The soldier took a moment to sit up taller in his saddlebefore he got to the point. “Have you seen any strange babies around here?”
Gretsella frowned. “Why do you ask?”
“Oh,” the soldier said, with a glance at his companion, “no reason.”
This didn’t strike Gretsella as particularly convincing. “No,” she said after a moment. “There aren’t any strange babies here.”
“But what about that one?” the second soldier asked, and pointed at Bradley, who was stuffing a fistful of grass into his mouth.
“He’s not strange; he’sBradley,” Gretsella said. “He’smybaby.”
The soldier looked somewhat dubious. “He doesn’tlookmuch like you.”
This was, in fairness, quite true. Gretsella was very tall and very thin and very pale, with green eyes and freckles and a long, crooked nose and an unmanageable head of graying red curls. Bradley, being a mere infant, was very short and very fat. He also had a tuft of straight black hair growing out of the center of his forehead, a complexion a shade or two darker than Gretsella’s own, and merry dark eyes, which were nearly swallowed up by what persons more sentimental than Gretsella might deemirresistiblychubby little cheeks. Gretsella drew herself up a bit. “Bradley,” she said, “has no obligation whatsoever to look like anyone but himself.”
The soldiers seemed unable to mount any objections tothis argument. The first soldier cleared his throat. “And aren’t you a bit long in the tooth to have a child of that age?”
Gretsella’s glare intensified. “I have no obligation whatsoever to be of any age other than my own,” she said. “Now go away, both of you.Shoo.”
The soldiers stayed where they were. Gretsella turned her attention to their horses and gave each of them a good long look straight in the eye. Then she said, very firmly, “Go away, anddon’t come back.”
The horses left. The soldiers, being mounted on their backs, left with them. Gretsella finished hanging out her laundry, and then she and Bradley set up a nice old-fashioned soldier-, salesman-, taxman-, and missionary-repelling perimeter around the garden. “I don’t know why it’s been so long since I set one of these up,” Gretsella said to Bradley. “What a negligent witch Mother is! Isn’t thatright, Bradley?”
Bradley cooed.
A Digression on the Subject of Witches
Once upon a time, a long time ago, a lonely little girl wandered through a dark wood. The little girl had a real name, but everybody called her Carrots. She climbed up onto a low branch in a tree—she was the sort of little girl who would climb as high as there were convenient handholds, but no higher—made herself comfortable, and thought about the universe. She didn’t stumble upon any remarkable insights. She was an ordinary little girl, not a philosopher-king.
Despite this, the universe said,Hmm.
If you’re the sort of person who reads, you’ll be aware that fairy tales ought to be taken seriously in their essence, if not in their particularity. Fairy tales, like fairies themselves, are not overly concerned with factual accuracy. They sometimes mislead. You should, therefore, take the following explanation of a peculiar phenomenon with a grain of salt: It’s alittle-known fact that, in the Kingdom of Evermore, just as caterpillars turn into butterflies, lonely little girls sometimes turn into witches.
The loneliness that creates a witch can’t be the temporary loneliness of a child whose parents have left her alone to fend for herself for an afternoon. It’s a deeper and more abiding loneliness than that. It’s the sort of loneliness felt by a little girl who, for whatever reason, walks alone into the woods and climbs up into trees to think about the universe more often than she’s invited to birthday parties. It’s the sort of loneliness that, over time, curdles into something that isn’t loneliness at all. This was the way in which Carrots was lonely.
Carrots was eleven years old. She wasn’t an orphan and didn’t have a cruel stepmother, and she wasn’t bullied by the other children for some distinct physical attribute. She was simply a little girl who was slightly too plain, slightly too loud, and slightly too intense in her contemplation of peculiar subjects. She wasn’t a round peg being forced into a square hole. She was, in a world of round holes, a peg that at some point in the manufacturing process had been made very slightly oblong, to the degree that the cosmic carpenter assumed that he was probably just hammering wrong and set her aside to try again later. This was always a particular source of pain for Carrots. If she were bullied for being the lone child with flashing green eyes and flame-colored hair in a village of dull, ordinary-looking children, that would be one thing. She’d be able to anticipate going on an exciting hero’s journey andmeeting lots of people who would recognize her remarkable qualities for what they were. Carrots, unfortunately, was shunned by the other children not because they were nasty provincial little bullies but because she was the sort of child who read a lot of books, thought she understood more about the world than she actually did, and didn’t understand how to play with the other children without annoying them. This made her very lonely, but she told herself that she didn’t care about those dull, silly children in the village anyway.
All of this was made worse by the fact that the pain felt by a lonely little girl is taken seriously by almost nobody, including the little girl herself. She is forced, therefore, to imagine herself into a world where she is a more important and interesting person experiencing a more important and interesting kind of pain. It is this specific combination of loneliness, pain, and inward-directed imaginative power that creates the ideal alluvium for germinating the seeds of witchcraft.
This condition of proto-witchery is not, strictly speaking, limited to little girls, though they experience it more frequently than any other type of person. Just as, under the right circumstances, towering trees can be found growing inside dark caves or clinging to the sides of sheer rock faces, this type of little-girl loneliness sometimes finds its expression in an embittered young widow, a forlorn and delicate elderly man, or, in one notable case, a desperately unhappy forty-five-year-old sergeant major struggling to reacclimate to civilian life after many years of fighting overseas. It is, however, an absolute fact that unhappy little girls are the ideal existentialceramic crock for fermenting the supernatural sauerkraut that is a fully developed adult witch.
Despite this rich, dark loam of little-girl loneliness being endemic in girls between the ages of seven and seventeen, it is notsufficientfor a girl to become a witch. It’s generally more likely to produce an adult with a slightly above-average level of interest in stories about notorious and gruesome murders. Even in the intensely magical forest of Brigandale, all that this sort of loneliness creates is a small divot in the fabric of reality. Most lonely little girls are too busylivingin reality to notice a crack in it.
That day in the tree, Carrots looked at reality, noticed a handhold in it, and pulled herself up.
Chapter 1.5
A Return to the Narrative That Was Interrupted by the Preceding Digression
After Bradley had been living with her for a month or so, Gretsella decided that there was no use in putting off the inevitable any longer. It was, in witch circles, generally considered perfectly respectable to raise a child who had been abandoned on one’s doorstep, but one did have to observe the usual customs. Gretsella made coffee and cake and set out an extra umbrella stand to accommodate the broomsticks. She went to her front door and, on the sign that hung there, moved the arrow pointer fromNot at Home: Go AwaytoReceiving Coven: Go Away. Then she waited.
Hyssop and Yarrow were the first to arrive, riding two to a broomstick, as usual. Their matching names and stout figures often led people to the mistaken impression that they were related in some way. The truth of the matter was that they were, in fact, longtime business partners, and hadselected their botanical witchnames in order to better promote themselves as the type of old-fashioned, rosy-cheeked village herbalists whom one could really trust to make a healing salve or efficacious philter without any rat poison in it. They had become so successful at their venture that they’d opened an apothecary in the capital, bought themselves a large town house apiece, and had not so much as harvested a sprig of lavender for a scented sachet with their own hands in almost ten years. Their abandonment of traditional witchly occupations in favor of success in the world of commerce had opened them up to a certain degree of criticism from their fellow witches. Gretsella, for her part, put much of the criticism down to jealousy over the fact that the complainers hadn’t concocted the scheme themselves.
The next to land in the garden was Magnetia, a very young witch who was ceaselessly torn between her desire to be taken seriously by her elders and her alarming propensity for doing things like buying a metal whisk with gears and a crank on it for mixing her potions. She arrived wearing all black, despite a summer heat that would convince even the most tradition-bound old crone to assent to some navy blue, and riding a broomstick that had been outfitted with what appeared to be a rubber pad for sitting on.
Then, at last, came the final member of their coven. She arrived late, as always. Barb (she claimed to have selected this peculiar witchname after having spent several days in dread communion with a spirit from a dark realm known asWeehawken) was married (to aman, of all things) and had given birth to several (it seemed rude to inquire as to the exact number) children, who often prevented her from leaving her house in a timely fashion for, presumably, their own iniquitous purposes (Gretsella preferred not to dwell too much on the details of what might occur within such an unnatural household). Barb lived just off the main street in a very ordinary village, where, it was rumored, she sometimes crossed hallowed ground in order to participate in a profane ritual she called “the annual church spaghetti dinner.”
Gretsella, who abhorred all gossip except when she was the one maliciously spreading it, could certainly not say whether or not these rumors might be true, and had made herself a bit of an object of controversy among local witches by inviting Barb to join her coven in the first place. Despite her eccentricities, though, Barb was a valued coven member and a hag after Gretsella’s own heart: Her accomplishments as an enchantress were undeniable, and even when Gretsella called for a witches’ convocation on very short notice, Barb could be relied on to bring a dessert.
