A circle of uncommon wit.., p.6
A Circle of Uncommon Witches, page 6
Ambrose lifted a shoulder, rolled it back. “An eye for an eye, Doreen MacKinnon.”
“You spent three hundred years locked in a tempest because of a curse.”
“Losing her was worse. What your ancestors did to her and me was unforgivable.”
“Either way.” She swallowed. “Just remember, until you and I fix this, or I turn thirty, I’m not so easy to kill.”
“There are pains worse than death, Doreen.”
“Perhaps. I simply want to remind you that while I don’t yet need to poison you or try to kill you in your sleep, you can’t harm me, either, should you decide to try.”
“I make no promises either way,” he said, his eyes tracking her every move. Doreen wondered if this was what a rabbit felt like before the dogs were released. “What do you mean, you’re not so easy to kill?”
She shifted, pressing her palms into the dirt, seeking a connection to it. “I mean your curse gave us thirty years of impeccable health and not a day more.”
“Impeccable or impenetrable health?”
“The latter.”
“Interesting.”
“I guess.” She stood and stepped back from the tree, turning to him. “It is what it is.”
“Your ancestor…” He rubbed his chin, his fingers brushing the stubble back and forth. “She only ever wanted to be impermeable.”
“Lenora?”
He nodded. “Understandably. She didn’t need to tell me how she needed to be made of steel to be a part of your family. I think it made her feel she needed to be impenetrable to them, and the world. It turned out her instincts were correct.”
“You think she was miserable because of—what, her parents?” She tilted her head, curious.
“Because they did not approve of me, or perhaps, her. She bent for no one’s will but her own, and they could not tolerate that.”
“Is that why you cursed us this way?”
“I repaid your ancestors for what they took from me.”
“An endless curse that robs everyone of true love in our line was a rational way to go about it?”
He glowered at her.
“Why can’t you break it?”
“I am here”—he waved a hand toward the needles—“helping.”
“Yes, I suppose you are.” Doreen sighed. “I’m almost done.”
“Good.”
She scooped up the little caterpillar leaf and put it in the pocket of her shirt, then stepped into the circle. “Ignore him, Hastings,” she whispered to it.
Doreen hadn’t been thinking when she said the name. Not about the circle, or the earth beneath it. She certainly hadn’t thought about the blood soaked deep into the core of Scotland, a country which had witnessed the persecution and death of thousands of innocent women and witches over the centuries. It didn’t matter. The dead heard everything.
Ambrose gave a sharp shout right as the earth opened and swallowed Doreen whole.
* * *
“It is argued that ergotism caused the witch trials,” a breathless voice said. “What fools they all were, but it did prove me right, didn’t it?”
“You’re a stronger fungus than ergot,” Ambrose said, his tone dryer than dust.
“Oh, hush,” the crackly first voice said, a childlike laugh following.
Doreen was slow to open her eyes. Her head was pounding, and every bone in her body ached. She managed to get one lid open enough to survey the scene before her.
A small person sat by a roaring fire, their back to Doreen. The fireplace was the largest she had ever seen. As tall as Ambrose, and as wide as four of him. There was a large stack of wood to the far left of the fire. The being on the stool was hunched over, holding gloved hands up to the flames.
Doreen tilted her chin down, and looked to Ambrose. He was standing at her feet, his hands on his hips, brow drawn. He was imperfect. The scowl on his face was as constant as the curls at the edge of his hair, behind his ears. She couldn’t stop staring at the way the black strands tucked in on themselves. She wanted to slip her finger into the edge of the curl, unfurl it and roll it back up. She wanted something to soothe the panic in her bones away, to chase the pain back into the shadows. But she was on her own.
Doreen pushed herself up into a seated position. Her clothes and hair were dry, and she was grateful for that. She took a shaky inhale, and Ambrose did not so much as blink in her direction.
“No one’s tried to cross here in a small forever,” the creature from beside the fire said. The voice was indecipherable. It sounded young, but as Doreen replayed the words in her mind, then the voice was brittle and old. The being shifted, their hood hiding their features. “You could have been spirited beyond the hedgerow, child, gobbled up by creatures no longer remembered by time.”
“I wasn’t,” Doreen said, her voice strong as she summoned a strength she did not feel. “Unless you’re one of those creatures.”
The sound came again, high and full. A delighted laugh that left her shuddering.
Finally, the creature turned around, throwing the hood back. The face was made of shadow and echoes. A person no more, here sat a ghost. An impossible apparition. One born of a ghost story Doreen’s aunt used to tell her when Doreen was a girl. One only spoken of by the aunts or cousins when too much moon wine had been consumed.
The Queen of the Order of the Dead was the leader of the Sgàilean Dorcha. A legion of ghosts. The queen was known for her eyes as fathomless as the deepest ocean’s floor, with pearls where their pupils ought to be. Given to her by the gods of death as payment for a curse the queen set a thousand years before. It was the pieces of others’ souls that gave her long life. She kept enough of the souls of the living she possessed to alter her into something beyond death.
The Keeper.
Her aunt Stella had told her of the queen, and immediately deemed the idea “obnoxious nonsense. To think there are spirits so clever as to have a dominion over themselves, let alone the living and dead, is utter hogwash.”
Yet here sat a spirit as real as Ambrose.
Ambrose cleared his throat, and Doreen realized she had been gawking. “I didn’t think you were real,” she said, unable to keep the shock from her voice.
“I exist in this reality,” the spirit said, its voice both ancient and ageless. “You exist in this reality. We are both of us real.”
“So you’re a real soul eater?”
Ambrose made a sound resembling a human garbage disposal. “Ada is the Queen of the Order of the Dead, and she’s not one for insults.”
The creature stood and shifted closer, her body moving out of alignment with her shadow.
Doreen remembered what Margot used to whisper when they stayed up too late telling ghost stories. The Queen of the Order of the Dead did not move like any other creature on the earth. She was made of bones, but they were not only hers. She was constructed of ashes and tears and the bits of soul she borrowed … or stole. She could appear the size of a giant one day, or the size of a child the next. Her arms might reach the floor, or she might have one leg twice the size of the other. Regardless, she moved with elegance, as though her mind was reminding the rest of her body to pretend to be water. To flow with an ease the bones should not allow.
“You don’t know your history, do you, girl?” Ada said, rolling her shoulders back one after the other, an audible pop, pop, echoing in the cavern. Doreen swallowed the gasp rising in her throat. “You don’t know about me or from whence you came. Yet you managed to penetrate my cave.”
Doreen fought a shudder at the hiss that followed, the sound bouncing off the walls. Something in the undulation of it reminded her of the warning of a snake before it struck.
“This is a cave?” Doreen asked, doing everything she could to keep her voice steady as she made a show of taking in the dark stone walls and floor, the dripping of water from the stalactites hanging overhead. She would have guessed right away … if not for the distraction of the mostly terrifying ghost in the room. “Which cave?”
She knew enough of her history to know that under Scotland ran a series of caves, reputed to be used by witches for centuries. They were where they hid from King James VI when he persecuted them in a baseless effort to prove his masculinity.
“I won’t be sharing that,” the queen said, her shadow snapping its fingers while her body remained still outside of the creaking of bones. She sounded like a rocking chair whose bolts no longer fit inside the joints. “This is my sanctuary.”
“I’m in a sanctuary for a bedtime story meant to frighten misbehaving witches,” Doreen said, her mind still reeling.
“The Sgàilean Dorcha will get you if you don’t watch out,” Ada said, something close to a smile pulling at the angles of her face. A strange buzzing settled over the tops of Doreen’s arms, skittering up to her face and over her scalp. “Yes, though it’s not a warning, it’s a promise.”
“We need your help,” Ambrose said, stepping in front of her so he cut Doreen off from Ada’s line of sight. Doreen let out a breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding as the sensation faded from her body.
“You want to make a deal with me, Ambrose MacDonald?” Ada asked, her voice echoing around them like a bell rung in a canyon.
Ambrose didn’t respond. His mouth thinned and his eyes dropped to the floor before he responded, “I do not wish to bargain today.”
If the Order truly existed, then there must be truth to the nightmare stories Doreen had been told as a child. Which meant everything about them could be true, and that was a terrifying prospect. Margot had once told her, “There are worse things than being cursed to not find love, Doreen. We could be like the queen of the Sgàilean Dorcha, cursed to steal the souls of the living. She takes them, slipping in and possessing without care or thought.”
Margot somehow always knew so much more than Doreen, though neither knew near as much as they wanted. Like Doreen, Margot’s life was filled with considering the magic most people preferred to forget. Or it had been, before she gave in to the curse.
Doreen wanted to call her now; the urge was nearly all-consuming. Ambrose turned to face her, his gaze pressing into Doreen. She took a long measure of the terrifying spirit peering around the giant of a man.
“The Queen of the Order of the Dead consumes souls,” Margot had said. “She’s a reverse necromancer. It’s because the spirits are bound to her through the ancestral lines, it must be—magic is thicker than blood, but better when it comes from it.”
It felt like Ambrose was waiting on her to speak, and Doreen had never been one to lack the gumption to ask what she wanted to know. “What do you want from us?” Doreen asked Ada, with Margot’s warning ringing in her ears.
“Answers,” Ada said. “But you don’t have them yet.”
“That’s pretty cryptic,” Doreen said.
“You want to break your curse?”
“Of course.”
“Don’t want to die? Don’t want to marry for less than love?”
“Yes.”
“That makes you an answer.”
Doreen’s eyebrows drew together. “What was the question?”
“Your ancestors settled. Why shouldn’t you?”
“Others have died rather than give in. That’s not exactly settling.” But that wasn’t a question. She started to ask again but froze as Ada’s face of shadow and bone shifted. Her pearl eyes flashed, and beneath them, sharp cheekbones that did not quite match and an angled chin lifted. Regal even in death, she gave Doreen a look that made her swallow hard.
Doreen looked to Ambrose, who met her gaze, his expression shuttered. “And so death came for them,” he said, his tone betraying a hint of urgency. Doreen understood. Do not linger with a taker of spirits unless you want to be stolen too.
“How do I break the curse?” Doreen asked instead, as the same itching sensation creeped back over her skin. Her mouth twitched outside of its own accord, a spasm trying to take over her entire face.
“You could let me in,” Ada said, shifting closer.
Static roared into Doreen’s mind. A haze drifted over her eyes and her head grew heavy. Her body sagged; her thoughts slowed. A resounding thump-thump knocked across her consciousness.
Margot’s voice drifted out from the attic of her thoughts: “We can never let our guards down, Doreen. Remember. You are the best of us.”
She dug her nails into her palms until blood pooled beneath her fingertips and her mind cleared. “No,” she said, her voice ringing out louder and clearer than any rung bell.
Ambrose growled and Ada let out a sound that might have been a sigh or a scream. “Then you have to go about this the hard way.”
“I don’t think this one knows what the easy way is,” Ambrose said, but he moved closer to her. If Doreen didn’t know better, she’d almost say he was protecting her.
“It’s good, then, that she has you as her shadow,” Ada said, letting loose a laugh that was all edges and corners. The sound scraped its way down Doreen’s spine.
“We will be rid of each other as soon as we can be,” Doreen said, and Ada laughed harder. “I won’t make a deal with you. I don’t have any answers.”
“And I can’t make a deal if you won’t give me what I want … but there is another way.”
Doreen leaned forward, stopped. Wracked her mind for any other bits about the Queen of the Order of the Dead, but Margot’s voice was no longer there. Only silence remained.
“Which is?” Ambrose asked, shooting an annoyed look in Doreen’s direction.
Ada’s cheeks pulled back, revealing a decaying row of teeth mummified beyond time. Doreen shrank away as she offered a poisoned grin and said, “If you need something from the gods, there’s always the trials.”
The Trials of Bheannachd
(The Blessing Trials)
There was once a complete history and knowledge of spells given to all witches as their birthright. It started with a handfasting.
When witches came of age (exactly what age was determined by their particular coven), they completed a ceremony where they were bound with the knowledge of the ancestors and the history of their magic; the bridging of this connection was witnessed by the village. However, time has a way of changing how things are done, though time might argue people have a way of changing laws and they therefore change everything.
The binding of magic to witches changed because of the latter. More specifically, due to avarice.
Avarice Maoileanach was a greedy man. He came of age in a time when great battles were fought, and power was the ultimate conquest. It was a time not unlike this one. There are always loopholes in magic. Things meant to be safety measures that inevitably are perverted by entitled mediocre men, typically, and set by the powers that be to test witches and determine whether they have become too greedy. Avarice was aptly named, and he was the downfall of magic.
In the beginning, magic was plentiful. It grew on the vine, like wisteria or grapes or honeysuckle. You only had to create your offering to draw more in. A bit of blood and hair, a few wistful and poetic words, a gust of wind and fire and you’d be right as rain. Magic was used to create, to bring art and peace into the world, to aid in the growth of community for the better. It was a gift from the Ultimate Powers and was not meant to destroy.
But Avarice wanted more. Of everything. To ensnare his enemies, enslave those he desired, to rule everyone and everything.
The Ultimate Powers did not need the competition in the form of an overzealous and maniacal male witch. They saw through him and decided to offer him a trial … of sorts. If he could complete the challenges they set forth, he would gain the power to transform himself.
The trials lasted for thirteen days and thirteen nights. Avarice was taken through the door of truth, into the Forest of Forgetting, and beyond to the lost city of words.
The trials were a measure of courage, heart, strength, and cunning. To complete them, the champion must free the heart from the stone, find the lost story of love, wake the slumbering giant, and sacrifice what matters most to break the curse.
He did not pass a single trial.
Avarice lost his magic and his power, and whatever the gods saw in him angered them enough that they took back half of their power from the witches of the world. No longer would there be handfasting to the ancestors’ truth and power. A history of magic was lost, the knowledge returned to its source. Witches had to write down their spells lest they lose them, creating the first of the grimoires. Magic flowed from line to line, but sparingly, like a sprinkle from a failing rain cloud instead of a gush from a geyser.
Over time, the trials were largely forgotten. Only a single witch succeeded at discovering and completing them.
Ada Rose made a choice. It was a selfish one, and a selfish choice is often any witch’s undoing. For when you choose to go against the rule “and harm none,” you undo magic in the world as it was meant to be.
The gods guarded the trials with the utmost care, for one never knew what could happen if such power landed in the wrong hands. Witches carried on recording their magic, and new powers grew on the vine, daring and different—and waiting for the right time to strike.
But power is always waiting, and it would only take one stubborn witch to set it free.
FIVE
Teeth terrified Doreen. It wasn’t just that they were exposed bone, which was a bit unnerving when she thought too long about it—it was that they were mountainous. She’d had visions as a child about teeth that turned into volcanoes, which erupted and festered and boiled. When Ada, with her cloak of smoke and face that refused to reveal itself, said the word trials, Doreen saw the jagged mountains of her waking nightmares.
“What trials?” Doreen asked after forcing a swallow.
“The blessing trials. They are the only way to break an unbreakable curse. Which is what you carry. There are ways to demand knowledge, to gain the answers to any question. Though there is a price that comes with the asking.”
“You have questions,” Doreen said. “Why don’t you take the trials?”
“You spent three hundred years locked in a tempest because of a curse.”
“Losing her was worse. What your ancestors did to her and me was unforgivable.”
“Either way.” She swallowed. “Just remember, until you and I fix this, or I turn thirty, I’m not so easy to kill.”
“There are pains worse than death, Doreen.”
“Perhaps. I simply want to remind you that while I don’t yet need to poison you or try to kill you in your sleep, you can’t harm me, either, should you decide to try.”
“I make no promises either way,” he said, his eyes tracking her every move. Doreen wondered if this was what a rabbit felt like before the dogs were released. “What do you mean, you’re not so easy to kill?”
She shifted, pressing her palms into the dirt, seeking a connection to it. “I mean your curse gave us thirty years of impeccable health and not a day more.”
“Impeccable or impenetrable health?”
“The latter.”
“Interesting.”
“I guess.” She stood and stepped back from the tree, turning to him. “It is what it is.”
“Your ancestor…” He rubbed his chin, his fingers brushing the stubble back and forth. “She only ever wanted to be impermeable.”
“Lenora?”
He nodded. “Understandably. She didn’t need to tell me how she needed to be made of steel to be a part of your family. I think it made her feel she needed to be impenetrable to them, and the world. It turned out her instincts were correct.”
“You think she was miserable because of—what, her parents?” She tilted her head, curious.
“Because they did not approve of me, or perhaps, her. She bent for no one’s will but her own, and they could not tolerate that.”
“Is that why you cursed us this way?”
“I repaid your ancestors for what they took from me.”
“An endless curse that robs everyone of true love in our line was a rational way to go about it?”
He glowered at her.
“Why can’t you break it?”
“I am here”—he waved a hand toward the needles—“helping.”
“Yes, I suppose you are.” Doreen sighed. “I’m almost done.”
“Good.”
She scooped up the little caterpillar leaf and put it in the pocket of her shirt, then stepped into the circle. “Ignore him, Hastings,” she whispered to it.
Doreen hadn’t been thinking when she said the name. Not about the circle, or the earth beneath it. She certainly hadn’t thought about the blood soaked deep into the core of Scotland, a country which had witnessed the persecution and death of thousands of innocent women and witches over the centuries. It didn’t matter. The dead heard everything.
Ambrose gave a sharp shout right as the earth opened and swallowed Doreen whole.
* * *
“It is argued that ergotism caused the witch trials,” a breathless voice said. “What fools they all were, but it did prove me right, didn’t it?”
“You’re a stronger fungus than ergot,” Ambrose said, his tone dryer than dust.
“Oh, hush,” the crackly first voice said, a childlike laugh following.
Doreen was slow to open her eyes. Her head was pounding, and every bone in her body ached. She managed to get one lid open enough to survey the scene before her.
A small person sat by a roaring fire, their back to Doreen. The fireplace was the largest she had ever seen. As tall as Ambrose, and as wide as four of him. There was a large stack of wood to the far left of the fire. The being on the stool was hunched over, holding gloved hands up to the flames.
Doreen tilted her chin down, and looked to Ambrose. He was standing at her feet, his hands on his hips, brow drawn. He was imperfect. The scowl on his face was as constant as the curls at the edge of his hair, behind his ears. She couldn’t stop staring at the way the black strands tucked in on themselves. She wanted to slip her finger into the edge of the curl, unfurl it and roll it back up. She wanted something to soothe the panic in her bones away, to chase the pain back into the shadows. But she was on her own.
Doreen pushed herself up into a seated position. Her clothes and hair were dry, and she was grateful for that. She took a shaky inhale, and Ambrose did not so much as blink in her direction.
“No one’s tried to cross here in a small forever,” the creature from beside the fire said. The voice was indecipherable. It sounded young, but as Doreen replayed the words in her mind, then the voice was brittle and old. The being shifted, their hood hiding their features. “You could have been spirited beyond the hedgerow, child, gobbled up by creatures no longer remembered by time.”
“I wasn’t,” Doreen said, her voice strong as she summoned a strength she did not feel. “Unless you’re one of those creatures.”
The sound came again, high and full. A delighted laugh that left her shuddering.
Finally, the creature turned around, throwing the hood back. The face was made of shadow and echoes. A person no more, here sat a ghost. An impossible apparition. One born of a ghost story Doreen’s aunt used to tell her when Doreen was a girl. One only spoken of by the aunts or cousins when too much moon wine had been consumed.
The Queen of the Order of the Dead was the leader of the Sgàilean Dorcha. A legion of ghosts. The queen was known for her eyes as fathomless as the deepest ocean’s floor, with pearls where their pupils ought to be. Given to her by the gods of death as payment for a curse the queen set a thousand years before. It was the pieces of others’ souls that gave her long life. She kept enough of the souls of the living she possessed to alter her into something beyond death.
The Keeper.
Her aunt Stella had told her of the queen, and immediately deemed the idea “obnoxious nonsense. To think there are spirits so clever as to have a dominion over themselves, let alone the living and dead, is utter hogwash.”
Yet here sat a spirit as real as Ambrose.
Ambrose cleared his throat, and Doreen realized she had been gawking. “I didn’t think you were real,” she said, unable to keep the shock from her voice.
“I exist in this reality,” the spirit said, its voice both ancient and ageless. “You exist in this reality. We are both of us real.”
“So you’re a real soul eater?”
Ambrose made a sound resembling a human garbage disposal. “Ada is the Queen of the Order of the Dead, and she’s not one for insults.”
The creature stood and shifted closer, her body moving out of alignment with her shadow.
Doreen remembered what Margot used to whisper when they stayed up too late telling ghost stories. The Queen of the Order of the Dead did not move like any other creature on the earth. She was made of bones, but they were not only hers. She was constructed of ashes and tears and the bits of soul she borrowed … or stole. She could appear the size of a giant one day, or the size of a child the next. Her arms might reach the floor, or she might have one leg twice the size of the other. Regardless, she moved with elegance, as though her mind was reminding the rest of her body to pretend to be water. To flow with an ease the bones should not allow.
“You don’t know your history, do you, girl?” Ada said, rolling her shoulders back one after the other, an audible pop, pop, echoing in the cavern. Doreen swallowed the gasp rising in her throat. “You don’t know about me or from whence you came. Yet you managed to penetrate my cave.”
Doreen fought a shudder at the hiss that followed, the sound bouncing off the walls. Something in the undulation of it reminded her of the warning of a snake before it struck.
“This is a cave?” Doreen asked, doing everything she could to keep her voice steady as she made a show of taking in the dark stone walls and floor, the dripping of water from the stalactites hanging overhead. She would have guessed right away … if not for the distraction of the mostly terrifying ghost in the room. “Which cave?”
She knew enough of her history to know that under Scotland ran a series of caves, reputed to be used by witches for centuries. They were where they hid from King James VI when he persecuted them in a baseless effort to prove his masculinity.
“I won’t be sharing that,” the queen said, her shadow snapping its fingers while her body remained still outside of the creaking of bones. She sounded like a rocking chair whose bolts no longer fit inside the joints. “This is my sanctuary.”
“I’m in a sanctuary for a bedtime story meant to frighten misbehaving witches,” Doreen said, her mind still reeling.
“The Sgàilean Dorcha will get you if you don’t watch out,” Ada said, something close to a smile pulling at the angles of her face. A strange buzzing settled over the tops of Doreen’s arms, skittering up to her face and over her scalp. “Yes, though it’s not a warning, it’s a promise.”
“We need your help,” Ambrose said, stepping in front of her so he cut Doreen off from Ada’s line of sight. Doreen let out a breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding as the sensation faded from her body.
“You want to make a deal with me, Ambrose MacDonald?” Ada asked, her voice echoing around them like a bell rung in a canyon.
Ambrose didn’t respond. His mouth thinned and his eyes dropped to the floor before he responded, “I do not wish to bargain today.”
If the Order truly existed, then there must be truth to the nightmare stories Doreen had been told as a child. Which meant everything about them could be true, and that was a terrifying prospect. Margot had once told her, “There are worse things than being cursed to not find love, Doreen. We could be like the queen of the Sgàilean Dorcha, cursed to steal the souls of the living. She takes them, slipping in and possessing without care or thought.”
Margot somehow always knew so much more than Doreen, though neither knew near as much as they wanted. Like Doreen, Margot’s life was filled with considering the magic most people preferred to forget. Or it had been, before she gave in to the curse.
Doreen wanted to call her now; the urge was nearly all-consuming. Ambrose turned to face her, his gaze pressing into Doreen. She took a long measure of the terrifying spirit peering around the giant of a man.
“The Queen of the Order of the Dead consumes souls,” Margot had said. “She’s a reverse necromancer. It’s because the spirits are bound to her through the ancestral lines, it must be—magic is thicker than blood, but better when it comes from it.”
It felt like Ambrose was waiting on her to speak, and Doreen had never been one to lack the gumption to ask what she wanted to know. “What do you want from us?” Doreen asked Ada, with Margot’s warning ringing in her ears.
“Answers,” Ada said. “But you don’t have them yet.”
“That’s pretty cryptic,” Doreen said.
“You want to break your curse?”
“Of course.”
“Don’t want to die? Don’t want to marry for less than love?”
“Yes.”
“That makes you an answer.”
Doreen’s eyebrows drew together. “What was the question?”
“Your ancestors settled. Why shouldn’t you?”
“Others have died rather than give in. That’s not exactly settling.” But that wasn’t a question. She started to ask again but froze as Ada’s face of shadow and bone shifted. Her pearl eyes flashed, and beneath them, sharp cheekbones that did not quite match and an angled chin lifted. Regal even in death, she gave Doreen a look that made her swallow hard.
Doreen looked to Ambrose, who met her gaze, his expression shuttered. “And so death came for them,” he said, his tone betraying a hint of urgency. Doreen understood. Do not linger with a taker of spirits unless you want to be stolen too.
“How do I break the curse?” Doreen asked instead, as the same itching sensation creeped back over her skin. Her mouth twitched outside of its own accord, a spasm trying to take over her entire face.
“You could let me in,” Ada said, shifting closer.
Static roared into Doreen’s mind. A haze drifted over her eyes and her head grew heavy. Her body sagged; her thoughts slowed. A resounding thump-thump knocked across her consciousness.
Margot’s voice drifted out from the attic of her thoughts: “We can never let our guards down, Doreen. Remember. You are the best of us.”
She dug her nails into her palms until blood pooled beneath her fingertips and her mind cleared. “No,” she said, her voice ringing out louder and clearer than any rung bell.
Ambrose growled and Ada let out a sound that might have been a sigh or a scream. “Then you have to go about this the hard way.”
“I don’t think this one knows what the easy way is,” Ambrose said, but he moved closer to her. If Doreen didn’t know better, she’d almost say he was protecting her.
“It’s good, then, that she has you as her shadow,” Ada said, letting loose a laugh that was all edges and corners. The sound scraped its way down Doreen’s spine.
“We will be rid of each other as soon as we can be,” Doreen said, and Ada laughed harder. “I won’t make a deal with you. I don’t have any answers.”
“And I can’t make a deal if you won’t give me what I want … but there is another way.”
Doreen leaned forward, stopped. Wracked her mind for any other bits about the Queen of the Order of the Dead, but Margot’s voice was no longer there. Only silence remained.
“Which is?” Ambrose asked, shooting an annoyed look in Doreen’s direction.
Ada’s cheeks pulled back, revealing a decaying row of teeth mummified beyond time. Doreen shrank away as she offered a poisoned grin and said, “If you need something from the gods, there’s always the trials.”
The Trials of Bheannachd
(The Blessing Trials)
There was once a complete history and knowledge of spells given to all witches as their birthright. It started with a handfasting.
When witches came of age (exactly what age was determined by their particular coven), they completed a ceremony where they were bound with the knowledge of the ancestors and the history of their magic; the bridging of this connection was witnessed by the village. However, time has a way of changing how things are done, though time might argue people have a way of changing laws and they therefore change everything.
The binding of magic to witches changed because of the latter. More specifically, due to avarice.
Avarice Maoileanach was a greedy man. He came of age in a time when great battles were fought, and power was the ultimate conquest. It was a time not unlike this one. There are always loopholes in magic. Things meant to be safety measures that inevitably are perverted by entitled mediocre men, typically, and set by the powers that be to test witches and determine whether they have become too greedy. Avarice was aptly named, and he was the downfall of magic.
In the beginning, magic was plentiful. It grew on the vine, like wisteria or grapes or honeysuckle. You only had to create your offering to draw more in. A bit of blood and hair, a few wistful and poetic words, a gust of wind and fire and you’d be right as rain. Magic was used to create, to bring art and peace into the world, to aid in the growth of community for the better. It was a gift from the Ultimate Powers and was not meant to destroy.
But Avarice wanted more. Of everything. To ensnare his enemies, enslave those he desired, to rule everyone and everything.
The Ultimate Powers did not need the competition in the form of an overzealous and maniacal male witch. They saw through him and decided to offer him a trial … of sorts. If he could complete the challenges they set forth, he would gain the power to transform himself.
The trials lasted for thirteen days and thirteen nights. Avarice was taken through the door of truth, into the Forest of Forgetting, and beyond to the lost city of words.
The trials were a measure of courage, heart, strength, and cunning. To complete them, the champion must free the heart from the stone, find the lost story of love, wake the slumbering giant, and sacrifice what matters most to break the curse.
He did not pass a single trial.
Avarice lost his magic and his power, and whatever the gods saw in him angered them enough that they took back half of their power from the witches of the world. No longer would there be handfasting to the ancestors’ truth and power. A history of magic was lost, the knowledge returned to its source. Witches had to write down their spells lest they lose them, creating the first of the grimoires. Magic flowed from line to line, but sparingly, like a sprinkle from a failing rain cloud instead of a gush from a geyser.
Over time, the trials were largely forgotten. Only a single witch succeeded at discovering and completing them.
Ada Rose made a choice. It was a selfish one, and a selfish choice is often any witch’s undoing. For when you choose to go against the rule “and harm none,” you undo magic in the world as it was meant to be.
The gods guarded the trials with the utmost care, for one never knew what could happen if such power landed in the wrong hands. Witches carried on recording their magic, and new powers grew on the vine, daring and different—and waiting for the right time to strike.
But power is always waiting, and it would only take one stubborn witch to set it free.
FIVE
Teeth terrified Doreen. It wasn’t just that they were exposed bone, which was a bit unnerving when she thought too long about it—it was that they were mountainous. She’d had visions as a child about teeth that turned into volcanoes, which erupted and festered and boiled. When Ada, with her cloak of smoke and face that refused to reveal itself, said the word trials, Doreen saw the jagged mountains of her waking nightmares.
“What trials?” Doreen asked after forcing a swallow.
“The blessing trials. They are the only way to break an unbreakable curse. Which is what you carry. There are ways to demand knowledge, to gain the answers to any question. Though there is a price that comes with the asking.”
“You have questions,” Doreen said. “Why don’t you take the trials?”
