemy, trying to tear them apart. But then I got this letter saying something about how he wanted to take her power… It didn’t really make sense, and it was from when she was sick. Our parents used it as evidence after she died, but the Assembly’s court dismissed it as hallucination. Maybe it wasn’t, though.”
To take her power. How could Dad have done that back then? His messages with Frankford had indicated that the binding he’d had my stepmother work out was a new strategy they hadn’t tried before. What had they used to manipulate witches in the past? And had they really been doing it for that long?
Whatfor? Celestine had said they wanted to control me because of how much power I’d had. Both the Hallowell line and the Levesque’s were strong magically, and the two combined… I’d seen for myself now how much power I could wield already. But Dad couldn’t have used that excuse with my mother. What would he have done with her magic—whathadhe done? Had the Assembly known even then?
All those unanswerable questions condensed in my stomach, leaving me queasy. Ginny leaned across the gazebo and gripped my hand. “They can’t keep getting away with this. We can’t let them. Anything I can do to keep you safe, you just let me know.”
Tears burned in the back of my eyes. I wanted so badly to trust her, to spill the whole story and be wrapped up in the protection of a family who really would have my back. But it wasn’t just me who needed safety. And she wasn’t the only one on her side of the equation either. There were too many factors for me to risk diving in headfirst.
“Thank you,” I said. “I’m still figuring out where to go from here. Can you give me a little time to think about what I’d need? And then I’ll reach out to you again.”
“Of course,” Ginny said. “Take whatever time you need. Just don’t hesitate if you think of anything.”
I held her gaze intently for a moment. “And can you promise you won’t mention me or anything I told you to anyone else in the family, just for now? The more people know, the more likely the wrong people could find out I’m here…”
“Of course. Of course. Don’t you worry about that for a second.”
She got up, and I stood too. The second I was on my feet, she opened her arms, offering a hug without pushing it on me. I blinked hard and stepped into her embrace. Just for an instant, it felt almost as if I’d found my mother again.
“I’ll be back in touch soon,” I said. “Thank you again, so much. It means a lot just knowing I have someone here.”
Now I just had to wait to make sure I really had her on my side—that her words hadn’t been as false as so many of my dad’s had been.
Chapter Fifteen
Gabriel
