The Orphan Witch

by Paige Crutcher

  “You’re stronger than you know,” Hyacinth said.

  Persephone rubbed at the crown of her head. “I feel like it’s an uphill battle. The training, the curse, all of it.”

  “You have innate magic in you. When the time comes, you will be able to do what you need to do,” Moira said.

  “And what the Ways said?”

  Moira hesitated for the briefest of moments. “The thing about prophecies is they are open to interpretation, and the Ways read it one way, and as a warning.”

  “What do they believe?”

  “That the true witch will bring about the end of the Mayfair line,” Hyacinth said.

  “Who are the Mayfairs?”

  “The Way sisters,” Hyacinth said.

  Persephone cocked her head in confusion, and Hyacinth nodded. “They changed their last name a few generations back when they tried to reinvent themselves. It didn’t work.” Hyacinth smiled. “They’re still awful.”

  Moira tutted out a breath. “Really, Hyacinth.” She turned to Persephone. “The Ways didn’t use to be so … volatile. A lot has happened over the past decade, and like water shifts foundation, change alters a person. The prophecy foretells that a time walker of the Mayfair line will one day have the power to unmake the world. Whether or not she ends the line is a matter of interpretation.”

  “I’m a Mayfair?” Persephone asked.

  “Yes,” Hyacinth said. “Your grandmother changed her last name when she left. Likely trying to do what she could to cut the tethers to the island. Each generation who tried to break the curse has failed, and rather spectacularly. Your grandmother did what she thought was best by leaving, like my mother and aunt.”

  Moira flexed her fingers at the mention of her mother and aunt. When neither she nor Hyacinth said anything more, Persephone went to reach for the photograph, to try again to tell the witches about what she’d found, about the library, and Dorian. Persephone opened her mouth and the words on the tip of her tongue spoiled. She couldn’t utter a vowel. Damn the befuddling librarian and his library’s rules of magic.

  “Shouldn’t we try to convince the other witches?” Persephone asked instead. “To help us instead of fighting us? I … I think that’s what the island wants.”

  “We’ve tried to look into the curse with their help before,” Hyacinth said. “That won’t be happening again.”

  Persephone scrunched her nose. “They’ve helped before?”

  “Yes, and trust me when I say there is no way Ariel’s going to assist us in anything other than perhaps trying to drown me.”

  Persephone’s eyes widened, and Hyacinth shrugged.

  “My sister is right,” Moira said. “Not about the drowning, perhaps, but there is no way either Way sister will help us today.” Moira said, gazing toward the crackling fire, “Fear holds power of a different sort, and they are scared of what you represent. They have twice made attempts on your life. The third time I worry you may not fare so lucky.”

  Persephone tried not to picture a third time. “What changed? If they were once willing to help?”

  Moira set her piece of cord in her lap. She tilted her head, her gaze drifting to the twin band of rings Persephone wore on her thumb.

  “Did you know bad things don’t come in threes?”

  Persephone cocked her head, gave it a slight shake.

  “They arrive in twos. A sunrise leads to a sunset, light must have dark, yin needs its yang. Success is balanced by failure.” Moira rubbed at her eyebrow, before dropping her hand into her lap. “In our family, twos can get into the most magical of trouble, and our aunt and mother proved this a decade ago.

  “Every generation has tried to break the curse since it was cast. It never goes well. A curse is a haunted kind of magic. When you attempt to interrupt it, it disrupts. Our mother and aunt knew they weren’t going to be able to break it. They were only two, after all, not three, and they had seen how previous failed attempts blinded my great-aunt and turned my grandmother’s hair white. My mother and her sister thought to be more clever than the curse. To bend instead of break.” Moira looked out the window, to where the mountain rose. Persephone’s heart squeezed at the pain on her cousin’s face.

  “It didn’t go well?” she asked, her voice soft.

  “No, it did not.”

  Hyacinth cleared her throat. “As Moira always says, there is a cost to magic. Theirs was to be cast off of the island for trying to alter that which refused to budge. They left … without a word, as soon as their spell backfired.” Hyacinth looked to the fire. “We have not seen them since.”

  “Do the sisters blame you?”

  “Not for that,” Hyacinth said, while Moira said nothing. “They blame us for what came after.” Hyacinth ran a hand through her curls. “Ariel and I were once great friends. After our mothers were forced to leave, we tried to find a loophole to get them back. We knew when a witch left the island they were cut off from the coven. We just didn’t realize it could happen to us, to our parents. We also knew better than to cast, lest we be cast off, too, so we looked instead—to see if there was a way to fix it.” Hyacinth bit her lip. “We found something we didn’t expect.”

  “What did you find?”

  “A girl.” Hyacinth swallowed and gave her head a shake. “A girl … who came between Ariel and me.” A look of discomfort moved across her cousin’s face. “She wasn’t who we thought she was, though, and in the end, she showed us that the hinterland is like any tap—over time it can corrode and cracks can appear.”

  “Cracks?”

  Hyacinth nodded. “When they do, a leak occurs.”

  “Like a magic leak?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you what, made contact with the hinterland through the girl? Was she a medium?”

  “No, the hinterland made contact with us,” Hyacinth said, looking Persephone in the eyes, the agony behind them clear. “A powerful witch found a way to crack through the world. I believed she was trying to ask for help, but the Ways took it as an attack.”

  “I don’t understand,” Persephone said. “Who was the girl?”

  “She…” Hyacinth opened her mouth, and a crash came from outside. Wind nipped against the windows, an incoming storm pressing against the house.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Hyacinth said, standing. She swallowed twice, her usual joy dimming into embers of nothing. “Not anymore. Not the girl, not Ariel, none of it. The only way out now is to go forward.” She tossed the cord she still gripped aside. “We can’t go back.”

  Hyacinth broke the circle then, as she brushed the line clear with her foot.

  “Moira,” Persephone said, after Hyacinth scurried outside, the back screen door clanging shut behind her. “What happened? Who was the girl?”

  Moira gave her head a small shake. “An interloper. One who broke Ariel’s heart and Hyacinth’s.” She paused, lifted her chin and stared hard at Persephone. It was a look Persephone had grown to understand over the past few weeks. Moira was deciding something.

  “I’m going to trust you with a truth,” she said. “One that Hyacinth does not know. Something the Ways do not know.”

  Persephone’s heart gave a thump against her chest at the sharp crack in Moira’s voice. She had grown closer to the serene woman who seemed made of steel. There were visible chinks in Moira’s armor now, and it caused a tremble in Persephone’s stomach. “Of course,” she said. “I will be glad to bear your trust.”

  Moira nodded. “I do not know who the girl was, but I know that death brought her. Hyacinth’s and my mother left not because of the curse, but because I told her to, because it was unsafe for her to remain on island.” She took a slow breath. “Persephone, my aunt never left the island. She did not survive the attempt to bend the curse.”

  As the words and their meaning rooted in Persephone, Moira squeezed her eyes shut tight. “My mother told me of what happened, of her sister dying, made me promise not to tell.” She opened her eyes. “I agreed to but onl
y if she left. My mother carried darkness with her when she returned. I could see it, feel it. It wasn’t safe for us, for Hyacinth, for her to remain.”

  Persephone swallowed, and Moira placed a hand to her heart. “There is a leak from the hinterland, and hungry, malevolent magic is spilling onto the island. The curse is deep and dark, and will have its way until the crack is wide enough for us to slip through. We must break the curse, and it cannot be broken without the power of three. We cannot fail, Persephone. We have already lost so much, and the cost for failing again will be immeasurable.”

  * * *

  AFTER UNBURDENING HER soul, Moira returned to the kitchen, more shaken than Persephone had ever seen her. Persephone sat staring at the fire. She watched the flames crackle, the wood smolder, and ash grow in the hearth.

  She tried to make sense of what she’d been told. Moira had lied to Hyacinth, had lied to her other cousins. Their mother, her aunt, was dead.

  Persephone wondered if at this point, all loss felt the same to Moira. Whether a parent was cast from the island or died, they were cut off from you for the rest of your living days. Perhaps being a witch also meant accepting death with the kind of ease Persephone herself did not possess.

  Persephone thought of the painful cost of bearing a secret. She thought of Dorian and the library, and how she knew what it was to hold her own secrets on the island.

  Finally, Persephone thought of the fear on Moira’s face and urgency in her voice when she said the cost for not breaking the curse would be steep.

  Moira had spoken of bad things coming in twos, not threes, and Persephone couldn’t help but wonder what kind of price could come with success.

  When the sun began to shift from the sky, Persephone went in search of her other cousin. She found Hyacinth in the garden, talking to the flowers and herbs.

  “Hyacinth?” Persephone asked, watching Hyacinth tend an overgrown summer rosebush somehow blooming in the start of winter. At her name, Hyacinth’s ears climbed to her shoulders. It was clear she expected Persephone to press her on the girl, and Ariel, on everything that had transpired before.

  Persephone didn’t want to add to the heartache Hyacinth appeared to carry, and she didn’t want to let something of what Moira had shared show on her face, so she asked the other question on her mind. “Have the Way sisters been looking for me all this time, too?”

  Hyacinth glanced up at the question, relief clear in her eyes. “No, definitely not. Ariel would rather hide in her house and pretend the rest of the world doesn’t exist … until it shows up on her doorstep.”

  “I guess I delivered myself then,” Persephone said, earning a slip of a smile from Hyacinth. “But you found me. You sought me out.”

  “I—” Hyacinth’s hand slipped, and the rose she’d been trying to revive faltered and drooped in death. “Drat.” Hyacinth let out a low curse and placed the rose in a large flowerpot full of her failed attempts.

  Magic took great concentration for Hyacinth. She seemed to work twice as hard for half the results, and Persephone was learning that not being as gifted as her sister was an area of great pain for her cousin.

  When Hyacinth held up her hand, her thumb was pricked with a single drop of blood. “Rosa spinosissima,” she said, naming the rose. She shrugged a shoulder. “Everything takes its cost.”

  Hyacinth went in to cleanse the wound, leaving Persephone to wonder if she meant the cost of taking the rose from its natural state or of finding Persephone.

  Persephone reached a hand into her pocket. Hyacinth had gifted her a small moss green stone with splashes of pink the previous day. It was the sixth crystal she’d given Persephone, in hopes that one of them would be Persephone’s grounding stone. So far the rocks were simply added weights when they were in her pockets or palms, and nothing more. Still, Persephone took the unakite jasper from her pocket, cupped it, and thought, Rise.

  “You’re too focused on it,” Hyacinth said, when she returned to the garden and witnessed Persephone struggling to make the stone in her hand levitate.

  The truth was, for whatever reason, when Persephone tried to pull her aether to her, nothing happened. The nothing was frustrating.

  Persephone focused again, stared hard at the rock, and willed it to leave the laws of gravity behind. It didn’t even twitch.

  “Try to see it with your mind.”

  Persephone closed her eyes, saw her aether, saw the rock … and gasped as Dorian’s quirk of a smile flashed before her.

  The stone sat unmoved.

  She growled, irritation at the man and the gemstone flaring, and threw the stone as hard as she could. She hit a furrow-browed gnome tucked beside the Saint-John’s-wort, taking out one of his eyes completely and leaving a gaping hole in the little man’s porcelain head.

  Persephone’s hand flew to her mouth in horror as she looked at Hyacinth, who broke into a gale of laughter.

  “Whoops.”

  “Whoops indeed,” Hyacinth said, her laugh morphing into a giggle.

  Persephone grinned back, glad her temper was good for something. If she could bring the color back to her cousin’s cheeks, she’d throw a hundred stupid stones.

  Hyacinth went over to better inspect the hole. “You’re lucky the broken bits fell out into the grass and not into Saint John’s bushel. Otherwise, the fairy folk might consider it a trespass and come for you in your sleep.”

  “Ha ha,” Persephone said. She considered Hyacinth’s raised brow. “You’re joking about the fairies, right?”

  Hyacinth’s only response was to scoop up the porcelain and pocket it before turning back to the house. “I’m gathering our shoes. I need a break, and so do the wee keepers of the garden.” Hyacinth looked at the one-eyed gnome. “I imagine it’s hard to be on the lookout when you don’t have a way to look out.”

  Hyacinth was in and out of the house in a matter of minutes. When she returned, she was bearing shoes, sweaters, sunglasses for the gnome, and Persephone’s small bag.

  “Where are we going?” Persephone asked, wrapping the burgundy sweater around her shoulders.

  “Where else is there to go on island this time of year?” Hyacinth asked, put the shades on the little gnome’s face. “To town.”

  “Really?” Persephone knew how little Hyacinth enjoyed going into town. Neither sister liked to be away from the house for long.

  “Yes, really. I need to see the postmistress, and I can’t delay the trip any longer.”

  Persephone rubbed her hands together. “Fabulous.”

  They walked out of the yard onto the path. All around them wildflowers grew, bringing a wild kind of charm to the view.

  “It’s incredible here,” Persephone said, sighing at the sense of peace being on the island brought to her—even amid the chaos of trying to break a curse.

  Hyacinth gave a halfhearted murmur of agreement.

  Persephone studied the side of her cousin’s face, and a thought struck her. “Hyacinth? Do you … ever wish you lived somewhere else?”

  A quiet smile curved her lips. “All the time.” Persephone’s eyes widened at the vehemence in the words, and Hyacinth waved a hand. “I love the island. But I grew up here. There have been so many days where I wake up wishing I could fold into the busyness of a big city for the winter, somewhere you forget yourself like New York City, or Paris, where there are cafés and strangers on every street corner. Where no one knows my name, and the world doesn’t care what I do or don’t do.”

  “That makes sense,” Persephone said, tugging the edge of her sleeve. “I hadn’t thought of it quite that way.”

  Persephone knew the sisters said they couldn’t leave during the winter months. That her arrival was a gift, because the island didn’t allow anyone to come to it during what the sisters called the “off” season. As she thought on the implications, she found it both romantic and horrifying—to be so isolated for half the year.

  “Magic often has a cost,” Moira had said, when explaining it. Persephone wa
s beginning to understand there were many angles to cost on Wile Isle.

  Still. Having seen so much of the world herself, even while struggling to make ends meet, Persephone realized she was lucky—she had never felt locked away. “It must be frustrating.”

  Hyacinth shrugged. “It is what it is. Thankfully our business does well enough all year-round that I can travel more when the spring equinox comes. Everyone’s business does, really. Luck—or curse—of the island. Our postmistress stays the busiest, with the grocer following. Laurel and Holly do better than the rest of us, well, and Our Delights.”

  “Our Delights?”

  “The bakery and luncheonette in town.”

  Persephone nodded. “That must be where I stumbled into the other day. It smelled heavenly.”

  “Did it?” Hyacinth asked, raising a single brow in a motion Persephone herself had tried and failed to achieve a hundred times before.

  “Yes, though it was a little off-putting. The magic inside seemed wonky.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. Time moved sluggishly, and the costumes the people wore threw me a little. Does the bakery not ever interfere with Moira’s business?” Persephone asked. Moira ran her own online bakery of a sort, called the Secret Ingredient.

  “No,” Hyacinth said, with a quirk of her lip. “Our goods vary enough from the bakery in town. They don’t offer lavender-infused serenity bites or chocolate biscuits for the brokenhearted. We do a high turnover in the holiday season, particularly from word of mouth that on-season guests provide, and I’ve learned my fair share of online marketing from a girl I hired off island. The internet is rather its own alchemy.”

  “It’s certainly something,” Persephone said, stepping widely over a crack in the cobblestone path.

  Hyacinth reached out and ran her fingers over the white little fence that bordered the right side of this part of their walk into town. “Still. Business isn’t life,” Hyacinth said. “It’s a passing of time. The more time passes, the worse off we are, and the more aware we are of who and what we’re missing on Wile.”