Slowly, I drag a finger over the lip of a copper cauldron in the fireplace. It’s filled with water, reflecting not my own face but rather the image of a dilapidated black cabin—the same one we walked into minutes ago. Whoever peers into this cauldron can see the comings and goings around that cabin.
“Look at these.” Morgan waves me over. Now that I’ve accepted my environment as real, and not a dream, my normal sensibilities come trickling back in and the whole world twinkles withFind Out,Find Out.
He’s analyzing potions. By their milky coloration, I suspect most of them have soured. One cupboard consists entirely of fatal tonics. Two bowls sit under the table, one filled with pet kibble and one with water.
And then—
“Books!” My heart soars, and so do I, over to a bookshelf crammed with clothbound volumes. I eagerly begin flicking pages, all jam-packed with graceful handwriting. Spells for ridding gardens of pests and plant diseases. A dual-purposecharm that softens grief and chases away dogged sensations of bad tidings to come. The instructions are most confounding.
Use a bellows to summon a sail of wind. Add mourning bride and asphodel. Crush to a juice. Let drain through cheesecloth into a goblet of rice wine and give to a party of your choosing.
There are notes in the margins, words walled between question marks. A half-finished sketch for a possible fear-banishing draught takes up the last page, calling fora simmer of snakeskin, ghoul-light, and the bones of a gray rabbit skinned in spring. I snap the book closed, leaving it on the table, and start poking through an odd sort of mulch piled up on a shelf.
“Now, that’s not very polite, is it?” somebody pipes up. “You of all people should know that when you’re finished with a book, you put it back in its proper place.”
I leap in fright, spilling the mulch into the cauldron, and there, occupying a chair at the table as if he’s been there all this time—and perhaps he has been—is a young man.
“Hello, Zelda,” he says amiably. “I see you’ve found Hither again.”
—
The man tapsthe glass of his pocket watch and a mug of tea appears next to his hand. It’s hard to tell if he’s in his twenties or thirties—he’s got a youthful face and thick, rumpled brown hair, but his pale blue eyes wear the weight of the world.
“Hither?” Morgan repeats, as I say, “Again?”
“I created this village quite a long time ago. I call it Hither, and this will be the third time you’ve visited.”
As if in a dream, I look down to see myself dragging over a stool, seating myself opposite—but I don’tfeelany of the physical matter I touch, as I am so out of my body. “I’ve never been here before.”
He magicks up a second cup of tea and slides it across the tabletop. Morgan quickly sits down beside me. “Can I have a coffee?” he asks.
The man makes him another tea.
“You ran away when you were little,” the man tells me, stretching out his legs. “Your grandmother was worried about you because you didn’t have many friends or an easy way of social things. But I could smell the magic on you—a particularly wild magic, that, by nature, gave you a predisposition for going off on your own. I still can’t tell exactly what your gift is, but obviously it’s something to do with running around the woods.”
“My gift is that I can see paranimals,” I manage to reply, the words wobbly. “Enchanted creatures. Are they yours? Are you the Black Bear Witch?” I’m floored. “I thought the Black Bear Witch was a woman.”
He smiles. “That isn’t your gift from magic itself, that is your gift fromme. It’s been a while since I’ve been out in your world, in the way I used to be, but I’ve still got quite a lot of power left in me. When you were a little girl and found my village, you needed a bit of cheering up so I gave you the ability to see the true nature of my animals. But then you found me again, some time later, after one of our four-legged friends was struck down by a car.”
“Katrina.”
“Yes. I explained to you that my creatures cannot actually die, they merely turn into other creatures or dreams or spells—magic cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed, and all that—which made you feel better. But you wouldn’t remember any of that now, naturally. I had to remove your memory of my home, and then I gave you another memory spritz to discourage you from coming back into the woods. Please forgive me. I had to make you afraid of exploring Falling Rock all by yourself. You were always wandering around here, and I worried you’d get hurt.”
Morgan leans forward. “So you’re the one who gave Zelda her powers?”
The man tilts his head, studying him. “She already had her own powers. What those are, only Zelda can tell us—but the ability to see my enchanted animals as they are and not how ordinary people perceive them;thatpart is a present from me.”
“Butwhydo you enchant the animals?” Morgan asks.
The man shrugs. “Why not? I like to experiment in my spare time, which I happen to have quite a lot of.”
I’m still thinking aboutShe already had her own powers, and what that means. What are my natural-born powers, then?
“The ability to hear brays,” I say at once. “That’s my real power.”
“You can hear them?” The witch sets his cup down, blue eyes alight with interest. “That’s extraordinary. What do they say?”
“A lot of nonsense.”
