The Promise Witch

by Celine Kiernan

  The witch’s black eyes dropped to the green fire which flared on Mup’s fingertips. “What do you hope to do with that? Singe my eyebrows?”

  “I don’t know what I can do with it,” said Mup. “And neither do you. But I do know that you can’t fight us all – not without getting hurt anyway.”

  Magda sneered. She looked as though she was on the verge of no longer caring. She looked as though she might start shooting just out of tiredness and frustration. Mup let her own lightning die. “Don’t hurt anyone, Magda. Just let me go out and find the queen’s path. I’ll get right back in, I promise. I won’t cause you any trouble.”

  “Do it.”

  A man called out as Mup stepped down into the searing heat of the day. “Are you all right, little ’un? Do you need help?”

  Mup crouched and pressed her hands to the mostly dead grass. “I’m OK.”

  “Come over to us,” cried a woman. “We won’t let that creature take ye.”

  Their kindness and courage almost made Mup want to cry.

  You’re so brave, she thought. You’re so, so brave. “Where are we?” she asked.

  Magda’s voice came cold as ice from the porch at Mup’s back. “Stop talking.”

  The man ignored her. “You’re in Cnoic na mBó Beag,” he told Mup. “Near Glas Gort.”

  “I don’t know where that is. Can you get a message to my mam?”

  Magda’s command came again. “Stop talking.”

  The man’s eyes flicked to her in fear, but he stepped a little closer to Mup.

  “Who is your mam?” he asked.

  Who is my mam? What do I call her, when she refuses to be called “Queen”? “She’s … she’s the old queen’s daughter.” The man’s eyes widened. The magic that sparked at his fingertips faltered a moment in shock. “Tell her I was here, will you?” said Mup. “Send a message to the castle and—”

  “STOP TALKING!”

  Magda’s lightning rent the air. People screamed and ran. Small fires flared where the lightning hit the ground. Mup glared back at the witch. Magda seemed to fill the porch, her clothes and hair writhing, her face livid with anger. “Do. Your. Job!” she hissed.

  Mup pressed her hands harder into the ground. The path opened up, and Mup’s own rage propelled it on its way. The path cut like a sword slash past the fires Magda’s lightning had started, past the crowd of people fighting those fires, out through the boundaries of the fairground and into the countryside. It ripped through miles of thirsty grassland, bisected oven-baked townships, divided the trees of suffering forests – and then stopped.

  Mup saw the parched rocks of a shimmering mountainside. Near it she sensed the darkness again, that great roiling cloud towards which they were heading. She sat back. Such a huge, powerful bitterness lay there, waiting.

  “Well?” asked Magda. “Where are we going?”

  Mup took in the previously industrious marketplace. What she saw surprised her. The fairground was a shambles, smoke rising, flames flickering, and folks running about. But already people had the fires contained. Already, they were soothing their unhappy livestock. Soon they would have everything under control. Soon it would be as if Magda had never been here. She’s not in charge any more, thought Mup. Despite all the harm she could do to these people, she won’t break them.

  “Where are we going?” insisted Magda.

  Mup didn’t answer. She went to the horses, stroked their velvet cloud-noses, breathed instructions into their lungs, and returned to the porch in silence. The creature that had been Crow’s dad elbowed Magda aside as he took in the vardo steps. The witch lurched and had to steady herself as the horses took to the air.

  In the receding crowd the man lifted his hand to Mup: Be safe!

  Mup smiled at him: Thank you.

  Magda watched this from her position against the porch rail. Mup thought she looked smaller, despite the damage she’d just caused. She looked confused. Mup had expected her to glower at the crowds until they were out of sight. Or to suck Mup up into the pendant as a show of power. Instead she stumbled into the vardo and shut the door.

  Mup followed her.

  Mam and Dad

  Inside the vardo, Magda had come to a halt by the door, staring at Crow. He hopped from foot to foot in his cage, that angry glee brighter than ever in his round black eyes. The leather gag was lying on the table. Crow chattered his beak as if to demonstrate his freedom from it.

  “How did you do that?” grated Magda.

  Crow just laughed.

  Magda went and stood over him, her clenched fists braced on the tabletop. “One note,” she warned. “One single note out of you and I’ll turn you into an earthworm.”

  “Pah,” said Crow.

  Mup glanced around the vardo. She was hoping to see the little grey girl. Magda had jerked her away from the castle so quickly that Mup had no idea if the girl had been able to follow. Her eyes fell on the gag lying limply on the table… How had Crow managed that?

  She met her friend’s gaze. He winked at her. “It’s getting crowded in here,” he croaked.

  Mup grinned. The grey girl was here.

  “How’s my dad?” asked Crow.

  “Your dad,” huffed Magda. “What would you know of Toraí? You can’t remember enough to even conjure him properly.”

  “I do so remember my dad.”

  “How could you? Your father was never home.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “It is true, and you know it. Sealgaire raised you. Your dad was too busy to spare you anything more than an occasional visit.”

  “That’s more than you ever gave me!” cried Crow.

  Magda – seeing she’d finally needled past her son’s cheery defiance – smiled. She turned from him in satisfaction, and began examining the shelves of the vardo. Her hand drifted over the many neat contents – the teacups, the pictures, the ornaments that Crow had retrieved or replaced since rebuilding his lovely home. Mup could see that the witch was regaining her control. Having someone to torment seemed to steady her.

  “I’m sorry your mam is so cruel, Crow,” said Mup.

  “I’m not cruel,” murmured Magda. “I’m honest.”

  “She’s not honest,” Mup told Crow. “She’s mean. She’s saying stuff just to hurt you.”

  “I know that,” said Crow. “Dad loved me, and I loved him. Nothing she says will change that.”

  “Oh, do stop your prattling,” said Magda.

  “The only reason Dad wasn’t home much was because he was fighting the queen. He wouldn’t have had to do that if it wasn’t for people like you.”

  Magda’s mouth tightened.

  “I’m proud of you, Crow,” said Mup.

  Crow blinked at her in surprise. “Thanks,” he said. “I… I’m proud of myself!”

  “Good. You and your dad should be proud. You both stand up to people that do wrong, even if they are stronger than you. Imagine if your mam had been like that.”

  Magda was getting that agitated look to her again. “Stop talking about me as if I weren’t here,” she snapped.

  Mup ignored her. “Your mam is so powerful, Crow. She could make a real difference to this world if she used her magic for good.”

  Magda thrust her face up close to Mup’s. “I do make a difference to this world,” She was so close, her pale skin and black eyes so terrible, that Mup couldn’t help but flinch. Magda sneered. “Couldn’t keep ignoring me for long, could you, dear?”

  Coldly, Mup turned her face away. You can hurt me, she thought. But that doesn’t make you more important than me. I choose who I talk to and who I don’t talk to, and I won’t talk to you.

  “Why didn’t you help Dad?” asked Crow. “Instead of hurting people and making this world a horrible place, why didn’t you try and—”

  Magda rounded on him. “Because I’d have ended up dead like him and all the fools who fought with him. When the rebels were caught, the queen gave me a choice and I took it. I handed those si
mple-minded dreamers over to her and I never looked back. The queen respected me for that. She honoured me. She made me the second most powerful witch in the borough! Feared, respected, obeyed – all thanks to her.”

  Magda straightened, as if having made a winning point. Almost feverishly she went back to examining the shelves. “I don’t like what you’ve done to my vardo, boy. Why have you changed all my things?”

  “All your things?” croaked Crow. “You haven’t lived here since I was a baby!”

  “Nevertheless, it’s mine. Who said you could change it?” With a cry of recognition Magda found something familiar. “Oh, I remember this.” She snatched it from the shelf. It was a little blue painted horse.

  “That’s mine!” said Crow.

  The witch snorted. “Yours? No. My mother made this for me when I was a child. She carved it and painted it. You can see the chips on the hooves where I used to clop it across the stones of our summer camp.”

  Magda raised the little toy to the light. For a moment the horse’s jolly face smiled into hers. Then it fell to ash in her hand.

  Crow cackled. “Second most powerful witch in the land, and look what it got you. A tomato in the face and a handful of ashes.”

  Magda clenched her gritty fingers into a fist. She glared at her laughing son.

  “Leave him alone,” said Mup.

  Crow preened. “You can’t even stop two skinny kids from telling you the truth to your face.”

  With a roar, the witch advanced on Crow’s cage. Mup leapt for her. “Leave him alone!”

  There was a flash, and a flutter of Magda’s cloak, the world did that horrible swirl, and Mup found herself back inside the pendant. She battered the glass walls with her smoke-fists. “Leave Crow alone! Leave him alone.”

  Outside was a chaos of shadows, a confusion of motion and sound.

  Mup could make nothing out through the glass.

  Was Magda lifting the cage? Was that her screaming?

  “CROW!” yelled Mup. “CROW!”

  She … will … hurt him.

  “Grey girl?” Mup spun in her prison, trying to see. “Help him!”

  Can … not. Too … weak.

  The muffled noises from outside the orb were horrible – squawking and screaming.

  Mup tried to grab the girl. She snatched only smoke. “Save Crow!” she cried. “Take him onto the roof like you did me!”

  Too … tired.

  “We’ll do it together!”

  The girl paused, as if she hadn’t ever considered the possibility. Mup grabbed again, hoping for a spectral hand. She found one. Together they leapt.

  There was a bright flurry of chaos. Magda’s snarling, shouting face. An iron cage being shaken in clenched white fists. Feathers flew. Mup and the grey girl swooped like hawks towards the centre of the cage. There was a surprised squawk, a momentary catch, and they were free and up, zooming through the roof of the vardo, a cloud of startled boy-shape dangling from their arms.

  “Let me go!” yelled Crow, kicking and struggling in a frenzy of panic. “Let me go, you rotten hag!”

  “Crow, it’s us!” yelled Mup.

  “You’ll be sorry! Wait and see. I’ll sing the flesh off your bones! I’ll sing your eyeballs inside out! I’ll—” Crow came to a startled pause, clinging to the roof of the vardo. “What?” he said. He looked around, taking in the open sky: the breeze that ruffled his hair, the half-amused, half-distraught face of his best friend. “Mup … where?”

  Then he saw the grey girl and the shock sent him sliding down the curved side of the roof.

  Mup dived and grabbed him, and for a moment he was dangling over the edge, staring up into her face. “You’re … you’re see-through,” he said. He looked down at their transparent hands, gripping tightly onto one another. “We’re both see-through!” he yelled, as Mup heaved him over the edge. “We’re ghosts! Mam’s killed us, Mup! She’s killed us! Who’ll stop her now?”

  “We’re not dead, Crow! You’re still connected to your body! Can’t you feel it?”

  Crow calmed. He put his transparent hand to his transparent chest. Mup saw the moment when he found the invisible thread that hummed between his ghost-heart and his body in the vardo below.

  “Can you feel it?”

  Crow nodded. “I thought Mam had killed me,” he whispered. “She was so angry.”

  “It’s my fault, Crow. I wanted her to know how unimportant she was … so I ignored her. It made her very angry. She took it out on you.”

  “It’s what people like her do,” rasped the grey girl wearily. “They hurt people who can’t fight back, just to make themselves feel big.”

  Crow looked down at the vardo. “It’s gone very quiet down there. What do you suppose she’s up to?”

  Mup pressed her ear to the roof.

  “What you doing?” frowned the grey girl.

  “Trying to hear what’s going on,” whispered Mup.

  The grey girl looked at her as if she was quite spectacularly stupid. “You’re a ghost,” she said. “Ghosts don’t have to listen. Ghosts can look.” And she stuck her head down through the roof of the vardo, like plunging it into a pool of water.

  How marvellous, thought Mup, and she did the same.

  Mup had to giggle when she realized that she and the girl were hanging upside down, two disembodied heads poking through the roof of the vardo. All Crow will see is our bums sticking up in the air. But then she followed the girl’s bleak gaze to the table below, and her amusement fled.

  Crow’s body was lying in a drift of feathers at the bottom of the battered cage. His eyes were closed. His beak slightly open. His feet curled loosely into his chest. He looked dead. He looked well and truly dead.

  Magda was sitting heavily in one of the vardo’s little painted chairs, staring at him.

  “I didn’t mean it,” she told his motionless body. “Wake up.”

  Mup yanked her head back into the open air. Crow was sitting on his haunches, waiting expectantly. At the look on Mup’s face, his expression fell. “Crow,” she said, “don’t take this the wrong way, but … are you sure you’re not dead?”

  “It’s hard not to take that the wrong way, Mup!”

  “Boy is not dead yet,” rasped the grey girl.

  “I’m not sure I like how you said yet,” muttered Crow.

  The grey girl shrugged. Mup supposed being dead wasn’t something a ghost would consider overly serious. She went to speak, but Crow held up a hand as if to prevent her telling him anything more.

  “Whatever my mother has done to me,

  Crow definitely wishes not to see.”

  With a sigh, the grey girl lay down on the roof of the porch. Her light was getting very dim.

  “Is she all right?” asked Crow. “She looks even deader than usual.”

  “You should go home, Girl,” said Mup.

  “Without me, children will not be able to jump from bodies; children will not be able to travel. I stay.”

  Mup knelt at the girl’s side. To her immense surprise, the girl pressed in close against her. Mup gently stroked her ashy back. The girl curled up like a big strange cat, and shut her eyes.

  Mup anxiously scanned the landscape that whizzed by below. Great grass plains, burned dry by the merciless sun, stretched as far as the eye could see. Up ahead there was no sign of any mountains. But Mup knew they were there, growing closer every moment.

  Grandma was just over the horizon.

  “What’s the plan?” asked Crow.

  “Find the old queen.”

  “And then?”

  Mup felt a blaze of fierceness. “Make her stop. Make her admit that her time is over.”

  “You’re bringing my mam to her. You know that, right? One of the strongest witches in the borough – the queen’s main enforcer – and you’re bringing her right back to the queen’s side.”

  “People threw tomatoes at Magda, Crow. The raggedy witches aren’t as strong as she remembers. The people may not b
e as powerful as the witches, but they’ve reclaimed their magic, and they’ll never let themselves be pushed around again.”

  “Hmm,” said Crow. He lowered himself over the edge of the porch roof. “I’d be a touch more confident if the person saying that wasn’t currently trapped in a pendant around my mother’s neck.” He swung in beneath the overhang, and disappeared from Mup’s sight.

  After a moment, his voice – odd now, and ghostly, but still achingly sweet – drifted up in song.

  “Boy is singing again,” murmured the grey girl. “Sounds nice, now he’s not so alive.”

  Not so alive? thought Mup. I don’t like the sound of that.

  She lay on her stomach and peered anxiously over the edge.

  Crow was sitting close to the creature on the driver’s seat, singing to himself as he watched the fields stream by. At first, the creature drove the horses onwards as always, its face creased with the usual confusion and distress, but as Crow’s song continued, Mup saw the tension leave the creature’s misshapen body. She saw the dark brow clear.

  The creature turned its eyes to the small luminous boy sitting by its side.

  Sensing his gaze, Crow looked up. “Hey, Dad,” he whispered.

  The creature lifted his arm. Crow slipped beneath it and leaned against the creature’s side. The creature closed his arm around him, and Crow went back to singing.

  Mup looked from him to the little grey girl, lying dark and silent at her side. Her two fierce, defiant friends. They had already suffered too much. Things were only going to get worse for them.

  Mup set her jaw. She got to her feet.

  The girl blearily raised her head. “Where are you going?”

  “I’m taking you home,” said Mup, and she grabbed the little girl and leapt off the side of the world.

  The Grey Girl’s Path

  The grey girl’s howl followed them into the corridors of the dead. Mup could feel the castle out there somewhere, trying to pull the girl home. But the girl fought against it. Wailing miserably in Mup’s arms, she clung to the foggy walls, slowing their progress.

  “You left Boy alone. You left him alone with that minion.”