I swear he blushed.
The Weftwitch led me outside to her garden and stooped to pull up a few weeds. “Would you mind?” she said, gesturing at the neighboring bed. “My back.”
I knelt in the grass and pulled weeds of my own. The earth was dark and bitter as coffee, the plants indecently green and full of juice. This was a healthy place, and I felt healthy in it.
“You are like me,” she said conversationally.
“A witch?” I said, startled. She honked out a laugh.
“Dear child. No. The opposite of a witch, in fact. I have no magic.”
“But ...”
“No, what I have is the opposite of magic,” she said. “A resistance to magic so strong that it can almostseemmagical.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“Oh, believe me, neither did I, before I figured it out,” she said. “Confused me to no end, at first. We use magic differently here than you do in your kingdom, and it’s not confined to just one special group. Lots of people have magic of one kind or another, even if it’s as small as getting a kettle to boil a wee bit faster.” She moved to another bed, and I followed.
“You need people who are resistant to magic, too, to balance it out. That’s why they call me the Weftwitch—warp and weft, do you see, like weaving cloth? Both are necessary.” She straightened up, stretching her back, before continuing to weed.
“Those with no magic, or a resistance to it, are celebrated here as the most powerful. Being the Weftwitch is a great honor. I work with the magic-workers to help them control their magic, give it limits. You have seen yourself how wild it can run without someone like me to contain it. It is its own sort of power.”
I thought back to how I had quashed Sylvester’s disastrous spell in the House, how I had helped him open the door to the chamber where Millie was prisoner. I suppose I could see how the presence of resistance, control, could keep balance in the complicated system that magic seemed to be.
“But real magic needs hearts,” I said. “We were always told ...”
“Oh, that’s what theytellyou,” she said. “They wouldn’t want you thinking that everyone had a bit of magic in them, oh no. You have to be some special, fancy royal person to have magic, is what they’d have you think. But you do not need hearts to perform magic. There are other ways.”
“Well yes, but only for small things. Not for big, grand magicks, like the sorceresses do.”
She snorted. “Not so. Heart magic is powerful, yes, but not the only powerful kind.”
I blinked. “So, they don’t have to use hearts at all?”
“For their kind of magic, they do,” she explained, “But it’s a dark, consuming kind. And it’s greedy. Stealing the magic from other people—well, let me put it this way. If you train a dog with kindness, it’ll do what you tell it and be loyal. If you train a dog with beatings and the like, it might do what you say, but it also might turn on you, given the opportunity.”
“... And magic is the dog?”
“It is. Fair comparison, too. It comes when you call. It obeys, most of the time. But it has teeth.”
I had known that the magic Sylvester and the other magic-
workers did was wrong somehow, unnatural. What I was having more trouble wrapping my head around was the fact that everyone could have a little magic in them, and that it could be a gentle, natural thing, with no blood or sacrifice necessary.
“So, they’re not just taking hearts,” I said. “They’re taking whatever magicks someone has inside them?”
“Yes,” the Weftwitch said. “Which is contained in the heart, I suppose, or part of it. Someone’s magic is all bound up with the rest of them, though, and you can’t take it out without doing damage.”
“And some people have more than others.”
“Right,” she said. “And some have none. Everyone called me a wet blanket when I was a child. I spoiled the fun whenever I turned up. If I were in a house, the kettle wouldn’t boil, the bread wouldn’t rise, and the hens wouldn’t lay.”
She sighed, then continued, “I thought I was just bad luck for the longest time, until I figured that something about me stopped magic from working. Even everyday things like water boiling and dough rising take a tiny spark of magic, and I sucked away every little spark I could without realizing it.”
I thought back on my life in the village.
“I don’t remember things like that happening,” I said. “Although I rarely went into anyone’s house but our own. I certainly never had the best of luck, but I kept house for my Da and me right enough and worked in the shop.” I thought harder. “I always thought I was cursed, and that’s why I never seemed to do that well when it came to other people.”
