Sweet & Bitter Magic

by Adrienne Tooley

  Tamsin elbowed her sharply. “Can you not?” She glanced pointedly at their fellow travelers. For all she knew, they’d try to stone her atop the mountain. “And no, I can’t just ‘magic us over.’ ” Her whisper did nothing to hide her disgusted tone. “What do you think a witch actually does?”

  Wren frowned. “I don’t know. Whatever they want?”

  Tamsin pursed her lips together in annoyance. She would hardly have believed that someone with such a strong reserve of magic could know so little about it, except that she had been on the road with Wren for several days, and so, of course, she could.

  “It isn’t that easy,” Tamsin sighed, keeping her voice low. “Am I powerful? Absolutely. Can I whisk us up and over a mountain without losing a leg?” She frowned theatrically. “Unlikely.”

  “But I’m a source. Surely that would help.”

  “Great, so I’ll only lose half the leg.” Tamsin rolled her eyes, but Wren still looked confused. Tamsin sighed. She was going to have to explain as though teaching a child. “Think of it like a scale.” Tamsin held out both her hands, palms up. “The amount of magic it would require to move us up and over stone is immense. If I take that much now”—she dropped her left hand and raised her right—“I’m going to have to pay it back.” She glanced at her right hand, which rested near her ear. “Where is that energy going to come from? I got no sleep, so I don’t have any to spare.” She shot Wren a dark look. “And I am responsible not only for myself, but for you, too. That’s now double the magic I need.” She sank her left hand even deeper, so that it hung near her hip.

  Wren opened her mouth to protest, but Tamsin cut her off with a glare.

  “Fine, say I pull magic from you.” She moved her left hand back up so it hit near her waist and let the right one droop down near her shoulder. “But you haven’t been trained properly, so it’s likely you’d overcompensate and offer too much too quickly, which would deplete your resources, not to mention probably make you ill, leaving me with most of the grunt work. That’s still a lot of energy that I have to make up for. So either the magic chooses for me and I lose a limb”—she balanced her hands out—“or I sleep for the next half century in an attempt to repay my debt to the earth. While I would be a lovely sleeping corpse, I’m sure”—she smiled sardonically at Wren—“it might be easier if you just got over yourself and started climbing the stairs.”

  Wren stared at her, openmouthed.

  “There’s a railing. You’ll be fine.” Tamsin swatted the girl’s shoulder. “Go on.” Surprisingly, Wren obeyed, falling into step behind two middle-aged women.

  Tamsin watched her climb the first few steps before sighing and starting her own ascent. She did not bother with the railing. The steps were clearly the work of witches. She knew she would not fall. Instead Tamsin fiddled with the journal tucked into the waistband of her skirt.

  She had been so certain she had escaped the diary’s clutches. But that had been foolish—she had been foolish, to forget that when dark magic took hold of something, it pushed and pushed until it destroyed.

  Her legs burned as she continued to climb. The stairs were short and steep, just wide enough to fit two climbers side by side. A tapestry of thick moss clung to the side of the peak, giving the air a heavy, humid quality. The higher they climbed, the harder it became to breathe. Yet Wren still insisted on talking.

  “That explanation seemed a bit simplistic.” She glanced over her shoulder at Tamsin, then stopped, clutching the rail with white knuckles. “I shouldn’t have looked down.”

  “Novice mistake.” Tamsin clucked her tongue. “And I explained it simplistically because that seems to be the only way to make you understand.”

  Wren’s face soured. “It isn’t my fault I don’t know things. You don’t have to be so patronizing.”

  “Actually,” Tamsin said, keeping her own eyes on the back of Wren’s head so they would not stray to the ground far below, “it is your fault. You’re supposed to report to the Coven upon recognition of your talent so they can train you. Technically, you broke the highest law of the world Within.”

  “Where?” Wren paused, frowning.

  Tamsin, too, stopped climbing. “Within,” she repeated. Wren’s face remained blank. “The Coven’s land. Beyond the Wood.”

  Wren’s face lit with understanding. “Oh. I didn’t know it had a proper name. Most people just call it the Witchlands.”

  “The Witchlands?” Tamsin would not have been surprised to learn her eyebrows had become permanently attached to her hairline. “Is everything a story to the ordinary folk?”

  Wren looked a bit embarrassed. “Mostly. Yes.”

  Tamsin sighed as they continued to climb.

  “You know, it is rather beautiful up here,” Wren said after several more steps. “It smells like salt, and that breeze…” She sighed contentedly as the wind whipped at them, blowing Tamsin’s hair in her face.

  “So?” She tried to sound cross, but as she was extracting hair from her mouth, it sounded more like a mumble.

  “And the sky. It’s so blue it’s practically clear. It’s almost as if we’re high enough above the world that the plague doesn’t exist. That the dark magic cannot reach us.” There was a hint of hope in Wren’s voice, as though speaking it could make it so.

  Tamsin glanced around, a pang of longing in her chest. She often forgot exactly how much of the world her curse kept her from enjoying. Even colors were impossible to remember. In Tamsin’s eyes, they were merely climbing up the side of a gigantic rock. She gleaned no pleasure from the act, no enjoyment from the height, just a turning of her stomach when her foot missed a step. There was nothing beautiful here but Wren’s ability to be nauseatingly optimistic. Still, she kept silent. Wren’s words were something, even if they were simple and fleeting. They weren’t a feeling, but they were a reminder of one.

  A person could feel. A person could hurt. Tamsin wished there were more nuance to her personal emotional spectrum. It was exhausting, being angry. Feeling bitter. Biting back. She pulled the diary from her hip and turned it over in her hands.

  “Okay, seriously, what is that?”

  Tamsin hadn’t noticed Wren stop walking. “Nothing,” she said quickly. But Wren didn’t budge.

  “Your face looks strange.” She stared suspiciously down at Tamsin from her step.

  “My face is fine,” Tamsin snapped. “Keep walking.”

  “I’m not an idiot.” Wren’s words were a challenge. “I know you think I’m stupid, but I’m not. You’re hiding something from me.”

  Tamsin sighed. For a moment she considered telling the source everything. Her entire history, everything about her sister, about her banishment, all of it. But if she did that, Wren’s feelings toward her would change. She would stop being in awe and start being afraid. With the world in chaos and the dark magic getting stronger, the only way Tamsin would survive this trip Within was to go with someone who did not know all the deep, dark parts of her. For their bargain to work, Tamsin could show no weakness.

  “I mean it.” Wren watched Tamsin with cloudy eyes. “You can trust me.”

  “Trust you?” Tamsin laughed, hard and harsh, but she felt no relief. “You don’t even trust yourself. You know nothing about your magic, nothing about my world. So don’t pretend you know anything about me.”

  Wren dropped her hands and stared at Tamsin incredulously. “That’s only because you’re too self-absorbed to share a single thing with me. I’ve asked you so many questions, and all you’ve ever given me are half answers, brushed away because you think I’m a fool. Well, so are you.” Wren shook her head.

  “Fine,” Tamsin said. “I’ll tell you.” If Wren wanted to call her a fool, she would act like one. “They’re love notes. From a secret admirer.” That got a laugh from Wren. Tamsin set her shoulders and brushed carefully past Wren. The group was nearly a hundred steps ahead of them. “Just because you haven’t fallen victim to my charm doesn’t mean other people don’t find m
e delightful.”

  Wren hurried to catch up with her. “You’re lying.”

  “That’s my prerogative,” Tamsin said over her shoulder. “I’m not one of the fair folk.”

  Wren gaped at her. “You’re impossible,” she hissed. “I wish I’d never met you. I’d be better off with my father. At least he appreciates me.”

  “Are you sure about that?” From what she could gather, Wren’s father was a selfish, simpering man. The kind of person who took but never gave. To hear Wren tell it, though, her father might as well have been a saint.

  Wren narrowed her eyes. “What are you talking about?”

  Tamsin shrugged. “Don’t be so quick to think your sacrifices are appreciated.”

  Wren’s face had gone red. “What does that mean?”

  “You didn’t join the Coven.” It wasn’t that Tamsin was sorry she and Wren hadn’t been classmates—the girl was infuriating at best—but she couldn’t ignore the flash of interest that sparked behind Wren’s eyes every time Tamsin talked about magic. It wasn’t innocent curiosity. It was a raw, powerful hunger.

  “I couldn’t.” Wren’s eyes were wide. “By the time I understood what I was, my mother had died. I was all that my father had left. I couldn’t just leave him.”

  Tamsin arched an eyebrow. “Why not?”

  “It was my duty.”

  “Why?”

  “What do you mean, ‘why?’ ” Wren snapped.

  Tamsin shrugged. “Why did you give up your life for your father’s?”

  “That’s not what happened,” Wren said fiercely. “He would have died without me.”

  Tamsin looked her over coolly. “I’m sure he liked to tell you that.”

  Wren looked ready to cry. “I love my father.”

  “Convenient, considering that’s my payment.” Tamsin sighed, brushing her long hair around her shoulders. “But just because you love him doesn’t mean he loves you back.”

  Wren let out an incredulous laugh. “You know, I felt sorry for you, not being able to love. But now I wonder if maybe you’d have been this way anyway. You don’t care about anything or anyone. So you can pick and pick and pick at me and my father and my decisions, but at least I know I love someone. At least I have someone I would do anything for. Someone I would give up my life to protect. Can you say the same?” Wren’s voice hit a register so high she might as well have been shrieking. But her words sliced Tamsin at the center of her useless, dark heart.

  “You have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said, voice shaking. Her hands were clenched into fists, the world wobbling at the edges.

  Tamsin was so used to viewing grief and sadness as an extension of love that she had nearly forgotten she had the capacity for it at all. But now, here, she wasn’t hurt because she cared about someone. She was hurt because she didn’t. Because she couldn’t. Because the useless, driveling girl standing before her had abilities that Tamsin did not. To see magic. To love her family. To shame Tamsin for choices Wren knew nothing of.

  “Who hurt you?” Wren squinted at the witch, her voice barely a whisper, nearly lost in the wind that had begun to roar.

  Tamsin said nothing.

  Wren looked at her a moment, disappointment etched across her face, before pushing past her, taking the stairs two at a time to catch up with the rest of the group.

  Tamsin let her go, and the diary fell open in her hands. She looked down at Marlena’s loopy scribbles. The answer to Wren’s question was complicated. There were a great many people Tamsin blamed for her pain. But the fact was that, in the end, the person she blamed the most was herself.

  My sister is keeping secrets. Not that it’s anything new for her. Did you know that she found her power nearly three years before I did? And she refused to tell anyone so we could enter the academy at the same time. She wanted so badly for us to do everything together that she didn’t even tell me for over a year. It’s lucky Vera wasn’t the kind of person to dress us in matching outfits, but I know Tamsin ached for it. Every time I changed my hair, she’d change hers, too. If I started wearing green, she’d enchant all her clothes the same shade. She was so desperate for us to be the same that she never stopped to consider how fundamentally different we were.

  But that’s beside the point. Right now, something’s going on, something weird, even for her. She keeps looking at me all teary and shifty-eyed, and her lips are chapped and cracked. It’s a telltale giveaway that she has a secret. Tamsin’s such a goody-goody she always wants to be honest and pure, and the only way she can keep herself quiet is to bite her mouth shut. And she just hovers over me. No matter the hour, she’s always popping her head in to check on me, like she’s making sure I haven’t died.

  Not that she’s the only one. Healer Elthe is looking at me like I’ve come back to life. You should have seen it: The moment I opened my eyes, she gasped and clutched her heart like she’d seen a ghost. Apparently, I was unconscious for close to a week, my pulse so faint it was nearly nonexistent. Everyone fully expected me to die. Instead they’re getting ready to discharge me. That’s right: I get to leave this terrible, sterile place!

  So yes, here I am, back among the living. Fundamentally not dying, which, I know, is unusual for me. Yet my sister continues to bite her tongue. She’s keeping a secret, something bigger than she’s ever held, and it’s eating her alive. Amma told me she’s been fighting with Leya. And they never fight. Honestly, it’s disgusting how in tune they are. Apparently, Tamsin’s been sitting alone, always tapping her foot on the floor or her quill against the table, so agitated that she doesn’t even participate in lessons anymore. Within’s golden child has suddenly come undone. But by what???

  She hasn’t even bothered to scrub her fingernails. They’re caked with dirt. I mean, honestly… you’d think she’d care a bit more about appearances. But maybe that’s just me.

  Tamsin and Marlena had been twelve years old when it happened. In a particularly tense lesson, the students had been tasked with battling the blue flames of an enchanted fire. Marlena’s attempt sent her crumpling to the floor. When Tamsin abandoned her own flame to aid her sister, the fire grew tenfold, injuring several students and incinerating the instructor’s desk.

  “You are superior,” the High Councillor told her as Tamsin sat, chastised, in the woman’s stone chambers. “Even in the womb, you sensed your mother’s power, and so you took it for yourself.” The High Councillor’s eyes danced with something frightfully close to pride. “But,” she warned, “if you continue to trouble yourself with Marlena, you will never live up to your full potential. You made a decision then. You must honor it now.”

  Nearly a week passed, but still Marlena did not wake. Healer Elthe was growing more concerned by the day, her lips pressing into the thinnest of lines each time Tamsin showed up to inquire about her sister. Although the healer wouldn’t say it aloud, Tamsin knew the truth: Her sister was going to die.

  Marlena had always been weak, compromised by even the faintest use of magic. But Tamsin’s twin was not the kind to sit idly by. She always forged ahead. Pushed harder than she should. Ended up in the infirmary just as often as she slept in her own dormitory, all while Tamsin continued to grow stronger, her stamina longer, her power tangible. Magic was about balance, but the sisters were as imbalanced as it was possible to be.

  Tamsin had appealed to the High Councillor, begged her to tend to Marlena, to use a source, use any means necessary to wake her sister up. But the High Councillor had refused. “One must not dabble in death,” she told Tamsin, her lips quirking downward. “There is a rule of returns. It is a rule we witches cannot afford to break. For death is not kind. It does not understand. It only feeds.” The woman had smiled at Tamsin sadly. “Someday you will understand.”

  But Tamsin hadn’t.

  If she held enough power for two people, she should be able to share it with another. Or so she had reasoned as she spent hours poring through the library stacks, looking for a spell that would al
low her to share her strength. When she found none, Tamsin turned her attention elsewhere. She slipped out of her dormitory after dark, seeking out elderly witches in shadowy taverns who whispered stories about Evangeline and dark magic. When she learned that Evangeline and the High Councillor had been best friends, Tamsin snuck into the High Councillor’s study, a place where she was trusted and welcome, and stole pages from her private notes. When she had everything she needed, Tamsin begged Leya to help her plan, to accompany her on the night she attempted the spell, but the source refused. Leya understood the consequences Tamsin had chosen to ignore.

  So Tamsin fumbled through the ancient ritual alone. She summoned forbidden dark magic from the cool clay of the soil, dug her fingers into the earth, and spoke the fearful, caustic words that bound her sister’s life to Tamsin’s power.

  It had worked, for a time.

  And then the rains came.

  TEN WREN

  Wren took the stairs two at a time. Even as she stomped upward, she kept an eye on Tamsin nearly ten feet below. Clearly, the witch couldn’t be bothered with her. Tamsin wasn’t even looking where she stepped. Instead her face was buried in that book. Surrounded by her own secrets.

  Well.

  Wren had only been trying to help. But lately she had started to worry that being willing to offer help—a trait she’d always considered a strength—might actually be a weakness.

  When she had agreed to trade away her love for her father, she’d thought she was choosing to do something noble. Something good. But if her help always hurt, well, then what was she really doing?

  Her foot caught on the stone stair. She was climbing, that was what, up a mountain in the company of bandits. Bandits. Honestly. And the worst part, Wren knew, was that as far up as they climbed, they had just as far to go back down. In her misery, she barreled into the squat woman before her, who was not nearly as out of breath as she.