The Curses by Laure Eve

Author:Laure Eve [Laure Eve]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571333240
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2018-02-26T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 17

Entering woods was like entering another world. Winding ribbons of mist curled around the bottoms of the slender, silver birch trunks. The sounds of traffic fell away into muffled unimportance, washed out by the land-sea rustling of wind through the treetops.

It was Friday afternoon on a muted February day, and the bird calls were few.

Walking through woods always gave me a sense of quiet, connected power. Everything I passed felt alive and watchful. I enjoyed the feeling. There was no menace to it. The trees could feel me the same way I could feel them, and we liked the experience.

A childhood memory arose as I walked, sparkling clear in my mind.

It was the first time Gwydion had tried to teach me how to access the magic inside myself. A preparation ritual to focus the mind before attempting any kind of spell.

‘Please,’ I had begged Gwydion, and his clear, clean blue eyes had studied me thoughtfully. ‘I’m ready. I can do it.’

‘I don’t know,’ he drawled, the exact same drawl that Fenrin picked up in his early teens. ‘Can you listen and concentrate, and do everything I say?’

I knew I’d won, and he knew I knew, and that I’d do anything to comply now that I saw the prize. I nodded seriously.

I was eight and my father meant the world to me.

Gwydion smiled. ‘Sit down in front of me then.’

He had chosen the woods as the backdrop for that day’s lesson, and I remembered that same land-sea rustling rushing in my ears as I sank cross-legged to the ground underneath an oak tree, soft summer grass scratching gently at my ankles and the outsides of my bare feet. Gwydion did the same, so we faced each other, kneecaps inches apart. He pushed his hair back from his face, that cascade of warm, caramel tones that didn’t yet come brushed with so much grey.

‘Breathe,’ he said, ‘and think of stars.’

I watched him, wishing for his stillness, his surety. Then I closed my eyes and pictured stars, like I had been doing erratically over the previous few weeks, whenever I remembered, whenever it didn’t bore me, whenever Thalia reminded me. I wasn’t a diligent student. I’d never be like Thalia. It all came so naturally to my sister, but my energy and concentration had always manifested in unpredictable gusts.

Still, I had tried. I had practised turning my mind’s eye upward, picturing a black velvet sky speckled with points of light, some clustered, some sparkling at me. I had felt the enormity of the universe, and I drew comfort from it. The woods felt like breathing and thinking of stars. Sometimes you didn’t need to focus to feel magic. You just needed to be in a place that breathed it out.

Today, I had come to the woods directly from school on my own – Thalia and Fenrin would meet me later. I didn’t tell them why I wanted them to come, just that I wanted to show them something. Once I reached the

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