When Kara woke up the next morning, she knew what she had to do: Destroy the grimoire. She decided when and where she would set the fire, even how much wood she would need. But as Kara stepped out the front door she wondered if she was being hasty. This was, after all, the only connection she had to her mother. Perhaps the book held other secrets, other answers.

Kara found herself returning to the abandoned Thompson farm.

I am a Child of the Fold, and I do not want to use magic, she thought, but I might have to, in order to learn the truth. And the truth is a good, righteous thing! Wasn’t it Timoth Clen himself who said, ‘Truth is the flame that reveals all’? He would understand: I just need to cast a single spell so I know that what happened last night wasn’t a figment of my imagination. After that I’ll destroy the book.

Kara sat in the weeds in front of the house and placed a small stone on the ground. Moving an object without touching it. That sounds like something a witch should be able to do. Kara stared at the stone. Move, she thought. When this didn’t work, Kara took the grimoire out of her satchel and held it in her lap. She willed the stone to move once more. It didn’t. Kara opened the grimoire to a blank page and placed her hand on it. Stared at the stone.

“Move!” she exclaimed.

Nothing.

Kara realized, with a sinking sensation, that she had no idea what to do.

She hadn’t meant to control the gra’dak; it had simply happened. Trying to cast a spell intentionally was completely different. She wondered if it was even possible.

It has to be. I just have to figure out what I did the first time.

A plump rat scampered across the roof of the farmhouse. It settled inside the rain gutter but peeked its head out, pink eyes intent with curiosity.

Kara held the stone in her hand and tried it that way. Nothing. Perhaps it’s too large. She tried a smaller stone and then a smaller one than that, eventually working her way down to a pebble.

“Move!” she exclaimed. “Please?”

Kara thought the pebble trembled just the slightest bit. Then she realized that she was the one shaking—with frustration. This was ridiculous. What was the sense of having powers if she didn’t know how to use them?

But you’re not going to use them. You’re going to destroy the book.

Of course she was. But when Kara set out to do something, whether it was chores around the house or copying passages on a slate, she expected to get it done. If she could control a beast from the Thickety, she should be able to move a stupid little rock. She had assumed this would be easy, and the fact that it seemed completely out of her control made Kara angry.

It struck her, then. The answer.

Anger.

When she had cast her first spell, she had been furious. Terrified and desperate too. The gra’dak was going to kill her friend, and she would have done anything to stop it. The magic of the spell had been generated through strong emotion.

That felt right to her. Emotion was the key.

Kara looked back at the pebble. She thought of all the people who had wronged her through the years. The fen’de. Grace. She remembered her mother, the future that should have been hers. All of this and more she focused into her next word.

“Move!” she exclaimed, throwing her arms into the air.

The pebble, unimpressed by this dramatic display, remained still.

“Ahhhhh!” Kara threw the pebble as hard as she could toward the abandoned farmhouse. It struck one of the remaining windows but, not being large enough to break the glass, bounced away with a pathetic little plink.

Still watching from above, the rat regarded Kara with what might have been amusement.

“Stop looking at me!” Kara screamed.

The rat froze as though caught in a beam of light. Slowly, like a marionette on a string, it spun on its hind legs until it was facing away from her.

It remained that way. Motionless.

“Hey!” Kara called out. She clapped her hands together. “Hey!”

The rat trembled slightly but remained in place.

It can’t move, thought Kara. Unless I let it.

She flipped opened the grimoire. A perfect illustration of a rat had appeared on the second page, constructed from the words she would need to conjure it again. She compared the sketch in front of her to the rat on the roof. The details, surprisingly, were not exactly the same. In the illustration the rat was thinner, fiercer-looking. Nothing like the pathetic creature before her.

“The drawing isn’t just this rat,” Kara said. “It’s any rat. All of them.”

Kara wondered how long her little friend would stay on the roof. Would it be released the moment she left? Or, if she came back two weeks from now, would there be nothing left but a tiny pile of bones?

Why not try it?

Kara was tempted. It was only a rat, after all. Any farmer would kill it instantly. She would be doing the community a favor.

But then she thought of how the innocent creature must feel—like a prisoner in its own flesh—and suddenly felt ill that she would even consider enslaving it a moment longer.

“Go,” she said. “I release you.”

The rat scampered over the far side of the roof and was gone in seconds.

No matter what I did, I never would have been able to move the stone, Kara thought. I can only control animals. That’s my gift.

Kara had never thought of witches as having specialties, but she supposed hers made sense. She had always had a way with any sort of animal, from horses and sheep to the smallest mouse. Truth be told, she felt a closer connection to them than to most of the people in her life.

She ran a hand over the illustration of the rat. It was slightly warm to the touch, as though the symbols had just been branded into the page. Kara felt a temptation to speak the words and let them course through her. If she wanted to, she could make dozens of rats rush to her feet. They would have no choice but to obey. How nice it would feel, after all these years, to finally be the one giving orders. To be in control.

Kara slammed the grimoire closed.

She needed no sermons or parables to know that forcing a living creature to do her will was wrong. She thrust the spellbook into her satchel with a solemn promise that she would never open it again. Her purpose today had been to learn what it could do. Now that she had, she could destroy the grimoire and be done with it forever.

 

She imprinted the next creature in the grimoire by accident. Kara had been sitting in class, thinking about the best place on the island to build a secret pyre for the book, when a fly landed on her desk. She swatted it away, but the persistent insect returned, its incessant buzzing disturbing Kara’s thoughts. Before she could even think about what she was doing, the fly had suddenly paused in midair, hovering before her face.

Go away, she thought.

The fly darted out the window. She found the new addition to the spellbook after class. Having never seen a fly in such detail, Kara stared at it for some time, entranced. This made her curious about what other insects looked like up close. She skipped her chores and learned how to conjure a beetle and an earthworm. Just to see the pictures, she told herself. Then she began to wonder how the illustrations appeared. Did they simply rise up from the paper, all at once, or were they scrawled by an invisible hand one symbol at a time? Kara took to capturing animals with the grimoire open in front of her, hoping to see the new entry in the process of appearing. In this way she learned how to conjure a nightjay, a bloomjacket, a black beetle, and a ladyspider. Kara never did see a page in the process of being illustrated, but in time she forgot that had even been her intention and just continued to gather different species. Hummingbeetle, lilysnapper, batterkay. She spent one glorious day knee-deep in pond water. Trestlefish, snapping turtle, orangeray. Kara promised herself each and every day that she would destroy the grimoire, but somehow that never happened, and after two weeks she stopped promising. Controlling the animals would be wrong; she admitted that. But all she was doing was gathering them into a beautiful book. She was like a naturalist, except instead of using charcoal and paper she was using her gift.

By the end of the month, she had filled the first forty pages of the grimoire.

Spells, apparently, had weight, and the grimoire grew much heavier. Kara’s shoulder ached from carrying it in her satchel, so she started to keep it hidden in its original spot beneath the floorboards of the barn. During class she stared into space and recalled the touch of each page, the music of the symbols. At night she slept with the book under her pillow. She listened carefully to the sounds of the sleeping house, eager to hear the telltale pitter-patter of a mouse, even the soft rustling of a bedbug. They were small—insignificant, even—but she would take them. Finding that she no longer needed as much sleep as she used to, Kara began to spend the nights with her face pressed up against the window, gasping with anticipation at the slightest movement in the dark. Perhaps it was a new creature, one she lacked.

This was how she came to hear the people outside.

There were four of them, dark shapes huddled together in the night. One shape loomed over the others, and Kara quickly identified this as Simon Loder. It was the first time she had ever seen the giant without Grace, though Kara had little doubt that the white-haired girl was behind his appearance here.

The group made its way toward the barn, laughing and hushing one another. A huge sack dangled from Simon’s shoulder. Something black and viscous leaked from the bottom.

Kara knew why they were here.

The bedroom window creaked when Kara opened it, but she doubted anyone heard; it had been windy lately, and this night was no different. She slipped through the small opening and onto the ground below. Although Kara was wearing only a nightshirt, the frigid temperature didn’t bother her.

Standing on tiptoe, Kara reached back inside her room and grabbed the grimoire.

She kept close to the shadows of the house and then dashed across the property until she could see the four boys gathered outside the barn. In addition to Simon, the group included Aaron Baker, Silas Goodson, and one of the Lambs’ farmhands, a burly youth no older than fourteen. All of them paced with nervous energy except for Simon, who watched the proceedings with his usual blank-faced wonder. The three other boys were arguing among themselves about who would get to “do it” this time. Kara found their whisper-shouting so silly that she had to stifle a laugh. She couldn’t believe that these children, none of them much older than herself, had been vandalizing her house all these months. Why had she ever been frightened of them?

Finally Silas—a weaselly, red-haired boy—snatched the sack from Simon, who reacted with about as much emotion as a log.

“She told me I could do it this time,” Silas said.

He must mean Grace, Kara thought. Surprise, surprise.

Silas opened the sack slightly, wincing at the smell. He raised it up, preparing to throw the contents at the barn door but first smiled back at his cohorts.

“This is going to be good,” he said.

Kara sent the rats.

They came from nowhere, a writhing mass of fur and teeth that swarmed around Silas’s feet. The sack fell from his hands, and Kara watched with no little satisfaction as the brackish contents intended to humiliate her family splattered across Silas’s pants.

The farmhand—easily the smartest of the four—took off.

Silas slapped at himself and screamed—a high-pitched, surprisingly feminine shriek—as white blurs slipped up his pants. Aaron tried to help him, but the rats bridged the gap and covered his arms and chest. Simon, his face as impassive as ever, calmly plucked a rat off the ground and crushed it in one hand. Kara screamed as a sharp pain pierced her chest.

It hurts me when they die, she thought.

She looked up and saw all three boys looking in her direction.

“Witch,” Aaron said. “Witch!”

Simon took a step forward, but Silas grabbed him by the collar, guiding him across the field. Kara allowed the rats to pursue them for a few minutes before releasing her hold.

The night was quiet once more.

Kara searched the ground until she found the rat Simon had killed. Cradling it gently in her arms, she returned to the house and buried the fallen soldier beneath her bedroom window. It seemed the least she could do.