The Orphan Witch

by Paige Crutcher

  “Do you miss her? Ariel? I’m sorry,” Persephone said, kicking herself for bringing it up after seeing Hyacinth’s smile fall. “It’s really none of my business.”

  “It’s okay,” Hyacinth said after a moment. “The truth is there are family feuds and then there are witch family feuds. You’ve stepped into a history of knots.”

  “Have you never tried to work it out?”

  “Some wounds require more than a bandage. Maybe one day Ariel will be ready,” Hyacinth said. They turned a corner and ducked through the brush to step from the cobblestone walkway into the village. “The truth is that she has every right to her feelings. All I can do is forget the dark and focus on the light.”

  The light seemed to spread out as the village stood before them, and it had transformed again. Dusk was settling in, the twinkly lights previously strung through the trees sparkled down at Persephone. Persephone lifted a hand to brush against the lowest limb of a moss-wrapped tree, and the light blinked bright in her palm.

  “It’s a bit like Goblin Market, isn’t it?” Hyacinth asked. “That’s what Moira and I decided when we were girls.”

  Persephone grinned at the idea of the two sisters running through the village, spouting Rossetti’s epic poem, searching for forbidden fruit. “No wonder you’re worried about the gnome.”

  Hyacinth let out a ringing laugh, and Persephone grinned before she studied the scene before her.

  The dusky sky offered a more forgiving view of the town than during daylight. The fading shutters and chipped slate tiles appeared worn with charm instead of wear, and while half the shops were closed, Persephone smiled to see there was a handful open with their friendly chimneys smoking. Hyacinth led her to the post office, where she pulled slips from her bag for the mail. Persephone spent twenty minutes getting a short history lesson on spirits of the drinkable kind from Laurel the postmistress, whose hair was a vibrant shade of pale blue and whose eyes were as green as the laurel tree Persephone hoped she was named after.

  She was also the girl from Hyacinth’s memory. From the look Hyacinth shot Persephone as she greeted Laurel, Persephone knew she wasn’t the only one putting those pieces together. Persephone tried her best to smile at Hyacinth, in hopes she understood Persephone wasn’t looking back but forward.

  “Most people haven’t a clue our island makes its own small batch rum and vodka,” Laurel told Persephone, showing her where the distillery was marked on the pretty map framed on the wall of the office. “The vanilla vodka is worth its weight in rubies but the coconut rum is only to be drunk under a full moon when you’re of a mind to make a fool of yourself.” Laurel wiggled her hips, Hyacinth laughed, and Persephone felt the tension in her shoulders loosen at Hyacinth’s ease. She joined in, thankful to feel the balance between them restored.

  From the post office, their progress was a slow, gentle turn about the cobblestones. Hyacinth paused here and there to bid good evening to the few faces wandering the village after dark.

  “The visitors who stayed,” Persephone said. “What kept them? Didn’t they sense the change in the village after what happened and everyone disappeared?”

  Hyacinth shook her head.

  “How?”

  “Our remaining ancestors had enough magic to bind their memories, and perhaps plant the seeds to keep them from leaving. You can’t have a thriving village without the people to help it grow.” Hyacinth ran a hand over a browning vine and Persephone watched as new growth rippled and unfurled, changing its color to a lively green. “It could also be the magic that drew them to the Menagerie of Magic rooted in the soil.”

  “What kind of magic do you think drew them?”

  “Our gran used to say True planned ‘to give back life to those afraid to live’ by showing them glimpses of miracles and magic—promises of what they could become. It was rumored she lay with a man who snuck into the menagerie before it was finished. He stole her idea, and a piece of her heart, and took both back to the mainland. Soon thereafter he announced his first circus. True had thought to bring the magic of life to the masses, to show that power was nothing to fear but a way to help heal the world. The man who betrayed her decided to twist her idea into a perverse freak show.”

  Persephone couldn’t help the flare of pity for True. Having never been in love herself, Persephone had read countless books on love. In heartbreaking stories, the heroine was betrayed and left broken by the wrong man. She imagined love could poison a person in a thousand insidious ways.

  “Do you think her broken heart changed her dream to something sinister?”

  Hyacinth glanced over to Persephone. “No. There is a reason the women in our line mate but do not marry. We have learned the lessons of foolish hearts. True may never have forgiven her man for perverting her vision, but she didn’t stop from planning the Menagerie of Magic. When it finally opened to the public, it brought in a successful showing of two hundred open-minded people who were gifted shades of magic and a night of wonder.”

  Persephone watched a young woman on a pale yellow bicycle with a white wicker basket ride past.

  “No one is certain of the precise mechanics for how the exact curse was cast, that was lost along with the witches. We only know what came after.”

  “Lost witches. All of them frozen in time.”

  “That’s the easiest way to put it,” Hyacinth said. “They are locked away.”

  Another villager strolled past, pausing to bid them good evening. Then Hyacinth resumed her explanation.

  “Aside from our ancestors and a few visiting families, the island lost all its inhabitants when the curse fell. The non-magical people who stayed here today carry a whisper of sight, and some make the most of it. Off land, Wile Isle is known for being something special, and it is the people of the island who feed that story when tourists come. They make and sell their tisanes or speak in their affected fortune-teller ways, and profess they can read the stars—for a price. The truth is they, too, are cursed. Only … they don’t know it.” Hyacinth tilted her head back so the new rays of the moon slanted across the planes of her face. Hyacinth filled her lungs with the crisp air and blew an even exhale. “Still. The island holds its beauty. Even now.”

  “Yes, that it does,” Persephone said, turning over the idea of the Menagerie of Magic, the curse, and how to break something when you don’t know precisely how it was formed. Persephone studied a row of shop houses with their large windows and bright, if not faded, shutters.

  “You mentioned seeing costumes last week,” Hyacinth said, glancing at Persephone. “What kind of costumes were the townspeople wearing?”

  “Ah, Victorian nobility, I think.”

  Hyacinth paused, and pointed at the thatched roof cottage standing before them. “In this bakery?” Hyacinth proceeded ahead, pushing open the navy blue door and walking inside. Persephone blinked at the shop, and the sign hanging beneath the awning: OUR DELIGHTS.

  This was not the same bakery.

  Persephone took an unsteady breath. What had Dorian said? You’re in the wrong world. What if it wasn’t only the library in the wrong world, what if the bakery was, too?

  Persephone turned around, looking for the right bakery, and did not see it anywhere. Fighting a flash of panic, she followed Hyacinth inside.

  Our Delights was a lovely and welcoming shop. It boasted seven cheery white tables with mismatched pastel-colored chairs, cream walls, beautiful Gaelic decor, and a tearable paper scroll on the wall with an inspiring “quote of the week” reminding Persephone that “Those who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those doing it.” It smelled of freshly baked pastries and pancakes, spices, and chocolate. The counter was filled with a variety of succulent treats, each more decadent than the one before.

  And Persephone had never stepped a foot inside the shop a day in her life.

  “This is not the bakery I was in earlier,” Persephone said, her voice a faint whisper.

  “No,” Hyacinth said, surveying the quiet scen
e before them. “I rather thought not.”

  Persephone sat down hard onto the nearest chair, and rubbed at her eyebrow. She’d seen the other bakery before she saw Dorian and the library. Before the first attack from the Way witches and the dark force they controlled. A chill worked its way down her neck and Persephone let loose a shudder, trying to mentally retrace her steps.

  “Tell me about the other bakery,” Hyacinth said, her tone so light it nearly brushed past Persephone.

  Persephone studied the room, and an urge to run out of the bakery and back to the library washed over her. She gripped the edge of the chair and watched two middle-aged women with kind eyes and busy hands bustle at their stations, going from the kitchen back to the kneading station with its large marble slab as they worked what appeared to be caramel across its heavy surface.

  “It was darker,” Persephone said. “The colors were less cream and amber and more…”

  “Forest green and midnight blue?”

  Persephone gave a short nod. “Yes.”

  “Hmm.”

  “You know it?”

  “Of it.”

  Hyacinth said nothing more, and the pieces knit together for Persephone. Persephone should have realized it sooner, after Dorian explained about the library. She should have put it together—it had been so obvious and she’d been obtuse.

  Persephone truly was a walker.

  “I was in a different world.”

  “Or one hidden within another one,” Hyacinth said. She turned her eyes to Persephone, and there was something calculating in them. A knowing, and a hiding.

  It was disorienting, being able to see so clearly into someone else. For the first time Persephone wondered if being unable to maintain eye contact hadn’t been a blessing in disguise. Persephone had been certain the windows to the soul would bring a deeper connection, would help her find her place in other people’s hearts and lives. It had seemed to be working, in Moira and Hyacinth she experienced peace at being seen.

  When she met Hyacinth’s eyes this time, Persephone did not feel understood or settled. The balance she’d held moments before wavered. Hyacinth tried to school her features, but it was no use. Persephone’s powers hadn’t manifested in all the ways the other witches expected, but as she studied her friend, Persephone knew one of her gifts was to see through—the veil of space, the realms of place, and the subterfuge of someone hiding something they very much did not want the other person to know.

  Persephone leaned back in her chair, trying to figure out what Hyacinth could be hiding. Was it more of the same—the witches speaking in near riddles because they lived their life in shadows and were so heavily cloaked in secrets they forgot they wore them? Or was this something else?

  Hyacinth, for her part, offered a temporary deflection by getting up to order a fresh pot of mint tea and cherry blossom cheesecake for them both. Hyacinth said it was the best on the island and yet Hyacinth barely did more than move her slice around on the plate.

  Hyacinth took a delicate sip of her tea. “Can you tell me more about where you were?”

  Persephone ran the teeth of her fork over the slice of cake, drawing three roads down its center. Something about the three roads stood out in the back of Persephone’s mind, but when she tried to see it clearly, her vision blurred and the cheesecake was just a cheesecake.

  Persephone thought of the current running underneath Hyacinth’s easy tone. Everything on the island had a current. The people, the water, the ground. She imagined the cheesecake and the three lines formed their own currents. Persephone saw the island of Wile, the Library for the Lost, and the other bakery. Each three separate places, each three individual worlds.

  Persephone looked up. “The colors stand out, and the smell of freshly baked goods.” She looked around the bakery. “It smelled much like this one, but there were people in costumes—or so I thought.”

  Hyacinth considered her cousin, and rapped her knuckles on the table, a decision made. “You walked into the bakery that was. It’s in the hinterland now, a mirror image I imagine of what existed on Wile Isle before the curse. You are a world walker, Persephone. When you walked through space you crossed beyond the veil into the hinterland.”

  Persephone released a breath, relieved Hyacinth answered her honestly, even if she wasn’t telling her anything she hadn’t figured out.

  “But how? I don’t know how to control ‘walking’ any more than I understand how to call and control aether.”

  “I don’t know.” Hyacinth took another sip of her tea, her eyes focused on her cup. “Success is about steps, and many of those steps are getting something wrong … or almost right. Failing is finding your way to success, and you’re going to get a handle on your magic soon.”

  “But will it be soon enough? We’re at the end of September, only a month remains.”

  Hyacinth picked up her fork. “If the Goddess wills it.” She took a bite, and Persephone finally gave in and followed suit.

  “Yes.” Hyacinth nodded firmly. “What will be will be.”

  * * *

  FOR THE NEXT week Persephone worked twice as hard to grow control over her magic. September shifted into October and her level of skill ebbed and flowed. Magic was simply not what Persephone had thought it would be. It was practice and sweat, blood and tears, and giving far more of yourself over than you could expect in return. She’d imagined controlling her magic would become easy as breathing, but then Persephone supposed breathing was a complicated business—one just forgot to recognize all the mechanics to something they had perfected in utero.

  As her days grew longer with study, Persephone found her skills seemed to be going in reverse. She could hold light for moments, and bring flame to fire, but she also set two bushes ablaze and shorted all the fuses in the house four times when her magic overpowered her.

  Beyond the Arch, she practiced memory spells with Moira and continued learning defensive ones with Hyacinth. They tried only once to blend their individual power into three, and ended knocking Hyacinth unconscious for five excruciatingly long minutes.

  Moira pulled spell after spell from her grimoire. She showed Persephone how to freeze rain from the sky and then explode each droplet of rain—trying to break a barrier of frozen magic. When Persephone tried, each droplet turned to snow and sludged to the earth. Hyacinth grew a tangled bramble of tree roots and Moira dug out a flame, while Persephone tried to douse the flame with water pulled from a river beneath their feet. Instead the flame grew as tall as a giraffe and threatened to engulf Persephone. Moira singed the hair off both her arms wrestling it away from her.

  Each spell backfired. Nothing they tried seemed to lead them closer to breaking the curse, or Persephone gaining pure understanding of her gifts. She decided it was like looking into the mud for a flower. You knew something could grow there, but it was impossible to see through it to a viable root.

  Persephone bled for her craft. She dug deep into the roots of the earth, pulled in the air, and pushed fire across water. None of it was enough.

  “We aren’t there,” Hyacinth said one afternoon, a current of worry running through her voice.

  “I know,” Persephone said, wiping sweat from her brow with the back of her arm. Her hem was caked in mud and her cheeks were the color of a ripe tomato from effort. “I’m doing my best.”

  “Of course you are,” Hyacinth said, biting her lip.

  “We have time,” Moira said.

  “Very little of it,” Hyacinth said. “It’s a few short weeks to Samhain.” She tapped her fingertips along her jaw. “Why don’t you try to walk? If you can cross the spatial boundary you went to before when you saw the bakery, maybe it will reveal something we are missing.”

  Persephone nodded. It was worth a shot. She closed her eyes, held up her hands, and pushed.

  Nothing.

  She squeezed her eyes tighter, blew out a breath, and said, “Bakery bakery bakery bakery bakery,” under her breath.

  The world did not
change.

  Frustrated, but refusing to give up, Persephone kept at it. For the rest of that afternoon, and the next, and the next, she spent hour upon hour attempting to leave the island and walk into worlds she barely knew. Her success became a near obsession for her and Hyacinth. Persephone tried her best, but the truth was it was difficult to walk through worlds.

  When Persephone had walked previously, it was because she was scared or angry. Hyacinth and Moira were firm in the belief that magic was best achieved with a clear head. Following their line of thought, Persephone eventually managed, with a little luck and a lot of perspiration, to slip through the veil of a world.

  She imagined a new place inside the arch. She wanted to see the real cliffs of Scotland, to feel the spray of the sea on her cheeks and the salt of the brine on her tongue. The air shimmered around her, and Persephone stepped out into a space void of anything. She opened her eyes and saw the rolling hills that built into cliffs. She reached out a single hand and the vision wavered. Persephone blinked and she had returned.

  Out of breath, Persephone turned to Hyacinth.

  Hyacinth scratched her nose. “That was like watching a light flicker on and off. One minute you were here, the next…” She ran a hand through her dark curls. “I can’t see where you go. I don’t like that,” Hyacinth said, her forehead furrowed in worry.

  Persephone had only tried once to return to the hinterland, and the library, with Hyacinth watching. When she had attempted it, there was the tug in her midsection, leading her anywhere other than to those locations.

  “I went to the cliffs of Scotland. It was beautiful, but there wasn’t anything out of the ordinary waiting.”

  Hyacinth frowned. “Try again. Maybe we overlooked something.”

  For the rest of the day, Persephone returned to Scotland. Each time she returned, Hyacinth was standing a little closer, her eyes a little darker, her mouth more compressed.

  When she wasn’t practicing magic, Persephone was persistent in her search for information on her family. Her cousins kept diligent records on everything, from which plants they harvested during which season, to the allergies of returning tourists who regularly placed orders for Moira’s baked goods, to when the earth’s soil produced the best crop of lavandin—a type of lavender that should only grow in Provence, but flourished in their garden. If only they had more on Persephone’s family. In all the books she read, Persephone could not find a single line on her grandmother mentioned.