Page 83 of Witchlore
“I do want to talk to you,” I say honestly. All my fury over Bastian’s lie has drained away, like it was iron in my blood that dripped out onto the dirt floor in Merlin’s cave. With my restored memories, I understand how people can, astonishingly and miraculously, live through and with a grief that nearly killed them. I survived Bisan Tavi’s death and, breathtakingly, met Elizabeth. Then Bastian. It’s perplexing and I didn’t understand it before, the sting of Bastian’s betrayal and my own lack of awareness of how it feels to finally move on clouding the truth: Bastian changed. People change. That in itself is its own kind of implausible magic.
I stand up, feeling my body move differently. I look down at my hands and think I recognize them. As we fall into step besideone another, walking past the small car park and into the forest, I catch sight of my reflection in a car window. This is a familiar male form: same gingery hair, same pale skin and muddy green eyes. This is the same form I had after Elizabeth’s death, the form I met Bastian in. I smile to myself.
Gently, we follow the path out toward the Edge, following the marked track underneath the trees, gourds and carved pumpkins laid against tree roots in bright flashes of orange and white and green for a children’s trail.
“Can I… Is it okay if I apologize to you?” Bastian asks nervously. I fondly watch the way he fiddles with his snake bone charm necklace. We’re both holding our hands loosely at our sides and occasionally, the backs of our hands brush.
“You’ve done that already.”
“You’re not angry anymore?” Bastian looks at me curiously. I sigh.
“I wish you hadn’t lied to me, but I would never have got my life back without you. And… I understand now. I understand how you changed. I believe you, that you didn’t mean to use everything we found to bring back Shasta, and I know that must have been hard. You love him.”
“Yeah, but there are… different types of love.” Bastian’s eyes flicker to me and then away. “I should have told you about Cameron, all of it.”
“You should have,” I agree. “I think we would have got through it. It was the lying, the keeping of secrets, that made it all feel malicious.”
“If it’s any consolation, I’m going to regret it forever.”
“Maybe not that long.” I catch his fingers with mine. I don’t mean for it to happen, but something warm and bright passesbetween our skin, a static charge, a hint of our magical exchange. Bastian jumps but squeezes my fingers back gratefully. “Are you going to lie to me again?”
“No, never.” He shakes his head. I believe him. We drop our linked fingers and walk on together, climbing the hill up to the Edge. The incline is slow and steady, the path through the forest and the crunchy, freshly fallen leaves opening up on the cliff top to the bare, rugged space of Alderley Edge. The ancient stone beneath my boots, the stone that Merlin’s cave is carved from, feels lively and thrumming with potential. I feel the magical possibility in the air like I never have before. It quickens my blood, my spirit, and I smile with it.
“So, do you remember everything from the past?” Bastian asks as we step up onto the great weathered stones that look over the Cheshire valley.
“Yeah.” I nod. “Ariel’s memories are all there. I remember times of sadness, of anger, of pain, but it’s a faint memory. It doesn’t feel like it happened to me.”
“You’re calling them Ariel’s memories. Not yours.”
“You know how, sometimes, you look back on yourself at a younger age and think, ‘God, I don’t recognize myself’?”
“Oh, yeah, my boy band phase, age twelve.”
“Well, that’s how it feels. I’m happy to have it all back, it’s like it’s fixed something inside me that was broken.” I think briefly of how the love of Ariel’s parents, my true parents, heals the wounds of the parents I have lived with in this life. “But it is different. The intensity isn’t quite there.”
“It might come back.”
“It might.” I can’t imagine it right now, what it would feel liketo experience the sadness of my parents’ death all over again, to feel the desolation of Bisan Tavi’s death, but then I realize that if it happens, I will survive.
“You’re not… scared?”
We sit down on the edge of the rock, our legs swinging perilously over the trees far below, their beautifully colored leaves spread out beneath us in a vivid tapestry.
“No.” I am done being scared about things I can’t change.
“Well, you marched with suffragettes and fought in a war,” Bastian mutters, tapping his fingers against the rock. “Of course you’re not scared.”
“I’m not scared because you’re here.”
I gently put my hand on top of his. The truth is thrumming inside me:I can move on.The past matters, it makes us, but today the future is wide and waiting. Something that seemed impossible yesterday is now wondrously feasible. I look out over the valley, the patchwork of green farmland and russet blobs of trees, dots of white sheep in fields, and silhouetted against a clear blue autumn sky, the city I have known in peace and ruin. This is the land I was born in, this is my life and body and my world, and it is all stupendously beautiful.
“Do you feel… really old?” He turns his hand over and links his fingers with mine. “I must seem… I don’t know, young and daft to you now.”
“No.” I laugh. “Bastian, I can tell you absolutely that you are one of the cleverest witches I’ve ever met. Besides, I’m a teenager, I don’tfeelold.”
“You don’t?”
“No.” My jeans feel like they fit badly and I’m thirsty, but I don’t feel particularly old or wise. “It’s like… it’s like I’ve watcheda load of films. I can see it in my head, remember smells and tastes and sounds, but… it doesn’t feel like I did it.”
