Chapter Thirty
Honey’s Helpful Hint, from
Honey Frost’s Southern Cookbook for Recipes Gone Wrong:
The body can only handle one mystery meat at a time.
—Mayor Marigold Frost
Eight days later, I’m outside the one door in Knight Manor that frightens me most.
I raise my hand to knock but pause, stiff as cold butter.
The Warlock and I leave at dawn. It’s now or never, Frost.
My brain whirs like my mom’s old Breadman. The last week was a blur of preparation.
Sunday supper became a strategy dinner. Rett delivered the traveling equipment we ordered; Arna Jean packed me with various tiny charms and mysterious herbal tinctures she collected from Carolina and Ms. Marrow.
Silas… made me call my mother. At some point, all of us were in the library, ransacking the archives one more time for anything we missed.
The Warlock’s magic hasn’t returned, and the Manor has been feeding off the man’s anxieties all week as the solstice looms. The kitchen cabinets are extra grumpy. At this rate, the house might suck the next visitor through the floorboards of the front porch.
But no one has tried to talk me out of my plan.
Everyone knows we’re out of fixes buried in books or baked in breakfasts.
Trip sounds like a vacation. Expedition deep into the forgotten parts of the Holler to find an infamous magical being who casts dangerous curses and has a personal vendetta against the Warlock.
That’s better.
My fist still frozen, the door opens before I can knock.
Governess Zeen stares back. “Please cease your loitering. I could hear you breathing from inside.”
I crane my neck to glimpse her room. What mysteries does Letha Zeen’s personal space contain? Old harlequin romances? An entire closet devoted to cardigan sets?
She places her stout figure in the doorframe, blocking my view. “Are you lost?” she asks in a voice a local might use with a tourist. Not that the Holler gets tourists.
I steel myself. The Widow Witch will be much more frightening. Probably. “I, uh, wanted to thank you again for protecting Lazlo while we’re gone. And for watching him while I was at the hospital. And for letting me borrow that dress—”
“You’re rambling, dear.”
“Sorry.”
“Stop using that word. Just promise me we’ll avoid a repeat of last week. When Mr. Knight gets panicky, you know the house is a dreadful copycat.”
Oh, I can tell. Asking me to elude anaphylactic shock is a… surprisingly thoughtful gesture coming from her. I’m almost touched.
“Don’t look at me like that. We’re not friends, dear. Good night.”
“Wait,” I say before she can close the door in my face. She looks like she really wants to. “I wanted to—say hello? Or goodbye. Whichever. Before tomorrow since we don’t know…” Deep breath. “Why aren’t we friends? You’ve hated me from day one.”
Ms. Zeen somehow looks down her nose at me despite being inches shorter, even in kitten heels. They match her black-and-white houndstooth cardigan today. “I don’t hate you. No matter how hard I’ve tried.”
I must look pitifully confused, because she sighs, smoothing nonexistent wrinkles from her skirt. “I have always voiced concerns about Lazlo’s sheltered routine. I’ve fought Mr. Knight’s stubbornness for years. You’re here mere weeks and he acquiesces to your ideas. Why is that?”
My shoulders fall. “I don’t know. My magic doesn’t involve any kind of persuasion. Even if I had a recipe for persuasion, I wouldn’t bake it.”
“That was a rhetorical question, dear.”
“Oh.”
“Why are you outside my door, Ms. Frost?”
“I wanted to get your advice.”
Of all things, this is what sends genuine surprise skittering across her face. “My advice?”
“The deal Mr. Knight made with the Widow Witch last year—did you know?”
“Ah. When did you figure it out?”
“He told me himself.”
“Curious. My money was on you discovering it first.”
There’s not much left in my own shock tank these days, but Ms. Zeen bet on me? This iron Mary Poppins bet on me.
“I didn’t find out until after he’d gone through with it. Otherwise I would have forbidden him from it. Make no mistake, we began hunting for a cure long before he hired you.”
And I wouldn’t be here if they’d succeeded.
If there’s one person who can forbid the Warlock from doing anything, it’s Governess Zeen. No wonder he skipped permission and went right to forgiveness.
“He made a mess of things,” she huffs, “but that mess was Lazlo. However shortsighted that bargain, Mr. Knight has been happier in the last year than I’ve ever seen him.”
I feel like there’s a prologue to this story that I’ve skipped. Ms. Zeen has been the Warlock’s gloved right hand—assisting with research, Manor upkeep, Lazlo—all these years. Why? Then I remember the crumbs of our last conversation.
“You told me you owed him a favor.”
But it’s more than that. This loyalty smells almost like debt.
She glances down the hall then, as if the house is listening. A melancholic shadow crosses her face. “How much do you know about the library fire?”
My brain limps to keep up. “You were there that night. Weren’t you?”
“More than there. I was the librarian.”
“What?” There is still some gasoline churning in my shock tank.
Her nose becomes a sharp beak as her nostrils constrict with a tight inhale. A decision. “I won’t repeat myself, so you best listen.”
My shoulders snap back. I try not to salute.
“Twenty-five years ago, Mr. Knight’s parents broke into the library intending to use the empty building for hazardous spellwork.”
“Why didn’t they just call on a Witch in town?”
Folks who don’t have magic can still utilize a few basic spells if they have the intention and right tools. But beyond that, spellwork doesn’t amount to much without corresponding magical energy to power it. The only reason they’d dodge asking a Witch to help is—oh no.
“Chaos magic,” I breathe. Hedgewitch magic.
Ms. Zeen nods. “The Widow Witch granted them a wish, years before. For a price, of course. But only with time did they realize the price was too high. When she came to collect, they tried to escape their bargain, counter the magical imbalance with stronger spellwork…”
She doesn’t finish. I know what happened next.
The library burned up like a toothpick rocking chair.
“Mr. Knight followed them that night. But he was young, his own magic was new to him… He would’ve given his own life to save his parents. So I pulled him from the inferno before it could take him, too.”
Of course. The missing paragraph was right there, hiding under my bookmark, all this time. How did I look at Ms. Zeen every day and read her as anything but a librarian?
“His parents weren’t bad people,” she murmurs, her hands clenching the hem of her cardigan. “Just human.” Her exterior cracks, stern eyes glistening. “But I couldn’t save them. Or wasn’t brave enough to. All on my watch—”
“Ms. Zeen, none of that is your fault.”
She gives a terse jerk of her head, dismissing my words. “If I had just intervened sooner, Mr. Knight might not have grown up alone. Or made his own fool bargain with that Witch years later. We might not be here at all, gambling another boy’s childhood.”
My throat constricts. After losing so much, no wonder he disappeared into this Manor and never dug himself out.
“I tried to defend the Knights, for their boy’s sake.
He was barely sixteen…” Her expression hardens again, back to the Governess I know.
“But the Holler didn’t handle the fire well.
Tensions grew, sides formed. Magic versus the church.
The beginnings of what you see now. Oris Webb’s father was the pastor then, and he was a nasty fellow, always blaming magic and looking for enemies. ”
No wonder Oris Webb has been strategically harboring his vendetta against magic. It’s his family legacy.
“I’m guessing it didn’t take much for Gertha Fudge to exile you from the Holler’s good favor. And the church,” I say. She’d already lost her husband to the Widow Witch at that point.
Another grim nod. “Tolerance for magic got better under Mayor Summer, but the damage was done. I tried to live quietly, take up as little space as possible. I stomached ten years of that nonsense. Then my dear friend Ambrosia Frost passed.”
Dear friend? My grandmother? Even I sometimes forget how small Foxe Holler is. Momaw Frost probably baked the Governess plenty of cures over the years. Shoot, Ms. Zeen likely knew my grandmother longer than I did.
“Her death… I decided I wasn’t going to waste the rest of my life shrinking myself to fit into a place that made no room for me.
Mr. Knight was the only other person who’d lived through that fire, and I knew he was alone, up in this empty house.
So I thought, if we both had to suffer in silence, we could do it together.
He never blamed me, didn’t care about my history with the church or the library.
He gave me a room and a job and never asked me to leave. ”
My mouth is definitely open. Attractive, I’m sure. I somehow have more questions than I did before. If Ms. Zeen knew my Momaw, then surely the Knight family made it down to the Apothakery while my mother was the Farewitch. Or did they keep to themselves even then?
One mystery meat at a time, my mom says. I need to be focused on tomorrow, not twenty-five years ago.
“Can you tell me anything more about the Widow Witch?”
“Ask Beulah. She’s older than Gertha, and Fudge won’t give you a straight answer, anyway.”
“So I’ve learned.” I make a mental note to visit Ms. Buchanan before we leave if I can. “Why is Fudge so pissy all the time?”
I know why she hates magic—the Widow Witch took her husband. And I know why she dislikes Ms. Zeen. But none of this explains why she hates a man who hasn’t stepped foot in town in two decades.
Ms. Zeen pulls me from my thoughts. “Sometimes, dear, when folks think old women are grouchy, we’re just weary.
We’ve been tired for years. No one is perfect.
As there is a cost to magic, there is a cost to caring for someone.
You just need to find the good folks who are worth the cost and hold on to them.
” Her expression shifts. “Be cautious tomorrow, Ms. Frost. Some folks despise magic because they have none. But some resent it whether they have their own or not, simply because others have it, too.”
“So which one is the Widow Witch?”
“It doesn’t matter which your enemy is, dear. It just matters which one you are.”