Season of the Witch

by Sarah Rees Brennan

  “How are you feeling?” I asked.

  “If I’m ever allowed to have a familiar again,” Ambrose said, “I might want a bird.”

  A witch’s familiar is a goblin in animal form who is their partner in all magic. Aunt Hilda has her spiders. Sometimes when she reads her romance novels she sits at the kitchen table with the spiders crawling in a black stream up her wrist to sit in the hollow of her free hand, held up to the pages as if their eight eyes are reading about stormy, romantic adventures too. For my dark baptism, I’ll be getting a familiar of my own. Aunt Zelda has already left a few helpful pedigree books around the place, marked and highlighted, but I haven’t decided what kind of familiar I want yet.

  Still, I’m excited about it. A familiar will be like another member of the family, someone who will always take my side and never leave me and understand everything about magic. A familiar is a witch’s constant companion.

  According to the terms of his sentence, Ambrose is forbidden to have a familiar.

  I rested my cheek against his shoulder. “What kind of bird?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, cousin, I’m just talking. I’d be happy with any kind of familiar. I’m this close to painting a smiley face on a rock.”

  He shrugged me airily off, moving toward an earthenware vase on a side table. He lifted it in his hands and mimicked a squeaky voice.

  “Hello, Sabrina. I’m Ambrose’s new familiar. Together we will make powerful magic!”

  I giggled. “Might not be quite up to Aunt Z.’s standards.”

  “Well, if I ever do get a familiar again, Auntie Z. certainly isn’t going to be picking one out for me.” Ambrose put his vase back down on the table. “I don’t want a creature bred in captivity. I know how that feels too well. I’m taking no prisoners.”

  I nodded. “That makes sense.”

  I hadn’t thought about it before, but that made a lot of sense. Maybe soon, very soon now, when it was my turn to get a familiar, I’d want one who was wild too. A familiar who would choose to stay with me.

  Ambrose was staring out the window again. The last swallows of summer were zigging and zagging across the sky, the delicate arches of their black wings cutting dark lines that almost resembled the lines on a map.

  “Maybe a bird,” he murmured.

  I keep forgetting that if Ambrose could choose, he wouldn’t be here with me.

  “What did your spell say?”

  I didn’t realize how sharp the question came out until I saw Ambrose’s eyes narrow.

  “Oh, not this again,” he said. “I’m not talking about this! I don’t talk about anything that bores me.”

  “But—”

  Ambrose pointed a finger and then whirled toward the door when a knock came. He flung the door dramatically open, all while still pointing at me. “I said no! No to boredom. I’m off to the mortuary, where all the exciting conversationalists are! ‘The crack in the tea-cup opens/A lane to the land of the dead!’ Right about now.” He exited through the arched door under the stairs. I might have followed him except that Harvey and, oddly, his brother, Tommy, were standing in the doorway. They looked understandably perplexed.

  “Hi?” said Tommy.

  “Are you sure you should be bringing teacups down to the morgue?” asked Harvey.

  They were both answered only by Ambrose slamming the door. I went over and patted Harvey’s arm. My man, asking the real questions.

  “Ha-ha,” I said. “Ignore him, Harvey. Hey, Tommy. Fancy seeing you twice in one week!”

  Tommy shrugged easily. “I have early shifts for the next few days, so I figured I could take you and Harvey to school.”

  “You work too much. You should take better care of yourself,” Harvey said, his brow clouded for a moment. Then he looked at me, and it cleared. “And you should just stay perfect.”

  I popped up on my toes to give him a quick kiss. “I’ll try.”

  We climbed into Tommy’s red pickup truck and made for Baxter High.

  “Funny guy, your cousin,” Tommy remarked.

  I bristled. First the mailwoman, and now this. “How do you mean?”

  Tommy sounded taken aback. “I mean—he made a joke? About dead people being exciting conversationalists?”

  I deflated. “Oh.”

  “Like I said, funny.”

  “Yeah,” I muttered. “He’s a scream. That was a quote, by the way, about the teacup and the land of the dead, not demented babbling. It’s from a poem by W. H. Auden.”

  Tommy raised his eyebrows at Harvey in the sideview mirror.

  “Smart girl you’ve got there. Family who quotes poetry to each other. Hang on to that one.”

  “That’s my plan,” said Harvey, his arm around my shoulders.

  I had my arm around his waist. I didn’t want to let go either.

  At school, Tommy leaned out of the window to give Harvey a hug goodbye. The two of them held on for a moment, casually affectionate, really sure of each other. Really family.

  “Take care of yourself down there,” said Harvey.

  Tommy winked at me over his brother’s shoulder. “Take care of him, Sabrina.”

  Harvey slid his arm back around me as we went up the stairs and into the hallway, where the glass in the windows made the light filtering through faintly green, as if we were underwater. Ms. Wardwell gave me a tiny smile as she scuttled past, but she didn’t stay to talk.

  There was a line drawn between Harvey’s brows. “I hate thinking about him down there. I hate those stupid mines.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Harvey looked at me as I spoke, and the line between his brows softened. “You’re beautiful,” he said. “Like a star I can’t believe I get to keep.”

  Susie came over to us and headbutted him in the shoulder. “Chill out, Romeo.”

  Harvey blinked at her, puzzled. “But nothing’s more important than true love.”

  “Sure there is,” said Roz, coming to my side. “Consider your GPA.”

  “Ease up on Harvey,” I begged when we were in the girls’ bathroom, washing my hands clean. “He’s not being that weird.”

  “He is!” Susie and Roz both yelled from their respective stalls. “He is being THAT weird.”

  I scrubbed at my hands with renewed vigor. The pale pink soap from the dispensers was turning an unpleasant color, like foam flecked with blood. Your hands can never be too clean.

  “You don’t understand,” I said in a low voice.

  Roz came out and joined me, tilting her head at her reflection in the mirror. There was something odd about the way she was staring at herself. She was squinting too much.

  “What don’t we understand?”

  “It’s nothing, it’s fine,” I told her. “How’s your head?”

  Roz swung her head toward me. For a moment, her gaze looked unfocused, as if she couldn’t think what I meant.

  “Your head was hurting,” I prompted her.

  “It was nothing,” she murmured. “It’s fine.”

  I couldn’t say: I’m a half witch, and on my next birthday, in little more than a month, I will go through my dark baptism and become a full witch. My family want me to do it, and I want to do magic, but I’m pretty sure my family expect me to leave my whole mortal life, including you guys, in the dust. I’m holding on as hard as I can to Harvey and to you, but I’m not sure what to do. And that’s new for me. I’m used to being sure.

  Susie came out of her own stall, washing her hands while studiously avoiding her reflection. I stared at them both hopelessly.

  They wouldn’t understand. I couldn’t tell them, and I couldn’t talk to my aunts or Ambrose about Harvey, not really. There was nobody in the world I could talk to about everything.

  I wished for my parents. Then I thought about the spirit of the wishing well.

  “Actually,” I said when Harvey was walking me home on the path through the woods, “you can leave me here. I was thinking I might like to take a walk through the woods. Okay, bye!�
��

  I gave him a breezy wave and began to power walk through the trees. Seconds later, I heard him crashing after me. There was no way, barring magic, that I was outpacing him. My legs are short, like the rest of me.

  When he caught up with me, Harvey was beaming. “I’ll come with you!”

  “You’ll be bored,” I said desperately. “I am going to collect, uh, flowers. And press them in a book. Then I will have many dried flowers.”

  “Flowers for the rose of the world.” Harvey smiled. “I’d like to draw you collecting flowers. Nothing you do could be boring.”

  I made an impatient gesture. “See, nobody is fascinating one hundred percent of the time. People sleep. People go to the bathroom. Nobody’s fascinating in the bathroom.”

  Harvey seemed bewildered. “Well … I’m sure you’re …”

  “Actually, I don’t want to pursue this line of discussion!” I told him quickly. “I’d like us to stay together and not be mentally scarred for life. Sure, let’s go.”

  We walked hand in hand through the woods, under the dappled sunlight and the shadow of the leaves. Until I spied what I was searching for: the tiny scarlet flash of a ladybug curled up in a green leaf. I went over to the leaf and nudged at it until the bug tumbled out, and then held it up on my fingertip.

  “Ladybug, ladybug,” I said under my breath, because Harvey was watching, “fly away home.”

  “Oh wow, Sabrina, I’m so sorry,” said Harvey. “I’ve just remembered I have to go home.”

  I smiled and kissed him. “Is that so?”

  Harvey cupped my face in his hands. “The woods are changed because you are made of ice and gold,” he informed me seriously.

  “Um, thanks. Thank you for that,” I told him. “Goodbye, now.”

  That matter settled, I headed toward my destination, past the shadows of the woods to the clear line of the stream.

  But I didn’t make it to the clearing, or the creek. I had barely taken a few steps before I heard a familiar sound. Like falling leaves, except louder.

  They dropped from the sky as if they were dropping out of the trees like three wicked, gleaming apples, but I knew better. Witches came from the sky, not the trees. Their three shadows fell over me, streaming long and dark.

  Prudence, Agatha, and Dorcas. Agatha’s black hair flew with the wind like a flag made of darkness, and Dorcas’s red hair mingled with hers like a flag made of flame. They looked powerful and strange, picture-perfect witches, but it was Prudence who was the really dangerous one.

  Prudence’s hair was bleached nearly bone white to contrast with her flawless dark skin. Her lips curled into the sneer that was Prudence’s default expression, or at least Prudence’s default expression around me.

  “The woods are changed because of I-can’t-believe-what-I-just-heard and gold.” Prudence tipped back her head and laughed. “Oh, Sabrina, Sabrina, what have you done?”

  Agatha and Dorcas echoed Prudence’s laughter, as they echoed most things about Prudence. Their black and red heads bent together, sisterly and close. They weren’t really sisters, but they always called themselves that.

  Even they could be sure of each other. And they were the worst people I knew.

  “Oooh, Henry, call me the rose of the world again!” cackled Agatha.

  “His name is not—”

  “Nothing you do could be boring!” cackled Dorcas. “Except literally everything you mortal lovebirds do is boring.”

  Their fingers were all linked, like little girls skipping off to the playground together. They dressed in clothes with the same cut, short skirts and high lace collars, a uniform for witches. Or sisters.

  Prudence unlinked her fingers and wandered over to a tree, sliding her arm around the trunk and caressing the bark. For a moment she looked like the world’s nastiest dryad. When she glanced over at me, her dark eyes were even sharper than usual.

  “You know,” she said thoughtfully. “I have a wide experience of teenage boys. And they really, normally, do not speak like that. I mean, they’re primitive life-forms, they can barely grunt. It’s hard to make out even simple phrases like Nice bod and Let’s go out for a milkshake sometime. I think our little Sabrina may have cast a spell on him.”

  Dorcas said throatily: “And now he’s hers.”

  I tried to brush past them, but the three girls joined fingers again and blocked my way.

  “Oh, no judgment, Sabrina! The path to hell is paved with broken men,” said Prudence. “So, fun journey, fun destination, really. Except I thought mortals were so precious to you. Almost like real people, right?”

  “You always act so high and mighty about us ensorceling mortal boys and leading them to their doom,” Agatha said in a singsong voice. “But in the end, you’re just like us.”

  Dorcas tossed her long hair over her shoulder like a red whip. “She wishes she could be like us.”

  Prudence strolled toward me, long legs eating the space between us in two strides, leaned down to get in my face, then jabbed at my shoulder with a long, glossy black fingernail until I fell back a step.

  Softly, Prudence said: “But she never will.”

  When the Weird Sisters first sought me out in the woods, a few years ago, I was so excited. I didn’t know any witches besides my aunts and my cousin, not really. It seemed ideal to meet three girls, the same number as my three mortal friends at school, as if I could mirror my experience of mortal life with them. I wanted them to be my friends, to tell me everything about magic and exactly what it was like at the Academy of Unseen Arts. It’s hilarious to imagine now, but I wanted to love them.

  Except they hated me. They sought me out so they could torment me, always declaring that a half witch was never going to be good enough. They don’t want me at the Academy of Unseen Arts, and I don’t know if I want to go to school with people like them.

  I stopped falling back and glared at Prudence. “I’m nothing like you. And I’m not going to doom anybody.”

  “So why’d you do it, then, if not to break his mind and his heart and bend him to your will?” Prudence seemed genuinely puzzled. “Your behavior is senseless.”

  I usually don’t let myself show weakness in front of the Weird Sisters, but this time I made a crucial mistake. I broke our gaze, dropping my eyes to the forest floor, and Prudence’s laugh rippled among the leaves.

  “You used a love spell on a mortal because you want him to weally, weally wuv you? Maybe even commit to you? What’s he going to do, give you a promise ring when you skip off to the Academy of Unseen Arts?” Prudence laughed. “That’s pathetic.”

  “It wasn’t a love spell—”

  “Are we feeling a little insecure about our dark baptism, half witch? Wondering if you can take your place among the witches and leave the mortals behind? Tell me all about your problems,” said Prudence. “I love stories that make me laugh.”

  The words fell from her sneering mouth, bitter as poisoned apples. They were all the more bitter because they were true.

  “Stay in the mortal world if you love it so much,” said Dorcas venomously. “It would be better if you did. Everybody knows you’re not cut out to be a witch.”

  “Yes, Sabrina,” trilled Agatha. “I really think going through your dark baptism and coming to our school would be a mistake.”

  “You’re the ones making a mistake,” I said. “You’re in my way.”

  I barreled through the barrier of their bodies, breaking apart Dorcas’s and Agatha’s joined hands. They were clearly the weak link, and I was past them and crashing through the trees before they could hurl a single spell at me.

  “Can’t bear to be apart from a mortal boy,” Prudence called after me, as if she was a judge pronouncing a sentence. “Watch out, Sabrina. If you’re too desperate for love and magic, you’ll fall between two stools and get nothing. You’ll be lost.”

  I had no answer for her. I ran away through the woods.

  I didn’t know why Prudence was always needling me. I di
dn’t know why she had to be the way she was. I didn’t know why she had always hated me so much.

  Witches dream as mortals do.

  Prudence, Agatha, and Dorcas have known each other since they were little. They didn’t go to the Academy after their dark baptisms. They have always been there, three tiny girls walking hand in hand in hand through the halls, living with the towering statue, between the stone walls of the edifice that looked more crypt than school. The harshness of the Academy shaped the Weird Sisters, and they don’t expect life to be anything but hard.

  It’s Sabrina’s own fault, and her own foolishness, that she does. It’s not Prudence’s problem. Prudence has her own problems to deal with.

  Witches’ lives are dangerous, and orphans are not uncommon. Their High Priest took them in and is caring for them. They’re lucky, Father Blackwood tells them: especially as witches aren’t exactly rare. Not like warlocks. Boys might find homes, but orphan girls never will.

  They call themselves the Weird Sisters, and when everyone else starts calling them that too, it feels like a triumph. Everyone told Prudence she had no family, but now, through her own will, she has sisters.

  And sisters share.

  “I can’t exactly give all three of you my letter ring, or class jacket, or whatever the mortals call it,” the Weird Sisters’ warlock boyfriend, Nick Scratch, told Prudence in the woods on Sunday—the day for restless sin—and Prudence realized to her insulted astonishment that he was breaking up with her.

  With all of them, through her, which is pure laziness.

  When she tells him so, Nick flashes the bright, insincerely charming smile that first attracted them.

  “Idle hands do the devil’s work,” he said. “So I have to keep super idle, in the service of the Dark Lord.”

  Prudence rolled her eyes. It’s amazing how much effort men will put in so they don’t have to make an effort. Dorcas and Agatha will be disappointed, though. They really liked Nick. He made a change from tormenting mortal boys. But then, Prudence thinks, who needs a change from tormenting mortal boys? It’s the best.

  She shrugged. “Of course none of us want you to do ridiculous mortal things with jackets and rings. Why would you bring that up?”