Sweet & Bitter Magic

by Adrienne Tooley

  The not knowing was the worst part, clawing at her insides like the sharp nails of Councillor Mari’s cat, which had never liked her but had adored Marlena.

  The weight of her sister’s memory bent Tamsin’s head over, sent a shooting pain down her back. It was a complicated weight, awkward and lopsided. For so long, Tamsin had mourned the sister she remembered—although, of course, her curse had blurred some of Marlena’s edges. But now, thanks to the diary, Tamsin was starting to fear that the sister she thought she had known had never truly existed at all. That the Marlena she missed was a figment of her imagination. Her warped memories. Her desperation.

  Tamsin scratched at her left arm, nails digging into her scar. Already she was exhausted, and they had yet to leave Ladaugh.

  At least the diary wasn’t with her. Its smooth leather cover could not dig into her side. Its words could not swim before her eyes. Tamsin was grateful for small mercies. Small mercies like silence.

  Too much silence.

  Tamsin whirled around, coming face-to-face with endless ears of corn. Wren was nowhere to be seen. Tamsin, having been wrapped up in her own fragmented memories, had no idea how long she had been missing.

  “Wren?” She hadn’t wanted to phrase it as a question. Statements were controlled. Questions were dependent. And if there was one thing Tamsin did not want to be, it was dependent on Wren.

  There was no reply. Against her better judgment, Tamsin shouted Wren’s name again, louder this time.

  A rustling—several stalks bristled, swaying lightly in the afternoon breeze. Tamsin held her breath. The sound was chaotic, a tangle of feet that made it difficult to determine if the limbs belonged to a human or an animal. She tried to brush away the fear creeping up her spine. Giant spiders were just the beginning. Perhaps there were poisonous beetles, or the farmer’s scarecrow had come to life. Maybe it had taken Wren, tying her to the post to keep watch over the crops.

  Tamsin fingered the ribbon around her neck, a glimmer of hope swirling in her chest. If Wren were dead, the ribbon would unfurl. Tamsin would be free to return home and forget this altogether-terrible idea. But the necklace stayed firmly tied at her throat. Tamsin sighed with annoyance. Wren wasn’t dead, then.

  “Wren.” This time it wasn’t a question.

  “What?” Wren came crashing through the field, bobbing and ducking between the stalks. Her eyes were as wide as a baby deer’s, the spring in her step more joyful than the season’s first warm day. “I caught sight of these blooming along the road.” She shoved a fistful of wildflowers at Tamsin. The flowers’ thin roots were perfectly intact. It appeared that Wren had not picked the flowers so much as gently coaxed the spindly roots to remove themselves from the ground.

  Tamsin stared at the bouquet blankly. “What am I supposed to do with those?”

  “Look at them?” Wren scrunched her brow with confusion. “Smell them?”

  “That seems like an extraordinary waste of time.”

  Wren’s jaw dropped as she examined Tamsin’s pinched expression. “You can’t even love a flower?”

  Tamsin clenched her jaw in fury. “What of it?”

  “That’s so sad.” Wren’s eyes were wide but not mocking. She frowned. “So, when you look at these flowers, what do you see?” She shoved the bundle into Tamsin’s unwilling hands.

  “The petals are… white?” Tamsin held a stem up to her nose and inhaled. It smelled of nothing, of course. “This is ridiculous.” She threw the flowers on the ground, then stomped on them with her heel for good measure.

  Wren flinched. “You hurt them.”

  “They’re flowers.”

  “They have magic,” Wren insisted. “They can feel.”

  Tamsin rolled her eyes. “What did they say when I stomped on them?” Her voice was jangling, mocking. Wren looked pained.

  “They didn’t say so much as scream.” She tugged on her braid. “Anyway, the petals aren’t white; they’re pink, like the sky just before the sun sets. Their scent is sweet, like the grass after a summer rain.” She crouched down and ran a finger over a petal. “And they’re soft, like a baby chick.”

  Tamsin tsked in annoyance. “They are not.”

  “They are,” Wren insisted. The earnestness of her expression only served to fuel Tamsin’s fury. Not only could this girl feel, but she described things just poorly enough for Tamsin to remember exactly how much of the world she was missing. Just well enough that she hungered for more.

  “We don’t have to talk.”

  “Oh.” Tamsin could hear the hurt in Wren’s voice, but the sudden quiet was so blissful she had trouble finding it within herself to care.

  * * *

  The sun was low in the sky when the cornfields opened up into a vast, grassy expanse. Tamsin and Wren were far from the road now, though if Tamsin squinted, she could make out the shapes of people heading for the town she and Wren had finally left. The grass beneath their feet was marshy and wet despite the fact that it hadn’t rained in weeks.

  “Stop.” Tamsin held out a hand. Wren barreled into her. “I’m hungry.”

  Wren regained her balance. “Oh, good, you brought food.”

  Tamsin frowned. “You didn’t bring any?”

  Wren’s eyes narrowed. “You didn’t bring any either?”

  Tamsin shrugged. “Well, I thought you’d bring some.”

  Wren gaped at her. “I’m supposed to be reading your mind now?”

  “That would save us both quite a bit of trouble, yes.”

  “You’re impossible,” Wren huffed, flinging herself onto a low stone wall that snaked up and down the valley.

  Tamsin ignored her. They were on farmland, after all. It wouldn’t be terribly difficult to summon something proper to sup on. She reached for Wren.

  The girl swatted her hand away. “What are you doing?”

  “I want some of your magic. I need to keep myself in one piece. We’ve got quite the journey ahead of us.” She grabbed Wren’s arm and pulled the source’s magic toward her. She whispered a summoning spell, and in moments there was a certifiable feast: a loaf of bread still steaming from the oven, four links of sausage, and a basket of pears. Tamsin could hardly believe how simple it had been. She felt nothing, no consequences, not even a moment of light-headedness from the effort.

  To some, it might have been a thrilling moment, but Tamsin refused to revel in power without consequence. She did not want to invite any further similarities between herself and the dark witch Evangeline than she already had.

  Wren gaped at her. “You can’t just take my magic without asking.” But her eyes betrayed both her awe and her hunger, and she got to eating, shoving handful after handful into her mouth. She was really rather feral.

  Wren stopped chewing mid-bite. “Wait.” She set her handful of bread back on the tea towel it had appeared with. “Where did this come from?”

  Tamsin shrugged. “I summoned it from a nearby farmhouse.”

  Wren stared indignantly at her. “But that’s awful. Now someone doesn’t have bread for the night. What if these pears were for a tart?”

  Tamsin shook her head uncomprehendingly. “Then they won’t make a tart?” She pulled off a piece of bread and chewed it slowly.

  Wren looked pained. “Have you ever wanted for anything?”

  “I’ve wanted plenty,” Tamsin snapped, though her tone was softened by the bread in her mouth. She did not appreciate this girl acting as though she knew her after they’d traveled together for less than a day.

  “Unbelievable,” Wren muttered to her hands.

  “Fine.” Tamsin swallowed thickly. “Keep your morals. Starve for all I care.”

  Wren sat, arms crossed, staring determinedly anywhere but the food. Tamsin carried on eating. The food was tasteless, but she still managed to put on quite a show of enjoyment, moaning and groaning as she took several exaggerated bites.

  Finally, Wren dropped her piteous act and scrambled for the final sausage.

  “Tho
ught so.” Tamsin took a triumphant bite out of the largest pear.

  Wren scowled and turned her attention toward a bird that had landed on the wall beside her, murmuring to the creature quietly. Tamsin smiled through a mouthful of fruit, though the bite was devoid of any pleasure. That was all she had sometimes: her spite. It didn’t make her any friends, but it gave her something to focus on. Something to feel. She imagined it as a fire within her, even as her limbs froze, as people frowned and turned away, as her empty cottage echoed with loneliness.

  Who was Wren to say she’d never wanted? She had lost. She had yearned. She had settled into a life she wasn’t meant for. Tamsin was never supposed to have been alone. She was a twin, one part of a whole set of sisters. It was always supposed to have been TamsinandMarlena, spoken in one breath so that their names crashed together the way their lives had once collided.

  Again Tamsin thought of the diary, barreling into her every chance it had. Her past was creeping back to haunt her from all sides—dark magic hanging in the air, her sister’s words swimming before her eyes. But Tamsin had the sort of past that should stay buried. If she held too tightly to it, she would only be dragged down into its dark depths.

  Twins were supposed to be equals, two sides of the same coin, only she and her sister weren’t and never had been. Tamsin had been greedy, had stolen all the strength in their mother’s womb. Had left nothing for her sister, so that magic had been her undoing. So that, in the end, Marlena had died of the exact thing that made Tamsin so strong.

  Wren was wrong.

  Tamsin had wanted.

  Tamsin wanted to turn and run back toward Ladaugh, wanted to stay far from the home where she was no longer welcome. She wanted her sister to be more than a memory.

  As it was now, the nothing Tamsin felt when she thought of her sister—the way Marlena always took the high harmony when they sang songs that echoed off the vaulted ceilings of the academy’s Grand Hall, the way she tied her hair into knots when she was anxious, the way she never quite gave anyone her full attention—made Tamsin want to scream. But wanting, Tamsin knew, begot nothing, and so her scream echoed inside herself. Left nothing but silence ringing in her head.

  EIGHT WREN

  Wren had never spent the night beneath a bridge before.

  “You’re acting like a child,” Tamsin snapped from the shadows as she shoved her rucksack beneath her head and draped her cloak across her like a blanket.

  “But trolls live under bridges.” Wren hung back, tugging on her braid anxiously. She was having trouble shaking the stories she had been told as a child, the warnings she had been given by a father who was afraid of everything magical and a mother who knew nothing of the wider world.

  “I take it back. A child has more sense than you.” Wren couldn’t see Tamsin’s face, but she was certain the witch had rolled her eyes. “Trolls are only native to the South. They thrive in warm, marshy climates.” Tamsin turned over, her back to Wren, her voice muffled. “Now get out of sight and go to sleep.”

  Wren hesitated, staring up at the starry sky, but eventually she gave in, settling herself as far from Tamsin as possible.

  The witch snored, but sleep evaded Wren.

  They had planned to stop at an inn. Tamsin had hoped for a bath. Wren had hoped for other people, for anyone who wasn’t Tamsin with her bitter chuckle and her constant whining about her feet. The girl was likely no older than Wren’s own seventeen years, and yet she complained more than any old woman—even Saroya, the woman from Wells who had spent years playing the harp for Oöna, the queen of the giants. Saroya’s hands were gnarled and ruined, yet she always had a spare smile for Wren on market day.

  If Wren hadn’t seen Tamsin filled with a momentary flash of love, she wouldn’t have believed the witch’s lips could do anything other than sneer. And kiss.

  But that was beside the point.

  Sure enough, even as Tamsin slept, her face was screwed up with displeasure. Wren thought Tamsin’s muscles must be exhausted from such strain. Wren herself was exhausted simply from staring at Tamsin’s sour expression for an entire day.

  Even the nearness of the witch was draining. Wren seemed to be drawn to Tamsin the same way magic was drawn to Wren. While she had no desire to be any nearer to Tamsin than she absolutely had to be, she couldn’t seem to help it. Tamsin, too, had kept her close. The witch seemed to believe she had free rein over Wren’s power. Thrice that day the witch had poked her shoulder with a long finger, sending ice through Wren’s body as her magic moved toward Tamsin.

  As if the journey hadn’t been difficult enough. Wren rolled out her neck. Her legs felt weak and gooey as she stretched out on the dirt. She walked often, but not nearly so far. And not with such chaos, the ribbons of natural and dark magic twisting around one another like serpents, the sweet, sour smell of them clouding her nostrils.

  They had come to a town as the sun set, the scent of sulfur overwhelming Wren the moment they’d set foot on the cobblestones. The light from the small lantern Tamsin carried had been strong enough to illuminate windows and doorways boarded up from the outside. The wood, nailed to the front doors of nearly half the cottages, was warped and cracked as though an animal had attempted to escape captivity. Tamsin had dismissed the houses as abandoned, but Wren could see the black ribbons of dark magic hanging above the huts. There were plague-riddled people trapped inside.

  The realization had turned her stomach. Wren knew that no matter how desperate she was for a bed, she could not stay in a town with people who would treat others in such a way. And so they had walked on, and settled in the dried-up creek beneath a stone bridge instead.

  The witch gave a gigantic snore, thick and phlegmy. It was unfair that sleep came to Tamsin so easily. Wren could not recall a night that she hadn’t spent tossing and turning, her mind replaying her actions and her words, analyzing what she could have done to appear more normal, things she could have said to have been more polite. Worrying over how she could have better served her father. Wren could hardly remember the last time she’d woken feeling refreshed.

  She didn’t know why she’d assumed things would be any different now. Yet everything else was. Wren herself was different, lying under a bridge in a small town, far from home and everything she’d ever known.

  Wren, who had never been farther than the marketplace in Ladaugh, had often dreamed about the wider world, and yet she had never understood exactly how vast it would be when she got there. The sky stretched on forever; the rocks beneath her feet were endless. With each step, she stretched a bit of herself. The small girl with the small life in the small town was starting to grow. There was so much to see.

  She might never be finished looking.

  Wren had sacrificed so much, not knowing exactly what that meant. But now, surrounded by flowers with colors she had never learned to name, watching people pass with clothes cut from fabrics she’d never touched, hearing voices with accents she could not place—a reminder of so many cities she still did not know—Wren again felt something dark rear its ugly head. That evil, suffocating thought that she had made her father sick because she had yearned for more.

  Her father’s face swam before her. Pieces of her memory were hazy—his eyes still evaded her—but it was there. He was there, still, in both her head and her heart.

  But not for long, she reminded herself, fighting back a wave of nausea. For Wren had given away the one thing upon which she could always depend: her father. She’d left him behind, fading, like embers dying in the hearth. Had chosen to do so.

  And when he was well and truly gone, scrubbed from every inch of her heart, Wren didn’t know who she would be or if the trade would feel justified. Would it be worth it in the end, when she was finally allowed to embrace all the pieces of herself she had spent so much time trying to deny?

  Magic had killed her brother, and Wren felt that weight fully each time the wind shifted and she caught a taste of sunshine. Each time a star shot across the sky and her own he
art glowed. Wren was more than her life had ever allowed her to be. When she no longer loved her father, would she love her freedom more than she had ever loved him?

  Her throat tightened, making it difficult to breathe. Wren inhaled slowly, trying to focus on the flow of air through her lungs rather than the ragged sound of her breath catching. She had gone a bit light-headed.

  And then a voice, so faint she almost missed it. One tiny, terrified word: “Help.”

  Wren sat up so quickly that the world around her began to spin.

  Tamsin didn’t stir.

  For a moment there was nothing but the night. Then, the voice again. Louder this time. Desperate. Haunted.

  “Help.”

  Wren turned toward Tamsin, who was still scowling in her sleep. She moved to shake her but stopped before her fingers could close around the witch’s shoulder. Tamsin was already the crankiest person Wren had ever met, and that was in her waking hours. She shivered at the thought of the ire she would invoke if she pulled the witch from sleep.

  Carefully, so as not to disturb a single pebble, Wren got to her feet. She stumbled through patches of sharp summer grass on shaking legs. When she was far enough away that she would not wake the witch, she too called out. “Hello?”

  “Hello?” The voice again, excited and eager. “I’m here.”

  The night was still, the starlight illuminating nothing but the rocks at her feet. “Where?”

  “Here,” the voice insisted. Wren wheeled all the way around, but there was no one there. “No,” the voice said, sighing heavily. “Not there. Down here.” Something sticky skimmed her ankle. Wren shrieked, jumping back. “Careful,” the voice snapped, affronted. Wren peered down into the shadowy grass.

  It was a frog.