The Broken Circle: Yarns of the Knitting Witches

by Cheryl Potter

  Skye gasped, while Trader smiled broadly, as they realized they were able to pick out images in the swirling vapor. There was a collective intake of breath. The group watched as sulfurous chunks of great burnt rocks, once suns, smashed to the ground. Still smoking, the boulders scattered across a broad valley edged by snaking rivers.

  “It’s working!” Smokey cried. She gazed at the empty space beside Skye. “We must be Twelve. Could Teal have joined us?” She asked Aubergine, peering up at the ceiling in search of green haze. “Or did Mamie herself, perhaps?”

  Troubled, Aubergine shook her head. “I don’t know. Watch and see.”

  Ratta rambled on as if reciting by rote. The witches paid rapt attention as the story unfolded. “The ancients honored their ruling-class dead by building crypts, embellished with carvings of their suns and of the rivers that crossed at each end of their valley. With these folk they buried pets and riches, clothing and small statues, all signifying their wealth and social standing. These items were intended to accompany the dead into an afterworld they had hoped existed. None of these families wished for less importance in the land of dreams than the station they had possessed in their dying world.”

  Ratta revealed a scene in which tombs dotted a low bluff overlooking a barren landscape. Piles of uncut stone heaped nearby suggested that more crypts had been planned, but never finished.

  “The First Folk were proud and clever,” Ratta recalled in her vacant voice. “The death of their suns was neither the beginning nor the end of the damage they wreaked. They used the powerful crystals mined from the riverbanks to defy natural law in other ways.

  “A group called the Rainmakers learned to manipulate the change of seasons. By releasing cold-fire crystals into the air, they forced summer to lengthen and rain to fall only on command. Several of the Rainmakers’ wives went on a rampage to exterminate bothersome insects, ignoring the plant life that depended upon such flying pests to carry their seed, as well as the birds that starved without such bugs to use for food.

  “Another band of First Folk so altered the natural chain of life and death, growth and regrowth, that the seasons ceased to follow each other in order. Fish and fowl became barren, and grains and grasses dwindled to extinction. Instead, there was an endless supply of things the First Folk favored: fragrant blooms, heady wines, and blazing days of sun and sand along the Tigris and Eye. Fertile gardens fell fallow, unable to produce the hardiest grain or root vegetable.”

  Captivated by the scenes in the haze over the dye pot, Skye saw families reclining on woven mats spread along a glittering beach, beneath sunflowers whose heads were so large they provided shade. Beyond, untended fields held stunted crops.

  “Finally the suns, overworked by the constant demands of the First Folk, died. And the world quietly froze.” Ratta’s vision showed them the river valley growing ever colder. The flowers had shriveled and turned brown, and the beaches were bare and windswept. The twined rivers iced over and snow began to fall.

  “Additional First Folk perished from frost and famine. Few remained to bury them. Bodies lay frozen where they had fallen, for the last wolves and carrion birds to ravage. The Guardians of nature observed all this. Although they had pledged never to interfere with those under their watch, they decided to scour the lands clean once more. So began their process of encasing every last sign of the ancients’ folly in a mausoleum of ice, which today we call the Northland Glacier.”

  Within the swirl of smoke, a huge mass of ice formed over the frozen valley. It began to slowly grind south, growing in size as it scraped up every vestige of civilization in its path.

  “So began the Age of Ice,” Ratta recited. “When young, the glacier was small. As it grew, looming ever larger on the landscape, wind began to sculpt its peaks, and to carve icy spires known as the Out Crops of the Northlands. The glacier itself molded the gentler foothills to the south, where later the freshets of the Crystal Lakes would pool.”

  Wheat found that she could distinguish familiar features of the glacier that she saw on her return from the Western Highlands each spring. Although there were no Burnt Holes yet, Sierra recognized the eastern bluff of ice that came to house them.

  “What the Guardians forgot was that nature always seeks to renew itself,” Ratta continued. “Ever so slowly, the world warmed. Eons passed before the season we call spring returned. By then, the Guardians had completely forgotten about our land. When its rebirth came to their attention, they looked upon it favorably. They blessed us with a new sun—but just one, and they kept it far enough from our reach that half of each day remained dark and cold. They hoped that if we had no perpetual sun, as the First Folk did, we might be thankful for time well spent in the light of day.”

  As she spoke, a new day dawned over the great pot, bathing those within the circle of Twelve in its rosy halo. From the back of the room, the maid crept closer, drawn to the vision like a moth to flame.

  “As the temperature rose, more of the world awoke,” Ratta went on. “Delicate grasses pushed through the snow, and ice melted into streams that became rivers. The lands became greener again, and the Guardians peopled it once more, taking care to spread us further, from the Lowlands to the Northlands, from the Western Highlands to the Far East and beyond.

  “All was true and good until Nature began to unbalance for a second time. Drought and famine in the Lowlands forced a quarrel with the North, and we in the Middlelands became caught in between. Were the Guardians testing us and tiring of us? Or had they merely forgotten us and moved on?”

  Ratta opened her faraway eyes to scan the circle. “Baited, one of us aligned herself with the South. With the support of the Lowlands, she seeks to rediscover the power of the First Folk, and to tilt nature to her will as they did. That is another tale, a future yarn that perhaps none of us will live to tell.”

  As the others began to protest, Aubergine raised her hand to silence them. “Let Ratta finish. She has not yet completed what Mamie Verde wants us to know.”

  Ratta waited for quiet before speaking again. “As the world thawed and the people began to wander, the Guardians grew concerned. They watched from afar as trade routes sprang up along the rivers, and bridges were built across them to neighboring villages. Knowing what had transpired before, the Guardians feared to expose these new folk to the ancients’ folly, or let them stumble across powerful crystals unaware. They decided that one of them would have to keep the remains of the First Folk hidden for all time.”

  While the witches watched, rivers flowed south from the melt-off. Beyond the glacier’s shadow, new grass sprang up in the foothills and fish jumped in the colorful pools that formed the Crystal Lakes.

  “This special Guardian was appointed to protect the ancients and their lore, frozen deep within the glacier, among a chain of caverns called the Crystal Caves. According to legend, these vast chasms and passageways formed naturally as the world awoke. Glaciers have life cycles of their own, melting and moving during the warm season and refreezing when it turns cold. Each spring thaw, melt-off from the Northland Glacier carved new caves and tunnels, riddling its underbelly with passageways. Minerals tinged some of the ice caves green and others blue. Underground rivers rushed through fissures to forge tunnels, while air pockets widened into caves.

  “Each spring thaw, fragments from the First Folk civilization melted free to tumble through the freshets flowing south, and bits of cracked crystal began to appear in the rivers and lakes. We call these shards. Even now, fossickers occasionally find bits of limestone emblazoned with sun rays or twined rivers.”

  Within the steam over the dye pot, ice sculptures of fantastical size and shape formed in an immense cavern, its ceiling studded with dripping stalactites. Beyond, ice melted from ancient First-Folk holdings, exposing brick and crypt, cudgel and crystal.

  “To keep signs of the ancients safe from discovery, the Guardians salted the passageway to the Crystal Caves with false en
trances and blind tunnels,” Ratta said. “The Guardians cursed the Caves with the voices of the frozen dead and appointed familiars as Watchers. If disturbed, the ceaseless sound of First-Folk murmurings would drive mad any living being who dared to enter the passage leading to the cave after cave of rubble and relics that held the crystals.”

  Ratta lifted her chin toward Lavender Mae, huddled in her army jacket. “If you disbelieve me, look no further than our Mae. It is not the smoke of glacier weed or the years spent as a river rat searching for the lost crystal that has addled her brain. Ancient voices echo inside her head. None but a Guardian can cure her.”

  “Finally the Guardians sealed the Crystal Caves. Their cautionary tales are designed to keep those of us born in more temperate times from being tempted to repeat First-Folk Folly. With each generation, the old stories are told by one who is destined to become caretaker of the First Folk. Each Keeper of the Tales dwells among us for a time to tell the yarns, as Mamie Verde did around this very pot. When the final tale has been uttered, the Keeper of the Tales must name a successor and then assume the Guardianship. While the next Keeper of the Tales spins the yarns of the First Folk anew, the caretaker dwells and keeps watch in an antechamber outside the Crystal Caves.”

  Trader tapped the table again, more loudly, as the last amethyst shard sifted through the neck of the hourglass. She looked to Aubergine. “The glass is empty. What should I do now?”

  Aubergine did not answer, for like the others, she stood frozen. Just to make certain, Trader reached for the old woman’s arm. It was cold as stone. Panic-stricken, Trader realized that Aubergine’s prediction had come true. Time was standing still. She looked around the circle. All of the witches had turned into statues. Then she noticed something even more shocking. While the witches in the circle had been entranced by Ratta’s vision, the kitchen maid had crept close enough to join them. As frozen as the rest, the girl crouched in the vacancy half-hidden between herself and Skye.

  Trader searched the shed wildly, uncertain of what to do. She wondered if time had stopped for everyone, or just in this room. And why she herself did not seem to be affected. Holding her breath, she listened intently, relieved to hear the sound of a wagon picking up trash in the back alley.

  Trader turned to the cloud of fog encasing Mamie to see if it held clues, but the steam had dissipated and the old woman’s remains seemed to have gone up in smoke as well. Or had they? Trader looked closely. She discerned the faint outline of a body drifting over the great pot. It hovered, as if waiting. Taking a wild guess, Trader hefted the hourglass and inverted it again, gasping at what she saw.

  “Hold it up,” Aubergine said, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. “Hold the glass for all to see.”

  Trader held the heavy timepiece with both hands. Wisps of fog lifted from the dye pot and seeped inside the glass, obscuring the purple shards with smoke. As that enclosed fog cleared, the witches watched a vision in the timekeeper itself, as crystals trickled down through the waist of the glass below the image of a young woman entering the Crystal Caves. Her body had a radiant glow that lit the dark halls of ice.

  “Who is that?” Smokey whispered.

  “Mamie Verde,” Aubergine said. “She is passing through to the Crystal Caves to assume her role.”

  “That can’t be Mamie,” Ratta said in disbelief. “She is younger than I.”

  “And will be forevermore,” Aubergine affirmed, with a raise of her eyebrows.

  As the witches peered intently into the hourglass, the young Mamie came to a small antechamber, dark and dank with disuse. To one side, a tunnel stretched away into the ice, unguarded.

  “Mae,” Lavender Mae shouted out in warning, as she recognized the caves. “Mamie!”

  “That must be the Guardian’s dwelling,” Lily surmised. “But where is the Guardian?”

  “No longer there, it seems.” Aubergine said, shaking her head sorrowfully.

  “Perhaps Mamie waited too long,” Winter Wheat said.

  “Perhaps Ratta did,” Indigo added.

  “The cycle of the Guardians may be as broken as our circle of Twelve,” Sierra said, “because Mamie did not leave us to assume her watch over the First Folk in time.”

  “She may surprise us yet.” Ratta smiled, observing the lithe young woman in the hourglass as she searched the anteroom. Finding nothing, Mamie disappeared into the tunnel and the glass dimmed.

  “It looks like we are in the dark again,” Esmeralde muttered in disappointment.

  Indigo narrowed her eyes at Ratta. “That’s no surprise.”

  “Enough,” Lily said. “Before any of you faults another who stands around this pot, know this: We few are charged with our world as it is, and we few will determine whether it survives.”

  “Listen and learn,” Aubergine admonished with a stern look. “There is no need to blame the war between North and South. It does not help to bicker with each other. Do not confuse our gifts with the might of men, who vie with each other to rule. For, as we all know, they cannot.”

  Mae’s gaze was fixated on the hourglass. In the dark, she glimpsed one spark after another. Soon the entire bowl erupted in pinpricks of light. “Maaaaeee,” she groaned. “Maaaee.”

  “What is it?” Esmeralde asked, glancing toward her. “Is she sick?”

  “Mae recognizes the sparkle of the crystals,” Sierra answered. “This is one tale I do know. Magic crystals from ancient caves wink even in the black of night, each orb infused with its own light. The pink quartz beacons that we use to show our way through dark paths at night come from such caverns, as do the cabochons tied to Wheat’s crook. Mae knows. She has been through the caves herself, many times.”

  Lily tore her gaze from the fireworks inside the hourglass to look at Aubergine. “Judging by the starburst, my guess is that the Guardians have welcomed Mamie into the Crystal Caves. She has begun her watch at last.”

  Aubergine nodded with satisfaction. “It is just as I had hoped.”

  “When must I relieve her?” Sierra asked.

  “When the last tale is told,” Aubergine said. “With Mamie’s help we may yet be able to wield the crystals, even from afar. By the time you assume your watch, if fortune goes our way, our powers will be rekindled and we may rule once more. That is what the Northlanders fear most; otherwise they would not have outlawed the use of magic and hunted us down as witches.”

  “We shall wield the crystals?” Sierra gave Aubergine a look of concern. “No yarns predict that—not even the Lost Tale. Legend suggests that it is our purpose to keep the crystals out of the hands of those who would use them to wreak havoc on the world.”

  “It depends upon how you read the stories,” Aubergine countered. “Isn’t that so, Lily?”

  Lilac Lily nodded. “The art of using crystals to bend natural law may have been buried with the First Folk, but it is not lost. We have employed such stones for similar intentions in small ways.”

  “If we use the crystals to rule all, we are no better than the First Folk,” Sierra disagreed. “We are as ill-purposed as the Dark Queen.”

  “We already use the crystals. Think on it,” Lily said. “Here in this shed, as we circle this cauldron, the shards we use to dye yarn are fragments of the rock of the ancients. Aubergine found such stones in the Crystal Lakes when she was young. Over time and quite by accident, she learned to harness some of their magical properties.”

  “That was different,” Sierra protested. “It was innocent. When I discovered crystal rock flour in the Lavender Rill flowing by my farm, I dissolved it and used it to dye whimsical cloaks and caps. No one was more surprised than I to find that my garments allowed their wearers to remain serene or to pass unseen, and offered some of them the power of persuasion.”

  “Innocent or not, you used crystal power to bend others to your will,” Lily pointed out. “It is the same.”

  “All of us wield magic
crystals, some more than others,” Aubergine pointed out. “Esmeralde gleans cracked crystals from fossick boys who scavenge the flooded freshets each spring. Finely silted stone laces her tinctures, allowing her to strengthen her remedies and better practice her lore. No wonder that her medicines heal like no others. Indigo Rose’s greenhouse grows exotic plants far from home. She chops the odd rock and uses it to fertilize fantastical seedlings, which later grow into fruit out of season, much as the First Folk did.”

  “The ancients ruined their world,” Winter Wheat objected.

  “We may yet do the same,” Aubergine shot back. “With or without the crystals.”

  “Wheat, you burn holes with your clacking amber beetles, which also light up when they sense danger,” Lily pointed out. “Crystals placed on my bed stand at night enhance my ability to ken what you all think. Smokey Jo can start a fire from nothing and sometimes disappears into wisps of smoke. Ratta cannot only hear but recite Mind Speak, which is none other than the language of the Guardians themselves. Poor Mae is far gone, for the voices of the ancients murmur in her mind, but she would find us the missing crystal if she could. Her goal is to make Aubergine’s amethyst necklace whole again, so that we may rekindle our lost power.”

  Suddenly the raven-haired kitchen girl stepped from hiding and fully occupied the remaining place in the circle between Skye and the spot where Trader had stood. In the hourglass, the young woman who was Mamie turned and stared. In return, the serving girl laughed loudly, a sound out of keeping with her submissive appearance. Mamie’s shape began to blur. The hourglass went dark. After waiting a few seconds, Trader set it slowly down on the table.

  “Mamie disappeared,” Trader raised her eyes toward the stranger who stood before her. “Why would she do that?”