The Orphan Witch

by Paige Crutcher

  Moira lifted a shoulder. “I saw what her temper can do.” She looked at Persephone. “Can you control your power?”

  Persephone rubbed at her temple, trying to process everything they were throwing at her. She was as unaccustomed to speaking about magic and curses as she was making eye contact. “Sometimes.”

  Moira harrumphed. “Like I said.”

  “And we can help her with that, like I said.” Hyacinth wrinkled her nose at her sister.

  “But how can I help you break a curse?”

  Moira muttered something under her breath, shot her sister a look, and left the room. Hyacinth waited until her sister was ensconced in the kitchen, and offered a dimple of a smile.

  “There is a spell. A very particular spell that invokes the power of three. Moira and I are two, with you, we are three.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Yet. You will.”

  Persephone blew out a slow breath. Hyacinth smiled at her and hope, the biggest bubble of it she had ever felt, washed over Persephone. Persephone blinked and realized she was crying.

  “Oh, Persephone,” Hyacinth said, and reached forward. She wrapped her arms around her, and didn’t let go for thirty-eight whole seconds.

  “Sorry,” Persephone said, savoring the feeling of being held, really held. “I didn’t mean to do that.” She sniffled and wiped her face as Hyacinth leaned back. “I think I may be in shock.”

  “You aren’t in shock,” Hyacinth said, as Moira walked back into the room holding a tea tray. She passed Persephone a thick mug of alabaster marble.

  Hyacinth nodded at her. “You’re found.”

  “Drink up,” Moira said, before she turned and left again.

  Persephone was struck with the realization the irritable woman was trying to take care of her by giving her the scones and the tea. All of a sudden, Persephone wanted to laugh, and cry harder.

  “She’s prickly on the outside and gooey on the inside,” Hyacinth said. “Like a cactus.”

  Persephone hiccupped a laugh, drank the tea, and embraced the calm that settled over her. The heat of the mug warmed her hands, and the sparkling eyes on her friend’s face thawed her down to her bones. Hyacinth was staring at Persephone like she saw her; she saw her and welcomed who she was. More, she needed her.

  No one ever wanted Persephone, let alone needed her.

  “I really don’t understand,” Persephone said, feeling like everything was about to change, hoping she could handle whatever was coming.

  “I know. There’s a lot to explain.” Hyacinth held out a hand, and Persephone didn’t hesitate. She slipped hers inside it, and followed Hyacinth to the kitchen. It was the first time Persephone had seen the heart of the house, and she couldn’t stop staring. The long room was the perfect combination of modern rustic southern (white farm sink, counters and cabinets with perfectly matched robin’s-egg blue appliances and copper fixtures) coupled with the insides of what could have come from Mary Poppins’s carpetbag.

  There was a large oak table with a peacock Tiffany lamp resting in the center, seven vintage Coca-Cola signs, and a collection of thirteen cuckoo clocks along one entire hall. The windows over the sink were wide and rectangular, bringing in a slew of natural light. An upright cream antique stove sat in the corner and appeared in working order, while over the small squat wooden island was a baker’s rack filled with an assortment of cast-iron cooking wear. The room appeared well loved, and hinted at being a place where secrets and scents and impossible tastes sprang to life.

  Moira leaned against the farm sink, a bright red kitchen towel tucked into the back of her pants, flour dusting across one cheek, and those same reading glasses perched atop her head like a beauty pageant’s finest crown. Her face gave nothing away.

  “We should take this conversation to where the walls can’t hear,” Hyacinth said.

  Moira nodded. She untucked the towel from her waistband, brushing the flour from her face with it. “If she turns out to be the wrong Persephone, I’m casting her memory of the island and you from her mind before we send her back on her way.”

  Moira swept from the kitchen toward the hall full of clocks, leaving Persephone gaping after her.

  “Like I said, a cactus,” Hyacinth said in a tone that did little to reassure Persephone. “You are our third, Persephone. Of this I have no doubts.”

  Persephone swallowed, but followed after the sisters. She finally knew what she was, knew they had to be the same. A thrill shimmied its way up her spine, because for the first time in her life, Persephone May was going to get answers.

  * * *

  MOIRA STOOD IN front of what Persephone mistook at first glance for an antique Bavarian timepiece. It featured a Craftsman-style house with a balcony, and a chronometer in the center for a face—but where the Bavarian tended to showcase dancing boys and girls with men brandishing pints of ale, this clock costarred only women, dancing with scrolls and hourglasses with the sand frozen halfway in time. It was a puzzle of a message Persephone felt certain she should be able to figure out if there were but one more piece to it.

  Moira stepped up and whispered something into the ear of the tiny carved woman closest to the center of the timepiece. The wall groaned and began to slide back. It shifted four feet away and ground to a halt.

  “After you,” Moira said, her smile a promise or a challenge or both.

  Doubt crept in. Persephone didn’t really know these two women. She didn’t know anyone other than herself …

  And that was the problem.

  She could stay here, in the hall, and nothing would change. Or she could go with Hyacinth and Moira and take a chance that something good would happen for once.

  Persephone squared her shoulders and stepped into the darkened space. As she walked deeper down a narrow hallway, the light grew brighter and brighter until Persephone was standing in front of a well-lit arch. The arch was made of brilliant stained glass in a hundred shades of blue and white sea glass, and featured a thick copper handle on a door.

  Hyacinth’s face was half hidden in the dark, and from where Persephone stood, Hyacinth appeared more specter than person.

  “To where it began,” said Moira, whose own face was steeped in shadow much as it had been the first time Persephone saw her. “Our cliffs.”

  Hyacinth stepped next to Persephone and reached out. Her right hand closed around the handle and she flashed a grin, then Hyacinth gave the door a gentle tug and it opened.

  The room before them was not a room at all. It was a doorway into the impossible.

  Into another world.

  Persephone gasped and stepped through the arch. The land beneath Persephone’s feet was firm but yielding. The grass grew long in some places and short in others, its shade of green vibrant in the way all living things are when they reach the peak of their season.

  Before Persephone lay a path perhaps ten feet wide. The edges of the path dropped off, the land sloughing and cascading down into the beckoning waters of the deep blue sea.

  “These are your cliffs?” Persephone had never seen nature so raw and complete. She pressed a hand to her stomach at the sight of the crashing waves. “Are we on the island?”

  “We are on an island,” said Moira, the words spoken with reverence before a crisp breeze captured them. “The cliffs of Skye, in Scotland.”

  “How?”

  “Magic,” Moira said, in a tone that implied duh.

  Persephone stepped forward, her gaze drawn to the meadow buttercup, the small, friendly yellow wildflowers growing in groups along the path like swaths of paint sprinkled across the ground. The clouds overhead were a deep neon pink bleeding into orange, rolling into purple, and shifting into a paler shade of gray and misty morning blue. Persephone had never felt such peace in a place.

  She walked the rest of the path, studying how the flat surface of the cliff was rocky enough to be imperfect and dramatic enough to feel like a painting come to life. The view stole the last of her breath.


  “This was once our island,” Hyacinth said, coming to stand beside her. “This is a memory. It’s the gift of the Arch to Anywhere. When you pass through the arch, if magic runs in your veins, it will take you where your heart desires.”

  “I don’t think this was my heart’s desire,” Persephone said. She would never have known to dream up such a place.

  “Your desire to follow us brought you here. Here is where our story begins.” Hyacinth took a deep breath, and seemed to grow taller from breathing the sea air. She slipped a hand into the front pocket of her shirt, and pulled out three seeds. “Two hundred years ago there were three islands. Elusia, Olympia, and Wile. These three islands were sisters, having broken off from a larger peninsula.”

  Hyacinth held up a seed and waved a hand over it. Persephone watched as it grew into a pomegranate.

  “My ancestors escaped to Wile in 1620,” Hyacinth continued, “but they weren’t the only refugees. Other covens of witches had already found their way here. In their journals, they noted it was like the islands had sprung up from the water just for them. The people of the three islands brokered peace with one another, and found that the longer they lived on the soil of the islands, the more powerful they became.”

  “How?” Persephone asked, studying how the pomegranate seemed to flush pink with life.

  “Magic sprung up from the earth, and it went into their crops and became nourishment for their bodies and their minds and their souls,” Hyacinth said. She waved a hand and the other two pomegranates grew ripe in front of Persephone’s eyes.

  “For one hundred years, our people flourished on the islands. Then, as time has a way of doing, life caught up to them.” Persephone watched as Hyacinth’s words shift into worlds, scene after scene unfolding before her eyes like a movie projected onto the sky.

  “In 1720 dark magic spread on the islands of Olympia and Elusia as the witches’ greed for power corrupted them, and the two lands began to waste from the inside out. Treacherous, selfish magic turned the heart of each person on Olympia and Elusia dark.” Persephone watched as the darkness spread across the islands, witnessed the sky and lands grow black, the waves of the sea rise, and the land get sucked back into the ocean that had once borne it.

  “By 1820 the two islands disappeared back into the sea. The people who lived and worked the land were lost.”

  The scene blinked out, and Hyacinth held up the fruit—two of the pomegranates lost their luster. Where before they had bloomed with life, now they decayed in death. Hyacinth waved a hand and the decayed fruit returned to the two seeds. She held up the other remaining pomegranate in her hand. “Only Wile Isle remained. Our small island. Then, one hundred years ago come Samhain, it was cursed.”

  “Right. Cursed.” Persephone said, giving a shake of her head. It was a lot to take in. “How?”

  And so Hyacinth began her strange tale.

  THE TALE OF THE BLOOD MOON CROWN

  Once upon a time Amara Mayfair had it all. She was young, gorgeous, magical, and clever. Her sister True never felt half as fair. Then one day the two teenage sisters found their mother’s sacred grimoire, and decided to cast a real spell.

  It was a simple spell, one used to make roses bloom in winter. Their island already grew flowers that shouldn’t grow in times when they shouldn’t bloom, so they decided to manipulate the spell and see if they could make a tree grow apples out of season.

  Following what they had learned from their mother and aunts, they cast their circle by placing three gemstones, four seashells, and eight candles around them, clasping hands, and calling their intention. This was the first time they were practicing deep magic (they usually served as amplifiers in a circle or were confined to helping their grandmother make tisanes in the kitchen), and the rebellious freedom was seductive and thrilling.

  Once their circle was set, they called to the corners of their land—the guardians of North, East, South, and West—and were delighted as the small flames they had struggled to keep lit bloomed with light.

  The spell asked for proof of intent and promise of dedication. Amara offered blood in the pricking of her thumb. She pressed the droplets to the apple core she carried, and buried it deep into the earth. True confessed her truth to the circle: she wasn’t as clever or powerful as her sister, and she was jealous. True whispered the words into the earth as she slid the dirt over the apple and sealed the spell with her tears.

  The sisters’ intent planted into the ground. Like seedlings, the spell sprouted and spread. From the earth, a tree grew overnight. It bloomed bright with apples the color of blood. Then the roots of the tree tethered to each sleeping girl, and magic flooded into a single sleeping sister: Amara.

  When they awoke, both sisters were delighted to find their tree alive. Amara reached for an apple, and found it too hot to touch under the noonday sun. She wished it were cooler so she could pluck and eat it … and the apples shook on the vine. They shifted in color, as ice spread out across the surface and froze them solid. Ice apples, the shade of plums, now rested in place of the fresh juicy apples.

  Amara’s magic was potent, but True found hers was unchanged. She couldn’t turn fruit on the vine, or stir the wind, or rush the tide.

  As True’s jealousy grew at the injustice, so did Amara’s magic—which was too powerful to reside in only one person. Magic choked Amara in her sleep and ate her from the inside out. The next day she awoke to discover she was too sick to leave her bed. The sisters tried to get rid of the magic, to chop down the ice apple tree and send the new power back into the ground. But axes, spells, and wishes all ricocheted off the tree’s needle-sharp bark.

  True, desperate to help her sister, found another spell in the grimoire called the Bound-Thorn Stave. The Bound-Thorn Stave was a spell for taking magic. All witches knew stealing another’s power was dark magic, and besides being dark, this spell hinted at something else—a prior bargain having once been made.

  With Amara’s magic, they discovered the Bound-Thorn Stave was the spell their ancestors had used one hundred years before, striking a bargain with Wile after their two sister islands, Elusia and Olympia, sunk into the sea. Those witches bound themselves to Wile, swearing to give their magic to the island and in return, the island would trade its magic freely.

  “It’s a curse,” Amara said, her voice hoarse, the magic that filled her also draining her. “That’s why the island gave me the magic and not you. Because when we cast our spell I gave it blood. Our blood is tied to our essence, and is tied to our magic. We’re connected to Wile, that’s what the vision showed. We are what it needs. We’re addicted to its power and it to us.”

  “Is that why we don’t leave?”

  “People leave,” Amara said. “I’ve traveled with the aunts and I can’t wait to leave again. To find a place I truly belong. You are the one who doesn’t leave, sister.”

  Unlike Amara, who was restless and never felt like she fit with the puzzle that was her family or the land they tended, True loved everything about the island. The way the garden could grow any fruit or vegetable she’d ever wanted. The way people seemed to love coming to visit, and how no one ever looked twice at how the witches spent more hours asleep in the day and awake at night.

  True read over the Bound spell carefully while her sister slept. It was simple, really. The spell required bound rope, a blood promise, and the light of the moon. It would siphon the power of another, and grant it to the other person. If the sisters bound themselves to each other, then maybe it would flow back and forth between them. True knew that the spell could have strings, magic often did, but if it could save her sister, she didn’t care.

  “We can use the spell,” she told Amara, “because we aren’t making a deal with the island. We only want to share what we have, not take from anything or anyone else.”

  Amara tried to argue. There was a loophole somewhere, or a price—magic always claimed its price. But she grew sicker and sicker and she eventually gave in.

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nbsp; The spell took an extra hour and a lock of hair, but it worked. The two witches bound themselves to each other. True was able to siphon power from Amara (and in the process acquire the kind of power she’d only dared dream of), and Amara was able to grow strong enough to live her life again.

  But dark magic is clever.

  As the years passed, it bid its time. The ice apple tree didn’t wither, and neither did the magic’s connection to the sisters. For that was the loophole. What they shared wasn’t only theirs to command.

  When Amara and True were twenty-five, the deep dark magic seeped back into them. Amara’s nails grew razor sharp overnight, True’s eyes changed from green to copper, and when the sisters would snore in their sleep sparks would fly from their mouths. The island’s visitor population was growing, and the dark was ready to come out and play.

  “We have to do something,” Amara said one night, feeling the dark as it tried to push its way into her will and convince her to turn an unruly neighbor child into a puppy. “We need a way to rid ourselves of this.”

  True only studied the moon and sighed. She did not agree.

  So her sister scoured Wile and the family books on magic, and traveled off island to look for a cure. Meanwhile, True stayed on island, busy testing the boundaries of what her strong magic could do.

  True met a man, charmed him to her, and then did the same with four more. Unlike her sister, True couldn’t fathom leaving Wile Isle—especially when she realized anything she desired to learn about life off island she could simply discover by dipping into a traveler’s memory and taking possession of their mind.

  With heightened senses and abilities, True grew intoxicated by the power. What she discovered about the outside world only strengthened her dislike of it. This was the same world, after all, that killed their kind and made martyrs of women and witches alike.

  Amara returned from her travels weary and worried. She noticed the change in her sister, and realized it wasn’t only she who had been affected by the dark magic. But True seemed to flourish from it while Amara wilted.