Chapter One. In Which a Witch Returns
CHAPTER ONE
In Which a Witch Returns
Bad Things happened around Risa Porto.
She didn’t will them to happen. She didn’t stare at Farmer Juan’s barn and think, Yes, I would much prefer that this dilapidated, termite-ridden monstrosity be on fire right about now, and then watch it burst into flames despite the perpetual rain that fell on Barrow.
She didn’t skip to the river and wonder what it would look like swollen and overflowing, only to have it rise above the banks and flood the empty valley at the edge of town.
In fact, most of the time, she wasn’t even around for those disastrous events.
They happened while she was sleeping, or minding her own business, or getting chased by the other children.
But none of that mattered to the people of Barrow. They believed crossing the path of a black cat meant certain death; that sweeping the shoes of a maiden guaranteed spinsterhood; and above all, that being a girl born on a Bad Day made that girl a Bad Thing.
That was the issue with superstitions and superstitious towns, and Barrow was most certainly a superstitious town. Bad luck was a shadow. It followed—a warped, monstrous thing—until it was bigger than itself. Until it touched everything and made it unrecognizable.
Less than eight hours after turning seventeen, Risa drifted through the town square, aware of the way her shadow lay long and drawn-out.
The slanted figure loomed larger than life against the wooden door of the tailor’s shop shuttered before her, a padlock firmly secured in place.
Nailed to the door was an aged piece of parchment, which had been hammered to that very same spot several times before.
“‘We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone, specifically Bad Things by the name of Risa Porto,’” she read aloud, her voice ringing in the empty square. “Seriously? It’s been ten years since the tavern flooded!”
But there was no answer from the townspeople of Barrow, who remained safe behind their drawn curtains and closed shutters, hiding from the day.
It didn’t matter that the tavern had been flooded by the tavern owner in an attempted insurance scam; the owner had simply pointed his grubby finger at seven-year-old Risa and proclaimed it her fault.
The people agreed. The insurance provider did not.
They hadn’t added cursed girls to their checklist under Acts of Gods, and they had no desire to listen to the claims of superstitious people when they still had to cross the Bosque back to Kheadon’s capital before nightfall.
A clatter overhead drew Risa’s attention skyward.
“Go home!” came a voice. Emilia, the tailor’s daughter, poked her head out of the window above the store.
Risa waved a black satin ribbon in the air like a white flag.
Bought on a whim the day before, after Emilia’s mother had shown her every ribbon but the one requested.
When the tailor’s wife finally brought out a strip of pale yellow satin with scalloped lace edges, Risa decided to purchase the ribbon the woman had shown her an hour earlier instead. To be contrary. Impossible.
Bad.
“Emilia, I don’t even want my money back. Store credit will do.”
Emilia made an unladylike gesture involving a finger, and Risa rolled her eyes.
“Fine. I don’t even need store credit. Do me a favor and just take the stupid thing back.”
Emilia was a pretty girl. Long brown hair in silky curls, olive skin unlined and soft. But staring down at Risa, Emilia screwed her face tight in anger, her mouth an ugly snarl, her nose wrinkled with discontent.
“Do us a favor and go away forever.” She slammed the shutters of her window closed.
Risa sighed and dropped the unwanted ribbon, watching it flutter slowly to the ground like a flightless bird. She stood there, in the quiet of Barrow, without the constant drone of perpetual rain to distract her, and considered revealing the truth to Emilia and the rest of town:
She wanted to go away forever, too.
More than anything, Risa wanted to one day leave this place, cross the dark and mossy trees of the Bosque, and come out the other side remade. No longer a shadow or a portent of misfortune, but a real person, free of her curse.
And that day was coming up fast. In a matter of hours, really, though the idea of it was as terrifying as it was thrilling.
She’d been waiting a whole year. Since her parents had sat her down at the banquet table that hadn’t been used for sixteen years and revealed the unfortunate reality of her situation. How her bad luck only kept getting worse. How debts had to be repaid. How Risa was the payment.
“Fine,” Risa snapped, pointing a finger where Emilia had just been. “I hope a family of frogs moves into your toilet.”
There was a loud gasp. Emilia’s voice, muffled by wood, needled through: “We’ve been cursed by the Bad Thing!”
Risa didn’t hear the turmoil that followed. She turned on her heels and stalked up the hill, where her home stood proud. She was determined to spend what remained of her birthday away from the town, Emilia, and her own bad luck.
The sun was at its highest peak when Risa stretched her arms above her head.
Beneath her sprawled form, a tattered old blanket barely cushioned the perpetually damp packed dirt.
The rays’ warmth turned her skin a few shades darker.
Just another reminder that she was different from the average townsperson.
A badge of honor among a terrified, pale crowd.
There on the tallest hill in the barren garden of the mayor’s house was peace.
No one sneaking glances. No one saying awful things loud enough for her to hear.
No collection of bundled sticks tied in odd configurations to darken the Porto doorstep—witchtraps meant to ward off the awful thing that lived within the mansion’s walls.
Best of all, there would be no rain.
“Risa,” she heard her mother whisper-shout from the front door. A click of the tongue. A certain wagging of a finger. “Get back inside!”
Head tipped back, Risa watched an upside-down image of her mother peek out from the entrance of their imposing home and glance up at the sky with palpable worry.
Checking for a crack in the heavens or a sign that a storm of epic proportions would soon be unleashed.
But nothing would happen until the clock struck midnight and the Bad Day was over.
That was when the rain would return, covering Barrow for another year, the drum of water on metal roofs never lifting, turning the gray town cold once more.
Risa waited a beat, letting Ma’s agitation grow a fraction more.
This was a practiced dance, one they repeated every single year.
For months before her birthday, her mother would warn, plead, and demand that Risa not find a way out of the house on her birthday.
And Risa, like the properly stubborn girl that she was, did exactly what her mother asked her not to do.
She would miss this. Her purposeful refusal to listen to her mother, her mother’s characteristic fretting. She hoped her mother would miss this, too. Remember it fondly when next year came around and there was no Risa to scold.
“I’m fine.”
She could practically hear her mother’s scowl. Ma was preparing to unleash a tumult of admonishments, ones Risa would ignore as she was wont to do. She hadn’t survived being labeled Barrow’s problem by listening to everyone call her Barrow’s problem.
If they were going to blame her for being Bad, then she would be worse.
But Ma’s thinly veiled threats did not surface. What rang in the stillness was only deafening silence.
Risa bolted upright.
At the elaborate wrought-iron gate of the Porto home was a woman stooped over with age, her knobby hand gripping an even knobbier walking stick as ancient as the world itself.
Wrinkles upon wrinkles were etched into her face, folds so deep and skin so dark that she resembled the trees in the cursed Bosque surrounding Barrow.
Risa cocked her head. That stump of an old woman had to be a witch, as her hooked nose and raggedy clothes were clear indicators of magical ability. She knew so because she’d read it somewhere, and everything written in books was well researched and true.
This was it. The moment that her parents had waited seventeen years for.
“Remember me?” the ancient woman asked Risa with a voice like dried leaves scraping against the ground.
Risa shook her head. “Not at all. I am not in the habit of meeting old ladies.” Truth be told, she wasn’t in the habit of meeting anyone, considering everybody avoided her like the plague.
Which hadn’t swept through Barrow in several centuries, at least, so surely her bad luck only extended so far.
The woman narrowed her beady black eyes, and something flashed in their onyx depths.
Risa should have been scared. Barrow had its stories of witches hiding in the woods. She’d read century-old articles and pamphlets that detailed the witch agenda, which was typically about the fairy godmother trade or payment agreements or the traveling-witch circuit.
But Risa was desperate. She didn’t care about hidden agendas or presumed danger. She needed a miracle. Something wildly powerful.
A witch.
She had waited a whole year. Despite the expectation that someone would come knocking on her seventeenth birthday demanding payment for a forgotten favor, she was still surprised that it was this witch—a small thing weighed down by all the centuries she had undoubtedly seen.
Her mottled, leathery brown skin was pulled taut across bone.
White wires sprang from her head, on a personal mission to defy the physical rules of the universe.
Somewhere behind Risa, a door slammed shut. Her mother stumbled out of the Porto home in a mad rush.
“Brunhilda,” Ma greeted, skidding to a halt beside Risa.
Ma gripped the lapels of her silk robe in a tight fist to keep it from flying open, though it didn’t hide the faint scars that traveled across her collarbone like a meandering stream.
The scars did nothing to diminish Ma’s beauty.
Unlike Risa, her mother had frizzy silver curls that escaped a neat bun and framed her heart-shaped face, hazel eyes that shifted from brown to green under different light, and a plump figure that suggested a refusal to change after having created life.
Five years ago, Ma’s hair had been the color of a cloudless midnight, much like her daughter’s.
But one fateful morning, lightning struck Ma as she stumbled outside to chase after Risa, who was determined to run away from home.
Risa had frozen in horror to watch the door of the house catch fire, the entrance burn down to cinders, a crawling scar of bright red lines appear across her mother’s torso, and Ma’s hair turn the color of stormy skies.
It was Risa’s fault, of course. Everyone whispered about it when they saw her mother in town later. Poor thing, her mother—cursed with a daughter who only brought bad luck, as was evidenced by Ma’s near-death experience and the partial destruction of their home.
It was then that Risa had realized her curse was determined to destroy everything she loved. Her town, in all its sadness; her home, in all its grandeur; her parents, for all their harried attempts to love her despite knowing what she was.
The witch nodded in greeting. “Preena.”
Risa looked between her mother and the old woman standing at the gate.
Ma placed a delicate, trembling hand on top of Risa’s head. “This is my daughter, Risa.”
Brunhilda returned a nearly toothless smile, though it did not reach those fathomless dark eyes that searched Risa like they saw right through her and found her lacking.
“She’s tall.”
Risa chanced another look at her mother, whose worried face appeared more fraught than usual. Despite having had seventeen years to prepare for this, her mother looked beside herself.
“This is the woman who helped me during your birth,” Ma explained, words slow. Risa knew the story by now but remained silent as her mother pursed her lips, deep in thought. “When no one else would.”
Brunhilda cocked her head, observing Risa with that uncomfortable stare.
“Are you ready?”
Risa’s heart sputtered.
Her mother gasped, “No, you can’t! She’s too young—”
But her mother made no attempt to shield her daughter. She stood frozen, much like Risa had five years earlier when lightning struck.
An insistent itch started at the back of Risa’s neck, like fire licking at her fingertips. An omen of trouble ahead. “For what?”
“For an adventure. What people here would call a Bad Thing.”
Risa did not move. She glanced at the Porto mansion, at the windows with their curtains drawn, at the facade leached of color after centuries of rain.
Where her bag was waiting, packed since her last birthday.
Where empty rooms held memories of years spent alone, years dreaming of the Bosque and the world beyond it, where no one knew her.
Risa Porto is a Bad Thing.
It was clear there was no way to break her curse in the confines of Barrow. At least outside its hold, she might be able to find an answer. Or ask the witch to help her.
When Risa was younger, she’d hoped a prince would be the one to rescue her, or a fairy godmother would float down from the rain clouds and wash away her Badness.
Instead, it was a decrepit old witch collecting payment for a favor offered seventeen years earlier.
Still, it was a type of freedom all the same.
“Well?” Brunhilda tapped the end of her walking stick against the ground, impatient.
Turning back to the witch, Risa placed her hands on her hips and frowned. Yes, her future was already decided, but that didn’t mean she had to make things easy.
“You didn’t even bring me a gift on my birthday.”
“Excuse me?”
“If you’re going to come here making demands, the least you can do is bring me a birthday present.”
“I already gave you a gift.” Brunhilda lifted her stick and pointed it at Risa’s chest. “And I can take it back.”
Risa glanced down to brush away some invisible dirt from her thighs. “You can’t take back gifts.”
As soon as the words left her mouth, a heavy weight overcame her.
She fell to her knees, unable to catch her breath, every bone in her body threatening to break under the immense pressure.
She scratched at the ground, fingernails clawing at the caked earth, scrabbling for purchase in a world that might disappear beneath her.
A din like rain rose in her ears with a roar.
“Stop!” Her mother’s voice sounded far away. “You’re hurting her!”
It was over in moments. Risa lay sprawled and gasping for air.
Life. Brunhilda had given her life.
Ma was at her side to help lift her onto trembling legs. Brunhilda observed them with the same disinterest she might have for a bug, picking leaves from her drab, moth-eaten clothes and flicking them aside.
“Now, come along.” The witch glanced toward the heavens. “I haven’t got all day.”