From the Ashes of Victory: The Complete Series, page 83
part #0 of From the Ashes of Victory Series
The rejection, though she had seen it coming, had been made doubly painful by the timing. She had looked so forward to the rally, buoyed by the prospect of it as she hadn't been since she'd figured out how to make witchlights fly. The airfield had been a scene of such tragedy, to have it be made into one of such hope and optimism about the future had been wonderfully stimulating.
To find that name and address waiting on her desk when she'd gotten home had virtually stopped her heart when she'd seen it. Such fortuitous timing couldn't have been coincidence, she'd thought, until she'd opened it.
Hope, she knew only too well, was fragile. Weeks of preparation, hours of boundless optimism amidst a collective energy that Victoria had never before been privy to, all gone in seconds with a few strokes of a pen.
She sighed heavily.
People, all people, knew who she was now, and that she was a witch. Magic was real, and she had done it. Undeniably, spectacularly, and very, very publicly. It had attracted attention from all over, not just the people she may have wanted it from, like the authors of the precious letters she kept in a special box—and that brought with it a whole slew of consequences.
Yes, she was, to her chagrin, famous; as were Katya, Millie and Elise for being out on the airfield when Juno went down, so she had finally merited the attention of the peers she had secretly craved since the end of the war and the re-ignition of the suffrage movement.
From speaking, and now from her father and grandfather's alma mater, she had been rejected because of what she was, and what she had done.
A witch or a woman, it merited the same response. Even if Dr. Samuels managed to change the board's mind, Victoria was certain the former would have gotten her the same letter, in spite of how far her Manifest could push the bounds of known physics. There was no way to know for sure, and now, she supposed, it was irrelevant. But it was a gnawing, un-scratchable itch in the back of her mind to know that the two most fundamental aspects of her identity were working in tandem to smack her back down to the ground every time she even thought of flying near the sun.
But at least Icarus had been allowed to fly at all.
A small roofing nail floated up from the bucket of random metal objects she kept by her desk until it was hovering just below the circle described by the movement of her witchlight. Stretching and deforming, the small white globe spun out into a ring, vibrating with the effort it took to exert her Manifest and shape a witchlight simultaneously. But it was small, safe practice, and Victoria felt no pain or discomfort as she did it.
Staring up at the flat head of the nail, she considered the shiny metal a moment before giving it a mental kick. It fired straight through her ring of light to smack into the ceiling so hard the head all but disappeared into the plaster.
"Let me in or the hostage gets it," Victoria said aloud to herself, firing another nail into the ceiling. Tiny motes of white dust drifted down to settle onto her black-clad shoulder. It only took a few half-hearted swipes to get rid of it, hardly enough to distract from her predicament.
Even without the officially-accredited paperwork that would declare her one, she was a scientist, like her father and grandfather. Her Manifest might be the single most useful tool in the world for learning about how the universe worked, and she had documented evidence of virtually everything she had ever done with it.
It was also, she had to admit, dangerous. Regardless of her intentions, she was of sufficiently-developed imagination to see how she could be seen as a weapon.
A threat.
Implicit though it may be, having someone who could accelerate any inanimate object to lethal velocity with her mind be admitted to a place of higher learning would either bolster or obliterate its reputation. There couldn't be a middle ground anymore. She knew things the greatest scientists in the world didn't, because she'd seen them. Manipulated them. She could make any of a dozen doctoral proposals from the things she'd done on accident. She had no idea how the one she'd actually made had been seen, if it even had, with her name on the cover.
There were other institutions that might be more amenable, but she was a Ravenwood. The last Ravenwood. And the Ravenwoods earned their educations at the University of Sherwood.
For someone so keen on upending the ways things 'were always done,' she couldn't have said why this one particular way was the one she made an exception for. Pride? She wasn't one given to pride. Perhaps just the rightness of it. The principle. Those she was happy to stand firm on.
She was all that remained of her family, and as different as she had always been, perhaps it would take being allowed to walk the same well-worn path as those that came before her to let her finally feel accepted.
But it wouldn't happen.
Flicking her attention to Dr. Samuels' letter as it lay on the floor, it leapt into the air at her mental command and shrank to the size of a postage stamp. Trailing smoke as it spiralled back down, it was soon nothing but ash and memory.
The same as her hope.
Dawn saw Pretoria back at the river, or a river, since she didn't know if it was the same one she had crawled out of. The river that had nearly taken her life had been her life as long as she could remember, so they must have walked a lot farther than she thought, or taken a route through the forest to some offshoot that she'd never navigated before. There were plenty of creeks and streams that came down from the Pennine Mountains that eventually fed into the River Eden, but this was too wide to be considered either.
Here, the trees grew right up to the banks, the roots exposed by erosion, leaving many to topple over and form natural bridges. The spot Niamh led Pretoria to was between two such felled giants, forming a sort of lagoon.
The Irish witch was already in the frigid water, having shown zero hesitation about stripping off her blood-soaked clothing in front of a total stranger and plunging in without a stitch to cover her modesty.
Pretoria flushed and her hands flew over her eyes, but the shameful peek she took between her fingers made them fall limply to her sides again.
Niamh's entire body was criss-crossed with scars. Her back was a mat of them, deep troughs and thick ridges conforming to her shoulder blades and wiping out the path of her spine. Her arms and legs were not as heavily mutilated, but stark white slashes stood out on both, almost like tiger stripes, but arrayed in random, conflicting directions. Her thighs were marred by not only slashing scars, but hideous pits, with similar pock-marks up and down her arms. It took Pretoria a moment to realise they were burns. Deliberate ones.
Beneath the scars was a lithe and toned figure, like a dancer would have, not a soldier. Her coal-black hair was cut shorter than any woman Pretoria had ever known, and without needing to ask, understood was for purely practical reasons.
Who was this woman?
"Come on. Your back wounds need to be looked at, and getting that muck out of your hair will help you start to feel human again."
Any other moment in her life, Pretoria would have shied away in embarrassment and shame, but now she didn't hesitate, glad to rip off the horrible hessian robe that, through no fault of her own, had marked her as an outcast and pariah to everyone she'd ever known.
When she hit the water this time, it was because she wanted to, not because she'd been thrown in in a burlap sack.
In spite of her horrific near-drowning, Pretoria stayed under as long as she could, letting the flow of the river wash over her and taking the terror she'd felt the last time with it. With her feet on the smooth stones below her—rather than being dragged over razor-edged rocks—the wan orange light of early morning above her, Pretoria leaned into the river, standing against the flow on her own terms. It made her feel strong again.
She would not allow herself to fear the river. Whatever else they had taken from her by throwing her in to die, she would not let them have that.
When she was six, Pretoria had been helping Aunt Agatha in the garden when she'd been startled by a garter snake. Wailing and screaming, Pretoria had fled the harmless creature to clutch at her aunt's leg and beg her to make the nasty thing go away.
Instead, she'd been led right back to it.
'You have the power, not your fear,' Aunt Agatha had told her. Pretoria couldn't be afraid of something if she knew it well enough. Her aunt had stood there while little Pretoria looked down at the snake first in terror, then slowly in fascination. It had been shiny black and yellow, with keen little eyes and a forked tongue that flicked in and out, telling it more about her than all of her senses together could about it.
After a few minutes, not only did she not fear it, she'd tried to pick it up. But as she'd reached down to do so, it had shot back into the hedges.
Now, she would face her fear again.
The water was clear to the bottom, and she opened her eyes to look at the bubbles forming as it was disturbed by the lower side of the tree, listened to the sound of it moving around her.
The whoosh of rushing water, the burble of the bubbles from the fallen logs, the sounds were familiar and comforting in a way they easily could have no longer been. Shafts of sun slashed through the surface, making slanted columns of light. Pools of brightness wavered on the bottom, so unlike the terrifying blackness she'd been trapped in as she desperately tore at her imprisoning sack, the darkness deepening with every breath she couldn't take.
She was suddenly snatched out of her memories as an iron grip clamped onto her shoulder and hauled to the surface. Water streamed from her hair, taking a cloud of brown along with it as she was dragged to the shallows by the armpits.
"Are you all right!?" Niamh said, her features taut with concern. "You were under so long, I thought you were drowning."
"Was I?" Pretoria said. It hadn't felt like it. Blinking drips from her eyes, the sun was so bright, and her skin was warm again. She could have stayed under longer. Forever, it felt like.
Yet she felt far better than she should have, regardless. She'd barely been able to move when she'd woken up by the fire, and now she was swimming? Her lungs had been full of water last night, and now she could hold her breath even longer than before?
"What was in that soup?" she asked.
"Enough to get you to Longstown, hopefully. Surely you've made elixirs before."
"Not good ones," Pretoria admitted.
"Well, we have very good elixir makers at EVE," Niamh said. "And you'll need them, looking at these wounds."
Pretoria looked resolutely ahead. "Is it bad?"
"Maybe. There's one deep one that looks like it might be a problem, the others just look like they hurt. Do they?"
"The cold helps, but yes. Do yours?"
She'd said it without meaning to, and was suddenly all-too aware of her state of undress in front of the imposing Irish witch. Pretoria wilted, drawing her arms and legs tightly against herself.
"Not anymore," Niamh said. "I earned them."
Pretoria looked back at that, searching Niamh's grey, almost colourless eyes. She found no hint of pain or regret in them, only conviction.
"Thank you for saving my life," Pretoria said.
Niamh's features softened slightly. "You're welcome. Just don't make me regret it."
In the early summer sun filtered through high, thin, clouds, Selene looked as Katya had never seen her. Given to spending much of her time indoors, finding Selene outside with her hood down came as a surprise. Her long raven hair was radiant in a way that black shouldn't have been, and her normally ghostly-white skin shone with a depth and solidity that made her web of scars far less evident, more like plays of light than stark, permanent evidence of the horror that had caused them centuries earlier.
She walked slowly but assuredly along the path that was gradually being eaten into the grass by the witches of EVE whenever they needed time to themselves. With so many witches, and so many normal workers at LAC besides, contained within the fence of the airfield, the outer perimeter was the only place where one could be alone sometimes. But following Katya's conversation with the Longs, she didn't want to be alone.
Still, she approached EVE's matron with hesitation.
"It's all right, Yekaterina," Selene said. "Walk with me. I can see you have something on your mind that could do with a long walk."
"Thank you," Katya said, hurrying to catch up.
Selene's raincloud-grey eyes turned as Katya fell into step beside her. "Is it serious?"
"It's personal."
"That sounds serious." A gust of wind caught Selene's hair, blowing it backwards and away from her face.
If Katya had had to guess, she would have said Selene couldn't be older than 45. Even then, she didn't look 45, it was just the high end Katya would have thought possible. But Selene was ten times that old, even if she didn't know by exactly how much more anymore, since she'd stopped counting.
With her hair and complexion, Millie joked that Selene could pass for Vita's mother, and if that's what Katya had been told when she'd arrived, she'd have believed it. But she knew the truth, and that's what had made her brave joining Selene on her early morning constitutional.
"About you," Katya said.
"Oh?" Selene said, intrigued. "Not many have ever said that to me." She smiled. "But thank you for remembering I am a person, and not just a font of bottomless wisdom."
Though Katya appreciated Selene's attempt to cut the tension that knotted Katya's insides, she still fidgeted. Selene was a mentor to all of them, and she was a font of wisdom; it's what made her intimidating.
"Just ask, Yekaterina. You won't be the first, no matter what you say."
Katya watched the grass slide below her feet, and couldn't bring herself to look up. "Do you still love?"
A single eyebrow climbed Selene's forehead. "I stand corrected."
"I thought so," Katya said dejectedly.
"I'm actually flattered that you would ask someone my age that question. May I ask why, though?"
"Because I'll be your age some day, and I need to know if it will still be possible," Katya said.
"Grace?"
Katya shook her head. "In 400 years it won't be. And that's what has been keeping me… awake." One of the things, she didn't say.
"Are you so fond of her?"
Katya sighed. "I don't know. I thought I would be…"
"But now?"
"I… I don't… I'm not ready. What happened to me, I can't—"
"You don't have to explain yourself to me, Yekaterina," Selene said. "What happened to you was horrific, and you should never feel guilty or ashamed. You are not the monster."
"Thank you… but it feels so… strong… still. When I think about my suicide attempt, it makes me want to live, but when I think about what they did to me, I— it still has power."
"And it will for a while yet. It will never pass completely, but you will manage it. You will adapt."
"That's what I told Vita," Katya said.
"And you were right to. You've helped her immensely, you know. But you must allow you to help you as well. Listen to yourself. Take the time you need to heal. Not all wounds are the same. Some cut much deeper than others. Or bleed longer."
Katya nodded, and felt a weight lift from her shoulders. She wasn't broken, she was hurt, and hurts needed time to heal. Talking would only help so much this time.
Time. Always time.
"But it makes me wonder about my future. What if I do heal? What if… what if I am ready someday? There could be someone. That would frighten me enough without the… immortality."
Selene nodded. "You're thinking long-term for the first time."
"Yes. I've never been able to before. I see Millie and Elise, and they are so happy together. But they're both witches. Grace… anyone," Katya quickly corrected, "who isn't a witch, though, how— how can that possibly work? I can't live the way my father did for centuries."
They walked in silence as Selene thought, and Katya was happy to give her all the time she needed. It was a beautiful day, and she wanted the right answer, not the first one.
The wind whispered through the fence, the fabric of their dresses flapped and rustled. A train whistle blew in the distance, and Katya looked over to see the smoke rise from the path it took away from Bedford and south on its way to London.
"It depends very much on your tolerance for pain," Selene said finally.
"What do you mean?" Katya had had enough of that in her life. The idea that she would have to bear sixteen times more of it before she was Selene's age left her feeling slightly ill.
"Life is about both pleasure and pain. We learn from both. We carry both, it helps define us. The pleasure of the time we have with those whom we will outlive must be balanced against the pain of living the rest of our lives without it. Other than your sisters, whomever you devote your time or heart to will die before you." Selene's eyes were pointed straight ahead, but Katya saw that her mind was looking back. "You must accept that truth. You've already seen much death in your young life. Too much, for your age. But you will see a lot more. It's part of the price."
"Of being a witch?"
Selene nodded. "What's my surname?"
Caught off-guard, Katya stammered. "I— I don't know," she admitted.
"Nor do I. I've outlived my family, other than Niamh. She's the only blood I know. Everyone else died centuries ago, so I didn't bother to remember it. It doesn't describe me anymore. Nor her. We share a grandmother, but neither of us could tell you what her surname was, either. After so long alone, we are… singular beings. The only thing we can carry with us through the centuries is ourselves. Everything else must, by nature, fall away."
"That sounds tremendously sad. I can't imagine forgetting my family—"
Selene held up a hand. "I have never forgotten my family, Yekaterina. Do not mistake."
"I'm sorry."
"No need. This is something very few have had to deal with. I forgot my name, yes, but not where I came from. I still remember my father and mother. My sister, who didn't carry the Talent. My son."
Katya stopped so fast she almost fell over. "Your son?"
