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“You don’t even follow the cycles of the moon anymore?” Persi asked, clearly disgusted. “My goddess, who are you?”
My mother didn’t reply. Instead she said, “Do you have what we need?”
“Of course,” Rhi said.
“Well, then let’s get it over with.”
“Communication will be clearest at three o’clock,” Rhi said tentatively.
“Fine! Three o’clock. Where should we—”
“In the garden,” Persi answered. “Under the elder tree, like we used to.”
“I’ll bring everything with me. Just… just come, okay?” Rhi implored.
My mother didn’t reply out loud, but suddenly there was a creaking of floorboards and the shutting of a door, and I realized I had about five seconds to sneak back to my room or get caught at the top of the stairs. I scrambled to my feet and dashed on tiptoe back to my room, closing the door behind me and darting for the bed. I’d only just managed to pull the quilt up over me when the door opened again, and a golden shaft of light stretched across the floor and over the foot of the bed. I held very still, eyes screwed shut, breathing slowly and evenly. I heard my mother sigh, then pad across the floor until she stood beside my bed. She bent down and kissed me on the top of my head. My anxiety screamed that she would know I was awake, but if she did, she said nothing. Then I heard a strange, quiet clanking noise, almost like the windchimes out on the porch, but less musical. Before I could identify it, silence fell again. I heard my mother cross the room, and darkness descended as she eased the door shut again.
I sat up, blinking. The room seemed undisturbed. I turned to stare out the window at the moon bright patch of garden, my mind spinning. My mother was going to meet her sisters in the garden at three in the morning to “get answers,” but how? And from whom? It almost sounded like… I put the idea out of my mind. Asteria was dead. There was no speaking to her. The more I thought about the conversation, the more confused I became. The elder tree? The moon? None of it made sense, and there was no way in hell I was just going to let it go. I had questions, and no one was bothering to answer them—in fact, no one even seemed to think I was entitled to answers. And so my decision was made.
I just hoped I’d be able to stay awake until three o’clock.
9
Idon’t think I could have slept even if I’d tried. For the next few hours, my thoughts writhed in my head like serpents, coiling and intertwining and slithering away before I could get a hold on them. I tried to distract myself scrolling through my phone and reading a book, but it was useless, and I tossed them both aside in frustration. Desperately, I tried to make sense of the last twenty-four hours.
My grandmother had died. No one seemed bothered to explain exactly how. My mother and I returned to a town where everyone knew us and stared at us in the street like a bigfoot sighting. Now, a few sentences in Asteria’s will seemed to have tied me to this place forever, this house that felt strange and yet familiar, a song to which I could feel the tune deep in my bones; and yet, I’d forgotten the words. As hard as my mother had tried to cut ties with this place, here she was, more tangled up in it than ever, and now here I was, climbing out of bed and into a pair of jeans to sneak out into the garden and spy on…whatever the hell it was my mother and her sisters were overcoming their estrangement to do together. Freya watched me dubiously from the bed as though to say, “Better you than me, human.”
I stopped in front of my mother’s bedroom door, heart pounding, and eased it open the tiniest crack I could manage. The bed was rumpled and empty, and I expelled a held breath. She was already outside, then.
The house was silent—a heavy quiet that pressed down on my skin like humid air. I considered which way I had best enter the garden. Persi had mentioned their meeting spot as “the elder tree,” but as a city girl, I was useless at identifying different types of trees; and so my earlier walk through the garden had left me no closer to knowing what tree she might be talking about. I decided, therefore, to enter the garden from the front of the house and work my way around the outer edge of Lightkeep Cottage’s extensive garden, pressing myself into the added shadows of the fence and border hedges for a little more cover, in case I rounded a corner and came upon them suddenly. Eventually, however, I had to venture further toward the center, thinking perhaps I just couldn’t glimpse them from the perimeter; but even these explorations turned up nothing but Diana prowling for unsuspecting mice. I began to panic. Had I gotten the time wrong? Was there another part of the garden I hadn’t noticed? I wound along a path that ended in the stone wall I’d discovered earlier; a dead end, I thought, and had nearly turned back when I noticed the door.
In the brightness of day, the door with its lavender paint had been locked tight, half-hidden in a curtain of creeping vines and blossoms. Now, however, there were crushed petals scattered on the ground in front of it, and the door had been pushed inward. I bent to see a key, ornate and rusted with age, sticking out of the lock, and the sight of it unlocked something else: the realization of what I had heard in my room, the strange clanking sound when my mother had lingered by my bed. If I went back up there and examined the key ring on my bedside table, the one that Lydian had given me only earlier this afternoon, I knew I would find the largest, oldest key was missing, swiped in the night by my mother, who needed it to open this door.
The door had been shoved open far enough for me to slip through it easily, and so I made no sound as I entered the walled part of the garden. The moment I crossed beyond the boundary of the wall, there was a shift in the very air around me. It was as though a veil had fallen over the garden, one that separated this inner sanctum of the garden from the outside world. Here, the distant crash of the ocean waves could not reach my ears, and the persistent breeze that ruffled the leaves and shook the blossoms had been tamed, like a wild creature into purring submission. Above my head, stars were blooming between scuttling, purple-tipped clouds, and the moon shone round and full. I felt the pulsing of my anxiety calm as I looked up at it and found myself suddenly glad of its face shining down on me, watching. I felt braver under its gaze, less afraid of what I might encounter here.
The inner garden was as lush with bloom as the outer garden as I entered it, but there was something more exotic about the foliage here. I was quite sure that some of these plants shouldn’t be growing on the coast of Maine. There was a hothouse heaviness to the air as I breathed it in, ripe with dizzying perfumes. I kept to the shadows of larger bushes and shrubs, listening over the insistent pounding of my own heart. I heard nothing to guide me to where they sat; but then, a seductive scent reached my nostrils and, at the same moment, a swirl of gray smoke rose from the center of the garden.
I crept forward, using a massive hydrangea bush for concealment, and spotted them at last. They sat, all three, under the branches of a squat tree with a rough, furrowed trunk and an impressive canopy of thick green leaves. Among the leaves were clusters of deep purple berries—elderberries, I realized. This was the elder tree, then. I’d found it. The three sisters sat cross-legged in a triangle facing each other, their faces pale and drawn in the colorless cast of the moonlight. As I watched, Rhi lifted her arm, gently waving a smoking bundle of sage over her head. She circled it once, twice, three times, and then passed it to Persi, who did the same. Then Persi thrust it toward my mother, who hesitated, and then took it, imitating her sisters’ motions before handing it back to Rhi again, who placed it in a wide, shallow basin, still sending tendrils of curling smoke up into the sky.
“Ready?” Rhi asked, looking at each sister in turn. Both nodded, though my mother’s was more of an unwilling jerk of the head. Rhi took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and held out her arms as though welcoming an embrace. “We come to this place of our roots, to be rooted, grounded in our purpose to find answers. We imagine ourselves planted here, reaching downward, downward, deeper, deeper, finding purchase, claiming home in the soil that sings to our power. As our mothers and grandmothers did before us, we connect ourselves to this place, and to our sacred purpose.”
Goosebumps began to creep up my arms and the back of my neck. My breathing, calmed at first by the tranquility of this place, had begun to pick up again as I tried to make sense of what I was seeing: some sort of ritual? I wiped a trickle of sweat from behind my glasses and inched forward, the better to hear their next words.
Rhi next lifted a large wooden spoon from a bag on the ground. It was rounded and smooth, with scorch marks along its edges. She kissed it once and handed it to Persi, who took it into her hands with the kind of reverence a mere spoon could never conjure up. She stood up and then turned to face the east, with a far-reaching gaze that seemed to reach the cliffs and the ocean beyond the garden wall. She raised the spoon like a conductor’s baton and pointed as though to conduct the music of the waves themselves.
“Element of air, I call on you,” she commanded in a clear voice. As though in answer, the tranquility of the inner garden was disturbed by a sudden gust of wind that whipped Persi’s hair around her face before settling again.
Air, announcing its presence. I could scarcely breathe.
Persi turned in a clockwise direction, dragging the spoon against the dirt as she did so, so that she drew a quarter circle in the earth. Now she was facing the south and, I realized with sudden panic, me in my hiding place. I froze like a small animal scenting a predator, but if Persi knew I was there, she didn’t let on. She raised her chin, lifted the spoon and said, “Element of fire, I call on you.” A searing heat flashed past me along with a crack and a brightness that rent the night in two. From nowhere, lightning and the electric tang of static in the air. I threw my hand up over my mouth to contain the scream that had coiled there, waiting to escape.
Next she turned away from me to the west, dragging the spoon in the earth again to create a half-circle. “Element of water, I call on you.”
At once, a fine mist was cooling my face, as though the earth itself had given up the water in the ground, in the air, in the plants, to answer the call. Persi turned her face up, enjoying the feel of it on her skin before turning one last time to face her sisters and the north, still drawing with the spoon.
“Element of earth, I call on you.”
In a single movement like stretching toward the sun, the foliage around me shifted, reached, orienting itself as close to the sisters as it could without uprooting itself. The very bush in which I was hiding bent forward as though it had suddenly become alive in a new way. If it had been the first strange thing to happen, I would surely not have been able to control myself. But luckily, the sudden manifestation of the other elements had somewhat prepared me that something would happen, and therefore I did not run shrieking in terror out of the garden. Instead, I flung a second hand over my mouth and forced myself to sit impossibly still until the moment had passed and the garden had settled itself comfortably around me again.
