“So why couldn’t I feel it before I left?” I asked. “The town, I mean. It only really started when I touched the original Grimoire.”
“If you think back, you’ll find it first began when you returned to town for the Gauntlet, in your formal capacity as the Harlow scion, a rising elder,” my father corrected, and he was right—I remembered that raw swell of magic, so much bigger than anything I’d experienced before, that had greeted me so effusively as soon as I crossed town lines. “That would have been the beginning of the transition, from me to you.”
“What transition?” I said, my head swimming. I hadn’t slept at all, on top of being drained from my stint as Arbiter last night, and the aftermath of the adrenaline geyser that had been the tiebreak challenge. Even afraid as I still was for Talia, I was starting to flag.
“The Harlow elder serves as . . . well, think of it as an avatar of the town,” he said. “While all the Harlows take part in the distillation, only one of us at a time maintains such a strong, primal communion with Thistle Grove. And now that you’re back, and old enough to take it on, the communion is transitioning from me to you.”
“And what if I hadn’t come back? What would have happened then?”
“Then it would have shifted over to Delilah, just like the Arbiter’s role.”
But I had come back, just in time to ruin all the things for my cousin in one fell swoop.
“Why isn’t any of this in the Grimoire?” I demanded, massaging my throbbing temples. This changed everything about my place here, how I thought I fit into this town. We Harlows weren’t just the record keepers, after all, but something much bigger and stranger than that. And yet, I thought, with rising aggravation, I’d never even been told about any of it at all. “The Thistle Grove origin story we all get notably includes none of this. Why haven’t I ever heard any of this before?”
If I’d known, everything might have been different. Maybe I’d never have been the kind of person Gareth could hurt as badly as he had. Maybe I’d never even have left at all, too confident in my own worth to be rattled by someone like him.
And maybe, I considered, thinking about it even deeper, this was why the Blackmoores’ long reign hadn’t caused the Harlows any harm. Possibly, as conduits of the magic itself, we were immune to its Gauntlet-related fluctuations, even if we didn’t get to reap its benefits.
“It’s a bit of a sneaky test,” he admitted. “Elias thought of this role as a great privilege, an unparalleled honor. He didn’t want it squandered on someone who didn’t love this town enough to stay here, even without the communion serving as the ultimate prize for their fidelity. So if a Harlow heir were to leave, before the communion was passed down . . .”
“Then they never got to have it,” I said flatly. “Wow. What an utter crock.”
“My sentiments exactly,” my mother murmured into her cup, speaking up for the first time. “What, James? It’s the very worst sort of archaic nonsense to keep it under wraps, and it always has been. And you know it, too.”
“It’s tradition,” my father argued.
“It’s patriarchal codswallop,” she countered, eyebrows raised over the rim of her mug as she took an emphatic sip. “And it’s as though he didn’t even consider the consequences for his family’s standing. This town, as it is now, wouldn’t even exist without the Harlows—and it would do certain other families a great deal of good to recognize as much.”
“Wait, is this why we don’t compete in the Gauntlet, but only arbitrate?” I asked, even more inclined to fume. “Not that we’d win as often, but still, this is a definite advantage—and we don’t even get to try? Because, what, we’re just supposed to settle for our communion with the town, as if there are no other perks to being the Victor of the Gauntlet?”
“Elias believed that being the voice, the human soul of Thistle Grove, should be more than enough for any witch,” my father said, with a helpless shrug. “I imagine he didn’t think longevity, good luck, or any of the rest of it really stacked up in comparison.”
Unlike the other ancestors I’d been seeing in a new light, Elias Harlow was turning out to be every bit the stick in the mud that I’d thought—and not a very ambitious one, to boot. The communion with Thistle Grove was spectacular, almost unspeakably wonderful, he was right about that much; it was clear how deeply my father would miss it, once it fully passed to me. But why limit his descendants this way? Why hamstring us into being this and only this, never anything more? Who was Elias to decide that this was all any of us might ever want from our lives as witches of Thistle Grove?