Page 90 of Divine Oaths

“Hmm, I’m not sure. The name’s a little familiar.”

“What about a student named Vivian?”

“Yes, of course. Vivian this, Vivian that. A friend of your mother’s. Though, if I remember correctly, she didn’t graduate from Westfield. Did she?”

“And neither did Mom.”

“No, dear. Your mother dropped out. Her sisterhood was her lifeline there, but that place terrified her.”

Angelica had spoken of my powers as if Vivian had been the only person she’d come across who also had an affinity for time. But my mother could see into the future. She too had what the sisterhood would call a gift. And she had been one of them, even if only for a brief period.

“Then why did you encourage me to attend? If Mom hated it, why would you want me to come here?”

“Well, dear, it’s one of the best schools in the country.”

I waited for the rest of Louisa’s answer.

It never came. Because that’s all there was to Westfield. It’s what I’d cared about when I’d been obsessed with it in my youth. The status of getting accepted to Westfield, of being accepted by an institution that had historically determined access to the biggest and best opportunities and networks in the world. And now here I was, bound to Westfield too.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

The stars are fire

BEFORE MY FIRST OFFICIAL TRAINING to become one of the Ԑnhye, I was ambushed by Angelica and Vivian while leaving Poppy House for breakfast. With an egg sandwich and cup of tea they handed me, I followed them on campus to Angelica’s office. In her small garden in the back, we sat on wooden ottomans that had been hand-carved. Once again, the insignia of the Ԑnhye was repeated on the bottom of each seat.

“You spoke to your aunt, I presume,” Angelica said.

“Why didn’t you tell me my mother was part of the sisterhood? And the fire here, on the day of my audition—is that connected to the curse? If the curse caused the fire, then this entire time, my life has been affected too.”

“We are all but threads in each other’s tapestries,” Angelica said. “One knot can cause a tear through the fabric that binds us. We will answer any questions you have about the sisterhood or your mother. Now that you’ve taken the first vow of the Ԑnhye, your path to the sisterhood begins.”

I thought of my mother, who had been Ԑnhye before, and Vivian, who, even in death, belonged to the sisterhood.

“I’m ready,” I said. “I pledge myself to the Ԑnhye.”

I drank the concoction they’d brought me, this one a black tea mixed with peppermint and something willowy and bitter that I couldn’t quite place.

Angelica and Vivan nodded.

“This incantation, once spoken aloud, cannot be undone,” Vivian said. She held out her hand. Angelica took it, and they both extended hands to me.

Static sparked in the air, and the manifestations of their affinities filled the small enclosure. I repeated the pledge once again, my powers brimming in the back of my mind as if a magnet had pulled them to the surface. “I pledge myself to the Ԑnhye.”

When Angelica and Vivian let go, the air was lighter, like the sky was clearer than it had been earlier.

“You have made your pledge, and now we shall begin your bid. But first, you must understand us and where we come from.” Angelica calmly stood while Vivian explained the tenets of Ԑnhye.

For centuries, ever since Yara and her kin founded their society, the Ԑnhye had been developing their powers as guardians of the realm between the living and the dead. Their cowrie shell bracelets and jewelry were imbued with protection. And Westfield, at one point, had been their bastion as they carved out a place for themselves while under the protection of Kent Saint James.

But on the heels of Kent’s death, the safeguards they’d once been promised disintegrated—the evil they’d believed to have defeated at the end of the Civil War took new forms during the dawn of Reconstruction. As the decades passed, Ԑnhye became an ember of resistance, passing down their teachings, adapting their powers, and guiding one another as the tear between realms deepened. They adapted and stayed rooted in their ancestral connection, even as the times changed.

As a ghost, Vivian was one of their oldest members who hadn’t passed on peacefully to the realm after life. However, Vivian suspected there were others who predated her who were tethered to this world, hiding their presence completely.

“Our motto is hye wo nhye,” Vivian said. “That which does not burn cannot be burned. Though Angelica and I remain the only members of our sisterhood here at Westfield, at least on this side of the realms, the others are here with us, not visible to the eye, unless they choose to take the form of a moth to remind us of the connection they once had to the realm of the living.”

In an empty patch of dirt in her garden, she drew a symbol that looked like a peach pit. It had an oval center and two mirroring inverted forms, almost akin to the number three but drawn backward, or the wings of a moth.

Adinkra, just like the patterns in my mother’s dress and Angelica’s necklace.