Page 22 of A Circle of Uncommon Witches

TWENTY

The spirits were not cooperating. Ada stood next to the candle with the black flame and tried not to scream. The wax, which for so many centuries had not melted a whisker, was a good three inches less than it had been the day before.

She was, finally, running out of time.

The gods had not granted her eternal life, but rather a way to continue this one while she sought what she had lost. While she searched for Margaret. The souls kept her going. They kept her tethered to reality and gave her time. The bones made her strong. Ada should have felt invincible. After so many years of trying, she had managed to trap not one but two living souls. Plenty of food.

But her strength was waning instead of growing. She couldn’t feed off any of the three souls inside her underworld. It was like they were encased in glass. Little lights she could see, who her spirits could follow, but did nothing to satiate her.

Ada was starving.

She had consumed many pieces of souls in the past year, too many, but still they barely dulled the hunger. Her appetite was growing. The bits she had consumed only managed to reduce the ache to a gnawing chasm. She wanted more than a snack. She needed a feast.

“You summoned me?” Hastings said, the last of his shade drifting forward.

“Once again, I really didn’t.”

“You are fading,” he said, his voice a low metronome. A constant ebb and flow, a tick tick tick in her head.

She was fading. She was also tired of him. Of the reminder of what could have been. Hastings had been a ghost long before he was dead. He had spent all his years in life and beyond haunting her.

She sighed, stood, and walked to the alcove off the farthest entryway into her cave. It held a few jars, a small altar of stones and drawings, and a box. She opened the box, then pulled out another, and another. Ada removed the key from the final one, walking out of the alcove and into the main chamber. She went to the wooden shelves and slid the key into the door at its base. It was rusty and angry but opened.

There, she pulled out a doll.

It was the oldest of the dolls, having been Margaret’s when she was a child. Carved of stone with exaggerated etchings, it was a gnarly thing. She pressed her palms to it, leaned down to whisper against its face. Ada wished she could remember how it had felt to hold the doll when Hastings gave it to Margaret, when Margaret had been a girl. Now it was just a stone with a face and a reminder. Of a free, happy, funny light who laughed all the time. Ada could no longer hear the laughter.

Ada didn’t remember merriment.

She only knew longing and hunger and pain.

With one last stroke to its head, she looked up to see the spirit of Hastings hovering. He gave her a deep, final bow.

Ada nodded once, and then she leaned down, keeping her eyes on the man who could have been her husband. She pressed her lips to the temple of the doll and its mouth broke open. Wind filled the cave. Hastings flickered. The ground shook and Ada grinned as the last of his soul floated up and out, and she sucked every drop of him down.

Margot knew certain things about magic to be true. You needed to water it every Thursday like you would a String of Hearts plant. You had to honor your ancestors, the four corners of the world where they might be hovering at any moment, and, perhaps most importantly, yourself.

Magic was also unpredictable. It opened the doors precisely when it could.

Finally, if you wanted anything to work, you had to believe. Belief could move mountains. It might even wake one up.

The three witches stood beneath the stones that formed the Old Man of Storr, staring up. The earth here was hard and cold, and dotted with smaller pebbles that made it difficult to walk across.

“How do we want to do this?” Ambrose asked Doreen.

“Maybe we yell?” she said, trying to find her footing.

Margot screamed. Doreen shouted. Ambrose bellowed.

Echoes of their calls rained down on them, but the rock formation of a slumbering man did not so much as shift a pebble.

Next, they spread out, pacing back and forth, up and down, across the stones grouped there. They called his name. “ Wake up, Old Man, ” they said. “ Rise and shine, Mr. Storr .”

The echoes followed, before settling at their feet and fading away entirely.

“That was strange how it ate the sound,” Doreen said. “And also ineffective.”

“Maybe if we are trying to wake a giant,” Margot said, “we have to get his attention?”

“Can’t be any sillier than our yelling at him,” Doreen said.

Margot gathered a section of rocks and she and Doreen attempted to bespell them, to charm them to move for them. Doreen had seldom felt so foolish as she did saying, “Come on, little rock, roll to your home.” They’d thought to use the rocks to shift the tectonic plates under the sleeping rock form.

Slide the man around and see if moving him physically would wake him. It made sense in theory… but these rocks rolled together and broke apart, over and over.

No matter how they varied their spells, the ground beneath the Old Man of Storr remained unmoved, and so he slept on.

“This is a waste of time,” Margot finally said, throwing a large rock at the mountain range and causing a small avalanche.

“Let’s spread out,” Doreen said, wiping sweat from her brow. “See if we’ve overlooked something?”

Day settled into night, and the moon rose high into the sky. They walked the grounds, focused and searching. Doreen murmuring about teeth as she passed Ambrose, while he hummed a quiet melody.

Margot watched them, the way they checked on one another. How Ambrose would reroute his steps to be near Doreen, to provide a hand if he thought she needed it, which she never did.

He did not know how strong Doreen was.

Margot thought of Dean. Of how he seemed to know what she wanted as she wanted it. How he was never overbearing or needy or clingy. He knew precisely what to say and when to say it. He was a perfectly gentle lover, a spot-on gift giver. He never hogged the remote and liked all the same books and movies as she did. He didn’t burn the toast or try to guard her from things that could harm her. He would not have stayed close to her like Ambrose was positioning himself to be beside Doreen. She wouldn’t have growled at him like Dore did to Ambrose when she noticed.

She didn’t really even fight with Dean. Not unless she had the thought that it was time for a little conflict, in which case Dean was more than willing to contribute.

Their relationship was practically perfect in every way.

But as she watched Ambrose and Doreen, she understood it wasn’t real. It was an echo of a relationship, built solely off her preferences and her power. The truth of it broke her already fractured heart. She wished with every wish imaginable it would be, could be, real.

Margot turned a corner, nearly tripping over a thorny bush, and looked up. “Oh my,” she said, her eyes traveling over the bench in front of her. It was covered in Gaelic symbols, surrounded by flowers blooming in this otherwise barren wasteland of a rock formation.

“I think I found something,” she called, looking for her cousin, and found Doreen nearby. She appeared to have found something as well. Doreen stood in front of a chair, or throne perhaps, with similar markings as Margot had seen on the bench.

“I don’t know how we move him into the chair or bench,” Doreen yelled, nodding at the giant.

Ambrose stood behind Doreen, his eyes drinking in the etchings.

“Can you read what it says?” Margot called back, leaving the bench and moving closer to them.

Ambrose hesitated before his eyes met Doreen’s. Whatever they shared, unspoken and unacknowledged, led him to giving a single nod.

Yes, Margot thought, what they had was very different from her relationship with Dean. Here, between the two of them, was a language of their own, and an endless array of possibilities.

“It says that love is like wildflowers, found in the most unlikely of places,” he said.

“It’s almost a greeting card,” Doreen quipped.

“I wonder if it’s true,” Margot murmured to herself. “There’s a bench too, over this way.”

The bench was down closer to the foot of the mountain. It read: View the miracle of a single flower, and your whole life may change.

“Okay,” Doreen said. “Neither of these tell us what we really need to know, though I like the poetry.”

“Yes,” Ambrose agreed. “They’re poetic platitudes. I’d rather not write that beast of a rock man a sonnet if that is what this implies.”

They crossed back up the hill, and Ambrose came to a stop in front of a large table made of the same stone as the rocks littered around them. “Here’s something. Tomorrow’s flowers bloom because of the seeds of today ,” he read.

“Okay,” Doreen said, blowing out a breath. “I don’t quite know what that one means.”

“Oh,” said Margot, and she thought of Dean again, of what she was missing. “It’s little bread crumbs. The flowers are the miracle—they can change our tomorrows. Look at the flowers bordering the chair, bench, and table. There are doll’s eyes, moonflowers, wolf eyes, and black-eyed Susans. All are flowers meant to bring sight or heal failing sight.”

“And we what? Eat the flowers?” Ambrose asked.

“Not quite. I think if we want to wake a sleeping giant, first we have to make sure he can see.”

“Of course,” Doreen said, looking over her shoulder at Margot. “You can’t see without eyes. You can’t wake without seeing.”

Margot nodded.

“How do you propose we make eyes for the giant?” Ambrose asked. “Carve them into the stone?”

“Stop being grumpy,” Doreen said, rubbing his back like a child soothing a puppy.

“It’s a logical question.”

Margot opened her hands. “We use the flowers of the gods. We make a poultice and smear it in. If you have eyes that need to see, this should help them.”

Ambrose looked at the flowers surrounding the table. “Many of these are poisonous.”

Margot smiled sadly, thinking of her marriage. “Some of the best things are, Ambrose MacDonald.”

The three of them collected the flowers, mindful of the poisonous parts.

Margot hummed as she worked, and Doreen thought of their many mornings in the apothecary. This was Margot’s happy place, working with flowers, creating and educating, healing and helping. Her cheeks were rosy, her eyes light.

This will work , Doreen thought.

It was a simple matter of blending herbs mixed with a handful of dirt to bind it, using the words of the ancients to pour into the petals. Then grinding them down with stone and creating a paste. They made the poultice in under three hours and portioned it out. Each witch carried a separate portion. Together, they systematically spread it across the stones. A little fusion here, a dab-dab there.

It took them as long to spread the ointment as to create it, and when they were done, they stepped back to admire their work. Slashes and blots of a dark ointment oozed across the various stones of Storr. It was as though they had given the rocks a very colorful mud bath.

They waited, watching, listening to the steady breeze and constant exhalation and inhalation of their breath.

The stones did not move.

“Maybe we got it wrong?” Ambrose said.

“Or maybe we didn’t use enough?” Doreen asked.

“It seemed so straightforward,” Margot said.

“I mean, we have done everything I can think of,” Ambrose said. “Maybe we need to scream at it again.”

“Perhaps we simply need time,” Doreen said, standing as her eyes tracked the illumination on the rocks ahead. Under starlight and moonlight, a path arose. A simple path that had not been there before, it went up the side of one rock and down the other, over and around, until it came to the center stone. Here the light split and lit up two deep caverns.

“Are those…” Ambrose started.

“His eyes?” Margot finished.

“Have to be,” Doreen said.

They crossed to the section and Margot reached into her bag for the last of the poultice.

“Hang on,” Doreen said. She stared at the place where eyes could be and thought of Ada. Of how the Queen of the Order of the Dead had eyes that could not see. Pearls for her sight. There was a parallel here, a connection. She reached into her bag and pulled from it a stone.

“I don’t have pearls,” she said, “but I have something perhaps better.”

“Obsidian?” Margot said, leaning closer.

“Once used to restore the soul,” Doreen said. “It’s a stone from the fire in Ada’s cave.”

Margot passed her the potion and Doreen rolled the obsidian eye in it, smearing it with purpose and focus.

She carried the eye to the giant and studied it. Ada’s words in the cave returned to her. The spell is the truth, the truth is the spell. She lifted the eye and sat it into a notch of carved stone, whispering a single word: “Awaken.”

No sooner was the stone placed than the ground started to rum ble, the earth shaking. Doreen stumbled back as the first rip in the soil started. Like a series of threads being snapped with the snip of one line, the large boulders of Storr began to vibrate, and ever so slowly… roll. As they rolled, they began to pick up speed.

The farthest two sped in toward the center stone, followed by the other outlying ones. They came together with a thunderous snap before they shifted and righted. The head bowled up the side of the rock body and centered at the top. The eye, black as a single pearl in the center, blinked and opened. A howling cry came from the slit in the center of the face as the Old Man of Storr awoke and came back into one piece.

“Holy hells,” Margot said, taking a few leaps back. “Was this really the best idea?”

The three of them continued down the hill as the old man stood and wobbled. They ducked and covered as smaller stones freed themselves and fell over them. Soon a bellowing laugh filled the canyon, echoing off the mountains behind. It looked, for a moment, like the other mountains were laughing, the teethlike peaks quaking, and then all noise came to a deafening stop.

The Old Man of Storr looked down on them and said, “Little witches. I see Ada’s time is finally running out. Which of you is here to take my place?”