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“What were the girls called?”
“I think it’s time I showed you,” Hans said, and chanced pulling me to my feet. “Come. Let me show you the beautiful road of your past.”
He led me through a doorway at the back of the kitchen. It opened into a study with rich green decor, but there was barely any furniture in there besides one desk.
It was all about the walls. Pictures, and paintings. Framed embroidery, and pressed flowers. Hans pointed to the family tree painted in beautiful italics, framed high and proud on the wall.
It began at the top, with Mary, then showed generations of children, leading to children, and grandchildren and great grandchildren. My gaze flitted over them – so many relatives, all from me.
“You should be very proud of yourself,” Hans told me, with his arm around my waist. “You left a great legacy.”
I attempted to soak in all the names but it was pointless. There were too many. Tiny pieces of italic script, each one symbolising a soul. A whole life in one tiny scribble of text. It blew my mind to think about all those lives living out their journey. All of the people they’d known, and the love, loss and life they must have all experienced.
And then – right at the bottom – was me.
Katherine Jane Blakely.
Seven hundred years of a family tree, and there I was again, born anew.
“I don’t understand it,” I said. “With reincarnation and being in the same family line, why did it take me so long to come back?”
“I don’t know the answer to that, little one. All I can tell you is that time means both nothing and everything, so far as I’ve learnt. Souls come back when they’re ready. There are hints and whispers in the family chain, but a soul is its own beautiful thing on its own beautiful journey. I’ve been waiting for yours to come back for centuries.”
“You’ve been watching my family for all these years? Really?”
“Yes,” he admitted. “Very, very closely. They just never saw me doing it. I was waiting for you, sweetheart.”
“How did you know for sure that I’d ever come back? That was quite a risk, wasn’t it?”
He kissed my head before he answered me.
“Even through all my suffering and doubt, and through the turmoil of trying to reconcile my faith with my experience of life, I still believed in destiny and the benevolence of the great unknown. I trusted you’d be back, and I trusted your soul would pick the same beautiful family line to come back into. Your chain was too strong to let go.”
My brain rattled at the thought. I felt like a tiny little speck of life in a very bright sky.
“I knew you were returning the very second it happened,” he continued, and I looked up at him, adoring his happy smile. “I felt it at the moment of your conception. It made no sense, but it awoke me from my slumber. I rushed out to find Edwin and spun him around in my arms, whooping with cheers.”
“Really?”
“Yes. I didn’t find out your mother was pregnant for certain until a few months later, but I didn’t need to. I already knew.”
“I don’t know what to say,” I whispered.
He squeezed my waist as I turned my attention back to my vast family tree.
“You don’t need to say a word. Your soul already has the answers it needs, your mind is yet to catch up with them. But it will. Don’t worry about that. It will.”
I scanned through the names, still trying to comprehend it. There were so many girls in our family chain, mapping out a river from me back to Mary.Ruby, Georgina, Margaret. Jane, Deborah, Kerry-May.So many distant relatives, all on the path from me to her.
Were we really all witches?
“You were all good witches,” Hans said. “Some of you used your skills more than others. Some were a lot more reserved in their approaches, others dived in all the way.”
He pointed to Kerry-May.
“She was quite a character. You’d have liked her. She lived the legend with everything she had. The head of the Garway group for over forty years.”
I got a serious prickle right then.
