Under Her Spell

by Bridget Essex

  It was a shimmering woman, hands out to her, beseeching…

  With eyes brighter than stars.

  Please help him.

  The serpentine shadow began to move.

  ---

  Isabella’s eyes flew open, her breath thundering through her body as she sat upright, clutching the blanket in unyielding fists.

  It was only a dream.

  The witch pressed her fingers to her eyes and let out a long trembling sigh.

  It had happened again. She’d had this nightmare the night before, the night of her near-drowning, and now again, tonight. But that strange, monstrous shadow had been new. And the woman. “Please help him?” Help who? Isabella flopped back onto the bed, staring up at the dark vaulted ceiling of her little cottage and breathing out. The frustrating thing about dreams was that their messages were rarely simple; they chose the most obscure language, used symbols that took dream philosophers tomes and tomes to decipher.

  And poor Emily! Isabella worried that she must be disturbing her with her own restless sleep, waking in the middle of the night…

  But, Isabella soon realized, Emily was not in bed beside her. For a brief moment, the fear of the nightmare came back, crawling across her consciousness like a serpentine shadow… But Isabella shook her head, sighed out.

  The fire burned on the lower floor of the cottage, below the loft, and Isabella put on her robe as she gazed over the railing and down at her sweetheart, Emily's tousled mane sticking up in odd directions as she leaned over something on the bench by the fire, working with infinite concentration.

  The witch padded quietly down the ladder, not wishing to disturb Emily, but—really—she was a deer shapeshifter, and how impossible is it to sneak up on a deer?

  “Hello, darling,” said Emily quietly, not glancing up from the knife she held in her palm, wood shavings piled delicately at her feet, the carved stick in hand and Isabella’s great book spread out before her. “Worried about tomorrow?”

  “Not…really. Well. A little,” said Isabella, kneeling down beside the Changer. “I had a nightmare about a gigantic snake, I think—and… Whatever are you doing?”

  “Well,” said Emily softly, slowly, setting the knife down on the bench beside her and turning the stick this way and that. It was a beautiful bit of carving, with delicate and fluted vines and leaves and flowers embedded in the wood, spiraling around the long stick all the way to its end. It was almost as tall as Isabella, and if Isabella didn’t know any better, she would have thought it looked just like…

  “I’m making you a replacement broom,” said Emily, glancing up at her quickly in the half-light. Her eyes were wide and dark, and there was pain in them, but a soft surety, too. “After what happened… Well, I know you ordered a broom from Eliza, but you do go through brooms quite often, so..." She smiled faintly, teasingly. "I thought it’d make you glad to know that you have an extra.”

  Isabella stared at the stick in the Changer’s hands, then back to Emily’s face, mouth open for a long moment.

  “Do you like it?” asked Emily then, clearing her throat. “You were so sad to have lost yours…”

  Isabella felt the flush of heat moving over her skin as she stared at the Changer, heart beating quickly against her ribs. “You did this…for me?”

  “I have to find straw, is the only thing,” said Emily, glancing down at the great book. “But it’s a weaving spell, placing the straw on the broom, so I can do it quickly. It’ll just be hard to find straw this close to spring…”

  How could Isabella ever explain to Emily the enormity of what she felt in that moment? She decided to try, anyway. “This is the nicest…the kindest…the most lovely…” she stammered, and then, because there were really no words that could convey the totality of Isabella’s emotions on the subject, the witch carefully picked up the knife and set it on the kitchen table, swept the wood shavings into the fire, and climbed neatly into the Changer’s lap after setting the carved broom handle by the door.

  “You are lovely. You are kind,” she whispered. “And that is the most thoughtful thing anyone’s ever done for me.”

  “I love you,” said Emily, as if those three words were explanation enough for everything.

  And they were. Isabella kissed her, putting her arms about the Changer’s neck and, for once, drawing Emily’s face up to meet hers as she sat in her lap. The familiar, comforting scent of cinnamon and clove and coffee washed over Isabella, and she opened her mouth, breathing her lover in.

  Alice chose that moment to come indoors from her nightly hunt, clearing the kitty flap that Emily had thoughtfully placed for her in the back door of the magicmaker’s cottage. But the snow-speckled cat took one look at the amorous proceedings and sighed for a very long time before turning around and leaping back through the door, out into the cool wilds.

  Emily stood, carefully lifting the witch in her arms. When she kissed Isabella, there was a bittersweetness about the way her lips lingered over the witch’s mouth and neck and shoulder, a heat that trailed those kisses long after she’d moved on. The witch, flustered and desperate, wrapped her arms about Emily’s shoulders again when the Changer paused, staring down at Isabella for a long moment in the firelight.

  “What?” said Isabella, pleading. “What is it?” She traced a finger over Emily's cheek, her mouth.

  But Emily’s gaze lingered for a moment longer. “You had another nightmare. About the lake?”

  “Yes,” she said, shaking her head. What did it matter? Tomorrow afternoon, after the probably doomed Ostara story hour, she’d gather up a few spell ingredients, and then it would be farewell, nightmares! She was a witch, after all, and dream magic was one of the easiest of all witchcrafts—luckily enough for her.

  She took a breath to tell Emily all of these things, but the Changer then pressed her mouth down again at the curve of Isabella’s neck and shoulder.

  “I’m not ever going to forget,” she sighed against Isabella’s skin, “the way you looked, falling away from me into the water. I felt as if I'd lost you forever.”

  “You didn’t,” Isabella reminded her, placing a finger beneath the Changer’s chin and angling her head up so that their gazes could meet. “My darling, I'm still here. Still breathing and well. Still capable of entertaining those fifteen children tomorrow—I hope.”

  “It’s just… What if you hadn't… What if…”

  Isabella captured Emily’s mouth again, bound and determined to coax her Changer’s mind from gloomier thoughts to the decidedly happier realm. Clumsily, they climbed the ladder together, so locked in each other’s embraces that they fell, laughing in a heap, onto the loft floor.

  Poor Alice!

  She stayed outside all night.

  ---

  “Have I ever told you about the time I saw the Glossmer?” was the first thing that Emily said when Isabella woke. Their sheets were rumpled, and their clothing was scattered about, and the bright and new morning washed over their skin with gold.

  Isabella was wrapped so tightly within Emily’s arms and legs that it was hard to tell, in that moment, where she ended and the Changer began. She loved this half-awake state of warmth and togetherness, and she snuggled a little closer to Emily, sighing out and opening one bleary eye.

  “I don’t think so,” she said, yawning into the palm of her hand.

  “Glossmer,” repeated Emily, smiling at her sweetheart. “The creature that lives at the top of Glimmer Mountain. Lacey told you about it yesterday, remember?”

  “Darling,” said Isabella, sleepily pillowing her head in the crook of the Changer’s arm, “go back to sleep. We hardly got any sleep.” She reached up and fumbled for a moment, trying to find Emily’s nose with her lips. This she achieved only after kissing Emily’s cheek and right eyelid. She nestled down, then, yawning hugely.

  And, just like that, she remembered.

  Isabella’s eyes flew open as she inhaled deeply, sitting bolt upright. “Oh, my goddess. Oh, my goddess. Th
e kids. The Mother Temple. How could I have forgotten? Emily, I have to go. I’m late! I think I’m late—I don’t know!” She almost fell out of the bed as she fumbled with wrinkled clothing tossed upon the floor, her ankle twisted in the sheets.

  "Isabella!” called Alice from down below, the cat flap swinging as she bounded inside. “Lacey Turtle is looking for you! Something about a story at the temple?”

  “Can you… Alice, I’m so sorry. Can you tell her I’m just running a little late, and I’ll be right there? Wait for me at the Mother Temple, Alice, all right? In the solar room! I think!” Isabella picked up her dirty stockings from the floor and gazed at them for a moment before she began pulling them over her legs—she was too late to find fresh ones. “Alice, please?”

  “All right, all right,” said the cat testily. “But I’ve been down at Mrs. Goose’s all night, and—”

  “Alice!”

  “You owe me, is all,” sang the cat sweetly up to her, her whiskers decidedly smug. And then the cat flap swung again, and Alice was gone, presumably to do what Isabella had asked of her.

  Presumably.

  “I can’t believe I forgot…” muttered Isabella, breathless as she pulled on yesterday’s dress over her head, ignoring the messy, clean contents of her wardrobe in favor of immediate availability. “Emily, I’m so sorry… We’ll talk later, okay? I promise.” She dashed forward and kissed the Changer deeply, leaning on the edge of the bed.

  “Good luck,” said the Changer softly then, gripping the witch’s hand and squeezing it.

  “Thanks, Em,” the witch grinned, leaning down and brushing her lips over the Changer’s palm. Then she dashed to the loft ladder and almost tripped down the rungs as her stockings began to sag. When she reached bottom, the witch twisted her fingers and used magic for the most frivolous of all spells: the garter charm.

  Her cloak was only half on as she escaped the cottage, crunching over the snow in her unlaced boots. She ran all the way to Benevolence proper, and, for the hundredth time now, she wished she had not so carelessly lost her broom.

  Finally, she skidded to a halt before Mr. Ox’s bakery and made a feeble effort at straightening her wrinkled and mis-buttoned clothing.

  When Isabella entered the bakery, she pushed the door so hard and so quickly, the bell almost fell off the wall, plaintively chiming as the witch dashed up to the flour-coated counter which Mr. Ox stood behind, wiping his dusty hands on his apron as he cocked his head. “Isabella! What brings you—”

  “No time. Pastries for the kids. Ostara story,” said Isabella, panting, and thankfully Mr. Ox was quite used to Isabella’s strange ways and simply nodded, smiling as he turned and went to his back room, returning with a large silver tray laden with witch peak pastries and cookies shaped like Ostara eggs and sweet little purple bunnies. Isabella should have felt a bit guilty (but didn’t) as she thanked Mr. Ox profusely and left the shop, shoving one of the bunnies into her mouth and crunching furiously as she walked as fast as her broomless legs could carry her toward the Mother Temple.

  She was about to face down fifteen children who might, quite possibly, prove to be just as bad as that first-year class at the Academy. Or impossibly—but entirely possibly—worse.

  She needed all the sugar she could get.

  Alice bounded down to her from the steps of Lacey Turtle’s toyshop. “Lacey’s shipment of toys came in. She’s quite happy,” said the cat, stalking in front of Isabella and the enormous tray of pastries now, tail curved into a question mark. “She said that the children had probably not arrived at the temple yet, so you should still have a little time to prepare.”

  “Prepare? I thought I was just telling a story…” said Isabella, peering over the edge of the tray at her Familiar, who kept walking.

  “Don’t curse the messenger. I have no idea what any of this is really about. You never did tell me last night what it was that you’d volunteered yourself—and myself, apparently—for.”

  “Oh. You know. Being eaten alive by fifteen children as I try and fail to tell them the Ostara story. I thought it’d be fun,” Isabella murmured, eyes heavenward, as they reached the Mother Temple on the main drag in Benevolence.

  There was at least one Mother Temple in every town, and Isabella had been run out of a lot of towns, so she’d seen a lot of Mother Temples, the nondenominational buildings erected to accommodate all of the different religions practiced by the people of Arktos. The temples were typically white and tall enough to tower over other buildings, but here, in Benevolence, Eliza Goose’s dry goods shop had surpassed this temple’s height. Still, the roof of the Mother Temple was sharply peaked at the top, and, standing before it now, Isabella tilted back her head and took in the stained glass windows depicting different goddesses.

  At the front of the temple loomed four columns that rose from the top step to touch the far-off roof. They were carefully painted with scenes from the different seasons: spring bore flowers unfurling; summer was covered in rolling green hills and deep blue streams; autumn bore rich golds and sunset colors, peppered in a bounty of harvest vegetables; and the winter column was painted in ice blues and whites and boasted a beautiful mountain—Glimmer Mountain—at rest beneath a blanket of snow.

  As Isabella climbed the steps, with Alice by her side, she balanced the pastry tray carefully on her hip and brushed her fingers along the spring column, tracing a purple flower’s fluted petals and sighing out. She had never passed a winter on a mountain before this one, and she could now easily say that it had been lovely and picturesque, but she was now quite done with the snow and the bitter cold, thanks ever so much. She was craving spring.

  And, hopefully, spring would arrive tomorrow. Isabella turned back to look at the bare main street of Benevolence, at the snow devils dancing there in lieu of people, the windows in the shops and houses all lit against the gray morning.

  Spring couldn’t come fast enough.

  For everyone.

  Isabella and Alice moved into the Mother Temple through the main door, its rusted hinges screaming. In the entryway were the pegs to hang cloaks, and the slatted wooden boxes to keep the melting snow from boots off the floor, so Isabella set down the tray of pastries and hung up her cloak and placed her boots in the tray as Alice bounded into the solar room on the right, twitching her whiskers.

  “Lacey said she was going to set up the egg hunt in the sanctuary…” Alice called over her shoulder, even though Isabella already knew this. She let the cat mutter to herself as she followed her into the bright room. The regular seasonal school of Benevolence was held in the solar room; the lunar room, for prayer and ritual, was usually off limits to the kids on anything other than holidays and full and new moons. Now Isabella walked across the solar room and set down the tray of pastries upon a table that held terrible clay sculptures of animals made, she guessed, by the kids—though Isabella knew she could not possibly have done better than any of them.

  “I’m just going to go give reverence,” she told Alice quietly, to which the cat nodded, leaping up onto one of the benches and beginning to lick her back paws. Isabella left her Familiar to her own devices and stole out of the solar room and past the lunar room, entering through a more well-oiled and peaked door into the sanctuary proper.

  The cobalt blue tile on the floor was older than Isabella’s mother’s mother, she knew, and it was such a comforting balm, that particular hue of blue, the way that some of the tiny pieces were broken or missing, grouted over, reminding her of the big Mother Temple she’d frequented in Arktos City, once upon a time.

  Here, the darkness of the wood on the walls between the stained glass windows contrasted beautifully with the brilliant blue, directing her eyes ever upward to the windows that encompassed the sanctuary, with little tin plaques engraved with the names of the goddesses affixed beneath them. As a follower of the Rose Goddess Cordelia, Isabella blew a kiss to the window on her immediate right: it depicted Cordelia, the Lady of the World, She Who Gives Us Beauty, Love
and Kindness, holding a basket of roses and gazing down with an abundance of love, soft brown hair flowing out away from her perfectly painted stained glass face.

  For good measure, Isabella blew a kiss, too, to the Changer goddess Morpho, Emily’s matron goddess, portrayed in the stained glass window that was at the front and center of the sanctuary, the focal point for good reason in Benevolence, the town of Changers. Morpho appeared in the window as Isabella had often seen her depicted: brown skin burnished as she held a wolf mask over her face, half removing it, only her fierce, green eyes gazing over the top of the mask, down at Isabella. Her many-colored shirt was dazzling, made of differently hued glasses fused together, and the goddess’s black hair was filled with stars.

  And here, immediately to the left, was a window design that Isabella had never paid much mind to before; the name on the tin plaque beneath it made her pause. It read, simply, “The Glossmer.” Eliza had claimed yesterday that the Glossmer brings spring. Isabella tilted her head as she examined the image before her. The window was hazy, as if misted over, which is why Isabella had never really noticed it next to the more vibrant and colorful goddess windows. There were only two different colors of glass in the Glossmer's window, white and green, and the pieces looked wavy and swirled, as if they had been melted. Or, perhaps, the artist had purposefully meant for the creature’s form to appear vague…

  As Isabella stared at the window, she heard the door to the Mother Temple open and shut, and she dashed back into the hallway and entryway. There was a little boy standing on the front rug, scuffing his boots and sniffling as he wiped his too-pale nose on the back of his sleeve. His black-as-soot hair stuck up at odd angles, and his eyes were dark and quick as he grinned slyly up at her.

  “Mornin’, ma’am. I’m Billy Crow. My pa’s Mr. Benedict Crow. Miss Lacey told Pa you was to be tellin’ the 'Stara story.”