A Discovery of Witches - Deborah Harkness [202]
The witch muttered, and my body spun around and then flattened against the floor, facedown. The impact knocked the wind out of me. A circle of fire licked up from the cold stones, the flames green and noxious.
Something white-hot seared my back. It curved from shoulder to shoulder like a shooting star, descended to the small of my back, then curved again before climbing once again to where it had started. Satu’s magic held me fast, making it impossible to wriggle away. The pain was unspeakable, but before the welcoming blackness could take me, she held off. When the darkness receded, the pain began again.
It was then that I realized with a sickening lurch of my stomach that she was opening me up, just as she’d promised. She was drawing a magical circle—onto me.
You must be very, very brave.
Through the haze of pain I followed the snaking tree roots covering the floor of the hall in the direction of the familiar voice. My mother was sitting under an apple tree just outside the line of green fire.
“Mama!” I cried weakly, reaching out for her. But Satu’s magic held.
My mother’s eyes—darker than I remembered, but so like my own in shape—were tenacious. She put one ghostly finger to her lips in a gesture of silence. The last of my energy was expended in a nod that acknowledged her presence. My last coherent thought was of Matthew.
After that, there was nothing but pain and fear, along with a dull desire to close my eyes and go to sleep forever.
It must have been many hours before Satu tossed me across the room in frustration. My back burned from her spell, and she’d reopened my injured forearm again and again. At some point she suspended me upside down by my ankle to weaken my resistance and taunted me about my inability to fly away and escape. Despite these efforts, Satu was no closer to understanding my magic than when she started.
She roared with anger, the low heels of her boots clicking against the stones as she paced and plotted fresh assaults. I lifted myself onto my elbow to better anticipate her next move.
Hold on. Be brave. My mother was still under the apple tree, her face shining with tears. It brought back echoes of Ysabeau telling Marthe that I had more courage than she had thought, and Matthew whispering “My brave girl” into my ear. I mustered the energy to smile, not wanting my mother to cry. My smile only made Satu more furious.
“Why won’t you use your power to protect yourself? I know it’s inside you!” she bellowed. Satu drew her arms together over her chest, then thrust them out with a string of words. My body rolled into a ball around a jagged pain in my abdomen. The sensation reminded me of my father’s eviscerated body, the guts pulled out and lying next to him.
That’s what’s next. I was oddly relieved to know.
Satu’s next words flung me across the floor of the ruined hall. My hands reached futilely past my head to try to stop the momentum as I skidded across the uneven stones and bumpy tree roots. My fingers flexed once as if they might reach across the Auvergne and connect to Matthew.
My mother’s body had looked like this, resting inside a magic circle in Nigeria. I exhaled sharply and cried out.
Diana, you must listen to me. You will feel all alone. My mother was talking to me, and with the sound I became a child again, sitting on a swing hanging from the apple tree in the back yard of our house in Cambridge on a long-ago August afternoon. There was the smell of cut grass, fresh and green, and my mother’s scent of lilies of the valley. Can you be brave while you’re alone? Can you do that for me?
There were no soft August breezes against my skin now. Instead rough stone scraped my cheek when I nodded in reply.
Satu flipped me over, and the pointy stones cut into my back.
“We don’t want to do this, sister,” she said with regret. “But we must. You will understand, once Clairmont is forgotten, and forgive me for this.”
Not bloody likely, I thought. If he doesn’t kill you, I’ ll haunt you for the rest of your life once