Page 90 of A Resistance of Witches

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 thelow, 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 againstallmagic, 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 upat 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. Hermother’shome.

“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.”

Twenty-Five

Lydia felt as if she’d been defiled. As if the deepest, most essential part of her had been excised. She languished in bed for one day, and then another, surviving on warm broth and healing potions, wearing her grandmother’s shield stone, all the while knowing that none of it would make a bit of difference until they discovered how she’d been bound, and by whom. She felt helpless and panic-stricken, and as she lay there, too weak to stand, a constant chorus seemed to drone inside her mind.

Five days until the full moon.

Four.

Three.

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