The Witch's Curse (Legend of the Dreamer, Book 1.1)

by David James

  The

  Witch’s Curse

  The Witch’s Curse

  Magda’s Story

  By David James

  A

  Legend of the Dreamer

  Story

  Copyright © 2012 David Knapp

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews when credit is given to the author by name.

  First Edition, e-format only

  First e-format, December 2012

  Cover design by Keary Taylor

  Edited by Helen Boswell

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Knapp, David, 1986-

  The Witch’s Curse: Magda’s Story (Legend of the Dreamer #1.1)/ by David James. - 1st ed.

  Digitally printed in the United States of America

  To lost loves-

  and ones not yet found.

  “Deep into that darkness peering,

  long I stood there wondering, fearing,

  Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal

  ever dared to dream before.”

  Edgar Allan Poe

  ~

  Love cannot live in blood.

  I could feel the darkness-

  The blood as it called-

  The spell choked me.

  It lived.

  It died.

  The blood called.

  ~

  Prologue

  Love And Blood

  Love cannot live in blood.

  Momma told me things, whispers; tiny breaths caught in moments between. Truths, she said they were, when secrets were what she wanted them to be.

  I did not believe in secrets back then.

  Secrets made me think of Samuel-

  of moments so still-

  so quiet-

  they made you wonder if they weren’t moments at all, but living, breathing bits of love whispered deeply.

  Momma told me that love cannot breathe from blood even though it is blood that gives our hearts beats. There are different things that keep us alive and love is not one of them.

  We do not need love to live.

  I remembered her whispered words as though they had cut my skin and not my heart. Blood not love. But that is where I felt her words, my heart, and I wondered what that meant.

  Lips black and close enough so her breath dripped warm down my neck, she would whisper, “Magdaline, do not let the boys trick you with their bits of love they offer so freely. Don’t let your heart make you a fool. Love cannot feed you. I know. Only blood will keep you alive.”

  I remembered, always.

  Love is a desire-

  for all.

  Blood is a need-

  for people like us, she told me.

  Love and blood do not mix.

  But I had tried to force them together from time to time, tried to bleed different things to see if they would love me with the same need I had for them. As a child, I tried to force love from blood.

  My heart tricked me then.

  Momma said, “You are different from your sister.”

  Time after time it tricked me.

  She said, “Emaline is nothing like you.”

  Then, a swallow sang in the distance.

  A fox.

  A cat hissed in the night.

  A rabbit.

  A snake rippled in the tall grass.

  A crow.

  I killed them all. Dripped blood from their open wounds until the last things wet were their hearts. I listened to the beating, the breaking. I closed my eyes and whispered the magic words Momma had taught me. I prayed so viciously my body shook with thunder and rain and my heart became so shocked with lightning I died each time a spell failed.

  Blood spells only worked on humans.

  I learned that with Samuel.

  Love cannot survive in blood. Love will not touch something like blood. Instead it dissipates into the air and flies away like one hundred black ravens into the night while the blood, the magic, is left behind.

  Momma told me other things too. Told me how to slide a blade slow across the third finger of my left hand because the blood is stronger there; that the vein of love bleeds the darkest kind of magic. Told me about my eyes, how the violet in them would die as I did. Told me about the curse that plagued me then and now and forever.

  But what I remembered most was this: At night before I lost myself to nightmares, Momma would drag the dull side of her white bone knife across my forehead and tell me that she loved me, but that love and blood do not mix.

  Not ever.

  Chapter One

  When Darkness Dies and Lives

  I could feel the darkness-

  always.

  Feel it bend and break inside me; some dream only I could dream; some dawn only I could break; some life only I could take.

  I could feel darkness like death-

  waiting.

  It was a void inside me, yet it filled me.

  I could feel it drum shadowed fingers against my heart in time to the beating blood that pulsed through. I could feel it smile at the closeness of blood, and I knew this darkness, this insatiable need for the dark magic entwined in blood, was a burden I would never kill.

  It was so, so alive.

  Samuel, I thought. Always Samuel.

  He was where darkness died. For me, he was life and love and light. He was strength.

  But darkness was strong, too.

  Like death, darkness lived in a different way. It haunted proud moments within weak ones; crawled in holes made from smiling doubts; stuck to love even when the heartstrings pulled.

  Samuel might have been the death of darkness, but I was the death of light. I took light, took his, and no amount of it could ever pull my darkness free.

  “You will kill,” my mother said to me.

  I blinked as she did; our eyes were the same curse, the same wicked kind of greatness that haunted until it did exactly what Momma predicted.

  I said, “I will never kill like you do.”

  At that, she laughed. “You are so young, Magdaline. Sixteen years old and still so young. So naive.”

  My head fell. My right hand reached for my left as I whispered, “There is a difference, Momma, between being naive and being hopeful.”

  “Hopeful for a boy you cannot love back? You are my daughter,” she said as if it were the answer to everything. As if it were a reason for me to forget my hopes and dreams and sink deeper into the night as she did. “He loves you, that boy Samuel, but that will never change the fact that you cannot love him back.”

  Again, we blinked; violet gone and back again.

  “You cannot change your fate, Magdaline.”

  Violet. Always these cursed violet eyes of witches.

  Against the dark of night, we stood as though we were pieces of it. Tall. Dark. Dangerous.

  “I remember,” she said, “a time when I was hopeful. Before I changed and moved to Ashfall. I smiled back then, I think. My curse is still new enough for me to remember; the blood has not taken me yet.” Her chest moved with her breath, up and down and up. “I loved once. A boy named Alexander. But the curse of a witch curses love as well, Magdaline.”

  I asked, “Why did you change?”

  “I had no choice. Sometimes there is no choice.”r />
  I whispered, “I want a choice.”

  She said-

  nothing.

  I said-

  nothing.

  And then the night became something much more than it was ever meant to be. Dark waves of clouds rolled in from beyond the mountains and covered the world in fog. The veins of a hundred bolts of lighting shot across the sky to meet the beating hearts of thunder. Rain began to fall-

  down my face in tears.

  I said, “I have to believe in love.”

  I let it rain.

  Let it storm.

  She asked, “Do you remember the story of the Singing Tree? The one my mother told me as I told you?”

  I didn’t speak, didn’t move.

  “That story,” she said, “is our history. The Singing Tree was a place for our people, the Women of Prophecy, to meet in secrecy during a time when secrets were not so easy to keep.”

  I swallowed, everything. “I remember.”

  “There is more to that story, Magdaline. There is a legend I never told you. It is a prophecy filled with words so sacred they consume your very soul.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I can’t. Not yet.”

  “Why?”

  Her dark face was shocked by lightning, her words nearly lost to thunder. “The Legend of the Dreamer is magic, Magdaline. It is power, the last stitch to complete the curse. It is life and, at its heart, it is death. The second those words are spoken aloud my soul will be taken from me. My body, gone. My heart, nothing. As soon as I say those words, the darkest part of night will have more life than me.”

  Rain-

  so much rain I could not see.

  “Don’t tell me,” I choked. “Don’t.”

  She said, “We don’t have much time left.”

  I was afraid.

  She said, “The blood is destroying me.”

  No.

  She whispered, “I am losing myself.”

  I was terrified-

  of the love I felt for the darkness of night.

  I was almost lost to it.

  I was blended with it.

  I breathed it in and sucked it down until I felt its cold fingers touch my lungs, my heart, and frost the light over.

  Mother said, “You will love to kill, but you will never love the life you take. It is not yours to keep. Remember that, Magdaline, because soon you must leave the safety of Lake Iris and name Ashfall as your home. Remember that you can never keep the love you crave so badly. That is the life of a witch. We cannot love anything but blood, and even that we must sacrifice. Life is yours to take when you must, but you may never keep those lives.”

  “Who gets to keep them?” I asked pulling fingers through my black curls.

  Momma twitched. “I cannot say. Only the blood is our concern, not the life for which it was given.”

  Darkness eclipsed the world when I opened my eyes. Night had taken the life of day and left shadows where people might have been.

  I smiled.

  Here, I was safe; nothing but shadows lived on the hill we called Sang Noir, and shadows did not have hearts like people did. Here, this secret place looking down on the sleeping town of Ashfall, was a place where Samuel was not.

  Shadows could not hurt or harm or kill or love.

  I was safe here, alone.

  I was dead-

  inside.

  I was alive-

  inside.

  I was darkness-

  forever.

  ~

  I waited, always.

  On Sang Noir, just below where the Rocky Mountains began to grow, as morning flew on clouded, golden wings slowly closer, I waited for Samuel.

  As the sky began to burn, I saw him.

  I smiled-

  and then I was nothing more than a heartbeat.

  Beat.

  Running.

  My smile hurt.

  Beat.

  My feet barely touched the ground.

  The wind cut cold against me-

  Beat.

  and held my voice. Samuel.

  Beat.

  Beat.

  Beat.

  We crashed together, lost.

  I felt him close, felt him breathe.

  This world was deep enough to be everlasting.

  The cold touch of his fingers made his warm breath explode against my neck. Slowly, his lips found the deep hollow of my throat and my heart beat his name: Samuel.

  Standing at the edge of the dark forest, he kissed me.

  Hot and cold; light and dark; good and evil: In that moment they were the same. They were him and me, and we were so lost we were nothing in a moment filled with everything.

  The forest shook, trembled. Where the snow touched the trees, white flecks rose into the air and danced on the hands of the wind. Branches waved. Trees swayed, bending to almost break.

  Or maybe it was me, us. Maybe it was us moving while the rest of the world stood still.

  “Magda,” he whispered.

  His name lived and died in a breath. “Samuel.”

  Chapter Two

  Sixteen Drops

  The blood as it called-

  my smile as it set like the sun-

  were poison.

  But I needed him.

  I wanted him.

  Samuel made me so happy I could die.

  In this moment-

  I loved him.

  In the distance, I saw him.

  Bodies were waves in the room, rising and falling in dance. Music so appropriately lush it seemed fated to be played in the air around me. Red and green and white candles lit the hall in soft shadows. Frowns became smiles became laughs.

  And then, when he turned to face me, the world fell to the exile of him and me. Each step he took he stole from the vanished room. His eyes surprised, his smile turned, his dimples deep, I could not look away.

  “What’s your name?” the boy asked.

  I felt my feet push down and lift me up. My mouth opened and closed and opened until my name left in a whisper. “Magdaline Langel.”

  His lips opened to teeth white as the frosted peaks of wanting waves. “Can I ask you a question, Magdaline?”

  “Only if you tell me your name,” I said.

  He was quiet, and then, “Your eyes. You’re not like other girls are you?”

  My head wanted to fall but I held it up. “Is being different such a bad thing?”

  “I’m not sure. Sometimes, in our world, I think it might be. The Order doesn’t respond well to difference.” His grin flipped sideways. “But with you it is a very good thing. I ...” His hand moved to where his eyes looked, resting in the air between as though stopped by a solid wall of hesitation. “I can’t seem to look away from your eyes, Magda.”

  Inside, I shattered as breath replaced his words; I wanted them to stay forever in the air around me. Wanted to hear more.

  Wanted to feel wanted.

  I said, “You haven’t told me your name.”

  His eyes, warm and brown, held me.

  He said,“Samuel Barrows.”

  “Your father is Warrior Barrows?”

  “That’s him.”

  “My sister says he’s nice,” I said.

  “He’s a bitter kind of nice. And you?”

  “I don’t know him, or you.”

  “Do you not like to spend time with Warriors?”

  I blinked. “I spend my time differently.”

  “By choice?”

  My lips pulled down. “There isn’t always a choice.”

  His hand broke the distance between us, and the warmth that started when he tilted my chin gently up began again in my heart. “Of course there’s a choice, Magda.”

  I wanted to believe.

  I asked, “How can you be so hopeful?”

  At once, I was reminded of rain; his eyes were wet with a certain kind of sadness found only at the place where life met death. “I choose to be hopeful, because I’ve seen what it’s like to not be. My mother
was killed by the Orieno three years ago.”

  My skin felt cold when his hand left.

  My lips parted-

  “Don’t tell me you’re sorry, Magda. It was a long time ago, and it wasn’t your fault.”

  “How did you know what I was about to say?”

  “Your eyes gave you away. They are almost as beautiful as your name.”

  Those words.

  Samuel’s thirteen words became heartbeats-

  became my reasons to breathe in-

  and out of that moment.

  More than blood, I wanted him.

  I whispered, “Why did you want to know my name?”

  “Because my heart needed a name to beat to.”

  I grinned. “Is your heart always so delirious?”

  “Would it be a heart if it was anything else?”

  I stepped forward, unafraid of anything that could make me feel like this. “And what else does your heart need, Samuel?”

  I tripped-

  and he caught me.

  He said, “For you to dance with me, Magda.”

  “Magda?” Low, his voice sounded in my chest. “Do you remember that first time we met? At Christmas one year ago?”

  I closed my eyes. “I was just remembering.”

  “You know what’s funny?”

  “What?” I asked.

  His hand took mine. “I can’t remember anything about that night except looking into your eyes as we danced.”

  My eyes opened-

  and somehow the world looked different.

  I smiled. “I think you’re lying.”

  “Never,” he said. “I still have the bruises on my toes to prove it!”

  “Samuel!” I laughed.

  His smile warmed the cool mountain air. “You know what I think, Magda?”

  I fell into his arms. “What?”

  I felt my lungs tighten as he squeezed me, and then we were falling back and he caught me and we lay together on Sang Noir.

  Morning was gone; days seemed to pass in hours when I was with Samuel.