Blessed

The morning dew dapples the dandelions with water droplets. She plucks each one from the ground—carefully, so the roots stay attached—and wipes each flower on the hem of her shirt, stowing them in the basket until its grassy bottom couldn’t be seen anymore. Eodalin chirps and wraps his limbs around her arm until she satiates him with a flower, letting him gnaw on the florets.

“Is this enough?” 

The creature clicks his tongue. Yes.

At the cottage, she uses a dagger to separate the dandelions into parts, into sections of roots, leaves, petals, buds. She throws the stems in Eodalin’s bowl and the rest in the boiling water. When it’s finally steeped into tea, she pours herself a cup. It’s less leisurely than practical; when she’s done the first, she pours a second and downs that too. 

With the pot almost polished off, she exits out into the clearing and squares her shoulders, stretching like she always does. Drawing spells is the very first thing she’s learned and the last thing she mastered. Her teachers had urged them to never depend on it, but the weight of the chalk’s power had always felt more right than her own.

She’s cleared out the area herself, each root and mound carefully removed or flattened— shaky shapes become liabilities. The spell’s containment circle is drawn first. Bent over, the witch continues with the straightest lines—they always come second—dissecting the ground into different sections of dream and reality, give and take. Icons are next. Isolated, they are nothing, so she carefully etches patterns around them to give them meaning, and then chains them together with curved lines. The lines for channels of life are the final step, one unique to herself, and they run throughout the circle like veins that feed into the heart of it all: the sun. 

She stands. The dagger reopens an old wound on her palm. Silvery blood falls in the very center. It holds the power itself, a bind between art and artist, dream and dreamer, and it’s the difference between mere chalk lines and magic. This spell is so large, she offers more blood than usual. Stars begin to spin under her eyelids.

Dandelion tea is meant to help her blood circulation, but it doesn’t relieve her of her aversion to blood itself. She kneels and focuses on the soil until her breathing evens.

Eodalin climbs into her hood and wraps his furry body around her neck. “It’s not that bad,” she tells him with a grimace. When the sound of falling sand no longer rings in her ears, she glances down at the weeping wound. She stamps down the urge to gather the skin around the marred flesh and pinch it closed, will the gash away. She tears off a strip of her dress instead. Wrapping her wounds felt good. It was good, honest work. She was proud. 

She finishes off her tea in satisfaction over the silvery swirls on the ground, shifting and fostering into something powerful. Hope flutters in her chest. 

“Isobel.”

Dread sets in as quickly as contentment. The lines of the spell have begun to thicken and whiten into reality, spiraling into the sun at the center. She can’t hide it away. She doesn’t want to.

“Come out,” Isobel calls into the thick, heart hammering against her ribs in anticipation. “Stop hiding!” 

“Hiding?” Shadows contort, pulling away from their masters, swirling into new shapes, into monsters and men. They shrivel the bushes, wilt the grass, wither away at years of work. “Look at yourself before accusing me of such cowardice.” 

Cora materializes from nothing more than wisps of mist and smoke. She stretches like a silver cat, languid, and glances around with her slitted eyes—new wrinkles have emerged to bridge them together. She scoffs derisively; Isobel’s standing warily in front of the cottage, still more a girl than a fighter. Between them, the circle’s outer lines are starting to spawn off thinner, paler, lines that are webbing inward towards the sun icon. They advance and meet and retreat dozens and dozens of times, spinning a thousand-thread web. It is Isobel’s magnum opus. It is the reason why Cora is here.

“How did you find me?” Isobel demands. She orders her pets away, even Eodalin, but Cora’s eyes trail after them predatorily. If she wanted to, she could kill everything right now. Cora had always been unpredictable, and now she is dangerous.

“Do you think we wouldn’t keep an eye on our greatest weapon?” Cora laughs. Then she pretends to clutch her chest in pain. “Oh Isa, is this your welcome for an old schoolmate?”

“We’re not schoolmates anymore.”

“You’ve grown a backbone!” Cora’s laughter swells into something more hysterical. The sound rattles around tree trunks, echoes into the dark. “I’m almost glad that you’re still wasting away, running from responsibility. Too much change makes me feel old.”

“Insulting me isn’t going to earn my help,” Isobel says. She steps anxiously into the circle, the spell spiraling and blossoming at her feet. A few more minutes. A few more minutes, and it will be complete, and even Cora—top of the class Cora, shadowmaster Cora—won’t be able to do anything to stop her. Because despite everything, Isobel—

“You’re the chosen one,” Cora simpers mockingly. “You’re the most powerful one of us all, but you’re so damn useless.” 

Sometimes, during quiet nights, Isobel would rehearse a defense, a plea. She knew someone would be sent to bring her back someday; she just naively hoped it would be bumbling Amie, who could be chased away with a few words, or reckless Sarine, who could be tricked if need be. But Cora was the obvious choice all along, and Cora was vicious. And Isobeth feels seventeen and stupid again, lying about headaches and nausea to get out of class so she wouldn’t have to feel her awful power on her fingertips.

The shadow witch was staring down at the spell, an ugly twist on her beautiful features.

“I was wondering,” Cora spits. Her shadow coils and flexes. “If you knew how to use your gift at all. You were always such a poor student during our days in the academy. I doubted that you even learned intangible conjuring, but this?” She kicks at the marked soil. With a witch’s blood imbued it, however, the spell was impenetrable. “Drawn magic from our very first year at the academy. Pathetic.”

The world shifts as if offended. After all, it—the cottage, the woods, Eodalin—was a product of magic itself, a manifestation from a circle drawn in chalk by a girl who ran away with nothing else. 

“It’s versatile.”

“Wasteful.”

“It’s my power to waste.”

“You can end the war,” Cora hisses. “Stop the decades of bloodshed and territorial dispute. Kill the other generals with a flick of your hand.”

A crunch erupts in Isobel’s head. She stumbles backwards, reeling. The world blurs.

“Please don’t make me,” she whispers. She had pinched her fingers, hadn’t even pressed them completely together.

“You were always such a goody-two shoes,” Cora snarls, eating up the distance between them with small, furious steps. “But you have the chance to stop a war, and you don’t?” 

The man had begged for his wife before his head cracked open like an egg. She had just pinched her fingers, hadn’t even pressed them completely together. Crunch. 

Isobel lets out a sob. 

Cora strides towards her impatiently until Isobel can see every scar, stress-induced crease of skin on her face. She tries not to look too eager, contorting her features into something that resembles gentleness. She thought her persuasion caused Isobel’s outburst. “Are you finally listening to me? Are you finally going to do something? We need you, Isa, we can win.”

Crunch. The sound of something fleshy hitting the stone. 

Isobel shoves Cora’s hand off her shoulder furiously. “I never asked for this,” she snaps. “I never wanted to have the power of life.”

“It’s not something you can want,” Cora says, frustration resurging, eyes blazing. Shadows lash away at the fig trees Isobel grew last week. “You were always so spoiled! Some things you can’t choose, you dolt!”

And Isobel is suddenly furious. The world around her shifts, channels of life twisting and buckling in tree trunks, chrysanthemum buds, Eodalin’s tense body from inside the cottage. She could feel her own heart racing, blood flushing her face. She imagines the workings of Cora’s jaw, its muscles and nerves and life, and imagines shutting her mouth with a clench of a fist. 

Crunch. 

The world stills once more. She breathes.

“I was twelve,” she says. “Do you remember?” They were in the king’s hall, where the king called up a prisoner of war and Isobel to the throne. It was a demonstration, he said, and everyone smiled encouragingly. After Isobel crushed him, they left for the great hall for dinner, where she swallowed bites of veal and heaved it up on her dessert. “I was twelve when you sat back and let me kill him.”

“We’ve all killed people,” Cora hisses. There was no recognition of the man in her mind. “This is war, Isobel, whether you like it or not.”

They were standing face to face, toe to toe. The sun icon glimmers under their feet; they were in the heart of the spell now.

“Tell the king to back out of the territory. There’s no point to all of this.”

“Not when we’re this close to victory.”

Cora’s fatal flaw is that she’s too self-righteous, too determined when the win is within grasp. Isobel doesn’t know if she knew exactly what the spell was for, but maybe she did, because when she finally looks down at the completed, whitened swirls beneath them, she grabs Isobel and tries to wrestle her away, but Isobel plants her heel right at the edge of the sun’s rays, and it is enough, just enough. 

The sun shines under her foot. For a moment, she feels nothing. Then she feels hollow, as if someone had scooped out something from inside her and she didn’t know what it was. And then relief pours into the hole left. It was successful.

The woods shift, murmuring and whispering. The spells that grew each tree, bush, bird, were bound to her magical blood, but she had just set them free. 

She’s set herself free. 

When she was studying and experimenting and practicing with all sorts of drawn witchcraft, Isobel considered the consequences of stripping away the world’s chosen one; she wasn’t self-centered enough to consider implosion or planetary misalignment—the world was fine before she came along, really—but she would like people to feel something, like a skipped heartbeat or a mysterious white hair, just to make her stance clear. She wasn’t a soldier.

Cora is silent. She knew. She says, unconvincingly, “You couldn’t have. It’s impossible.”

“Magic flows through people’s life channels too,” Isobel says, even though she didn’t need to. Cora’s fight has left her, and she stands there like she wasn’t sure what she was doing there. Isobel places a hand on her shoulder. She feels fuller, more relieved than she has in years, and a little sorry all the same. Maybe she could learn how to cook and turn her cottage into an inn for the children lost in the war. “Take care of yourself, okay?”

Cora snarls and stalks off. Isobel watches her until her black cloak becomes a swath of shadow, and then she turns her attention to her home.

The fig trees Cora’s shadows touched were falling apart at the branches, and there could be no spell-drawing without magic in her veins. Isobel picks up a discarded fig, prying open the gash in its thick skin to reach the seeds. She’ll plant them soon.