Star Cursed

I clench my jaw and breathe deeply through my nose.

“She healed me,” Mei explains. “See?”

Lord, but I wish I were at home in my own bed. Mrs. O’Hare, our housekeeper, would bring me a cold compress for my head and a cup of peppermint tea. I can picture it so clearly I can almost smell the tea; I can almost feel the worn, familiar cotton pillowcase against my face. Tears prick the corners of my eyes. I’m glad no one can see; Alice would laugh at me for acting like a homesick child.

“Perhaps she’s not utterly useless, then.”

I peer over at Alice as she slides onto the seat next to Mei, crossing her ankles primly as the carriage rocks forward. Her skirts are spotless, untouched by the dust and dirt of the street. I don’t know how she manages it.

“Better than you.” Mei smooths her black fringe. Bangs are the new fashion; she had Violet cut them for her last week. I was afraid it would look a fright, but it actually suits her. “You can’t heal a paper cut.”

Alice rolls her eyes. “Everyone knows healing is the least useful kind of magic there is. It figures that would be Cate’s affinity.”

I sit up gingerly, ignoring her insults and peering out between the curtains, watching the crowds of people swarming down the sidewalk. The noise is deafening: horses and wagons clomping their way downtown, hammers pounding away on new buildings, men’s voices shouting in a dozen different languages, street vendors hawking food and clothing.

I’m not a city girl. It overwhelms me. Maura would love the busy rush of it, the thrill of something always new. I miss the quiet of home, the birdsong and the buzz of cicadas. I am lonely here, surrounded by strangers. Without my sisters, without Finn and my flowers—who am I?

I am not who the Sisterhood wants me to be.

“Cate was too much of a coward to do mind-magic back there,” Alice scoffs, toying with one of her onyx earrings. “Too afraid to stick her neck out to help people.”

“Don’t pretend to care about helping Mrs. Anderson,” Mei snaps. “You just wanted an excuse to do mind-magic. Sisters are s’posed to be compassionate, you know. Don’t you think these people notice the snooty way you look at them?”

“I don’t care what they notice,” Alice says, wrinkling her patrician nose. “I’m hardly going to pretend they’re my equals. They’re fools to come here in the first place, the way things are, and greater fools yet to keep having children when they can’t afford to feed them.”

Mei is shocked into silence. Her father is a tailor; her mother takes in embroidery and raises Mei’s younger brother and four younger sisters. Mei said once that she feels guilty for coming to the Sisters instead of going out to work. Her family is proud of her supposed scholarship to the convent school, but they don’t know she’s a witch.

“Everyone’s got troubles, Alice. It wouldn’t kill you to show a little sympathy,” I suggest.

“Oh, yes, it must be so difficult being Cate Cahill. Lifted from obscurity in your backwater nowhere town. Told that you’re going to be our savior!” Alice rolls her eyes again. I hope they’ll get stuck in the back of her head someday. “I don’t see it, myself. A timid, mousy thing like you?”

It’s true that I’m no great beauty—but timid? I almost laugh. I know how to keep my head down and stay out of trouble, and I don’t boast of my mind-magic and terrorize the other girls, if that’s what she means. In the six weeks I’ve been at school, I’ve kept mostly to myself. The Sisters have fallen over themselves to offer me tutoring, so I’m busy morning, noon, and night.

Still, I can’t imagine anyone who knows me dubbing me timid.

“That’s how you see me?” I arch an eyebrow at her.

Alice fusses with the black rabbit fur at her cuffs. Even her Sisterly uniform has fancy touches, though the entire point of a uniform is uniformity. “Yes. Aside from your supposed mind-magic, you’re still a beginner. If war broke out tomorrow, what on earth could you do? I’m starting to think the whole prophecy is nonsense.”

“I wish it were,” I admit, glancing out the window as the carriage turns away from the busy riverside streets toward the quiet residential neighborhood of the convent.

One hundred and twenty years ago, the witches who ruled New England—the Daughters of Persephone—were overthrown by the priests of the Brotherhood. For fifty years, any woman suspected of witchery was drowned, hanged, or burnt alive. Anyone who escaped the Terror went into hiding. There are, at best guess, only a few hundred witches left in New England now. But just before the Terror, an oracle prophesied hope—three sisters, all witches, who would come of age before the dawn of the twentieth century. One, gifted with mind-magic, would be the most powerful witch in centuries. She would bring about the resurgence of magic—or, if captured by the Brothers, cause a second Terror.

The Sisters think that it’s me. That I’m the prophesied witch.

I’m not entirely convinced, myself. But they were willing to bargain my sisters’ freedom for mine, and I consider that a sacrifice well made.

My mother didn’t fully trust the Sisterhood, so neither do I.

Outside, the gas streetlamps flicker to life. We rattle past half a dozen large houses, each surrounded by a manicured lawn, before stopping in front of the convent. It’s a gargantuan three-story building of weathered gray stone and arched Gothic windows. White marble steps lead from the sidewalk up to the front door, but in the back, there’s a garden, hidden from prying eyes by a high stone wall, filled with flowers and red maples and Sister Sophia’s vegetable patch.

“You don’t even want to be the prophesied witch, do you?” Alice demands, pulling her hood up over her golden pompadour.

“I don’t want one of my sisters to die.”

Even Alice doesn’t know what to say to that.

That’s why Maura and Tess and I were separated: the oracle also predicted that one of the three witches wouldn’t live to see the twentieth century, because one of her sisters will murder her. The Sisterhood wasn’t confident that Maura was in control of her magic. Given the dreadful nature of the prophecy—and, frankly, the nature of Maura’s temper—they were afraid she might hurt me. And they aren’t willing to risk the safety of their prophesied witch.

I tried to tell them the notion of Maura hurting me is impossible. Ludicrous.

Since our mother died and Father became a shadow of his former self, Maura and Tess and I have only had each other. The Sisterhood doesn’t understand how strong our bond is. I would do anything for my sisters.

But I still wake crying from nightmares where I stand helplessly over their bloody bodies.

Chapter 2

“THERE YOU ARE!” RILLA STEPHENSON says, bouncing into the modest room we share.

I look up in surprise, lying on my stomach on the narrow feather bed. I’ve been rereading letters from home. Letter, I should say; there’s been only the one, and I already know its contents by heart:

Dear Cate,

Father came home last week. He was terribly surprised to find you gone to New London, but he accepted your decision with good grace. He asked me to give you his blessing and convey his love. He seems thin, and his cough is worse than ever, but he has promised to stay at home with us until after the New Year—though he insists our lessons are best left to Sister Elena.