Chapter Fifteen. In Which the Trio Encounters a Jilted Witch #2
The shapes were trash. Heaps of it. The contents of everything in the world were strewn upon the floor, spilling out from the mouth of a smaller cave like the insides of a gutted animal.
Different piles were scattered across the area.
Broken chairs here, uprooted dead trees there, upside-down cast-iron stoves, tangles of dried kelp, several pieces of winding rope.
Wherever she turned, a new pile emerged out of the disarray.
A small mountain of shoes—but only the lefts.
Ragged bits of cloth. Half of a wrecked pirate ship, the wooden figurehead of a woman’s naked torso intact.
“This is horrifying,” the Wolf’s voice echoed.
Brunie climbed up Risa’s legs and perched around her neck like a furry snake, tail tucked gingerly under her nose.
At the sight of the cat, the witch gave a melodramatic wail.
It reverberated amid the trash, echoed against the damp cave walls.
She flung herself onto a settee made of what might have been comfortable bits of trash accumulated over the centuries.
A large brown canvas cloth was thrown over it in an attempt at home decor.
“I know!” the witch cried, arching backward, a poor, tragic heroine rendered in the flesh.
Her anguished sobs tinkled like music. Glittering diamond tears ran down her cheeks.
She draped a delicate pale forearm over her eyes.
“It’s an awful, horrible mess! I didn’t expect company.
” She sat up suddenly, nose and cheeks tinged the delicate pink of dawn. “Tea, anyone?”
The Wolf picked her way through the garbage. Short arms flailing, she hopped from one clear spot to another, boots landing with a soft splat in what Risa hoped was a puddle of stagnant water.
“No, thank you,” the Wolf responded, the only one retaining any form of manners. She teetered near the rotted half of the pirate ship and stared up at the figurehead’s flyaway hair, whipped back by invisible winds. “Would you like some?” she asked Risa.
“Sure,” said Risa, because she didn’t know what else to do.
Tears welled in the witch’s eyes again. “I don’t know where my teakettle is!” she cried, burying her face in the crinkling garbage settee.
Risa did a careful half turn and refused to look down when something crunched beneath her foot, the sound like tiny bones being crushed.
Everywhere she looked, there was junk. Collected over centuries, from different parts of the world.
She could see no stream that might have brought half a pirate ship to the witch’s shores, nor could she understand where the crumbled remains of a stone tower might have come from.
It must have all gotten here through magic, though Risa could not for the life of her feel any of its heat prickling her skin or making her shiver.
The witch howled again and flopped over onto the other end of the settee.
Brunie’s tail twitched with exasperation, a slow, annoyed growl working in his throat.
“That’s not a problem,” Javi assured the witch. He remained rooted beside Risa. “I, myself, abhor tea.”
After a few more sorrowful sniffles, the witch focused her bleary silver eyes on the cat around Risa’s neck. “I hate cats,” she said, the words firm.
“Me too,” Javi said, though Risa caught his quick guilty glance at Brunie that suggested he did not, in fact, hate cats.
And just like that, the witch’s tantrum was over.
The witch turned to the Wolf. “I love your cloak,” she said, eyeing the swishy gray fabric with an appreciative nod. “Did you put the spell on it yourself?”
The Wolf startled and picked up one end of the cape with two fingers. “It has a spell?”
The witch’s eyes widened. She laughed nervously and began her version of tidying up. “I’m not good at conversation; I don’t get many visitors,” she admitted.
The Wolf shook her head in warning when both Javi and Risa opened their mouths. Risa’s mind was reeling from the leaps between conversation topics.
Not that the witch noticed. She grabbed a knitted blanket—or sweater, who could say—from a crate filled with more deformed knitted monstrosities. “Oh, she loved this one.” She chucked it over her shoulder, and it landed on a pile of unused mousetraps.
“Who?” the Wolf asked, having somehow made her way across several trash piles to a collection of mismatched cabinets standing in the middle of the cavern.
All were broken somehow: Some were missing doors, others the glass that kept dust at bay.
The Wolf was opening each to investigate the contents, finding mostly stacks of chipped saucers.
“My love!” the witch wailed, flinging herself onto her pile of left-foot-only shoes. Her hand rooted around in its depths before revealing a teakettle from the previous century. “I was looking for this.”
Perhaps they would get tea after all. Risa’s stomach growled at the thought.
“I wasn’t always like this,” the witch sobbed, keen on sharing her story.
Risa didn’t blame her; it looked like a lonely existence.
“When she left, I thought I could become lost in the tunnels. I wanted to wander an endless path, a ghost of my former self, longing for her until my body ceased to move and became food for worms, my skeleton an altar for love.”
“That’s rather romantic,” Javi breathed dreamily, lashes fluttering.
The witch nodded. “I like to think so!” With a sigh, she rested her head against the pewter kettle.
“Yet I went on breathing. I missed her so much, I started to collect the things I thought she might like in case she ever returned. Leaves. Twigs. But she didn’t.
I guess I’m cursed to be lonely forever. ”
Risa felt the words steal her breath. She blinked at the trash witch, focusing on her face, trying to see if there was indeed a curse like Risa’s snaking through her veins, winding around her arms like a climbing vine.
Nothing.
What she did notice were the dried husks of climbing vines in a wicker basket beside the settee.
Cracked eggshells where bluebirds once grew.
Gold rings missing gems in a cloudy glass jar.
Several chairs without legs or arms, useless for their purpose but still standing upright, a souvenir of parties never held.
Bits of ripped parchment, too small to write odes of love on.
Magic for remembering what one couldn’t forget.
Risa supposed she had her own brand of magic, then, too.
Some were memories: the names the children of Barrow had called her, the times she saw her parents get hurt.
Repeating over and over, keeping her up at night.
Others were tangible items still back in Barrow.
Tucked beneath her floorboards were scraps of paper and the twiggy witchtraps left on her doorstep.
What remained of a gnarled stick from when her father had fallen out of a tree and cracked his skull; in a vial, charred soil where her mother had been standing when lightning struck; a bit of stone that had given way from when the river overflowed. Each a reason she was bad.
Each a kind of curse.
Some people drowned in puddles. The witch had nursed love into a curse of her own making. Growing the vines herself, letting them curl around her slowly, suffocating.
This was not a curse Risa could break. She couldn’t see where to start. Only the witch knew where the vines grew. Only she would be able to root them out.
Risa blinked away the stinging in her eyes, and took measured steps around the relics of the witch’s heartbreak.
She didn’t know a thing about kindness, but she had spent her whole life wishing someone would extend a warm hand.
Palm on the witch’s shimmery shoulder, she said, “I’m not very well versed in love, but I know that sometimes you have to want to break your own curse. ”