The Night Sorceresses

by Erica Griswold

  “What?” Willow gasped.

  “Shhh! You don’t know who’s listening!” Andaria hissed. She looked around just to make sure there was no one else around. “Yes, we must be extra careful now! Let’s try to find our way back to the road to Fernhollow.”

  Willow tried to turn into a cloud and fly back, but because some of the iron was still in her body, she could not. They found the road and followed it, but stayed hidden among the trees in case they had to dodge out of sight. That evening, their supper consisted of berries they picked in the forest. They walked until nightfall. Willow and her mother cried themselves to sleep, thinking about her father.

  Willow was awakened by the sound of feet walking around them in the middle of the forest. She held her breath, and her heart throbbed in fear. Willow could feel that her magic had started returning to her, and she felt much stronger than she had during the day. She heard a man’s voice say, “Yeah, that guard Vernon fell asleep, and they escaped.”

  Police! Willow thought, suddenly wide awake. She felt a strange liquid coating her arm. Oh no! Please don’t let that be blood! Please don’t let that be blood!

  It was time for her to get revenge on those who had killed her father. She lay still and looked upward. They were surrounded by men carrying torches. Willow recognized every one of their faces as the men who had arrested them.

  She seethed with anger, and much to her relief, she felt her arms tingle with electricity. The iron had worn off. Willow hopped to her feet, startling the policemen. She threw a bolt of lightning out in front of her, striking one of them in the chest. The police were so caught off guard this time that they ran in all directions. Willow filled herself with hot air and floated off the ground. She willed her hands to light up brightly with electricity to light her way.

  Willow flew after each of them, and she felt intense delight throwing a lightning bolt at the man who had stabbed her father. Relief flooded her as she watched him slump to the ground in a burning, electrocuted heap. She darted after each of the officers and threw a bolt of lightning at every one of them. “You won’t be telling your king about this!” she hollered into the night.

  None of them survived Willow’s vengeance. She filled herself with cold air and floated to the ground. Willow lit up both of her hands and examined each body to make sure that all the people who had destroyed her life were really dead. All the bodies had lightning burns on them, and seeing all their corpses lying lifeless on the ground gave her the sick satisfaction of knowing they had not survived and would never harm another person again.

  Willow walked back to where her mother lay. In the light of her hand, she saw they had slit her mother’s throat. Willow collapsed on the ground in a heap, sobbing. She waited until morning, built a funeral pyre, and cremated her mother. She scattered her ashes in a nearby creek.

  Willow turned into a cloud and floated back to Fernhollow. She turned back into her human form and walked up to the front door. Then, she realized that her house key was in her bag, which had been stolen by the Ethermoorian Police. She remembered that she had a spare key in Starfire’s stable. Willow walked up to the fence and climbed over it. The gate key had also been in her bag.

  As soon as she landed on the other side, she heard a soft whinnying sound. She looked up and saw a white horse trotting through the trees alongside the back of the fence. It was holding her bag around its neck. Willow couldn’t believe her eyes. “Starfire!” she screamed excitedly.

  She always knew Starfire was a unique horse. She’d known from the moment she saw Starfire as a little foal when she was six years old that there was something unusual about her.

  The man who gave Starfire to her was selling horses for outrageous prices at the village Friday Night Market. Willow remembered the instant connection she’d felt when she’d looked into Starfire’s eyes. When the man saw how well Willow and Starfire connected with each other, he gave her the little foal for free. Willow never saw him again.

  She took the bag from Starfire and searched through it. Everything that Willow had packed was still there. She threw her arms around her horse’s neck and said, “Thanks, Starfire!”

  She remembered her mother telling her about the visitor to the shop who said her granddaughter was a Sea Sorceress.

  I have to go find Cecilia in the morning, Willow thought. It was nearing nightfall, and she was exhausted and ready to sleep in her own bed. Willow opened her bag and saw her keys laying in the bottom of it. She was thrilled to see the conch shell and her ancestors’ books in there just as she had left them. The books were her mother’s most valued possessions, and Willow didn’t know what she would do without them. Andaria had passed them down to Willow on her twenty-first birthday.

  Willow rode Starfire around inside the fence until dark. She ate supper by the light of a candle in her kitchen. She wondered if either of her ancestors’ books had anything about a library for sorcerers written in them. Willow opened her fairy ancestor’s journal. She very carefully poured over the fragile old pages but saw nothing written about a library.

  Then, two pages that apparently had been stuck together every other time she had read the journal came unstuck. A folded-up piece of paper fell out onto the ground. The pages opened up to a drawing of a castle.

  The words on the page read, “This is the castle of Zadelia, the fairy queen. This is where she hid the spell to summon a fairy from Faemoor, the fairy world. Recite it to break the magic banishment spell at a time when it is safe for magic to return to Ethermoor. The spell is carved into an altar in the room where she performed all her magical rituals. When someone recites the spell, there will be an explosion in the air that will be heard throughout the realm of Valfariel. A bright light will shoot across the sky. That is how you know that magic has returned.”

  Wait, Queen Zadelia left a spell to bring magic back into the realm? Willow thought, intrigued by the new information she was reading.

  Willow opened the piece of paper and discovered that it was a map of the interior of the castle. Sorcerers used to summon fairy helpers to help them with their magic. She wondered if the spell could summon a fairy who could bring her parents back from the Dead Realms. She decided that she would try to find the castle after she found Cecilia.

  Willow woke up the next morning after a fitful night’s sleep of sobbing and restlessness. She saddled Starfire and rode away from Fernhollow. When she arrived in Seaside, she asked some of the villagers for directions to the old apothecary shop, and they told her where it was.

  She rode Starfire up to the shop window and saw darkness inside. All the shelves were empty, and Willow felt a stab of regret for never knowing the other sorceress existed. Most sorcerers and sorceresses only met by chance because they were scared that organizing as a group could lead to their discovery by the government.

  A sign that read, “Shanty Shack Apothecary Shop,” hung above the window. There was a hair salon next door to the former shop. Willow decided to go inside and ask the people who worked there if they knew anything about Cecilia’s whereabouts. She walked inside and saw three women cutting people’s hair. Another woman stood at a counter, reading a book. Willow walked up to her and asked, “Excuse me, but do you know where the grandmother of the woman who owned the Shanty Shack Apothecary lives? Her name is Cecilia.”

  The woman looked up from her book and spat, “Who wants to know?” Willow was taken aback by the woman’s reaction. She did not want to let it slip that she was a sorceress. “Well, she gave my mother the name of a library that she wanted her to go to, and my mother has forgotten it.”

  The woman put her book down and walked out from behind the desk. She stuck her forefinger in Willow’s face. “Look, with the way government officials and the police have been hovering around here lately, I’m not giving strangers any directions to people’s houses! I’ve never seen you in this town before!”

  Willow admired the woman’s resolve to protect her city. Everyone else in the salon suddenly eyed Willow with su
spicion. She knew all too well what being watched by the government was like, and decided not to press the matter any further. “Thank you,” Willow said. She turned and walked out of the shop.

  She tried asking for directions to Cecilia’s house at other shops, but she got the exact same response. No one wanted to give a stranger directions to someone’s home.

  Willow decided to cast a tracking spell to find Cecilia. She walked out to the forest where she hoped no one would see her perform magic. She held her left hand out in front of her. With her right hand, she pinched the pendant of the bracelet that she had put on that morning.

  This was the bracelet she always wore on days she thought she might need to cast a tracking spell. It was an ordinary bracelet with a dragonfly pendant that was so small that onlookers would not notice if it were pointing in a specific direction.

  She pinched the small dragonfly and said, “Earth and wind, come together to guide this little dragonfly pendant to the residence of Cecilia, the grandmother of the Sea Sorceress who owned the Shanty Shack Apothecary.” Willow tried to be as specific as possible about which Cecilia she wanted to find since she didn’t know Cecilia’s last name. The pendant glowed as it absorbed Willow’s magic.

  The little dragonfly jutted forward, tugging on the bracelet. Willow followed the bracelet as it led her through the village streets. She lost count of the number of times she passed Shanty Shack Apothecary, and realized that she was going around in circles. She knew this only meant one thing. Either Cecilia or someone else had cast a spell of protection around Cecilia’s home so that no one could discover her home by using magic. Willow felt a pang of sadness and fear, knowing that if she could not find Cecilia, she would probably never find the way to the rumored safe haven for sorcerers and sorceresses.

  Chapter Two

  Willow decided to cast the locator spell on the pendant to find the library. A locator spell was removed from an object by placing the object in a natural water source and letting the water wash over it. She found a stream, dipped the pendant in the water, and let the water wash over it. She tried to think of the most precise description of the library that she could think of since she didn’t know the name of it. Willow dried the pendant off, pinched it between her thumb and forefinger, and said, “Earth and wind, come together to guide this little dragonfly pendant to the library that is safe for sorcerers and sorceresses.”

  She let go of it, and nothing happened. The pendant just dangled limply on the bracelet. Willow thought she was either not specific enough about what library she wanted to go to, or that there indeed wasn’t anywhere that was safe for sorcerers and sorceresses. She suspected the latter of the two. Willow decided to follow the map to the castle in hopes of finding out if the spell was still there.

  Willow rode Starfire back to Fernhollow and packed enough food in her bag to last a week. I’ll try casting the locater spell one more time, she thought. She wondered if the castle was worth trying to find if the pendant didn’t point her in the direction of it. Willow pinched the pendant and said, “Earth and wind, come together to guide this little dragonfly pendant to Queen Zadelia’s castle.” Willow’s heart gave a leap when the pendant jutted over in the direction of the road that, according to the map, led to the castle.

  She saddled Starfire and rode off in the direction the pendant was guiding her. She followed the map to the road that led to the castle. Willow knew the street very well but had never been as far away from Fernhollow as the map route was taking her. After three days of walking, she saw a nondescript rock formation, which, according to the journal, was supposed to be the marker along the dirt road to show where to turn to go to Zadelia’s castle. Her pendant guided her off the road.

  Willow and Starfire rode through the brambles and weeds and made their way through the woods. There was no path, and Willow hoped the pendant would prevent her from getting lost. She also hoped that Zadelia hadn’t cast a protection spell around the castle, which would cause the pendant to take her around in circles for days.

  That evening, Willow fell asleep in the forest. She had a dream that she was walking through the forest and came upon another stone that, according to the journal, marked the way to the castle. A tree stump sat a few feet away, and a crust of molded bread lay on the ground next to it.

  When she awoke the next morning, she dismissed her dream as just an odd dream that she had. She ate a breakfast of berries she picked in the forest and continued walking.

  Then, the second marker came into view among the trees. Willow remembered what the forest surrounding it in her dream looked like, and she thought it was strange that she had seen the same trees in her dream the night before. She saw a tree stump sitting a few feet away from the marker, and a molded crust of bread lay in the weeds next to it! It was as if the dream had given her a message about what she was going to find the next day. She had never dreamed about events that later came to pass before.

  A cold chill ran down Willow’s spine at the sight of the molded crust of bread. This is strange! she thought. The bread was also a sign that someone had very recently been in the forest before her.

  She looked beyond the rune marker and saw the remainders of a cobblestone path poking up through the weeds. Willow was grateful that her pendant led her in the direction of that path. She followed it for a few moments and saw two huge megaliths poking over the treetops.

  According to the journal, the castle was surrounded by megaliths covered in runes. Willow’s heart throbbed with excitement.

  She stopped and ate her apple and beef jerky lunch before continuing on her journey. She stared in awe at the megaliths. According to the book, each one was two hundred feet tall. They sat in a large circle, which at one time served as the main Ethermoorian fairy ring gateway to Faemoor.

  The stone path led between two of the megaliths. Willow felt dizzy just looking up at them as she passed by. Runes covered them from top to bottom, but Willow couldn’t read them because many had worn away. Vines wrapped around the base of the megaliths, hiding the other runes still there. The ruins of Zadelia’s castle sat at the center of the ring. Willow could see that entire walls were missing, and the crumbling castle was only a remnant of its formerly majestic self.

  It was still a very beautiful old structure to look at, with vines, trees, and flowers growing out of nearly every nook and crevice in its walls. Willow walked down the path and stopped at the formerly huge and majestic double doors, which were now just fragments of wood hanging on hinges due to centuries of rotting and termite infestation.

  Then, a human-sized hole in the rotting wood, along with a pile of wood sitting by the door, caught her eye. Willow knew that termites did not pile wood up like that. It was clear to her that someone had found the castle before she did. Given that there was a whole piece of bread sitting nearby, she wondered if that person had been there just days before.

  Willow walked through the hole. She saw light streaming in through the holes in the roof, and the scent of stagnant rainwater and mildew wafted through her nostrils. She walked around the castle, searching for the doorway to Zadelia’s magical study.

  She arrived at the place where the door to Zadelia’s study was according to the map, but she didn’t see a doorway anywhere.

  As she was looking around, she saw an old candelabra hanging on the wall. Willow lit her left hand up with her electricity to get a better look at it. She was able to channel her electricity into her hands to light them up so that she could see in darkness without a torch. She held her hand close to the candelabra and saw fingerprints in the thick layer of dust.

  So, someone really was here recently! Willow thought. She reached up and tried to fit her right hand in the fingerprints. Willow accidentally pulled on the candelabra, and part of the wall moved away, revealing a dark passageway.

  Bingo! Willow thought excitedly. She shone her hand in the doorway and saw a dark spiral staircase that led upward. Willow walked inside and sneezed when the dust particles hit her nose
. It was evident to her that this part of the castle had been closed off to fresh air for centuries.

  Willow hoped that the staircase would not crumble under her weight as she placed her foot on the first step. She walked up the stairs. When she arrived at the top, she saw sunlight streaming through the door of Zadelia’s study. The room was round and surrounded with large windows that looked out onto the forest canopy.

  Willow walked around the study, in awe of the view of the forest from the room. She noticed that there weren’t any bookcases or books in the room. Of course, Zadelia had probably taken all the books with her when she left Ethermoor. There wasn’t anything in the room except the altar. There was a massive crack in the floor that ran from the altar and across the floor. Another crack ran up the wall on both sides of the room and across the ceiling.

  Willow’s mother had taught her how to read fairy runes. She walked up to the altar and saw the runes to the spell carved in the side of it. Her heart throbbed, and she trembled with nervousness. She said each word out loud slowly and distinctly. “Garrinhov, Mothmoria, Uthusia, Vingaring!” She paused and waited for something to happen, but nothing did. According to Raven’s journal, a bright flash in the air and a massive explosion that could be heard throughout all of Ethermoor was going to occur when the magic barrier lifted. Willow only heard silence.

  Okay, maybe there is something else I need to do when I recite the spell,Willow thought. She flipped through the journal and found no other instructions. She decided to walk outside and see if anything had happened that she could not see from the tower. She walked down the tower steps and out of the castle. Willow looked around but did not see anything different about the forest.

  She decided to try reciting the spell one more time. “Garrinhov, Mothmoria, Uthusia, Vingaring!” she said. Still, nothing happened. The only sound that answered her was the chirping of birds.