Page 12 of The Moorwitch
It had all happened so quickly, a blur in my memory: the faerie’s appearance, silver and shining and terrible against the crimson walls of my uncle’s study; my garbled plea for aid; the threads of the vowknot winding around my fingers as I accepted his terms. He had freed me at a cost:a favor to be performed by my twenty-first birthday,I had vowed in my child’s voice, thinking such a day an eternity away, while my aunt’s torments were daily. I would have sold mysoulto be free of her.
Perhaps that’s exactly what I did.
“What do you want?” I whisper.
The corner of his cruel mouth quirks. “I want to go home.”
It was not the answer I had expected. Ten virgins sacrificed by a full moon, maybe, or some equally horrible thing. But to go ...home? It sounds so ordinary.
“You want to go to ... faerie land?”
Amusement arches in his brows. “Faerie land? A child may call it that, I suppose. To my folk, it is the World Below, or Elfhame.”
“Why can’t you justgo? Isn’t that where you belong?”
“It isn’t as simple as snapping my fingers, child. I have not been there for many centuries. Most of the doors to Elfhame were shut long ago, when it was made apparent that my people and yours could not dwell together in peace. Time among your mortals has taken its toll on me. You forge so much iron these days ...” His eyes slip away, his voice fading, and for a moment he seems a thousand leagues distant. “There are those Below who may ... challenge my return. So I must return at full power or not at all, and to do that, I need your assistance.”
His expression is serious as it shifts to me, his age apparent in his eyes. It is like being held in the gaze of a mountain or a ruin or some other ancient, unknowable thing.
I lean back, wishing Emma would reappear, but she—and every other serving girl and boy—seems to have vanished entirely.
“In Elfhame,” the faerie says slowly, “there is a tree. I require but a piece of it. You, little bird, will flit into the realm of the fae, pluck a branch from this tree, and bring it to me.”
I stare at him, feeling the strangest urge to laugh.
Slip into Elfhame? A worldfullof monsters like him? Steal a piece of some sacred faerie tree and sneak out again?
I want to tell him how impossible it is. That I won’t be beholden to the oath of a child, however skilled a Weaver I might have been. I want to tell him to gostuffhimself with iron.
But then he says, “Do this for me, and your heart will be whole again.”
I inhale sharply. “I have no idea what you—”
“Do not act the witless fool with me. We know one another better than that.” He leans toward me, tapping one long nail on the tabletop. “I can guess at the pain you’ve been feeling when you channel. We draw near your twenty-first birthday, do we not? And still your vow is unfulfilled. Or did you think the vowknot you tied was merely ceremonial?”
I press a shaking hand to my chest. Of course I knew. I’d known from the moment the pain had begun what the true cause of it was, though I’d never let myself fully believe it.
“You can deny me this favor,” he adds. “I cannot compel you. But itwillcost you your magic. For it was your heart you swore upon when you tied the vowknot to seal our bargain.”
Yes, I remember.
Vowknots are specific things, requiring clear collateral. And I had made my vow with the one thing I held dear, the only thing in my life that had ever—and still only—brought me joy.
“I swear on my heart,” my eight-year-old voice echoes back to me. The heart. The precious catalyst wherein a Weaver spins energy into magic. I offered up as collateral the very crux of my fledgling power.
The idea of refusing him is alluring. I could walk away right now. I could prove I am beholden to no one. I could hold my chin high.
And I would lose my magic entirely.
My lungs tighten, my skin going clammy, the way it does when I realize a spell is going to fail. In that moment, I feel the crushing sum of all that panic and fear and, most of all, overwhelminghelplessness. I’d become less than nothing. A ghost in my own skin. A quivering mouse. Dependent on others, forever crushed in a world that despises poor, plain women with murky reputations. I simply cannot survive without it.
Picturing life without magic is like falling, plunging from heights unfathomable through dark and empty air. It is a feeling worse than death, to have all control and strength wrenched from my hands.
It is the same feeling I found at the end of my aunt’s pipe, when she pressed it into my skin.
But beyond fearing life without it, the deeper truth is that Ilovemagic. Everything about it—the thread forming arcane patterns between my hands, the immediate connection I have to the things living and growing around me, the rush of energy through my body, and the smoky burn of magic at my fingertips. All those hours as a child, lit by sterling beams of moonlight, buried in stolen spellbooks and spools of thread. Even knowing my aunt would beat me when she caught me at it, I could not resist magic’s lure, my need overpowering my fear.
And even more precious to me now are my students and my classroom. I treasure our quiet lessons bent over embroidery hoops, as I teach them how to Weave their way free of an uncaring world. To claimtheirfreedom as I’d claimed my own. Without my magic, I can never return to my classroom.