The Magical Book of Wands

by Raven M. Williams

  Goran would be happy to see the lot of the Observers fade into memory like a bad dream. Modernity did a fine enough job of keeping the lid on things. The average person could walk right by a vampire draining a victim dry in an alleyway, and in the interest of minding their own business they would have forgotten the whole thing by the time they made it to the street. They might be left with the faint impression of an overly amorous couple, but they would never think they had just witnessed a creature from their medieval ancestors’ darkest nightmares feasting on flesh.

  Goth culture and the advent of neopaganism covered Goran’s tracks even better. On his last visit to the United States, he’d seen spell candles for sale in a natural foods shop, and Ivanka and Veronika had shown him the popularity of witch culture on social media. He might get dismissed as a New-Age weirdo or a deluded dirt worshipper, but no mundane would guess for a moment that magic was real and that witches walked among them in the marketplace.

  Perhaps the Observers still served as a barrier against the darker denizens of the Veil coming to light. But those demons and beasts could be kept at bay by the Witchfinders with their crosses and holy water. The Witchfinders were troublesome in their own right, but much less so than the Board had become.

  Goran rearranged the desk set and paperweights on the spindly-legged desk at the center of the display window and walked to the door to flip the sign to Odprto. He didn’t expect to be busy today. Few locals and even fewer tourists ventured into his shop. He did have a client to prepare for that afternoon, and the preparation required a bit of concentration.

  He walked through the store, admiring the pieces he’d collected. It was very different than his mother’s shop. She had kept it cluttered and in slight disarray—to not appear too successful, to not draw too much attention. And she had decidedly not used her small shop as a front, or at least not for the same thing. His mother had traded in information and herbal folk remedies on the side out of necessity.

  He specialized in more aggressive magic, and for a much more select clientele. His afternoon appointment was looking for assistance with a troublesome work situation. Goran always counseled his clients to take action in the mundane world before looking for a magical fix, as magic could sometimes produce the desired result at an unexpected cost. That was much more difficult to explain to someone who didn’t know the truth of those who lived behind the Veil.

  Goran made his way to the secreted room in the back of his shop, where he kept his lab of sorts. There was a battered workbench with a circle carved into the top, for containment. Wooden shelves lining the walls bowed with books and bottles and jars and boxes. He had managed to create a semblance of order, but there was still little room for anything more and barely room for anyone else, save him.

  He pulled down a heavy volume bound in worn oxblood leather and laid it open on the work bench. His mother’s neat scripted hand flowed over the pages under a sketch of botanical ingredients. Perhaps it was finding the wand or giving it to Ana, but his mother felt both very close to him and impossibly far away. He was gifted in spell work and creating talismans, but he had little success in divination or communing with the spirits of those who had passed into the Unseen.

  As he read over his mother’s careful instructions for a spell to bring about luck in situations involving trade or money, he envied witches who could call to the dead and those few mortals like his neighbor Jo Wiley who could give them physical presence in the world for the time they were with her.

  He suspected or, more accurately, he wanted to believe his mother had long ago passed into the Next, a place even someone as powerful as Jo couldn’t reach. Still, he wished he had been braver earlier, when there might have been time to contact his mother before she left this plane.

  He wished he’d been braver earlier still, and had been able to stand up to the Observer who took her away from him.

  ANA SKIPPED SCHOOL again. And there would be trouble, again. After the last time, her aunt had made a production of going to the school and explaining to the faculty that Ana had lost both of her parents and sometimes had trouble coping.

  It was bullshit, as Veronika would say. Veronika had trouble coping. Ivanka plowed on with her job and her boyfriend. Ana knew her parents had died, but she also knew they were safe in the Next. She was sad they had gone, but it was a little like hiding your most prized possession in the bottom of a drawer. She couldn’t see it all the time, but she knew exactly where it was.

  The bus ride to Škofja Loka was quiet. Most people were commuting the opposite direction into Ljubljana for work at that time of day. There were two tourists sitting in front of her, a man and a woman. Ana could tell by the jumble of their thoughts this was their first trip together. The woman looked out the window, and the man read. The woman thought about what it would be like to live in one of the houses whose gardens backed up to the road. The man skimmed the words of the book and thought of the woman. Ana knew about sex, but she didn’t want to hear other people think about doing those things.

  The bus driver thought about her lunch in a bag in the compartment behind her seat. Ana’s stomach growled at the idea of food. She’d slipped out early to more easily ditch Veronika; Aunt Olga had asked her sister to keep an eye on her on the way to school. It was annoying and unnecessary. Ana only skipped if she had something more important to do. The sisters had agreed not to tell their aunt about the content of the lessons with Goran. Olga was distracted enough by her own life not to ask too many questions.

  Ana noticed an apple tree in a garden as the bus passed another tight grouping of houses. Its branches were almost bent to the ground with green fruit. Sometimes she felt that way as she held onto others’ thoughts and knew things no one else could know. It was a lot to carry. She wondered if there would come a time when those thoughts and knowings would get picked, like those apples would in the autumn. She imagined her lighter limbs floating up like when you stood in a door and pressed the back of your hands against the frame for a minute and then walked through.

  When they got to Škofja Loka, Ana let the tourists get off the bus first. The woman tapped her phone screen a few times to pull up a map, and the two walked off toward the old part of the town. Ana stepped off the bus and hesitated. It was a bit of a walk to the forest where she usually went with Goran and her sisters. Maybe this hadn’t been the best idea. The bus driver stepped down behind her.

  “You OK there?” She had her lunch in her hand.

  “Yes. Just deciding which way to go.” Ana smiled at her and walked toward a nearby bench.

  Ana slid her backpack off and set it next to her. She pulled out a water bottle and took a sip, looking across the street as another bus pulled into the dusty lot. It was probably the one going back to Ljubljana.

  “You know you can close your eyes anywhere and reach out to the Inbetween.” The woman from the clearing sat down beside her.

  “Can everyone see you or only me?” Ana put the lid back on her water bottle and secured it in her backpack.

  “Only you. While I’m here we are ... how to describe this? A little out of synchronization with the rest of the world.” The woman looked up and to the left as if she might find the words in the nearby trees.

  “We stepped sideways?”

  “You did. I’m always sideways, or Inbetween.” The woman watched a group of American tourists, students, gather near the bus shelter. They had on bright green, matching T-shirts. “You shouldn’t skip school to come find me. I can meet you anywhere. I just found you in the woods that day because you looked for me there. You should hurry if you are going to catch that bus back.”

  Ana still missed the whole day of school. The headmaster had called Aunt Olga at her office, and she was very unhappy about it. Her aunt had been quiet at dinner except to ask Ana where she had to be that was more important than school. Veronika had stared daggers at her over their soup because she was in trouble, too, for not keeping Ana in line.

  As far as Ana was concerne
d, there wasn’t anything to tell them. It had been a mistake to not go to school, but she had learned something and that was important. Ana washed up the dishes alone and went to her room. Aunt Olga had told her there would be no television or computer privileges for a week and she would be taking her to school until the end of the term. Ana suspected that wouldn’t last. Her aunt was far too busy to make good on her threat, but it didn’t matter anyway because now Ana didn’t have a reason to skip school, except that it was sometimes very boring.

  Ana laid down on her bed on top of the covers. She turned on the lamp next to the bed so the room wasn’t completely dark and then closed her eyes. She thought of the clearing in the woods and park benches because that’s the other place she’d encountered the spirit.

  “I told you it would work.” The woman sat on the edge of the bed.

  “I believed you. I just had to wait for a bit.” Ana sat up and swung her legs over the edge of the bed to sit next to the woman. “Do you have a name?” Sometimes spirits forgot their names or they didn’t want to share them. Names were powerful things.

  “You can call me Breda.” The woman hadn’t hesitated. Either she trusted Ana not to misuse her name or she was much more powerful than Ana and had nothing to worry about.

  “Like the princess in the story?” Ana remembered her mother reading to her about the princess who was sweet and good until she was forced to leave her kingdom to marry a prince. Ana had no intention of leaving her kingdom or getting married, prince or no prince.

  “Something like that.” Breda smiled. “Have you used the wand again?”

  Ana nodded and pulled it from her pocket. “I still haven’t learned what the other side says.” She looked closely at the letters. They glowed blue in the dim light as she read down the curved twig.

  “Maybe it isn’t ready to tell you. May I?” Breda lifted the wand from her hand. Faint, blue traces flowed from the end as it moved through air.

  Breda flicked her wrist in a rolling motion, and a copy of the letters from the side of the twig slid off the wand and hovered in the air. She pointed the wand up, and the letters grew bigger. They were funny things. Some looked like little houses with a door, and others just looked like shapes stacked on top of each other.

  “That one that looks like an upside down pitchfork, that would be an A to you. And this one—” Breda touched another letter that looked like a very fancy P, “—that’s an N.”

  “Why does the wand have my name on it?”

  “Because it found you. When it found Goran, it had his name on it.”

  “You said it recognized the witch.” Ana touched the letters that hung in the air, and they dissipated into luminescent smoke. “And the rest of the words?”

  “That is a message just for you.”

  “I think it’s a bad message.” Ana looked down at the wand again and then back up into Breda’s kind face. “Are you Goran’s mother?”

  “Ana, you are a very smart witch.”

  Ana smiled. “But you don’t want me to tell him?”

  “No. Not yet.”

  GORAN WATCHED GUSTAF Lichtenberg make his way across the courtyard and into Renegade Tea. He looked determined. Goran laughed. He knew Ivanka and Vesna wouldn’t tell him anything new that day. Jo had gone home to the United States, somewhere in the South, to deal with her family. No one, except maybe Vesna, knew when she would be back. Death worked on her own timeline.

  Goran had learned that Vesna had even less use for the Observers than he did. She was the daughter and niece of powerful Witchfinders. She, like her uncle, didn’t subscribe to their more medieval beliefs: She had no problem with her best friend being a Vox du Mortius, a Voice of the Dead, or with sharing a building with a witch. She did, however, have a problem sharing the building with the Observer Gustaf Lichtenberg. In her words, she didn’t trust any Observer as far as she could throw one. Given her slight build, that couldn’t be very far at all.

  Vesna followed Gustaf back out into the courtyard and closed the door behind her. Goran couldn’t hear their conversation through the glass, but he didn’t need to understand the words to get the body language. Vesna was furious. Her face and neck were flushed, and she camped in Gustaf’s personal space as he incrementally backed away from her.

  Gustaf turned on his heel and walked out the door of the courtyard, disappearing on Zajčeva. Vesna noticed Goran then. She half smiled and motioned him to come out into the courtyard.

  “You should know this, too.” She was still angry, but there was resignation there, too.

  “Know what?” Goran was uneasy where the Observers were concerned.

  “Bettine wants to visit Ljubljana.”

  Goran felt the blood drain from his face, and his hands went clammy.

  “Are you okay?” Vesna’s expression changed quickly from anger to concern. “Come inside, and let’s have some tea.”

  She settled him at a table in the empty teahouse. They weren’t open for another hour, and he could hear Ivanka and the cook, Frédéric, working in the kitchen. Goran looked at the mural on the wall. It was a clipper ship surrounded by waves filled with burning crates of tea. It looked to be the work of that Japanese artist who did the Great Wave, but Vesna’s boyfriend had painted it.

  It was so detailed that Goran could almost hear the water lap against the wooden boat and smell the ocean. And the tea.

  “Here you go. Fred’s special.” Vesna set a pot and two cups and saucers on the table from the tray she carried. She slid the tray onto another nearby table and sat across from him to pour. “So I take it you know Bettine?”

  Goran took a sip of the tea; it was strong and much sweeter than he would have liked. He set the cup back down and hesitated.

  “I know of her. I never saw her or met her in person. She was the Observer in Ljubljana when I was a child.”

  Vesna’s eyes went wide. “Gustaf never mentioned that.”

  “Perhaps he didn’t think it was important.” Goran felt the need to share the whole tale, but he also hesitated to reveal his family’s secrets to the daughter of a Witchfinder.

  “Your aura is conflicted. You don’t need to tell me anything if it makes you uncomfortable, but you know my uncle and I don’t subscribe to my father’s and grandfather’s beliefs.” She looked at him pointedly.

  The daughter of a Witchfinder had the sight. That was very interesting news. No wonder Vesna didn’t subscribe to the idea that anything supernatural was demonic.

  “My mother was a witch, though she stopped practicing around the time I was born. When it became clear that I had been marked, she took it upon herself to teach me.”

  “Oh. I guess I assumed it ran in your family, but I hadn’t really thought about it.” Vesna turned her cup on the saucer distractedly.

  “Yes. And I was a bit of a disaster in the beginning. Mother was good at covering it up, for the most part, but I did draw the attention of the local Observer—though thankfully not the Witchfinder.”

  “Yes. Well. I’m not sure which was worse at that time.”

  “I hate to say this to you, but the Witchfinder was worse. The Board might relocate someone, but the Witchfinders got rid of people and beings with more finality.” He didn’t want to offend Vesna, but he thought it was better to tell the whole story.

  “I am sorry for that. My grandfather was relentless and my father ... well, you probably already know that story.”

  Goran nodded. “My mother took credit, or more accurately the blame, for the incidents I created as I learned to keep my magic in check. I don’t know what my father really knew or understood of her, or of me for that matter, but I came home from gymnasium one day when I was about 15 and my mother was gone. My father would only say she had been taken. Though disappearances were relatively rare under Tito, my father assumed it had something to do with my mother’s shop and kept quiet about it.”

  “But you knew better?”

  “Mother had warned me about the Witchfinders and the Obser
vers. She made sure I understood that there were very few people who understood what it meant to be a witch, and that I needed to be careful with my gift and my words.” Goran finished his tea and watched the leaves drift in the very bottom of the cup.

  “I’m so sorry. I can’t imagine what it must have been like for you to lose your mother so young and what others must have thought of you and your father.” Vesna took his cup and saucer from him and swirled the dregs before turning the cup upside down on the saucer. It was done so swiftly, he was certain it was reflexive on her part.

  Vesna narrowed her eyes and scrutinized the pattern of swollen tea leaf debris. “Teaching. No surprise there.” She turned the cup again. “And revenge, but it’s crossed. Crossed by love? That doesn’t make any sense.”

  It made perfect sense to Goran.

  AFTER SPENDING THE day listening to the most boring lectures imaginable, Ana walked the whole way home from school. She needed to think, and sitting on a bus full of people and all their thoughts wasn’t the best place for that.

  Her experience with magic like what Veronika could do was still new. She didn’t have Ivanka’s ability to see things in the future, but she didn’t want to. She’d always been able to hear people’s thoughts, but she didn’t want that either. Until recently she’d assumed everyone could do that. She hadn’t yet told Goran or her sisters about it. They would scrutinize her even more, and she definitely didn’t want that. Being the youngest had always sucked; coming to understand what she and her sisters were had only made it worse.

  Ana tried to puzzle out why Goran had given her the wand and why his mother had come to teach her about it. There had to be a reason; there almost always was. Though she couldn’t see the future, she could see that things happening in the present set up branches for what could happen, and that choices mattered.