The Girl of Hawthorn and Glass

by Adan Jerreat-Poole

  She promised us.

  Without the Heart, how can we change anything?

  Since when had she become a beacon of hope for the lonely? When had she become responsible for the lives and wishes of such fragile creatures? They craved her guidance, clung to it. They wanted her magic.

  Her mouth salivated with the sweet and bitter taste of power, like almond and orange peel.

  The Hedge-Witch sighed and reached for her mug of chamomile tea. She added a spoonful of honey, the crystallized coppery sweetness still buzzing with the memory of wings. A sprig of lavender. A rusted iron nail. She took a sip.

  Calm radiated through her body.

  Where was Tav’s ghost? The creature had followed them willingly, had protected them. Would he work for her, follow her directions, now that Tav was gone?

  Not he, it. It was a ghost. She had spent too much time with Tav and was starting to think of it as a person. Where was it now? Waiting at a closed-down bus station, wading in the river, watching The Sun with dead eyes? What would it do when Tav didn’t return?

  A sense of foreboding fell across her forehead like a shadow.

  She looked up and faced her followers, their eyes desperate for a story. “The Coven will be coming for us. We need to prepare.” Had they been killed? Would it bother her to learn that Tav had died, after all the time she had spent with them? But then humans died so easily, like crickets.

  “The Coven?”

  “Here?”

  “Cam would never tell them about us!”

  “Babe, it’ll be okay.” A woman with dark braids brushed a human hand against a non-human arm. The air between them rippled like water.

  “The trace spell I planted on them is broken.” The Hedge-Witch took her lover’s hand and kissed it. Her lips left behind the shape of the kiss in orange rust. “Something terrible has happened. I can smell it in the air. I can taste it in the dirt. My dreams are broken. The Heart has changed, and the City of Eyes is changing, too. Magic feels different — the texture is coarser and harder to grasp. You wouldn’t understand.” She sighed again. Sometimes she missed the company of other witches. “Something has changed, but it isn’t what we had planned.”

  In the moments that followed, the cacophony of human bodies pounded in the Hedge-Witch’s ears — their twitching eyelashes, shifting joints, grinding teeth. She could hear their skin shedding and growing, their bones rotating in imperfect sockets.

  She took another sip of tea. That helped.

  “What do we do?” someone asked nervously.

  “We should never have trusted that witch-made creature.”

  “Don’t worry,” said the Hedge-Witch soothingly. She reached out and stroked a flowering cactus. “We can still get the Heart. This isn’t over. We just have to find the girl.”

  She swallowed the rest of the tea in one gulp, catching the nail between her teeth. She bit down on the iron, letting her tongue graze the tip. Blood summoned blood.

  The door swung open.

  A girl walked in, steely eyes panning the room. Two swords were strapped across her back. One cobbled together from broken bottles and Phillips-head screws. A weapon meant to wound rather than kill. A cruel edge. The other crafted from thousands of iridescent insect wings. The sound of a swarm of wasps followed the blade. It was restless.

  The Hedge-Witch took the nail from her mouth and set it delicately in her empty cup.

  “You didn’t think Eli was the only one, did you?” She turned to her made-girl, the project she had finally completed after all this time. She offered her daughter three strands of hair, sticky with saliva.

  “Find her.”

  Acknowledgements

  I owe so much to the amazing Dundurn team, who brought this adventure from YA NOVEL DRAFT 3.docx to printed book. Thank you to Rachel Spence, who read the first chaotic draft and saw something in it. Thank you to Jenny McWha, Chrissy Calhoun, and Shari Rutherford for polishing the story and making sure we knew the recipe for Eli’s body. Thank you to Elham Ali and the marketing team for sharing my story with readers. Thank you to Laura Boyle and the design team, especially Sophie Paas-Lang, for the beautiful cover design. I will never stop fanboying over it.

  A thousand thank yous to my incredible editor, Whitney French, who guided me through every writing crisis with tea and Avatar: The Last Airbender references. This book would not exist without your thoughtful insights and suggestions.

  Thank you to my sister, Haven, who was my first audience and fan. We shared a bedroom growing up, and I used to tell her stories about fairies, princesses, and magic teenagers. She would always remember the characters’ names and ask me what happened next. Haven is also the first person in my family I came out to as non-binary, and she has been so incredibly supportive. I love you so much.

  Thank you to my mom for always encouraging me to read and write — and for making mimosas when I found out that my book had been accepted.

  Thank you to my early readers and magical bookish friends who told me after ten pages that they would read more: Zoe Lyons, Ingrid Doell, Matthew Scott Wilson, and Jack Morton.

  Thank you to my cat Dragon for being patient with me when I didn’t have time to play, and for mostly sleeping on my lap instead of my keyboard.

  Thank you to Rida Abu Rass for the playlist “Weird mixtape for cute authors editing their books” <3.

  Thank you to the queer book club in Hamilton where I first felt accepted using they/them pronouns, to the baristas in all the indie cafés where I wrote and edited, and to all the angry feminists doing their thing.

  Finally, I want to write a bit about what it means to be a Canadian author living and writing in Canada. I grew up in Kingston, Ontario, on the traditional lands of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe nations, sixty-five kilometres from Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory. As a Canadian author, it’s important to recognize the Indigenous Peoples living on the land they have always cared for and to respect the rights and sovereignty of these nations. I did not write about Indigenous struggles in my book, but I encourage all readers — especially those in Canada — to think and learn more about our relationship to each other and to the land and to support Indigenous girls, women, and two-spirit people.

  Tav

  Tav was dreaming.

  The river was frozen over with thick black ice. When they knelt down, they could see blue-and-white flames trapped under the surface. They placed a palm over the ice, feeling the cold burn like fire. The flames flickered wildly, trying to reach their hand.

  A hairline crack snaked its way between their feet. Tav stepped back, uneasy. As they watched in horror, the river tore itself in two, ice and water and earth splitting apart. Tav stumbled and fell, narrowly avoiding the spears of ice stabbing the air like a fractured bone puncturing skin.

  A great chasm stretched across the frozen river. Tav found themselves on one side of the fierce water, which gushed through a cracked mirror of black ice.

  A boy climbed out of the depths of a world splintered by frost and starlight.

  Cam. Eyes like stone, hard and cold. Blue veins glistening under exposed skin.

  Cradled in his arms lay the crumpled body of a girl, a sprig of hawthorn growing from her chest.

  She was dying.

  “I brought your heart,” he said, stepping onto Tav’s side of the river. The curve of his smile was a fishhook. He stopped an arms’ length from where Tav crouched, their fingernails etching lines into the crystalline landscape. He waited.

  Tav rose slowly, unsteady on their feet. Sweat dripped down their neck. They could smell rot.

  Pain surged through their shoulder blades. They cried out as great feathered wings burst from their back. The wings were black as ink, with an oily lustre of gold and purple and green. As the pain began to subside like a waning crescent moon, Tav found Cam’s eyes and forced the breath from their lungs into the shape of a single command.

  “Give her to me.”

  “You’ve left me no choice,” he said. His f
ingers curled around hawthorn, twisting brutally. The girl whimpered.

  “Let her go!” Tav beat their wings, and white flames burned through the ice at their feet. The ice floe was unstable, and one wrong move could lead to hypothermia and drowning. The stars glittered overhead, their lights reflected in the dark mirror. The universe was burning.

  The branch snapped, and the girl screamed, a body made of bone and glass crying out in agony.

  Tav lunged, nails like talons curving around Cam’s throat.

  When it was over, Tav was on all fours, frost licking their knees. Blood everywhere. Body parts were scattered across the ice. Tav wetted their lips and looked down, catching a glimpse of their reflection —

  the face of a witch

  Tav woke suddenly and found themselves back in their apartment, the sheets soaked through with sweat. In the dim room lit only by distant streetlights, the shadows looked like blood. Tav fumbled for the bedside lamp. When the yellow pool of light showed no evidence of a crime scene, the anxiety curling its claws around their wrists and ankles released its hold. It was just a dream; it was already fading. Tav listened to the sound of their pounding heart, waiting for the rhythm to slow. Proof that they were human.

  Tav closed their eyes against the pain of sudden brightness, but it was too late. Already a headache was spreading through their temples and pushing into the corded muscles of their neck.

  They switched off the light and lay back down, opening their eyes to the dark. In the distance, sirens sang out, the clear, sharp pitch breaking through the dull roar of engines that never ceased. Threaded through the darkness was the magic of the Heart, which wound its way through walls and doors and flesh and bone. Tav fought the urge to reach out and grab it, to make themselves strong, to heal their pain, to take that power all for themselves and use it.

  Use her.

  Eli was sleeping on the couch, separated by only a wall. The thought sent another shiver of excitement through Tav’s body, but of a different kind. They kicked off the lounge pants they’d fallen asleep in and lay back in their boxers. Eli’s hair would be messy, her body tangled in the blanket. Tav remembered her body; they had followed the path of her collarbone with their mouth, traced the curve of her waist with their hand …

  Tav rolled their face into the pillow to stifle a moan. They lost themselves to fantasy before sleep finally returned for them.

  In the morning they had forgotten about the dream.