Page 2 of As Many Souls as Stars
It was clearly laid out in the family grimoire, passed down between generations of Harding witches and written in ink that was no longer blood but might once have been: the firstborn child of each Harding generation would be a witch. But if that witch was a girl, then the grimoire was very clear. No woman could bear the weight of such power. She would be tainted, her magic uncontrollable, bringing disaster to all those around her.
Some would call the Harding inheritance evil, even Satanic. The grimoire spoke of dealings with shadows, a dark bargain made in years forgotten that had traded pieces of each heir’s soul for power. But Cybil’s father, a witch himself, refused to believe his ancestors would have made such a pact. Christopher Harding, a man of the Renaissance, saw his unusual inheritance as anangelicblessing. What else could such magic be but a heavenly gift?
The Hardings were an ancient family—a line that may have once been truly venerable, before the rumours began that they dealt with the dark. They had owned their land since time immemorial, had built their great houses on the same Suffolk hill, over and over,through myriad cycles of destruction: walls of daub and lumber and stone falling to war, flood, and flame; the tenants of their village dying from invasion, plague, and famine; and yet, still, they persevered. Now their walls were brick, they had the favour of Queen Elizabeth, and the village prospered once more after decades of failed harvests.
Christopher Harding had been raised within the fervour of the Reformation. He knew the false idols of stained-glass windows and golden statues; he knew that God’s plan, inevitable, ineffable, would never afford such power and prosperity to a family that dealt with the devil. Mayhap his misinformed ancestors had believed otherwise, but nowhewould lead the Hardings down a path of sanctity. With a touch, a chant, he could make lead into gold, sing a storm silent, cause the stars themselves to fade. All ‘magic’ was an exchange, paying with the light of a soul to command the dark—was this not a form ofconversion? The spreading of miracles?
To him, the Hardings were nothing less than a line of saints. But if their blessings were biblical, it made sense that—just as Eve herself was tempted—so could little Cybil, squalling red-faced in his arms, someday squander the angels’ blessing and tumble into sin. There was only one thing to do with a First Daughter, the act all Harding witches before him had performed when faced with the same problem. He would leave her in the woods for the wolves to take.
Cybil had often wondered why he had not done it. It may have been Christopher’s first and final moment of fatherly affection, cradling his child in his arms. It may have been the tearstained and pleading face of her mother, begging him to spare her. It may have been the strength of his faith, that great commandment prohibiting murder. But truthfully—and Cybil knew this well, she spent her whole life knowing it—the only thing that saved the little girl-child was Christopher Harding’s hubris. He had heard the wails of his baby and thought,Here is the final puzzle, the final failing of our bloodline; I shall be the one to solve it.
Christopher Harding did not leave his First Daughter in the forest. He took her to the ritual table instead, laying a salt circle around her. He lit candles and chanted an incantation, calling upon the Holy Ghost to release her from her sins innate, to rebirth her pure.And—as he did so—Cybil began to glow with a light that Christopher could not consider anything less than holy. Her cries ceased, and she looked at him with eyes lucid and burning.
Once the light had faded, once Cybil slept and the candles had burnt out, he proclaimed the curse cured. It did not matter that he had no proof, that the shadows had swarmed around the edges of the circle and pressed against it, eager and hungry. There was only one thing Christopher Harding feared more than his daughter, and it was the prospect of his own failure. It was the possibility that he was not a saint. It was the realisation that God did not favour him, that the Hardings were witches and their souls damned.
Cybil sometimes wished he had accepted the inevitable and left her to the wolves, after all.
Cybil grew. Cybil learnt to walk, to speak, to fear the darkness that waited for her in the shadowed corners of Harding Hall.
She knew from an early age that her father did not love her. How could he? To acknowledge her, to accept her, would be to accept responsibility for whatever disaster she might cause. He would much rather pretend she did not exist.
Cybil did not seem to have magic, not in the manner he did, but there was something unearthly about her, something alienating. Sometimes, she had more shadows than she should; sometimes, she had none at all. The flames of candles bowed to her. Once, at church, the water in the font began to boil without reason. They stopped going after that. Once she had the words to do so, Cybil told her parents that she saw visions of violence, that she felt phantom pains as if pieces of her were being carved away. Her father told her she was mad. Her father told her not to speak of it, or else she would make her visions reality.
Cybil’s only real parent, then, was her mother. Bess Harding loved her daughter. She combed her hair out every night, called her ‘my dove’, taught Cybil her letters, and read her Aesop’s Fables. Together they explored every nook and cranny of the Hall, which had so many rooms and corridors, Cybil felt she could never see them all. With its vaulted ceilings, its pale brick, its sprawling gardens—the Hall wasa monument, not a home. It exposed its innards to the surrounding countryside through windows so wide and tall that if Cybil stood before them she would get vertigo, feeling herself falling, tumbling over the edge of the glass to impale herself on the rosebushes below. Bess tried to make it feel friendly, feel familiar: she sang little songs as she carried Cybil from room to room. ‘Harding Hall, more glass than wall. Harding Hall, wonders all.’
But meanwhile, outside the safety of the walls, whispers of the cursed girl began to spread through the village.
The Hardings employed only a dozen servants, not quite enough to keep the entire place clean. Solitude was Christopher’s preference, and as many rooms in the building were shut up as were used.Hisfather had built the Hall to entertain, as a home magnificent enough for a Royal Progress. But Christopher Harding was not a man who wished to entertain. He had a holy calling, and he would not be distracted from it.
Only a dozen servants, then, but enough to notice the child’s strangeness. Cybil was too intelligent for a girl, too brazen for a lady, and there were further oddities about her, too: she would sometimes whisper words to people who were not there, pluck and swipe at the air as if fighting something off. When she was only four, one nursemaid claimed she had seen little Cybil leaking light in her sleep, a glowing substance running down her cheeks like tears. But then she had been dismissed, and the servants spoke of it no more.
By the age of nine, Cybil was fluent in four languages and had yet to make a single friend; at twelve, she had read all of Machiavelli and had found him to be very reasonable; and at thirteen, she was interrupted by her mother in the midst of a virginal recital—performed to an audience of empty chairs—to be told that she ought to be betrothed. When she heard this, all the chairs began to tremble, as if fearing her reaction. Bess smiled tightly and said, ‘No fear, my dove. All will be well.’
The next week, Cybil was introduced to the son of a local lord, sixteen and pimpled, with one tooth already rotted from a diet of sweetmeats. The boy’s father had come too, and he had taken a lock of Cybil’s hair in his hand and grunted in approval, for Cybil had thequeen’s hair, flaming red, and this was considered beautiful enough to make up for her low forehead and squarish jaw.
The boy spent the entirety of his visit bullying her and trying to peek down her bodice. As the sun set that day, he had shoved her into the garden pond. Cybil, silent and sodden and furious, had stared and stared at him as he laughed and wished that he woulddie. A bough from the oak tree above them cracked and fell on top of him, breaking his neck. Shocked, Cybil stood in the water, skirts pooled around her, hands balled into fists. She did not know whether to laugh or to cry.
‘A terrible accident,’ Bess had said. ‘Oh, how terrible, my dove. Trouble yourself not over it.’
But Cybil’s father did not believe it was an accident. He believed it was magic. Not the wild, uncontrolled power of a curse—of course not; to admit as much would be admitting defeat—but perchance something more useful. Perchance Cybildidhave the powers he and his forefathers laid claim to: not doomed and uncontrollable, but the sort that could be honed and applied—the stuff of miracles, the blessings of a saint. So, for one extraordinary year, Christopher Harding had cared for his daughter. He had permitted her to read from the grimoire. He provided her incantations and elixirs, and showed her strange dances to do around ritual circles, teaching her an alphabet of angel letters that squirmed upon the page like leeches. Then he had taken her to the gardens, standing her before the apple trees in the orchard. ‘Break the bough, Cybil,’ he would say, watching her with wads of parchment notes crumpled in his fists. ‘Break the bough.’
But nothing ever occurred. When Cybil saw the darkness begin to surge beneath her feet like floodwaters swelling across a plain, when she felt the furious, hungry tug of those shadows reaching within her, eager to swallow her whole—Cybil had feared the power too much to allow it purchase. She felt the burning of magic within her, and she made herself douse it. The pain was too much, as if a wound deep within her were being opened anew—and even more so, thepossibilitywas too much, the sense that if she gave the darkness what it wanted, she would set the world itself aflame. She closed her eyes and pulled her light within her until it was smothered. She was not asaint—she was a First Daughter. Cybil had seen the grimoire, and she knew the legacy she carried.
Cybil felt the hunger of the shadows; she heard the voices in the dark.
Her father may have believed the curse was gone, but Cybil knew that he was wrong.
Once it was clear his daughter had no talent for magic—or, at least, none that she could control—Christopher ignored her once more.
No more local lords sent their sons for courting. Cybil told herself she did not mind. She had never liked the manner in which young men observed her, as if she were ripe fruit on the turn, as if they wanted to both eat her and throw her away to rot. Better for her to be alone, surrounded by her books and her mother’s love, without any distractions within the walls of Harding Hall.
That winter, the winter of her fourteenth year, Cybil’s mother bought her a marchpane-and-jam dollhouse for her birthday. It was a reproduction of the Hall: a perfect confection of quince-paste brick, blown-sugar windows, oozing black-red raspberries from its foundations and almond-studded roof. There was even the orchard in miniature, the marchpane trees growing comfits for leaves and fruit: sugar-glazed seeds of fennel and caraway, stained red and orange with beet and turmeric.
Cybil did not like sweet things; she never had. Bess continued to hope she would, for loving sugar was that most basic of childhood traits, a last hope of Cybil’s normalcy. So, she pretended to like it, pretended she would eat it later, but then she brought the entire thing down to the servants in the hopes it might make them like her better.
It turned out the jam was tainted. Many fell sick, and one man died—Cybil would never forget his limp face, the manner in which his body had spasmed. ‘Terrible,’ Bess had said, pale and weeping. Christopher Harding examined the corpse before returning to his study, silent.
The servants had been wary before, but now they were frightened. Although Cybil had never been close with them—she was a lady, it would not have been right—these were among the few faces who were familiar: Mrs Verney, the ruddy three-toothed laundress with a cloudof grey hair, who on occasion had taken pity on her, and listened to her play the virginal; Mr Stapleton, the gardener, who hummed tunes as he trimmed the hedges; even Jane Lennard, a young housemaid the same age as Cybil, who had once smiled at her and complimented her hair. All of them now blanched to see her, turning away after stuttered bows to busy themselves with chores. Jane did not smile at her anymore. Once, she dropped a glass in the same room as Cybil, and apologised so profusely, so fearfully, that she began to cry and had to flee to another room.
