The Orphan Witch

by Paige Crutcher

  They spent weeks reading. Studying spells of a hundred different ways to break a curse. To pierce the veil, to call to lost spirits, to send a message of hope across the tides. They finally settled on calling a lost spirit home, but it didn’t work. Hyacinth knew the reason it failed. It was because for any type of great magic they needed the stronger witch. Hyacinth was simply too weak.

  Then Stevie arrived in town bringing secrets and change.

  In this very garden, Hyacinth had slipped wormwood and yarrow into a tonic, for reversal of magic and a bit of good fortune, and asked the Goddess to remove Ariel’s infatuation with Stevie. She wanted her friend back, and she didn’t trust the strange girl who asked too many questions and stared at Hyacinth like she could read her soul.

  After Hyacinth finished making her tonic, she’d heard it. A stir in the wind, an echo of a voice. It came down from the Great Mountain. Through the oaks, up from the roots, down from the sloped land carved from secrets.

  The Great Mountain had not existed on Wile Isle until the menagerie took place. Until the night of the curse, when one world was frozen away. Island folklore told that the mountain grew overnight, though, to Hyacinth, the story had always felt like a bit of make-believe.

  When she was a child, Hyacinth and Moira explored the caves into the mountain, trying to find the lost witches frozen in time. But there was nothing there beyond the usual stalactite and stalagmite. Neither witch was overly fond of tight places, so their spelunking adventures had only lasted the one season.

  That evening ten long years ago, Hyacinth heard that whisper, heard it call her name. Spoken in a soft caress, with yearning. She’d felt the truth in her bones. Hyacinth was not alone.

  The whisper carried with it a request for health, for healing. Hyacinth quickly learned the person on the other side of the voice was dying. The being was trapped between worlds, her power waning, her life fading.

  Her name was True and she was stuck between worlds.

  Hyacinth knew who she was, knew her story as well as she knew the tales of Santa or the tooth fairy or the eight Elvin priestesses.

  True told Hyacinth her sister had trapped her outside the hinterland, lost in the veil—that she existed on the wind, and she needed help. She needed Hyacinth’s magic.

  That this great witch thought her a powerful one was its own potent tonic. That someone so renowned would have to live such a limited life was tragic. When True promised Hyacinth the power she’d always dreamed of in return for aid, it sounded like salvation.

  All she had to do was give her tonic to Stevie, under the blood moon, underneath the old apple tree that never bloomed. True promised it would send the girl on her way, and provide an opening for True to escape.

  Hyacinth did as she was asked without thinking through the angles. It was two birds and one stone. Get rid of Stevie, gain real magic, and become the witch she was meant to be. Then she could find their mothers and bring them both home.

  The spell did not go wrong, but it certainly did not go right.

  Stevie drank the glass of wine. She dropped the goblet. She fell to the earth.

  “What’s happening?” Hyacinth asked, her blood speeding up as the color in the girl’s face faded from dusky rose to pale pink.

  She bent down to shake her awake, and Stevie’s eyes opened.

  “Well met, darling girl,” a voice that was not Stevie’s said. Then she cupped Hyacinth’s cheek, and kissed her long and hard on the mouth.

  When she released her, Stevie laughed so loud the leaves on the apple tree shook. Hyacinth never saw Ariel watching them from the path. Didn’t know her once bosom friend had witnessed the kiss between Hyacinth and the false witch under the moonlight.

  It would be years before Hyacinth would realize True had used her power to find her way into Hyacinth’s mind. Drawing on the spirit of her nearest blood connection, Hyacinth’s weakness was what made her the perfect person to open the door for True.

  Hyacinth’s goal had been simple. Goodbye Stevie, hello friendship with Ariel. She would have grown her power. She would have been the hero.

  In the end Hyacinth got rid of Stevie, but it cost her everything.

  True needed Stevie as a way on and off the island. She left, saying she would free the girl once she reached the mainland. Stevie was gone and, after what she witnessed, Ariel never forgave Hyacinth for it. Hyacinth tried to explain many times the first year, but each time she opened her mouth she got the hiccups, then a coughing fit, then pneumonia. Eventually she accepted that magic had a price, and this spell a particularly high one.

  She even tried to set Ariel up with Laurel. She’d known of Ariel’s long-standing crush, and watched the way Laurel stared at Ariel when Ariel didn’t know she was looking. But that backfired, too. She eventually stopped trying to find a way back into Ari’s life.

  Time has a way of carving new paths, and when Hyacinth finally found Persephone, she was ready to do what had to be done. She was prepared to right her old wrongs.

  In the garden, Hyacinth rocked back onto her haunches and listened for her sister. Inside the house, Moira slammed cupboards, making tea and muttering to herself.

  Moira had been as good as a mother to Hyacinth in many ways. But Moira had more magic than she’d ever cared to tame. Moira didn’t know what it was like to spend your life in someone else’s shadow, to spend your every minute making wishes that would never come true.

  She wouldn’t have made the choices Hyacinth had, but that didn’t matter any longer.

  Hyacinth finished the elixir, stirring it clockwise to counterclockwise, before lighting the fire bowl. The time had come. Hyacinth had put all her faith in Persephone, and now she prayed to the Goddess that her cousin would find the way.

  It was all up to her now.

  Hyacinth took a breath, raised the athame, and struck it down.

  * * *

  INSIDE OF WAY House, Persephone watched how the home was responding to Amara’s arrival by lighting a fire, dropping orange peels along the floor in blessings and good luck, and rose petals along the back of the chairs. It took an hour for her to tell her tale, and when she was done, she studied the room into which they had retreated.

  “The wood in your walls came from Ever House,” Amara said, running a hand along the floorboards. “It was our home—before. After the curse was cast”—she glanced to Ariel—“I watched from my new home in the hinterland as every witch left on the island set out to try and break it. For decades you all tried every spell you could, only to be thwarted again and again. Until your grandmothers, Beatrice and Viola Mayfair, and Magnolia Ever, found three precious stones that disrupted the paths of space.”

  “Precious stones?” Ellison asked.

  “The lost charms of Three Daughters. Astral stones, spirited from the moon by the Goddess herself. A ruby blessed in blood, a rose quartz born to true love, and a moonstone harvested during the blood moon.”

  “What did they do with the stones?” Persephone asked, her hand going to her hourglass, where Dorian’s rose quartz and Ellison’s ruby were tucked away in the false bottom.

  “They tried to use them,” Amara said. “They didn’t know the three stones fit into a lone key, and the key fit into a singular lock. In their excitement, they cast a spell and nearly split Wile Isle in two. During the earthquake it caused, your gran, Persephone, had a vision. A few months later, during the spring equinox, your grandmother Viola met a traveler, fell into lust, and grew ripe with child—your mother, Artemis.

  “That’s always been our way,” Ellison said, staring out the window to the rolling tide of the sea. “Mating with travelers from other lands, letting the sea bring them to us and then releasing them like a fish when we’re done with them. I once asked Gran if it was part of the curse, that love never stayed. She said it was a gift that our line was varied and diverse and so were our talents. That our world was large, even if we could not leave it often.”

  “She was correct in part,” Amara said
. “Lust is fleeting, while our sisterhood is eternal. But true love stays—if your heart is open to it.” Amara gave Ellison a small smile, before continuing. “Viola had a vision, and in this vision, she saw the dark magic’s price.”

  “Which was?”

  Amara shook her head. “I do not know. I cannot see the vision of another. She packed her things, wrote a letter to her sister, and left. Whatever the price, she feared it so greatly she left behind her home.”

  “She did it to protect me,” Persephone said, remembering her vision of Hyacinth and Moira dead at her feet. Her voice cracked as her heart gave a painful thump in her chest.

  Amara reached out a hand to brush Persephone’s hair from her face.

  “Our mother tried to break the curse,” Ariel said. “She was sent off island. All magic connected to the curse carries a steep price.”

  Amara sat on the small navy stool, before looking over her shoulder at Ellison. Ariel narrowed her eyes.

  “What was that?”

  “What was what?” Amara asked.

  “That look. What is that look?”

  “Your mother was lost,” Amara said.

  “Was?”

  Amara gave a helpless shrug as Persephone glanced over to Ellison’s stricken face. Persephone forced herself to swallow, grateful she didn’t gulp. She knew where lost things, lost witches went. The truth was in the details of everything Amara said.

  “What of the stones?” Ellison asked. “Did Persephone’s grandmother take them with her?”

  “She threw the two she could find, including her rose quartz, into the sea. The third was here,” Amara said, tapping her foot over one of the removable floorboards in Way House. “The house would not surrender it. But one is hardly a concern when two are missing.”

  “In her letter to Beatrice that I recovered, Viola said that we were the key,” Persephone said. “Our generation.”

  “What letter?” Ariel asked, looking at her. “You never said anything about a letter. Why is everyone suddenly cryptic and frustrating?”

  “I didn’t know I was ever not frustrating,” Persephone said. “There’s been a lot to say and not say. I didn’t get to mention the letter before everything erupted.”

  Ariel lifted a brow, and Amara spoke. “Viola was correct. They were too early to break the curse. Spells have rules, and while we can bend them, the consequences of breaking one are dire. One hundred years, a proper seal of time, needed to pass for the curse to be ready to break.”

  “You say that like the curse is a person,” Persephone said.

  “Magic is a part of the divine, the divine is a piece of the Goddess. Who’s to say it isn’t a being of a sort?”

  Persephone thought of the library, of Dorian, and bit her lip to keep her focus.

  “They also needed the right key for the lock,” Ellison said, looking to the front door. “A physical and metaphorical key. Persephone and … something else.”

  “Yes.” Amara tilted her head, studying Ellison. “You saw this.”

  Ellison shrugged. “I see many things. Not all come to pass.”

  “This something else?” Ariel asked. “Where is it?”

  Amara’s lips curved. “Lost.”

  “Oh, something else is lost? You’re smiling at that, fantastic,” Ariel said.

  “It is,” Amara said, “but I have a feeling what is lost can be found, when it’s meant to be.”

  Ariel rolled her eyes and stomped off, but Persephone looked at Amara.

  There was only one place she knew of where lost things would go.

  * * *

  MOIRA WAS TIRED of having a dead body in her kitchen. It had only been a few hours, but after learning Hyacinth had given her life over to the astral realm to seek some level of darkness in assistance to an evil witch, Ever House felt like a land for death.

  That Deandra Bishop’s body was cloaked and ready only added a level of strife to this day of horror. It was a day for the most bizarre of realizations.

  Hyacinth was in leagues with a dark witch. Persephone had killed her co-worker in a misguided effort to drive out the dark. The curse was no closer to being broken. The Way witches tried to help the Evers.

  There were four corners of the earth, and four corners to this new predicament. Moira did not know who to trust. She did not know what to do. Moira would no sooner turn on her sister than she would carve out her own heart and try to go on living without it.

  But she wasn’t sure how deep Hyacinth was in the throes of dark magic, or how to extract her from it. This was not something Moira had been taught, had never thought to learn for herself.

  On Wile Isle, the rules were clear and concise. Learn from the light, seek the Goddess, and harm none. When the time came, and the anniversary of the curse was upon them, look to the stranger who is not a stranger to break the curse. The prophecy was clear. Persephone had come, she was the key.

  And yet Hyacinth had made a fucking mess of everything.

  When Moira tried to confront her in the garden, her sister started humming and pruning her violets. With her hair. She refused to speak to Moira, and eventually Moira gave up to go inside and make a truth serum. If Hyacinth wouldn’t volunteer answers, Moira would steal them. Fuck the rules.

  Moira knew astral mania was a common side effect of leaving your body for too long. That spirits and darkness hid in the veil beyond this world, and could manipulate anyone who traveled without form. Moira feared what had happened to her sister, and wondered how long it had been happening. Mania was the only acceptable explanation for Hyacinth’s behavior she could come up with.

  Moira finished the serum, and pocketed it. She’d administer it once the bigger task at hand was complete. She washed her hands and went over to where Deandra Bishop’s body lay. She prepared it with lavender, lemon balm, and eucalyptus. When the time came, Moira circled it with salt, called up her circle, and set the boundary spell. Then she stepped back and waited.

  Before her eyes, the body wavered like a television channel flickering in and out. The air fizzled, there was a loud pop, and the body was gone. Ariel’s efforts to pull the body through space had been successful.

  With the body gone, the air cleared.

  Moira took a deep breath, blew it out, and smelled the hint of iron and sulfur. Not inside, but coming from the garden.

  Hyacinth.

  Moira turned and ran from the room, dashing through the kitchen and bursting out the back door.

  The ground where Hyacinth had sat only a half hour before was blackened. A circle the color of spilled ink ringed her once favorite part of the garden, the place where Hyacinth swore the fairies guarded. Rust tickled Moira’s nose and she walked closer, studying the scarred earth.

  Blood magic. Dark, poisonous magic. The earth was thick with it. The air curdling from it.

  Moira turned and grabbed her cloak from where it was thrown over the rail, and sent out her power. Calling for a trace of her sister, for a flicker of Hyacinth’s signature on the island.

  The only thing to come back to her was the river of primordial ooze, as black as the circle, as marred as the earth, running somewhere deep inside the great mountain. With her heart hammering in her chest, and her palms slick with sweat and fear, Moira threw the cloak over her shoulders and ran for Way House.

  * * *

  WHEN THE CLOCK struck eleven, Ariel used her ability to reach into space to transport the body of Deandra Bishop from one spot on the island to another. She told Persephone it was rudimentary magic, when you got down to it, but Persephone noted that even Amara looked impressed at the feat.

  Persephone’s grief was a shroud of sadness as she studied the body. As her tears flowed, the weight pressed out into the room. It was like sharing space with a rain cloud, and Ellison walked into the kitchen to try to seek shelter from it.

  “Why now?” Ellison asked Amara as Ariel and Persephone said a blessing prayer over the body. “You’ve had the mirror, you’ve had motivation. Why not steal
back some of your magic from your sister and come over like she did?”

  “My sister stole magic from those she came in contact with by slipping into their minds. Possession is dirty magic. It’s great power, but it comes with a great cost. I would not take from another like that. Nor would I give up my humanity for power,” Amara said, her voice weary. “You know the price power bears. You know what it took from your mother.”

  Ellison let out a shaky breath, but did not respond for a long moment.

  “Timing,” Ellison said a while later, noting how Ariel wrapped an arm around Persephone as she elevated the body in the air. “It’s always timing, isn’t it?”

  “When the Goddess wills it, yes.”

  “Does this mean I’m being possessed?” Persephone asked once Ariel went into the kitchen for a sachet of aster. She was finally able to voice the question that had been dancing in the back of her brain. “By the Many?”

  “No,” Amara said. “You are in control of them.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “There are many things I do not understand, but possession is not one of them,” Amara said. “You are not a possessed being, Persephone May. You opened the door for the Many, and you can close it.”

  The front door shifted open, and all of the witches followed the body out of the house, down the steps, and to the raft waiting on the beach. Deandra Bishop would be laid to rest at sea, and her soul—they hoped—would return to where all souls that no longer wander go.

  “You know who the Many are,” Ariel said to Amara, while Persephone and Ellison stood some distance away at the water’s edge.

  “Of course.” She smiled. “Don’t you?”

  Ariel looked to where Persephone kept the Mayfair locket tucked beneath her shirt.

  “The library keeps the souls of the dead,” Ariel said, remembering what her gran had said of it.

  Amara slipped her hands into the pockets of her cloak. “And the dead keep watch over the key.”

  “And my mother? That’s where she is, isn’t it? That’s what the look you shot Ellison was about. I’m not a fool, Amara Mayfair. I haven’t had that luxury in some years.”