Toil & Trouble

by Jessica Spotswood

  “Inside?” Her mind raced, wondering whether they planned to steal the mule or light a fire.

  “It’s only fair,” Delbert said, pulling a handful of nails from his pocket. “If we’re not allowed in, I don’t know why you should get out.”

  * * *

  Elsa sat on her bed, listening to the men laugh as they nailed her door shut. Her shuttered windows left the room stiflingly dark. They were small enough to keep out predators, but now she felt like cornered prey.

  When the hammering stopped, she heard Del muttering, then Roy yelled, “Damnit!”

  She peeked through the shutters to see him dancing around, holding an injured hand. Delbert was laughing as he put the pin in one of the traps. He placed it gingerly below the window, looking up to wink at her visible eye.

  Captured, she thought. To what end, she wasn’t sure. “Delbert!” she called. “What if I need to use the privy?”

  “You got a bucket?”

  She paused. “I suppose.”

  He lifted the rifle. “Better learn to use it.”

  * * *

  Delbert was smart enough to ignore Elsa’s questions, but Roy was easily annoyed and eager to prove himself clever. “Why bother feeding me?” she asked the third day, when he slid the daily bowl of corn mush onto the windowsill. “Seems a fool way to starve a woman out.”

  Roy snorted. “Can’t get those horses with you dead.”

  Elsa studied the tin cup of water he’d provided, not knowing she had makeshift plumbing. “You think Zeb will just hand them on over when he sees me held hostage?”

  “If he comes back, you’ll play along, or you’ll both end up in the garden with your momma.”

  Elsa resisted the urge to toss the water in his face and snapped the shutters closed. Two weeks, she told herself. Two weeks and Zeb will come back.

  The chances of Del and Roy leaving peacefully with the horses seemed unlikely now, but she wasn’t sure she had any alternative but to wait them out. She’d already bruised her shoulders trying to open the door. Without a saw, it would be difficult to widen a window or the trapdoor, and the noise would draw the men’s attention. Even if she did escape on foot, they’d quickly catch up to her on Otis. She might could steal him from the barn...if only the men weren’t sleeping in shifts to prevent it.

  She’d underestimated them. She wouldn’t make that mistake again.

  Taking stock of her remaining provisions, she figured that with careful planning and small portions, she could survive with full strength until Zeb came back, possibly a week more. But if something happened to him...or if he chose not to return...

  Well. No point in deciding which was worse.

  She knew it was weeks too early, but just in case, she used her flint fire starter to light a candle in the northwest window.

  * * *

  In the morning, she watched in helpless fury as Roy and Delbert harvested her entire garden. They tied Otis to a porch rail in sight of her window and tossed the stalks and stem to the mule, laughing as his stomach began to bloat. For days after, they left him outside while expanding their own space inside the barn. The answer to “what if Zeb doesn’t return” became apparent: Delbert and Roy were preparing to winter over in the oasis.

  At least we won’t starve immediately, Elsa thought, but it was little comfort. Gathering sufficient stores for herself was challenge enough; the men knocked off early every afternoon and would never be able to provision all three of them through the winter.

  Elsa struggled to keep herself occupied. She did daily chores as best she could, sweeping the floor, making the bed, even giving herself sponge baths at the basin. She emptied her bucket commode out the southeast window, where the wind was most likely to blow the smell away. Throughout the day, she checked on Otis, always comforted to see him alive, if not well cared for.

  But her brain still raced from anger and despair to frustration and boredom, each feeling as dangerous as the last. Wild scenarios played out in her mind—Zeb arrested, murdered, caught in a hailstorm, swept up by a twister.

  She kept a tally of marks on the windowsill, counting down the days, impatient for two weeks to pass, and terrified they wouldn’t bring Zeb with them. But stir-craziness still snuck up on her. One moment, she was gazing around the cabin, thinking of her parents. The next, she was furious. Treasures! What use were they to her now? She crossed the room and kicked a drum made of cowhide, earning herself a warning shout from outside.

  On the eighth morning, she began to sort her belongings according to a new perspective. The bone awl from a beading kit could be repurposed as a different kind of tool. The beautiful carved cottonwood dolls might have to fuel the wood-burning stove, though it hurt her soul to consider. Few things would serve as weapons, and many were cruelly useful for travel. She put those under a blanket, out of demoralizing sight.

  That afternoon, she lay on her bed with arms extended, attempting to test her powers. Try as she might, she could only move small trickles around, not the tidal wave she needed to drown her enemies. She spent the entire next day trying to create a sinkhole in the main path, but only managed to twist Roy’s ankle with a small hole.

  If only I could summon more than water, she thought, remembering a similar despair years ago. If only I could summon Zeb home.

  * * *

  By the day when fourteen candles lay spent beneath the windowsill, Elsa’s mind was beginning to melt. The heat alone was cause enough, but if she opened the shutters, the men would come taunt her until she closed herself in again. Her stomach gnawed constantly, but she didn’t dare let herself eat more than one day’s rations. She’d read every book in her stack at least twice, rearranging the tomes by author, by title, by size. She’d patched every hole in all three of the dresses she owned, but her thread supply was small, and the brownish light that came through the shutters made sewing difficult.

  Otis began to bray the panicked call he made when wolves were nearby. Elsa’s heart jumped into her throat, knowing wolves wouldn’t circle in broad daylight. She ran to the window and saw him snubbed to a post near the barn.

  “No!” she screamed.

  A shot ran out.

  Shaking, she closed the window and sat on the floor for hours until, to her horror, her stomach growled. She leaped to her feet and fashioned a mask from a handkerchief, but nothing could block out the scent of Delbert and Roy cooking her best friend.

  * * *

  After nightfall, a noisy pack of coyotes came to pick the mule’s bones. Their caterwauling drove Elsa from her bed, where she’d been lying all evening, face covered with both arms. The noise awoke something frantic, consumed her with the need to escape. She dropped to her knees at the trapdoor and tore at the floorboards, desperately trying to widen the space. When blood dripped from her fingernails into the spring below, she grabbed the bone awl to pry at the wood.

  By the time the coyotes wandered away, her energy was gone, too. But the larger hole soothed something in her mind, something she couldn’t quite make herself examine yet. Exhausted, she realized her candle was out, and raised her shaking arms to light another. But the drawer was empty. She’d never bothered to keep much of a supply—the darkness had never troubled her before.

  Lighting the last lantern wick instead, she collapsed into bed and uneasy dreams.

  * * *

  Her days became a mindless blur. When the wind blew hard enough to cover the noise, she scraped at the floor with the awl. When it broke, she dismantled the birdcage and fashioned new tools that made the work much quicker.

  At night, all of her wooden possessions served their duty as beacon fuel, as did the bird’s feathers and the cornhusk dolls. She tore her extra clothes into strips, but they smoked and smoldered instead of providing a flame. The books burned too quickly, singing her hand as she beat out the flames before they consumed the cabin.

&nb
sp; Roy and Delbert jeered at her. “He ain’t coming back,” Roy yelled from the darkness. “Zeb’s long gone and he ain’t interested in a skinny thing like you.”

  “You ain’t in love now, are you?” Delbert heckled. “You don’t really think that white man’s in love with you?” They both cackled.

  Elsa paid them no mind anymore. In the deepest corner of her heart, she dreaded that what they said was true, but life on the Llano had taught her that survival always came before feelings.

  She added the horsehair wig to her pile, which made her realize she’d overlooked another asset. Digging through her father’s old belongings, she found his straight razor, brought it to her head, and quickly lopped off both her braids, adding them to her burn pile. Next she planned to try the feather mattress. It wasn’t as if she’d been sleeping anyway. Then she’d have to break apart her cupboard, burn her shelves, and if pressed, the mantel, too.

  But not the walls. The walls were her captors, but also her protection.

  Unless.

  Stricken by the idea that had simmered for weeks, Elsa went to the southern window. Roy and Delbert sat in their usual place, playing cards. They were obviously hunting enough rabbit and prairie chicken to keep their stomachs content. Her own gave a painful twist, but she’d die before admitting to them she was hungry.

  She was going to die, regardless. When their stores ran out, they’d stop bringing her the tiny rations they provided now. She’d have to get out.

  She couldn’t keep waiting for Zeb.

  But she would leave a light on like she’d promised. If she had to burn the whole thing down.

  * * *

  Elsa spent her last day sitting perfectly still, staring at the memories she’d be leaving behind.

  No. The memories she’d keep. Only the items would be abandoned.

  Night slipped more slowly than usual over the mesa, hiding the grasslands inch by inch until it enveloped the house. Outside, Roy and Delbert began their usual taunting. “Not lightin’ that candle tonight?” one called. She could no longer tell their voices apart. They had ceased to be people to her, just specters haunting a nightmare. One began to sing a cruel song about a wife left behind to mourn a husband gone to war. “He ain’t coming back for you,” the other called.

  He doesn’t need to. I’m coming to find him.

  She threw back the shutters for the first time in weeks. “I got a new proposition,” she yelled. The singing stopped. She felt their eyes on her. “I propose,” she said, voice splintering, “that y’all enjoy yourselves in hell.”

  Both men jumped to their feet, guns pulled. Elsa didn’t hurry. They couldn’t get through the door any easier than she could. Taking careful aim, she clicked the flint against the steel, sending a spark into her braids on the windowsill. From there, she caught the clothing scraps she’d soaked in lantern oil. Then the mattress. The cursed front door. The walls.

  As the men crashed against the house, she gathered her travel supplies from under their blanket, then lowered herself through the floorboards into the pool she’d driven underground hours before. Crawling on her belly, she emerged behind the house with the torch she’d prepared, lighting it from the flames already shooting outside. Roy and Delbert didn’t notice as she raced for the barn. The sod and adobe wouldn’t burn, but the wooden supports and mule feed would consume all they’d stored inside.

  “Get to the well!” she heard one yell. “The barn’s on fire!”

  Elsa stuck to the perimeter until she reached the corner of her oasis, then turned back to tell it goodbye. The cabin was already half gone, the barn not long behind it, the yard so brightly lit that she could see her flowers wilting. Her mother’s handmade gravestone reflected the flames, and she pressed her fingers to her lips. “Goodbye, Momma. Tell Daddy I love him.”

  The grandfather clock gave a final clang as the roof of the house caved in. She pictured her stuffed snake writhing in its second death.

  “Hurry up with that bucket!” one voice yelled.

  “The well is empty!” the other shouted back.

  Elsa turned and set off northeast, hoping her love was just lost and not gone. The constant wind blew the fire south. She brought nothing but the water along behind her.

  * * * * *

  BEWARE OF GIRLS WITH CROOKED MOUTHS

  by Jessica Spotswood

  JO IS HALFWAY down the stairs when the vision strikes. She stumbles, her feet scrambling on the steps, hands clutching at the banister. The words scald her throat—prophecies always want to be spoken aloud—but she swallows them back, bitter as black tea. Her lips tingle and burn, her vision swims, and then—

  She is somewhere else, somewhere not-here; she is descending another staircase, a grand wooden affair that curves as gracefully as the prow of one of Papa’s ships. Her hand rests on the banister, but it is not her hand as it is now; it is older, wrinkled, with blue veins lining her thin skin like rivers. An enormous sapphire anchors her ring finger and dread anchors her heart. Four blue-eyed girls are gathered in the hall below. They are waiting for her.

  “It’s happening again, isn’t it, Grandmother?” a blonde girl says. Dimly, Jo registers that she is Grandmother, that the girl’s ocean eyes are like hers, like Eleanor’s and Georgiana’s and their mother’s before them. They are the unnervingly blue eyes of a Campbell witch.

  “We have to find a way to stop this. I won’t stumble over any more cousins washed up dead on the shore.” A girl with dark curls and apple cheeks plants her hands on her wide hips.

  “If one of us has gone mad, she won’t stop till she’s the only one left standing. Not unless we stop her.” Josephine feels fond of this small, angry, bespectacled girl. “That’s what happened last time, isn’t it?”

  “And,” the sour-faced blonde says, looking straight at Josephine, “the time before that. Once the madness starts, only one Campbell witch will survive in each generation. Isn’t that right, Grandmother? That’s what the Book says.”

  “The Book is wrong.” Josephine’s hand trembles on the banister, and she makes a conscious effort to stop it. She cannot betray any weakness, any regret for her deception. These girls will smell it on her like blood in the water. “My sisters—they ran. They may still be alive because of it. I altered the Book. Recorded their deaths, so that no one would look for them.”

  She expects an explosion, a flurry of accusations that does not come.

  “They left Mercer’s Cove?” The blonde frowns.

  “They left you?” the apple-cheeked girl asks.

  The girl with spectacles crosses her arms over her scrawny chest. “I wouldn’t be sorry to see the back of any of you. But we have a better chance of surviving if we work together.”

  The fourth girl—tall and willowy, and silent up to this point—steps forward, her fists clenched at her sides. “I’m not a murderer, no matter what any of you might think. I’ll stand beside anyone who’s willing to stay and fight.”

  These brave, foolish children, Josephine thinks. They are enormously powerful, clever girls, and yet they are still so terribly, terribly young. They have been spoon-fed warnings not to trust one another by doting, oblivious fathers and by damaged, unforgiving aunts who still wear the scars of the last generation in their eyes and on their lips and scored into their hearts. But they don’t believe it. Even when presented with the truth, they think they will be the ones to change the curse. To not only survive, but to do it together.

  Josephine has lived a long time now, but she’s never seen a Campbell witch able to choose sisterhood over sovereignty. It’s not in their nature. Herself included.

  She stares down at the sapphire ring on her finger. By all rights, it should have been Georgiana’s. She tries to summon up the memory of Georgiana’s face, but it’s murky, as though her sister is lying at the bottom of the sea.

  For all she knows, that may
be true. She has not seen either of her sisters for almost forty years. They could be long dead—but she would know, wouldn’t she? She would feel it?

  Her hand trembles again on the smooth wood of the banister. For nearly half a century, she has been the matriarch of the Winchester family, the richest and most powerful woman in Mercer’s Cove.

  But she would trade it all to be able to remember her little sister’s smile.

  * * *

  Jo breaks to the surface, gasping. For a moment, frantic, she still cannot picture Georgiana’s face. Her mind is empty except for the feel of the glossy wood beneath her palm, the heft of that sapphire ring on her finger, and the dizzying panic that pulls at her like the tide.

  “Jo? Jo!” There. Georgiana: a riot of soft brown curls framing a heart-shaped face. A pink rosebud mouth and freckles across the bridge of her nose that will persist, despite Elle’s potions. Georgie wraps a long arm around Jo’s shoulder and shepherds her down the stairs, across the hall, and into the parlor.

  “Are you hurt?” Georgie settles next to her on the rose-velvet settee.

  What have I done? Jo raises her hand—now smooth and freckled and empty of adornments—to her dismayed mouth. What will I do? That sapphire ring—it’s meant for Georgie. Nathaniel Winchester let slip to his sister, Alice, that he intends to ask his grandmother for her sapphire betrothal ring, and of course Alice told Elle, and Elle told Georgie, and Georgie’s been floating around the house like the cat who ate the canary ever since.

  Georgie waggles her fingers in front of Jo’s face. “Did you knock your head?”

  “No. Just give me a moment.” She has to think. Why was she wearing Nathaniel’s ring? How is that possible? He’s never given her a second thought, nor she him.

  “That’s a relief,” Georgie chatters on. “No broken bones, no concussed head this time. Why must prophecies happen so often on the stairs?”

  “It’s a between place,” Jo says faintly. That’s what Mam told her. Doorways and stairs.