Page 115 of Spellcast
I nod roughly, anger rising up in me. Instead of containing it as I should, I snap, “Thatisso, and I don’t find it funny in the least. For years, I’ve lived in a prison, enduring this...this”—I search for the words to encapsulate all that I’ve lost and arrive only at—“spell! Simply because some witch decided to amuse herself by sentencing me to a horrible existence.”
“Yes! You! You!” One of them points at me in a fit of glee. “That witch is you! You did that to yourself, dearest cousin.” I flinch at the endearment that only seems to confirm the familial connection between witches and harpies.
Another shakes her head. “Daft girl.”
Fury bubbles up in me, but beneath the simmer a small niggle of misgiving twitches, a sprout beginning to break through the cold winter ground.
The one called Drifa sidles closer, her feet skimming the ground as her wings carry her forward. “We know every magical creature in and out of these mountains. It comes with being born of magic ourselves.”
“N-no,” I insist. “I’ve seen dragons. Talked to them.Theydidn’t know, and they’re magical, too. They didn’t tell me this...theyconfirmedthat it is a witch who cursed me—”
“Dragons,” she sneers. “What do they know? These new ones know nothing. They’re still learning what it is they are. They’re not like the Old Ones that knew a thing about a thing about a thing. These strut about ignorant of their own magic, how can you expect them to know anything about yours?”
I shake my head, a sinking sensation starting in my gut. “It cannot be.” I would know.
I would know.
“You should be thankful they didn’t recognize you to be awitch.” They all nod in agreement. “They have an unhealthy hatred for your kind. You wouldn’t be here now. They would have torn you apart.”
“I just—no.” I continue shaking my head, and then say harder, “No.”
“Fine. Be foolish. Go about your life uninformed and oblivious. Stay under a spell of your own making.” Drifa shrugs. “It is nothing to us.”
“If...” I struggle to get the words out, unwilling to even admit that a kernel of possibility exists in what they are saying. “You can’t be right...I wouldn’t even know how to do such a thing to myself.”
The largest of the harpies steps closer, her thick, snarled hair caught up in a band, matted ropes jutting out in every direction from the top of her head. Her bright black gaze, void of whites, fixes on me, almost accusing. “You merely had to wish it...give it voice and put it out there into the universe, and your magic will answer the call.” She sticks her face close to mine, and the smell of her breath is enough to make me gag. My attention drops to those stained fangs, bits of gore trapped between the crowded teeth. “Ah. Your eyes. You’ve the look of a moon witch.”
“A...what?”
“A moon witch. There are all kinds of witches, identifiable by hair color or other features. Moon witches always have one eye like the moon. A frosty blue—more frost than blue.”
Drifa steps closer to peer at me, looking at my mismatched eyes, always a point of embarrassment for me—that thing that made others do a double take. The only thing I did not miss these last years.
“My eyes?” The same mismatched eyes, according to my father, my grandmother possessed. The mother he claimed to have lost long before I was born when he was very young. Speculation had been that something happened to her. Some mishap. Wild animals. Bandits. Something. One day she’d gone into the woods and never returned.
Maybenothinghappened to her at all.
Maybe she had simply left.
Witches don’t age as humans do. Maybe she had to leave because of that. Because she wasn’t aging as every other human in the village, and she feared being caught and put to the pyre.
My thoughts race feverishly. If this is true, then I...I’m to blame for everything.
I shake my head, a choking lump rising in my throat. “I don’t understand,” I whisper.
“It means your power thrives when the moon is visible. You are lucky. That’s a fair amount of the time. A desert witch can only wield magic in a desert. Who wants to live in a desert?”
“What happens when the moon isabsent?” I query. Like in the daytime and those few times a month when there’s not a moon in the night sky.
“If the moon is absent, then so is your magic. The fuller the moon, the brighter your magic. On a full moon...a supermoon, you’re very powerful, indeed.”
Your magic.
I wonder if the night I fled into the woods and set loose those stupid words had been the night of a supermoon.
My limbs give out. I dissolve to a boneless puddle as everything sinks and settles into every crack and fissure of me.
I can’t move. I don’t want to. I just want to disappear, expire into nothingness.
