Chapter 4
“Attempt twelve,” Englebert announces from the windowsill.
“Nobody asked you to keep count.”
“Somebody must. You certainly aren’t. That’s half your problem, Marigold. You’ve no rigor, no record, no respect for the data.”
“You’ve been spending too much time with Emma.”
“I am quoting a respected colleague.”
Annabel came by this morning with a shoebox full of candles under her arm.
“You’ve been avoiding me,” she said.
“I’ve been busy. I have a deadline.”
“You’ve been avoiding the kindling charm.”
“The kindling charm and I have agreed to see other people.”
“Twelve attempts is hardly a lot,” she says, sitting across from me, arms folded like we have all morning, which, unfortunately for me, we do. “I’ve had students take hundreds of tries at this charm.”
“Your students are typically under the age of ten.”
“I’ve seen grown women throw the candle across the room, and by ‘grown women’ I mean me, my first summer learning it.”
“How many tries did it take you?”
“Nine.”
“You’re a terrible motivational speaker.”
She nudges a saucer containing a single tea light toward me.
“Everybody’s magic comes in crooked. Mine came in early and useless. It took me a decade to figure out how to apply it properly. Yours is coming in late and sideways. Late and sideways still arrives.”
“It’s not arriving. It’s been thirty-six years. It missed the exit.”
“You found a dryad the whole Council couldn’t find, just a few months ago,” she says, “and last month you cracked a windowpane with your mind, so.”
“Kindling charm attempt four remains the high-water mark of my magical career,” I say. “I peaked with unintentional property damage.”
The problem with arguing with Annabel is that she simply doesn’t engage. She just waits until you run out of objections.
I hold my intention like a match and offer it to the wick.
The saucer rotates a slow half turn and stops.
“Well,” Annabel says. “That’s new.” She leans over the table, studying the saucer. “Attempt four cracked a window. Attempt seven knocked over the pepper grinder—”
“‘Knocked over’ is a bit of an oversell. It unscrewed itself and fell over.”
“—and this one turned the dish. Mari, everything you do moves objects. You keep aiming at the flame and hitting the thing holding it.”
She takes the candle out of the saucer and sets it directly on the table, bare. “Again. No dish this time. Nothing to hit but the candle.”
I, once again, hold my intention like a match. Attempt thirteen moves the shoebox the candles came in.
Before Annabel can insist on more intention, Gabe calls.
“I know it’s not Tuesday,” he says. “But I’ve got the Kowalski service at eleven and the sitter has a sudden dentist thing, and Hannah’s busy at the Community Center all day—”
He arrives a few minutes later with Addie, a box of pastries, and an apology already in progress before the screen door is fully open.
“Addie is very upset the girls are at the Community Center and she’s not—”
“It’s unfair,” Addie says, ducking under his arm into the kitchen. “Emma gets to use the drill.”
“I am quite certain Emma does not get to use the drill,” Gabe says.
“We can go to the Community Center when we’re done here,” I say.
Gabe sets the pastry box on the counter and looks around the room. “Am I interrupting witch business?”
“You’re interrupting remedial witch business,” I say. “Stay. Watch me menace a candle.”
“I’d love to, but I have to bury a Kowalski.” He pours himself half a cup of coffee anyway. “Addie, listen — Ms. Rose is not your teacher right now. She’s Mari’s teacher. She’s your host.”
“I know how to be a guest,” Addie says, with dignity, climbing onto the chair next to Annabel.
Outside the screen door, a little grey face appears at the gap, whiskers first — Bandit, Addie’s raccoon familiar.
“Do I smell pastries?” he says, pressing himself against the screen.
He’s not allowed in my kitchen, not on account of any particular crimes, though he’s committed plenty, but because Englebert lives here, and there is a limit to how many opinions one room can hold.
Addie passes him a corner of a croissant through the gap.
Gabe takes his leave and Maude comes down from wherever he spends his mornings, so attempt fourteen happens with an audience of one witch, one apprentice observing for educational purposes, one raccoon at the screen door, and two cats.
The candle does nothing. The matchbox next to it slides three inches and knocks into the sugar bowl.
Addie writes something in her composition book.
“What are you writing?”
“Data,” she says. “Emma says if you don’t write it down, it didn’t happen.”
“Read me the data.”
“Attempt fourteen. Candle, no. Matchbox, yes. Ms. Mari’s magic likes things,” she reads from the book. “That’s my hypothesis. Emma taught me ‘hypothesis’. It means a guess you’re allowed to say out loud.”
“That’s roughly it, yeah.”
“Annabel’s magic likes plants. Emma’s mom’s magic likes doors. Yours likes… stuff.”
Maude chooses that moment to yowl. It isn’t his usual food yowl or his closed-door yowl.
It’s his long-aggrieved yowl, which he usually saves for genuine injustice, and, for some reason, he delivers it staring directly at Addie, tail ticking.
Addie winces, and then giggles, and then composes herself into solemnity.
“Maude wants me to tell you something,” she says.
The whole kitchen turns to look at my cat. My ordinary, non-magical, regular cat, who cannot talk, but who can, apparently, be heard, if the listener happens to be an eight-year-old magical savant.
“Go ahead.”
“He says...” She pauses, listening. “There’s a lot. He says the sunbeam in this kitchen belongs to him. The morning one. He says he’s been sitting in the spot every day to show everyone, and some cats keep being in it first because some cats wake up early on purpose, which is cheating.”
“It is a shared sunbeam,” Englebert says.
Maude produces a short, flat sound.
“Maude says it isn’t.”
“That sunbeam has fallen on that sill since before either of you were born. I have spent my mornings in that light for decades—”
Maude, still staring at Addie, makes a low noise.
Addie’s eyes go round. She’s clearly torn between her duty as an interpreter and what seems to be a matter of professional discretion.
“What did he say?”
“I don’t want to say it.”
“Addie. The court requires it.”
She takes a breath and delivers it with her chin up, like she’s ripping off a bandage. “He says Englebert doesn’t even feel the sunbeam through all that ego.”
Annabel puts her hand over her mouth. From the screen door comes a wheezing, clicking sound, which is Bandit, laughing.
“THE ANIMAL,” Englebert says, at full theatrical volume, on his feet on the windowsill, “IS ILLITERATE. He is a tenant. He arrived not but a few months ago in a pet carrier. I have advised witches on the Council. I have consulted on productions near and far. I have—” He takes a breath.
“Cease that noise at once,” he says, to Bandit, who, predictably, does not cease the noise.
Maude walks to the exact center of the sunbeam, folds himself down into it, and closes his eyes.
“He says the sunbeam feels amazing,” Addie reports.
Negotiations collapse entirely at that point.
Englebert descends from the windowsill and stalks out of the kitchen, announcing over his shoulder that he has notes to prepare and a company to hold together and that he will remember, individually, everyone who laughed.
Bandit is still making the wheezing sound. Addie writes the whole thing down.
“For the record,” she says, tongue between her teeth as she writes.
Annabel leans over to see the page. “What’s the record say?”
“‘Sunbeam: Maude’s’,” she reads. “It’s official now.”
* * *
“I brought help,” I call out to Hannah as we make our way toward the stage.
“You brought a second-grader.”
“And myself,” I say. “I brought labor. We’re labor.”
Addie has already peeled off toward Emma and Lily, who are stationed at the foot of the castle wall. Lily has a paintbrush, a can of paint, and, perhaps against anyone’s better judgement, a noticeable lack of direct supervision.
The castle wall stands about ten feet tall and twelve wide. It leans — not dramatically, but enough to be a problem. Hannah has it tied off with a ratchet strap while she works. There are pencil marks and abandoned screw holes all down the back edge.
“What’s up?” I ask.
“It won’t take weight on the left foot. I’ve re-braced it three times. Every time I plumb it, it settles back half an inch overnight. Nothing’s warped. I don’t know what’s happening. The math works, but the wall won’t.”
“Isn’t this your whole… thing? Your magic is building houses.”
“This isn’t a house. It’s a picture of a house. There’s nothing in it for me to talk to.”
Hannah’s gift is hearths and doorways and buildings and their bones, but she’ll deny to your face that she uses it on the job.
“I painted a new stone,” Lily announces.
We all look. Down in the corner, at Lily-height, among the grey-painted stone, there’s a fresh blob the color of a tennis ball.
“Lily. Why is the stone green?”
“It’s a magic stone,” Lily says. “Every castle has one magic stone. That’s how you get in. Everybody knows.”
“I thought lime green was for babies,” I say. Lily went through a phase earlier this summer where everything needed to be lime green. Lily’s phases last, on average, two weeks.
“It is,” she says. “Duh. But the magic stone needs to be bright, so you can find it.”
“Plus it’s the only color paint she could find,” Emma says.
Hannah closes her eyes and does the breathing exercise Moonbeam taught the whole crew.
“Fine. It’s weathered granite with lichen on it. Kids—”
“Wait,” Addie says, appraising the wall.
“Ms. Archer, your magic is like… doors, right? Emma said doors and fireplaces and that sort of thing.”
“Something like that.”
“So, why doesn’t the castle have a door?”
“It’s a castle wall,” Hannah says.
“A castle wall with no way through it,” Addie says.
Hannah looks at Addie for a moment, then puts her palms against the wall, listening. “Huh,” she says.
She snaps a chalk line and cuts an arched doorway into the castle with a jigsaw while the girls provide unsolicited engineering commentary. I hold the offcut, and when the arch is cut and sanded and the wall goes back up on its feet, it stands, and it stands without a lean.
“It’ll still get braces before dress,” Hannah says, circling it, suspicious of her own success. “I don’t trust a wall that changed its mind. But that’s… yeah. Huh.”
“You’re welcome,” says Lily.
“For what?”
Lily points. The arch’s right-hand edge sits directly beside the lime green stone, aligned at doorway’s foot like a threshold marker.
“The magic stone,” Lily says. “It’s how you get in. I told you.”
* * *
The Byways piece is due at midnight, and I am working with the most difficult editor of my entire career.
“Read me the part about me again,” Englebert says.
He’s sitting on the table, his eyes just above the level of my laptop screen. He’s forgiven the household for the sunbeam tribunal, or, more accurately, he has ‘elected to rise above it’, which he continues to mention at frequent intervals.
“‘A source close to the production,’” I read, “‘describes the company as the finest ensemble assembled in Vermont in a generation.’”
“Good. And the other one.”
“‘The same source confirms the production observes every theatrical tradition, including the venerable prohibition on speaking the play’s name —a rule enforced, quote, ‘without exception and without mercy.’’”
“Without exception and without mercy,” he repeats, savoring it. “You may file.”
“Thank you.”
“The attribution is airtight?”
“You are a source close to the production. It’s technically true, and no one will be suspicious. Nobody reading a local interest magazine is going to think the source is a talking cat.”
“Their loss,” Englebert says. “Posterity will sort it out.”
I file the piece sometime after nine. Somewhere between the send and the confirmation email, Englebert relocates to the windowsill — the evening sill, the west one, which remains uncontested territory, a fact he has confirmed twice today — and Maude installs himself on the table, exactly in the spot Englebert just vacated.
The last candle is still on the table where Annabel left it. Her parting instruction was to not practice tonight. To just look at it while I do something else. To let it get used to me.
At some point, Maude crosses the table and plops directly on top of it.
Attempt fifteen can wait.