Page 72 of Holly & Hemlock
“What are you doing?” Larkin’s voice is raw, the usual archery of his tone blunted by real fear.
I ignore him. I flip through the pages, searching for the line of the curse, the place where Anwen’s wish twisted into a noose for everyone who followed her. The paper is old, dry,fragile as eggshell. When I find the blessing, it is not a benediction but a demand: Hold fast what is loved, keep close what is cherished, never release what the heart claims as its own.
I stare at the words, at the way the ink has bled through the page. I tear it from the binding in one slow, deliberate motion. The sound is obscene, as if I am separating muscle from bone.
Larkin scrambles to his feet, looming behind me. “That’s not—” he begins, but Lane cuts him off with a single, seismic grunt.
“Nora,” Lane says, and the word is a boulder in the stream.
I do not turn. I do not answer.
Instead, I kneel closer to the hearth, holding the torn page over the flame. I fish a fountain pen from the folio’s sleeve, the nib so fine it might draw blood if I’m careless.
The men edge closer, not out of courage but because the room has shrunk, the center of gravity shifted so that nothing can exist outside the circumference of this moment.
I don’t know what to write, so I let the memory of the dreams, the ghosts, the words in the folio, and the blood of my blood, Anwen, guide my hand. I cross out the old words, strike them through with deliberate violence. In their place, I write:
Let go. Let rest. What was loved is not lost. What is bound can be broken. I release you, and you release us. No more hunger. No more holding.
I can’t tell if the tremor in my hand is nerves or just the house’s vibration, crawling up through the floorboards. My eyesblur, and the next line comes out warped, the letters melting into each other like soft wax.
My tears are hot, sudden. One drops onto the page, exploding the ink into a black nebula. I do not stop. I dip the pen into the next tear, and the next. By the end, the script is as much water as pigment.
Larkin crouches beside me, voice gone thin with something like awe. “You’re rewriting it,” he says, as if I am both mad and miraculous.
Lane is silent, but I feel him at my back, a force field of muscle and breath and worry.
I finish the blessing, or the curse, or whatever it wants to be now. I stare at the wet page, my own reflection smeared across the black. For a second, I think I hear Anwen’s voice—high, strange, un-English—but it is only the wind rattling the glass.
I look up at the men. They are both terrified.
There is no ceremony. No chant. Just the moment when the old words burn away, and the new ones take their place in the muscle memory of the house.
“I'm going to free her,” I say, and before either can stop me, I toss the page into the heart of the fire.
The moment the inked paper hits the flame, the world tips off its axis.
The fire does not consume it gently; it devours. The edges curl and blacken, but the center—my words, my command—flares white, then blue, then a color I have no name for. A searing shriek splits the air, not from any living thing but from the hearth itself. The stone of the mantel fractures, hairline cracks radiating like veins from the keystone. The air tastes of ozone and rot, as if a thunderstorm is unmaking itself inside my mouth.
The wind comes next. It slams down the chimney, upthrough the ducts, battering the library doors until they boom in their frames. Books leap from the shelves, their pages ripped into confetti and flung into the cyclone of heat. I see the folio lift itself from where I left it on the rug, spin once, and explode—manuscript, notes, old photographs spinning around my head in a cloud of ancestry and warning.
Lane is on his feet in an instant, charging for me. “Nora!” he roars, but the wind knocks him sideways. He hits the edge of the reading table, cracks it clean in two, and rolls to his knees, head down, bracing against the blast.
Larkin is pinned to the bookcase, hands gripping the ladder rail so tightly his knuckles go bloodless. He tries to shout, but the words are sheared away by the gale. He looks at me, eyes wide, and I see in his face the certainty that he is witnessing something final.
The temperature plummets. Frost spiderwebs across the window glass. The sweat on my skin beads and freezes, but I do not feel cold. The air is electric, charged with a promise and a threat. My hair lifts from my scalp, fanned out and wild, every strand a live wire. My knees dig into the hearthrug, but I cannot rise; I am rooted, held by a gravity that belongs to the house.
Then, the rain. It begins with a single drop, fat and heavy, landing on the bridge of my nose. Then another, on my eyelid. And then it pours—an impossible deluge, not from the roof but from nowhere.
Water hammers the rug, the books, the men. Steam erupts from the fire as the drops strike it, sending up hissing clouds that smell of burning ink and scorched wood. I am soaked in an instant, dress clinging to my body, the weight of it trying to drag me down.
I sense, rather than see, Lane make another attempt. He staggers forward, arms out, but something stops him—something invisible and absolute. He slams into it, his palms pressed flat against the air a foot from my shoulder. He shouts my name, a raw and helpless sound, and I want nothing more than to turn, to reassure him, to say this is what I meant to do. But I cannot move. My hands are welded to the page, which still burns in the fire, refusing to be reduced to ash.
The roar of the wind grows higher, sharper, then resolves into a voice. Not a human voice, but an aggregate of every whisper, every confession, every secret ever kept within these walls. It is a litany, a chant, and though I do not understand the words, I know the meaning:
Hold fast what is loved. Never let go. Never let go. Never let go.
The voice isinside me now, eating through my ribs, flooding my lungs. I am choking on it, drowning. I cough, and when I open my mouth, the wind pours out, mixing with the rain in a geyser of memory and loss. My skin burns, then numbs; my vision tunnels until the only thing I see is the white-hot center of the fire, the page melting in the crucible of the house’s fury.
