INTERLUDE
The little girl made her home in the forest with the witches.
The bloodied bread knife had been her only relic brought from home and the ragged wound upon her hand healed into a wine-red grimace.
The memory of the grimoire faded and now she slept in a tent beside another girl her age and was taught, rune by rune, to wield magic.
Her library was the leaf litter; her bedroom, the belly of the forest.
On her eleventh birthday, the little girl returned to the valley of willows from where she had come.
She knocked on the door to the home that no longer belonged to her.
Her mother opened it. The woman shrieked for her husband and collapsed on the girl, clutching her, crying: My darling. My darling, we’ve missed you.
Her father watched, a few steps away.
Mum, said the girl, I’m not here to stay.
Her father sprang and seized her, but his embrace was not a thing of love. It was a cage. The little girl flapped and shrieked and broke the hold, and her coven leader appeared and took her, and into the night they flew.
Her mother and father howled and the girl knew she was loved. She returned on the annum – when she turned twelve, then thirteen – until their tears dried up and their resentment stoked, and they began to blame her.
How could they not?
If they did not blame her, they would have to blame themselves.
On her fourteenth birthday, they did not answer the door at all.
She found them instead in the church hall, in progress of a funeral.
Looking through the window, she spotted the children she’d known, the big bosses, the matronly secretary.
The girl realised that they cried for her.
Her mother and father did not. So, the girl ran.
She left behind her the valley of willows.
She did not care; she had someone better to love.
The girl she shared her tent with. The girl named Opal.
Opal had eyes like her namesake, iridescent with bolts of blue flame.
Her hair was dark like the girl’s, identical always in length and texture, though Opal’s skin was much lighter.
Opal laughed in explosions and was honest in stabs.
It was her cruelty that drew the girl in, arrow-sharp.
It made the girl feel safe. She was no disappointment; Opal would have said so.
At last, the girl had family who would not abandon her. The witches of Acanthi did not allow estrangement. They did not allow divorce. They did not allow betrayal. There would be no leaving, not ever.
Yet, Opal dreamed of taking a boat to the northern hemisphere and never returning.
That, they both knew, was impossible, and they spoke about it in whispers. For, every few years, a deserter was strung up upon the oaks as an example, with runes cut into their belly – to fortify the wards of the forest, to keep away the enforcers of Article 13.
It was Opal who comforted the girl when she had nightmares about the blood.
It was Opal who struck another girl in their scrying class for making fun of the scar on the girl’s hand.
It was Opal who laughed with her, climbed trees with her, saved her weekly pocket money to buy new watercolours for her.
They grew together in tandem, closer than any other children of the coven.
At twelve, they ran off from their runes tutor to play with caterpillars behind the butcher’s tent; at thirteen, they stole poppy seeds from the herbologist, chewed them and pretended to sway like the opium addicts they had seen in the village.
Opal began menstruating first, and she told the girl as if this was some grand achievement.
This made the girl embarrassed of herself.
Yet, she did not want to bleed. She wrapped her mouth around the word ‘woman’ and found it to be a hooting sound, soft and ugly and betraying.
‘Girl’ was safe. It was her. ‘Woman’, however, was a tainted, performative thing that felt strange and foreign and faraway.
The girl did not tell Opal this. Instead, she listened intently as her beloved accomplice explained to her the menstrual belt and the cotton and the herbs that would lift blood from linen.
This was not the only thing that Opal was first and superior in. She was better at magic. She was adored by all the coven leaders. Opal was the sun itself and did not notice how her radiance left the girl in the shade.
When they were fourteen, Mistress Moira had them skin rabbits in the study of blood magic.
The girl had always had a gentle disposition and so she sobbed at the broken little bodies and flayed fur and the grotesque liquids spilling like juices out of rotting peaches.
Opal took the girl’s bread knife from her, held the living rabbit under the chin and deftly cut away the skin as if she peeled an apple. The girl vomited. Opal laughed.
The sting of that sound – sharp, cackling – hurt more than the image of the slain creature. The next day, the girl chewed ginger and cut the rabbit’s head right off.
Under Opal’s gaze, the girl felt herself warp and change.
Fifteen came. The girl stumbled onto Opal kissing a boy from the coven named Edward.
Edward heralded in Terrance who heralded Larry, then Brian, then William, and so on. Quickly, it became boys from a nearby village. Quickly, it was men. Tall, broad, sullen, drunken, each of them awkward and unbeautiful and entirely unworthy of Opal.
Every time Opal broke another heart, she and the girl would go swimming in the lilypond in their underthings.
It became their own small tradition. I want to be clean of him, Opal would say, diving deep, kicking her legs, surfacing, laughing as if no one and nothing in the world could hurt her.
And the girl caught herself watching Opal a little too long, her eyes trailing the skin upon her thighs, the swelling of her chest, the wet hair on her arms.
They slept beside each other every night in their ruby-coloured tent, the girl dreaming of Opal wading through the lilypond, her dress soaked through.
She woke at last to the sudden and horrifying realisation that she was in love.
And, in their sanctuary of childhood sketches, jars of caught butterflies and incense burned to ash, the girl realised she no longer wanted to be Opal. She wanted to be loved by Opal.
On the night of her sixteenth birthday, the girl studied wards with Opal’s mother. You have a talent for this, Catherine Weyer had said.
Why should she care?
The girl’s obsession was not spellcraft, now.
It was everything Opal loved and everything Opal detested.
She hated tea, but loved lemon in hot water.
She thought roses were ugly, but blackberries were beautiful.
She found dogs insufferable, but ravens delightful.
The girl cut away like rabbit’s skin any preference, interest or part of herself that Opal did not admire.
She did it until she was a new creature entirely, no longer the child from the valley of willows, with her quaint, common name, and her parents who could not love her.
After all, the girl was happy to be anything at all, so long as she was not herself.
She turned seventeen and Opal stole pennywine from her mother’s tent. The two of them got drunk and kissed under the stars and slept between the bracken and mushrooms and for the first time in her life, the girl felt happy.
And then the boy ruined it.
He was not new to the coven. He had arrived when they were fifteen and the girl and Opal had sat in the crook of a laurel oak, watching his parents barter with Opal’s mother.
Wealthy people who paid in jewels and gold for their son’s ‘tuition’ and for a tent larger than all the others, and the girl had almost commented on how handsome he was.
There was something to his eyes, to his mouth that made her heart flutter.
But Opal had scoffed and mocked him and so the girl agreed that he was pompous and too keen on himself and how silly that he wanted to be a poet, of all things, and not a Magician.
But that had been years before, and now all of them were on the cusp of the wrong side of childhood.
The girl woke in the bracken still a little drunk, the memory of Opal’s skin under her nails and she spied sleepily the figure of her beloved friend in the distance, crouched beside the coven fire, drinking her lemon and hot water, her eyes on the boy, those irises burning for him.
With a terrible rush of heartache, the girl witnessed, again, her own funeral procession.
Opal giggled, tucked her dark hair behind her ear.
The girl saw on the pair’s faraway lips her own death date carved.
A week was all it took, and the boy and Opal were in love.
He had the early fluff of a beard coming in and was lanky- limbed and straight-backed with a long nose and skin darker than Opal’s, but lighter than her own.
Ghistian in his heritage. The wife of Saint Penelope had been a Ghist, and he looked a little like the early paintings of her that the girl had seen before she had come to the coven: beautiful and delicate, with melancholy eyes and an artist’s hands.
The girl nodded and smiled at every happy word from Opal’s lips. Whenever she saw the boy, she felt sick. He was, indeed, charming. He was, indeed, admirable. Easy. Unabandoned. This time, the girl could not simply skin away another part of herself. Opal had simply chosen a better rabbit.
She turned eighteen alone.
She spent hours winding poppets and memorising charms and studying runes and developing her talent for wards. Now, she superseded even Opal’s mother in the subject. Opal did not like that.
No one’s ever going to bed you if all you can do is cast wards.
Maybe you should inherit the coven from Mother; you’re clearly her favourite.
Your spells are slapdash and hollow and if you need to mutter nursery rhymes to cast them, then really what is the point of having a talent at all?