“I don’t understand how that could be,” Oliver said, surprised and uncomfortable to have his own worldview challenged. His right hand smoothed down the thick blond hair of his left arm. As he considered my words, his mouth pulled down into a deep frown, and he looked down at the floor.
“I don’t know for sure. Maybe it’s like an alternating current. I doubt if the other anchors will ever share the details of how the witches created the line with me now, so I don’t know if I’ll ever be sure. But I do believe that the magic begins as ours and is fed into the line. From there, it gets parsed back out, in a more even distribution. No witch does without, but no witch can rise to his or her true potential either.”
“No witch who isn’t an anchor,” Oliver said, nodding. “I don’t like it. Your theory makes me uncomfortable, but that tells me you are more than likely on the right track.”
“I don’t like it either. I wish there was a clear and easy way to look at the line and the decisions that the families who built it have made. I mean, yeah, the three rebel families are evil. Their evil is Technicolor, in-your-face evil. I worry, though, that the side we have chosen has its own form of evil too. One path is totally wrong, but what if the other is just a longer, more scenic route to the same hell?”
“Then you will blaze us a new path toward sanity,” Oliver said. “Frankly I think that’s why the line chose you. Most people want easy answers to life. They will agree with whatever the echo chamber around them says as long as it means they don’t have to think for themselves. Only a precious few can cope with ambiguity and carry on.”
A soft knock on the door interrupted us. The door opened a crack, revealing the dark giant on the other side. “I apologize for the intrusion,” Emmet said. His black eyes poked holes into me, probing me. Checking to make sure I was truly unharmed. Checking to see if the experience I’d been through had led to a change of heart. I smiled, as I felt happy to see him, but I did my best to convey without words that nothing had changed between us. He turned from me to look at Maisie. “She will awaken soon. I am sure of it.” I sensed that he had not intended his words as an actual prognostication. He had meant them more as a comfort.
“Thank you,” I said, and he nodded.
“I meant to honor your request,” he said, “that I stay away from your home, but circumstances—”
“I know. The families sent you.”
“Yes. They hope that you will accept a request to meet with the other anchors. Work through any misunderstandings that may have arisen.” Oliver harrumphed, and we rolled our eyes at each other. “Please understand,” Emmet continued, “that even though I agreed to act as emissary of their message, I am in no way neutral, not after the crimes they have committed against you. I have chosen a side, and you, Mercy, have my full allegiance. The families are aware of this, and that is why they asked me to approach you. They hope to prevent the deepening of any schism between you and the other anchors. They ask that you meet with them to see if you can work out your differences in a way that will not harm the line. In return for this meeting, they will make an oath not to interfere with your sister.”
As I considered his words, I listened to Maisie’s steady breathing and turned to look at her beautiful face, blessed in sleep with a serenity I hoped she might one day feel upon waking. I wanted many things from the other anchors, starting with this oath to leave my sister alone as we worked through her issues. For once, though, I found myself in a place of power, and I had every intention to take full advantage of that. “Tell them I agree,” I said. “But I will pick the time and the means.”
FORTY
I learned that the line’s anchors rarely met face-to-face. Of course, due to their duty as anchors, they could not physically venture too far from the places they had been chosen to anchor. Because of this, when they gathered together, they did so virtually, leaving their bodies at home and projecting their minds to the meeting space. I knew the perfect place for the gathering they had requested, one that would allow all of us to meet, perhaps for the first time in the history of the line, in the flesh. I opened new entrances to Jilo’s haint-blue chamber over each anchor’s home. We could all meet together without anyone leaving their territory.
I bent these entryways, though, so that each entrant would have to pass through the world of the endless living shadows, the minor demons that folk in the low country called boo hags before reaching the chamber. These creatures held no fear for me now. I could almost pity their lust for a skin that would allow them to walk in the world of light. Almost.
I laughed at the thought of the other anchors seeing this place, a place that had once terrified me, built by a woman who had once scared me out of my wits. Again and again I found myself taking comfort in the smallness of my past horrors. My skin prickled and turned to gooseflesh as I wondered if there might arrive a tomorrow when I looked back from the vantage point of even greater terrors, feeling nostalgic for today. That kind of thinking would get me nowhere.
The chamber had collapsed to half its previous size, bending and twisting in on itself. The endless cyan was now punctured by bruised plum stains left by the poisoned magic of Tillandsia. I had to maintain my focus and my confidence. Thoughts of Emily and Josef were a threat to both, so I pushed away any remembrance of Tillandsia and took my place at the portion of the room that bent upward. I would claim the higher ground. It might not lend me any true physical advantage, but it would help a lot psychologically. I claimed Jilo’s abandoned cerulean throne and sat in it. This would count as the final time I’d come to the haint-blue room. At Jilo’s request, I’d close the chamber down after this meeting, collapsing it until it became merely a dense, dark point in space. In the quiet before the others came, I allowed myself one long last look.
Just as I finished taking the room in, its edges began to shimmer. A fluctuation in the air here, a quiver there, vibrations announcing the arrival of my magical colleagues. Disappointing was my most prominent thought as they resolved into their full physical forms. They were not as tall as giants, and not one of them had a sunbeam crown or a quiver full of lightning bolts. No, the pantheon of anchors looked like plain old regular folk. African, European, Asian, Middle Eastern, and combinations of all the above. True, all of them were witches, and if they were not truly the most powerful witches in the world, they were at least the witches with the greatest access to power. All the same, I swear one of them looked like she had come from dropping her kids off at soccer practice, and another like he had been working in his garden. Calm. Nonthreatening. None of them would even arouse a sense of disquiet, leave alone danger. I suspected this was by design, but this calculated attempt to disarm me brought Hannah Arendt’s phrase “banality of evil” to mind.
Smiles from some, heads lowered in deference from others. Each person’s pose screamed, “We are all friends here!” In spite of that, my intuition shouted at me. I feared that maybe I was growing paranoid or jaded. Maybe the way my own mother had turned on me had colored my perception of the world. I considered the possibility that perhaps these witches weren’t my enemies, but then I remembered how they’d tried to sacrifice the innocent individuals of my hometown in a misguided attempt to look out for what they considered to be the greater good. “All right. Y’all wanted to talk. Well, I’m listening.”