They called her Mother Ruth, but she was no one’s mother. At least not by blood. Her arms had never held a babe of her own, nor had they ever yearned to, because she knew a simple truth—giving yourself over in that way was a weakness. She would never allow a man to take that freedom from her, because she’d had enough of her freedom taken already. Hadn’t she watched her parents scrape by with barely enough to feed their family? Hadn’t she seen with her own two eyes how her mother wasted away, babe after babe, until finally, her fourteenth had taken the last she had to give?
Or perhaps her own mother had wasted away for another reason. Ruth often wondered—was it truly the babes? Or was it that her mother had given away the part of herself that made her whole? Because Ruth had to imagine that what made her mother whole was the very thing that made Ruth herself whole—magic.
Ruth’s father had been a small-minded man. Only heaven knew why her mother had made herself small to get a ring on her finger. But when her father had learned that his wife had the old magic, he’d done what he could to beat it out of her until she’d found ways to keep it hidden from him. But something like magic can’t be pressed down forever.
Her mother had only kitchen magic, a kind of power she could weave into the food she made or the ale she brewed, but Ruth herself knew the power that something so seemingly simple could bestow because her own power was the same. She’d never understood it, a woman like her mother, cowering in fear of a man such as her father. But even as a small child, Ruth had been old enough and wise enough to know that some things in the world weren’t meant to be comprehended. Ruth’s mother had hidden her magic, and before she’d died giving birth to her fourteenth child, she’d taught the rest of her children who’d been born with affinities—Ruth included—how to hide theirs.
On the day they’d buried her mother, Ruth’s father had told her in no uncertain terms that, as the oldest, the children were her responsibility now. Ruth might not have had a choice in the what, but she decided that day that she would chose the how. She taught her brothers and sisters how to stand on their own and how to cultivate their magic so that they couldn’t ever be pressed small by anyone.
Maybe she could have run off. Maybe she should’ve.
After all, she was already more than twenty when her mother died, and in those days, she was still young and pretty enough that there were plenty of boys whose heads turned when she walked by. She could have picked any one of them, thick-skulled and easygoing as they were, but why trade one duty for another? Better the devil you knew, she reasoned.
So she’d managed to raise all her brothers and sisters to adulthood. Mother Ruth, they called her, even when she told them she wasn’t their mother. Most of them took themselves far from the meagerness of their childhood, which was fine by Ruth. Fewer for her to worry about. They could do what they would with the world, and she would do the same.
Her whole life, Ruth had exactly one hour to herself each week—the hour she took to go to Mass. But on a fateful Sunday, she never made it. That Sunday she chanced to dart under the cover of a random livery stable for shelter from the rain on the way to St. Alban’s. In addition to the soft rustling of horseflesh, she’d found herself interrupting a meeting, and it surprised even her that she’d stayed to listen to what was being said instead of continuing on. But there had been magic in the air, a warmth that she’d missed from her own mother’s arms—a warmth that called to her in a way that nothing else ever had. And there was something else: a righteous anger that she felt an answering call to deep in her bones.
Instead of praying, she learned to shout. Instead of kneeling, she learned to rise. And she hadn’t stopped since.
The Antistasi had been a new beginning for her. When she found the group that day, they were little more than a ragtag bunch hoping for companionship and an escape from their hard-scratched lives. They were disorganized and undisciplined, taking their name from bedtime stories about another time, when Mageus had fought fiercely against their annihilation during the Disenchantment.
But since the Great Conclave two years before, since the Defense Against Magic Act had made the very thing she was illegal, something had changed in the organization. And Ruth had changed right along with it.
She had given the movement everything she had, everything that she was. She used money from the brewery she had built for herself and her siblings, and she used the Feltz Brewery building in support of the Antistasi’s cause as well. Now she walked through the rows of women cleaning and filling bottles, and she knew that she’d been put on this earth for a purpose. Not only to save the girls who worked for her from a lifetime of servitude for a moment’s indiscretion, but for something much larger—a demonstration of the power those who lived in the shadows held. A demonstration that could change everything for those who still had a link to the old magic.
Her eyes were sharp on her workers as she walked toward the nursery, which was housed in the back of the brewery. The nursery was Maggie’s doing. Ruth’s youngest sister—and the one who had taken their mother’s life—Maggie was already seventeen and was the last to remain with Ruth. They had no pictures, so Maggie couldn’t have known that she was the image of their mother, with her ash-brown hair curling about her temples and the small pair of silver-rimmed spectacles perched on the end of her upturned nose. And her eyes . . . For Ruth, looking at Maggie was like seeing her mother peer at her from the beyond. Or it would have been, except that Maggie’s eyes had a strength in them that Ruth had no memory of her mother ever possessing.
When Ruth entered the small nursery, Maggie was tending to the newest little one, a bundle of energy who had been abandoned by parents who either couldn’t take care of him or didn’t want to. It happened too often, Mageus born to parents after generations of affinities gone cold. Many of those children were seen as anomalies. Freaks. Abominations.
Some parents accepted their children as they were—but that was rare. Most of the time, when the parents’ efforts to curtail their children’s powers didn’t work, they discarded them. Asylums or orphanages across the countryside were filled with these castoffs, strange children who didn’t understand who or what they were. Those sent to the asylums rarely left whole—if they left at all—and at the orphanage, the rod wasn’t spared. Those children left mean as junkyard dogs, dangerous and volatile, easy marks for the police or the Jefferson Guard.
The other children in the nursery were the victims of the Act. Their parents had been rounded up and imprisoned or sent away. The children who were left behind might be taken in by friends or neighbors, hidden away so that the Guard couldn’t find them, but not everyone had someone. Those who didn’t were often brought to the brewery until they could be placed in homes where they would be safe.
It had been Maggie’s idea to start taking in the urchins—to steal them from the children’s homes and asylums when necessary—and to raise them with an understanding of what they were so they could be placed with families who would appreciate them. So they could thrive the way Ruth had allowed her to thrive, Maggie reasoned.
The girl was too innocent for her own good. She’d meet a hard end if she didn’t look past that rosy tint she saw the world through. Ruth permitted the nursery because it seemed like good business. More children with magic meant that the Antistasi could grow rather than die. The Society and other organizations like them could do what they would to snuff out the old magic, but another generation was waiting to rise up behind.