Chapter I.10 #2
Miria returned to her dinner, but her gaze fell upon the jar Yali had given her years ago.
It had been a long time since she had felt the need to add anything to it, but it reminded her of what Yali had said that day Miria woke up in her bed.
“You told me there was magic in my anger and grief. Do all strong emotions bring out power?”
“What do you think?
Miria tried not to groan. It had also been a long time since Nana had played the what do you think game instead of just answering questions.
She wiped her fingers and drank some cider while she considered. After she’d impressed Yali with her actions today, she didn’t want to disappoint. “I think … You never suggested I add any other emotions to a jar for their power. There must be a reason for that.”
Yali’s lips did more than twitch this time.
She chuckled. “I can’t fault your reasoning, but all emotions do contain power.
” She reached beneath her blouse and pulled out the blue charm she always wore around her neck.
Miria knew it was magic, but she’d never asked what it was.
“I don’t usually bother with emotion magic, but a sister witch made this for me with the happiness we shared one time. ”
“What does it do?”
“It keeps me feeling younger than my years.” Yali’s smile was mysterious as she tucked it back under her shirt.
“Most of our emotions will never contain enough power to make them worthwhile for magic, yet when they do, they can be very effective. Strong love for someone, for example, can provide strength or protection. Intense joy is useful for certain types of healing spells. Fear can be handy if you wish to curse someone, although a witch should never do that. And anger …”
Yali steepled her fingers, and glanced toward the shelf with Miria’s jar.
“Anger is the most potent emotion for magic because of its very nature. Anger is a sense of injustice, and injustice is the universe in chaos. When an injustice is corrected and justice obtained, that is making order from chaos. And what is magic?”
“Magic is making order from chaos,” Miria said. It was one of her nana’s first lessons.
The universe constantly moved toward chaos.
Miria had known that before she’d met Nana.
Everyone knew that because the church taught it.
People fought against the chaos—they built houses, wove fabric, were simply born—itself an act of defiance.
But wood rotted, fabric decayed, and people died.
That made witches like knights in the great cosmic battle against chaos.
They had special skills and the training to fight.
All of this, too, Miria had known for a while, but she was finally arranging these facts in her head, and they were not stacking neatly. “I don’t understand why the church doesn’t like magic when the church is also about order.”
Nana let out a strangled kind of grunt. “That’s because the church doesn’t truly care about order; it cares about what benefits itself.
Divine Order says humanity should submit to the church, that women should submit to men, that those with common blood should submit to those with noble blood, and royal blood rules over them all.
Why is a woman’s loose hair a sign of chaos?
Why is questioning a priest? I’ll tell you—because it’s not about order; it’s about control.
Control that benefits the church and those who run it. ”
Yali was getting into her rant, and she stood, pacing in front of the hearth.
“Anger is about justice pushing on injustice; order pushing on chaos. That makes anger the purest form of power a witch can draw on. And that is why the church tells women and children to suppress their anger, that there’s something wrong with them if they act upon it.
They don’t want any of us to have power. Only them.”
Miria wished dinner hadn’t been so good.
A stuffed stomach did not help her brain form clear thoughts, and Nana had given her much to think over.
She’d known Yali disliked the church, but Miria had thought it was just because the church did not like witches.
While that still seemed to be the case, it sounded like the reasons the church did not like witches were complicated.
Yali took a seat on the bench next to Miria, and she clasped her closest hand. “No more questions? That’s unusual.”
Miria hadn’t realized how long she’d sat, pondering Yali’s words. “I don’t know where to start,” she admitted. “There’s so much I don’t know.”
She’d been feeling so proud of herself for what she’d done today, so responsible. So ready to be a true witch. But as usual, the more she accomplished, the more she discovered she had to learn. She barely knew anything—not just about magic, but about the greater world and how she fit into it.
When she admitted this to Yali, her nana squeezed her hand gently. “That’s half of what it means to be a witch, child. To question everything and never stop learning.”
“What’s the other half?”
“To push,” her nana said. “To use what you’ve learned as you push against the chaos.”
Although Miria wondered whether Yali was humoring her when she said Miria would never stop questioning and didn’t need to know everything to be a witch, she discovered soon enough that her nana had been telling the truth.
It was on a crisp autumn day that Yali declared Miria had finished her apprenticeship and was ready to be initiated—as long as Miria was sure that was what she wanted.
“No one is born a witch,” Nana told her. “A witch is something you must choose to be. By now, you know most of what it entails, and what this life will ask of you. If it’s not what you want—”
Miria hadn’t even allowed her to finish the sentence. It was all she’d wanted for years.
Her nana had nodded, clearly not expecting any other answer.
“Think on your reasons,” she’d said. “You will make that choice official later, but more—there is still a lot for you to learn and a lot of work ahead of you. You can’t know all of it until you become one of us, so you must be willing to go forward on trust, and I know you have good reasons not to trust anyone. ”
“I trust you,” Miria said. Her nana was the only person she trusted, so if Yali trusted the other witches, that would have to be good enough.
“You trust me, or my basket of raspberries?” Yali asked, but Miria could see the way Nana’s lips quivered with emotion as she smiled, and she pulled Miria into a tight hug.
“Why did you become a witch?” Miria asked after Yali let her go.
It felt like a daring question, one Miria wouldn’t usually be bold enough to ask.
Her nana doled out bits of her past in unexpected ways, and usually at times when Miria least expected them—singing a song she’d grown up with as they washed clothes, their attempt to recreate a cake Yali remembered from her youth because she’d gotten a sudden hankering for it, the saga of how she’d obtained her chickens when one escaped the garden (it involved an ogre, a riddle, and some magical beans, and Miria still wasn’t sure if all of it had truly happened or if her nana had been teasing her).
But Miria rarely got an answer to a direct question, and as she’d grown older, she’d realized that Yali possibly didn’t like thinking of her past any more than she liked thinking of her old family.
Under the circumstances, though, Miria thought Why? might be a fair question.
Nana had been in the process of braiding grasses that they would dry over the winter, and she didn’t speak until she’d tied off her current braid. The braids would be useful in all sorts of spells from cleaning to healing.
“When I was a little younger than you,” Yali said at last, “a plague swept through the city where I grew up. Doctors couldn’t stop it.
The people said all the death must be as the gods willed it.
Now, the gods where I was born are the not the same gods as we have here, nor is the church the same church—not in name anyway, but they are much the same in other ways, just as people are much the same everywhere even if they look or sound different.
That church claims magic belongs to the divine, and to use it is to argue with the gods. ”
Nana closed her eyes as she sank into the memory.
“There was one woman in town who could cure the sickness, but my family, like most people, wouldn’t take her cure when they got ill.
Whether they believed the church that using magic meant you were fighting the divine will, or whether they were afraid of the mortal consequences, I don’t know.
But I snuck out to this witch and begged for the cure for me and my baby sister, and it worked as promised.
We got better. We lived. After that, I decided that if death and suffering was the will of the divine, then I had a duty to argue with the gods.
No one should suffer when a person has the power to alleviate their pain. ”
To argue with the gods. To push against the chaos. Miria was almost sorry she asked Yali for her Why as the weight of the responsibility being offered to her pressed against her chest.
“Did that woman become the witch who trained you?” she asked, needing a lighter topic.
“Eventually, yes. I was older than you were when I started my training.” Nana playfully brushed Miria’s nose with the braided grass. “Do not look so somber. There’s plenty of joy in a good argument.”
If by a good argument, Yali meant there was joy in performing magic, that was true. And if she meant she enjoyed a good rant, that was certainly also true.
But, because Miria was curious, she had to ask: “What would happen if I said no to becoming a witch?”
“Then we would find a home and vocation for you,” Yali explained, “and over time, your magic would fade like anyone else’s.”
And so, on the thirteenth full moon of Miria’s thirteenth year, she became a fully fledged witch.
It was the first time Miria got to meet other witches, these mysterious women who Yali occasionally visited, who lived in lands she’d never seen, and spoke with accents she’d never heard before—or, at least, several of them did.
A couple appeared to be as old as her nana, and one didn’t look as though she could be much older than Miria herself. The rest spanned the decades between.
They were every bit as disparate in their appearances—short and tall, slim and round, some with skin paler than Miria’s own and others with skin as dark as the darkest owl or sparrow’s feather.
Only twelve traveled through Yali’s portal for the initiation, though it sounded like there were dozens more around the world.
Nana explained that it took thirteen witches to anoint a new witch.
One of the witches, a woman named Sarel, had arrived two days before the others.
She was tall, with olive skin, amber eyes, and a friendly dimple when she smiled.
Miria took a liking to her immediately, and the feeling seemed mutual, which was a relief.
Yali had explained that Sarel would be the one to perform Miria’s initiation; Yali herself should not do it since Miria was her apprentice.
Since Sarel was the first new witch Miria had met, she wanted to pepper Sarel with questions about where she was from, but for most of those two days she was shooed away from the cottage.
Sarel was helping Yali prepare the spells for the ceremony, and Miria was not allowed to learn them until she’d been initiated.
The winter night of the ceremony was silent and frosty, and a layer of snow shimmered under the moonlight, sparkling like the stars above.
The evergreen branches hung low with it as though they’d dressed in their best finery and were bowing before the group of women who’d assembled.
Someone had added fragrant herbs to the bonfire, and the cold air smelled as spicy as the mulled wine Miria had been given to drink.
Yali, Miria learned, had already presented her reasons for initiating Miria into the witches’ sisterhood, and this was why she’d been gone so many times over the past year. She’d told others of Miria’s knowledge and skills, and—just as importantly—of her curiosity and empathy.
“Why do you choose to be a witch?” Sarel asked as a way to begin the ceremony.
After her nana’s instruction, Miria had put some thought into her reply. “Because one day, another girl might be left in the woods like I was, and she’ll need someone to care for her and fight for her like someone did for me.”
Nana looked teary-eyed, and Miria thought her heart might burst with how much she’d grown to love the old woman. The witch she’d once foolishly feared had become the mother she’d never known.
“To be a witch is to live on the edges of society,” Sarel said.
“A few people will appreciate your gifts and value you for who you are. Most, if you are fortunate, will tolerate you because you are useful to them. But to others, you will never be anything but evil. And yet, a witch doesn’t bend toward chaos, even though that’s easier.
She protects the vulnerable, she defies the tyrant, and she strives to always be a shining light in the darkness.
Despite these burdens, you chose to make this your path.
It’s not your power that makes you a witch; it’s what you do with it.
Magic is merely the tool we’ve perfected.
And now that you’ve made your first choice on your path, we’ll ensure you retain your ability to use it. ”