Turn

41

Virginia, Greyson, and Quinn, sat in the boys' room, listening to Andrea's incredible tales, for the rest of that Saturday.

"I was born in 1479," she told them. "In an Italian village. My mother was a healer and she had learned her craft from a woman called Gaia, who I called Nonna. My Nonna taught me differently than she had taught my mother; she said that I had a gift for magic. So I became a witch. But when I was just a little girl, people became suspicious of Val Camonica, my home, and the residents. They began to whisper that witchcraft was abundant there and it made us wicked, like Sodom and Gomorrah, and that we had to be cleansed. Most people supported Gaia there, and my mother, because they helped the people around them. I grew up under my mother's care and Gaia's tutelage, and I became powerful. Gaia told me that someday, she was sure, I would surpass her."

Virginia could hardly believe this tale as it was spoken but she somehow knew every word of it was true.

"In her later years, as Gaia had been born in 1384 and was nearly a hundred when I was born, she began to search for immortality. After I was about six and started to come into my gift, she asked me for help with it," continued Andrea. "She eventually decided that the answer lie with the soul, that it had to be preserved, removed from the body, to become immortal. Like vampires. She had small successes at prolonging her own life, but she continued to age, to whither as she got older. By the time I was sixteen, she was one hundred and eleven, and she was quickly deteriorating. She didn't have the strength to perform the rituals keeping her alive anymore."

Andrea was overcome with emotion, speaking about the death of her Nonna, even after more than five hundred years. She cleared her throat and smiled a little at them.

"She meant so much to me, and when she died, she gave me her grimoire," Andrea nodded. "That's the book you have there."

"This?" Virginia pulled the book out of her bag, and Andrea nodded.

Slowly, Virginia went to hand it to her, but Andrea only smiled sadly.

"No, I can't touch it. I'm not real enough," she said. "I can't touch anything in the corporeal world, but if I could, that would be the first thing. To feel those pages again, to read the words that Gaia read to me as if it were a storybook...That was compiled for her by her clan, from a southern island, before she came into Italy in her infancy. All the women there were imbued with magic, but they were dying. Their island was dying. They could not allow their spells to die as well, however, so they wrote this grimoire. When Gaia was born, the youngest and last of them, they sent her on a raft away from the island with only the book and a spell to carry her to safety. She reached the Italian shores and was adopted by a fisherman and his wife. They knew she was powerful from early on and when she was eleven years old, they cast her out from their village after, in a youthful fit of anger, she brought a hoard of insects onto a boy who had struck her. So Gaia set out to find her original home. She made a journey across the sea back to where the island had once stood, but it had since sunk into the ocean, swallowing every trace of her people and her home."

The three listened to her words in rapt silence, and Andrea only sighed with a sad, quiet smile on her lips.

"Gaia came to Northern Italy after spending time in Rome. She was, so it was said by some, consort to a few Popes," Andrea smiled. "It was said that it was her magic that imbued Rodrigo Borgia with the power to take the Papacy after she left Rome. But those were the sort of rumors Gaia dismissed with a smile. Once she came to Val Camonica, she found my mother, who was nine and just lost both her parents to the plague. Gaia protected my town and no one else died that year."