Page 4 of A Circle of Uncommon Witches

FOUR

Doreen’s feet were killing her. She hadn’t dressed for a trek through the Scottish countryside with an ornery ancient witch when she’d left the house. She had thought she would find Ambrose, ask him the right questions, get the information she needed, break the curse, and be done with it all. She did not think it would involve freeing a trapped witch, going against Stella, stepping through a portal, and climbing over indescribably beautiful rolling hills and roots that were as large as an SUV.

Or going on a quest to find who she was calling Real-life Gandalf. Doreen blew out a breath, climbed over another root, then a boulder, and finally arrived at the top of the hill… right as storm clouds formed overhead and rain broke free.

Fat, freezing drops tumbled quickly down. They made the earth beneath her impractical shoes soggy. She stepped over another root and stumbled, falling to the ground. Ambrose let out a low curse and crossed to her. It seemed like every move she made left him grumbling. His warm hands circled her arms as he helped her up. His touch was far gentler than the expression on his face, which, if Doreen were reading it like a sentence in a book, might state I’m going to shake you until you break.

It was the furrow in his brow, the pinch of his lips, and the way his eyes narrowed. His gentle hands spoke a different language. Doreen preferred the look on his face to the unfamiliar etymology of his touch; it was the latter she didn’t know what to do with.

“I’m fine,” she said, untangling from him.

“You’re a bloody disaster,” he said, his hand clenching. “You can’t recharge, can’t walk…”

“I can send you back to that dungeon of a cage,” she said, his annoyance at her inspiring the strong urge to spell him on his ass.

He shifted a step closer. “I don’t think you will.”

“Oh, no?” She crossed her arms over her chest, wishing she were taller, or at least had the higher ground. He was too damn tall.

He gave his head a shake. “Your aunt is a sadist of a witch, but you clearly don’t have that streak.”

Doreen thought of Jack and swallowed hard. Maybe she did, maybe she didn’t. “There are other things I can do to you.”

“Sure, but the thing is, I’ve had everything done to me already and I’m still standing. I don’t want to be cursed again, and I don’t want to be tied to you.”

“Feeling’s mutual.”

He didn’t so much as glance her way. “I want to be free as much as you do,” he said. “Though I have my doubts you can do much in the way of freeing me.”

She snorted. “I already have. Remember: me, you, the Dead House of your demise?”

He rubbed at his temple. “Can you even perform a summoning spell?”

“Of course I can.” She paused, brushing the soaked locks of hair back from her face. Gods, he was cranky. “What do you want to summon? A better attitude?”

He looked at her, barely, his eyes skimming her face in what she took as disinterest. “Who, not what. The Keeper,” he said. “There’s no way we will make it to the Forest of Forgetting with you falling over your feet. The Keeper will be less inclined to help us from a summoning than if we knock on their door, but I can’t carry you, and at this rate it will take us a week to get there.”

“Perhaps I should have left you in the cage, after all,” Doreen said and stretched her aching back. Though he wasn’t wrong, much as she hated to admit it. If they kept walking, she was going to end up with blisters on her blisters and cracks in her bones. “I’ll need something of this Keeper’s. You don’t happen to have a lock of their hair on you?”

“You mean did I keep a lock of hair in my pocket for three centuries while being tortured?” His nostrils flared. “No, I did not.”

Doreen winced, and bit her lip.

“It must have been awful,” she said, looking away. She didn’t want to empathize with him, but facts were a hard thing to dismiss. “Stella has a way of drawing things out. Of stretching a simple punishment for making a potion for the wrong ailment into a year of silence.” She wrapped her arms around her midsection, trying to infuse warmth. “I made a mistake once, and gave someone voice, when she wanted me to take it.”

“Why did she want their voice?” he asked, his eyes eventually, reluctantly, finding a way to hers.

“They were saying things about us in town.”

“What kind of things?”

“That we eat little children and kidnap puppies,” she said, the corner of her lip curling up. “That we kill our own and use their plasma to curse our enemies. You know, the usual.”

“Why didn’t you take their voice as punishment?”

Doreen reached for a twig, peeling back the dead bark on it. “The woman was sad. Lonely. Bitter. Not because of us, but because of a bad romance. I gave her back her voice because she didn’t know she’d given it to him. After, she wasn’t sad anymore. She got out of the relationship, and she stopped talking about us.”

“Bad romance?”

“She was stuck with a horrible man. He made her feel small. Some people like to do that.”

“Yes,” he said, looking up at the sky, the corners of his mouth turning down. “They do.”

“Let me guess,” she said. “Stella once turned you into a frog, shrank you down?”

“I was thinking of my father,” he said. “He was exceptional at making his words into weapons, even without the power of a spellcaster. Stella never got into transmorphiguration. She preferred sharper, pointier methods. Though it sounds like she made you feel small, too. She certainly did her best to keep your power minimal.”

“You don’t need to tell me what I already know about Stella,” Doreen said, and studied his profile, waiting.

He sighed. “Hastings.”

“That was your dad’s name?”

“No. Hastings is a name the Keeper cannot ignore. A connection to who the Keeper once was. Try using it for your summoning spell.”

Doreen wanted to ask him about his father, but banished it as a foolish thought. It wouldn’t do to forget who Ambrose was, and who he wasn’t. He was a problem and a solution, not someone she should waste her compassion on. Instead, she nodded and set about gathering twigs and leaves. He didn’t offer to help. She lay them in a circle around the base of a thick yew tree. Doreen hadn’t taken many supplies with her when she’d gone to confront Ambrose, but improvisation was her strong suit.

Ambrose watched Doreen pluck flowers from around the base of another tree and lay them against the trunk of the yew. “You don’t need casting materials?”

“These work,” she said. “The ritual and intention are what matters. The words and my ability to manipulate energy and see beyond the borders of this world are what guide me. I mean, yeah, certain elements amplify spell work, but it’s the witch who really matters.” She looked up at him, from where she was crouched. “You of all beings should know that.”

“In my day we were precise with our work and words. Sometimes when you concoct, you can step into the wrong element.”

“You make it sound like you’re going to hang out with a bad crowd instead of performing a summoning.”

“Maybe you summon the wrong crowd.”

Doreen snorted. “Can you grab some of the pine needles for me?”

He crossed his arms over his chest. “Why?”

“I need them.”

“You just want me to grab them so you don’t absorb the poison and I do.”

She huffed a breath out. “The needles of this tree aren’t poisonous. Wait. Can you safely ingest poison?”

He lifted a single eyebrow. “It won’t kill me, but it will hurt.”

“Interesting,” she said.

“Don’t even think about it.”

“I would never,” she said, unsure if she was telling the truth. She thought of what her family had done and winced. He had a right to assume she’d trick him or want to watch him writhe in pain, but it was the opposite of who she was. She didn’t hurt, she helped. She would not forget that. She stood to gather the needles, but he was already moving toward them. Grumbling, but helping.

She walked to the tree and stared at the purple-and-red bark. It shimmered before her, a sign this tree was more than old. It was as ancient, if not more so, as the witch behind her. She gathered two handfuls of berries.

“As a cursed witch, thanks to you, I don’t have a long lifespan. Unless, of course, I decide to enthrall some poor human and take their chance at happiness and love.” She turned to him, the question popping out before she could swallow it down. “Can you be enthralled?”

“By you? Definitely not.”

“Okay.” She rolled her eyes so hard she got dizzy. “I’m cursed to die, but you can’t enthrall me either.”

“Half your line chooses to die rather than marry.”

“You still say that as if they had a choice. We die if we don’t marry. No action required on our part.”

“You’re not choosing the marrying path.”

“I guess I would rather die than settle.”

“Death or love?”

“Life or death,” she said, wiping her brow with the back of her soaked sleeve and huffing at the ineffectiveness of it all. “When you don’t have love, you don’t have anything.”

“That’s true in more ways than you know,” he said. “When you have it, the world is open. The air is easier to breathe, the skies are bluer, the sea is sweeter. Food tastes better, but you don’t need it. Songs sound sweeter but you only need the sound of the other person’s voice to know true music. Life is worth living, if you have true love.” He dragged a hand through his hair, scratched at the stubble covering his jaw. “It’s also no longer worth living when it is taken from you. Without it, life is hell. The landscape menacing, void. Worse than feeling nothing, you feel everything. The pain and devastation, the cold emptiness. It is a torture far worse than any the daughters of MacKinnon ever inflicted on me, than anything anyone ever could.”

He stood still, his breath rising and falling in equal measure. His one hand was clenched into a tight fist again, the other clutching a bunch of needles. Doreen was afraid to inhale, to breathe in not his scent this time, but the ruin seeping out of him.

“She must have been something, Lenora,” she finally said, when she thought it safe to speak. “For you to do what you did.”

“She was everything.”

“I’m sorry.”

He gave a single, curt nod. His hand released, a slow unfurling that left her sighing. He glanced over. “You aren’t entirely without. Is there not someone in your life you love?”

Doreen crouched by the tree. “Yes, Margot. She’s my best friend. Or was. She got married, and now… that’s gone too.” She looked down at her hands. “You’ve been spying on us for centuries. You should know this. My mother chose to have me, but not to marry. Death was perhaps more preferrable to her than staying for her daughter. You lost sight of her; so did the rest of the family. Margot was the only one who wanted me for me.” She cleared her throat, finding it too clogged for comfort. “I have one chance at finding the real thing, and I have to believe it’s worth it. Even with the cost of losing it.”

Emotion flickered across his face, there and gone so quickly she wasn’t certain if she’d imagined it. He took three steps to her, and lay the needles down, overlapping her berries. His movements were quick and skilled; he may have been out of practice, but he was not without knowledge.

“Do you really believe the curse, all of this, was worth it?” she asked him, her voice growing quiet. “It… it didn’t bring her back.”

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.”