Justine reached out and put her hand on Sage’s shoulder. “I visited every holiday I possibly could,” she said. “We haven’t missed one for a while, have we?”
Sage smiled at her. “No, indeed.”
After dinner they went into the main room to sit by the fire and relax with glasses of elderberry wine. Eventually Sage and Rosemary sat side by side at the piano and played a showy duet of “Stardust,” embellished with arpeggios and glissandi.
Justine curled up in the corner of the sofa, gathering up her knees beneath the long flowered skirt and hooking an arm around them. She smiled at Jason as he settled next to her. “They like you,” she said in an undertone.
“How can you tell?”
“‘Stardust’ is their best piece. They only play it for people they like.”
“Are they … together?” he asked tactfully.
“Yes. They don’t usually talk about their relationship. The only thing Sage has ever said to me about it is that no matter how old you get, you’re always capable of surprising yourself.”
Jason watched Justine’s expression as the melancholy notes of “Autumn Leaves” filled the air. It was the kind of song that didn’t need words, emotions balanced on every lonely note. Firelight played over Justine’s porcelain skin and the wistful curve of her mouth. Delicate shadows smudged her eyes. She was tired. He wanted to hold her while she slept, her body tranquil and dream-heavy in his arms.
Lightning shot through the sky, accompanied by an earsplitting crack that caused Justine to start. “It feels like the storm will go on forever,” she said.
“I think it will die down enough for you to leave tomorrow,” Sage said, still playing the piano. “Of course, we’ll have to work up a good strong protection spell before you go.”
Justine’s expression tautened, and she gave Jason a wary glance.
“Protection from what?” he asked, his voice pitched so the other women couldn’t hear. “The storm?”
“Sort of.” Justine’s fingers harrowed the folds of her skirt, plucking and smoothing.
His hand covered hers, subduing the restive movements. “Can I help?”
The question nudged a brief smile to her lips. “Saving my life was more than enough.”
As Sage finished the song, Rosemary turned on the bench to face Justine. “We have something important to discuss,” she said.
Even though he knew it was none of his business, Jason couldn’t stop himself from saying, “It would be better to wait until the morning.” Justine was still fragile from the day’s events, not entirely in control of herself. At the moment, the only likely result of a discussion, or argument, was mutual frustration.
Justine frowned, pulling her hand from his. “It’s something I have to talk to them about,” she told him. “I wouldn’t be able to sleep otherwise. It’s why I came to visit in the first place.” Her mouth pulled into an apologetic little grimace. “I don’t mean to be rude, but … could you go to the guest room for a little while?”
“Of course.” Standing, Jason went to the built-in bookshelf near the fireplace. “I’ll grab a couple of books to take with me. I’ve been wanting to catch up on my reading.” He pulled a couple of random volumes from the shelf. “Especially…” He paused to glance at the top title in the stack. “Mushrooms of the Pacific Northwest. And The History of Marine Propellers and Propulsion.”
“You’ll love that one,” Justine told him.
He gave her a sardonic glance. “Don’t spoil the ending for me.”
* * *
Jason had insisted on carrying the dishes into the kitchen before going upstairs to the tower bedroom. It had pleased and surprised Justine to discover that a man of his position would help with housework. And it amused her to see how much Rosemary liked him in spite of herself.
“It’s not that I dislike men,” Rosemary said defensively, after Justine had made a comment to that effect. “It’s just that I dislike so many of them.”
That remark, and her sour expression, caused both Justine and Sage to crack up as they rinsed and stacked dishes at the sink.
Rosemary wiped the countertop with great dignity. “I will admit,” she said after a moment, “that Jason is a charming and well-spoken man. Not to mention intelligent. I can hardly credit that he once played football.”
Justine affected a tone of grave concern. “I hope he hasn’t ruined any stereotypes for you, Rosemary.”
“I don’t stereotype. I generalize.”
“Is there a difference?” Justine asked with a grin. “You have to explain it to me, because I don’t see one.”
“I’ll explain it,” Sage interceded. “If Rosemary were to say that all men are insensitive brutes who love football and drink beer, that would be stereotyping. However, if Rosemary said that most men are insensitive brutes who love football and drink beer, she would be generalizing.”
Justine listened with a dubious expression. “Neither version gives men much credit.”
“That’s because none of them deserve it,” Rosemary said.
Sage said to Justine sotto voce, “That is stereotyping.”
The three of them worked companionably in the kitchen, rinsing dishes and loading the dishwasher until it was full. Justine volunteered to wash the large soup pot in the sink. As she plunged her hands into hot soapy water and scrubbed the pot, she pondered how best to open the subject of the curse, when Sage did it for her.
“Justine, darling … Rosemary seems to believe that you have somehow managed to break the geas. Which I told her couldn’t be true, since it would be nearly impossible for you to accomplish such a thing on your own.”
Justine didn’t pause in her scrubbing. “So you admit there was a geas?”
A nerve-grating silence greeted her question.
Justine was astonished that they were trying to keep secrets from her, even when those secrets had a profound impact on her life. After Zoë, there was no one Justine had ever trusted more than these two women. To be deceived by them hurt her on as deep a level as Marigold had ever reached.
“There was a geas,” Rosemary admitted quietly. “Let’s return to the main room and sit together while we—”
“Not yet. Still working on this pot.” Justine scoured the stainless steel with frantic intensity. She needed an activity—if she had to sit still with nothing to occupy her, she felt as if she might explode.
“Very well.” The two women sat on wooden stools at the small kitchen island table.
Sage’s voice again: “Justine, will you tell us how you found out? And what you’ve done about it?”
“Yes. But first I’m going to tell you why I did it. Although you already know.”
“You wanted love” came the quiet reply. Justine wasn’t even certain which one of them had said it.
“I wanted at least a chance at it.” Justine drained the soapy pot and began to rinse it industriously. She tried to speak calmly, but her voice had tightened like a windup mechanism until it threatened to break. “How many times have I sat in this kitchen and bitched and cried and told you that I knew something was wrong with me? I even asked you once if it might have something to do with magic, and you both said no. You said things like, ‘It’ll happen someday, Justine. Just be patient, Justine.’ But you were lying. You knew there was no freaking chance I’d ever have anyone. That I would always be alone. How could you do that to me?”
“One can be alone,” Rosemary said, “without being lonely. And lonely without being alone.”
Infuriated, Justine set the pot on the counter with unnecessary force. “I don’t need fortune-cookie wisdom. I need answers.”
Sage spoke gently. “Justine, you were going to tell us how you found out about the geas.”
Still facing away from them, Justine braced her wet hands on the sink. “The Triodecad,” she muttered. “Page thirteen.”
Her shoulders stiffened as she heard audible gasps.
“Jumping Jupiter on a pogo stick,” Rosemary said.
“Oh, Justine,” Sage faltered, “you were told never to do that.”
“I was told about a lot of things. Unfortunately the geas was not one of them. So I had to find out from the Triodecad.” Justine turned to face them defiantly. “It’s my spellbook, and my decision to make.”
Rosemary sounded more bewildered than accusatory. “You aren’t nearly so naïve as to think you can break one of the rules of magic without causing consequences for everyone in the coven.”
“I’m not a covener. So it’s my business and no one else’s. I opened the Triodecad to page thirteen, and it gave me the spell to break a geas, and I followed the instructions.” She gave them both a rebellious glance. “Now I’ve got some questions: Who cast a curse on me, and why? Does my mother know about it? Why hasn’t anyone ever told me? Because I can’t imagine what I’ve ever done to make someone hate me that much.”
Neither of them wanted to reply. As Justine looked from one face to another, she had a bad feeling, a standing-on-the-train-tracks feeling.
“It wasn’t done out of hatred,” Sage said carefully. “It was done out of love, dear.”
“Who the hell was it?”
“It was Marigold,” Rosemary said in a quiet voice. “She did it to protect you.”
Justine was stunned, suspended in ice. It made no sense. “Protect me from what?” she managed to ask, although it hurt to force the words from her throat.
“Marigold barely survived losing your father,” Sage said. “She wasn’t … herself for a long time afterward.”
“She wasn’t sane,” Rosemary said. “She was in the kind of pain that leaves no room for anything else. And even after she recovered, she was never the same. She came to us when you were still an infant, and said she had decided that her only child must never endure such agony. She wanted to bind a geas to you, so that you would be protected from loss forever.”
“Protect me from loss,” Justine said in a hollow voice, “by making certain I’d never have anything to lose.” She wrapped her arms around herself, an instinctive effort to keep from falling to pieces. Emotions flooded into the blankness like watercolors bleeding across wet paper.
“… disagreed with her,” Sage was saying. “But she was your mother. A mother has the right to make decisions for her child.”
“Not that kind of decision,” Justine said fiercely. “Some decisions even a mother doesn’t get to make.” It infuriated her further to read from their expressions that she had scored a point. “Why didn’t you stop her?”
“We assisted her, Justine,” Rosemary said. “The entire coven did. The geas was too powerful a spell to accomplish on her own.”
Justine could hardly breathe. “You all helped her?”
“Marigold was one of the coven. We were bound to help her. It was a collective choice.”
“But … I never got a choice.”
They had betrayed her, all of them.
It seemed as if everything in the universe were a lie. Justine felt like a wounded wild thing, ready to attack, wanting to hurt someone, including herself.
“It was for your safety.” She heard Rosemary’s voice through the pounding blood in her ears.
“Marigold didn’t want me to be safe,” Justine cried. “She wanted me to be in a prison she’d made. I would be alone, and then what choice would I have except to copy her life exactly? I would have to join the coven and follow her plan, and she would oversee everything I did and I would be just like her. She didn’t want a daughter. She wanted a clone.”
“She loved you,” Sage said. “I know that she still does.”
It outraged Justine more than anything else that Sage could look at what had been done to her and call it love. “How do you know that? Because she said so? Don’t you understand the difference between love and control?”
“Justine, please try to understand—”
“I understand,” she said, thrilling with anger so intense it felt like panic. “You’re the ones who don’t understand. You want to believe every mother wants the best for her child. But some don’t.”
“She didn’t mean to hurt you, Justine—”
“She meant to do exactly what she did.”
“She may not have been a perfect mother, but—”
“Don’t try to tell me what kind of mother Marigold was. I’m the only person in the world who knows what it was like to be raised by her. A mother is supposed to want her child to have an education and a stable home. Instead I was dragged around like a cheap suitcase. My mother never stayed anywhere or stuck with anything unless it was ‘fun.’ And whenever parenting wasn’t fun, which was most of the time, I had to fend for myself. Because I was inconvenient.”
It was the truth. But neither of them wanted to hear it, like most people faced with uncomfortable truths. Their relationships with Marigold and Justine, their culpability in the geas, their trust in the coven’s collective wisdom, all of it was suddenly precarious. And Justine knew exactly how they were going to handle it. They would blame her for being rebellious and difficult. It was easier to blame the troublemaker, the unhappy victim, rather than look inward.
“Of course you’re upset,” Sage said. “You need time to adjust to this, but there isn’t time. We must do something now, darling, because in changing your fate, you’ve managed to—”
“I didn’t change my fate,” Justine snapped, “I changed it back.” Energy smoldered beneath her skin, racing from cell to cell.
Rosemary was staring at her oddly, her face drawn. “Justine,” she said carefully, “you can’t ever change things back to exactly what they were before. Your fate has been shaped by every action you’ve ever taken. For every action there is a reaction. And in breaking the geas, you’ve upset the balance between the spiritual realm and the physical world. You’ve created a storm in more ways than one.”
As far as Justine was concerned, the last straw was having to endure a lecture from a woman who had helped to place a lifelong curse on her. “Then you shouldn’t have helped to curse me in the first place!” The energy released in a volatile and undirected snap, flooding the light fixture on the ceiling. A trio of bulbs exploded, glass raining and glittering in the remaining glow from the corner lamp.