To Kill a Witch (ONC 2024 SHORTLIST)

Chapter 9

As the slight echo of Wilf's voice faded away, purple footprints started to appear, shining against the dark rock of the mine floor.

Thea half-rose, staring, open-mouthed and trembling. She felt almost dizzy with shock. Wretchedness.

"Tracking spells only work when they know the person they are searching for," Wilf said. "And you can only know someone when you know their name."

They called her wretchedness for a reason, Mam had once said, when she'd grown tired of Pa's insistence that his mam had not been a witch. Magic was a force for good in their house, but witch was still synonymous with evil, especially in Mam's eyes, a woman who had lived sworn to the Saint. It was said that she had only made one mistake with her days, and that was marrying Pa — she had chosen him for love, not money, and soon, that love had died. It was the stories that started it. Desmona. Wretchedness.

"This cannot—" she said, her voice trembling. She clenched her hand around the watch, till it's ticking hands vibrated against her bones. How could it be, that her grandmother, the best village Silvertongue this side of the Wood, had become the Witch that so terrorized Devil's Corner, that sent revenants after her brother, that lured Thea into a nightmare of her own making? How could such a thing be?

Ceridwen clicked her beak. "Did your Pa never tell you about how a witch is made?"

Thea shook her head. Her heart was pounding somewhere high up in her throat. "Pa always loved the heroes." Probably one of his biggest shortcomings. He always saw the good in people, in magic, even when all the evidence pointed in quite the opposite direction. He did not focus on what evil was, but what it could be, and sought lies that told her all broken things could be fixed.

"All magic comes from somewhere," Wilf said. "Even the most inexperienced could craft a spell from the right ingredients. And those are just pulled from nature, even if you need a special kind of skill to take them. A witch can get the world to bend to their will. They can cast spells and curses without needing ingredients. They are walking conduits."

"But for this particular brand of magic, a witch needs to get it from something that is magic all on its own — something that violates the laws of all that is known in ways that no educated can understand. In most cases, a demon."

Thea scooted back across the floor, pressing herself against the wall, rocking slightly. "Grandmother made a deal with a demon?"

"Yes." Ceridwen said. She didn't try to move closer to Thea, but was watching her intently, shuffling her feet as she spoke.

"Why?"

Wilf did what Thea could only describe as a shrug. "She never told me why."

"Probably because she knew you'd tell every cat, mouse and bird in a thirty-mile radius," Cerdiwen muttered, sinking down to tuck her legs up into her feathers.

"But she died. We have a grave." In the plot where Pa had been buried. Where Ridoc would be buried, if she didn't find the Witch and stop listening to this. Her grandmother could not be the one terrorizing the people of Devil's Corner. She could not be the one responsible for luring Thea into the Woods. She could not have done... not for all the magic in the world.

She shook her head. "She was a Silvertongue—"

"The best village Silvertongue this side of the Woods, right?" Wilf asked. "So good she could breathe life into the words." He titled his head. "Ever heard of a cat that talked, before?"

"Only in—" Thea froze. Her lips were parted around the word, but she couldn't make herself say it. She couldn't. Because if she did... well, then, Wilf was living proof. But she supposed that Lae could be that as well. As for Ellis, he was dead proof. The living and the dead. All characters in a story come to life. Drawn into being by the uncanny knack of a village Silvertongue.

Of a Witch.

She closed her eyes, holding back an unsteady, trembling cry. The voice that had called her into the Woods That Night, the voice that had haunted her during the shadowy time between sleeping and waking, had always been strangely familiar. Calling to her across space and time, a half-forgotten friend from when she was small, and still whole. 

Her fingers corded in the wool of her brother's coat, pulling at the cuff of her missing sleeve.

"What about me?"

Her voice sounded hollow and impossibly fragile in the silence.

Wilf opened his mouth. Ceridwen shushed him. "She made a deal." She said. "A deal with a demon to have magic she could only dream of. Demons make up the very essence of the world. They are what lurk in the cracks and dark corners. You'd be hard pressed to find one that would not ask for a steep price — souls, perhaps, or a heart."

Harmless fun.

"Pa said that Grandmother could change how you felt with a single word." She said. "Once. Could she have been..."

"Stealing feelings?" Wilf finished. "Possibly. It would certainly be much less noticeable."

"And then she stopped." Ceridwen said. "Stopped feeding the demon, stopped feeding the Woods, because she saw what it was doing as it spread — and it's been taking revenge on her ever since. By attacking her family."

Thea. Ridoc. We think the Witch is losing power. We think it might be because of you.

Because of both of them. She'd stopped using her gift, stopped stealing little things to feed a greater horror. She'd hidden away, and tried to protect them instead. And the demon had sent its monsters after her and her family in an attempt to get its services back. Because no one, not even a witch, could skip out on a deal.

Pa had always said that the darkest things had hearts.