Season of the Witch

by Sarah Rees Brennan

  “Oh,” I said, light dawning as I realized what she must be. “You’re from the well?”

  I was shaking with the chill of night air and my soaked clothes, but I curled up on the bank and studied her with the same curiosity that shone in her bright oval of a face. I’d never seen a wishing-well spirit before. Aunt Hilda told me they were shy but friendly spirits who lingered invisibly about wells, hoping to meet a worthy human whose wishes they could grant. My aunt must be right that they were benign spirits, because this one had saved me without my even having to ask.

  The spirit of the wishing well smiled, and there were little ripples in her silvery cheeks, like the ripples when small fish swim too close to the surface. I thought they might be dimples. I smiled hesitantly back at her.

  “That’s right, Sabrina. Do you want a wish?”

  “No, that’s okay. You’ve done enough, and I’m just looking for myosotis anyway.”

  The wishing-well spirit pointed a gleaming fingertip, and I saw the plant growing in the dark grass near my foot, its petals shimmering blue. A trick of shadow must have hidden them before.

  “I owe you,” I said, and gathered the tiny blue flowers, careful not to crush them.

  The spirit’s eyes flashed, bright as sunlight on a stream, as she saw the flowers in my hand.

  “I believe I know the spell,” she remarked. “You wish to open a man’s eyes to love?”

  “Um. Yes,” I said, embarrassed.

  It seemed suddenly like the magic equivalent of when Simon Chen got a crush on Roz and spent all his time loudly mentioning that his uncle had a yacht.

  The wishing-well spirit regarded me with tranquil, friendly eyes. The wishing-well spirit, I felt, did not judge.

  “I’m a little surprised,” she confessed. “I would have thought a witch like you wouldn’t bother with small spells. I imagined you might be coming here to do a different spell entirely.”

  A witch like me. The spirit said the words admiringly, when most witches didn’t think I counted as a witch at all.

  “Do you know many witches?” I asked.

  “No,” said the spirit of the wishing well. “There are three witch girls who often ramble through my woods, but I never show myself to them. They don’t mean well, and I don’t wish them well. They’re not like you. As soon as I saw you, I wanted to talk to you. I could tell you were special.”

  I had never thought before about the term wishing well, and how that did not only mean a well in which you could toss a coin and a wish. It could mean truly wishing well: wishing only the best for me, as a friend might.

  She didn’t see something special in Prudence, Dorcas, or Agatha, who thought they were so far above me they might as well have flown their brooms to the moon. She saw something special in me. I couldn’t help but be flattered.

  “What was the spell you thought I’d come here to do?” I asked curiously.

  “Oh,” said the spirit. “It’s a spell you can only do with the waters of the wishing well, to unlock your true potential. Only certain witches can do it. The ones with the potential to be great. When you walked into the clearing tonight, the moon shone behind you like a crown of bone, and the night streamed behind you like a cloak of shadows. I could see you were born to be a witch of legend.”

  “Wow.” I coughed, trying to hide how pleased I was. “I don’t hear that every day.”

  “You should,” murmured the spirit. “But I’m glad you found what you were looking for. If you’re sure that you did.”

  A chill needle sliced through the warm clouds wrapping my mind. The hour was very late, I realized. Ambrose was waiting for me. I was scared that he’d worry. I scrambled to my feet, even though I wanted to stay and talk to the spirit a little longer. Maybe hear some more about the spell.

  “I did.” I lingered another instant. “Thanks again. I wish I could repay you.”

  The spirit of the wishing well nodded as she sat upon the bank, silver hair twisting about her like moonlit leaves in a wind I could not see. There was something forlorn about her shimmering, slender form. She seemed as sad to watch me go as I was to leave.

  “If you want to repay me, come and see me again. It has been so long since mortals visited my well and made wishes for me to live upon. I am so lonely, and there are so many things I would like to say to you.”

  I stopped in my room to change clothes and then carried the river flowers to my cousin’s door. I’d already decided not to tell him about the tumble into the stream, or the spirit of the wishing well. Ambrose would be upset if he knew I’d gotten in trouble because of where he sent me when he was helpless to go with me or protect me.

  Ambrose always tried to play things off and keep the mood light, but every now and then he couldn’t help letting a sign of his frustrated fury slip through the façade. Trapping him in this house was as wrong as confining a tiger in a birdcage, and sometimes a predator’s eye gleamed through the bars.

  Today he seemed glad to have something to do. He let me into his room with a whispered inquiry as to whether the two-headed monster had seen me come in with the goods. I said that was no way to talk about our aunts, and we grinned at each other, a pair of conspirators who knew we were probably going to get into trouble. That was half the fun.

  Ambrose took the flowers and laid them out on the table where he’d prepared the rest of the materials for the spell: Harvey’s hair, the coltsfoot, a length of old rope, and a special candle. Ambrose snapped his fingers, and a flame leaped from the wick, not yellow and blue but black on black, as if a shadow of a flame was burning.

  “They say if someone pure of heart lights this candle, the dead will rise,” Ambrose told me, his voice warm and eager. “Sorry, candle, not today.”

  Necromancy was Ambrose’s pet subject. I watched him lean over the table, his dark eyes mirrors of the black flame, alight with magic and mischief.

  “Have you ever been in love, Ambrose?” I asked. “Who was the lucky guy or girl?”

  “Oh …” said Ambrose, “that’s a difficult question.”

  “Is it a difficult question where the answer is yes or where the answer is no?”

  Ambrose shrugged and gave me a fox-like grin.

  “It’s tricky for witches to love. Perhaps we have harder hearts than mortals. Hard and cold as the highest stone wall, people say. Witches are well-known to be cold and fickle. Maybe it’s because we live for centuries, and mortals die so soon. Our hearts must be resilient, because they need to beat longer.”

  He spoke lightly, but the words settled as heavily on my heart as stones. In the times of the witch trials, mortals used to “press” us witches for confessions. The pressing meant they would pile tablets of stone on a witch’s chest until the witch confessed her own sins and the names of other witches in her coven. One of the heroes of Salem, a warlock named Giles Corey, refused to give up his fellow witches. He died, his last words calling out for his mortal torturers to add more weight.

  Right now, what I was doing and the thought of what was to come felt like stone tablets on my own chest, making it difficult to breathe. Was Ambrose saying that when I went through my dark baptism, I wouldn’t care so much for Harvey and my friends? Was he saying that he and my aunts didn’t care as much as I’d always thought—that they couldn’t care about me as much as I’d always believed they did?

  I didn’t want to be crushed under any weight. But I didn’t want to be hard-hearted either.

  Ambrose was merrily twining flowers through the length of rope. “I don’t want to talk about the past. I’d like to be in love in the future! I’d like love to come to me as a great and wonderful disaster. Failing that, I suppose it would be exciting to be captured at sea.”

  I blinked. “I’ve never thought of love and piracy as similar things.”

  I stared at my cousin and wondered how different what we felt was, and what we wanted. If I had a soft mortal heart in a witch’s breast, would the dark baptism crush or freeze it?

  No.
I knew witches could love. I had proof. My father had loved my mother so much that he married her, against all tradition and all law. Their love had been epic, world-changing, rule-breaking. I had always wanted a love just like theirs.

  And ever since I was a little girl, in all my daydreams of storybook love, Harvey was my prince.

  “I always thought I’d love to be a sexy pirate. Oh well, let’s get your love life in order before we address the tragic issue of mine. Knot this rope nine times as we say the words.” Ambrose winked as he handed me the rope. “Knot of nine, his heart is mine.”

  I took the rope in my hands, feeling its rough surface scrape across my tender palms. I thought of the first time Harvey had held my hand, in that dark movie theater, and how our skin pressed together had felt electric.

  Strangely the icy touch of the spirit’s hand, pulling me from a watery grave, came back to me, more like a shiver than a memory. It felt foreboding. The word last occurred to me again. Last chance to turn back, I thought.

  I tied the first knot in the rope with one swift, decisive movement.

  “Lavender’s blue, rosemary’s green; she will be loved as soon as seen,” I murmured.

  “Omnia vincit amor, et nos cedamus amori,” Ambrose added, the Latin tripping so fast off his tongue I barely understood it, though I’d learned Latin at Aunt Zelda’s knee.

  “Omnia vincit amor …” I repeated, stumbling on the words. I tied several more knots, trying to keep up in one way at least.

  “Quos amor verus tenuit, tene—”

  The black flame of the candle leaped, looming suddenly and terrifyingly large. Ambrose smiled in the same way, with leaping darkness. Like a wicked witch.

  “Wait,” I said. “What was that?” I couldn’t hear the last words he’d said. Something about tenebris, or shadows, I thought.

  My hands were still moving, on automatic. I tied the last knot of rope twined with rosemary, lavender, and the flowers from the river that had cost me so dearly. The rope felt warm suddenly in my hands, as if it were a living thing.

  Ambrose’s smile was smug. “That was the spell being sealed.”

  It was done now. I put the nine-knotted rope down on the table and watched the black flame die away. I felt a dull ache and realized I’d bitten down on my own lip too hard. The taste of blood was in my mouth, metal and fear and magic.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t have done it.”

  “Magic is what keeps us safe from mortals,” Ambrose argued. “Why risk your heart, or anything else? You believe in Prince Charming and happy endings and fairy-tale love, Sabrina, but what happens to witches in fairy tales?”

  I looked away from my cousin’s dark eyes and darker smile, away from the rope. The flowers I had gathered from the riverbank were bright against the knots, like tiny blue stars, and I thought of the other name for myosotis: forget-me-not. I’d always thought of that as a sweet name, romantic even, but for the first time I thought about it as a command. Forget me not, even if you want to.

  Suddenly it was as hard to breathe, here in my own warm home, as it had been in the stream when the cold waters closed over my head.

  It was done, I told myself again. It was too late to wonder what I had done.

  “Don’t worry so much, Sabrina mine.”

  Ambrose’s voice was coaxing, sweet as poisoned honey, a voice I had trusted and followed all my life. It was much too late for second thoughts.

  “You need to get used to breaking the rules, that’s all,” he assured me. “It’s well past the witching hour, and you should go to bed. Good night, fairy-tale princess. May flights of dark angels wing thee to thy rest. You’re half human. You should get half a happy ending, at least. I hope your prince will be charming tomorrow.”

  Rosalind Walker has the strangest dreams.

  In the waking world, she’s totally normal. The preacher’s kid, studious and well-behaved unless she has to fight for justice—and Jesus fought for justice too, so Roz feels that’s okay. Her grandma is a little eccentric, but whose grandma isn’t? Roz spends all her free time with her family, or with her friends since forever, Sabrina, Susie, and Harvey. Her dad does have doubts about her friends, though.

  Funnily enough, Reverend Walker has no problem with Harvey, the only boy in their group. Even though Harvey’s brother is the town heartthrob, Roz secretly, guiltily thinks Harvey is just as handsome. Not that it matters. Harvey has always been so into Sabrina there’s no way out, thus he’s no threat to Roz’s doubtful virtue, and Harvey’s brother, Tommy, never takes off the cross around his neck. Reverend Walker says the Kinkles are good boys.

  Sabrina and Susie are a different matter. Reverend Walker only frowns a slightly puzzled frown over Susie and doesn’t comment, but he has a lot to say about Sabrina. Nobody has ever seen the Spellmans in any church.

  Roz’s dad can get pretty intense, but she can’t discard what he says entirely.

  Sabrina is Roz’s BFF. Best friends forever, the most sacred agreement there is in a teenage girl’s life, and most BFFs know absolutely everything there is to know about each other. They constantly sleep over at each other’s houses.

  Sometimes Roz is scared to sleep at Sabrina’s place. She used to think her fear was because of the house being a mortuary, and it is a little freaky to think of bodies laid out, cold and still, beneath the floor Roz walks on whenever she sets foot inside. Roz was once standing in the hall, waiting for Sabrina to come downstairs so they could go, and she had a sharp flash, as if she’d really seen it, of a dead woman lying somewhere beneath her. A dead woman staring up at Roz with open eyes, wide and white and blind.

  Where do people go when they die? her father asked Roz once when she was a kid, and she said: They go to Sabrina’s house.

  She still remembers the stern, disappointed expression on his face as he told her that when they died, people went to heaven or hell.

  They went to heaven if they were good, and believed, and to hell if they sinned, and did not believe.

  What goes to Sabrina’s house are only the empty shells, after the souls are gone. Roz believes that. She’s almost certain she believes.

  She still gets a little freaked out even going near the Spellman house, even talking to Sabrina’s creepy aunts, and her creepy cousin. Her dad says they are sinners, and Roz senses that, at the very least, they have secrets.

  Maybe secrets and sins are the same thing.

  Then there are her dreams. Roz keeps those secret. She’s a sinner too.

  In her dreams there are ghosts in the woods, hanging shadows that swing into Roz’s path and stop her from taking another step. In her dreams she sees the Kinkle family with guns, hunting through the woods. She’s terrified of Harvey’s father, no matter how much Reverend Walker approves of the Kinkles. In her dreams she sees Ambrose Spellman in the mortuary, with blood on his face, laughing. And her best friend, Sabrina, Roz sees her in the woods wearing a white dress that turns black.

  And worse than that, worse than anything … Sometimes in Roz’s dreams the pictures she sees blur, like destroyed paintings, as if the wet paint of the world is running. She sees herself in a mirror, and her eyes turn to darkness, and darkness drips down her face in long, black trails. The whole world is reduced to messy streaks of color against an overwhelming, all-enveloping dark, and she weeps and her tears are shadows, and nothing makes sense any longer.

  Roz loves her friend, and she fears for her, though there seems no reason for fear in the waking world. She’s frightened for herself too, and she hasn’t told her friends. Not about the dreams. Not about her eyes failing.

  She gets headaches, and the words of her father’s sermons seem to pound in her head: his voice thundering judgment, so different from his usual low and loving tones. Sometimes Roz thinks those words will split her skull. Sometimes she thinks she will weep blood.

  Do you believe in what you cannot see? If she couldn’t see at all, what would she believe in? Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet believe. What ab
out what she can see? Is she supposed to believe in every vision?

  She sees things differently, in her dreams. She wonders what other people see in their dreams. Everybody worries that the people around them see things differently, but perhaps Roz worries more than most.

  Roz has her dreams, and she has her doubts. On the days after her worst dreams, on the days when the strangest things happen, the doubts get stronger.

  She doesn’t know whether her dreams are warning her about danger to Sabrina, or if Sabrina is the danger.

  I went downstairs that morning to find Aunt Zelda staring disapprovingly over her newspaper as Ambrose leaned in the doorway and flirted with the woman delivering our mail.

  “You know the saying,” I heard him murmur. “How does it go again? Something about good things and packages.”

  The girl was a redhead, so her blush was extremely apparent, violent crimson under her peaked cap and freckles. We go through a lot of mailmen and mailwomen. I don’t know if Ambrose scares them off, or if Zelda requests for them to be changed.

  Aunt Zelda came and sat with me at the kitchen table. Usually Aunt Hilda is at the stove, making me breakfast, but not today. I looked out the window and saw the fresh soil heaped on the grave outside. I swallowed and poured myself some cereal.

  Ambrose swaggered in a few moments later, passing Aunt Zelda an envelope from the school. It was probably about the next parent-teacher meeting. Aunt Zelda ignored the envelope with total disdain, as she does everything about my mortal life. She was having a cigarette for breakfast, which was standard.

  “Really, Ambrose?” Aunt Zelda asked. “A mortal? A mortal who brings the mail?”

  Ambrose shrugged and snagged the cereal box from my hand. “It’s not like anyone’s actually getting attached. I don’t meet that many people. What am I meant to do, hit on mourners attending funerals? That would be shocking and inappropriate.”