“Y’all didn’t say give it up—” Anna ventured.

“Thet’s on account of now that y’all’s got the way of it, the Glory’s got its hooks deep in y’all, an’ givin’ it up’d be like givin’ up a arm or a leg,” her aunt replied soberly. “Think on it a minnut. Y’all’ll know it’s truth.”

She didn’t even have to think about it for a minute to know that her aunt was right. Giving up magic now was as unthinkable as having it had been before she came here.

“Finish yore supper, he’p me clean up, an’ go do whate’er y’all’s gonna do afore y’all sleep,” Aunt Jinny told her, with a half smile. “Which, I reckon, is ter go hang out the winder up by y’all’s bed, stare at th’ moon, and daydream ’bout thet boy.”

She was awfully glad that the deepening gloom of the cabin hid her blushes, because that was exactly what she most wanted to do.

15

THUNDER shocked her awake with a gasp and a pounding heart. Her eyes flew open in time to catch the flash of lightning that turned the entire loft white, and another crash of thunder that occurred simultaneously. She shrieked before she could stop herself. Not that anyone could have heard her in that noise!

She scrambled to the window to shut it when a gust of icy wind drove in, carrying with it stinging rain that pelted her face before she slammed the window shut. Then she sat on the floor beside the window, looking out at the glimpses of the garden offered by the lightning, waiting for her heart to stop pounding. This was the second huge storm that had come in the night since she moved here. How often did these things blow in, anyway? She just wasn’t used to weather like this.

It wasn’t as if there hadn’t been storms back in Soddy . . . but they seemed so much bigger here.

The garden—how was the garden going to fare? She thought of all the half-ripened vegetables out there with a stab of apprehension. The root vegetables would probably be all right, but what about the rest?

She expected to hear a torrent of rain pounding on the roof just over her head, but despite the violence of the lightning and thunder, it appeared they weren’t going to be drowned any time soon, nor were they going to find the garden flattened. There was rain, she could see it in the lightning flashes, and hear it between the thunderclaps, but it wasn’t the sort of toad-strangler she had expected from the aerial violence outside.

Downstairs she heard her aunt slamming the windows—and then slamming the door, which must have been blown open—shut against the storm. But her aunt didn’t call up to her to ask for her help with anything, so after a little, she went back to her bed. The thunder receded into the distance, and she slept again.