by S. W. Clarke
The faintest mirth touched Umbra’s face, but was just as quickly replaced by a furrowed brow. “To keep you by my side, to keep you safe, while I train you.”
“In what?”
Those violet eyes glinted in the light from the window. “In everything I know. You still have one piece of the weapon yet to retrieve, and procuring it will be your greatest trial yet.”
Epilogue
I sat cross-legged in the grass, staring at the far-off mountains and meadows. Switzerland was as idyllic as a picture, even here in the middle of it.
Behind me, the faint scent of baking bread wafted through the window. The headmistress’s forty-something daughter hummed a song I didn’t know, but it was as pleasant as her two rosy-cheeked children, whom I could hear playing in the toy room.
And I could hear Maeve Umbra playing with them.
She was pretending to be a bear, growling and stamping. She roared, the children shrieked and ran and laughed. I had never heard her like this, so easy and carefree.
Turned out, Maeve Umbra wasn’t just a headmistress—she was a human being like the rest of us.
Beside me, Loki lolled, paws up in the air. When I tried to stroke his belly, all four sets of claws latched onto my hand. “How dare you.” He fixed me with dilating green eyes.
I winced, tried to disentangle my hand. Like a Chinese finger trap, that only made him hold on harder. “I have regrets,” I said.
He disengaged his claws and rolled onto his belly. “You’re supposed to be focusing, anyway.”
I groaned, readjusted my seat. “I have been—for hours. A normal human’s attention span is only twenty minutes, and I’m so not a normal human.”
All I wanted to do was go back and re-read that snippet from the latest Witches & Wizards—in which Frostwish had declared she’d been scarred by the fire witch. Before, I had been a fugitive of the formalists with no record of evil-doing. Now, I was a deserved fugitive.
“That you are not.” Loki’s tail flicked as he stared out at the road weaving through the meadow below us. “Here’s a hint: Umbra’s magic is an earth color.”
The first step to casting Umbra’s enchantments was seeing her enchantments. They were air magic, and while I could see Eva’s and Liara’s and Frostwish’s magic, I couldn’t see Maeve Umbra’s.
And I didn’t know why.
“How can you see it?” I groused. “I had to work for months at it, and you…”
“I’m just a cat?” He glanced back at me, and I could have sworn he smirked. “What does that say about you, then?”
I sighed, refocused. It would take as long as it would take, and I had the rest of the summer.
The sun had fallen behind the mountains, and Loki had retreated into the house by the time Umbra came out, her staff tapping on the stone walkway to announce her arrival. She came to stand beside me. “Dinner’s served.”
“I know,” I said. “I can smell it.”
She set a hand on my shoulder. “Be patient, child. You cannot possibly hope to see the world properly without sustenance.”
I looked up at her. “Why did we take the train here? Really.”
She winced in the half-light. “I suspected you wouldn’t be put off.”
My eyebrows went up.
She gestured with her staff out at the pristine meadows and valleys. “This looks quite beautiful, but you cannot yet see what I can see. Before the summer ends, you will.”
“And what can you see?”
“The leylines.” Her eyes tracked across the skyline. “Some have begun to darken with the Shade’s magic.”
“Darken,” I echoed.
“Yes,” she murmured. “She has begun to corrupt them as she did five hundred years ago.”
Afterword
Hi friend,
In her third year, Clem begins to appreciate the “consistent, unsexy effort” people put into their lives. She respects it almost more than anything else.
And the older I get, the more I find I agree with her.
Of the people I’ve known in my life, I’ve had a special, unique admiration for the people whose consistent, unsexy efforts I’ve been witness to.
My father, who never missed a day of work at his exhausting sales job to support me.
That writer I went to school with, whom everyone knew would succeed because she wrote every day. (And she has.)
Five years ago, I first read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Of all the characters, I was most heartbroken and changed by the main character’s mother. She was an Irish immigrant, and she spent her life washing the floors of wealthy homes to keep her children from dying of poverty.
I’m fortunate I haven’t had to get on my knees. I haven’t had to work a sales job like my dad. Which is why I’ll never underestimate the beauty of even the workmanlike days of writing a novel. In the end, nothing is sexy all the time—but consistent effort put toward the things that matter will grow you.
As promised, here’s the soundtrack to Good Witches Don’t Curse: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0M1WPky2NPNGk19GlVjMm0?si=5cvIjPmQQQOv8bvkpTYn7Q.
Until next time—
Shavonne
About the Author
S.W. Clarke lives in Houston, Texas with her partner and two identical—unrelated—cats. (Yes, they judge her every day.) She writes to inhabit the lives of the smartest, bravest women her brain can conjure.
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