The Vine Witch

by Smith, Luanne G.

  A tingle ran up and down her skin as she stood before the door. Elena could almost feel the synergy waiting to converge. She put her hand over the lock and whispered her secret word. “Vinaria.”

  Nothing.

  The curse was still siphoning off the lifeblood of her magic.

  “Try it again.”

  She nodded and took a deep breath of cellar air, concentrating her energy on her palm against the lock. “Vinaria,” she commanded.

  To her relief, the lock gave a click and the door swung open.

  Inside, the room looked the same as she’d left it, with bottles, jars, and dried herbs lining the built-in shelves on one wall. The worktable, which took up half the space, still held her scale for measuring pinches and dollops and the small burner with the glass beaker she used for reducing her concoctions to their purest form. On the shelf, a granite grinding mortar had been propped up as a bookend to hold her half-dozen spell books with the gold-embossed spines. The pestle was draped by a sheer spiderweb speckled with dust. The rescued belongings blurred in a watery mosaic in her teary vision.

  “I was certain it would be gone.”

  Grand-Mère lifted the lamp to better show off the upper shelves. “I’ve dipped into a few jars for a spoonful of this or that over the years, but otherwise everything’s just as you left it.”

  Elena twisted the lid off a jar of rosemary and sniffed at the contents. A bit off its potency but still viable. The dragonfly wings still shimmered in their bottle, as did the beetle shells and flakes of mica. The beeswax had grown brittle and hard, but it softened in her hands almost immediately. In truth, most things seemed workable again as she looked around. The sale of the vineyard was an abomination, but if this Jean-Paul fellow could be convinced of her value, perhaps her plans could still be salvaged too.

  “It’s possible to get the vineyard healthy again,” she said, believing so with all her heart after seeing her belongings. “With luck we may even see results by harvesttime.”

  “Since when has luck got anything to do with it?” Grand-Mère smiled and set the lamp on the worktable. “I’ll leave you to get reacquainted with your things. Come up to the house when you’re ready. I’ll have a guest room made up for you.”

  But she did not return to the house. She spent hours inventorying the bottles, balms, and ground-up herbs she’d left behind seven years earlier. She flipped through books, wiped down the worktable, and sorted out a trunk containing her old clothes. Then, when sleep beckoned, she took out a thick wool blanket and lay down on the flagstones within sight of the wine barrels. Using a trick remembered from childhood experiments with her shadow vision, she placed her ear against the floor and closed her eyes, and soon she was listening to the footsteps of the monks who first worked the cellar. Their voices hummed inside the stones as they chanted their ancient songs in their old, forgotten language.

  She breathed in the fragrance of wine and oak and let her body relax for the first time in days. Staying on at Château Renard under these new conditions would be a risk. She knew it the moment that man wiped his feet on the kitchen rug. Yet this was where she belonged. Without the vineyard she’d never gain her full strength back. Nor would she be able to see her revenge through to the end, and only a life for a life would satisfy the constant yearning in her heart. She did not know why the All Knowing was testing her so, but she would have payment for the years stolen from her, and if that meant a few uncomfortable compromises along the way, so might it be.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Jean-Paul reached the southern slope of the vineyard as the first rays of light spilled onto the hillside. He enjoyed working in the crisp morning air with the sun shining on his back and his lungs breathing in the autumn scents of woodsmoke, the leaf decay in the undergrowth, and a whiff of musky fox from a nearby den. So different from how he’d spent the last ten years of his life stowed away in a corner office in the city, buried up to his nose in books and legal papers.

  The law had its merits but had never been his choice. From the time he was a boy he’d been told he must attend university to fulfill some perceived duty owed to his family lineage. The Martels, after all, practiced the law. They mingled with powerful and beautiful people in top hats at the Palais Opéra. They ate foie gras and caviar at Maurice’s, drank fine wine at the Moulin â Farine, and spent their summers vacationing along the sunny coast in bourgeois comfort, with the Chanceaux Valley at their backs.

  They also succumbed to early deaths. The heart had a tendency to harden off after being forced to survive inside a life two sizes too small, deprived of the oxygen of dreams. At least that’s where Jean-Paul’s reasoning had led him. The death of his father convinced him he had to make a change before his heart shrank any further. And so he’d escaped to the country, where a man could walk among the dormant vines in solitude and give his dreams a chance to breathe in the open air.

  But damn the grapes. And goddamn the wine.

  When he first read the news that Château Renard was for sale, he could hardly believe his luck—a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to own a piece of the valley’s history and be part of a renowned winemaking legacy. Certainly he’d heard the rumors that the old woman wasn’t functioning at her peak anymore, but making wine was a secret aspiration he’d harbored since his first taste of the vineyard’s pinot noir a decade earlier. Such musky, sensuous flavors of plum, cherry, and the perfect underlay of oak and flint. He would re-create that bouquet or die trying.

  But something always went wrong. For three years he’d blamed himself whenever he caught someone tipping their head slightly to the side, as if controlling the urge to wince in disappointment at the way the latest Renard pinot hurried over the tongue, vanishing as a jammy afterthought. Yet he also suspected the old woman knew more about what had gone wrong with the vintages than she’d let on when she sold him the place. He’d hoped his invitation to let her continue living at the house would provoke her into sharing what she knew about the trouble so he could fix it, but she’d merely shrugged and blamed the disappointing harvests on jinxes and bad luck.

  The entire valley was obsessed with witches and their so-called influence in the vineyards. He knew most of the big vineyards employed a witch to infuse her brand of magic into the wine as a sort of signature. It was outright charlatanism. An old-world custom bound up in superstition that the locals used to sell their wine to impressionable tourists. But he’d read enough books to know a good wine didn’t require the aura of magic to make it taste amazing. His research told him the winemaking process should be no more difficult than getting the pH levels in the soil balanced, harvesting the grapes at peak sweetness, and allowing the fermentation to do its job. Alas, none of that had worked since he’d taken over, but he still held out hope that things could be turned around. If only the damn weather would cooperate.

  He stoked the coals in the brouette, then took out his clippers to finish pruning the last row of young vines. Knowing he had the ability to shape the next year’s growth by trimming the canes back gave him a sense of optimism. It was one of the small things he thought he was doing right. He relished the feeling as he stood alone, master of his fate on a brisk morning.

  “You’re too accommodating.”

  He turned with a start to find the Boureanu woman standing behind him. How did she do that? Twice now he’d not known she was there until she stood within arm’s reach. “I beg your pardon?” he asked, trying and failing to mask how she’d caught him unaware.

  “The drainage system you’ve set up to feed the new vines will spoil them,” she continued, running her hand over the hard canes. “The roots are like children. You can’t pamper them or they’ll get lazy.”

  He straightened to look at her, noting with relief the change in her appearance from the night before. She’d found some proper clothes, though they struck him as oddly out of style. The bodice had the distinct pigeon-breasted fullness the women in the city now seemed to shun, and the black wool skirt dragged the ground
without so much as a peek at her ankles. But her hair was an attractive improvement, cascading around her face and down her shoulders in a tumult of soft waves rather than the frenzy it’d been when he first saw her. He was glad she hadn’t pinned her tresses up in a pompadour. And, thank God, she now smelled of lavender soap.

  He cleared his throat, feeling the need to assert himself. “The vines require all the extra care they can get in these uncertain conditions. I’m not losing another field to drought this spring.”

  “You have to let them find their own way in hard times. They’ll be stronger for it.”

  He pointed the clippers at her. “If they survive.”

  “They will.” She knelt down beside the base of a vine and swept the snow away. Scooping up a handful of wet earth, she rubbed it between her palms, then held the soil to her nose. She closed her eyes, as if remembering a pleasant dream. It smelled, he knew, of flint, oak, chalk, and fire.

  “At least the soil isn’t the problem,” she said, opening her amber catlike eyes again. “The calcium and lime components are still intact.” She looked up at him in a most disarming way, as though she could penetrate his heart and mind with a look. “I wanted to apologize for yesterday,” she said. “To come home and find the old place had been sold . . . it caught me by surprise. I may have said some things to you that weren’t fair. I’m sorry.”

  The way she stuttered through her apology suggested she wasn’t in the habit of being wrong. He nodded, more than willing to let the matter go. “And I’m sorry you didn’t receive word earlier. I did try to find Madame’s relatives at the time of the sale, but there were no records of anyone alive. If I’d known she had a granddaughter, I would have written you at the time to let you know she was welcome to stay and not to worry.”

  “She’s not really my grandmother. Not by blood anyway.”

  “Oh? I just assumed.”

  “I’ve always called her Grand-Mère, but she’s more of a mentor.” Elena snapped off a dried grapevine and passed the broken end under her nose before tying a purple string around it. The move struck him as a nervous gesture a child might do with their hands. “I was brought to live at the vineyard when I was five. As an apprentice to Madame Gardin and her husband, Joseph, after my parents died.”

  “You were sent here to learn the wine business as a child?”

  “Among other things.”

  He had a hard time imagining the woman standing before him as ever having been a child. There was a flinty edge to her that defied any sense of innocence. “But you are like a granddaughter to her. I can see that.”

  “We have a strong bond.” She tossed the vine in the brouette and watched the string catch fire. “That’s why I returned. The vineyard is the only home I’ve ever known.”

  Jean-Paul glanced over his shoulder at the house. He knew better than to ask anything as personal as where she’d disappeared to all these years. Yet he was put in an uncomfortable position to have this stranger, so intimately familiar with the land, suddenly return out of nowhere and call the vineyard home. Certainly he’d had no problem letting the old woman stay on at the house after the sale. He didn’t want to be accused of throwing Madame Gardin out in the street in her old age when she had nowhere else to go. But what was he to do with this woman? She was trouble. He knew so the minute he laid eyes on her in the kitchen and felt the heat rise in his temples. And yet if she had grown up learning from the old master—Joseph Gardin himself—she must know a trick or two about making wine with these finicky grapes.

  “The weather isn’t the only thing giving you trouble,” she said, as if reading his thoughts. “But it isn’t too late. I can help, if you’ll let me.”

  The way she’d shown up at the house as though she’d been living rough, the ferocity with which she’d stared at him when she learned the vineyard had been sold, the hunger in her eyes now as she waited for an answer—all tore at him as he considered her proposal.

  “Unfortunately I was telling the truth yesterday when I said I wasn’t hiring. I can barely afford to pay the two field workers I have now.”

  The woman wrapped her shawl tightly around her body, as if guarding herself before she spoke. “Sometimes there is more to making wine than what we can see and measure and taste. That’s the part I can teach you. I can work as your partner. Share with you what I know about making the kind of wine men would pay a ransom for. And in exchange all I require is a voice in the process and a roof over my head. And perhaps some of Grand-Mère’s cooking.”

  Jean-Paul smiled at her last comment even as he knew he had to say no. He’d read every book on winemaking he could get his hands on, attended seminars given by the famous Yemeni brothers, and toured the vineyard at Bastien du Monde’s, the most successful winery in the valley. He’d studied all he could about drawing out the subtleties of various grapes. He already knew the science of making wine.

  Yet this cat-eyed woman, who claimed with granite confidence she could restore the vineyard’s reputation, had him mesmerized.

  He already understood the techniques of the craft, from pruning and planting to pressing and bottling, but could there be some secret to transcending from ordinary to superb? Some ancient wisdom passed down from generation to generation that would always elude him if he turned her away?

  He might believe wholeheartedly in his methodology, but even he wasn’t fool enough to ignore how instinct and intuition played their role in the process too. And in his heart of hearts he wanted to make great wine. If she knew even half of Monsieur Gardin’s secrets, and if she was willing to work side by side with him in the field, she’d be worth her weight in coq au vin.

  He extended his hand. “All right. Room and board in exchange for your help.”

  “Just one more thing,” she said. “I wish to be a silent partner, at least until we get the grapes through veraison. It would be better if certain people didn’t know I was helping you just yet. Or that I was back at the vineyard.”

  Ah, she meant Du Monde. He would never admit to eavesdropping, but he’d heard more of her talk with Madame than he’d let on. He could only guess at her reasons for wanting to avoid the esteemed vigneron.

  “I should add an addendum then too,” he said, his negotiating skills dull but hopelessly ingrained from his years of law work. “I believe in science and innovation, mademoiselle. I’ve already told the other workers I won’t tolerate the superstitious nonsense they do at the other vineyards. No luck charms, no evil-eye amulets, and none of that widdershins business before stepping into the field.”

  She raised one eyebrow at him, and he waited for her to argue like the rest of the workers had. Instead, she swallowed whatever had irked her, nodded her agreement, and held out her hand. With grudging admiration he shook it, feeling her fish-cold skin in his grip as they made their pact.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The spine, stiff from neglect, creaked as Elena spread the Book of Shadows open on the worktable.

  “Hush,” she said and turned the pages until she found the notes she was looking for. As she read, marking her place as she went, the book finally relaxed and sighed under her trailing fingers. “I missed you too,” she said and continued reading.

  Alternating between doubtful frowning and optimistic lip biting, she wrote out a list of possibilities, at least for the first of the vineyard’s hexes she’d identified. She hoped to unravel them all one by one, as if untangling a child’s game of cat’s cradle that had gone horribly wrong. And she had to do so without the new owner suspecting she was using witchcraft.

  She’d thought at first that would be the hard part, but the kink in her magic still prevented her from all-out spellcasting. Incantations tasted like dust in her mouth. And though she’d been able to maintain a trance state the night before, she suspected she might be suffering from a form of psychic cataracts that clouded parts of her shadow vision. How else to explain the inability to identify the cause of the melancholia in the roots?

  Her magic was un
steady, but perhaps the weakness was like a strained muscle and she just needed to get moving again. Or maybe it was like a hand falling asleep and she’d feel a prickling pain take over once the magic rushed back in. Hadn’t she felt a small jolt of . . . something . . . when the wishing string caught fire and the mortal agreed to let her stay despite his prejudices, sealing it with his hand pressed to hers?

  That man. A cloud of privilege had risen off him like morning fog the moment she’d confronted him in the field. He was a peculiar one. City raised and book fed, intelligent and generous, yes, and yet malnourished when it came to a belief in the profound. He’d been taught to believe in only what he could see, feel, hear, taste, or smell. There was a time she wondered what it was like to live with such confinement of spirit, until she found herself held captive inside another creature’s skin.

  Was that what it was like to be a mortal?

  An unexpected pang of sympathy for the man crept up on her as she wiggled her toes inside her soft slippers—well, with the one notable exception. Though Old Fox had nearly eaten her alive, she was glad for the physical reminder of what she’d endured. The ache kept the fire of revenge burning, stoking the hard coal of hatred that smoldered day and night within her. And for that she would hide her magic from the mortal and let him continue believing the world he saw was the world he lived in.

  A page in the spell book rippled softly, as if disturbed by a breeze. “Yes?” she asked, and the words “strand of wolf’s mane” shimmered on the page in iridescent green ink. “Ah, of course. Clever book. You found it.”

  She sorted through the upper shelf to locate the woolly stuff. If dipped in sheep’s oil and twisted with a braid of cotton to form the wick of a candle, the smoke from the flame would repel the miasma that had been allowed to creep in over the fields each night. The Toussaints from the Alden River valley had used that particular spell on Château Renard before to stifle growth. Grand-Mère should have been able to counter the jinx on her own, but the old woman must truly have lost her edge to let the damaging fog linger over the property for so long. For humans, old age stole their hearing, their sight, or their mind. But when Nature was unkind, witches lost their intuition.