Luna studies it carefully, a thousand questions rolling through her mind. She wants to reach out and peel back the dressing for a closer look, to check if it is numbers there, or perhaps just a wound that resembled numbers. But no—she remembers seeing it through the lens of the magnifying glass. The odd vertical positioning of the digits. Someone did that to her sister.
There has to be a reason for it.
As she stares down at the dressing, a flash of something brightens vividly in her memory. A knife. Blood flying through the air like a dark ribbon.
Instinctively, her right hand reaches for the white line on her left forearm. She has no idea how she got this scar. But now the thought of Clover’s wound summons a memory. A girl, about ten years old, standing in front of her. A worried look on her face.
She held out a hand.
We have to take hands, she said.
It only works if we hold hands.
SAPPHIRE, 1998
I
Saffy is fully dressed beneath the bedclothes. Every thirty seconds she glances at her wristwatch, sighing with frustration. Why did Brodie want to meet so late? She knows why—he’s waiting until his parents are asleep so nobody asks any questions. But still. If the wait doesn’t kill her, the apprehension will.
In the meantime, she reads. When Liv told them all to pack their gear and leave York in the middle of the night, she’d been so out of it that she’d not packed a single one of her many books. She hates that she didn’t bring any. Drew, her mum’s vile boyfriend—or ex-boyfriend, she figures—will probably chuck them all out. She was an avid reader. The small selection of books in the bothy aren’t exactly thrilling, some from the 1970s on shipping routes and seabirds, but she is intrigued by the strange handwritten book bearing the name of her mum’s commissioner, Patrick Roberts. His grimoire.
The GRIMOIRE of Patrick Roberts
I will never know how many women Duncan accused, and how many were accused by his wife and sons. Following this accusation, the Laird of Lòn Haven had applied to the Privy Council for a Royal Inquiry into the practice of witchcraft on the island. About twenty of the accused didn’t get charged—folk said they’d bribed their way out of it—and in the end, twelve women and girls from the village were taken from their homes and thrown in the hole beneath the broch, where they were imprisoned until the trial. Among the women were my mother, as well as Jenny, Amy’s older sister, and her mother, Finwell.
Amy stopped speaking. I believe she stopped eating, too, because she quickly grew so thin that her green eyes seemed to bulge out of her head and her knee bones looked like they were going to explode out of her skin.
My father was still gone, and I had to look after my little brother. My uncle lived nearby but didn’t help, and I could understand why—folk were already distancing themselves from me and my brother due to our being the children of a witch. It didn’t matter that the trial hadn’t taken place. Women couldn’t present evidence against their accusers, so to be accused was as good as being guilty.
Still, I held fast to the thought that the judges would find my mother, as well as Jenny and Finwell, innocent. It was wrong, so very wrong—I knew Duncan deserved what he’d got, and he was still gravely ill, but he had violated my mother. The only person who belonged at the bottom of the broch was Duncan.
And none of us, not the gifted healers nor Amy, with her stones and powers of bringing fish back to life, could do anything about it.
But then Duncan died, and the whole of Lòn Haven was set alight with terror and intrigue. He was buried the day before the trial. It had been two months since my mother and the other women and girls were taken into the broch by the sea.
The trial was held in the kirk. Amy and I were present, covered as best we could with shawls so as not to draw attention from the villagers.
Each woman and girl was presented in turn, silent and weak, as the charges against her was read before the crowd, as well as her confessions.