The Magician's Witch

The Music Box and Midnight Confessions

The summer went by faster than Eilis anticipated. By September, the addition was finished. The cast iron stoves were installed in each bedroom; Erik had ordered a kitchen stove at the same time, unbeknownst to Eilis. That addition made a world of difference; no longer did Laleh, Bakhita, and Eilis have to crouch over Eilis' tiny one-burner camping stove, or risk getting burned pulling pots and pans out of the fireplace. All of them sported burns and scars from such fiascos.

The glass panes for the windows came in mid-August, but every single one of them ended up cracked or broken due to being poorly packaged. Erik cursed blackly as he revealed the last frame, a massive crack running right down the middle of the pane.

"Well, this was a complete waste of money," he seethed.

Eilis came up next to him and waved her hand over the cracked glass. It immediately fused back together. She smiled up at his astonished face. "You're welcome," she said sweetly. Eilis was able to save nearly all of the windows. One had been smashed so badly that there was no point fixing it.

A bathtub came as well, an upgrade all the ladies were thrilled about. The bathroom was tiled and grouted before the tub was installed. A drain emptied out into the yard, where it dribbled down a dug, stone-lined trench that flowed away from the house.

Bed frames had been ordered from the village, and mattresses ordered from a vendor in Mazandaran. They arrived in late September. Everyone was finally sleeping off the floor, much to everyone's relief.

Eilis was busy cutting cloth into diapers, making woolen socks and booties, and hats for her baby as the weather began to turn. She had made a couple of blankets and pillows for the crib; she repurposed clothes she no longer wore from the wardrobe she'd had at the palace. She kept some of those clothes, remembering she would return to normal size after she gave birth. From a beautiful pair of yellow silk pajamas, she made a few onesies and tiny pairs of pants of a couple of different sizes. Laleh helped her perfect her stitching.

By mid-September, Eilis came to the conclusion that if someone thought to launch her into outer space, someone might mistake her for a satellite or a planet. She felt huge and swarthy, waddling around like an old duck. Her trips to the outhouse were becoming more frequent, and she often fell asleep in the afternoon, whether she was sitting at the spinning wheel, sitting on her bed, or sitting in the rocking chair. More than once, she was shaken awake by someone, announcing that it was dinner time.

Ironically, when she did try to go to sleep at the end of the day, the baby suddenly wanted to perform a gymnastic routine or aerobicize. She felt constantly exhausted, which translated to crankiness much of the time. Everyone tried to tiptoe around her, and tried not to bother her, which sometimes made matters worse.

"I feel completely useless," she sniffled one evening as Bakhita had awoken her after she had nodded off in her chair in front of the spinning wheel. Eilis looked at the spindle and noticed that she barely had more than a few yards on there; she must have fallen asleep no more than a half-hour into her task.

"Why didn't you wake me," she complained to the other two women.

"Honey, you were sleeping like the dead," Bakhita tried to say gently. "We tried to wake you, but you were out."

Eilis frowned. "I don't sleep that heavily."

"You do now," Laleh said softly. "And it's no wonder. I heard you out here before dawn this morning. You couldn't sleep?"

Eilis huffed and rubbed her face, trying to dispel her fatigue. "No," she mumbled. "I thought drinking some warm goat's milk with honey might help me sleep."

"Did it help," Laleh asked.

Eilis scrunched up her face. "It was already near dawn, so not really. I had been tossing and turning all night."