Ember

by Bettie Sharpe

  How could I disobey her twice in the same day? I called the fire to the knife, and heated it as hot as it would go without losing its edge. I made a fist of my left hand, except the smallest finger, which I laid upon the block. I took a breath but couldn’t act.

  “Do it!” My mother shouted the words. There was magic behind them. My right hand lifted the knife and severed my little finger just above the knuckle. I screamed at the pain of it, and at the sight of my bloody finger on our cook’s cutting board.

  You’re thinking my mother was cruel and meant to punish me. Don’t shake your head, I read it in your eyes. You’re thinking of all the tales you’ve heard of wicked magic, of how witches make their sacrifices in blood and bone—their own, and others’. But it wasn’t like that. Not really.

  She meant to keep me safe. She meant for me to hide the finger somewhere far away. So long as a piece of my body was beyond the curse’s reach, I would, with struggle, be able to resist the Prince. After she bandaged my wound, my mother tucked my severed finger into the palm of my right hand. “Hide it well.”

  There are many stories of this wizard or that sorcerer who hid his heart in a tree or a gorgon’s nest atop a mountain thinking none would ever find it. You and I both know how they end. And you know I have never liked to take chances.

  Some will say what I did next was blood magic, or something darker. Some will say I sacrificed my soul that day. But what I did, I did to save myself. It was no great evil, just a minor sin. And don’t the Old Wives say that, sometimes, minor sins may serve a greater good?

  I offered my severed finger to the fire and spoke the Witch’s Bargain. “Flesh for power. Blood for knowledge. Bone for strength. Take my offering and become my servant, even as I am yours.”

  My mother gasped, but did not say a word to stop me.

  No power, no knowledge, no strength may be got without suffering. I felt every lick of fire as my severed flesh burned. I felt the flames every instant until my offering burnt to grit and ash. I screamed and cried at the pain, beating the floor and biting my lips until they bled. At last the pain died away, though the stench of burning meat never truly left the air. Even today, the front parlor stinks faintly from my wicked bargain with the Fire.

  My mother wept that I’d made a witch of myself, but when I met her eyes she nodded at my choice. “I cannot rebuke you as I should for choosing the way of the witch over the way of the Wise Woman. Mother’s love has made me selfish. I’d rather you lived a long, possibly wicked life than a short and virtuous one.”

  My mother grew weaker that night. I begged her to take her pendant back, but she wouldn’t have it. “I’m going to die, Ember. There is no stopping it. I had rather go easily into death knowing my only child is safe than to live a few extra days worrying the curse will take you again.”

  She died a few weeks later. Every fire in the city went out the morning my father and I found her cold in her sickbed. I did not want to believe the dead fires were my doing. I did not want to believe the fire had liked the taste of my flesh enough to grant my emotions such sway, but for the three days until we freed my mother’s ashes, there was no firelight or warmth in the city but her pyre. For three nights, there was no light save moonlight. Rumor said the Prince locked himself in his chambers at sunset each night without fire and allowed no one to look upon him.

  The fire returned when we threw my mother’s ashes into the wind. By then I was ready for it. I was at peace with my grief, and resolved to honor my mother’s memory by keeping myself safe from the Prince’s curse.

  I entered and left our house through the alley behind it and never walked the Avenida Delpalacio again. I avoided every image of the Prince, from the statues in the market at Commerce Square to his profile on silver coins. I carried my money in coppers and never complained at the ungainly weight of my purse. It was better to travel alleyways with a purse full of copper as a free woman than to strut the avenidas spending silver as a slave to desires not my own.

  I was so careful to avoid the Prince that I might have gone my whole life without ever seeing him again. I might have lived happily ever after, without him. But Fate, and the Prince, himself, had other plans for me.

  2. The Courtesans

  My father faltered after my mother died. His attention wandered and he slept poorly. His carts began to suffer from broken wheels. Grain went moldy before he could get it to market. He tried to turn his business to luxury goods and textiles from Terre d’Or, but despite his many past successes, he still had a drayman’s taste for flashy fabrics. He purchased several shipments of dubious quality.

  My parents were married for almost twenty years before my birth, and for almost twenty years after. They had become so much a part of each other that my father could not open his eyes in the mornings after my mother’s death without feeling her absence like a new wound.

  I was not surprised when, scarcely nine months after my mother’s death, my father returned from one of his buying trips with a cartload of second-rate silks and a new wife. I wasn’t angry, either. He was the sort of man who needed a wife. He needed stability, love and care. He needed someone to remind him to eat in the mornings and to take him to bed at night.

  When I saw the carriage trailing his cart, I’d high hopes of his new wife. But then he told me she was a beautiful, impoverished d’Oran noblewoman. He called her a delicate flower who needed his care. He said his new wife had two daughters just my age, and he promised we

  The carriage drew to a stop, and my father herded half a dozen footmen out to hold the horses, set up the stairs and open the door so he could help his new wife down from the carriage. Her hand preceded her from the dark interior. It was delicate and powdered white, gilded with a filigree of rings and bracelets. Her fingernails were varnished pink. The stones in her many rings twinkled prettily in the sunlight, but I knew they were glass.

  My stepmother’s foot followed next. She wore shoes of gaudy pink satin, frayed at the toes, studded with dull glass gems, and balanced on a spindly wooden heel that would barely support its wearer from one end of her bedchamber to the other. I do not mean to be cruel when I say this, only factual: I knew her for a whore before I ever saw her face.

  She was pretty enough beneath her mask of powder and paint and the black beauty patch in the shape of a swallow affixed above the corner of her cherry-red mouth. But hers was the brittle sort of beauty that came of constant care and vigilance. Hiding from the sun kept her smooth skin unmarred by lines or freckles. She’d gained her high, elegant eyebrows through pulling each unwanted hair out from the root. Her slender form bespoke a lifetime of half-eaten meals.

  And what little else she lacked in true beauty, she made up for in cunning and charisma. Her brown eyes gleamed with determination and an intelligence I could not help but respect. I understood why my father thought her beautiful.

  She paused when she saw me, and I couldn’t blame her. I knew what I looked like—my cold expression, my red hair and freckled skin, my angry black eyes smoldering like hot coals. Her eyes flicked to the torches flanking our door, noting, I am sure, the way the flames yearned toward me though the wind urged them in the opposite direction.

  Her face tightened beneath its façade of paint. Her white-powdered hand wavered on the verge of greeting me. In that moment, she realized my father’s tales of an innocent, biddable daughter were spun from the same wishful imagination that had let him believe her to be a noblewoman, and to believe the two hard-eyed whores (scarcely a decade her junior) who peered out of the carriage behind her were her daughters.

  “Step-mamá!” I greeted her, taking her shoulders and kissing her powdered cheeks. My lips came away white with a mixture of lead and lard, but it was worth it for the expression of surprise that crossed her face. When my father wasn’t looking, I wiped my mouth on the cuff of my velvet sleeve.

  “Come inside, let me show you and my new sisters our home. I know we shall be ever so happy together!”

  With my father
’s help, the three women wrestled their threadbare satin skirts and listing panniers up the stairs and into the house. I showed them to the parlor, which still stank faintly of burned flesh, and directed my new step mama to sit in my mother’s blue leather chair.

  “I just knew you four would get along,” my father said, beaming from the doorway. I hadn’t seen him so happy since before my mother’s illness. “I’ll leave you ladies to get acquainted while I see to the unloading of my latest shipment of fine textiles.”

  My new stepmother’s lips parted on a word as the door swung shut. I think she was going to say, “Wait.”

  I smiled, pleased as a spider to have so many flies trapped in my parlor. I winked at the hearth and it roared to life, shooting flames up the chimney and sparks onto the rug. The candles followed, lighting all at once.

  “Please don’t hurt us!” One of my new stepsisters pleaded. Despite her shopworn satin and powdered hair, she suddenly looked young and frightened. She was delicate of frame, and though she had rounded, girlish cheeks, the rest of her was too thin for good health. Beneath her paint, her eyes were puffy and shadowed, as if from lack of sleep.

  “We didn’t know,” said the other. “We didn’t know Master Drayman’s daughter was a Wise Woman.”

  “A witch,” I corrected, smiling wide to show my teeth.

  “Even had we known,” my new stepmother said, her voice sure and clear, “we could not have let him leave Terre d’Or without us. Sylvia has the loup, you see.”

  “Minette, don’t tell!” Sylvia hissed.

  “Don’t fret, Sylvie, it isn’t a crime here.” Minette turned to me, “But they were gathering the wood for her pyre when we fled Ville des Rois in your father’s care. Do you understand?”

  Damn her, but I did understand. For all their airs of worldly sophistication, our neighbors to the north are famously intolerant of magic. They hold witch-burnings the way other lands hold summer fairs. Sylvia was not a witch. Her condition was quite beyond her control, but her countrymen cared little for such distinctions.

  “How did it happen?” I asked.

  Sylvia looked away, but the skinny one, Dulcibella, answered. “A rich man from the east paid for a week with her. His eyebrows met in the middle. We should have guessed his nature, but his gold was good. He fell in love with Sylvie and imagined she wanted to be rescued from her life because he wanted to take her away. When she refused him, he bit her and infected her with his curse.”

  “And when I refused him again, he told the constable I had the loup.” Sylvie finished, crying softly into a mangled handkerchief. She looked up at me; her lovely face was striped pink and white by wet tears and smudged paint. “You’re a witch. Can you help me?”

  I crossed to her and tilted up her chin to look into her red-rimmed blue eyes. “I could burn it out, but that is as much a punishment as it is a cure. The fire takes more than the loup when it leaves. I know a potion to control it, but the potion will prevent you from conceiving while you take it.”

  Sylvie smiled at me and became almost beautiful again. “Sister, in my line of work, that potion of yours is a double-blessing. Will you help me?”

  “Say yes,” Minette cajoled. “Say yes, and we will leave your father and your home as soon as Sylvie can travel.”

  “Leave?” I said. “But my father needs a wife. The Old Wives say sheep dogs are descended from wolves, and the best thief takers were once thieves, themselves. You know how gullible my father can be, for you gulled him. Who better to look after him than one who knows his weaknesses?”

  My new stepmother opened her mouth to protest, but the fire flared in anger at her interruption. She snapped her jaw closed and let me speak.

  “Sylvia’s potion must be made and taken by the month. The price of my help, dear Stepmother, is that you stay.”

  “But I saw your sour face at the sight of us. You don’t like courtesans.”

  I laughed and every flame in the room danced with joy at the sound of it. “You mistake me, Sister. Whores are the better part of my business. A witch who shuns the custom of whores and courtesans will be a pauper. No. I dislike liars and cheats. I dislike deceivers and dissemblers.

  “Now that the air is clear between us, I like you just fine. My father needs a wife, and as long as you care for him and do not cuckold him with other men, we shall get along as well as he imagined.”

  * * *

  As I had predicted, we got along quite well. Minette was a loyal and helpful wife to my father, and my new stepsisters were far better at playing the dutiful daughter than I was. I gave them all the silks and satin gowns my father had purchased for me and went back to the comfortable linen and woolens I’d worn before he’d decided I ought to be clothed like a lady. Sylvie and Dulcie planned soirees and spent hours in the parlor embroidering handkerchiefs and other ladylike nonsense while I Worked at the kitchen hearth perfecting my potions and honing my craft.

  I knew the neighbors whispered that my new mother and sisters had made a servant of me, but I’ve never cared what others thought. I liked linen and wool, so that is what I wore. I liked to listen to the chatter of the fire in the kitchen hearth as I fell asleep, so I slept beside the hearth.

  In truth, the three years before my father’s death were quite happy. Though my new stepsisters, stepmother and I were very different, we got along in complementary fashion. Minette was canny and shrewd, but also wise to the vagaries of human nature. She always knew just what to say to charm or to console. Dulcie was bright and cheerful, despite her fragile nature. She had an unerring eye for beauty in art, and she could draw a smile from a stone. Sylvie was quiet and regal. She had a sadness in her, a sort of stillness, that made her presence soothing though she was sometimes too blunt in her speech.

  I do not know what help I gave our group, except my witchery. I am often confused by the irrational vagaries of human nature, and I have been told my sense of humor is as twisted as my right foot. I am rarely calm or still, I Work and fiddle and fix every hour I am awake. I created sleeping draughts for Dulcie to ease her fitful sleep, and stirred up cosmetics and perfume for Minette to aid her quest for beauty. Every month I made the potion that kept Slyvie’s loup from troubling her.

  My care must have endeared me to my new step-family, despite my prickly personality, for they were genuinely kind to me. Minette, Dulcie and Sylvie may have come to our home in deceit, but they were honest in their affection and their actions. I never had sisters and it is difficult for witches to find friends, but in those three I found both. I will ever be thankful for them.

  One day my father’s horse shied on a mountain pass and his cartwheel broke. When his drivers brought the news, my sister-friends were there for me. They arranged the funeral for the third day after his death, in accordance with Tierra del Maré’s traditions. They made me meals of uncooked fruit and vegetables when the fires would not light.

  It was Sylvie and Dulcie who helped me fill in my father’s grave. And it was Minette who soothed me, as my mother would have, when I wept.

  “Your father is with her again.” Minette consoled. “Don’t spend too much time mourning him, for you know he’s happy to be back at her side.”

  Minette’s words may not sound like much, but they were what I needed to hear. I stood from my chair and wiped my eyes. Outside, the rowdy shouts of our neighbors echoed through the streets as their candles and cookstoves sprang to life again.

  My relief was short-lived. The next day, I started on my father’s ledgers. His affairs were worse than I’d expected. The business was gone. We had to sell the carts and horses just to pay his debts. In the end, I managed to keep the house and its contents, though we had to let the servants go.

  “What will we do for food?” I sighed, burying my face in the crumpled pages of my father’s ledgers.

  “You worry too much,” Minette said. She sat in my mother’s blue chair, buffing her nails. “We have a house on the main road to the palace, with three whores in residence. A
ll I need to do is hang a garter ribbon in the window, and we’ll be feasting by week’s end.”

  “I couldn’t ask that of you.” I shook my head.

  “You’re not asking, I’m telling. Don’t think the girls and I haven’t enjoyed this sojourn in respectability, but we three are whores at heart. We chose the work, and we like the rewards. The downside of the job was always needing a procurer to manage the house and the books, but you can do that well enough, and offer protection, besides.”

  “Protection?”

  “I keep my eyes open. The illusion you use to hide your missing finger is flawless, but people in this city know you have power. They see the way fire burns brighter when you’re near. None will cross you. Or hadn’t you wondered why your father’s creditors were so reasonable?”

  I shook my head, shocked. I hadn’t wondered. I’d thought I hid the extent of my blood-got power, but apparently I didn’t. That explained why the custom for my potions had dwindled. People were afraid of me.