Tamsin rubbed the back of her neck nervously. That couldn’t be the case—she hadn’t touched the diary in years. Whatever was happening, Tamsin was not the one instigating it.
It was raining harder now, the water falling with a hiss, then a crackle. Tamsin glanced idly at her fireplace, expecting a shower of sparks as a flame devoured the log. But the fire had faded to embers. The hearth sat dark and empty.
That was when she noticed the glow. The sky had gone a sickly brownish green, and a thick, sharp scent pooled in Tamsin’s nostrils, all putrid ash and burning spice.
She was tempted to close the shutters, brew herself a sleeping draught, and go to bed. She was fairly certain she was having delusions. Perhaps she hadn’t had enough to eat.
Then she saw the smoke coming from her herb garden. Flames devoured her carefully cultivated plants—tiny leaves of basil, frail fronds of rosemary, thin tendrils of dill. Tamsin rubbed her eyes quickly, but the scene didn’t change. She stared, bewildered, wondering if this misunderstanding was part of her delusion too.
It was raining. Nothing was supposed to be on fire.
Tamsin, who had been gripping the sill so tightly that the tips of her fingers had gone a ghostly white, pried herself away from the window and ran to the door. Fury flooded her, filling the empty cavern in her chest.
She had invested so much time in her garden, had nursed the tiny seedlings into full-fledged plants, had watched them take root and explode across the once-barren soil. While she couldn’t enjoy their scents or notice the subtle flavor they imparted in her food, she had made them, had tended to the little plants the way she wasn’t allowed to tend to her own heart, to her memories, to the people she had once loved and then lost.
They were only plants, but the garden was all she had.
Tamsin’s fingers fumbled unsteadily with the lock, the metal bar sticking unhelpfully, before she finally managed to pry it open with a grimace-inducing scrape.
Giant droplets of rain plummeted to the ground, turning the long summer grass a singed brown that reeked of death. The sky was darker now, inky and ominous.
There was a creak, then a terrible groan as Tamsin’s fence shattered. One of the wooden fence posts toppled onto her patch of chamomile. She rushed out into her garden only for the rain to turn its violence on her—burning holes into the hem of her skirt, sizzling the ends of her hair, and leaving droplet-size blisters on her skin. She tried to cover her face with her arm, but the pain soon grew too much to bear. Reluctantly, she retreated to the safety of her cottage and its slate-shingled roof, while the heavy rain continued to eat away at the earth.
She settled herself shakily on her too-firm bedroll, rubbing camphor on the angry red welts. She had scoffed when she overheard the tailor tell the butcher how the ground in Farn had opened up, swallowing its citizens whole. But now it was undeniably clear: The plague had been cast using dark magic.
Tamsin’s gut clenched at the thought.
Dark magic, while appealing in its all-encompassing power, drained the earth rather than the witch who cast the spell. As the world tried to overcompensate for the loss of its natural resources, the magic that filled its empty wells became twisted and impure. The side effects of a spell borne from dark magic were endless and horrifying.
Magic was, after all, about balance. That was the first lesson Tamsin had ever learned. The Coven’s High Councillor had warned the young witch that no matter how strong she believed herself to be, magic itself was always much more powerful. And when magic was pulled directly from the earth, the earth had a tendency to rebel.
Tamsin’s empty heart twisted in her chest. When she thought about balance, she thought of her twin sister, of their palms pressed together, of staring into each other’s eyes like a mirror without the glass. Together, they had been their own kind of magic.
Tamsin wished that when she thought of Marlena, she could remember what it had felt like to love her. She wished she could remember more than her sister’s cold, clammy skin and the eerie blue of her lips against the crisp white sheets of the infirmary.
Tamsin could only remember clawing at the cold, wet earth, the dirt caked so thick beneath her fingernails that it took a whole week’s scrubbing to get clean. She could only recall how the ancient words, faded and smudged on the aged scrap of parchment, had stuck in her throat as she spoke them aloud, summoning the magic from the earth below to bind her power to her twin sister’s life.
But though the spell had been successful in saving Marlena, the dark magic hadn’t stopped there. It had slipped through Tamsin’s grasp, taking on a life of its own.
Taking lives.
Tamsin spent most of her mornings wondering why her classmate Amma had still been asleep in the dormitory when the rest of the students had evacuated to higher ground. She agonized over the way Amma must have struggled to breathe as the water poured in—flooding the room in a matter of seconds. Every night, Tamsin replayed the moment when the High Councillor had broken the bond between the sisters and the life had drained from Marlena, too.
She had done that. Tamsin had caused that. Two people were dead thanks to her misguided, desperate attempt to keep her sister alive.
Under the Coven’s rule, the punishment for using dark magic was death. Tamsin had been desperate enough to reach for it anyway. She knew what she had been willing to sacrifice, twelve years old and reckless. But her dark magic hadn’t been strong enough to make it past the Wood, the border of trees that separated the world Within from the world Beyond. Her spell had
