Dance Upon the Air by Nora Roberts

conversation with Ripley yesterday.”
    â€œGood. Then we’ve established that I’m a witch.” Mia sipped again. “You’re a sweet one, Nell. There you are, trying very hard to discuss this intelligently, soberly, when you’re thinking I’m—let’s say—eccentric. We’ll table that for the moment and go back in history so I can lay some groundwork for you. You know of the witch trials in Salem.”
    â€œSure. A few hysterical young girls, fanatical Puritans. Mob mentality. Burn the witch.”
    â€œHang,” Mia corrected. “Nineteen people—all innocents—were hanged in 1692. One was pressed todeath when he refused to declare himself innocent or guilty. Others died in prison. There have been witch-hunts throughout time. Here, in Europe, in every corner of the world. Even when most stopped believing, or admitting to a belief, in witchcraft, there were hunts. Nazism, McCarthyism, the KKK, and so on. Nothing more than fanatics, with power, pushing their own agendas and finding enough weak minds to do the dirty work.”
    And don’t, Mia thought, taking a breath, get me started. “But today we’re concerned with one microcosm of history.”
    She leaned back, tapped a finger lightly on the book. “The Puritans came here, searching, they said, for religious freedom. Of course, many of them were only looking for a place to force their beliefs and their fears on others. And in Salem, they persecuted and murdered blindly, so blindly that not one of the nineteen souls they took was the soul of a witch.”
    â€œPrejudice and fear are never clear-sighted.”
    â€œWell said. There were three among them. Women who’d chosen this place to live their lives and live their craft. Powerful women who had helped the sick and the sorry. They knew, these three, that they could no longer stay where they would, sooner or later, be accused and condemned. So the Isle of Three Sisters was created.”
    â€œCreated?”
    â€œIt’s said that they met in secret and cast a spell. And part of the land was torn away from the mainland. We’re living on what they took from that time and that place. A sanctuary. A haven. Isn’t that what you came for, Nell?”
    â€œI came for work.”
    â€œAnd found it. They were known as Air and Earth and Fire. For some years they lived quietly and at peace. And alone. It was loneliness that weakened them. The one known as Air wished for love.”
    â€œWe all do,” Nell said quietly.
    â€œPerhaps. She dreamed of a prince, golden and handsome, who would sweep her away to some lovely place where they would live happily and have children to comfort her. She was careless with her wish, as women can be when they yearn. He came for her, and she saw only that he was golden and handsome. She went away with him, left her haven. She tried to be a good and dutiful wife, and bore her children, loved them. But it wasn’t enough for him. Under the gold, he was dark. She grew to fear him, and he fed on her fear. One night, mad with that hunger, he killed her for being what she was.”
    â€œThat’s a sad story.” Nell’s throat was dry, but she didn’t lift her glass.
    â€œThere’s more, but that’s enough for now. Each had a sad story, and a tragic end. And each left a legacy. A child who would bear a child who would bear a child, and so on. There would come a time, it was said, when a descendant from each of the sisters would be on the island at the same time. Each would have to find a way to redeem and break the pattern set three hundred years ago. If not, the island would topple into the sea. Lost as Atlantis.”
    â€œIslands don’t topple into the sea.”
    â€œIslands aren’t created by three women, usually,” Mia countered. “If you believe the first, the second isn’t much of a stretch.”
    â€œYou believe it.” Nell