Episode Three: The Sisterhood #3

  The Sisterhood: Episode Three

  The Sisterhood, Volume 3

  Tali Inlow

  Published by Tali Inlow, 2020.

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  THE SISTERHOOD: EPISODE THREE

  First edition. November 30, 2020.

  Copyright © 2020 Tali Inlow.

  ISBN: 978-1393316510

  Written by Tali Inlow.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  EPISODE THREE The School

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  Also By Tali Inlow

  About the Author

  EPISODE THREE

  The School

  Summer and Autumn are turning thirteen this year. And that can only mean one thing: the time has come to enroll at the Whitmore School for Girls. The time has come to begin their training, and to learn everything that comes along with being a Whitmore Girl.

  Some thirty years before, Summer’s aunt and Autumn’s mother had attended the school themselves. Those two had hated each other, been competitive from the first moment they’d laid eyes on one another.

  History and the ways it repeats itself—a strange and miraculous thing.

  The school is prestigious, one of the finest preparatory academies in the country. The rates of Ivy League acceptance by its graduates are second, literally, to none. And while those facts—along with their general well-balanced curriculum of science, english, mathematics, history, the arts, and more—are well-known, there are other courses running along the underbelly of Whitmore that may be considered less savory by some.

  One of the proudest traditions of the Whitmore School is that of nepotism. It’s a hard secret to keep, that of training young girls in magic and murder—though the magic doesn’t come until Year Five; the murder, Year Four. To have relations of alumni come to the school is the easiest way to keep their traditions a secret. And to keep their traditions a secret is to keep the Sisterhood alive.

  No one will jeopardize the Sisterhood, and that is a foremost fact and understanding of all who are a part of it.

  So Summer and Autumn, neither being any the wiser of the role the other will play in their lives to come, begin their respective journeys to the school. And journeys of some extraordinariness they are...

  Summer was born in the heat of August in ‘97. It was the kind of scorched earth summer that made the grass crunch beneath a person’s feet, no matter how much money and water got poured into lawn maintenance. Even the birds kept their beaks shut, and the creeks around the Virginian estate where Summer was born drew down to soft, barely audible gurgles. Her parents blamed her name on the oppressive heat, its torturous and unwavering existence in her mother’s final trimester all either of them could think of, no matter the time of day. Born in the middle of that misery, Summer was the only name that made any sense. The noun that had become a verb that had become a curse. But the heat dissipated the day after Summer was born, and so her parents gave her the middle name Destiny. It had felt fitting.

  It wasn’t destiny that brought Summer to the Whitmore School for Girls so much as that charmed thing, nepotism. Nepotism and the old, southern money that belonged to her father—that had come from his father, and his father before him. Summer had grown up attending the finest primary schools that money could buy, had spent nearly every stretch of schooling away from her parents for weeks and months at a time. By the time they sent her off to Whitmore, Summer was more than ready to be out of her parents’ house again, sprawling and rich though it may be—it had never been much of a home, not to her. It was a waypoint more than anything, a stopgap between semesters, between vacations, between one moment and the next.

  If the Norwood Estate was a home to Summer, it was in the most superficial sense possible.

  Summer loved her parents the way some people love Americanized Chinese takeout—sometimes she really craves them, but they never quite hit the spot. As the Whitmore School approaches, Summer doesn’t particularly miss her parents. But she does, at times, yearn for them. Or at least for the idea of them.

  It was 30 years ago when Summer’s aunt—her father’s sister—had attended Whitmore. Back then, her aunt had been a champion fencer, not just at the school or back home in Virginia, but in the entire country. She hadn’t gone further with it after graduating from Whitmore—that would have been more attention than any Whitmore Girl really needs in their life. A low profile is a blessing; renown, a curse.

  Her aunt is a large piece of the legacy that Summer carries on her shoulders as the big iron gates of Whitmore approach. She can’t see them yet, but Summer knows that they are up ahead—has heard them described time and time again by her boozy aunt, reminiscing about her glory days. But she hasn’t heard those stories in months—she has heard little about Whitmore at all since her aunt disappeared.

  The legacy hangs over her head regardless. And Summer doesn’t quite know what that means or how to navigate it, not yet. But she’ll figure it out. Because while Summer is physically fit and has her fair share of athleticism, she is not destined for the same titles and prestige that her aunt held. Swords and other weapons are things she can use, but she isn’t particularly drawn to that sort of thing.

  Summer’s favorite weapon? Language. Persuasion.

  A born politician, Summer has been charming adults and other children around her for years already, bending them to her will like a child at play. But a child she still is, not yet even a teenager. She had gotten her first period two summers ago, and she had held her stained underwear like a badge of honor. Like she had joined a secret club. She had told no one—not her mother, and certainly not her father. Not even the maid. Summer had taken some money out of the jar she kept hidden in the back of her closet, climbed onto her bike, and ridden the few miles into town before noon. By the time she got to the little grocery store on the main street, her blonde hair was plastered to her head with sweat. And once inside the store, she’d stared up at the shelves of products with a furrowed brow, ultimately climbing up to the top for some liners and a small box of tampons, none of which made any sense to her. She’d eventually worked it all out: where things go—and where they don’t. And she’d done it on her own, had even become something of a wise sage to her other friends when the next school year started, parsing out wisdom for free, knowing that it would come back to her in good time.

  Summer hadn’t been sure then that getting her period was what made her a woman, not really. She still isn’t certain. She thinks it must surely be something more complex than that. Time will tell.

  Back in May, Summer’s businessman father—always just a hair shy of too serious, too straightforward, too iron-fisted—had announced that Summer would be off to Whitmore come September. That was the beginning and the end of the conversation. Summer had learned a long time before that to engage with her father in anything more or less than his own set parameters of conversation was to inevitably either disappoint or anger him. Part of her politician’s understanding of the world was the knowledge of when and when not to start a fight, to push beyond her own limits. She knows when to bide her time. She knows when not to.

  She’d packed her own bags—three huge duffels full of clothes to get through to at least winter break, if not beyond it. Her goal was to make enough friends that she could have options for households to crash at instead of heading back to the Norwood Estate in Virginia come mid-December.

  Even at twelve years of age, Summer Destiny is always planning.

  Autumn, o
n the other hand, can hardly picture what suppertime at Whitmore will bring, let alone what her life could look like three months from now.

  The summer of ‘97 had been brutal everywhere, not just in Virginia. And when the heat broke in August, people everywhere rejoiced. Fall was on its way, and in spectacular fashion did it arrive. The trees turned early, exhausted and ready to drop, and they stayed that way longer than usual. The world was a beautiful place when Autumn was born—and so her parents named her for the season. Their newborn’s eyes were at first a blue as bright as the spectacular sky on the day she was born, but they changed over time to green; those eyes, they sparkled and danced, and held within them the freedom and exuberance of nature. The very air for months around her birth tasted of hope, and so her parents gave her that name, too.

  Autumn comes from Native folks from Oklahoma, folks who fought their way up to the middle class, and who cling to it even now as if it could be taken from them at any moment. Because it could be, couldn’t it? Little else had been proven time and time again so much as this lesson. But Autumn was cautiously excited about the Whitmore School for Girls, if for no other reason than the opportunity it provided to see more of the world her ancestors had been forced to leave behind just a short few generations ago. Her grandma told her about the land, the water, the plants and animals—she explained to Autumn about how everything was and is still connected through a delicate and precious balance. She taught Autumn some of the language, when Autumn would sit still enough to hear her and learn it. And Autumn’s grandpa, he told her about the Indian boarding schools—and how the white people, the government, had tried to take all of that history, culture, language, and connection away from them. He told Autumn how the white man had succeeded—and how the white man had failed.

  Autumn’s parents occasionally told stories too, but they had always been more focused on the present. Autumn did not fault them for this—not when, even at the young age of eleven, twelve, she had already begun to understand how her ancestor’s trauma was writ large on her own everyday life.

  Autumn had grown up on a modest farm, her dad and grandpa having been able to buy a few extra acres of land around the smaller allotments her great-grandfather had gotten as pittance for having to leave the old world for the new. Autumn’s feet are calloused from running barefoot all summer long, as was usual for her. Nature and the outdoors, that was where Autumn felt most at home. And as the vehicle she sits in approaches her home for the next few weeks, months, years, Autumn exults in the mountains and trees around her—even as her eyes prick with tears at the homesickness she feels in her bones.

  In her twelve years, Autumn hasn’t been away from her parents for longer than a few days at a time. Not even her mother’s stories of her time at the Whitmore School had hyped Autumn up enough to burn away her nerves entirely.

  And stories did her mother have, stories aplenty. Her mom had excelled at Whitmore, and in a very particular fashion. She had become a master of poisons, a secret that she had spilled to Autumn quietly one evening two years before, as they laid side by side in the soft summer grass, looking up at the Milky Way, reminiscing about the story her mom’s mom had told, of the dog and the cornmeal and the creation of the galaxy across the night sky. The admission had come quietly, and Autumn hadn’t even dared turn her head to look at her mom’s profile in the cool, moonlit night. But the admission had unleashed a wild deluge of questions, and her mom had answered them in whispers there in the grass, in the dark.

  Autumn’s mom had taught her much before she set off for school. But poisons—herbs and salves and various concoctions alike—were things Autumn did not particularly care for, as it turns out. She wouldn’t have said it to her mom, but there was something cowardly about poisoning a person, even if the art behind the process was undeniable. What Autumn had learned with certainty in the two years before heading off to Whitmore and fulfilling the legacy her mother had laid out before her—the legacy her mother had decided not even to pursue herself after graduation, a tale for another time—was that she prefers speedier treasons. Blades of all sorts and shapes. The glint, the power, the balance.

  And Autumn knows that either weapon—poison or steel—are last resorts. Even at twelve, she knows what she is capable of, what she is comfortable with, and that some things, a person cannot come back from.

  But what Autumn knows more than anything else is that there is a lot she does not know, a great deal that not even her mom told her, knowledge that she had not had time to bestow upon Autumn before the time came to climb the mountain to the school. Much that the Whitmore School itself has to teach her, that a Whitmore Girl must learn, and learn well.

  She has one large suitcase to make the journey with, and Autumn has packed it with fall clothes, enough to get her home at the first chance, really. And the inner linings of the suitcase could be carefully unlaced to reveal an assortment of weaponry. A girl has to have hobbies, after all—and no better place than Whitmore to turn a hobby into a livelihood.

  Her mom hadn’t given too much away, but she had given her one word of warning, and only one: Norwood. It was a surname, the last name of a girl Autumn’s mom had known during her time at the school. A conniver, she had said, a girl not worth trusting who had grown into something even worse in adulthood—a debutante turned politician’s wife, a woman who had forsaken what it meant to be a Whitmore Girl, who came from money and returned to it gladly after Whitmore. A woman who would sooner stab you in the back than not, who was as sharp of tongue as of sabre. A woman with pale skin and shining gold hair, glinting gray eyes and slender form.

  Summer’s aunt had issued a similar warning, a warning of a family whose matriarch had attended Whitmore with her. A loner of a woman who had excelled in the subtle arts of stealth and manipulation, espionage and camouflage. A woman who could disarm an opponent faster than a striking cobra. A woman whose skill with organic chemistry and poison mastery was rivaled only by her distrust in others—not that anyone ever dared to share food or drink with her. A woman who finished at Whitmore and then went and got married, then did nothing more with her life, so far as any other Whitmore Girls ever knew. A woman with brown skin and dark, wild hair, light brown eyes and a name given up to her husband. Watch out for the name Parish, her aunt had said.

  She has a daughter, one had said.

  A niece, the other had proclaimed.

  But fruit, it never falls far from the tree that bore it. And heavily do these fruits fall, burdened with dark histories and traumatized genetics and exquisite promises of betrayal.

  Neither girl thought to question the motivations behind their respective matriarchal hate, a dislike bred into them over time and by skillful tongues. But each girl valued loyalty. And to get loyalty, it had to be given. Family instills a special loyalty all its own. And so Summer and Autumn held the advice given them close. Summer with her duffels of clothes sufficient to avoid home, Autumn with her suitcase of blades and escape. Summer, enough to avoid home indefinitely; Autumn, ready to head back to it at a moment’s notice.

  There is power in a name. Summer has Destiny, Autumn has Hope, and the Norwood and Parish names that clashed a generation before were destined to do so yet again.

  One thing neither Summer nor Autumn had counted on, one thing neither Summer’s aunt nor Autumn’s mother could have fathomed: Fate, and the fickle webs it weaves.

  “Hi!”

  Autumn jumps in her seat, peeling her eyes from the tall trees lining the narrow mountain drive they’ve been ascending for what feels like hours. It’s only been about two minutes, but who’s counting?

  What Autumn will later find out is that two minutes for the girl sitting next to her was a record, a marvel in self-restraint. The sleek transport they are taking up the mountainside hits a nasty pothole, and Autumn’s hand reaches out to grip the armrest next to her. The other girl’s hand lands on top of hers, and they both grin at each other, giggling that nervous, tension-breaking kind of giggle between children
.

  “Hey there,” Autumn returns the greeting.

  “I’m Iris, what’s your name?”

  “Autumn.”

  “Autumn, like... fall?”

  “Yeah, except, like, Autumn.”

  “What’s the difference?” Iris asks, her freckled nose crinkling up adorably as the question leaves her lips.

  Iris’s fingers are busily twisting a few strands of light brown hair into the tiniest braid Autumn has ever seen. Autumn’s lips quirk into a lopsided grin that, over the years, will become familiar and comforting to Iris.

  “One’s just trying to be fancier, I think.”

  They giggle again at this, a conspiratorial air falling across the both of them like a shared shroud.

  “Hey!” a dark-skinned girl shoots straight up over the top of the seat in front of them. There’s a hint of an accent on her tongue and something about her that Autumn and Iris both like instantly. “What’s so dang funny, huh?”

  This causes Autumn and Iris to burst out into another round of giggles that bubble up into an uncontrollable laughter, neither of them entirely sure what the hell was making them laugh this way. Nerves, maybe—or tension, breaking.

  The twelve or so other girls in their shared transport mostly ignore them, but the girl’s seatmate also pops up, propping her chin in her hands and immediately frowning at them. Her blue eyes, white skin, and orange hair are a stark contrast to the girl next to her.

  “I would also like to know what’s funny,” she says, “if you don’t mind.”

  “Sure don’t,” Autumn says on a laugh. “But there’s not much to tell. We were just introducing ourselves, that’s all.”

  “And what’s funny about introductions?” the first girl asks.

  Iris pops up from where she’d been sitting with one foot curled up underneath her, extending her hand to the first girl. “I’m Iris,” she says, “and you are?”