56

The Eleventh Charm: The Anchor

IT IS SO EASY. Almost too easy.

The boy Peter, tall though he is, and strong—the Lady can feel the strength in him—couldn’t fight her. Couldn’t resist the spell. Oh, she has grown magnificent. She is mightier than even the magister now, despite the weight of the chatelaine against her hip. Soon she will be stronger than all the human frailties she despises.

She merely has to place the final charm. Pathetic, foolish girl, Katherine. The heart charm is for her.

The heart. Eleanor pauses.

Hearts are about love, are they not? Hearts could be full and could be broken, hearts could be given and could be taken, could be found and could be lost. But the Lady Eleanor now has a heart that can be none of these. Her perfect, rhythmic, metallic heart beats without a waver, without a skip. It will beat forever.

Eleanor once craved love. But her first lord took another wife, a girl so like Katherine in looks that Eleanor shudders.

When she gives the heart charm to Katherine, will it signify anything?

Memories: an eel slips through the child Leonore’s fingers, shiny and cold. A man shakes her father’s hand and contracts a marriage and rides away on a great stallion. A hope for a child vanishes in the cold Scottish mist. A wedding, not her own, is celebrated as her old heart cracks and shatters.

As the Lady Eleanor makes for the girl, to cast her final spell, to charm Katherine, she hesitates, as if . . . as if the Lady sees something else in the girl, some glow, something that is heartfelt, something about a loving family, some magic perhaps greater than her own, and it has to do with heart and love and memory, and with all that the Lady has lost.

Will the gift of the heart from Eleanor to Katherine be a gift of love? Eleanor hesitates, just for an instant.

Then all thoughts of hesitation vanish. The Lady Eleanor, witch of Rookskill Castle, moves with swift and eager desire toward what she believes is the fulfillment of her dreams.