Museum of Magic, page 4
“I don’t know!” Emmi snapped. Puck jerked back at her violent tone, but it wasn’t his movement that caught her eye.
It was the mirror.
On the wall opposite the hearth, the old scrying mirror, ancient and spotted. The dull surface only ever reflected the room. Schoolchildren on field trips would dare each other to say “Bloody Mary” in it.
But it was only ever just a mirror.
Except now?
It did not reflect the room.
Instead of the wall and the fireplace, the mirror now reflected an outdoor scene. Dark clouds in a twilit sky over a rugged cliff in front of crashing waves. An old stone building—a church, perhaps—barely visible in the mist.
As Emmi stepped closer, an image of a person came into focus, timed with Emmi’s steps. The person did not have Emmi’s face, did not even wear her shocked expression. It was a woman, older than her by more than two decades at least.
And she was furious.
The Devil, Transposed
finding strength, being on the right path but feeling trapped
Emmi was barely conscious of her feet moving across the carpet, slowly drawing her closer to the mirror.
To the woman screaming inside the mirror.
It wasn’t screaming, not exactly. There were words. The woman’s mouth moved up and down too purposefully to be anything but words.
But the mirror was silent.
It didn’t matter that the woman’s entire face strained with the effort it took to shout; no sound came out. Her fists were curled near her face, shaking with effort. Emmi shook her head a little, lips parting. “I can’t hear you,” she whispered in a strangled voice.
“What?” Puck asked.
Emmi ignored him. The woman’s eyes were on her and her alone, red-rimmed and tired-looking. When Emmi shifted a little, the woman’s eyes followed her. But even when Puck moved behind Emmi, the woman’s gaze did not flicker to him.
So much about the woman seemed—pained. Not just the corded muscles of her neck as she screamed silently or the white knuckles of her fists. She had been shaven, a short and uneven stubble of brownish hair across her scalp. Whoever had done this to her had not been gentle and had used a dull blade that scraped across her skin, leaving gashes more than nicks. A trickle of dried blood from a particularly brutal scrape tracked around a small mole over her left ear.
The woman wore vaguely medieval clothing. Not Renaissance Faire garb, but actual medieval clothing, a rough brown kirtle over a dingy white smock. Emmi knew enough about the clothing from that time to know that while the woman was fully covered, these were considered underthings. She lacked a proper gown—and from the looks of the dark gray skies and the goosebumps along the woman’s skin, she could do with a woolen cloak as well.
But it was hard to focus on any of these details as the woman did not cease screaming in the mirror. Whatever message she was trying to say was obviously urgent, and the longer Emmi went without understanding her, the more distressed she seemed.
“What do you think she’s saying?” Emmi asked. Puck stood behind her now, close enough that if she leaned backwards, she’d fall against him.
“Who?” Puck asked.
Emmi whipped around, staring at him. Puck seemed completely oblivious about the woman in the mirror, not perturbed at all. He was watching her as if she were the oddest thing in the room. Not a medieval woman screaming in a mirror.
“What…” Horror washed over her. Somehow, Puck not seeing the woman was worse than how she did see her. “What do you see when you look into the mirror?”
“You. Me.” Puck looked behind his shoulder. “This room. Why? What do you see?”
“Not that.” Emmi turned hollowly back to the mirror. The woman was watching her. As she spoke to Puck, the woman had silenced, but as soon as Emmi turned her full attention back, she started screaming again.
“What do you—?” Puck started.
“Shh!” Emmi hissed. She concentrated wholly on the woman’s mouth. She shouted the same thing over and over again, Emmi was sure of that. Just…three words. Perhaps she could…she could figure this out?
Emmi watched as the woman’s teeth bared in the first word, lips snarling. Then her mouth slammed shut before bursting out the next word. She ended with a furious scream-like word that stretched her lips wide.
Emmi found herself copying the woman’s lips, imitating the way her tongue and teeth moved. “Sss,” she said, copying her. “Mmmm—my! Lah? No…” The woman cycled back to the first word. “Sssss…ay! Say! Say…my…nnnn. Nae.” Emmi huffed a breath, realizing the woman’s words. “Say my name.”
She didn’t take her eyes off the mirror as she repeated it. “Say my name. That’s what she’s saying.”
“What who is saying?” Puck asked gently. He may not see whatever Emmi saw, but he believed her. That was oddly comforting.
“I don’t know,” Emmi said. “A woman. Medieval. She’s in the mirror—wait!” Emmi rushed to the mirror, splaying her hand on the cold glass, streaking soot and ash over the surface. “She’s fading! She’s—”
And just like that, she was gone. The storm clouds in the distance of the woman’s outdoor horizon were the last to evaporate to nothing.
Emmi’s eyes shifted focus from the reflection to her own hands. To the paper she still clutched. She spun around to Puck. “There was a woman in the mirror,” she said.
“Yes, I gathered.”
“She wanted me to say her name.”
“Will you?” Puck was, at best, idly curious, and his lack of urgency in the situation made Emmi want to punch him.
“No!” Emmi shouted. “I don’t know her name!”
“Yes,” Puck said. “I can see how that would be a problem.”
Growling, Emmi ignored him, looking back at the mirror, but it showed nothing now but her own grim face. I can figure this out, Emmi thought. The witchcraft part? That was confusing. But this? This was history. And Emmi knew history.
“That beach—rocky, curving—that is like the coastlines of Scotland, maybe northern England,” she said, musing aloud. “Not really a cliff like Dover, more like…craggy. There was at least a little sand on the beach below her. And a rock! I remember a rock in the water, big, like an island.”
“These very specific details will surely help you solve this mystery,” Puck said. “A rock, you say?”
Emmi ignored him. “She was definitely dressed in medieval or early Renaissance clothing. Hard to pinpoint the exact time with nothing but a kirtle really; they were used for centuries. Brown dye could have been any era. There was a building,” Emmi said, remembering suddenly. “A stone building—maybe a church? Behind her shoulder.”
“Good thing there aren’t that many medieval stone buildings in Scotland during the Middle Ages.” Puck sounded sincere, but Emmi knew he was being sarcastic.
“Or Renaissance,” Emmi growled.
“Yes, let’s add a few more centuries to our possible time frame for the mysterious mirror woman,” Puck said. “It’s always best to broaden the scope rather than narrow it.”
“Not helping,” Emmi muttered. With the mirror now just a normal mirror, she had nothing to do but look at the paper still in her hand. She brought the writing closer to her face. She’d noticed before that the handwriting was old, not just in age but also style. “I think maybe the woman was Renaissance, at least if she was linked to this paper,” Emmi said. “It’s not Middle English. It’s, technically, modern English. But like Shakespearean. Badly-spelled Shakespearean.”
She glanced at Puck through her eyelashes. It hadn’t gone past her notice that Puck was named after a Shakespearean character. She wondered if it was his real name, or if he’d mocked her by picking the name of a famous fae. If it was his real name, Emmi wondered if Puck was the Puck, servant to Oberon, king of the fae. Or maybe that was all myth.
Focus, Emmi, she told herself. Holding the old paper up, Emmi read the words carefully and slowly. “‘The description of the fourth kind of Sprites—no, I mean, Spirits.” The spelling really was bad. “‘Called the…Pharoah?” She forced herself to interpret each individual letter. P. H. A. I. R. I. E. What on Earth? But then she sounded it out, the same way she’d sounded out the mirror woman’s words. The “ph” became an “f” sound, and it clicked—fairy. “‘What is possible therein, and what is but illusion,’” she finished, guessing at the last word as it was torn off from the ripped page.
“Well, that doesn’t make much sense,” Puck offered.
“It tells us some.” Emmi headed to the door, Puck on her heels. “This is probably around the early 1600s, I think, judging from the way it’s written. The library may have something.”
“You have a library in your house?” For the first time, Puck sounded impressed. Emmi spared a glance at him as she headed up the stairs to the second floor. Okay, noted. Magic mirrors didn’t faze the boy, but a room of books was awe-inspiring.
Elspeth Castor’s library wasn’t exactly the dream-like fantasy that Beast presented to Belle in the Disney cartoon, but Emmi certainly felt like nowhere in the house was as magical as the aisles of mahogany shelves and meticulously recorded books. She went straight to the row of records from seventeenth century England, an eclectic mix of fiction and nonfiction, folios and bound copies mingling with handmade journals and scrolls of maps.
“How do you know where anything is?” Puck asked, eyes wide.
Emmi looked back at the paper. “I…” How was she supposed to find the exact paper that matched this one, and why did she think it would help her find the name of the woman in the mirror? And how did any of that help her remake a broken witch bottle and bring her Grandfather home? The impossibility of the situation washed over Emmi, and she felt her heart racing, her pulse pounding in her ears.
“Hey,” Puck said, noticing her rising panic. “Hey, hey, hey. What’s wrong? You have books. Books make you happy, yeah?”
Emmi snorted through her heavy breathing. Puck had only known her for a few hours, and he’d already honed in on how much of a nerd she was. The ridiculousness of that idea calmed her enough to say, “I don’t know how to find what we need.”
“So use your magic.” Puck said it so simply that Emmi jerked fully out of her shock.
“I don’t have magic. You’re the one who blasted wind out of his hands.”
“You’re the one who saw the woman in the mirror,” Puck pointed out. “Not me. You have a different sort of magic.”
“The kind that can see things,” Emmi said sarcastically.
But Puck nodded. “Yes. Exactly. You can see through the mysts, into the mystical.”
“Well, I’m not seeing anything here.”
“Have you tried?”
“Yes!” Emmi shouted, but then she stopped. She was seeing, but was she seeing? How did one turn on such a power? She hadn’t really done anything to see the woman in the mirror.
Emmi took a calming breath. She shut her eyes. Another breath. She let her body relax. She took a step forward, another.
And bumped her nose into a book.
Opening her eyes, she saw the spine and, with a trembling hand, she pulled it from the shelf.
“It didn’t work,” Emmi said, lifting the book up to shove it back into place.
“Why do you say that?” Puck grabbed the book and flipped through the pages.
“That’s MacBeth.” Emmi’s voice was flat. “It’s not whatever this came from.” She waved the burnt scrap of paper at Puck’s face.
“There’s witches in this,” Puck said, pausing. “Maybe you need this book, not the book the paper came from. Your magic could have pulled you to this title.”
Emmi shook her head. Yes, there were witches in MacBeth. They stole the show, what with their double, double, boil and trouble. But it was fiction, and it wasn’t what she needed, witches or not.
Emmi snatched the book out of Puck’s hands, intent on reshelving it, but the cover fell open, exposing the first page. And just as Emmi had caught movement in the mirror before she saw the woman, she thought—for a moment—she caught a swirling glimmer of gold over the page. She focused in on the words, reading the opening lines of the play. “‘When shall we three meet again, in thunder, lightning, or in rain?’” She looked up at Puck. “You were right.”
“I usually am. About what?”
“This was what I needed to see.” She pointed to the words, no longer shining. “The storm. There was a storm behind the woman in the mirror. And a storm here, in the text.” Her mind raced, trying to recall the details she’d learned. “The witch hunts in England started because of the witch hunts in Scotland. The king—James. James VI of Scotland. After he was married, his boat almost sank on the return journey from Denmark. He blamed witches. He started the witch hunts because of the storm.”
“Uh-huh,” Puck said, nodding but clearly not following along.
“When Queen Elizabeth died, she was the Virgin Queen. She had no heirs. James the Sixth of Scotland became James the First of England. And Shakespeare wrote MacBeth to, well, to suck up to the new king.” Emmi looked down at the paper in her hand. “This has something to do with James, I’m sure of it. James and the first witch hunt. Or…” her gaze slid over to the book she still held. “Or it has something to do with Shakespeare, and James’s connection to MacBeth?”
Puck shrugged. “No idea.”
It didn’t feel like enough. These clues were too distant from the witch bottle, and none of it seemed powerful or important enough to save the woman in the mirror who so clearly desperately needed help. Needed Emmi to say her name.
And how will this help me find Grandfather? Emmi thought.
“I don’t know what to do,” she said helplessly.
“What if we go there?” Puck said. “Maybe you’ll see—I mean, really see—something if we go there.”
“Go where?” Emmi held up the copy of MacBeth. “To the Globe?”
“The globe?”
“The Globe Theater, where Shakespeare did all his plays.” How could a boy named Puck not know about the Globe?
“Sure.” Puck shrugged. “Or we go to the random Scottish coast from the mirror, if you can figure out where that was. There was a big rock, if you recall, that’ll help you locate it.”
“Okay, let me grab my passport and just hop on a plane.” Emmi rolled her eyes. They’d saved for months for Grandfather’s trip; she knew the credit card he’d given her for emergencies wouldn’t cover an international flight, much less any other expenses.
“A…plane?” Puck shook his head. “Why wouldn’t you just use an ash sigil?”
She remembered then the magic design Puck had drawn in the hearth’s ash, the way it had shown the Orkney Islands.
She could go. To see. Or…to see. They could go right now.
She just had to decide where. The Globe Theater? Or pinpoint the Scottish coast and find the woman in the mirror? No—the Shakespearean connection felt too tenuous.
“Scotland,” Emmi said, looking at Puck with determination in her eyes. “We need to go to Scotland.”
But first, they had to figure out where in Scotland to go.
The King of Cups
deep feelings and finding the right path
Emmi stared down at the open book in her lap. It still felt…not enough. Like she was missing an essential piece of the puzzle. Idly, she turned the page, scanning the words of the infamous Scottish play.
“‘Fair is foul and foul is fair,’” she muttered.
“Reasonable words to live by,” Puck said amiably.
She turned the page and gasped aloud.
“What?” Puck leaned over the book. Someone had circled the lines in the play where the first witch said:
But in a sieve I'll thither sail,
And, like a rat without a tail,
I'll do, I'll do, and I'll do.
And in her grandfather’s handwriting, Emmi read the scribble in the margins: “‘Storms and News from Scotland.’” She traced her finger under the last three words—her grandfather had underlined them emphatically.
“Scotland again.” Puck sounded rather unimpressed.
“And storms.”
“Still not exactly helpful.”
Emmi looked back at the circled text. Sailing in a sieve? That was ridiculous. She tried to picture a person stepping into a boat-sized colander, the holes making it sink immediately. It was impossible—if someone were to do such a thing it would be… “Magic,” she whispered.
She glanced down at the paper in her hand, the soot-streak, burnt-edged scrap that had been in the witch bottle. It, too, spoke of fairies and impossible, magic things.
“There’s a reason why MacBeth featured witches, and why it’s called the Scottish play,” Emmi said, dropping the book to the floor and standing. She rushed to the book shelves, Puck watching her. “Shakespeare wrote it for King James. And he added the witches because…aha!” She crowed triumphantly, tapping a book. The King James Version of the Bible—commissioned by the same King James who watched MacBeth when it was originally performed for him. And beside it, Daemonologie.
She pulled the slender volume from the shelf. “James wrote this before he became King of England,” she told Puck, who shrugged, seemingly not seeing the connection.
Emmi scanned the pages of Daemonologie quickly. Black-and-white etched illustrations near the back caught her eye, and she slowed down, flipping the pages to the chapter header.
“News from Scotland!” she said, thrusting the book at Puck. She snatched it back before he could focus on it, reading quickly. “The news is witch trials!” she exclaimed. “James heard the dittays—the testimonies—himself.” Her eyes puzzled through the difficult Scottish spelling. “It all centers around a place called ‘North Barrick Kirk.’”
Finally Puck looked interested. “Now we’re narrowing it down, Castor. A town.”
“And a building,” Emmi said. “‘Kirk’ means church. The church in the town of North Barrick.”
It was the mirror.
On the wall opposite the hearth, the old scrying mirror, ancient and spotted. The dull surface only ever reflected the room. Schoolchildren on field trips would dare each other to say “Bloody Mary” in it.
But it was only ever just a mirror.
Except now?
It did not reflect the room.
Instead of the wall and the fireplace, the mirror now reflected an outdoor scene. Dark clouds in a twilit sky over a rugged cliff in front of crashing waves. An old stone building—a church, perhaps—barely visible in the mist.
As Emmi stepped closer, an image of a person came into focus, timed with Emmi’s steps. The person did not have Emmi’s face, did not even wear her shocked expression. It was a woman, older than her by more than two decades at least.
And she was furious.
The Devil, Transposed
finding strength, being on the right path but feeling trapped
Emmi was barely conscious of her feet moving across the carpet, slowly drawing her closer to the mirror.
To the woman screaming inside the mirror.
It wasn’t screaming, not exactly. There were words. The woman’s mouth moved up and down too purposefully to be anything but words.
But the mirror was silent.
It didn’t matter that the woman’s entire face strained with the effort it took to shout; no sound came out. Her fists were curled near her face, shaking with effort. Emmi shook her head a little, lips parting. “I can’t hear you,” she whispered in a strangled voice.
“What?” Puck asked.
Emmi ignored him. The woman’s eyes were on her and her alone, red-rimmed and tired-looking. When Emmi shifted a little, the woman’s eyes followed her. But even when Puck moved behind Emmi, the woman’s gaze did not flicker to him.
So much about the woman seemed—pained. Not just the corded muscles of her neck as she screamed silently or the white knuckles of her fists. She had been shaven, a short and uneven stubble of brownish hair across her scalp. Whoever had done this to her had not been gentle and had used a dull blade that scraped across her skin, leaving gashes more than nicks. A trickle of dried blood from a particularly brutal scrape tracked around a small mole over her left ear.
The woman wore vaguely medieval clothing. Not Renaissance Faire garb, but actual medieval clothing, a rough brown kirtle over a dingy white smock. Emmi knew enough about the clothing from that time to know that while the woman was fully covered, these were considered underthings. She lacked a proper gown—and from the looks of the dark gray skies and the goosebumps along the woman’s skin, she could do with a woolen cloak as well.
But it was hard to focus on any of these details as the woman did not cease screaming in the mirror. Whatever message she was trying to say was obviously urgent, and the longer Emmi went without understanding her, the more distressed she seemed.
“What do you think she’s saying?” Emmi asked. Puck stood behind her now, close enough that if she leaned backwards, she’d fall against him.
“Who?” Puck asked.
Emmi whipped around, staring at him. Puck seemed completely oblivious about the woman in the mirror, not perturbed at all. He was watching her as if she were the oddest thing in the room. Not a medieval woman screaming in a mirror.
“What…” Horror washed over her. Somehow, Puck not seeing the woman was worse than how she did see her. “What do you see when you look into the mirror?”
“You. Me.” Puck looked behind his shoulder. “This room. Why? What do you see?”
“Not that.” Emmi turned hollowly back to the mirror. The woman was watching her. As she spoke to Puck, the woman had silenced, but as soon as Emmi turned her full attention back, she started screaming again.
“What do you—?” Puck started.
“Shh!” Emmi hissed. She concentrated wholly on the woman’s mouth. She shouted the same thing over and over again, Emmi was sure of that. Just…three words. Perhaps she could…she could figure this out?
Emmi watched as the woman’s teeth bared in the first word, lips snarling. Then her mouth slammed shut before bursting out the next word. She ended with a furious scream-like word that stretched her lips wide.
Emmi found herself copying the woman’s lips, imitating the way her tongue and teeth moved. “Sss,” she said, copying her. “Mmmm—my! Lah? No…” The woman cycled back to the first word. “Sssss…ay! Say! Say…my…nnnn. Nae.” Emmi huffed a breath, realizing the woman’s words. “Say my name.”
She didn’t take her eyes off the mirror as she repeated it. “Say my name. That’s what she’s saying.”
“What who is saying?” Puck asked gently. He may not see whatever Emmi saw, but he believed her. That was oddly comforting.
“I don’t know,” Emmi said. “A woman. Medieval. She’s in the mirror—wait!” Emmi rushed to the mirror, splaying her hand on the cold glass, streaking soot and ash over the surface. “She’s fading! She’s—”
And just like that, she was gone. The storm clouds in the distance of the woman’s outdoor horizon were the last to evaporate to nothing.
Emmi’s eyes shifted focus from the reflection to her own hands. To the paper she still clutched. She spun around to Puck. “There was a woman in the mirror,” she said.
“Yes, I gathered.”
“She wanted me to say her name.”
“Will you?” Puck was, at best, idly curious, and his lack of urgency in the situation made Emmi want to punch him.
“No!” Emmi shouted. “I don’t know her name!”
“Yes,” Puck said. “I can see how that would be a problem.”
Growling, Emmi ignored him, looking back at the mirror, but it showed nothing now but her own grim face. I can figure this out, Emmi thought. The witchcraft part? That was confusing. But this? This was history. And Emmi knew history.
“That beach—rocky, curving—that is like the coastlines of Scotland, maybe northern England,” she said, musing aloud. “Not really a cliff like Dover, more like…craggy. There was at least a little sand on the beach below her. And a rock! I remember a rock in the water, big, like an island.”
“These very specific details will surely help you solve this mystery,” Puck said. “A rock, you say?”
Emmi ignored him. “She was definitely dressed in medieval or early Renaissance clothing. Hard to pinpoint the exact time with nothing but a kirtle really; they were used for centuries. Brown dye could have been any era. There was a building,” Emmi said, remembering suddenly. “A stone building—maybe a church? Behind her shoulder.”
“Good thing there aren’t that many medieval stone buildings in Scotland during the Middle Ages.” Puck sounded sincere, but Emmi knew he was being sarcastic.
“Or Renaissance,” Emmi growled.
“Yes, let’s add a few more centuries to our possible time frame for the mysterious mirror woman,” Puck said. “It’s always best to broaden the scope rather than narrow it.”
“Not helping,” Emmi muttered. With the mirror now just a normal mirror, she had nothing to do but look at the paper still in her hand. She brought the writing closer to her face. She’d noticed before that the handwriting was old, not just in age but also style. “I think maybe the woman was Renaissance, at least if she was linked to this paper,” Emmi said. “It’s not Middle English. It’s, technically, modern English. But like Shakespearean. Badly-spelled Shakespearean.”
She glanced at Puck through her eyelashes. It hadn’t gone past her notice that Puck was named after a Shakespearean character. She wondered if it was his real name, or if he’d mocked her by picking the name of a famous fae. If it was his real name, Emmi wondered if Puck was the Puck, servant to Oberon, king of the fae. Or maybe that was all myth.
Focus, Emmi, she told herself. Holding the old paper up, Emmi read the words carefully and slowly. “‘The description of the fourth kind of Sprites—no, I mean, Spirits.” The spelling really was bad. “‘Called the…Pharoah?” She forced herself to interpret each individual letter. P. H. A. I. R. I. E. What on Earth? But then she sounded it out, the same way she’d sounded out the mirror woman’s words. The “ph” became an “f” sound, and it clicked—fairy. “‘What is possible therein, and what is but illusion,’” she finished, guessing at the last word as it was torn off from the ripped page.
“Well, that doesn’t make much sense,” Puck offered.
“It tells us some.” Emmi headed to the door, Puck on her heels. “This is probably around the early 1600s, I think, judging from the way it’s written. The library may have something.”
“You have a library in your house?” For the first time, Puck sounded impressed. Emmi spared a glance at him as she headed up the stairs to the second floor. Okay, noted. Magic mirrors didn’t faze the boy, but a room of books was awe-inspiring.
Elspeth Castor’s library wasn’t exactly the dream-like fantasy that Beast presented to Belle in the Disney cartoon, but Emmi certainly felt like nowhere in the house was as magical as the aisles of mahogany shelves and meticulously recorded books. She went straight to the row of records from seventeenth century England, an eclectic mix of fiction and nonfiction, folios and bound copies mingling with handmade journals and scrolls of maps.
“How do you know where anything is?” Puck asked, eyes wide.
Emmi looked back at the paper. “I…” How was she supposed to find the exact paper that matched this one, and why did she think it would help her find the name of the woman in the mirror? And how did any of that help her remake a broken witch bottle and bring her Grandfather home? The impossibility of the situation washed over Emmi, and she felt her heart racing, her pulse pounding in her ears.
“Hey,” Puck said, noticing her rising panic. “Hey, hey, hey. What’s wrong? You have books. Books make you happy, yeah?”
Emmi snorted through her heavy breathing. Puck had only known her for a few hours, and he’d already honed in on how much of a nerd she was. The ridiculousness of that idea calmed her enough to say, “I don’t know how to find what we need.”
“So use your magic.” Puck said it so simply that Emmi jerked fully out of her shock.
“I don’t have magic. You’re the one who blasted wind out of his hands.”
“You’re the one who saw the woman in the mirror,” Puck pointed out. “Not me. You have a different sort of magic.”
“The kind that can see things,” Emmi said sarcastically.
But Puck nodded. “Yes. Exactly. You can see through the mysts, into the mystical.”
“Well, I’m not seeing anything here.”
“Have you tried?”
“Yes!” Emmi shouted, but then she stopped. She was seeing, but was she seeing? How did one turn on such a power? She hadn’t really done anything to see the woman in the mirror.
Emmi took a calming breath. She shut her eyes. Another breath. She let her body relax. She took a step forward, another.
And bumped her nose into a book.
Opening her eyes, she saw the spine and, with a trembling hand, she pulled it from the shelf.
“It didn’t work,” Emmi said, lifting the book up to shove it back into place.
“Why do you say that?” Puck grabbed the book and flipped through the pages.
“That’s MacBeth.” Emmi’s voice was flat. “It’s not whatever this came from.” She waved the burnt scrap of paper at Puck’s face.
“There’s witches in this,” Puck said, pausing. “Maybe you need this book, not the book the paper came from. Your magic could have pulled you to this title.”
Emmi shook her head. Yes, there were witches in MacBeth. They stole the show, what with their double, double, boil and trouble. But it was fiction, and it wasn’t what she needed, witches or not.
Emmi snatched the book out of Puck’s hands, intent on reshelving it, but the cover fell open, exposing the first page. And just as Emmi had caught movement in the mirror before she saw the woman, she thought—for a moment—she caught a swirling glimmer of gold over the page. She focused in on the words, reading the opening lines of the play. “‘When shall we three meet again, in thunder, lightning, or in rain?’” She looked up at Puck. “You were right.”
“I usually am. About what?”
“This was what I needed to see.” She pointed to the words, no longer shining. “The storm. There was a storm behind the woman in the mirror. And a storm here, in the text.” Her mind raced, trying to recall the details she’d learned. “The witch hunts in England started because of the witch hunts in Scotland. The king—James. James VI of Scotland. After he was married, his boat almost sank on the return journey from Denmark. He blamed witches. He started the witch hunts because of the storm.”
“Uh-huh,” Puck said, nodding but clearly not following along.
“When Queen Elizabeth died, she was the Virgin Queen. She had no heirs. James the Sixth of Scotland became James the First of England. And Shakespeare wrote MacBeth to, well, to suck up to the new king.” Emmi looked down at the paper in her hand. “This has something to do with James, I’m sure of it. James and the first witch hunt. Or…” her gaze slid over to the book she still held. “Or it has something to do with Shakespeare, and James’s connection to MacBeth?”
Puck shrugged. “No idea.”
It didn’t feel like enough. These clues were too distant from the witch bottle, and none of it seemed powerful or important enough to save the woman in the mirror who so clearly desperately needed help. Needed Emmi to say her name.
And how will this help me find Grandfather? Emmi thought.
“I don’t know what to do,” she said helplessly.
“What if we go there?” Puck said. “Maybe you’ll see—I mean, really see—something if we go there.”
“Go where?” Emmi held up the copy of MacBeth. “To the Globe?”
“The globe?”
“The Globe Theater, where Shakespeare did all his plays.” How could a boy named Puck not know about the Globe?
“Sure.” Puck shrugged. “Or we go to the random Scottish coast from the mirror, if you can figure out where that was. There was a big rock, if you recall, that’ll help you locate it.”
“Okay, let me grab my passport and just hop on a plane.” Emmi rolled her eyes. They’d saved for months for Grandfather’s trip; she knew the credit card he’d given her for emergencies wouldn’t cover an international flight, much less any other expenses.
“A…plane?” Puck shook his head. “Why wouldn’t you just use an ash sigil?”
She remembered then the magic design Puck had drawn in the hearth’s ash, the way it had shown the Orkney Islands.
She could go. To see. Or…to see. They could go right now.
She just had to decide where. The Globe Theater? Or pinpoint the Scottish coast and find the woman in the mirror? No—the Shakespearean connection felt too tenuous.
“Scotland,” Emmi said, looking at Puck with determination in her eyes. “We need to go to Scotland.”
But first, they had to figure out where in Scotland to go.
The King of Cups
deep feelings and finding the right path
Emmi stared down at the open book in her lap. It still felt…not enough. Like she was missing an essential piece of the puzzle. Idly, she turned the page, scanning the words of the infamous Scottish play.
“‘Fair is foul and foul is fair,’” she muttered.
“Reasonable words to live by,” Puck said amiably.
She turned the page and gasped aloud.
“What?” Puck leaned over the book. Someone had circled the lines in the play where the first witch said:
But in a sieve I'll thither sail,
And, like a rat without a tail,
I'll do, I'll do, and I'll do.
And in her grandfather’s handwriting, Emmi read the scribble in the margins: “‘Storms and News from Scotland.’” She traced her finger under the last three words—her grandfather had underlined them emphatically.
“Scotland again.” Puck sounded rather unimpressed.
“And storms.”
“Still not exactly helpful.”
Emmi looked back at the circled text. Sailing in a sieve? That was ridiculous. She tried to picture a person stepping into a boat-sized colander, the holes making it sink immediately. It was impossible—if someone were to do such a thing it would be… “Magic,” she whispered.
She glanced down at the paper in her hand, the soot-streak, burnt-edged scrap that had been in the witch bottle. It, too, spoke of fairies and impossible, magic things.
“There’s a reason why MacBeth featured witches, and why it’s called the Scottish play,” Emmi said, dropping the book to the floor and standing. She rushed to the book shelves, Puck watching her. “Shakespeare wrote it for King James. And he added the witches because…aha!” She crowed triumphantly, tapping a book. The King James Version of the Bible—commissioned by the same King James who watched MacBeth when it was originally performed for him. And beside it, Daemonologie.
She pulled the slender volume from the shelf. “James wrote this before he became King of England,” she told Puck, who shrugged, seemingly not seeing the connection.
Emmi scanned the pages of Daemonologie quickly. Black-and-white etched illustrations near the back caught her eye, and she slowed down, flipping the pages to the chapter header.
“News from Scotland!” she said, thrusting the book at Puck. She snatched it back before he could focus on it, reading quickly. “The news is witch trials!” she exclaimed. “James heard the dittays—the testimonies—himself.” Her eyes puzzled through the difficult Scottish spelling. “It all centers around a place called ‘North Barrick Kirk.’”
Finally Puck looked interested. “Now we’re narrowing it down, Castor. A town.”
“And a building,” Emmi said. “‘Kirk’ means church. The church in the town of North Barrick.”
