E
verything is connected. The people you pass on the street, the child looking up with trusting eyes, the old woman bent down with memories, the beggar on the corner. We weave in and out of one another’s lives, like circles within circles, and everything is for a purpose.

We were meant to meet Helen. Her life connected with ours, and together we did things that we could never have even imagined alone. She was the best of us, and this is her story.

It isn’t a story about magic; it’s about miracles. The miracle of friendship, and courage and sisterhood. And the miracle of love—the greatest power of all—that came down and touched us as Helen embraced her destiny. Crazy Helen Black, they said—but we know better. We
believe in everything she did, everything she was.

So when you next pass the girl who doesn’t fit in, at school or in the mall or walking down the street with her shoulders hunched and her eyes dark with loneliness, just stop for a moment and ask yourself—what power is she hiding deep within her soul? And ask yourself where your own powers are leading you. To the light, or into the shadows? We all have to make that choice sometime. We have to make our destinies happen.

This is Helen’s story. Read it, and then make your own choices. And may your destiny be as strange and beautiful as her own.

In sisterhood,

Evelyn Johnson and Sarah Fitzalan

One

F
ROM THE
D
IARY OF
H
ELEN
B
LACK

W
YLDCLIFFE
, S
EPTEMBER
13

I
’ve done something crazy and stupid and wicked, and you’re the only person I can tell. My Wanderer, I need you so badly.

When I scribble my thoughts to you in this diary, it’s almost as though you are here with me again, like you used to be, in the old days.

I can’t even tell Evie and Sarah what I’ve done, because I know it was wrong. But can you understand that I had to know what would happen? I had to see if I could make things different. To know whether freedom was possible for her—and for me.

The idea was tormenting me all summer, like a voice in my head. “Go and try it when you get back to Wyldcliffe, just see if it works, you won’t do any harm….”

But who can tell what harm we do? They say that every action affects someone else, like a tiny stone falling and starting an avalanche. Everything is connected.

If what I have done hurts Evie or Sarah, I’ll never forgive myself.

I went to the hills,

Where the wind blows

Over the high ground.

I looked for the prisoner

Who chains my heart.

I found a broken bird,

And a forgotten song.

I found myself.

The worst thing of all is that I know I will go and do it all again tomorrow. I hope that my sisters will forgive me, but I have to do this. And I have to do it alone.

I was crazy Helen Black, bent over my diary, snatching at words to ease my pain, pouring my heart out to a lost dream. The only person I could talk to was my Wanderer, and he wasn’t even really there, only in my secret memories. I was alone, I always had been, always
would be, and that was that.

The people I should have turned to, Sarah and Evie, were the ones I was most careful to hide the truth from. All my life I had craved friendship, but now I had found it, I hardly knew what to do with it. Ironic, isn’t it? I had even found my family at last—my dad, Tony, and his new wife, Rachel, and their two gorgeous kids. They were so kind to me, but I didn’t feel I belonged with them. On my visit to their home in the summer vacation, I had been awkward and self-conscious, craving their acceptance but not really knowing how to accept myself. I didn’t know how to break out of the protective cage I had built around my heart for years, so we never got to know one another properly. Despite their kind words and good intentions and my father’s promise to write to me often, I knew that Tony and Rachel were secretly relieved when it was time for me to go back to boarding school and they could get on with their own life. And I was glad to leave, liberating them of the burden of trying to be nice to me. But when I arrived at Wyldcliffe on a blustery September day, things started to get even tougher.

It’s not that my friends weren’t waiting for me. There they were, running down the platform when I got off the train at the little country station at the head of Wyldcliffe’s
windswept valley. They threw themselves at me with hugs and smiles. My friends. They were so special, both of them. Evie Johnson—sensitive, passionate, with long red hair and sea-gray eyes. She had known love and loss and she still grieved under that welcoming smile. Evie’s mystic element was water, connecting her to the river of time and the flow of the years. And Sarah—dear, dear Sarah, my sister of earth; good and grounded and caring, a queen of the green forests and wild mountains, with curling brown hair and dancing brown eyes and a heart that was true and steady as an oak tree. Ordinary girls, other people might have thought, but I knew they were unique and wonderful and powerful.

I told myself I wasn’t good enough for them. They deserved a better fate than to be tied to my miserable doom. I wanted them to be free of me, so I turned away from them and scribbled my secrets to a long-lost ghost.

Another September, another school year, another return to Wyldcliffe Abbey School for Young Ladies. But there was someone else waiting for me at Wyldcliffe.
She
was there, drawing me back to those dark hills.
She
was waiting for me. Our battle wasn’t done yet. As I sat once again in the gloomy classrooms and tried to concentrate on French and history, my thoughts wandered up to the
moors, where a beloved enemy was waiting for me to make the next move. What was she thinking? What was she planning? And did she ever think of me?

I had to find out, and I had to make sure that Evie and Sarah didn’t guess what I was about to do.

It was easy to sneak out of the school, now that I had my powers back. Now that I could step through the air again I could at least escape for a little while, and that’s all I did at first. When it all got too much—the noise of the school, the endless talk-talk-talk of the other students, the black looks from the mistresses because I wasn’t paying attention in class—I took the secret paths through the air and walked over the moors, reveling in the winds and the clouds and the call of the birds. Even the sympathy and concern of Evie and Sarah seemed too much sometimes. Stifling. They didn’t mean to be like that, but I could sense them watching me, the little glances between them—
Is Helen all right? Is she coping? What’s going on with her?
It made me feel like a prisoner.

If I sound ungrateful, I didn’t mean to be. And if my friends watched me closely, it was only because they cared. I was grateful, deep down. I loved Sarah and Evie. I would have died for them. But I still felt cut off and different. I still feel like that abandoned child in the orphanage.

That’s why I needed my Wanderer, even though he had left me long ago. I told him my secrets in hot, hasty words that spilled out like blood into my diary, instead of actually talking with my friends. But that wasn’t enough. More than anything, I needed my mother.

I tried to forget that she was Celia Hartle, the Priestess, who hated the very sound of my name. I ached to have what I had never known, and clung to any scrap of hope, telling myself that it was a new term, a new day, and a new beginning. And so I went to the moors alone, passing by the secret ways. I know I shouldn’t have, but I was driven to it by my restless, hungry heart. I went to the circle of stones on the Blackdown Ridge, where my mother’s spirit was trapped in the great, lonely rock.

And I spoke to her.

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