Chapter 3
THREE
The witch shall burn.
There lived a faerie in the armoire.
A lesser one, keen to come out in the darkest hour and steal my breath, or one who delighted in plucking eyelashes and fingernails while I slept.
The clatter of dishes had torn me from my faint and feverish state of weeping. It had taken me a minute to understand that the noise came not through the door, but from inside the wood-carved armoire. It ceased if I glared at it long enough.
The faeries who infested houses were the wickedest of all.
There were those who drank the blood of their hosts in the night, others who seduced humans into tearing their own ribcage open to let the faerie feast on their hearts.
The tiniest ones liked to weave illusions to drive their hosts mad, and those who lived under the bed slipped out in the night to unlatch the door and invite their tall kin inside.
I suspected the one who lived in the armoire was one of the latter sort. I’d find out soon enough. As soon as I’d obtained a little gift for it to lure it out for a bargain. If I was fortunate, it would fetch me a coat and boots and supplies for the road.
My leather satchel was nowhere to be seen—lost, I feared, to the wasteland.
There was not much worth in it: Just a pouch filled with what little coin I’d earned and saved over the winter moons, a bundle of threadbare clothes, the useless map, a piece of cheap soap.
I cared little for the loss of these things, but I ached desperately when I thought of my tattered notebook.
A breath of spring preserved with sketches and annotations and dried flowers on yellowed pages.
To think that it was gone… That I’d lost the one beautiful thing I had made of my time…
I stared blurredly into the winter storm until the wind calmed to whispers and the clouds cracked, revealing glimpses of late-afternoon skies.
Over the fresh snow lay a shroud of pink.
Slivers of fading sunlight danced over the near rooftops.
A dark river curved lazily past homes before it vanished into the forest sprawling over the hills.
On each crest flared a flame, like stars in the distance.
I found my gaze drawn again and again to the dark edge of the forest. A pair of elms framed the river like guardians, bent low under the weight of snow. Through the thicket weaved a little fox, horribly thin from a too-long winter.
The poor thing was about to starve—
I followed the little fox, brushing aside dense briarthorns barring my path.
From their frosted twigs dangled rosehips, bright like droplets of blood amid the endless winter.
I plucked them with a merry cackle, pricking my fingertips.
Out here, between snow-laden firs, the air was crisp and sweet with frost. I chased on swift legs deeper into the forest.
There was a hill, not far. The little fox was going there. To the ancient oak.
I had to make haste, lest it starve. The briar thickened, stretching its fingers after me to tear at my silkspun skirt.
The forest wept with anguish. Rosehips trickled like tears from the briar, staining the snow at my bare feet crimson.
I laughed shrilly as I tumbled down, down, down a slope.
Thorns bit at me like a starving beast, sinking fangs and talons into my skin.
I cackled as barbed vines coiled around my inkstained fingers, binding my wrists, pulling me deep beneath the snow.
Oh, what an honour to rest in the briar’s embrace.
To nourish these frozen roots—
I lived so vividly in my dream that frost kissed the tip of my nose and my fingers stiffened with cold.
A snicker shook me rudely awake.
At the bedside, so near that her long, snow-white hair tickled my neck, stood an ancient woman. She peered down at me with a toothless smile, face shadowed by an enormous straw hat, and she cackled when I recoiled with a shriek.
“Come now, girl. You need not fear old Almira.”
She was no faerie, at least. Her cratered face bore without question the signs of remarkably advanced age and her earthen eyes glittered as if lit by fireflies.
My quietness did not bother her. I learned quickly that Almira was a hale old lady with a fondness for grand chatter and even grander gestures.
She was the town’s herbalist and she’d come with a pouch of foul-smelling tinctures to dress my wound.
“Goodness!” she cried when she handed me a basket of fruit, our hands touching briefly. My nails were red-rimmed and sticky, as if I’d dipped them into berry preserves. “You are freezing to death. Has the boy no sense at all? He must come at once to fire the hearth!”
Almira had forgotten upon her next inhale all about her vexedness with the boy—she meant Adrik, I learned later—and chattered instead about her plants, all of which had strange names such as Bartholomew and Gertrude.
Our conversation required no partaking on my end save for the occasional sound of shock or approval. This promptly raised her in my esteem.
I glanced often at the basket of fruit she’d brought: An assortment of wildberries and plump peaches and strange pink things for which I had no name, all of which seemed rather out of season in this snow.
The faerie in the armoire, no doubt, would grant me a few wishes in return for such delicacies.
I retched when Almira unfolded the bandage on my leg.
“Come now, dear,” she said with a firm pinch of my cheek.
“It is only half as bad as it looks, and it looks not half as bad as it did when you arrived.
" I stared, to distract myself from the sting of whatever tincture she chose next for my torment, at the flickering flames on the hill.
“We invite the spirits of spring,” Almira said.
“The fires must burn, or winter will triumph.”
A madness, to believe such things. There lived no spirits in the earth and none in the trees—only wicked faeries. I gave her a benevolent smile, the same kind the miller’s daughter had often given my mother. It tasted like poison on my lips, that smile.
As strange as a hag and twice as mad.
Almira had already said her farewells when something beyond the window stirred her ire.
“The boy forgot to water the plants again.” I watched in horror as she drew a long needle from a pouch on her sash and pricked her finger.
She licked the drop of blood that welled at the tip.
“Small magics,” she murmured, raising her hand with a flourish.
Through the chamber swept a sweet warmth.
A plume of gold dust twirled in the draft and settled in Almira’s snow-white strands.
Outside, just past the window, the snow began to melt in a circle around a thin peach tree.
In its shade stood a stone-framed bed of withered herbs—withered, but bursting alive as Almira’s magic unfurled: lavender, stalks of bright foxglove, vicious thistles, belladonna and chamomile, and between them a vibrant tangle of a hundred flowers and herbs I’d never seen.
Thick bumblebees and shimmering beetles buzzed among them.
The peach tree bowed under the weight of blossoms and fruit.
“A witch of the wild,” I whispered, voice strange with fear.
A shiver slithered over my back, black claws travelling the length of my spine. Such aliveness amid the snow. I pinched the knotted scar, drew a tight breath. As long as I was sharp and focused, I could contain the darkness within. I could soothe the monster back to sleep.
I’d never met another who possessed this wild magic—possessed it and wielded it.
There were covens, it was said, of women born with this power.
Witches who called flowers from ash and crops from dirt with the wave of a hand.
Just a handful of them, a dozen or two in all the land.
Was this what I could have been, had I been born with this magic rather than cursed that night beneath the ribbon-hung elm?
Was this what I would have been able to do, had there not lived something rotten within me?
A curious magic—
“That I am,” breathed Almira. She clutched her walking stick with white knuckles. The blood had drained from her lips, as if she’d drawn too much of it from her finger. “Now, be a dear and remind the boy to water the plants, will you?”
She slammed the door with surprising vigor before I could insist that she rest for a while. As she passed the garden, she petted the sage as if it were a kitten, smearing blood over its stem. The plant nestled into her palm—a kitten, indeed.
I stared with unease after Almira: A bony figure stark against the snow in her vivid, patterned rags. She was wearing neither shoes nor a coat.
The breeze stiffened to a wind. Thick snowflakes began to tumble from the twilit clouds. I should alert someone to ensure Almira did not slip on ice or get lost in the storm. I should call someone…
The harsh tonic she’d forced down my throat gathered like mist in my mind. I was out before she’d passed the garden fence.
Hours later—the clouds had cleared and a thin sliver of moonlight painted the frosted window silver—I startled awake from a noise.
A shriek caught in my throat. Fear crept bitterly into my veins. At the tips of my fingers began a sinister tingle. The garden… I must have lost control of the monster while I slept. The hounds had found me, had tracked the stench of my magic to this snow-buried town and come to take me.
Hello, little bird.
A tap and a rasp. The scratching neared, claws against wood. The tingle in my fingers sharpened to a sting. I clutched the glass chalice and knocked it sharply against the edge of the nightstand. It shattered with a crisp clank in two, making a blade-like shard of its foot.
“Huh?” came a voice through the door.
I drew a hissing breath. “Who’s there?”
The scratching ceased. “Lorell. The, uh, the alchemist.”
I lowered my pathetic weapon.
As strange as a hag and twice as mad.