“You’re off to find him,” Vincent said knowingly, for it seemed Sally was a finder, just as he was. “He’s the lock, and you need to know what the key is to be rid of him. You must give up the one thing he wants.”
Sally listened, then embraced Vincent before quickly getting into the passenger seat. “Can you drive on the wrong side?” Sally asked her sister, nervous, especially when they took off at top speed.
“I can do everything on the wrong side,” Gillian assured her. “Where to?”
Jesse had told Sally the way to the manor. “Go west and keep driving.”
Theirs was the only car on the road, and they soon enough reached the forest. The red rain had gone to the east and inflicted little damage here, with only a drop or two destroying patches of ivy and ferns. Gillian parked in the lot for visitors; through the trees they could spy the ruin before them. There were buzzards and kestrels and sparrow hawks, all on alert, for skylarks and starlings and nuthatches nested here in great abundance. The birds made a racket when the car pulled in and fluttered around Sally when she stepped out of the car.
“It doesn’t look like much,” Gillian said of the ruined manor.
Sally had the spell Franny had given her. In every hex-breaker there were sacrifices, and most began with what was most dear, a gem, an amulet, and in this case, locks of hair, a gift you thought would always be yours.
Sally and Gillian had left the car to walk into the forest, stopping in a shadowy glade carpeted with ferns, lady’s fern, maidenhair, spleenwort, hart’s-tongue, bracken.
“You’re sure?” Gillian asked, for they had discussed what came next, and she knew what her sister intended.
Sally nodded, then sat cross-legged on the ground. Gillian draped her scarf on Sally’s lap so that the hair she was about to cut could be collected. Sally closed her eyes and imagined Ian as he’d been on the day she had found him. Once he’d begun to recover, they’d left him to dress. Franny wasn’t the only one to see him fully unclothed, Sally had as well. She’d turned back at the last moment; she’d spied the crow on his back and that was when she’d known he was the one. She’d fought it all this while, but her fate had written the future on both palms of her hands, the left and the right, the one that was made for her and the one she’d made for herself.
Save a man once, and you have a heart. Save him twice and he has yours.
When all of Sally’s hair had been clipped off, the birds came to gather strands for their nests. Her beautiful dark hair gone, her one vanity, her night to Gillian’s day, was now wound into the trees. This small sacrifice was given with humility and devotion, an offering from the age of Achilles, a practice of warrior women from the beginning of time so they could not be dragged away by their hair. Sally took the razor and cut her arm, dripping blood into the spell before they set a small pile of her hair on fire. When it burned, the smoke wasn’t red as she expected, but milky white. There was the scent of lilacs, and where there are lilacs, there will be luck.
When Sally arose, Gillian assumed she would accompany her, but Sally shook her head.
“I know you want to help me, but just your being here is help enough.”
Sally had dark pools under her eyes; with her shaven head and narrow frame she seemed little more than a girl. But she was a woman in her forties, with grown daughters of her own, and she refused to hear any arguments, no matter how persuasive her sister might be.
“Two against one would be safer,” Gillian told her sister. “How can I let you go?”
Sally shook her head, defiant, and said, “You know it has to be me.”
My daughter, my sacrifice, my magic.
Wild blackberries grew here, the fruit and bark used as ingredients in many of the oldest spells, often called the bramble. Sally felt her bloodline inside of her, everything she had ignored and avoided and despised when she was young, the power she had denied, the magic she had believed would ruin her could save her now. Gillian watched her sister, still beautiful without her hair. Up in an arched window there was a shadow reflecting in the only glass left in the house. It was the dark girl Gillian had seen in the fens, trapped in time. The shade lifted her hand and Gillian raised hers in return. Her frantic heart was in her throat. You live in the past. But if you are here, help us.