The High Councillor was surely fuming. She was the one who had taken down the dark witch thirty years prior, when Evangeline had used dark magic to cause her own plague. The High Councillor was the one who had founded the Coven, had made it her life’s work to create and enforce a system that would educate the young witches in her care and prevent the use of dark magic. Before the Coven’s takeover, the world of magic had been rogue and chaotic. Now there was an order. There were laws and due process and consequences.
Five years ago, Tamsin had betrayed the High Councillor’s trust. Now another witch had done the same.
Tamsin’s cupboard doors flew open with a sharp bang. The diary shot toward her, slamming into her gut with a shocking amount of force. Tamsin stumbled backward, gasping for air, her eyes never leaving the black book.
The first time, she had been able to write off the diary’s appearance as odd. The second time, she could find no reasonable explanation. She took a swift, shaking breath. Had she summoned it as she recalled her own use of dark magic? Or maybe it was the dark magic itself, messing with her balance. Trying to rekindle her grief. Poking at the yellow bruise of loss she tried so desperately to ignore.
Whatever was happening, Tamsin could not bear to face it. She flung the book back into the crowded cupboard, burying it beneath a moth-eaten quilt. Then she turned to the hearth, where the embers of her earlier fire had all but faded to nothing. Shivering, she took one of the few remaining pieces of firewood from her meager pile and nestled it into the ashes.
She fiddled with the flint, her shaking hands missing a strike once, twice, three times before she saw a spark. Tamsin spoke to the fire, her voice cracking with fear as she coaxed it to life. Once the hearth was filled with a flickering flame, Tamsin turned toward the table.
The diary was lying open to a page filled with loopy black handwriting.
Tamsin swore, her vision swimming as panic crawled its way up her throat. She scooped the book up, ready to fling it into the fire, when her eyes caught on the loop of a letter T.
Her name scribbled in her sister’s handwriting.
Marlena had always been writing. During lessons, meals, free spell periods, she was always scribbling, sometimes so quickly that the ink smeared on her page and splattered her left hand. She was messy, imprecise, and seemingly never out of secrets. Secrets she refused to share.
Tamsin had often tried to read over her sister’s shoulder, sometimes catching the hint of a word before Marlena slammed the cover closed or swatted her roughly away. It had been a part of her sister, that book, the words on the page an extension of Marlena’s soul.
It was one of the reasons Tamsin had never allowed herself to open it. She couldn’t bear to look at her sister’s handwriting and feel nothing but idle curiosity about someone she had once been willing to die for.
Tamsin’s curse had been placed by the Coven as a way to make sure Tamsin’s love for another would never again cloud her judgment. Now the sight of her dead sister’s handwriting brought her nothing but a creeping sense of disquiet.
Even as she settled into a kitchen chair, Tamsin tried to talk herself out of it. But her eyes had already begun to catch on full sentences. The last time a witch had used dark magic, two girls had died. Marlena had been one of them. And now that another spell had been cast, her diary was haunting Tamsin. Hounding her.
It couldn’t be a coincidence. Things either were, or they were not, Councillor Mari used to say. Clearly, the diary wanted something from her. So, Tamsin began to read.
Tamsin is testing me again. I know I shouldn’t blame her—I know it’s just my own jealousy rearing its ugly head—but you’d think she was a princess (one of those relentlessly privileged people that the ordinary folk are forced to worship), walking the halls, laughing with Leya like she doesn’t have a care in the world.
I suppose she doesn’t. It must be so easy to be her. But to be honest (and if you can’t be honest to a book with paper that can’t talk back, where can you be?), I wonder if she isn’t just the slightest bit tired. It must be exhausting, trying to maintain that level of perfection.
I’ve seen the way the councillors look at her when it’s her turn to cast. There’s so much weight there. Such expectation. Me, I can try until my face turns red and my blood runs blue and my vision goes black, and they’ll just sigh that little sigh (you know that sigh, the one I’ve gotten my entire life since my magic “appeared”) and pat me on the back and tell me “nice try,” and then I want to run away and die (but of course I only end up bedridden for days, my brain foggy and my limbs so heavy they might as well be rocks).
I don’t know what I’d do without Amma. I really don’t. Yes, her sight is becoming more advanced, but so are the headaches. What’s a gift if you don’t also have a curse? I’m sure I don’t know. But my sister might.
Sometimes I wish (and yes, I know wishing is futile—my mother is my mother, after all) that I knew what it was like to be her. Really and truly knew. I understand that’s a strange thing to feel about a girl who has the same face as I do (although I do maintain that I’m the
