Toil & Trouble

by Jessica Spotswood

  She had done everything right.

  Except she had birthed a daughter who had her Hands, but not her temperament.

  Bette is not sweetness and goodness, all bright calm and white light, willing to sacrifice her life for the good of the Circle. She is prickly and defiant, and willing to use blood and tears and the dirt of the dead to break free.

  Refusing to look at her mother she ran a finger over the chains, and with her words never wavering, she said: “I didn’t have a choice before. Now, I do.”

  “Bettina—” her mother started, but Bette met her eyes, and something in them made her mother stop, her own eyes flickering, suddenly uncertain.

  In that moment, Bette realized her mother was scared of her. Scared of her potential. Scared of her power. Scared of the spell she crafted that burnt decades of magic from her skin as if it were nothing. And Bette was angry enough—her grief a gushing wound inside her—to like it.

  Now they know better than to cage her.

  * * *

  Bette gets to the tea shop late. The sign’s flipped to Closed, and she locks the door behind her, turning the key three times to activate the wards. Sometimes tourists come tapping on the windows, wondering why they close so early on full moon nights—or seeking them out for less mundane reasons than tea.

  The shop is quiet, and it smells like herbs, like earth, like home. Tins line the shelves, and little glass jars of tea samples are scattered everywhere. Rows of teapots take up a far wall, everything from fine china to cast iron and even a few bamboo pieces her mother has been pushing.

  “Bette? Is that you?” Brenna’s voice floats out from the back.

  “Yeah, sorry I’m late.” She sets her bag on the counter and ventures into the storage room. There’s water boiling on the stove. Brenna has drawn it from their spring at the base of Castella and brought it to the shop for this occasion.

  There is old magic in the mountain, and if She blesses you with Her attention, there is much to be gained.

  Bette knows that better than most.

  “Did you and Auggie get the violets?” Brenna asks, pushing a strand of dark hair off her forehead. Brenna looks like their mother, with delicate features and a small nose and big eyes. Bette is all their father: wide mouth, freckles everywhere, hair that’s more carrot than red. Sometimes it hurts more than maybe it should, looking at her reflection and seeing what’s left of him in her.

  “Auggie has them at the bakery. She said she’d put a batch in the dehydrator for you.”

  “Good. Come help with the trays.” Brenna points at the stack of them across from the stove.

  “Auggie said Ronnie was asking about you,” Bette says over her shoulder. “Something about running into you on a hike? He’s nice, you know. He takes care of all the stray cats behind the bakery.”

  “Don’t, Bette,” Brenna says, her voice sharpening, and Bette sighs, because Brenna’s cheeks are turning red and she knows Brenna likes Ronnie. She also knows Brenna won’t ever do anything about it.

  This is the thing about Fate: She takes your choices away.

  Four years ago, Brenna’s soulmark appeared. A week later, the two sisters were driving down the road that curved up Castella when they came across an accident. The driver had spun off and hit a tree. And when the man saw them come running, he slurred, “I didn’t think anyone would come”—the exact words that twisted around Brenna’s arm like a cat’s tail.

  Brenna’s screams as she begged Bette to heal his wounds still haunt her. But he was too far gone by then. All she could do was make it painless.

  Brenna had spent years waiting for this man who’d spoken just six words to her, words that were carved into her skin like an inky reminder of what she’d never have.

  Brenna doesn’t really live anymore. She exists. She tends to her garden and mixes up tinctures for the Elders, as she always has. She works in the tea shop but rarely ventures out of the back room, leaving Bette to deal with the customers. She takes long walks in the woods alone, never letting Bette join her no matter how many times she asks. Brenna always hangs on the edges during dinners and gatherings, disappearing as soon as she can.

  She had surrendered herself to Lady Fate, to the idea that her soulmark would bring her not only love, but answers to all that ailed her.

  It was supposed to make her whole in a way nothing else could. Instead, it withered her to a heart beating persistently, but dully, without its mate.

  Bette knows pushing Brenna about Ronnie won’t help, so she turns back to arrange the fine china cups, hand-painted with runes and sigils that shimmer in the sunlight. Her phone buzzes in her pocket, and she puts the cup down to grab it and see the text from Auggie.

  Ronnie called in sick. Gotta get the bread made so I’ll miss tonight. Come over after?

  “Is the tea ready?” Brenna asks.

  Bette looks up from Auggie’s text. “Almost.” She puts her phone down and turns back to the tray.

  The Elders always meet at the shop before heading out to the woods. It’s considered an honor to be invited to take tea with them before Circle. Today, there’s a handful of witches in the back garden, the caws of magpies in the old oaks blending with the snatches of conversation Bette hears floating through the open window. She pours hot water into each cast-iron pot, swirling it around to heat the metal before dumping it in the sink. Brenna hands her a silver container and a spoon, and Bette scoops out the fragrant leaves and herbs, adding a measure to each pot. It’s a mix of ginger, honeysuckle, and rose hips—a blend made for luck, for light, for success. It’s one of the teas they don’t sell to the tourists who come into the shop, giggling about witches.

  “Which one is for the Elders?” Brenna asks, and Bette points.

  Her sister moves her hands over the pot in a complicated dance, sketching sigils in the air over the herbs. Bette can taste flowers and dirt on her tongue. She feels a frisson in the air as the boiling water hits the herbs, releasing Brenna’s spell.

  When the tea has steeped, they carry the pots out to the garden. There are people Bette doesn’t recognize—guests, she realizes, as she sets the last of the trays on the long table at the end of the garden.

  “Bettina,” says Elder Lee, a gray-haired woman with arthritis in both hands and a fondness for velvet dresses. Bette goes to her home twice a week to work on the woman’s hands and knees, drawing out the pain—the deep, troubling kind that makes her own bones ache for hours after—as much as she can. “How are you?”

  “I’m fine,” Bette replies, handing her a cup of tea poured from the pot spelled for the Elders. She thinks, for a moment, about giving her tea from one of the other pots. A small defiance, but she decides it’s petty. There are guests. And she doesn’t need to give her mother more reasons to be angry with her.

  Elder Lee’s eyes fall to the gold plaits. Bette tilts her wrist slightly so they slide against her skin, catching the light. Elder Lee’s lips purse, and Bette smiles innocently at her.

  They had tried to bind her hands a second time, after she’d cast her spell and burnt theirs to a crisp. Elder Lee had led that particular charge. But every time the Elders tried to get close to the chains with their chanting and sigils, the metal would spark, the magic of Castella wild and a little angry at being disturbed by anyone but Bette.

  Sometimes, during her twice-weekly healings for Elder Lee, when Bette brushes her fingers over the braids and the metal slithers in an almost liquid coil into her palm, she wonders how many of them see her as a tool first and a girl second.

  “Thank you, Bettina,” Elder Lee says before going back to her group, the half a dozen Elders who watch Bette with wary eyes.

  “Sweetheart!” her mother calls, and Bette looks from the Elders to see her approaching across the garden, towing a boy Bette’s age by her side. “You were late,” she says.

  “I’m sorry.”

>   “We have guests.” Her mother gestures to the boy. “A friend from college and her son. Grayson, this is my younger daughter, Bettina.” Her mother touches her on the shoulder, and then Elder Lee calls her name. “Just a moment, you two.” She hurries off.

  “It’s actually Bette,” Bette says to the guy once her mother’s out of earshot.

  “Bette, huh?” he asks, flashing a smile at her. “Not Betty?”

  She doesn’t go hot. Or cold. She doesn’t shiver or shake. Her heart doesn’t start thumping too fast, and there are no butterflies. The mark glows in recognition against her skin, the energy flowing through her like a river, speeding toward her heart.

  But it won’t find a home there.

  She can feel it, this razor-thin wire starting in her chest, reaching out, wanting to touch him. And she knows he must feel it too, because his eyes widen in confusion.

  She considers him carefully now, assessing, thoughtful. It’s as if she’s outside of her body as she looks at him. Tall, blue eyes, shock of blond hair dipping across his forehead. He’s beautiful, and he’d smiled at her bashfully before, in that way boys do when they see a pretty girl. When they know their smile twists girls up into knots.

  If she reaches out and touches him, the energy will spark and flow between them, and everyone will be able to sense it. Everyone will know.

  If she doesn’t touch him, Lady Fate will intervene. He’ll start showing up where Bette is, pulled toward her, and he’ll figure out she has the mark after the first or second time, and then he’ll be invested, Lady Fate’s magic and whatever commonalities they have drawing him in, mixing him up, getting him attached.

  It’ll hurt more, then. And she doesn’t want that.

  She could run. She could hide. She could try to deny it.

  But she isn’t a runner and denial isn’t her style and she is tired of hiding.

  She reaches out and touches his arm, and the heat bursts between them. It makes him gasp, and her mother’s head whips toward them. A hush washes over the gathered witches. Even the Elders fall silent.

  Bette folds her arms across her chest and taps her foot.

  “So,” she says. “Grayson, was it?”

  He nods, clearly dumbfounded. He must not be soulmarked. She’s not surprised; it’s not one of Lady Fate’s common blessings. Maybe it’ll make it easier, that he didn’t know she was coming?

  Her stomach clenches. She feels bad for him. She feels bad for her mother, whom she can see out of the corner of her eye, smiling, beaming, like all her wishes have come true.

  “I’m sure you’re a very nice person,” Bette says. “And I’m truly sorry. But this? You and me? It isn’t going to work.”

  * * *

  Her mother drags her from the garden and into the tea shop, Brenna trailing after them, her eyes round with worry.

  “What is wrong with you?” her mother hisses. She’s furious. The frown lines on her elegant face are worn to deep grooves as ire takes over. “What are you thinking?”

  Bette loves her mother. And she knows her mother loves her.

  But her mother hasn’t ever bothered to get to know her. She’s never asked and she certainly hasn’t seen and she’s never listened and Bette’s never corrected her, but now she has to.

  “It’s not going to happen,” Bette says. “I’m not interested.”

  Her mother’s eyes bug out at her words. Energy crackles in the air, and thunder rumbles in the distance. “This is not like your Hands, Bettina! He is your soul mate. This is not denying the Elders...this is denying Her. We do not deny Her blessings. There are consequences.”

  Bette swallows. She knows the consequences. She’s heard the stories. Her throat’s dry and her fingers knot together, but all she can think of is how her heart slipped into Auggie’s hands one day and never left.

  “Bette,” Brenna says, and there’s a light in her eyes. A bittersweet sympathy that tells Bette she knows.

  God, for how long? Bette can’t help but feel a twinge of guilt for hiding from Brenna. They are sisters, but they seem to have lost grip on that in the space between them that holds their grief and Brenna’s regret and Bette’s secrets and all of Lady Fate’s choices for them both.

  “I can’t love Grayson,” Bette says to her mother.

  “You can’t?” Her mother repeats it, and then her brows scrunch together. “Bettina...” she begins, and there’s not only warning in her voice, there’s begging.

  “I love someone else,” Bette says, even though she knows she’s breaking her mother’s heart and sparking fear in it. By denying the person chosen for her, she’s spitting in Lady Fate’s face, and no disciple denies the Lady without punishment.

  But she’s been making her own choices for a long time now. And that’s not about to stop because of a boy.

  “Who?” her mother demands.

  “Auggie, Mom,” Bette says, like it should be obvious, because it should.

  Bette doesn’t remember a time where she didn’t love Auggie. She doesn’t remember a time where Auggie wasn’t there. They were born three weeks apart, and that was the longest time they’d ever gone without seeing each other.

  Isn’t it nice our girls are such good friends? their mothers say, with the self-satisfied smiles of women who see only the surface.

  Augusta Bell has never been Bette’s friend.

  Augusta Bell is the love of Bette’s life.

  And Bette isn’t giving her up for anything.

  Not even Fate Herself.

  * * *

  This is the thing about falling: It’s tricky. Sometimes you’re tumbling down into love before you realize your feet have left the ground. But it’s a choice, too.

  Bette could have ignored how Auggie made her feel. She could have pulled her hand away the first time Auggie’s brushed against hers. She could have resisted kissing her at thirteen, quick and nervous and about to lose her nerve if she didn’t do it right then.

  She didn’t lose her nerve, though, then or now. Every time she could have backed away, she moved forward instead. And now she’s here, driving away from her mother and her soul mate, toward a girl she chose for herself.

  The bakery’s at the edge of town, right where it fades back into wilderness. There’s an oak tree in the front yard that’s older than any building for miles, with wrought-iron tables set around it for the morning customers. The picket fence that surrounds the garden changes color each year—right now it’s dark blue. Last year it was yellow. Bette helped Auggie paint it each time.

  The lights in the back are on, but Bette can’t bring herself to knock on the door. So she stands outside the fence and waits.

  It takes exactly ninety-three seconds. She counts in her head. And then the bakery door swings open, and Auggie steps out. Looking at her is a relief. Looking at her is terrifying. Bette has no idea what to say. Where to begin.

  But Auggie, as always, does.

  “I heard you had a big day.” There’s a smudge of flour on the high curve of her cheekbone and a dark curl escaping from the gingham bandanna that holds her hair back, and Bette wants to reach out, to touch her, to remind herself that she is real...that they are real.

  “I should have told you.”

  “That would’ve been nice,” Auggie says, her mouth—that wicked, sharp, beautiful mouth—twisting. “Look, it’s not like I didn’t know this was going to happen eventually.”

  Bette appreciates the out, but she’s acted like an ass, and she’s woman enough to admit it. “I still should’ve told you. It showed up a few days ago.”

  “I figured, considering I didn’t see it anywhere last time we...” Auggie trails off, and Bette knows they’re both thinking about the last time: kissing in the water, all cascading droplets and naked skin, the curve of her against her fingertips.

  Auggie sighs, looking up at the s
ky like she’s lost. Bette wants her to yell, to be angry, to be anything.

  “What’s he like?” Auggie asks, finally.

  Bette blinks. She actually has to snap her mouth shut, because out of all the questions she thought Auggie would be asking, that wasn’t the one she would’ve picked.

  “I have no idea,” she answers. “Blond, I guess?”

  Auggie’s eyebrows knit together. “You didn’t talk to him?”

  “He said the words, and I realized who he was. So I told him I was sure he was very nice, but this wasn’t going to work. And then my mother lost it and dragged me away to yell at me...and now I’m here.”

  “What?” Now Auggie’s the one gaping at her, and it hits Bette all at once.

  Auggie thinks Bette’s come here to break it off. She expects her to prance over and be all, Sorry, we’re done, I found my soul mate! It’s been fun! And then lose herself in Fate-approved bliss, like she’s supposed to.

  Bette would be horrified if she weren’t so damn relieved that Auggie’s upset about something that isn’t going to happen.

  She walks through the gate, down the winding stone path that leads to the bakery stairs. “Why would I be interested in him?” she asks. “I have you.”

  Then Bette sees a terrible kind of hope spring up in Auggie’s blue eyes, and it’s like a broken bone that didn’t heal right, the ache that fills her.

  “But he was chosen for you. He’s your other half,” Auggie forces out.

  Bette’s never felt like any of her was missing, let alone half. She certainly wasn’t made complete when Grayson’s eyes met hers.

  He can’t fill the empty spaces in her because there are none. There is no emptiness in a devoted heart.

  “Screw that,” Bette says, and it startles a laugh out of Auggie. It’s a clear, resonant sound, ringing across the empty sidewalk like her last name.

  “You hear me?” Bette tilts her head up to the starry sky, raising her voice. “I’m talking to you, Lady Fate! Screw you and your soulmark. Screw your rock slides and your Elders. I chose before, and I’m choosing now.” She looks at Auggie, standing at the top of the porch, just steps away from her. “I love you,” she says, and it’s far from the first time she’s said it, but she knows it’s different now.