The Orphan Witch

by Paige Crutcher

  A hiss rolled along her shoulders, thunder crackling against the sky.

  Persephone thought of Dorian, and the faith she had in him and he in her. She took three more steps, and the wind blew harsh against her back. The wind tugged at strands of her hair like cat claws playing with their mark before taking the final swipe.

  She thought of Deandra and her sacrifice, and the world around her went pitch-black.

  The key wrapped around her wrist warmed, shifted, a new transfiguration taking place.

  Light shot up from it, a flash in the dark.

  “Open the door,” said the Many.

  Persephone looked again and saw instead of a dark gaping arch, a large key-shaped hole stood before her. A keyhole the size of a person. She took a breath for courage, and walked forward.

  * * *

  PERSEPHONE SLIPPED INSIDE the arch like any good key fits any strong lock. On the other side of the tree that was not a tree, the entrance to the Menagerie of Magic waited.

  Its front hall was a sea of mirrors. Ovals, squares, diamonds, rectangles—looking glasses of all shapes and sizes stared from their perches down (or up) at Persephone. In the center of the room sat a small table with a lone purple candle wider than her hand and taller than her arm. The candle was not lit, and yet its light reflected onto the walls.

  Persephone bit back a shiver. She did not claim a love of looking glasses and tried not to think of the one in the box in her pocket. She knew Amara had made use of that particular magic, but Moira had taught Persephone that mirrors once were used to trap restless spirits. Still, these mirrors were not ones Persephone could avoid.

  They were also not the scariest thing in the room. Not by far.

  Between the mirrors, crawling along the walls, roamed shadows. Shades of men, women, and children slithered and writhed along the walls like guard dogs waiting to strike. If Persephone had wondered what happened to the restless spirits when they were not housed in the mirrors, she now had her answer.

  A sea of shadow monsters.

  Leashed but not locked, these creatures could only travel so far. The bodies of the witches were frozen, separated from the souls True Mayfair had stolen and trapped. The souls oozed a bleak sorrow wrapped in need so strong it nearly stole Persephone’s will to stand.

  “Frozen souls. Bound witches.”

  Persephone shuddered as she grasped the truth in what the Many told her. The witches of Wile Isle were frozen on the island, but their souls weren’t. Instead they were caged here, in the menagerie, by True.

  “Trapped.”

  Persephone cocked her head. That voice. She knew it.

  “Who are you?” she whispered to the Many, but was met by silence.

  Persephone forced one foot in front of the other as the lost souls quilted the room around her, and walked the final steps to the candle. She ran her hand over the flame as Hyacinth had taught her. It flickered and jumped. The flame was alive. As it responded, the shadows’ mournful cries swelled into the room before they were sucked back into the mirrors.

  Persephone swallowed past the lump in her throat and turned to look for a door. Another arch stood in the far corner of the room. It was a near duplicate to the one inside Ever House.

  No cuckoo clocks ticked here to remind her time was fleeting. Persephone wanted to call out for Hyacinth, to try and spell the air for a circle to pull the others over, but knew being so obvious was like going into a haunted house and setting off fireworks for the hiding serial killer to find your location. While Persephone did not believe she had the element of surprise, as long as she moved with cunning, she had an echo of one.

  What had the Many told her outside? “Space and magic.”

  If the rules could be bent inside the menagerie, Persephone would find her chance. She didn’t dare try to find Hyacinth on her own. It was likely a trick, but if it wasn’t it was definitely a trap. She couldn’t bring her cousins over while outside the menagerie, that had been apparent from how the land had revolted when she tried to keep her tether to them intact.

  No, Persephone would have to be smarter than the problem if she was going to bring her cousins to her.

  Persephone didn’t attempt to cast a traditional circle or follow any of the rules of magic as she had been taught these past few months. Instead Persephone did what she did best, and listened to her heart.

  She cupped her arms around the candle and pulled her fingers through the flame. Taking in the light, she saw strands of aether bending space. She saw the witches on Wile Isle waiting.

  Persephone wrapped her palms around the vision of the witches, called them each by name. She rooted her feet to the ground, took a determined breath, and pulled them through.

  Persephone gagged as the air swirled around her, as the ground shook and the candle flickered. The witches walked through her to cross over. The pain stole her breath; sweat broke out along her spine. When all four stood at her side, Persephone squeezed her hands around the flame.

  She dug deep and drew. The candle’s power, the island’s power, her own power. It flooded her system.

  Persephone had never felt so charged, so full of life.

  “Where the hell are we?” Ariel asked, as Amara pressed a palm to Persephone’s back.

  Persephone looked over, a quiver of unease rippling along the power in her veins at how Amara’s shoulders caved in, how waxy her skin appeared.

  “We are in the inner chamber of the Menagerie of Magic,” Amara said, light flickering across her face. “You’ve brought us inside.”

  “It was the only way,” Persephone said, her voice echoing out too loud into the chamber.

  “Not the only way,” Ellison said. “Whatever you tried to do when you crossed over nearly worked, but I much prefer this method. Before it felt like you were trying to rip our insides through to our outsides.”

  Persephone dropped her hands. Yes, that is what she had done to Dorian when she’d tried to call him to her from the library. Persephone closed her eyes for a brief moment to think his name, see his face, and pray to the Goddess he was somehow safe, while knowing she would never see him again.

  She pushed the pain away as it tried to rush her. It would be a tidal wave if she let it. She would mourn him later, if she survived this.

  “This world wouldn’t permit me to pull you through when I first crossed,” Persephone said. “Magic doesn’t work the same inside the menagerie. Hyacinth is here, and we need to find her now.”

  “The rules of this world are crumbling,” Amara said with a nod. “We need to find the heart, where the magic starts and ends, because that’s where Hyacinth and True will be.”

  Moira gave a curt nod and started toward the arch. Amara locked eyes with Persephone for a moment before she turned and followed.

  Persephone watched the light and dark comingle in the room. How foolish they had been. Persephone stood facing a room full of trapped souls, locked in shadow. She waited for the Many to whisper something, a hint, a promise for how to help. The voice was as quiet as a grave before the digger’s shovel strikes.

  Persephone walked forward and approached the arch. They couldn’t go back. They had to save Hyacinth and the others. The only way out was through.

  Moira flanked her left and leaned in to inspect the arch. “It looks like a twin to Ever House.”

  Amara nodded. “The wood for the Arch to Anywhere came from this tree’s double. When we were first stuck here, True decided to replicate everything in this world to match what existed in yours. I thought the menagerie was a piece of home for her, at first.”

  “Instead it became a place where she could grow her power,” Ariel said, with an eye cast back at the mirrors. “She wants to be free of this world, and return to overrun ours.”

  “I can’t entirely say I blame her,” Ellison said, shuddering a little as the pulse of the menagerie ticked faster beneath their feet. “This place is terrifying.”

  “True’s magic,” Amara said. “It’s grown as corrupt
as she is.”

  “We need to get Hyacinth, shut True down, and get the hell out of here,” Ariel said.

  “As with the other arch, this one must work off desire and determination,” Amara said, tapping a finger against it.

  “Must it?” Persephone asked. “Don’t you know?”

  Amara shook her head. “I haven’t been allowed to enter this sanctum in over fifty years. I have a small home in town, or did. I suspect it’s decaying.”

  “Everything is decaying,” Persephone said. “Space is unwinding the threads that hold this world together.”

  “Yes. I can feel it. The world is urging for me to reach out and pluck them apart,” Ellison said, her hands clasped together. “It’s all I can do to keep from tugging one thread like a child swiping an edge of icing from a birthday cake.”

  “I can bind you,” Moira said, “if you’d like.”

  “Try and I’ll wipe the eyebrows from your face,” Ariel said.

  “She doesn’t travel well,” Ellison said, as a near apology.

  Persephone tasted rust as she bit the tip of her tongue. Goddess, she would miss these women. “Let’s move,” she said. “We don’t know what we’re walking into, other than our desire to find True. Amara, you look like you could topple over any moment.”

  “I’ll hold,” Amara said, but took her place behind Persephone.

  The other witches flanked into formation, and though they did not touch, their magic wove as ribbons from one to the other, a solid connection. They closed their eyes, reached hands to one another, and saw their desire to find True in their mind’s eye.

  This time, their efforts worked. One moment the witches stood in the hall of the menagerie, the next they were on a lake of glass, beneath a tree of lights. Beyond them the world was smudged, faded at the edges.

  “We’re in a memory,” Amara said, wonder tingeing her voice.

  It reminded Persephone of being whisked into the pages of Dorian’s past, when she’d been at the Library for the Lost. Persephone hadn’t realized then that books could hold memories. Persephone now knew they could hold a great deal more. They could hold souls. They could hold damn near anything.

  “It’s Hyacinth’s memory,” Moira whispered. She took a step forward, and Persephone reached out and caught Moira’s wrist. Persephone pointed to the clearing ahead, where a table stood with a basket full of fruit.

  Ariel froze. “Their offers should not charm us, their evil gifts would harm us,” she said after a moment, her fingers to her lips.

  “Cheek to cheek and breast to breast, locked together in one nest,” Hyacinth’s voice was a whisper inside the room as she finished the rhyme.

  “Save her, save her,” the Many whispered.

  Persephone spun in a circle, looking, but did not see Hyacinth anywhere.

  “Goblin Market,” Ariel said, looking up at the glowing tree above them. Its branches of lights flickered. They burst open and fireflies dripped out of the casings, fluttering down to hover just above the group’s shoulders and heads.

  “Come out, True,” Amara called, her voice barely stronger than the twitch at the edge of her mouth.

  “Come and find me, sister,” the voice, made of smoke, whispered back. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

  Amara held up a finger when Ellison moved to speak. Amara closed her eyes, and reached out a hand. She dragged it along the base of the tree and came away with a palm full of blood.

  “Show me what I need to see,

  with my power you are free,

  as I will so mote it be.”

  The droplets pooled together onto the glass lake beneath them, and in the blood a room shifted into view.

  It was not a terribly large room. Objects inside it were piled from wall to wall, some visible, others covered in sheets. Persephone had seen a similar room before. It was a room of lost treasure, treasure sunken to the bottom of the sea that should have been with souls of the other two islands of Three Daughters. This treasure was not lost, but stolen. Much like the souls from Wile Isle that were locked in this very tree.

  “The poem,” Ariel said. “Hyacinth’s favorite. We used to send each other snippets of it during the endless winter months.”

  Moira nodded. “She and I did the same. We’d leave the pages in the arch, like bread crumbs to help us pass the time.”

  “Maybe it’s a clue?” Ariel said.

  They studied the tree, the endless vastness of the dark room.

  “It’s the Goblin Market,” Amara said, leaning into Moira for support. “We must eat the fruit. To move past this place, we taste the wine, give in to temptation.”

  “Come buy our fruits, come buy. Great. Let me guess, this is the part where the evil gifts will harm us?” Ariel said, reaching one hand out and running it along a strand of space.

  “Can you reach beyond the memory?” Persephone asked.

  Ariel shook her head, letting her hand drop. “I could, maybe, reach back into our Wile Isle. But with how this world is shifting and stuttering, that would be risky. I could lose my arm … or worse.”

  “So we eat the fruit,” Ellison said, pressing a hand to her belly. “Sure. Why not? I can eat.”

  They were slow to advance on the table, waiting for a new trap to be sprung, but the glass lake remained frozen, the world beneath their feet dark and cold. The lights on the tree shifted from twinkling casings that looked like pods to small beetle bugs. The bugs morphed into butterflies that flickered just out of reach.

  Moira sniffed, reached to snatch up a luscious-looking purple plum, and Ariel took it from her.

  “Tell her.” She looked deep into Moira’s eyes. “Tell her I love her. I forgive her, and I’m sorry, too, okay?”

  Before she could bite deep into the fruit, Moira snatched it back. “Tell her yourself, Ariel Way.” Then Moira bit into the plum. Juice ran down her lips and chin as she grabbed the goblet from the table and tossed its contents back. “The power is in you, my brilliant Persephone,” she rasped, looking at Persephone. She licked her lips and managed to whisper, “Don’t hesitate,” before her expression of pure determination froze on her face.

  Persephone’s knees locked. She swallowed back her tears as the juices ran clear, and Moira’s skin colored from a deep olive to pink to snow white. The freeze spread out from her lips and cheeks, depleting the color from her hair, hands, and body. Moira turned from witch to ice in a matter of moments.

  A crack split the glass lake beneath their feet in half, and before so much as a scream could form on their lips, the witches—save Moira—plummeted through the crack.

  * * *

  THEY TUMBLED LIKE Alice down the rabbit hole for ten excruciatingly long seconds. When they landed on the other side, a sea of fabric broke their fall.

  Persephone was quick to untangle herself. She jumped up and called for Moira. But when she tried to step forward the fabric caught her around her ankles and she went down again.

  A laugh from the center of the room had Persephone’s fists coming up as she tried to shake off the restraining cloth.

  “Really, True?” Amara’s voice floated up from somewhere beneath the linens. “That old trick?”

  A wave of magic crested through the room, pulsing into Persephone’s solar plexus. The familiar tug, her old friend, yanked once more. This time, it only reacted in one direction.

  The blankets dropped and pooled into the floor before dissolving completely.

  As they fell, Persephone got her first clear look at the room.

  It was a bit like a bird’s nest. A magpie’s in particular. Unlike the boat, this room’s treasure was pile on top of pile, shoved along the edges in the crevices, items boxed and in baskets, oversized bags toppling over beds. It was everything stuffed everywhere.

  “Moira?” Hyacinth asked, her voice timid and small, coming from the corner. Hyacinth’s eyes were glazed.

  The witch was drugged or dying.

  A low curse came from Ariel. Ellison whispered some
thing too low for Persephone to hear.

  The Many whimpered.

  “Someone had to eat the fruit,” Persephone said to Hyacinth, a lump in the back of her throat as she studied her face.

  Hyacinth’s remaining color leached away. “She wouldn’t have eaten it, the poem was a warning, she had to know, she couldn’t—”

  “Do whatever it took to save you?” Ariel said, her tone surprisingly kind. “You should know better than that.”

  Amara took a step forward, but it was too late.

  Hyacinth was up and running. She reached the arch on the other side of the room and threw the door open. Through a hole the size of a plum, Hyacinth spied her sister. Frozen. Trapped in a moment beyond space.

  Hyacinth’s frame shuddered as she struggled to stay on her feet. Ariel’s eyes filled with tears and it took everything in Persephone not to rush to Hyacinth. She knew from the look on Ellison’s face the witch felt the same.

  But True, who was a carbon copy of her twin sister Amara, had not turned her gaze from Amara and Persephone. True stood straighter than her sister with hair a shade darker, but it was nearly impossible to tell the two apart from first glance. Then True snarled and the two women couldn’t have looked more different.

  Persephone drew in a breath. The game was far from finished.

  “Two keys in the palm of my hand,” True said. “Which should I unlock first?”

  Persephone couldn’t look back at Moira, couldn’t give in to the grief pooling under her skin. She spared a glance out of the corner of her eye at Amara, who held her chin high.

  Ariel and Ellison, at the edge of the room, worked their way toward True.

  True couldn’t see how each sister had a thread of space thumbed around her finger, how they focused on where to go. They reached True, and Persephone saw her cousin’s blank face take them in, and realize what they meant to do. Hyacinth let out a shout in warning, but it fell on deaf ears.