Star Cursed

“I’m with Alice on this. There are hundreds of girls there. We can’t bring them all back to the Sisterhood. Even if they were grateful at first for saving them, who says they’ll keep our secrets?” Maura smooths her cream-colored skirt. “We have to put the Sisterhood first.”

“And you’re friends with the architect on the Harwood construction, aren’t you?” Alice gives Maura a calculating smile. “A little flirting, and I bet you could find out how to pull this off. We’ll glamour ourselves to look like construction men, and then we’ll create some sort of distraction, and in the midst of all the fuss, we’ll sneak the witches out.”

I have a sudden suspicion of what job brought Paul back to New London. His firm must be overseeing the construction on Harwood. Curious that Maura never mentioned that. I bite my lip. How did she and Alice get to be in charge so quickly? It was my idea, and now they’re the ones making decisions about who will be saved and doling out instructions?

Rilla shakes her head, brown curls bouncing. “I think Mei’s right. If only some of the girls escape, won’t the Brothers retaliate against the rest? If conditions there are already as bad as you say—”

“They are,” Mei and Pearl chorus.

“I won’t leave Caroline behind to be punished,” Maud says stubbornly.

“Oh, fine, we can rescue your stupid cousin. But we can’t worry about everyone. There are some risks in waging war,” Alice says. And though I know she’s right, and Sister Cora herself would agree, it doesn’t sit well with me.

I stand. “I’ve been to Harwood and seen the conditions there. It’s awful. I say we keep thinking until we can figure out a way to get all the girls out, witches or no.”

Mei pauses in her mantra. “I agree with Cate.”

“Me, too,” chorus Rilla and Maud and Daisy and Pearl.

“But you won’t take too long, thinking? We won’t let them languish there forever?” Rory presses.

I know she’s thinking of Sachi, of the trial that will be held tomorrow. “No, of course not. There’s got to be a way.”

“I’m disappointed in you all.” Maura glowers at me. “I knew Cate wouldn’t really go through with it, but I didn’t think you’d all fall in line with her like scared little ducks. We can make this work, I know it. If one of the nurses sees something she shouldn’t, Alice and I will just compel her.”

“That’s not the point,” I argue, hopping up on my desktop.

“And what if there’s more than one witness?” Vi speaks up for the first time, scooting her desk away from Alice’s with a sharp screeching noise. “What if your glamours fail and you expose all of us? You can’t bully your way through this.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Alice snaps, toying with one of her onyx earbobs. “Maura’s marvelous at compulsion, and I’ll be there to help her.”

“What if you can’t? If it comes out that the Sisterhood is a nest of witches, what would happen to all of us? To my father?”

“Don’t be a fool,” Alice snaps. “Your father could tell everyone he was compelled, that he didn’t know anything about our magic. I could erase his memory so he wouldn’t even be lying.”

Vi slams her slate down on her desk, so hard it cracks right in two. Half the girls in the room jump in their seats. “The devil you will!”

“Vi!” Alice gasps, her ears flushing bright red.

“No! Mind-magic’s not a toy, for all you strut around boasting of it. I won’t have you ruining his mind like you did that poor girl last year.”

Alice’s hand flies to her bosom. If I thought she had a heart in there, I’d feel sorry for her. “How dare you!”

Vi glowers at her best friend, defiant. “You would understand if your father meant any more to you than his purse strings.”

Alice slips out from behind her desk and stomps over to Maura, in high dudgeon. “Well, now I see who my true friends are.”

“This is too important to wait. If we had more witches with mind-magic, we could protect ourselves,” Maura insists, refusing to acknowledge that she’s lost the crowd. “We wouldn’t have to wait for the Brothers to come and take us away one by one. We could go after them.”

“How?” Violet gives an unladylike snort. “You can’t go compelling every Brother you meet on the street.”

I’m surprised Alice’s glare doesn’t turn her right to stone. “Why not? It’s a sight better than sitting here waiting for that mad oracle to give us away. We ought to be doing something, and I for one am glad to have someone around”—she eyes Maura—“who isn’t such a yellow-livered scaredy-cat.”

“It’s not cowardly to think things through instead of rushing into something,” I argue, setting my jaw.

“Maybe you just want to delay attacking the Brothers. Maybe you have more sympathy for them than you want to let on, because of your beau,” Alice scoffs, and my heart falls. Did Maura tell her I’ve still been seeing Finn? “It’s pathetic, taking up for man who jilted you.”

“You had a beau who was a Brother?” Next to me, Rilla gasps. “You never said!”

“You always do this, Alice,” Vi complains. “You mock everyone who doesn’t agree with you. The rest of us are allowed to have opinions, you know.”

“You’re just jealous because we’d have no use for you in this. You can’t do mind-magic, and your illusions are terrible. If your father hadn’t offered to be the coachman without pay, it wouldn’t have been worth it to save you!” Alice shouts, her pretty face red.

“Is that so?” Vi narrows her eyes, and suddenly Alice’s green dress is crawling with spiders. Hundreds of spiders.

It’s an illusion—a terrifying one, if you’re frightened of spiders. Judging by the way Alice is shrieking and dancing around, she is. “Get them off! Get them off!”

Maura goes to Alice, brushing a few spiders onto the floor. They scuttle away with surprising speed, and several of the girls draw their feet onto their chairs, screeching. Daisy tosses a book at a particularly large spider, flattening it.

“Calm yourself. They’re not real. You can’t fight back if you can’t focus,” Maura tells Alice.

“They shouldn’t be fighting in the first place,” I say, but with Maura’s coaching, Alice seems to have recovered her wits. She vanishes the spiders.

“Illusions? Let’s see,” Vi says, and then Alice is growing, taller than I am, tall as the bookshelves that line the back wall. Two curved horns like a ram’s poke through her golden hair, and her skin goes a gruesome olive-green, like a storybook monster’s.

Rilla bursts into giggles. Pearl covers her mouth with a hand. Even Eugenia and Maud, who usually defer to Alice, are hard-pressed not to smile.

Alice screams and runs to the gilt-edged mirror over the fireplace, bending and twisting so that her face is low enough to see. She screams again when she catches a bit of her reflection.

“Vi, that’s enough,” I reprimand, rising from my desk.

“No, it isn’t,” Vi argues, giving Alice a pig snout. Behind me, Rory laughs so hard she snorts. “She gives herself such airs. She’s not even the best witch here.”