The locket is warm against her skin, despite their hours apart. She leans back against the wall, and listens.
nce upon a time there were a brother and a sister who loved each other very much because they had no one else to love them.
The sister told the brother it wasn’t always so—she remembered the warmth of their mother’s arms, the boom of their father’s laughter—but the little boy never knew their parents as anything but hungry and hateful, with bitter coals for hearts.
In time they grew hungrier and more hateful, until one day their mother led them into the deepest dark of the woods. She gave them a single loaf of bread, more sawdust than wheat, and told them to wait for her return. They waited, as the owls swooped and the badgers burrowed, as the woods turned from blue to black and the tears froze on their cheeks, but their mother never came back. The little boy found that he, too, had a bitter coal burning in his heart.
The boy and his sister wandered farther into the woods. They ate their meager loaf of bread and shared the last crumbs with a black raven who watched them from the trees. The raven gave them a long, red stare, then led them along a twisting path until they found a little house tucked beneath the roots of an ancient oak.
Juniper thinks she knows this tale. In the version her sister told her, the house is made of gingerbread.
The house was crooked and wild-looking, and so was the woman who lived inside it. “A witch,” the boy whispered to his sister, but she didn’t seem to mind.
The witch sat them at her table and wrapped her fingers around their wrists. She tsked at the grate of their bones beneath their skins and fed them sweetmeats. When they were both reeling and drunk with the fullness of their bellies, she told them they could stay if they liked.
The boy’s sister agreed readily. For the next seven years she studied with the witch in the woods and grew wilder and stranger, until she was nearly a forest creature herself, until she seemed not to remember the mother and father who left them in the woods.
The boy studied, too, but he did not forget their mother or father, and looked always for the words and ways that would let him return to them. For that he required more than the witch’s old books and rhymes; he needed spells that could break wills and command hearts, that could change the nature of a soul.
One winter’s day the witch found the boy, who was no longer a boy, in a grove of rowan trees. The trees were full of starlings, but they were strangely silent. None of them cast a shadow on the ground. The witch watched while the boy commanded them to sing, and then to fly, and then to hurl themselves to the frozen earth, their necks twisted and bent at wrong angles.
The witch asked the boy to leave then, because she feared him, and feared the cost of his ways. The boy agreed without complaint, not because she asked him to but because he had learned what he needed. He asked his sister to come with him, but she refused. She chose to remain in the woods without him. He left with the coal burning bright in his chest.
The boy who was no longer a boy returned to his village. He found his mother and father still living, less hungry now without two more mouths to feed. His mother cried out when she saw him. Before she could curse him as a ghost or banish him a second time, the boy stole her shadow and her will. Her eyes turned empty and faraway, and she smiled as she held out her arms to him. “Welcome home, my son.”
The boy and his mother and father lived happily ever after. For a time.
Remember, remember till the fifth of December!
I know no reason why a single season
Should ever be forgot.
A spell to recall what is forgotten, requiring saltpeter & a single tear
James Juniper thought Gideon Hill was just like her daddy: a cowardly shit of a man who only felt whole when he was breaking something.
Now she thinks he’s more like her. Or what she might have been if she never found Agnes and Bella again, never stood arm in arm with her Sisters or held Eve tight in her arms: a vicious, broken creature who knew how to survive and nothing more.
Gideon Hill is staring at the ceiling, his hands clasped loosely in his lap. His dog is staring straight at Juniper with those mournful black eyes. Juniper doesn’t figure that’s their natural color.
“No one’s ever guessed what she is.” Juniper says it softly into the cell, the air still rich and thick with storytelling.
“I hide her well.” Hill’s fingers stroke the iron collar at his dog’s throat and the dog flinches.
“I thought witches were friendly with their familiars.”
Hill shakes his head at the ceiling. “That’s what the stories say, isn’t it? But if you want real power you must abandon sentiment. You must learn to think of your familiar not as a pet or a companion, but as a tool. And if a tool fails to do what is necessary, if it resists its master’s hand—” He shrugs in a manner that’s supposed to look careless but doesn’t.
Juniper tries to imagine what kind of devilry you’d have to wreak before witching itself resisted you, before your own familiar bared its teeth at you. Was it when he first bound his soul to someone else, and stole their body for himself? Or was it even earlier, when he drove a grove full of starlings to their deaths?
Her eyes fall to the rubbed-raw skin beneath the dog’s collar, and she wonders if it’s more than it seems. The first witch-collar, perhaps, crafted by some way-back incarnation of Gideon Hill to control his wayward hound. Then she wonders what would happen if it were free.
Gideon is still looking upward, waiting patiently for her next question. Juniper asks it. “What happened? After the happily-ever-after?”
Gideon sighs. He lifts one hand and its shadow stretches and roils across the cell floor, digits and joints bending in unnatural shapes. “The words and ways this requires are . . . potent. They come at a price—power always does. This isn’t a matter of wrong or right, you understand, but merely the working of the world. If you want strength, if you want to survive, there must be sacrifice.”
That’s not what Mags taught them. You can tell the wickedness of a witch by the wickedness of her ways. “So who paid your price?”
He bends his neck to look directly at her, weighing something. “A fever spread through my parents’ village that first winter.”
The word fever rings in Juniper’s ears, a distant bell tolling.
“It was nothing too remarkable, except the midwives and wise women couldn’t cure it. One of them came sniffing around, made certain deductions . . . I took her shadow, too. And the sickness spread further. The villagers grew unruly. Hysterical. I did what I had to do in order to protect myself.” That line has a smoothed-over feel, like a polished pebble, as if he’s said it many times to himself. “But then of course the fever spread even further . . . I didn’t know how to control it, yet. Which kinds of people were expendable and which weren’t. I’m more careful these days.”
The ringing in Juniper’s ears is louder now, deafening.
An uncanny illness, the Three had called it. Juniper remembers the illustrations in Miss Hurston’s moldy schoolbooks, showing abandoned villages and overfull graveyards, carts piled high with bloated bodies. Was that Gideon’s price? Had the entire world paid for the sins of one broken, bitter boy?