Winter, Faerstice

by Kevin Lawler

  Winter found Cal at the sick bay of the camp, or what passed for the sick bay in a ramshackle mining town. On the bed in front of Cal was a badly-injured man. He was shirtless and bandaged in places, including the left half of his face, and his skin appeared as if covered in road rash.

  Cal spoke while she tended to the man. “Well, there’s woad, and then there’s ‘woad’, which is the actual plant. Isatis tinctoria. It’s what they used to make the first woads, hence the name. Widely considered to be a good beginner’s plant. Well, if anything our kind does can be said to be ‘widely’ considered. Later on you might experiment with madder or weld: they can yield different effects.”

  The injured man shuffled in the bed.

  “Now if we had some angelica, that would help our friend here.”

  The injured man moaned.

  “But we don’t seem to have any in store. A pity. Angelica is great for magically inflicted wounds. This fellow was in the mine and swung his pickaxe a little too close to some explosive ore—one of the many dangers of mining. That’s how they earn their pay. Anyway, you must have a weirdling’s luck, because what we do have is some tinctoria. I found it where the calendula should be. It must have come from a cold harvest too since it looks diluted as all get out. Still, best to be careful, of course, with your mixture.”

  Cal gave Winter a sack full of plant matter.

  Winter hefted the bag. “Thanks for the plants, ma’am,” she said.

  “I’m not a madam. Don’t call me ma’am,” Cal said.

  Winter was seated a desk/workbench in an ore processing room. She was alone now, except for the resting pig, and she had the fruits of her collection task in front of her: the powdered stone from Meadow, the tinctoria leaves from Cal, and some bowls she had stolen from the mess. To the side was the diary. The pig rested his snout on the floor. He turned his eyes to look at the collection, then back at Winter. She was unnerved from her previous failed attempt, but even more focused as a result.

  Brightly colored smears covered her arms and face. They were the messy results of previous trials. They had all been inert. This was lucky in the sense that none of them had exploded, and unlucky in that none of them had any beneficial effect. Winter’s failures made her more determined to succeed. She ran her hands over the ingredients and charmed them as best she knew how.

  She took a handful of the leaves and crushed them with soda ash in the mortar. Will was an idiot, she thought. She should curse him. She needed better curses. She would have to ask. Who would know the best curses? Cal, maybe.

  The crushed leaf mixture, once yellow-green, turned blue. Winter had already gotten the hang of this part. She poured in a small amount of the brilliant blue rock dust along with some food oil. Then she dumped all this into a cheesecloth hanging over a jar and wrung the contents of the bolus into the jar. The bottom of the jar filled with a blue dye.

  As the dye collected Winter sat back and looked at the pig. “What do you think,” she said, “Will we get it this time?” The pig simply stared, but raised his head slightly at Winter’s attention.

  “I think this is the one,” Winter said.

  She lit a gas burner under an elevated bowl filled with honeycomb. As the temperature rose inside the bowl the fragmented honeycomb melted from hexagons into liquid wax. Wax rose from the bottom of the small bowl and the last bits of comb sank into it. To the wax Winter added the blue dye. She grabbed the side of the bowl with a towel and poured the hot contents into a mold.

  Winter was sure she had gotten it now. In her excitement the waiting did not seem so long. After the mold had cooled, Winter opened it and extracted a fat crayon of blue wax. She took the lipstick crayon, inspected it, and then drew a royal blue streak across her lips. She pressed her lips together. Then her head waved for a moment and finally hit the diary on the desk with a thump.

  Unconscious, Winter watched as a scene unfolded from the diary. The clothes and the places looked from about twenty years ago. A little blonde girl walked hand-in-hand with her mother towards a church. The buzzing of bugs was audible in the heat.

  “A day, a day, a day, a day, without stopping? Ever?” the girl asked. She was scared from the sound of her voice.

  “Yes, forever, in heaven,” the mother said. She tried to sound reassuring, but she also sounded a little irritated.

  “But doesn’t it end?”

  “No, of course not. Why would you want it to?”

  When Topple came into the workroom, Winter was passed out on the floor with the pig nosing her in the neck. It took the both of them rousing her for her to come to. Winter sat up, her hair a mess, and her face half-covered in amateur makeup. Her head throbbed. That must’ve been from where she had hit the floor.

  “Overdo it, huh?” asked Topple, “The good stuff can help you ‘see a little clearer.’ It’s also easy to get it wrong though. Or to get too much. Out here at this outpost it’s a lot tougher without any tools. Here, let me show you a trick I picked up in the circus. Gimme your paintstick.”

  Winter gave Topple the blue lipstick.

  “Here, sit,” Topple said. Winter sat facing out from the bench, and Topple pulled up a stool for herself. Topple wiped Winter’s face while Winter sat patiently. It relieved Winter to be taking a break, and she was thankful to have her mentor doing some of the lifting.

  “I saw one of your entries, in the diary,” said Winter, “about the circus. It was from when you were thinking of trying out for Cirque du Soleil.”

  Topple’s expression softened with the memory of the moment.

  “I’m guessing it worked out then?” said Winter, “The entry didn’t say.”

  “It did work out,” said Topple, “That was my first summer in Montreal. They took me on as a dancer and then later as an acrobat and tumbler. I even got to do a little bit of clowning... This was long before I met up with Cal or anyone.”

  “Can you still any of it? Can you show me?”

  “Maybe,” said Topple, “Right now let’s focus on your warpaint. You’ve already gotten it wrong once. Your application can change your woad’s effects. Woad can affect your thoughts, and it can amplify your magic.”

  “I saw something else, too,” said Winter, “in the diary. Well, not in the diary. While I was passed out. But I know it was from the diary.”

  “You did?” asked Topple. Her face was serious.

  “Yes. A girl. A little blonde girl. She was with her mother.”

  “Hmm.”

  “She was scared, and they were talking, and that was all I saw.”

  “It doesn’t sound like someone I ever found in the diary,” Topple said. “It could be one of the authors. The diary is weird like that, if it was the diary. It may be good to remember what you see, but don’t get obsessed over it. You don’t have any control over what it shows.” Topple kept on fixing Winter’s makeup.

  The pig walked in between them, at their knees, waiting for attention, and Winter rubbed her hand over his coarse hair.

  “That’s frustrating,” Winter said, “What good is a book that’s random?”

  “Well, the diary is frustrating. Rachelle’s entries would mention other authors, but then I never saw those authors. I used to wonder about them all the time. It was a goose chase, they never appeared.”

  “Rachelle, she’s the one writing in French? My French is terrible, I’m barely passing. I can only sort of tell what she’s talking about.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about her too much.”

  “Do you know any good curses?”

  Chapter 14

  Violet entered the room disheveled, her wavy black hair a mess. The metal door bounced hard against the wall.

  “Get out of the way,” Violet said, pushing two trainees from her path, “James H. Christ.”

  “What happened to you?” asked Isobel.

  “Kill yourself,” said Violet. She tossed the bouquet on the counter. Isobel was partly retarded. Violet grabbed paper towels and wiped her face. The trainee
s wandering around were clad in gray and looked almost like mechanics. Mechanics with ponytails. Violet was working in Jimbo’s Tire Service.

  “One of you—which one of you is the least incompetent—go and get Didrika.” The trainees looked amongst each other for a second, and someone self-selected right as Violet was about to explode. The disturbed girl hurried from the room. “It’s a shame Agnes harvests all the talented ones.”

  Violet was starved. She grabbed a bag of Rhythm Kale Chips from a rack and poured them into her mouth without looking. Then she knocked the rack over and tossed the bag. “Who buys this stuff? Who?” She opened the cupboards until she found some Little Debbie Zebra Cakes tucked away. “Finally. Are we some kind of fruitcake startup now? We are, aren’t we.”

  “Making a mess isn’t going to fix anything,” Didrika said. She was holding her stupid book at her side.

  Violet crinkled the plastic back around her cakes. “Here’s Isobel’s flowers,” she said, and she threw the bouquet of plant matter at Didrika. “It only took two trips.” Then she walked out.

  Didrika grabbed the handful of grasses and flowers. She dismissed the cadets, and then she delivered the bouquet to Isobel.

  “There’s no need to be rude,” Isobel said. She accepted the plants graciously.

  “I hate this dump,” Violet’s voice echoed from the hallway.

  “Don’t pay attention to it,” Didrika said.

  “I hate you, Isobel,” the voice echoed again, fainter.

  “So, is it what we needed?” Didrika asked.

  Isobel inspected the flowers. “I’m still looking,” she said, “I think so. I’ll need to test some of these in the lab for potency. They look a little withered. I mean, it should work.” She folded the petal of a flower back and forth.

  Isobel continued. “She is right, though. These trainees are wild. Not like, stupid stupid, but more like dangerous. I wouldn’t fight alongside any of them. They’re just as likely to nuke me as to nuke the target. They’re strong, sure, but what’s the point if they turn me into ash?”

  “You answered your own question,” said Didrika, “It doesn’t matter if you’re not there to get it. We won’t be around them. They can nuke each other if they want to be dumb. The point of a weapon is that it fires at all. Veterans come from somewhere. In this case they come from expendable cadets.”

  “Can you show me?” Elodie said. She was trying to piece together what was going on. Agnes had been making Elodie train cadets as junior coroners. Why, she didn’t know, but clearly there was something nasty going on that she wasn’t involved in. It didn’t seem like it was Agnes’s plan to replace her.

  “Sure, I can show you, easy,” said Jeff. He was a good foot taller than Elodie. “See, this is the map that we had before. All the machinery that drives it is invisible, and that’s where most of the work went. Most of the work we did anyway. I still don’t know how you guys built your module. It’s literally a black box. You put a black box in the server rack.”

  “It’s a lot of special know-how,” said Elodie. She thought about the skeleton bird’s beak piercing the prisoner.

  “Whatever you guys did—fixed it right away. Solved all the problems we couldn’t. The flashing purple dots here, these are all the witches,” Jeff said and laughed, “ESP adepts, whatever you wanna call them. I’m still not sure I believe. Agnes says these are the ones you couldn’t find before, so I take her word for it.”

  Whoa. Elodie stared at the map. It did work. Witches everywhere. She had no idea how many there were before. Or where they were. This was crazy. She could track them in real time.

  “I’m looking forward to going back to working on robots, honestly,” Jeff continued.

  “Isn’t this...a little invasive,” Elodie asked.

  “Mmmm,” said Jeff, “It’s no different from what advertisers have been doing for years, if you want to call it invasive. They collect the same data. We’re just slicing the dataset differently to get these weirdo ladies.”

  Elodie looked at Jeff.

  “I’m sorry, I mean, uh,” Jeff started, “Special ladies?” Jeff was turning red.

  “Don’t fret about it,” Elodie said.

  “I didn’t mean it,” Jeff continued.

  “What about these filters?” Elodie asked, “Are there any protections in place?”

  “Yeah, we drop everyone under eighteen. Not a bad policy. Agnes insisted on it.”

  “You tried to set it younger?” Elodie asked.

  “Well, we didn’t, not on purpose. One time Didrika came to talk to me. I thought about caloric restriction and metformin. We talk about life-extension sometimes, even cryonics, but really she wanted me to tweak the model to find girls outside the range. It’s creepy if you ask me. You should talk to her about it. Anyway, Agnes caught wind of it and shut her down. She called it dishonorable.”

  Skōhsl was in the receiving hangar, working on one of a fleet of identical models.

  “What do you think about the new robots?” Didrika asked.

  “Crap,” oralized Skōhsl, making a fist with her left hand and sticking her right thumb into the bottom, “They’re crap.” She broke it down slowly in case Didrika didn’t understand: “Gar-bage.”

  The quadruped robot stepped onto an unbalanced plywood board. The robot fell over on its side, its legs kicking uselessly in the air.

  “And the drones?” asked Didrika.

  Skōhsl gave Didrika a hopeless look.

  “Well, make it work,” said Didrika, “I know you’ve got special talents here. We need these things functioning. Your assistance on the adtech black box was very helpful.”

  “Different story,” oralized Skōhsl. Way different story. Skōhsl didn’t know the first thing about data science. It was just an easy problem to magically finesse. Robots, on the other hand, weren’t mere computers. They moved. They needed to think for themselves. They needed to be safe and deadly at the same time. Not even close to the same. This was too much work for one witch. She picked up a torque wrench.

  Didirika continued, “Regardless, we sold this idea to Agnes. If it blows up that’s on us. We need this to work. Can they be made to kill? I don’t...”

  Didrika had turned away from her while talking and it made it difficult to read her lips.

  Skōhsl wondered whether Didrika did this to screw with her or not. It wasn’t like Didrika to miss details. Perhaps it was just another instance of callous disregard for lip readers. Wouldn’t be the first time.

  Maybe it would be a good idea to return to the community, Skōhsl thought. Then she remembered a few reasons why they weren’t going to take her back. The wrench in her hand tightened.

  Didrika turned to face her fully. “We’ve got whatever gems you need to make this go.”

  Violet entered the side of the auditorium. Agnes stood at the front behind a clear podium. Gray-suited cadets milled about, conscript witches, talking in groups mostly. These cadets wore indigo berets, which meant they were the first class to pass the major course of training. Violet resented them for being in the way, but she also felt a little bit proud, actually. What did they call it? Esprit de corps. Yes, that must be what the feeling was.

  “I don’t want to take up a lot of your time here,” Agnes said into the microphone, “A couple of announcements though. First, good news, some of you may remember the demo we did for our sponsors earlier in the week. Well, I’m here to tell you that our backers have renewed our program for another two years.” There was appreciative applause from the cadets. “Yes, that fire shaping spell that we learn the first week isn’t easy, but it sure makes a good impression, doesn’t it?” This drew a laugh.

  Agnes continued to drone on. “The other thing I wanted to mention...” Violet was focused on one rather twitchy cadet whose face had soured. She was one of the ones who had had her sister killed. There were more than a few. Agnes’s penchant for culling talented young witches had caused some ire, and so they kept a special eye on surviving famil
y members. This one was in charge of dyeing Agnes’s clothes in blood. Violet wondered if she had been made to use her own sister’s blood. It would’ve been smarter to cull a family all-or-nothing, but the need to flesh out the ranks of the program overrode sound protocol.

  Violet laughed under her breath. She knew what was coming. These jokers.

  Sure enough, the cadet started making her way through the crowd. Violet moved to intercept her. There was a lot of ground to cover. The cadet was going faster now, and ah, there it was, the knife, her standard-issue athame.

  “My sister!” the cadet screamed. She broke into a run. Her other hand clenched into a tight fist.

  Violet had cleared much of the distance and was nearly on her. Violet unsheathed her knife. Another stride. She squatted low and sliced at the calf at the ankle, her knife arm coming far up behind her at the end of its arc. The cadet girl fell over unceremoniously. Her right foot was tucked up under her shin, the heel separated from the ankle and pooling blood into her trainer. When she fell a stone rolled from her other hand. Ah, so maybe they had taught them a thing or two about assassinations. Anyway, this attempt was over. The space around her had cleared. Some of the other cadets saw the stone and the space around it cleared as well. As the cadets murmured Violet walked over and pocketed the stone on the ground. One of the power stones from the robots. You could charge these to explode like a grenade in your hand if you were so inclined. The fallen cadet whimpered. She was still holding the athame and attempting to stand. Violet moved next to her and looked at Agnes, waiting for the signal to deliver the coup de grâce. Agnes shook it off. Apparently she was going to handle the issue herself.

  It took a minute for Agnes to begin her spell. Then the whimpering cadet rose from the floor, not on her own power but on the spell’s.

  Violet had seen this one before but didn’t want to miss the opportunity to see it again.