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Twenty-Four

“It’s midday, love. Come on now. Up with you.”

Lydia was racked with aches and chills, and her bedsheets had an unsavory, lived-in feeling.

She’d spent the better part of the night searching the shadows, waiting for whoever or whatever was in her room to reveal itself.

Then, slowly, the sun had emerged, flooding her room with weak morning light, and Lydia had realized that she was alone.

She’d fallen back into a troubled sleep and woken later that morning, long enough to wash and have a coffee, before returning to her bed, where she’d spent the remainder of the day.

“I don’t understand why I’m not getting stronger,” Lydia gasped as she pushed herself upright.

“Perhaps it’s because every time I leave you alone for more than a minute, you’re trying to leave your body and fly off to France.” Lydia looked at her mother in surprise. “Oh please. You think you’re such a mystery?”

Lydia reached for her dressing gown. Her legs quivered as she stood. “What are we doing?”

“Reading cards.”

“Mother, no .”

Evelyn rummaged through the chest of drawers. “Where is that deck I gave you? I was sure it was in here. Ah! There we are.” She produced a small bundle, wrapped in an old green silk scarf. There was a sprig of something tucked into the knot of the fabric, now dried beyond recognition.

“I think I should lie down.” Lydia tried to return to her bed, but Evelyn intercepted her with a firm hand on the arm.

“Lie down long enough, you’ll never get back up. Come on, the tea’s ready.”

She settled Lydia in a kitchen chair with a pillow behind her back.

Evelyn’s own tarot deck was already on the table, set atop a swatch of black silk.

Grudgingly, Lydia unwrapped the bundle in front of her, setting the tiny dried flower off to one side.

The deck had been a gift from her mother for her tenth birthday, a perfect copy of the one Evelyn used.

She turned the deck over in her hands and noted how the cards were still crisp and new looking, barely touched all these years later.

Meanwhile, Evelyn’s deck was worn at the edges from decades of use.

“I’m not sure I remember how to read them.”

Evelyn clucked her tongue. “There you go again, always so concerned about the meanings. Relax. Go with your instincts.”

“Easy for you to say.”

Evelyn poured the tea, then handed her own faded deck to Lydia. “I’ll read first, give you a moment to get reacquainted. Go on, then. Think of a question and give them a shuffle.”

Lydia began to shuffle the cards in her hands. They gave off a familiar odor—oakmoss, vanilla, tea, dust.

“What’s your question?”

Lydia hadn’t told Evelyn anything about what had happened in France. She’d become so accustomed to keeping her mother in the dark about her work within the academy, she’d hardly known where to begin.

“My friends,” she said after a moment. “Are they alive?”

Evelyn frowned, but nodded. “Cut.” Lydia cut the deck, as she had a hundred times when she was a child.

Evelyn began laying out cards, drawing two to start—the knight of swords and the Hermit.

She laid these at the top of the black silk, then drew five more.

The images didn’t speak to Lydia the same way they did Evelyn, but they still stirred strange feelings in her—like a story being told in a language she only vaguely understood.

Evelyn arranged the cards in a straight line: five of cups, five of swords, six of swords, eight of swords.

Too many swords always made Lydia anxious.

When Evelyn laid down the final card, Lydia took in a quick breath: Death .

“What have I told you about the Death card?” Evelyn said calmly. “It represents changes, transformations.”

“Is it ever interpreted literally?” Lydia tried to hide the tremor in her voice.

“Sometimes. But not today.” Evelyn placed her fingers on the two cards at the top of the spread, the knight and the Hermit. “They’re alive.”

Lydia exhaled. She and Evelyn had their differences, but Lydia knew one thing for certain—her mother’s cards always spoke the truth.

Evelyn laid her fingertips on the five of cups, with its solemn figure standing morosely over his spilled chalices.

“They’re worried about you. They don’t know if you’re alive or dead. They fear the worst.”

She moved on to the five of swords. A smirking figure stood in the foreground, with his two vanquished foes behind him. Their swords lay abandoned at his feet.

“They were captured.”

Lydia’s heart stumbled in her chest. “By the Gestapo?”

“No. Friends. Hers, if I’m not mistaken.

A betrayal. Now they’ve escaped.” Evelyn’s hand rested on the six of swords, showing two passengers huddled inside a boat.

She reached for the next card, the eight of swords, but hesitated.

On the card, a dark-haired woman stood bound and blindfolded, surrounded by swords.

A castle loomed in the background. Lydia knew without having to ask that the woman was her.

Evelyn’s hand hovered briefly over the bound woman, then moved on, picking up the final card, Death.

“Something’s happened. One of them is going through a great change. Him, I think.” She picked up the Hermit and held it next to Death. “He’s transforming. Getting stronger, embracing his true nature.” She set down the two cards. “I think he has a little magic in him, your Henry.”

Lydia frowned. “I never told you his name. Did the cards tell you that?”

Evelyn paused, the hint of a smirk curling her mouth. “The walls are thin, and you talk in your sleep.”

“Ah. Well. Thank you.” Lydia wished she weren’t so inclined toward blushing. She reached for her own deck, but Evelyn stopped her.

“You get a second question. Remember?”

She remembered. This had been their arrangement, years ago when Evelyn had first started teaching her to read the cards.

Evelyn’s way of teaching was to have them take turns reading for each other, but Lydia always felt exposed when it was her mother’s turn to read.

She saw too clearly, knew too much. It was just like the tea leaves, but so much worse—Lydia’s whole inner life, laid out in full color on the kitchen table.

Evelyn had been the one to suggest a solution.

Each time Evelyn read for Lydia, Lydia would get to ask a second question—no cards this time, just the truth.

She could ask anything she liked, and Evelyn would have to answer.

This way, they were always on even footing.

This was how Lydia had learned about the birds and the bees, and about her father, run off when Evelyn was six months pregnant, too much of a scoundrel to be any kind of husband, let alone a parent.

Lydia looked her mother in the eye. “Why did you hate Isadora?”

Evelyn knit her brow. “I didn’t hate Isadora.”

“No lies, that’s the rule. I want to know why.”

Evelyn gathered up the cards from the table and shuffled them back into the deck. “That’s the truth. I never hated Isadora. She was a strong woman. A leader, principled, intelligent. She cared for you like her own, challenged you.”

Lydia was bewildered. “Then why—”

“Do you remember the first time you came home from that school? You’d been there, oh, a few months I guess, and they sent you home for winter break.

And it was like you were a different child.

Everything I did filled you with disdain, everything I did embarrassed you.

You weren’t interested in herbs, or cards, you called them low magic.

You were only interested in high magic , academy magic.

We had a terrible row that week, and do you remember what you called me?

‘Dirty old hedge witch.’ I don’t know where you even heard such a thing.

I barely recognized you.” Evelyn didn’t look at Lydia as she refilled her teacup.

“I didn’t hate Isadora. I hated the academy. ”

“But every time I said her name…”

“You worshipped her, love. I was jealous. I wanted my daughter back. But I didn’t hate her. Not at all.”

Lydia felt ashamed. For years she had taken for granted that Evelyn had loathed Isadora. Now she realized that it was Lydia herself that her mother had resented. Not the girl who left for the academy all those years ago, but the person she had become.

“And Sybil?” Lydia asked.

“That’s another question, love. No extras.” Evelyn held out her hand, waiting.

Lydia handed Evelyn her own deck of cards. Evelyn gave them an expert shuffle and a cut. “Will business pick back up after the war?”

It was a meaningless question, and one Evelyn could have answered just as easily as Lydia, but that wasn’t the point.

It was the ritual, drawing Lydia back into their familiar routine.

Lydia opted for a simple spread, unable to remember any of the more complex arrangements Evelyn had taught her as a girl.

She pulled a single card for Evelyn and smiled.

The Empress.

It was a card that had a way of appearing in most of Evelyn’s readings. She stood for motherhood, fertility, bounty. Evelyn smiled, too, like seeing an old friend.

Lydia pulled three more cards. The eight of pentacles appeared first, then more pentacles, the seven this time, followed by the Wheel of Fortune, but the final two cards had landed upside down.

“Well?” Evelyn looked at her expectantly.

Lydia hesitated. “I told you, I barely remember how to read them anymore.”

“Nonsense. You know as well as I do what they say. The cards don’t lie. Don’t you start lying for them.”

It was one of Evelyn’s favorite sayings. As a child, Lydia was always trying to soften the truth, make the readings more favorable than they were. Evelyn had always insisted on brutal honesty.

“No. Business does not improve after the war.”

Evelyn appeared utterly unbothered. “Well then, that wasn’t so hard, was it?”

Lydia was beginning to feel queasy. “Mother, I’m tired, I think I should go back to bed.”

“One more while you finish your tea,” Evelyn insisted.

“Mother—”

Evelyn handed her deck to Lydia. “Go on, then. Give them a shuffle.”

Lydia knew there was no sense in arguing. She shuffled thoroughly and cut the deck, placing both stacks on the table.

“Will I regain my powers, before it’s too late?”

She expected Evelyn to ask, Too late for what? Instead, she picked up the cards with a nod and set about her work.

She laid the cards out in a complicated spread of her own design, one she reserved for questions of grave importance.

The High Priestess sat in the center of the spread, watching the story unfold around her.

Placed sideways across her, the five of pentacles showed a man and a woman, sick and suffering in the snow.

The Moon hung at the bottom of the spread, flanked on one side by Strength, golden haired, taming a lion with her bare hands, but the card had landed upside down.

On the other side of the Moon sat the Tower, harbinger of catastrophe.

Lydia felt her blood run cold at the sight of the burning pillar, the bodies flung to their deaths on the rocks below.

And there, sitting above them all, filling Lydia with a familiar sense of unease, was the Devil—horned and leering, with a naked couple chained at his feet.

Violence , thought Lydia. Manipulation. Obsession. Evil.

Evelyn gazed at the cards for a long time before she spoke. Then she looked up suddenly, as if she smelled something burning. She stood and walked swiftly to her bedroom.

“Mother?”

Lydia could hear her shuffling around in the other room, moving boxes and opening drawers. A moment later she reappeared, holding a smooth black stone on the end of a silver chain.

“I just remembered. This once belonged to your grandmother. She wanted you to have it.”

Lydia didn’t understand. “Mum, Gran’s been dead for fifteen years.”

“I know. Silly me.” She stood behind Lydia and draped the chain around her neck. The stone was ridiculously large and felt cold and heavy against her chest. It gave off a subtle hum of magic, vibrating faintly against her skin. Once it was secured, Evelyn returned to her place at the table.

“Mum?” There was something about the look on Evelyn’s face that frightened her.

“Your gran made that herself, you know. She was a Projectionist. Like you.”

Evelyn wasn’t making any sense. “I thought Gran was an herbalist. All the Polk women are herbalists.”

“She was both. Polk women have a talent for every kind of magic, the high and the low , as you call it. Your gran could fix any sort of potion, knew a thousand herbs by sight alone. And she could send her mind anywhere she pleased, just like you.” Evelyn turned her teacup in her hands as she spoke, swirling the leaves in the bottom.

“During the Great War, before you were born, women would come to your gran with some object belonging to their sons or husbands, and they’d ask your gran if their men were alive or dead.

Gran would leave her body and go find them on the battlefields in France, then come back and tell the women if they were all right. ”

She pointed to the heavy pendant hanging around Lydia’s neck.

“That is a shield stone. Your grandmother made it as protection against other witches like her, witches who could use their power of projection to follow her, spy on her. I always thought she was just getting paranoid in her old age, but now I see she had her reasons. Who knows, maybe she made it for you. You won’t be able to project as long as you’re wearing it, and it won’t protect you against all magic, but it will keep you safe from wandering eyes.

No witch will be able to use projection to follow your comings and goings. ”

Lydia looked down at the cards spread out on the table, then back up at her mother. A chilly sense of foreboding crept over her, making the hairs on her arms stand up. “I’m being watched.”

Evelyn nodded.

Lydia thought of the figure in her room, the unshakable sense that she wasn’t alone, and shuddered. She felt violated, imagining such a thing could happen in her childhood home. Her mother’s home.

“There’s more.” Evelyn lifted two cards from the table: the five of pentacles, with the sickly pair in the snow, and the inverted Strength card.

Lydia looked at those cards and felt a sense of dread in the pit of her stomach, like a premonition.

“Your magic’s been bound. That’s why you’re not getting better. ”