When she lifted her gaze and looked through the window, Kylie spied a handsome man in his twenties at his desk, his attention riveted on the book he was reading. The vine at the window scraped against the glass as Kylie leaned upon the sill, a slight sound, but one that caused Tom Lockland to turn from his studies. He was the seventh generation in his family to have that name and he carried the weight of those who’d come before him. He closed his book and turned off the light before rising from the desk.
It was only natural for Tom to be wary as he opened the door to Kylie, for he was a man who’d been bred to be cautious. His shaven head only served to bring out his sharp, intelligent features. Although he had been studying the Dark Art since he was a boy, the magic he practiced was a thin, weak strain, and the best he could accomplish were parlor tricks, sleight of hand, small incantations that called up desire in the women he met, and impressed drunken patrons in pubs when he held fire in his hand. Any real witch would laugh at his attempts, but not at his expertise in poison. That was one art in which he excelled, bringing people to the brink of death, using the herbs in an old poison garden that grew wild in Devotion Field where he foraged for Amanita virosa, a local variety of mushroom known as the Destroying Angel.
His life’s work was revenge and he was more than willing to use left-handed magic to do so. Like called to like, and to destroy something you often had to become it yourself. Tom had claimed the Crooked Path and took to walking at Lockland Manor, once his family’s sprawling estate, now belonging to the National Trust, visited by scores of hikers and vacationers when there was fine weather. The house itself had been built in the 1300s, but it was mostly a shell, topped by a tall spire, for it had been consumed in flame, and for those who dared to venture inside it was possible to look through the damaged ceilings to the sky above. It should have all been his—the parkland, the manor house, the family wealth—but the Locklands’ circumstances had grown worse with each generation and people in the village had calmly watched them come to ruin. There was drink involved, and bad luck; marriages were wrecked, lives were cut short, poverty haunted them, jail terms led to disaster. It was a tradition for women married to the Locklands to disappear and leave their men, and there were few who could blame them. Tom’s own mother had vanished on his fifth birthday and his father had neglected him, leaving him to sit outside the pubs he frequented where Tom would wait till all hours, having been reminded not to call his father Dad in front of any of the ladies, beaten when he talked back, sleeping in a shed whenever one of these ladies was brought home for the night. Tom had learned that women were heartache from the moment you encountered them and that men were not to be trusted. The first Thomas Lockland swore he’d married a witch; he’d taken their son away from his wife to be raised by his sisters, but in the end his wife had ruined him. When she ran away, he tracked her to the house of a woman who practiced the Nameless Art and after his downfall at the hands of this woman, Hannah Owens, his wife had run off with another man and the child they’d had during her marriage to Lockland.
The family curse had been initiated when his seventh great-grandfather was poisoned only half an hour’s walk from the village, in a place called Devotion Field, where an apothecary garden had once grown, rife with dangerous plants including yarrow and black nightshade, wolfsbane and foxglove and lords and ladies with its toxic black berries. All this bad fortune had been conjured by a cunning woman who had long ago been burned. Festivals were held on what had once been her land on the old holidays of May Eve, All Hallows’ Eve, Candlemas, and Lammas, with women gathering as the wheel of the year moved forward. On these occasions, white paper bags lit by candles arose into the violet sky so that stars seemed to be both falling and rising.
People in the village were fools for the old folkways and they always had been, leaving out saucers of goat’s milk for witches on overcast nights, allowing crows to fly through their windows rather than chase them away, drinking herbal teas they thought would strengthen their constitutions. It was the village council that had voted to remove the Locklands from their property nearly three hundred years earlier and Tom intended to pay them back threefold. Let them sit in their houses and hide, let them lock their doors and leave the streets of the village empty. When he had the power to do so, he would make them understand what it was like to be in exile in your own home.