Page 11 of A Circle of Uncommon Witches

TEN

The sorrowful melody followed Doreen out of the castle into the grounds beyond. The sky overhead was wool gray with wisps of clouds speckled throughout, like smoke stuck in the atmosphere, unable to shift or move. A chill cut across the earth, sharp and biting. It brought hints of clove and rose, and something muskier, earthy and old, beneath it. The notes of a violin rose, quivering like a breaking heart. The drawn-out tones were piercing, and they were not alone.

A whisper rushed beneath the sound. The woods are lovely, dark and deep. The woods are lovely, dark and deep. The woods are lovely, dark and deep. The words sifted through the air, a poem Doreen had memorized as a teen, when she’d found that only the escape into poetry could mend the cracks inside her at being a girl who needed a mother and having a Stella instead. These near-forgotten words rained down on her, the cadence soaking into her bones as it blended with the rise of the violin’s bright notes.

“Do you hear that?” she whispered to Ambrose. The patter of the rhyme brushing across her skin, a melancholic whisper at the edge of her ear.

“Oh, I hear something,” Ambrose said, his expression tight.

All doubt Doreen might have had about where they were had evaporated as soon as they exited the castle. The moat awaited them, its water choppy, and beyond it the sky still the color of an oyster starting to oxidize. A shade beyond healthy. The horizon was tinged with indigo stars and a moon three sizes too big. The night smelled ripe with rain that didn’t fall.

Together they walked down a pebbled road, the rocks beneath them a bright aquamarine. The stones they trod were rounded and looked vaguely like sea glass. Their beauty, especially against the near-sepia world, was unnerving.

“Are you going to tell me where we’re going?” Doreen asked, peering down the path to where it shifted into a dirt track and eventually an overgrowth of weeds.

“Fingal’s Cave,” Ambrose said, wiping perspiration from his brow. It was ridiculously warm out, particularly for Scotland. Or Not Scotland, as Doreen supposed she should think of it.

“Isn’t that a bit far from your castle?”

“I suppose it would be, but I don’t think it will be.”

“That makes no sense.”

“No, but neither does anything here. We dove through the sky into a moat filled with a deranged kelpie and got a tip from my former male valet who is now a soft-spoken female ghost.”

“Are kelpies anything other than deranged, historically speaking?”

He spared her a glance. “We’re walking on a path that appears to be leading to Cill Chriosd, which it very much should not be. We wouldn’t be able to get to the start of the trials and Fingal’s Cave if they were where they should be, seeing as this is technically seventy kilometers away from where we’re going, but as Cill Chriosd isn’t where it should be, I suspect nothing else is either.” Ambrose waved an arm to his left, and Doreen looked over to see a ruined stone structure in the distance, tucked beneath a ridge of mountains.

Mountains that looked like teeth.

She wrapped her arms around her waist as she stared at them looming on the horizon. “Those shouldn’t be there either,” she managed.

“I agree. It’s worrisome that here there are no Black Cuillin ranges,” Ambrose said. “Only red, and they are far larger than they should be.”

“A red range, a midnight sky, and a supersized moon. We are in the land of death.”

“Death is not loss, life is not winning,” Ambrose said, looking around them, seeming to mark each misplaced landmark laid out before them. “Each to the other is a friend.”

“Not the sort of friendship I’ve spent my life dreaming of,” she said.

“You’ve spent your life dreaming of breaking the curse.”

“Sure, because I want to find love. I want more, though. It would be nice to have friends.”

“I suppose it would.”

“Didn’t you have friends?” she asked. “Before?”

“I had servants and expectations. Then, I had Lenora.”

“Ah.”

“What else do you want?” he asked, glancing at her for a split second before turning his face back to the road. “Besides breaking the curse.”

“I would like to win,” she said. “And not end up dead in the process.”

“We are here to try to win,” Ambrose said, before he flashed a quirk of a lip, making her stomach clench. “And I’ve been nearly dead for some time.”

“ I’m here to try,” Doreen said, wishing he didn’t affect her so much. Wishing she didn’t want him to tell her he’d like to be her friend, before he grabbed her hand and maybe threw her off the path to kiss the stars down from the violet sky.

This place was really messing with her.

“I have no idea what you’re doing,” she said, both to him and her mind.

He cut her a hard glance. “I am here, at your side. Isn’t it obvious?”

“Nothing about you is obvious,” she said, her voice coming out rough. “Other than how cranky you are.”

“I’m not cranky,” he said. “I am determined. I would like to win the transformation. You want to break the curse; I want to make sure nothing ever curses me again.”

“Different but the same,” she managed.

The wind blew a hard, angry gust that sent another round of whispers down on Doreen’s shoulders, brushing against her cheeks and dripping down her forearms. She tried to wipe them away. This time they were in Margot’s voice, the violin no longer heart-piercing and enchanting, but a shriek ripping into tin and tearing: “The woods are lovely, dark and deep… and miles to go before I sleep.”

“Shut. Up,” Doreen whispered through gritted teeth.

“And you called me cranky,” Ambrose said, taking a step away from her.

“It’s the voices, and that bloody violin.”

“Try humming.”

“What?”

“Think of a different, soothing melody and hum it. In your head or out loud.” He unleashed a growl that any demon would envy. Rubbed at his ear, yanking it, then pressing his palm to it. “We need to move faster.”

Doreen wanted to argue. They had already been trudging for miles. They must have. She was drenched with sweat. Her shoulders pulled as tight as an overworked seam. Every muscle in her body strained at the effort of continuing down the never-ending path.

A bird bawled in the distance, a cry too human for comfort. She looked down and realized they had walked past the same cluster of stones at least twice. She looked up and there were the same mountains. They had been walking for at least an hour, possibly two, in a circle. Going nowhere and not terribly fast either.

She cursed under her breath, and looked over to see the stone structure in the distance. She struggled to make out the detail around the small foothold shapes set in front of it. Her vision blurred as she stared, unblinking. The whole of it reminded her of a helpful device. The dots and curve of the land, the green against the white.

“It’s a map,” she said. That was why they kept looping to this spot. Because they had missed what they needed to see. “I wonder…”

She took a single step to her left.

One step.

Two.

She stepped off the path.

The sky shifted from gray merged with midnight to dusk, the land under her feet fading from deserted earth to soft-shorn grass cushioning her aching soles.

Behind her, a pasture waited, hills rolling up and out into the horizon.

Before her stood the remains of the building, and surrounding it were a hundred graves placed along its edges.

She turned to Ambrose, to ask him what had happened.

But the path was gone, the castle erased.

Doreen was alone.

Doreen ran up and down the path, jumped on and over it, trying to return to Ambrose. She shouted his name, the wind whipping her voice with each call. Nothing brought her to him or him to her. Panic pressed against her throat and down into her belly. She looked up at the hill before her and hurried forward to climb it, hoping it would provide her a better view of the land so she could find Ambrose.

Instead, she found a cottage on the other side of it. It was a forgettable sight, the stone covered in soot and grime, the chimney too narrow for a strong fire, and the windows warped from age. And yet, as Doreen stood before it, her shoulders relaxed, her neck stopped cramping, and her jaw unclenched.

The door swung open, and the scent of sugar cookies drifted out.

Doreen didn’t think. She didn’t hesitate, not even a little. She walked inside.

The girl waiting couldn’t have been older than ten. She was dressed in a fencer’s outfit, white pants, shirt, gloves, and a strange wire mask that sat on top of her head, as though she had just pushed it up. Her feet were bare, and instead of a saber, she held a rolled-up piece of parchment.

“You’re late,” the girl cried as Doreen joined her inside.

Doreen’s mouth dropped. The girl was familiar, as were her dark eyes and fiery hair. She couldn’t determine how she knew her, but she did. “I know you,” she said.

“You should. You don’t,” the girl said as she walked into a side room and shut the door.

Doreen stood inside the cottage, waiting, suddenly quite unsure of what drove her to enter. She would never march into a house she didn’t know, in a place that shouldn’t exist. But she had been compelled.

She studied the well-furnished room, with its faded hardwood floors covered by a large rug that reminded her of the sun setting into an ocean set ablaze. Angry waves of red and soothing yellows curved together into a series of intricate knots that left her stomach flipping. Doreen gave herself a shake—she needed to find Ambrose, not stand here staring at décor.

The door to the side room opened again, and out walked a woman in her twenties. She had the same dark eyes as the girl, though her hair was a bit less coppery and a lot looser. She wore a dress the color of freshly mowed grass.

“Hi,” Doreen said, peering past her to what appeared to be a tiny bedroom.

“That’s better,” the woman said, her voice carrying the same cadence as the girl’s. “I never know who I am until I’m faced with myself.”

“What?” Doreen asked, shocked at the voice and how close it sounded to the child’s.

“The mirror,” the woman said. “I’ve only one, you see, and it’s in there.”

“And the little girl?” Doreen asked. She looked deeper into the room and saw that it was not full of a bed, side table, dresser, or reading spot as she’d expected to find in a bedroom, but instead it held a wall of mirrors. Not one, as the woman had implied. As Doreen took them in, a face moved inside one, looking back at her. It was the face of the girl.

Doreen automatically took a step back.

“You’ve never seen a self-wall?” the woman said.

“Is that what that is?” Doreen kept inching toward the door, the waiting faces in the other room as blank as a mannequin’s.

“It’s where I keep myself, so I don’t get too full. It’s hard having so many lives inside, you see. This helps me stay clear. Not that there’s been a reason to. You’re my first visitor since I was banished.”

“Who are you?” Doreen managed, as she bumped into a rocking chair.

“I’m never really sure,” she said. “But I call myself Eleanor.”

“And you live here, by yourself?”

“I have tried to leave. I don’t get far.”

“I am truly in the underworld,” Doreen said, more to herself, as she tried to get away from the eyes of those stuck in the mirrors.

“ I am in this under of a world, and you’re mostly here,” Eleanor said, her eyes raking over Doreen. “You glow too bright to be truly well and stuck. Lively and luminous.” Her voice dropped into a conspiratorial whisper as she leaned closer. “Those of us who are stuck lose our shine.”

“Why are you stuck?” Doreen whispered back, drawn into the wide gaze of her eyes, how childlike she seemed.

“Death, taxes, the usual,” Eleanor said.

“Are you stuck because of the trial?”

“No, but these trials are not mine to take,” Eleanor said.

“I’m sorry.”

“Me too.”

“How long have you been stuck?” Doreen asked.

“I don’t really know. There have been two others before you, those sent on trials who found their way off their path and ended up at this door. Though I wasn’t there then, I inherited this house.”

“Like Hansel and Gretel.”

“Oh, do you know them too?”

Doreen swallowed a squeak and the woman laughed. “Kidding,” Eleanor said, with a bat of her lashes. “You should see your face. Only don’t look in my mirrors or it will get lost.”

“I have never felt so unsettled in my life,” Doreen said, before she paused. “It is the opposite of how I felt looking in at your home, though. Then I found I wasn’t quite so worried anymore.”

“Did you?” Eleanor asked.

“Yes.”

Eleanor nodded. “So you are a MacKinnon. You’re safe here if you’re of my line. The house recognized you, and you recognized our song of longing. It’s the only gift I can give.” She smiled, then added, “I’m a MacKinnon too.”

Doreen studied her closely. The tiny mole beneath the corner of her mouth, the arching eyebrows that looked like boomerangs when she frowned. There were similarities there, to be sure. But—

“Why are you here if you’re my family? How?”

“That’s the right question,” Eleanor said, before plopping down in the rocking chair at Doreen’s elbow. “I am here because of the curse; I am bound to a creature more demonic than any devil. I assume I’m not the only MacKinnon to suffer this fate; we are all tied together, little lights and strands of DNA bound to the one who wants us. You are the key to breaking the curse, should you win the trials. If you want to succeed, you will have to succeed at freeing us all. Complete the trials and win. The fate of your entire line, what will be and what has been, is in your hands now.”