The Orphan Witch

by Paige Crutcher

  “Persephone’s stronger than any witch I’ve met,” Ellison said, running a nail against her teeth.

  “This is about more than being strong,” Ariel said.

  “You would leave my sister trapped?” Moira asked.

  “I wouldn’t send Persephone off by herself to get trapped, too.”

  “Stop it,” Persephone said. “Both of you. You’re wasting time. Amara, what do I need?”

  Amara took a deep breath. “If we can’t go together, through the arch, then you will need the original key. How many stones do you have?”

  “Two.”

  “You’ll need the location of the last stone, then,” Amara said. “With it, you can unlock anything.”

  “And we can save my sister,” Moira said. “I’m not letting anything happen to Persephone either.”

  Ariel gave a shake of her head, paused, let out a curse. “Hyacinth said the truest witch told her, ‘the queen just took your pawn.’ I forgot about it in the chaos of Amara’s return and Deandra’s send-off.”

  “Queen takes pawn.” Persephone’s fingers twisted together. Dorian. Finally.

  “The pawn isn’t who you think it is.” Persephone closed her eyes. “I have to go.” Waving an arm through the air, Persephone reached out into space. “I’ll get the other stone. I’ll find the way. I promise.”

  Persephone stepped forward, and, setting her spirit free, Persephone’s body dropped behind her, crumpling to the floor.

  * * *

  THE LIBRARY FOR the Lost had once again changed its form. The room was filled with floating sheets of silk and linen draped down from the rafters. It was like being in a dream, or, Persephone realized, like being in the cabin of the boat in the memory the library had shown her. Inside Dorian’s memory.

  In the center of the room stood a raised dais. Above it, floated Persephone’s family grimoire.

  The library offered no books to her aside from the grimoire in front of her. In fact, the library’s shelves were missing, the stacks gone. This was a room void of story, void of a guardian. Persephone reached for the grimoire and ran a hand over it. Spirit rained down like sparks flickering against the pages.

  “Show me what I need.”

  The book shuffled its pages forward, stopping on a spell: To Call a Lost Soul.

  Persephone skimmed over the words. Then she reached for her locket and closed her eyes.

  The voices of the Many, who had been so quiet since Deandra Bishop’s death, spoke up.

  “Mind the spell.

  You must give something up.

  To gain something back.”

  “I’ve given up enough,” Persephone said, but knew the fates would not care. This spell called for sacrifice.

  She ran her hands over her pockets. “Haven’t I given up enough?”

  “What is enough?”

  Persephone looked around the room. “I don’t even know what to offer.”

  She felt as if eyes were roaming over her skin. She had her power. Had little doubt the library would accept it as sacrifice.

  “That would never do. What else do you have?”

  Persephone’s hand went to her neck. The Mayfair locket. It was the first and only gift she’d ever received. But giving it up was giving up a part of the connection she’d formed to Dorian.

  Persephone sighed. She had to try.

  She pocketed the stones from the locket, sliced her palm with its edges for good measure, and threw the necklace into the air.

  The hourglass hovered suspended in the air before exploding into a mass of shooting stars. They shimmered overhead. Persephone thought she saw her own face reflected back. The stars dropped from the sky and Persephone acted on instinct—she threw her arms out and caught them as they fell.

  A warm rush of air flooded through her, threaded in her hair, and wrapped around her bones. She breathed deeply and looked down.

  A form appeared on the floor, the same one she stumbled over the last time she was in the library.

  “Dorian,” she said, crossing to him.

  He was shivering, but he was alive—or as alive as he could be. His clothes were wet, his hair thickened with ice. Wherever he had come back from, he had brought a piece of that realm with him. The room around them shifted and changed, the silk fabrics yanked away to reveal the library as it had first appeared to Persephone.

  The large stone fireplace was stacked with wood, the embers cold. She found matches and kindling and the fire roared to life. Persephone slipped her palms under Dorian’s broad shoulders, tugging him by the armpits, one inch at a time, until she had him in front of the fire. Persephone tried to warm him with magic, but, as always, in the library the usual rules didn’t apply.

  Persephone grabbed every scrap of blanket she could find, cursing the library for not leaving the sheaths of silk and linen behind. Then she took the top layer of Dorian’s clothes off and wrapped him as best she could. When that was done, she went back to the family grimoire.

  She tried to concentrate, but her gaze and heart pulled her back to Dorian. Each sentence Persephone read shifted from words to symbols. For all intents and purposes, Persephone might have been reading Finnish.

  “How do I help him?” she asked.

  “Time.”

  “Time?”

  Persephone looked around. There was no time here, or at least not time according to the laws of physics. Persephone walked back to Dorian, and settled next to him. She wrapped her arms around his sleeping form, and stared down at the strong brow, slope of his nose, and rise of his cheekbones. She brushed her fingers along his jaw, and thought of how he had seen her, truly seen her, from almost the very first moment.

  Her heart had been hammering in her chest since she first entered the library, but now it slowed. Grief settled in next to Persephone like a loyal Labrador who knows its mistress has returned home.

  She’d lost so much. Persephone couldn’t lose him, too.

  Even as she thought it, Persephone knew what a fool’s hope it was to think. Because Dorian was never hers. He belonged to the library. If she didn’t lose him now, she would lose him later.

  Her tears fell, quiet and urgent. Persephone bent her head over his. She wished with all her magic she had the answers the other witches needed, the strength to break the curse, and time to spend freely with the man beside her.

  As the tears fell, the light in the room rose. The voices of the Many were quiet, but something shifted. Books on the lowest shelf shook and tumbled free. They scattered along the floor, making their own bridge across the marble.

  Beneath her, Dorian stirred.

  Hope filled Persephone as her hands gripped him tighter. “Dorian?” she whispered. “Can you hear me?”

  He groaned in response, and his eyelids fluttered. He gave a slow blink.

  “Persephone.” He reached up, and pulled her mouth to his. It was a question and an answer. She responded by kissing him full of all she wished she could give, before gently easing back.

  “Are you okay?” Persephone asked, as she helped him sit up. She adjusted the blankets more firmly around him.

  “I’ve never been so looked after,” he said, with a wry smile. “All this and I only had to lose the light for it to happen.”

  “The light?”

  His half smile fell from his face. “Hyacinth found a way to remove me from my physical form. To separate the guardian from the library. Or at least, I think that was her plan. The library must have a guardian. It simply drove the light from me, sent my consciousness into the archives.”

  “Of the library?”

  He nodded. “It’s the only way I can cross into them.” Dorian stared deep into her eyes, his gaze searching. His fingers tightened on Persephone’s arms. “Viola Mayfair. I remember. She … found me. I was losing my grip on who I was. The archives have a way of deleting old information when it is no longer lost. Viola came.” He looked around, saw the books scattered along the floor. He climbed onto his knees, still holding her
, his tone urgent. “She said to give you what you need, but to tell you ‘there is always a cost. The debt must be paid.’ Viola told me to tell you, she was frantic. She’d have to be to seek me where souls should never go. She. She…” He trailed off, lost looking back to wherever he’d been.

  “Magic always extracts its cost,” Persephone said.

  “She didn’t mean magic,” he said, looking back at her.

  “Then what?”

  Dorian shook his head. “I … I don’t want to tell you.”

  “Dorian.”

  He closed his eyes. “The prophecy was incomplete.” He pulled out a small box and opened it. Inside was a small looking glass. “You have the power to break the curse. To do so you must remake the world. Only you have the power to do so, but if you do…” He looked down at the box in his hands. “The world will need a guardian. If you break the curse, you must remain in the hinterland.”

  Persephone did not try to stop the shudder as it ran through her.

  “And if you do not break the curse, the world will crumble and the souls in it will be lost forever. If you do not do this—” He licked his lips and shook his head.

  “If I do not break the curse, True will go free,” Persephone said, a chill burrowing into her bones as the meaning of her vision shifted into focus. “My cousins will die.”

  “You will die,” Dorian said, his voice a low rasp. “The world of Wile Isle and beyond will be at True’s mercy.”

  Persephone closed her eyes.

  “I can shelter you here,” he said, looking around, taking hold of her arms. “Time doesn’t work the same in the library. We can stay right here. You don’t have to go. You don’t have to do anything.”

  Persephone let out a hysterical laugh, which turned into a shaken giggle that hiccupped into fear. “If I don’t break the curse and stop the witch, my cousins and I die,” she said. The tears clogged her throat and she rubbed at her neck, trying to force them away. “If I break the curse and stop the witch, I’m as good as dead, aren’t I?”

  He put his hands on her shoulders. “You’re locked away, like me, only in a shell of the world with no way to set you free.”

  Persephone covered her mouth to keep the sob contained. It was too much.

  She had spent her life searching for her family. Knowing she didn’t belong, that the power she had was pain. Now she finally had family and friends. A man she was falling for, ridiculous as the circumstances were, and she was being told she had to give it all up.

  The other shoe had dropped.

  Dorian rose to standing. He looked rugged and ridiculous and he made her stomach flip even as she fought not to scream at the top of her lungs.

  “I came because of the key,” she said.

  “You mean rescuing me wasn’t your goal?”

  “It was a side road.”

  “You don’t have to stay on the road at all,” he said. “Let’s jump in the bushes, you and me.”

  Persephone had never been so tempted by an offer. She wanted, with every cell of her being, to say yes. To run away from the problem.

  But she’d been running for too long, and the problems never stopped coming.

  As tempted as she was to run away with Dorian for all of time, Persephone knew it would never work. While her heart was fast becoming his, she had also fallen in love with Moira, with Hyacinth—who she still wanted to strangle—with Amara, with Ariel and Ellison. She couldn’t let her family die, wouldn’t allow them to remain cursed when she could stop it.

  She didn’t want to leave Amara, who had spent one hundred years fighting to repair the damage she had helped cause, to try and face this battle on her own. Not when Persephone was the only way she could win.

  “I would follow you into another world, Dorian,” Persephone said, her heart in her eyes, “would it not lead to the end of the one for those I love.”

  It was his turn to close his eyes, to nod, as Persephone ran her hands up his arms to cup his face.

  After a short forever, he asked, “What do you need?”

  This time when Persephone spoke, it wasn’t her voice, but those of the Many. “She seeks a key that leads to everywhere and the final stone to unlock the veil.”

  Dorian’s eyes shot open. “Persephone.”

  Persephone blinked. “Yes?” This time her voice was hers.

  “Just checking,” he said, blowing out a breath. “Viola … she also said to give you what you need.” He gave Persephone a smile, and it didn’t reach his eyes.

  “Why don’t you lead?” he asked, waving her forward. “It’s what you did so many weeks before, when you first came to the library. I think the library will heed your call.”

  Clasping hands, they walked to a door and through it. “Dorian?” Persephone asked him, leaning into him as they navigated the long hallway. Her whole body was shaking, but she did not stop, only picked up her pace. “Why did the library choose you?”

  There was a rustle behind her, Dorian’s blanket-toga brushing against the stone of the floor. “Because I was born to pirate goods. Because I set everything in motion when I lost the magical items I was hired to protect.”

  “It doesn’t make sense though,” Persephone said. “That the library won’t let you go.”

  “It needs a guardian.”

  “Yes, but can’t someone else do it?”

  “I don’t think it works that way.”

  “But couldn’t it?” Persephone said, pausing to look back. “Do you ever wonder if change is what the library is afraid of?”

  The lights in the hall flickered off.

  A gong sounded from far off and a crack splintered into the wall of the library.

  A sharp searing pain split Persephone nearly down the middle. Her hand was ripped from Dorian’s before she could gasp a sound.

  The shadows descended.

  Wind whipped up from the floor, throwing Persephone into the air. An unforgiving gale wrapped itself around her, tangling her hair and clothes as it tossed her back and forth like a towel tangled in the spin cycle.

  As she rose, Persephone glimpsed the determination on Dorian’s face, the fear in his eyes. He reached for her, but it was no use.

  The library split apart.

  Persephone watched Dorian slam one hand into the wall, curse, and slam his hand again. On the third attempt, a small door opened. He yanked a box from out of nowhere, pulled a pouch from it, and threw it up to her. She caught it as an inhuman cry tore from her throat.

  The voices of the Many called out, and Persephone was ripped into a thousand pieces.

  Dorian shouted her name. Persephone thought she heard him beg the Goddess to take him instead. Persephone threw back her head, and screamed with all her might.

  * * *

  WHEN THE PAIN consumed her, the wind deposited her into the void. Persephone wasn’t entirely certain she was still alive. She struggled to grasp a tether of space. To stay on a path. Her arms shook and her head pounded with the beat of a thousand drums. The voices of the Many tripped over one another, speeding up, growing louder. Warning her of what was to come. Persephone couldn’t make out anything beyond it, and she couldn’t force a breath into her body.

  It was like being stuck inside an overactive beehive while the queen revolted. Persephone lay on the floor and begged the Goddess to make it stop.

  A very small part of Persephone thought maybe she shouldn’t get up. That she could stay lost. Lost witches ended up at the library, and she didn’t want to keep going. She didn’t want to break the curse, and she didn’t want to die.

  After too long and not nearly long enough, Persephone found the right path to drag herself back to Wile Isle. She crawled off the arch and found herself beneath Moira and Hyacinth’s tree, a few feet from the black circle that marred the earth.

  Persephone rested her cheek on the bark, too weak to wrap her arms around it. Tears ran down her cheeks as Persephone tried to hug it with her mind, and would have laughed at herself if she weren’t
facing her imminent doom.

  No manner of tree hugging would put her back together. Persephone thought of her grandmother finding a way to tell Dorian the choice Persephone would have to make. The answers she needed, they all needed, were hers. The problem was the price of magic wasn’t high, it was absolute.

  Could she do it? Forfeit her life?

  For thirty-two years, Persephone had been shuffled from home to home. She had lived a life without love. One devoid of companionship, of hope even as she clung to the possibility that she would find her place in the world. She had finally found her place among these witches, among family who saw her, loved her, and had helped her figure out who she was. She was strong and fearless, and right in this moment, she was fucking terrified.

  Persephone closed her eyes and wished she could make the curse, the pain—all of it—go away.

  Ellison’s voice reached her first.

  “Breathe in blessings, breathe out fear,” Ellison said, floating just outside her sight line. “One breath after the other.”

  Beyond her she could hear Moira arguing with Ariel. “We have hours, hours, until the one hundredth anniversary of the curse. If we don’t break it by then, Hyacinth is lost forever.”

  Amara was singing, her soothing voice low and warm. Something about time and love, about dark honeysuckle and ice apple trees.

  Amara and Ellison crossed to her, their hands laid over her.

  “There she is,” Ellison said.

  Persephone’s power flickered and flared. Warmth rushed into her body, like a desert stream being flooded, it filled her up. This power was permission. It was a door into not the minds, but the hearts of the witches who poured their magic into her. It carried love and hope. It was strength and it was faith.

  It was … faltering.

  Persephone sat up with a start, yanking her hands away. Amara’s color was close to gray, and Ellison swayed where she sat.