The Witch's Diary

by Rebecca Brae

  I was rather pleased to see Bob. He’s not much of a conversationalist, but he’s friendlier than the sisters. They weren’t so happy to see him. Not just because of the cleanup and emergency roof patching we had to do either. I’m beginning to think they don’t like having anyone around, even each other. And especially me.

  Mother halted her storms long enough for us to fix the roof, which did nothing to improve her mood. On the plus side, I did get to see the stars. I’m afraid I spent more time gazing up at them than patching peat. Finding and tracing the constellations felt like visiting old friends.

  I haven’t let on that I know Bob. It would just complicate matters. I did point out the carved badge on his chest and suggested he might have been checking hut stability when he fell in. That shut them up.

  He’s still holding that bejewelled wizard wand he acquired in the brawl. And he kept the cinnamon sticks and pine boughs I hung on his ears. He looks quite bizarre. At least he’ll keep the sisters guessing.

  They have no idea what to make of him. Is he a building inspector? Is he a wizard? Is he a random gargoyle that was knocked off a building and whisked into a storm? They don’t know and I’m not about to enlighten them. Not that I really know either. I mean, he was a building inspector when we first met, but now? Maybe he needed a vacation?

  There was a discussion between the sisters about stone soup and rock sculpting, but I doubt they’ll mess with him. Other than to move him. I tried to dissuade them from that too, but they wouldn’t listen. Big surprise.

  I didn’t think they’d be able to lift him, but Mother commandeered some loitering air elementals to transport him outside. Of course, as a druid, she doesn’t see them as elementals. She calls them nature spirits. As far as I can tell, they’re the same thing, only I like to think they enjoy the company of witches better.

  True to her usual flighty ways, Mother forgot the second half of her instructions. The elementals didn’t know where to put Bob and ended up dumping him a little ways from the hut. It’s a boggy spot and he had already sunk a couple inches by the time I made it out. He didn’t seem bothered, so I left him. He can relocate himself to wherever he fancies as long as no one is watching.

  Crone was livid. She spent the rest of the eventide rebuilding her wrecked tubule maze and sorting her disturbed piles. Thankfully, she was quiet-ish about it and I managed to get a half decent sleep.

  I hope this sun is calmer. I checked on Bob first thing this morn and he’s still there, wallowing in his bog. He’s sunk a few more inches, but is sporting his trademark crooked grin and seems content.

  There was a herd of baby hares snuffling around him. All but one ran off at my approach. The straggler hopped up into the crook of Bob’s arm and did a very poor job of hiding. I suspect that one won’t last long with Crone around. Though, to be honest, I can’t confirm if she uses meat in her stews, so maybe it’ll be fine.

  I’ve been instructed to spend the rest of this sun drumming up business, which involves flouncing around the moor like an idiot. It won’t work. Mother has a wicked storm brewing in the east. I’m sure it’ll hit as soon as I’m a fair distance from any viable shelter.

  But . . . I have a plan! I’m going to build a lean-to in a patch of trees I found. It’s far enough away from the hut that the sisters won’t be able to see it, yet not so far that I’ll freeze on the way. And the thicket will provide some wind protection. Once it’s built, I should be able to weather the storms in damp solitude instead of frozen solid solitude.

  Herman hunkered down in the hollow above my collarbone while I slept last night and refuses to budge. It would be fine, except he undulates every so often and it tickles. I keep forgetting he’s there and swatting at him. Good thing he’s squishy.

  Just heard an ominous rumble in the clouds. I’d better get moving. Time to put Operation Alone Time into action.

  Tydias, Seed Moon 2, 209

  I’M HAPPY TO report that my lean-to is complete and mostly solid. Herman decided to be helpful for once. He apparently picked up a thing or two about structural stability during his adventures at the Gingerbread Hut.

  I didn’t lose any extremities to frostbite during the construction, but it was close. My fingers were creaky and stiff by the time I finished. Thankfully, we’re surrounded by peat (no fuel shortages for me) and it still burns when damp. It’s just smokier and takes a while to light.

  Once things were set up, Herman ventured into the underbrush. I didn’t ask what he was doing. I don’t want to know how slugs spend their private time.

  It felt amazing to be on my own. I spent some time throwing the bones and reviewing the runic alphabet. I figure if I’m supposed to be reading omens and foretelling the future, I might as well do it right. I don’t accept the sisters’ “It doesn’t have to be accurate” BS. Their tone was so condescending. I’ll show them. I’ll foretell the crap out of anyone who stops by. They’ll be sorry they ever questioned this witch’s ability to portent!

  I was ordered out on another fishing expedition this morn. I didn’t expect to meet anyone, but accidently ran into a maiden cutting peat on the southern edge of the wailing bog (there are no ghosts as far as I know . . . the noise is made by wind playing among the dead trees at its perimeter). I’ll avoid that area in future. If only I had read my runes this morn, maybe I could have averted the ensuing fiasco. Then again, trying to prevent it might have made it worse. The Fates are tricky.

  As per my orders, I invited her back to the hut and for some unfathomable reason she came. Why are maidens such a trusting lot? I put no effort into hiding my creepiness. Herman said I sounded downright menacing when I told her I had something to show her in my hut.

  Anyway, I brought her back, all innocent and unsuspecting, and the sisters descended like a pack of rabid Lederswamp gerbils. They were all over her, touching her hair, petting her arms, shoving a cup of revolting-smelling broth into her hands. I would have freaked out if someone pawed at me like that, but not this girl. She just smiled and placated them, as if they were harmless old biddies starved for company.

  To be fair, I suppose that is the vibe they give off. I know them for the dangerous nuttos they are, but I can see how an inexperienced person might be fooled, at least for a while. I don’t know. This maiden seemed really slow to pick up on things. I hope this experience at least served to make her more cautious next time.

  I did my job. I sat down with her and cast the runes. It was a pretty dull reading. There’s a change or journey coming which she may or may not accept (the runes were wishy-washy on that). She has a foolish nature and can jump to false conclusions (no surprise there). And she’s prone to emotional instability (duh, she’s a teenager) and needs to spend time getting to know herself before she can be truly successful. Nothing world shattering. I cast the bones next, hoping for more drama. There was none.

  Crone’s attempt to make the reading more interesting was a nuisance. She’s been experimenting with alchemical ghost conjuration and hasn’t quite perfected the process. Instead of calling up a few dead souls for a nice roundtable chat, she only seems to get pieces. This time her concoction unleashed a fleet of disembodied heads that floated about the hut all muttering to each other. It was less disturbing than other parts she’s conjured. Try waking up to a flock of ghost butts in the middle of the night. Not fun.

  The incorporeal heads certainly surprised our guest. I shooed away a gentleman with an aggressively bushy beard who insisted on hovering right in front of me and blocking my line of sight to the bones. My hair, which the sisters insist I wear down at all times so that it whips about in the wind and impales my eyes, must have moved because the girl suddenly screamed, pointed at Herman, and fell off her stool in her haste to back away. Admittedly, a ghost slug riding about on a person is surprising, but it hardly warrants such a dramatic response.

  Mother grabbed the maiden’s hand, under the auspices of reading her palm, and spouted a bunch of nonsense. Seriously, she wasn’t even using rea
l words. Some of it was just grunting and possibly farting. To top off her act, she coughed up a baby rat in the girl’s hand.

  Between the floating heads and mouth-rat, the girl took off. Well, she did her best to anyway. She tossed the rat, which I thankfully managed to catch (Mother is so irresponsible!), tripped a few times on Crone’s piles, and got her skirts caught on a section of broken tubules near the door. Her sudden clumsiness made me suspect something interesting had been slipped into her broth.

  Mother and Crone melded into the smoky shadows and tormented her with animal noises, evil cackles, and shrieks during her escape. Talk about lame Outerplane magician parlour tricks. One of them even called a pack of small fire elementals that danced and darted around in the murk. Mother is the most likely culprit. She gets distracted at the worst times. A sprite nearly lit my hair on fire and we had several blazes to put out in the hut after. Fire does not go well with some of the things Crone is distilling in her flasks. I would ask why she didn’t just summon bioluminescent water sprites, but they wouldn’t have been as destructive, so that answers my question.

  I have to admit, despite the cliché nature of the sisters’ stunts, they were effective. I doubt that maiden will blindly accept invitations from strangers in future.

  The poor girl eventually made it out. I watched her weave across the moorland. It didn’t look like she headed for any boggy spots, so she must have kept her wits to some degree. Kudos to her. That’s better than most would do under that kind of duress.

  When I came back into the hut, Crone sniffed at me with her nose in the air like an irate queen at a guest using the wrong spoon. Mother pulled me aside and gave a stern lecture to a spider dangling a few inches from my ear. Part of it was about the proper way to tell fortunes, but it veered into a treatise on responsive web design. Sounded like a fiddly enterprise. Glad I’m not a spider.

  According to her, the only sensible way to do a reading is with entrails. She doesn’t approve of the bones, and the runes were inconceivable. She needs to get out more. Her methods are way out of date. Nobody uses entrails anymore. Too messy.

  When Mother finished that lecture, both sisters harped at me about sticking to luring and scaring, as opposed to actually practicing my craft. Apparently, creating the impression of doom and despair in meetings with clients is their sole concern. So much for my plan of stunning them with my presage skills. Looks like accuracy is just going to piss them off . . . now there’s an idea that really stirs my cauldron.

  I just let loose an evil cackle and now Crone is glaring. Whatever. If they’re going to mess with me, I’m going to mess with them. And if messing with them happens to involve following my job specifications to the letter, so much the better. What did they initially say: No magick required, find victims (they didn’t specify that bunkmates couldn’t be considered), foretell futures, wear the unmodified outfit (no way around that), and be disruptive. Will do, sisters! WILL DO!

  The way they mocked me at supper made me want to shove them in a cauldron and roll it off a cliff. Mother fished a pebble off the dirt floor, licked it, and dramatically proclaimed that she saw a round, iron object in Crone’s future. It was black and hot. Oh, it’s a cauldron. There’s a cauldron in your future!

  Very funny. So, the maiden’s fortune wasn’t exciting. Her boring life isn’t my problem. Except when the sisters decide to harass me about it, I guess.

  Crone got in on it too and made some asinine prediction about Mother going to sleep or snoring or something stupid. They went on like that for ages, but I ignored them. Gah. They are insufferable bullies . . . which brings me to the starting volley of Operation Sister Torment.

  I did some quiet casting this eventide on two cocoons and hid one in each of the sisters’ hay beds. A simple spell. That’s pretty much all I can manage. From now on, whenever they say anything derogatory, insulting, or mean-spirited, a stream of colourful butterflies will pour from their mouths. I’m balancing ugly with beauty in true witchy tradition. They will hate it and I can hardly wait.

  They must have pissed Herman off too because he left a trail of tubular poo on their stools. Took him quite a while. The curmudgeon is starting to grow on me (and not just because he looks like a slimy growth on my collarbone).

  He made an unfortunate discovery during his poo mission. One of the sisters has a pet hedgepig and it caught his scent. Those buggers are the one thing that might consider eating a ghost slug. It doesn’t help that Herman’s new form is slow enough to lose a race with a fossilized turtle. He’s scared, to say the least.

  The spiky interloper is currently rooting around in my bed. I’ll have to sleep with one eye open from now on. The only diplomatic and non-fatal (for the hedgepig) defence I can come up with is to sleep in the nude. At least that way I won’t miss it climbing onto me. As long as Herman stays close, it should work. Thanks to the sisters’ ever-burning hearth fire, getting cold isn’t a worry and it’s not much of a change from my prescribed attire. I doubt the sisters will even notice in the smoke.

  Cerridias, Seed Moon 4, 209

  AH, SWEET SOLITUDE! I never thought I could love a lean-to as much as I love this one. It is an oasis, a saviour, a sanity preserver.

  Good thing I built it when I did. It snowed last sun. The flakes melted as soon as they touched the ground, but still, snow. And I’m dressed like a lusty wench at a beach party.

  It’s a cosy place to hide out. I have a small fire going with a cauldron boiling away on a rock. Night has fallen, so the sky is a darker shade of grey. One might call it charcoal. There’s a break in storms and it’s only misting rain, instead of the usual downpour. It’s enough to conceal the smoke, and the trees and lean-to should hide the light of the fire. I’m safe from discovery for now.

  I happened across a healthy grove of nettles in my meanderings last sun and picked the youngest stems for nettle tea. I hung them up to dry in my lean-to. I’m enjoying a cup of it as I write. It tastes of green and hope. And it’s hot. Very hot. I’m grateful for that.

  The moors have many charming features: the solitude, the abundant peat, the fresh scent of wet heather. You can weave through the lowlands if you want to move about unseen, or climb to the high plateaus and see for miles (providing there’s no fog or storms, which is rare but theoretically possible). Even the howling wind has its benefits. You can go for long walks without the constant nip of bugs.

  I find the fog to be most pleasant. It can set a damp chill in your bones, but there’s something magickal and comforting about the misty veil. It gathers around you like a soft bubble, making it easy to imagine nothing exists outside. There’s just you and that little piece of the world. Nobody can see or hear you. There are no demands, or crises, or worries other than those you carry with you. Unless the sisters happen to be in the bubble with you, but even then, all you have to do is move twenty paces in any direction and poof, they’re gone. Yes, I like fog. Fog is good. Fog is my friend. Fog doesn’t fry you like a bolt of lightning.

  I was forced to talk to Mother about her thunderstorms last sun. If they want me wandering the moors at all hours, I object to playing dodge-the-lightning-strike. One hit so close that all the hair on my body stood on end and smoke drifted up from the soles of my boots.

  I came limping back to the hut to find Mother having a cosy tea party with a ball of lint, a dead sparrow, an aggrieved-looking stoat trapped under a basket, and a skull she kept referring to as Molly Scarhag (I really hope she wasn’t their last Maiden).

  I felt no compunction about interrupting. “You need to cool it with the bloody storms!” I forced the words out between chattering teeth.

  A thoughtful look stole over Mother’s face. Her eyes widened and she stood, abandoning her captive guests to stride outside.

  Part of me hoped she had seen the error of her ways, but the majority of me knew that couldn’t be the case. I followed her and watched as she swayed and chanted and gestured at the sky. She pulled something out of a pouch on her belt and ate i
t. Then she vomited a tarry substance that smelled worse than fresh troll droppings, coated a twig with it, and pointed the dripping stick at the clouds.

  The black mass swirling overhead turned a deep, angry red. Rain pounded down, gathering in great pools . . . only it wasn’t water, but blood. Mother spun to face me with an expression of wild elation. Streams of glistening blood trailed down her face and body, turning her white robes crimson.

  “Bloody storms!” she hollered over the thunder. “Bloody brilliant!”

  I backed slowly into the hut and left her alone for the remainder of the night. A druid lost in the ecstasy of magick is not something to mess with.

  My feet were still tender this morn, but the lightning burns looked no worse than a mild sunburn. After confirming Mother had recovered from her bloody revelation and calmed down, I broached the subject of storm moderation again. She grudgingly agreed to tame her storms while I’m out, but I’ve seen little evidence of that so far. And now, thanks to my incautious wording, I have torrents of blood to contend with. My outfit is permanently stained. I look like I’ve been on the slaughter for a moon without washing. Given my current mood, I almost wish I had been, but all my new look really amounts to is false advertising. Sigh.

  I suppose the thunder and lightning is slightly more distant. That seems to be the extent of Mother’s cooperation. I was hoping she’d stop them for a while and allow some blue sky to show. Apparently, that wasn’t an option. She muttered something about ambiance, but who really knows. She could have been talking to an imaginary gnat interior decorator.

  What the . . . ? Hold on. I need to check something out.

  OKAY. THAT WAS interesting.

  So, there I was, hanging out, enjoying a peaceful cuppa, when this massive moth nearly blew down my lean-to with the beating of its wings. I went out to investigate the sudden surge of wind and strange humming. It must have been attracted to my torch flame because it dive-bombed me and knocked the torch out of my hand. I heard a sizzle, but it can’t have been hurt too badly as it continued flapping around.