Toil & Trouble

by Jessica Spotswood

  I don’t need forgiveness. I don’t want forgiveness. You are in no position to forgive. You hurt Blue.

  “For I have sinned.”

  I am a sinner. You are a sinner. We are human, and therefore, we sin.

  “It has been seven days since my last confession.”

  It’s truly been months and months and months, because what have I to confess? Who are you to listen? And why is it that women are believed to have introduced sin? Eve was the original witch, a woman whose curiosity changed her entire world. And you would have burned her for it.

  I hesitated. My speech had been so practiced, so careful. Why couldn’t I say it? I had to say something. None of the girls in the camp could ever come into the reconciliation room and claim to be without sin, because we were witches and we were sinners and we were women.

  Don’t you understand, you stupid girl, the old priest from my childhood told me once. It is in a woman’s nature to sin. You can’t help it.

  “I have lied,” I said. “I have given into temptation.”

  “Tell me again,” the priest replied. “You tempted that man to sin? You cast a hex on him?”

  What temptation? I’d bring him a meal, or his morning papers, or write down his meetings, and he’d grab me with a laugh as I walked by. I’d go home and try to wash the memory from my skin. He would call me sweetheart, dear, love, pet, because I might as well have been any woman—any woman at all—unworthy of a name. What hex? When did I cast it? Was it when my eyes were on the floor (meeting his gaze made me want to shrink inside my skin, minimize myself, hide), or was it in the murmured excuses I gave to leave (back to work, sir. I have so much work)? Perhaps my crime was simply the misfortune of being a female in public. Was that it? Was it my body, Father? I was born with it, and it’s mine, and I thought he took it from me, but when I have my axe in my hands or when I lie down with Obsidian at night, it finally, finally, finally feels like my own again.

  Let me tell you, Father. Let me tell you my greatest sin. If I cast a hex one day, it’ll be to destroy him. And you. And this place.

  “No,” I told him. My voice was like steel. “No. But I wish I had.”

  VIII.

  * * *

  I was worried the guards would take me into the woods and make me disappear.

  As the priest escorted me out of the reconciliation room (his grip on me was so tight that each finger left a bruise) to the main part of the chapel, the girls were still in prayer. I caught their gazes, and they all looked afraid for me.

  They looked as if they might kill him for me.

  When Obsidian moved as if to stand (to do what? I don’t know), I caught her gaze and shook my head.

  I didn’t want any of them to disappear, too.

  The priest took me to a solitary cabin deeper in the woods. For days, he forced me to go without food, without heat, without anything. Before he left, he told me this: Pray. Pray to God that He should give you mercy. Day and night, witch. Nothing but prayer, until you’re begging me to let you out.

  I have not broken enough to beg yet. I plot, and I wish. I write these words with my fingertip on the dirty floor, because I will not be silenced.

  And because I will not be silenced, I cast my first spell: to tell the other girls I am here.

  I’m not gone, I whispered to them on the wind. I swear I heard it shake the trees. I’m still alive. They didn’t make me disappear.

  The following day, a panel near the door opened, and the priest delivered food.

  “You’re lucky,” he told me. “You don’t deserve this, but someone reminded me that ‘if my enemy is hungry, feed him.’”

  And that’s how I know it was Blue, and she made a deal with the devil again.

  Obsidian has snuck out to see me every night since my spell. I hear her whisper my name and settle in the dirt on the outside of the cabin. She keeps her vigil there until morning.

  Last night she came just when I felt as if I might give up hope. The priest hadn’t brought food for two days, and the scent of wood made me imagine terrible things. I had nightmares of being back in my prison cell, waiting to burn.

  “Night?” Obsidian’s voice was like a warm breeze in winter. “Are you awake?”

  I pressed my hands to the door that separated us, and imagined myself sitting next to her beneath the canopy of trees. “Yes.”

  I swear I felt the heat of her hands through the wood, as impossible as that was. I wanted to touch her again, wanted her to press her lips to my forehead like she did just before I fell asleep every evening.

  “Porcelain is sick,” Obsidian whispered. “Blue had to give her your rations.”

  “Good.”

  Not good. None of this was good. Blue shouldn’t have to be the girl sacrificed to the monster to save us all. Every one of us should take the monster’s head.

  “I miss you,” Obsidian breathed.

  I shut my eyes and pressed my forehead to the door and pretended it was her skin, still warm from my kiss. “If the priest leaves me here—”

  “Shh. We won’t let that happen.”

  Behind my lids, I saw her face. Her high cheekbones and brown skin, her beautiful endless eyes. “Say a spell for me then,” I told her. “Send it into the world, so I’ll see you again.”

  “Shall I tell you my spell?” Obsidian asked. “I say it during prayers. One day I’ll snap, and I’ll make them all bleed.” I hear her nails scratch down the wood, her next words like a spark of fire on tinder. “Because I am a wolf, and wolves survive.”

  Long after she left, I whispered her words in the dark room. They were my spell now, too, repeated when I had little hope left.

  I am a wolf, and wolves survive.

  IX.

  * * *

  I am still in the solitary cabin. Obsidian tells me it has been nine days, but it feels like an eternity.

  Last night, the girls all came to visit me. I heard their voices through the darkness, and they heard mine, and we told each other of the people who brought us here. Of why we are accused of witchcraft.

  * * *

  She is not normal enough, too fae-like, too strange.

  She laughs too freely, loves too freely, uses her body too freely.

  She is too assertive, too independent, strives for too much.

  She is too smart for her own good, studies too much, reads too much.

  She is too masculine, too forceful, too aggressive.

  She is too feminine, too sensitive, feels too much.

  * * *

  Every woman is never enough; she’s always too much. We angered someone, somewhere, for our too muchness.

  If to be too much is to be a witch, then I am a witch, and we are all witches. I told this to the other girls, and I heard them all whisper back yes, because to be a witch means our too muchness serves a purpose: it gives us power.

  We all whispered spells that sounded like songs, our voices freed into the darkness. Flying, flying, flying.

  I hope the priest looks hard at that cabin the next time he takes a girl there. Because if he studies the door, just at the bottom, he’ll find the names we carved there of our accusers.

  Every one of us has someone we want to destroy.

  X.

  * * *

  When I was finally released from the solitary cabin, the other girls crowded around me during the night as if to protect me. Obsidian is always next to me when we sleep, and we whisper words in each other’s embrace. Nonsense things, because we are often so exhausted these days.

  “What’s your name?” I asked her the other night.

  After all these months, our names remained like our dreams: unspoken, secret. They reminded us of all the things we had lost. Lives we could never have back.

  Obsidian and I tried to make peace with our new names. She would tell me how she cherished
the night, how she loved to gaze up at the stars and dream and wonder. Night, my dear Night, she would tell me, don’t you realize the stars are most radiant then? She would trace constellations among my freckles and name each one.

  So I told her about obsidian, and how people once carved the rock to make blades and arrows to hunt, and she loved it.

  And then, on other nights when the girls slept more soundly, she would kiss my lips and call me her Devi, her goddess. She would whisper a translation of the Devi Sukta from the Rigveda into my ear, and I would fall asleep listening to the words: They know it not, yet I reside in the essence of the Universe. Hear, one and all, the truth as I declare it.

  But I wanted to know her true name, for her to know mine. I wanted to listen to her murmur it when she curled against me and stroked my hair and sang me another hymn.

  “Vidya. My name is Vidya,” she breathed against my pulse. What a beautiful name. It sounded like a spell, one for hope. Something that would make flowers grow. “Yours?”

  “Faye.”

  She repeated my name, and took my hands in hers. Vidya pressed her lips to each cut, each bruise, each callus along my palms.

  When I woke the next morning, every injury was gone, as if they had never existed at all.

  XI.

  * * *

  It is winter now. The snow is high, and the priest and the guards cannot make it to our cabin. Oh, what a relief, to be standing on a Sunday instead of kneeling. But it’s grown too cold, and the coal has run out, and so I write this again with my heart. Yet I am not despairing, you see. None of us are. We are elated.

  We cast a spell for fire.

  It was beautiful. You must know how beautiful it is to stand, to hold the hands of my sisters, my friends, my lover. To squeeze our fingers tight and shut our eyes, and hear our voices. Oh, our voices. They merged together as one. Our lungs swelled with air and our hearts grew with hope, and when I opened my eyes, everything looked brighter, more vivid, and we all had fire between our hands.

  I understand now that magic is not for wickedness, not for the devil, not for those with cruel hearts. It’s for hope. For survival. It thrives in the darkness not because it is dark in nature, but because the fire shines brightest then.

  This is what witchcraft looks like: It is women holding hands, harnessing power, and changing their fate. If every woman practiced such a thing, we would learn what Eve did after she ate that apple. When she held knowledge in her hands.

  We would upend the world.

  XII.

  * * *

  The snow melted in a circle around the cabin from the heat of our magic. Flowers grew overnight, the only signs of life in an otherwise winter landscape. Wildflowers, some of them. But others are there, too: heliotrope and tulips, marigold and snowdrops, red poppies that seem more vivid than I remember. A flower bed of all seasons, all colors, blanketing the ground between the forest and front stoop of our cabin, as if to protect us from the priest and the guards whose cabins are still buried in snow.

  We barely have enough food to last between us, but we aren’t worried. What else can we do but take this reprieve and lie among the flowers and welcome the air on our skin? It’s been so long since we’ve had rest.

  Yesterday, as the other girls watched the clouds overhead, I pulled Vidya away with me to the other side of the cabin and we sat together among the wildflowers there.

  Vidya made a crown of daisies for me, and said my name in wonder. Then she called me her Devi, her goddess, because this is still our private name, and I want to keep it, too. “You look wild,” she told me, stroking her fingertips down my cheek. “Like a fairy. Would you steal me away from this place if you could?”

  Her black eyes were shining and her dark hair tangled around her face, and her ochre skin glowed like fire. I called her my wolf, my beautiful wolf, and wished I had a hymn to sing to her. “No, I wouldn’t steal you away,” I said, pressing her into the flowers and twining our fingers together. I loved the heat of her, her smile, her eyes, her voice, her everything. “Let’s not run, Vidya. We won’t disappear like the others.”

  “What, then?” she asked me.

  I smiled down at her. “I would follow you, my wolf. We’ll all be wild together, you and me and the other girls. Just like this. We won’t fear anything anymore, will we? We’ll burn our path through the trees, wolves and witches and goddesses, and we’ll make the world ours.”

  “Yes,” Vidya said. “Yes.”

  I leaned forward and captured her lips with my own. She made a small sound, a wild sound, a wolf sound; if it had been a song, it would have been the most beautiful one I’d ever heard. She kissed me back, and I sighed against her lips. My own song.

  Vidya slid her hands down my shirt, undoing buttons. When she had me bare, she smoothed her palms across my skin, my hips, my thighs, murmuring words as if in prayer. Her fingers were not frantic, but gentle. So gentle. She counted the marks on my body, the signs of my penance, and I did the same to her.

  We whispered spells against each other’s lips. We composed our own hymn, our own enchantment. Our bodies were the altars on which we practiced our magic.

  Later, we watched the sky dim above the trees. “Faye,” Vidya whispered with her lips to my temple. “Witch. Beautiful. My witch.”

  Long after our magic faded, we still glowed like the remnants of dying stars.

  XIII.

  * * *

  The snow has melted, and the priest hid away in the chapel once he saw our garden. I write this from the cabin, where the guards have locked us inside.

  We watched others come up over the mountain, men who drew their guns and pointed them at us. They had to bring tinder with them, because everything here is too damp to catch fire. We can hear them now, setting it all around the cabin, amongst our flowers. I imagine them trampling petals with their boots, attempting to squash our magic down, to light it aflame, to destroy it.

  They intend to burn us inside.

  Vidya is holding my hand as I write this, and before anything else I must tell you that I love her. She is my Obsidian, my wolf, my beautiful dark-eyed girl. She taught me how to hold an axe.

  And I love the girls. My coven. Our wolf pack, Vidya is saying with a smile. Shall I tell you our names? We are no longer secret. We are no longer afraid.

  We are Vidya and Gabby, Chloe and Alice, Maria and Tasbeeh, Grace and Antonia, Cecile and Daniella, Emily and Mahira, and me. Faye.

  We are thirteen. We have always been thirteen. And we are wolves, and goddesses, and witches.

  Here we leave our handprints scorched into this wood, so they will all be forced to remember us, remember our names, remember what they did, and how they tried to silence us.

  The other girls are calling for me now, telling me to get ready. But before I go, I must write another lesson here for those who come after us if we don’t succeed, for the women who find their way into this forest and are tempted to drop their axes and disappear. I am writing this now with my heart and with my mind and with my magic where I know everyone will see:

  Look at our handprints. Memorize our names.

  We did not go quietly.

  * * * * *

  AUTHOR BIOS

  BRANDY COLBERT is the critically acclaimed author of Pointe, Little & Lion, and Finding Yvonne. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in several anthologies for young people. Brandy lives and writes in Los Angeles. Her favorite movie witch is Louise Miller from Teen Witch.

  ZORAIDA CÓRDOVA is the award-winning author of The Vicious Deep trilogy, The Brooklyn Brujas series, and Hollow Crown. Her short fiction has appeared in the New York Times bestselling anthology Star Wars: From a Certain Point of View. She is a New Yorker at heart and her favorite witch is the Evil Queen herself, Regina Mills.

  ANDREA CREMER is the New York Times and international bestselling author of the Nightshade
series, The Inventor’s Secret series, and Invisibility (with David Levithan). She splits her time between the lakes and forests of Minnesota and the mountains and deserts of southern California. Her favorite literary witch is Morgan Le Fey.

  KATE HART is the author of After the Fall and a contributor to the anthology Hope Nation. She is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and lives in northwest Arkansas, where her family owns a treehouse-building business. She sells woodworking and inappropriate fiber arts at TheBadasserie.net. As for favorite witches, she dressed as The Wicked Witch of the West for five childhood Halloweens in a row.

  EMERY LORD is the author of Open Road Summer, The Start of Me & You, The Names They Gave Us, and When We Collided, which won the Schneider Family Book Award. She lives in Cincinnati with her family and several overflowing bookshelves. Her favorite literary witches are the Owens sisters.

  ELIZABETH MAY is the author of the YA fantasy trilogy The Falconer (The Falconer, The Vanishing Throne, The Fallen Kingdom). She was born and raised in California before moving to Scotland, where she earned her PhD at the University of St. Andrews. She currently resides in Edinburgh with her husband and two cats. She loves quiet, heroic witches with an abiding loyalty to family and friends, like Practical Magic’s Sally Owens.

  ANNA-MARIE McLEMORE grew up hearing la llorona in the Santa Ana winds and enraptured by stories of witches like Morgan le Fay. She is the author of The Weight of Feathers, a finalist for the 2016 William C. Morris YA Debut Award, and 2017 Stonewall Honor Book When the Moon Was Ours, which was long-listed for the National Book Award in Young People’s Literature. Her latest novels are Wild Beauty, a School Library Journal Best Book of 2017, and Blanca & Roja.

  TEHLOR KAY MEJIA is the author of When We Set the Dark on Fire. Her short fiction also appears in the anthology All Out. Tehlor lives in the wild woods and alpine meadows of southern Oregon with her daughter. Her favorite literary witch is Circe from The Odyssey.