by Laura Rich
The Binding Witch and the Fortune Taker
The Kate Roark Magic Series #1
Laura Rich
Copyright © 2017 by Laura Rich
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Created with Vellum
For my Family
Contents
When you’re finished reading The Binding Witch and the Fortune Taker, check out this short story set in the same world, for free!
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Can’t wait for the next installment of this series?
Acknowledgments
About the Author
When you’re finished reading The Binding Witch and the Fortune Taker, check out this short story set in the same world, for free!
Want to know more about the world of Kate Roark and The Binding Witch? Check out Soul Coin, a free short story about Indira, Kate’s best friend.
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I want more magic!
1
I’d seen Mom do this probably a hundred times, but it never stopped creeping me out. Not the whole midwife thing - I can handle a little blood and gore. It was what happened after.
The Binding.
I glanced at the new mom, a woman named Jessica, holding the baby my own mother had just ushered into the world.
“Hurry! Fix her so she’s not a witch.” Jessica’s eyes were shining with tears of joy and anticipation as the silky black bands of the binding spell slipped around her newborn’s damp skin. A magical echo of the charmed fabric sank into the baby’s skin and the poor creature let out a small wavering cry.
An early winter gale-force wind buffeted against the windows of the elegantly-appointed bedroom. I squeezed Jessica’s hand and released it, then rose to close the heavy curtains, and resumed my place for the next part that made my skin crawl. Not just a metaphor, the binding ribbon fixed a barrier around the body, locking the magic inside. I shuddered. They ask us to do this to their babies.
“Hold on, little one,” my mother said. “Almost done.”
The babe wailed and a tiny array of lights formed the barrier around its body and throbbed with a pearlescent glow once, twice, then dimmed to nothing. A magical christening that removed, rather than granted, divinity.
Jessica caught her breath in a short, surprised burst that touched my heart. Not many Bindan women appreciated the beauty of magic, much less the bitter ache of its light snuffed out.
It used to hurt my feelings to see a mother’s eagerness to be rid of her daughter’s magical birthright. Boys were easier, because we didn’t have to bind them. The mother just had to avoid kissing the baby boy in the first day of life to halt the trigger that brought forth their magic. You’d better believe a Bindan mother was separated from her baby boy for at least two days after birth to avoid that from happening. The Bindan were a careful people when it came to avoiding the taint of magic.
I would have done anything to have the magic they had thrown away. I’m a hedge witch: the child of a witch mother and human father. Sometimes the mother’s magic got passed down to the child, and sometimes it didn’t.
In my case, it didn’t.
My mother’s nod got my attention.
I sighed. “And that’s it.” I forced a smile and cut the umbilical cord on the other side of the clamp with a wet snip. I quickly swaddled the infant and passed her to her mother. “She’s all yours.”
I sat back and sighed. The most magic I could do was limited to some minor kitchen brews: potions that even a human could do, if they had the right ingredients, in the right order, at the right time, and for the right reason. But that kind of knowledge is closely guarded. No being not born of a witch would even know where to look for such things.
“Thank you, Kathy,” Jessica said, and gathered her babe to her chest.
“It’s Kate.” I said. They never got my name right. At least she was close.
She ignored my correction. ”And thank you, Clea.” Jessica said.
She was in a world of her own, so I let it slide. She stared at her perfect, non-magical child and snuggled in the down comforter.
It’s not like she’s the first Bindan who got my name wrong.
I’m just the help who managed the birthing schedule and coordinated our midwife visits around our other job in the region’s renaissance festivals, made sure we had all the medical supplies we needed and enough gas in the truck to get here when they needed us.
So, you know. Nobody special.
Mom watched me. “You okay?” she whispered.
I liked that she always checked in on me when I got upset. I appreciated the understanding, and the time to just sit with my feelings before I shared them.
“Sure,” I shrugged. It’s not like talking about it was going to change anything. “I’ll be fine.”
2
While we were busy cleaning up, and Jessica was lost in a world of her own, the bedroom door closed with a soft sigh that jerked my attention away from my tasks.
Mom shot me a knowing look.
I nodded. We had an illicit audience, it seemed. No one, besides the mother, was to witness the Binding. We would have to wrap up that loose end before we left.
We finished gathering our supplies. Clea removed all evidence of the binding: a copper bowl with the remnants of the charmed herbal infusion that inoculated the mother against any residual magic her child might have passed on to her in utero, and the roll of charmed silk used in the binding of the infant’s powers.
These she packed in her carpetbag that looked about a hundred years old. It was one of those bottomless deals, where she could fit whatever she needed in it, as long as it would fit through the generous opening. I got lost in there once, as a child. But that’s a story for another day.
I gathered the bloody sheets and towels and wished I had looked more closely at the box before I bought white garbage bags for this job. Nothing like the sight of blood against a white plastic before dinner to really whet your appetite.
I sighed and shook my head before I snapped off my latex gloves with a practiced movement that caught one inside the other, then turned them inside out so the bloody sides were tucked away. They went into the trash in the adjacent master bathroom. The other birthing paraphernalia, after the blood was rinsed off, got packed into a regulation stainless steel wash basin for sterilization at home, then into another garbage bag, then into a small cooler with handles.
The almost translucent garbage bag with the gory sheets and towels would go into the family’s laundry room on my way out. I was sure we would hear about that later, but what could I do? We were not to leave with their blood. Even the Bindan, who eschewed magic for a human life, knew what we could do with it. Not that we would, but they didn’t trust us that far. Just far enough to bind their babies of magic in every generation.
Mom slipped out of the room firs
t. I followed her and closed the door behind me, as if we were never there. That’s our role in the Bindan Colony: to be silent, effective and invisible. If we did our jobs right, which we always did, we never had to go back and re-bind a baby for this strange group of witches-who-did-not-want-to-be-witches.
Clea crept up and down the hallway, her peasant dress swinging on her small frame as she took deep sniffs. “I think it was those two Bindan girls, Ella and Lily,” she said, under her breath.
“Mom, they’re my age,” I said, in a conversational volume. If they were hiding, why should we be the ones who whispered? I glared down at her, which I could do at my height of five-ten. It was literally the only thing I had over my mother.
“Excuse me, then,” she glared back and continued to whisper. “Those two Bindan young women. Even if they’re your age, they sure don’t act like it.”
“Thanks.” I rolled my eyes. “But that probably has something to do with the fact that I grew up talking mostly to adults at the Renaissance Festival.”
“And the fact that you’re just not a whiner,” she said.
“But Mo-om!” I whined.
She glared at me.
“Okay,” I said, and smiled. “So tell me this. How do you know it was them?”
“I can smell them,” she said.
I wrinkled my nose and took a deep sniff, then shook my head. “Nope, I got nothing.”
“Oh, come on, Kate,” she said, still in a loud whisper. “I saw them hanging around downstairs earlier, eating a bag of fruit chews. It smells like a candy shop exploded out here.”
“I’m not getting it, but whatever,” I said, and pointed to myself. “Hedge witch here, remember? I don’t have your super senses.”
Someone with my heritage ought to be able to do actual magic - the real kind that comes from the inside. I do have a stronger than usual sense of empathy, which has no real connection to the practice of magic, in my opinion, and literally causes me headaches. Other than that, I am magically useless.
Clea glared at me and yanked open the upstairs linen closet door opposite Jessica’s bedroom. “Being a hedge witch,” she said, and secured the carpetbag’s handles at her elbow before she plunged her hands into the dim closet, and withdrew two sullen and blond young women, “does not mean you get a free pass not to use the senses you were born with. You’re being lazy, Kate.”
I glared at her. Then the fruity candy on their breath hit me as they protested and I raised my eyebrows. I guess I could try harder to reach those stretchy goals.
The sound of female visitors flooded up the stairs to join the new mother and celebrate the birth of another almost human baby. While the Bindan didn’t want the magic that accompanied being a witch, they certainly didn’t mind that the binding retained the hearty constitution that went along with it. Witches just weren’t susceptible to the same kinds of colds and flus that afflicted humans. Me either, actually. So I guess there’s that.
The muffled sound of footsteps on carpet grew louder as the Bindan women climbed to the second floor. Just outside the closet, Ella and Lily grew frantic.
“Don’t let them catch us up here!” Ella said.
Clea glowered in her best threatening witchy glower. “You shouldn’t have been watching.” She was surprisingly strong for such a small woman and her little fingers tightened their grip on her captives as they tried to get free. “You know it’s against the rules. Not my rules, but your people are very attached to them and I’m very attached to my job. No watching the witches work.”
I rolled my eyes. As if the Bindan would fire us. Who else would bind their babies? Apparently, that reality was lost on the Lily and Ella.
“Please!” Lily pleaded. “We didn’t see anything — ”
“Much!” Ella chimed in.
Lily elbowed her. “Shut up!” she hissed.
The waves of fear that rolled off of Lily all but smacked me in the face and I sucked in a breath. Underneath, I felt their struggle against the life of quiet obedience to their god and families and their pain at such a restrictive life. A slow ache formed behind my eyes. Crap.
I don’t normally get this much emotion off of others, as I’d learned to lock it out because of the accompanying migraines. Sometimes when I connected with someone, it just happened, regardless of my efforts to avoid it. Then, all those long practice hours carefully constructing mental walls went poof. Empathy sucks.
Now I just wanted it to stop. “That’s enough,” I said, and broke my mother’s hold on them. “Just let them go.”
I shoved them both back into the closet, yanked Mom away, and closed the door just as the welcoming committee breached the top of the steps. They froze when they saw us. We were usually gone by now. This little detour cost us our stellar record of being invisible to the Bindan.
My mother’s mouth fell open, then clamped shut at the sight of the women.
I winced as the pain stabbed at my frontal cortex, like tiny gnomes picking for gold, except in my brain. I wrapped a hand across my forehead.
Mom’s eyes darted to my movement. She’d noticed my headache.
“We were just leaving, ladies,” she said, her face resolving into a gracious smile. “If you’ll excuse us.” She took my elbow and gently steered me in front of her down the steps.
Through the stabbing pain, I saw the sneers at our presence and couldn’t help but mess with them. I held up the bag of bloody towels and sheets that I (well, technically, my mom) could very well take home and use to extract their souls from their bodies.
Then, I winked.
Their eyes grew wide and they all pressed against the walls to let us pass.
It’s the little victories, really.
3
Almost none of our income comes from the Bindan, surprisingly, since we spend so much time with them. We earn most of our living on Mom’s fortune telling gig, and my little side business selling charms on the renaissance festival circuit.
It’s a nomadic life, but we like it.
On the drive back home to our current renaissance festival gig in southeast Texas, Mom broke the silence. “It takes a strength of character to handle the gift of empathy,” she gripped both hands on the wheel and fought the wind to keep the truck in our lane. An arctic front had reached Texas while we were at the Bindan house and the temperature dropped thirty degrees. The wind howled through every gap and crack in our old truck and I was glad I brought our winter coats.
Mom hated driving, but didn’t give me the option tonight when we left, which I appreciated in light of my oncoming migraine. I pressed my cheek against the cold glass of the passenger window to distract my brain from trying to exit my skull from all sides.
“You have that strength,” she said. “I know it’s not magic like mine, but it’s powerful. I am so proud of you for that.”
“Right,” I said. This was not the first time I heard that speech. It was nice of Mom to try to make me feel better about not having magical powers, but empathy was a poor substitute and, with these headaches, more often a curse than a blessing. I rubbed my neck, where the pain had spread. It felt like one of those migraines that might stick around for a while.
“You let your guard down around them.” Mom shook her head. “They’re not our friends, Kate.”
“Their ways are not our ways.” I droned and made air quotes with my fingers.
Clea pressed her lips together. “I’m just afraid you didn’t do either of us a favor today by letting those girls get away with spying on us.”
I shrugged. “Relax, Mom. It’s not like we’re going to bump into them at the renaissance festival or something.”
4
“It can’t be that bad. What was the total so far today?” I asked.
Mom stomped around our trailer’s little original mid-century modern kitchenette in the long velvet gown she wore as ‘Madame Clea’ to tell fortunes. Her renaissance garb always looked comical in here, but more so today as she searched angrily for her favorite c
offee cup. It was the splotchy watercolor one I made her when I was five. She won’t drink coffee out of anything else and that still made me feel special.
It was just me and Mom. I never knew my dad. He died shortly after I was born and Mom doesn’t talk about him much. I know he was human and Irish, and his genes are responsible for my lack of magic, but I don’t harbor any bad feelings towards him. Much. I didn’t miss him so much as the idea of a dad. It would be nice if Mom and I didn’t have to do it all by ourselves.
Mom’s quest for a cup grew a bit more vigorous than it needed to be to illustrate her frustration but, as we only had three kitchen cabinets, it was a short search. Mom pulled the prized mug out and poured herself some coffee. “Thirty dollars.” She sank into a wooden chair painted avocado green and sighed. “I made thirty dollars.”
Her cat familiar, Gringo, curled up in his favorite position, on her toes, and glared at me.
I’ve determined he pretty much hates me for no reason.
I glared back at him and sat down opposite her, in a bright yellow plastic chair. None of our furniture matches, but it’s all of the same yellow-green color family, which is kind of cheery.
“How is that possible? The first day of the festival you always make at least five hundred.” I picked at a bubble that had formed in the Formica tabletop until the clear plastic ripped open. I shoved my finger inside the opening to feel the smooth surface. “Think it’s the weather?”