So, I’m instructing her as best I can; the others were fitfor only small magics. When I asked her what she knew, her reply was shame-faced: ‘I have no spells. I’ve never learned anything like that. Just the fire – it’s mine. It comes with my temper, with my fear, but only if I concentrate. I can’t make anything else happen.’
Untrained then. ‘No matter – everyone’s different on the witch’s scale. I can teach you spell craft, things that’ll be useful in your days to come.’
‘Thank you, Mehrab.’ And for the first time she sounded shy. I tell her that with a power like hers, witch-fire that she might draw on all day, she could try a Briar Witch trick and begin each morning with a small bloodletting, paying the red price ahead of time. It doesn’t really make sense for my kind of magic, but for hers it should make things easier. Faster. Especially if she’s needing to defend herself.
The sapling, after its week in the drying room, has been anointed with a peculiar mix of powders and a little oil to make the wood more absorbent (which surely seems counterintuitive). When it goes into the bath, I need it to soak in as much of the vile liquid as possible – but also not to take on its stench. Hence, the oil is aromatic, strongly so.
‘Ouch!’
‘What?’
‘Splinter,’ Rhea grumbles, but she’s smart enough not to drop her end of the sapling – it’s become unreasonably heavy, which is the weird way of things – and keeps moving with the peculiar gait of someone terrified of dropping a precious burden. Her backward steps are precise, measured.
When we’re next to the bath, I say, ‘Don’t just toss it in.That’s only going to make the liquid splash up, and we don’t want that on your skin or your newly made dress. Or on my skin for that matter.’
Neither of us is an especially able seamstress but armed with that knowledge we were very attentive to the task and seams were double stitched for strength. The frock will win no prizes at a fair, yet it does what it’s supposed to, which is ward off nakedness and she says it’s comfortable. There’s another dress pinned for cutting out too, and an old dress of mine, long unworn, to be repurposed into trews for her, but by consensus it was decided we both needed a rest before tackling those. Time for the needle- and pin-holes in our fingers to heal.
Slowly we lower the sapling into the broth, which burbles and bubbles. I step away quickly because experience has taught that those burbles and bubbles can send liquid flying, and Rhea has learned to listen to me on this subject at least.
‘And you said no one taught you this?’
‘No one,’ I say, surprised to sound nervous; I’ve never spoken of it before. ‘Not every woman’s a witch and not every witch is a spells-woman. Some work by ritual and wish, the small magics of hen- and hedgewives. Some have greater talent, can produce larger effects. Some have a gift – like yours with fire – and that’s all they ever work with.’
‘Do you have a gift?’
I ignore the question. ‘Some simply use what’s written in a tried-and-true book, passed down, never experimenting. Some are committed to their own workings. Some of us navigate by trial and error.’And ambition. ‘A constant process of experimentation, trying to further our abilities to matchour imagination.’ I clear my throat, putting something into words for the first time: ‘I’d always been interested in how things become other things, how flesh and substance might be manipulated. So, I pondered what I wanted, what was of most use to me. I tested various techniques, crafted and adapted spells until something worked the way I wanted it to.’
It sounds so simple, so normal. No hint of what drove the urge. Or of the things that went awry.
‘Do you do that often? Experiment?’
‘Less nowadays.’Nothing to prove, now.
‘What’s the greatest thing you ever did?’ Her eyes are shining like a child’s hearing a story.
I grunt, lie. ‘This. I thought one day how useful it would be to have someone around to help with the heavier work. I didn’t always have fosterlings, and they weren’t always up to the hard labour of hauling and lifting. I didn’t want to take on a lad because lads become men and cannot be trusted.’ I shrug. ‘So, I beganplayingwith this – there are spells in other books, other grimoires, there are things that are a little bit of this. I just… joined them together.’
‘Did it work the first time?’
‘No, it did not. A grand failure, an explosion, very messy.’ I hold the hair away from the left side of my neck, show her the scar from a jagged piece of flying plank. ‘Had to rebuild the barn – which is, not coincidentally, why I now do this work outside – but it taught me things. And I had the chance to design a structure that met my needs better, isn’t as simple as most of them are.’
‘The drying room?’
‘The drying room.’
‘What’s next? More stirring?’
‘More stirring. Off you go.’
***
The next few weeks drift by, broken up by stirring shifts, and lessons in enspelling shoes and cloaks for decreased visibility so one might pass safely by a threat, or sneak somewhere one isn’t meant to be. I’ve given her one of my unused journals so she may begin her first grimoire, and set her books to read and learn from (honestly, I don’t have the patience to begin at the beginning). She asks me questions when she fails at a task and I talk her through what went wrong – all failure teaches something, and humility is valuable for a witch to learn; without it, you might think yourself a god, and that way lies madness.
We’ve settled into a comfortable routine. During the day, we attend to the sapling and then hunt up the plants and fungi on Reynald’s list; sometimes she helps mix philtres or grind and combine dry ingredients to stock my own stores and staples. In the evenings, one of us will try to pry details of the other’s past; it’s become a game of sorts. Only little things have been extracted, nothing of import. The only disruption to life has been the discovering of offerings on the doorstep, every few days for the past fortnight.
Sometimes berries and other forest fruits, sometimes roots dug from deep in the woods, vegetables I do not grow and sprays of herbs and leaves; a few hares, a brace of partridges, a fat duck. Nothing out of the ordinary except at no point have we ever seen who left them.
No knock on the door, no one to say, ‘Thank you for what you’ve done’ or ‘I would like to buy a service’; no note. Just waking in the morning and finding a benefaction on the stoop as if it’s an altar. I’ve told Rhea not to eat any of it – not yet, not until whoever is bringing it presents themselves too, and makes a request – because eating implies an acceptance of a bargain, the details of which we are not aware. So, everything’s been piled into baskets in the coolness of the cellar, waiting.
