Page 62 of Hollow
My heart warms at the way he calls me Daffy. I hadn’t heard that nickname in a long time.
My mother twists around in her saddle to look at me sharply. “You performed magic for Brom?”
I remember my father’s words, and I immediately feel shame. “I know. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry,” she says quickly. “I just…I had no idea. You never showed any magic around me when you were little. I thought perhaps you barely had any, as if it skipped a generation.”
I’m about to tell her that Papa told me not to show it around her, but something stops me. Something that lets me know that my mother shouldn’t know of that conversation. Something in my father’s voice and eyes that had always seemed to say more than he was saying.
That my mother couldn’t be trusted.
She couldn’t be trusted around my magic.
“It wasn’t much,” I eventually say.
She stares at me for a moment, trying to read me. Then she looks back to the gates that rise up before us. “We all start small,” she says. “The small things add up with time.”
The gates open for us, and I wonder if Brom will lose his memories of earlier, if he even knows that it’s a side effect of the school. Did he take the tests at all? If so, when?
We ride through them, the pressure of the wards reaching into my skull and squeezing, the wash of cold, and then the pressure lifts, and we’re on the trail, riding through the dark woods.
I glance over my shoulder at Brom. He’s wincing, one hand pushing on the side of his temple.
“What was that?” he asks.
“The wards,” I say. “You must have felt them when you rode in.” I pause, waiting for him to tell me he didn’t remember that either. Unless going through the wards has the opposite effect for him. “Do you remember anything now?”
He shakes his head. “No.”
“Do you remember class earlier with Professor Crane? Your tour with Sister Margaret?”
“Yes,” he says, frowning.
“He remembers just as I do,” I announce to my mother as I face forward. “How do you explain that?”
“There’s a lot that can’t be explained right now, Kat,” my mother says in a tired voice.
That can’t be explained, I think. Or won’t be?
When we reach our house, Brom continues riding on, telling my mother that he’ll invite his parents over for supper. Brom’s family lives on the next farm over from my house toward town, and I contemplate riding with him just so I can have a chance to be alone with him and ask questions, but he’s already pushing on his way. Maybe he needs some time to be alone himself and try and figure out what’s happening. I can’t imagine what it must be like for him. The desperation in his voice when he asked Crane to fix him…it broke my heart.
We untack the horses and go inside the house, which smells like chicken soup. My mother finds Famke in the kitchen and tells her to make extra for dinner since we’re having company. Famke couldn’t look more surprised to hear of Brom’s return.
“Is it true?” Famke whispers to me while she’s chopping up celery, my mother having gone to take a bath. “Is Brom really back?”
“He’s really back,” I tell her.
She squints at me through a few strands of frayed grey hair that’s fallen across her forehead.
“You don’t look happy, child.”
I put on my best smile. “I am happy. I’m relieved.”
“But?” She presses the knife against the celery but doesn’t cut it.
“But he doesn’t remember anything,” I whisper. “Not why he left, not what’s happened while he’s been gone. He doesn’t even know how he got here. The Sisters said that he’s been home for days but was too ill to see anyone. But I don’t believe that, and Brom doesn’t either. He says the only thing he remembers is waking up today in my class. That’s it.”
Famke searches my eyes for a few moments.