Some of them Witches

Chapter 14

She and Virginia started meeting for their lessons more frequently after that until Marianne was climbing up Hometree nearly every day and spending entire afternoons in its shade.

Marianne snapped the book closed.

"What did you think?" Virginia was pacing around the partially assembled mirrored walls of her cabin. The title in question was Vilified Women: Some of Them Witches.

"What's a girl gotta do to get her own chapter in here?"

"Die a gruesome and violent death," she deadpanned.

"Exactly," said Marianne. "That doesn't seem like an achievement."

"Elaborate," ordered Virginia as she continued working her hands around the glass panels, crooning charming honeyed words or tones where necessary.

"There are quite a few women in here who literally do nothing and still get killed. At least some of them were trying to achieve something. Why include so many women who didn't contribute anything? I know why Joan of Arc and Anne Boleyn were threats, but there are women in here who were just unmarried past 30 or servants, tortured into false confessions."

"Just because you don't do anything wrong doesn't mean people won't get the wrong idea."

"But they're not doing anything wrong or right, they're just going to work or living alone. They didn't even have tests to verify if they were magical."

"They had tests. They just weren't sophisticated."

"Drowning a person to see whether or not they float isn't just not sophisticated, it's demented." Marianne's exasperation with the past coated every word.

"It did take rather a long time for them to find it ineffective," said Virginia between her string of spells.

Marianne could get lost studying Virginia's charms. Charms? Not spells to be sure. Each one sounded like the kind of soothing talk you would offer an infant or a kitten. "Think you could grow a little bigger?" she might ask, all sweetness or, "Maybe a little more..." and so on until she had charmed the object into her desire. It was so different from Marianne's own single word spells or the clichéd rhyming verses of old.

"Anyway, my point is, it sounds hopeless when you have it listed out to you like this. I think the author tries to play it off by not using any modern examples but there are modern examples." Virginia nodded expectantly. "If anything, leaving out modern examples has the opposite effect. It leaves it open to you filling in the blanks with the examples closest to you." It was dawning on Marianne quickly. "Like right after I finished it, I was thinking, this is happening right now and my mind immediately went to Kay Price."

Kay Price had been killed right here in Texas by a police officer. The cop was responding to a call from a concerned neighbor that had seen a "suspicious" individual going into the house while her neighbor was out of town. When the cop turned up there was no answer but he found the house was open and let himself inside, gun drawn. In his statement, he said he heard a strange noise, and turning toward it saw a figure coming toward him and fired.

She was the home owner's niece. She was house sitting. "She was 19. Barely even out of high school." Marianne could see the image of her on the news now. They showed her senior yearbook photo, all smiles in her cap and gown, rust-colored hair spilling over her shoulders. "And the only reason people are even talking about it is that it turns out she's not even a witch. He just thinks all women with red hair are witches. How has it been 500 years and a person is allowed to have a gun and still think that all redheads are witches?"

"And that all witches are dangerous."

Marianne could feel her features going slack. "Maybe he's seen too many news stories about red-haired teenagers lighting houses on fire."