Covenkeepers

by Denise Gwen

  “Oh,” Maddie said.

  Mama’s eyes brimmed with tears, then, just as quickly, she blinked them away and dashed the tears off her cheeks.

  “Mama, are you all right?”

  “In any event,” Mama said, smiling brightly. “I’ve dropped ten dollars’ worth of leaves for you. That should suffice.”

  “I think so too, Mama.”

  “Very well, then.” Mama looked around her. “Let’s go, then.”

  A few moments later, Mama, Maddie, and Malamar emerged from the woods behind the house and walked down the small incline, taking in the full measure of Batesville Middle School.

  “So this is what humans call progress,” Malamar noted dryly.

  “I must say,” Mama said, “this is mighty convenient. You can just slip out the back door to the house, cut through the woods, and then just show up at school, as happy as you please.”

  “That’s the problem,” Maddie seethed through gritted teeth. “I’m not pleased. I wish I were at home.”

  “I wish we were at home too, dear,” Mama said with some asperity.

  “No, not our Salem home,” Maddie corrected her. “Back at the house.”

  “In case you failed to notice,” Malamar said, “that house is haunted. And it’s got your name on its I’d like to hurt you list. If I were you, I’d be looking for every excuse to be out of that place.”

  “It’s not the house that I miss, exactly,” Maddie said. “I just don’t want to be away from everybody all day long. I hate that.”

  Mama shrugged. “We’re going to be terribly busy, you know. Brewing potions, channeling certain mediums back home to gauge the danger, stockpiling supplies.” She tapped Maddie lightly on the shoulder. “You’ve been a great help to us, sweetheart, but after a time, I’m afraid, you’d start getting just the tiniest bit bored. It’ll be good for you to spend time with young people your own age.”

  Maddie ducked her head. She didn’t want to spend time with humans her own age; she wanted to spend time with witches her own age.

  Malamar fetched a heavy sigh. “Speaking for myself, I’m already bored out of my mind. It may be an old, abandoned house, but there are only so many mice one can catch, you know.”

  “I’m not bored,” Maddie said stoutly. “Quite the reverse. I’ve been busy helping Nana.” She turned to gaze accusingly at her mother. “And I overheard you telling Nana last night that my potions are better than any you ever made for your final witching exams.”

  A flinty smile passed across her mother’s features. “True, my dear, very true.” She chuckled. “A certain little witch likes to listen in at keyholes, doesn’t she?” At Maddie’s innocent expression, Mama laughed. “Don’t pull that innocent look on me, young lady, I’ve seen it all. And for your information, I happen to know—for a fact—that when I had that conversation with your nana, you were supposed to be in bed, fast asleep.” She arched her perfectly plucked eyebrows. “What’s a young apprentice witch doing, wandering around the hallways late at night?”

  Maddie grinned. “Couldn’t sleep after all that excitement with the toxic cloud?”

  “Nuh-uh.”

  Maddie smiled sheepishly. “Busted.”

  “Yes,” Mama said, “you are so busted.”

  3

  “Did you bring a copy of the student’s transcript from her former middle school?”

  “Yes,” Mama said. “Indeed I did.”

  Mama and Maddie perched on hard-backed chairs in the assistant principal’s office, their hands demurely folded on their laps, bright, polite smiles on their faces, and an air of beatific elegance about their persons, as they regarded the gray-haired administrator.

  At Miss Sterling’s question, Maddie gasped audibly. A transcript. Goodness gracious, she owned nothing resembling a transcript. What in the world would she do? She gazed at her mother with dumbstruck eyes.

  Mama didn’t betray a shred of anxiety. She smiled enigmatically and reached into her cavernous black bag. As Maddie watched in an agony of anticipation, Mama rummaged around inside her bag for a long moment, then produced a sheaf of papers. She handed the papers over to the woman, then sat back against the high-backed chair with a self-satisfied smile.

  Maddie didn’t know what Mama produced, but Mama’s black bag was simply legendary. That black bag possessed an impenetrable abyss of mysterious concoctions and remedies. Did Nana find herself a bit low on hemlock, did she need a sprig or two? Go get Claudia’s black bag. Did Bettina want to know the history of one of their earlier ancestors—did she get burned at the stake or flung into a river to drown? Go fetch Claudia’s black bag and check the ancestral records. Were they low on foxglove, arsenic, belladonna? Look in Claudia’s black bag. That black bag saved the witches time and time again; in a pinch, a witch could always find whatever she needed just by taking a peek inside it.

  All the same, procuring poisonous herbs was one thing, but creating a transcript from Maddie’s ‘former school,’ a human school, moreover, that Maddie’d never attended? Something completely different. How in the world could Mama remedy this little pickle? The administrator scanned the papers Mama had pushed across the desk to her, and Maddie sat there in an agony of confusion and misery, casting worried glances at Mama, then gazing at Miss Sterling. For her part, Mama studiously ignored Maddie’s pleading looks.

  Maddie closed her eyes and thought about her curriculum back at Witches’ School in Salem. How, exactly, would that curriculum translate into a human middle school? What would compare to her prerequisite courses, for instance, of Ancient Mythological History, Divination, Pharmacological Remedies and Poisons, or Shape-shifting, or the special master thesis class, The Persecution and Betrayal of Witches in the Early Colonial Period in Salem?

  What kind of credit would Maddie get for these kinds of classes? And at what point would the administrator put down Maddie’s transcript and call the authorities?

  Maddie glanced nervously at Mama, but Mama remained eerily quiet and composed, a pleasant, complacent smile pulling at the corners of her mouth.

  “Very well.” Miss Sterling thrust the papers down onto her desk. She rose.

  Uh-oh. This is the moment when Mama and I get arrested. I wonder if her black bag’s got a ‘get out of jail free’ card. Somehow, I seriously doubt it.

  Maddie’s skin became pasty and clammy. Beads of sweat glimmered on her upper brow. She felt—and looked—like a criminal.

  “Very well,” Miss Sterling repeated, smoothing down her crisp pencil skirt. “Let me get a student handbook, and I’ll be right back.” She tit-tupped out of the room on her long stiletto heels and shut the door behind her.

  Maddie blew out a great gust of air. “Holy Aphrodite. A close one.”

  Mama glanced at her, smiling slyly. “What in the world are you carrying on about, child?”

  “My transcript, Mama. From Salem Witches’ School. What in the world did you do to my transcript? That woman didn’t even blink.”

  “Why in heaven’s name would she?” Mama asked with an implacable air. “There’s absolutely nothing wrong with your transcript.”

  “What?” An idea darted into Maddie’s head. What’d Mama do? Maddie stood up, and with a stealthy air, reached across Miss Sterling’s desk. She turned the pages of her transcript around and gazed, awestruck, at the words before her.

  French, Language Arts, Algebra, History of the United States, Earth Science. A nice, normal, run-of-the-mill transcript for a nice, normal middle-school girl. “What did you do, Mama?”

  Mama sighed with exasperation. “It was easy, silly. I just put a translation charm on the pages.” She flashed Maddie with a wry smile. “You could do it yourself, you silly little goose.”

  “Oh,” Maddie said, wonder filling her eyes. As she stared at the pages before her, the words Earth Science changed into Pharmacological Remedies and Poisons; History of the United States changed into The Persecution and Betrayal of Witches in the Early Colonial Period in Salem.

/>   “Well, I’ll be shocked.”

  “Easy peasy,” Mama said, examining her long, elegant nails. “I could cast that charm in my sleep.” She considered a moment. “You really ought to be doing that charm yourself. You must practice it tonight.”

  “I know,” Maddie said, as the letters re-configured themselves across the page. “But I can’t think on my feet as fast as you do, Mama.”

  Mama smiled kindly. “You’ll learn, sweetheart. You’ll learn.”

  Miss Sterling hurried back into the office, bearing a student handbook, a ledger, and a lock with a combination tag attached. “All righty,” she chirped, plopping herself back down behind the desk.

  As Miss Sterling seated herself, Maddie noticed the letters on her transcript re-assembling themselves so that Miss Sterling would see them in their translated form. Maddie giggled under her breath. Mama flashed her a reproving look.

  Miss Sterling handed the items across the desk to Maddie. “Here’s your student handbook, your ledger, your lock, your locker number, and the combination.” She smiled brightly. “Ready to meet your homeroom teacher?”

  “Sure,” Maddie said, and she gulped.

  ****

  Maddie always dreaded this moment. Time and time again, it always proved to be the very worst—the moment when a teacher brought her into a new classroom filled with strangers. As far as horror-filled moments went, this one ranked right up there with every imaginable form of torture any of her ancestors had endured; tied to a stake and the sticks set fire below her; flung into a herd of raging hogs and trampled to death; nailed into a wooden coffin and drowned in a river while an unruly mob of villagers danced on the shoreline and cheered.

  No, she hadn’t actually endured any of the foregoing moments. But her ancestors did. Her ancestors underwent such privations and worse; Maddie knew all of their history from listening attentively at Nana’s knee. And because she was a modern witch—and modern witches aren’t subjected to such humiliating, not to mention dangerous—acts of torture, Maddie had developed a profound sense of the injustice of it all.

  And so, with a heightened sense of the offenses visited upon her ancestors, Maddie felt that the closest she’d ever come to the level of her ancestors’ sufferings would be this moment, when she walked into an unfriendly classroom filled with students. Granted, it really didn’t compare to being burned alive at the stake, but it came pretty close.

  Remember the struggles of your ancestors.

  “I think you’ll like it here,” Miss Sterling said. “This is a wonderful community, filled with all kinds of lovely people. Ah, here we are.” They stood in front of Maddie’s homeroom classroom. The sign above the door read Couresant.

  As Miss Sterling turned the doorknob and opened the classroom door, a sea of hostile eyes turned as one and stared at Maddie.

  “Oh dear,” Maddie whispered.

  “Miss Couresant?” Miss Sterling inquired with a mild smile. “We have a new student. Where do you want this young lady to sit?”

  Miss Couresant rose from behind her desk. Maddie inhaled at the sight of her; astonishingly pretty, her soft brown hair curved around her shoulders, and she wore the oddest outfit—a preppy shift of mint green and bubblegum pink—but it looked strangely becoming on her. She wore a pair of pink ballet slippers and a pink ribbon headband held her hair back from her forehead. As Maddie gazed, mesmerized, at Miss Couresant’s ensemble, the teacher looked around her classroom with a confused smile. “Hm, how about, well, there’s a seat up here.”

  Of course. Of course there’d be a seat at the very front of the room.

  Miss Sterling placed her hand on Maddie’s shoulder and pushed her, gently yet firmly, into the direction of the vacant seat, located on the far side of the classroom. Maddie shuddered involuntarily as she passed a boy wearing a football jersey; no doubt, he was a football player, with the hulking shoulders and massive frame of a linebacker. His type tended to be the kind who’d persecuted her ancestors, in days of yore. Usually the dumb ones in the village, the ones who suddenly decided that the little old lady living all alone in her cottage with a multitude of cats must have something wrong with her, and therefore—because the villagers couldn’t fling any charges against her—concluded that she must be a witch. Maddie so instantly disliked this boy that she cast an evil look at him as she eased past.

  As she found her seat and sat down, she forced herself to gaze forward and avoid the unpleasant-looking boy.

  Miss Sterling left the room.

  “Welcome, Miss . . . Salem,” Miss Couresant said, gazing at Maddie’s student enrollment card.

  Maddie groaned inwardly. Couldn’t Mama come up with a better surname than Salem? Why not Alberforce, or Absinthe, or something else that at least sounded interesting. But Salem? Mama could be so lame sometimes.

  “Hey, Salem,” the boy crooned. “You’re not a witch, are you? Tell me you’re not a witch.”

  She studiously ignored him.

  I’m tempted, so very tempted, to cast a nasty little hex on him. Nothing horrible, like boils, or slugs erupting from his mouth. No, nothing like that, of course not, but perhaps something just unpleasant enough to give him a touch of indigestion.

  “Hey, witchy-poo, where’s your broom?”

  “I parked it up your bottom,” she shot back.

  A group of girls seated behind the jock burst out in nasty giggles. He turned, surprised, to gaze at them.

  Score one for emancipated witches; score zero for arrogant losers who like to persecute them. I’m vindicating my ancestors.

  “Stay after class a few moments, Miss Salem,” Miss Couresant said, “and I’ll give you your school books.”

  Maddie focused her gaze on the teacher.

  “Now, class. Let’s talk about your assignments for this week.”

  A tap at her shoulder. Maddie turned around and smiled into the eyes of a fellow Goth girl. Goth girl’s skin was ivory pale, her hair raven black; dressed in head-to-toe black, she sported silver rings on her fingers and a deep purple polish on her short, stubby nails. “Way to go,” she whispered. “That’s telling him.”

  “He’s so provincial, isn’t he?” Maddie said.

  “Oh, yeah,” the girl agreed. “Whatever you just said, that’s right.”

  “I’m Maddie.”

  “Victoria.”

  “I hope we’re in the next class together.”

  “Let me see,” Victoria said, gesturing for Maddie’s schedule and she obligingly handed it over. Victoria scrutinized it. “No, but we do share the same lunch hour, and I can walk you to your next class. We’re practically next door to one another.”

  “That’s great,” Maddie said, sighing with relief. For all her bravado and for all her skills at talking back to boys, she still felt terribly shy. It was nice to find someone friendly.

  ****

  Lunch proved to be, well, interesting. As it turned out, Mama had overdone herself with creating the one dollar bill leaves, for Maddie only needed to hand over three of the soft green bills to the lunch counter lady, and she walked away from the register with a tray filled with concoctions and puddings and other strange and assorted items.

  She walked over to Victoria’s table and sat down beside her.

  “What’s this?” Maddie asked, poking her fork gingerly into a mound of pasty-looking brown stuff.

  And here I thought some of Bettina’s dinners defied description.

  Victoria scrunched her eyebrows. “Uh, meatloaf?”

  “Are you sure?”

  “No.” And then Victoria giggled.

  As they sat there, six other Goth girls walked over to sit down and eat their lunch. Maddie counted and, including herself, there were a total of eight Goths.

  I’m so grateful Goth’s so in style!

  A witch didn’t need to feel like a freak; there were always plenty of other girls who loved dressing in black and wearing black eyeliner and black lipstick and vampy purple nail polish. She fit in so easil
y, she didn’t even have to try.

  She took a tentative bite of her meatloaf and gagged.

  “Told ya not to eat it, didn’t I?” Victoria said, reaching into a brown paper sack and producing a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

  “You did not!” Maddie cried, spitting bits of meatloaf into a napkin.

  Victoria grinned. “Okay. I guess I didn’t.”

  Maddie took a bite of the plum-colored pudding. It didn’t taste so bad. It almost tasted like pudding, so she ate it all up.

  “Where are you from?” Victoria asked thoughtfully.

  Without thinking, Maddie said, “I was born in Bangor, North Wales, but I grew up in Salem, Massachusetts.”

  A girl to Maddie’s right gasped aloud and Maddie turned to look at her. Another Goth girl, only this one sported vibrant purple hair with streaks of orange. “Salem? Isn’t that, like, where the witches were all burned alive at the stake or something?”

  “Which time period are you talking about?”

  “What do you mean?” the girl asked.

  “Well, are you talking about 1692, when the entire village of Salem went bat-shit crazy and burned all the so-called witches, which spawned the infamous Salem Witch Trials and became the basis for Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible, or are you talking about the mass extermination of 1437?”

  “Uh,” the girl said, looking confused. “I don’t know. I didn’t know there was more than one.”

  “Oh, there are lots of instances of witches being persecuted,” Maddie said with a knowledgeable air. “Especially so in England—why, you can’t walk a country mile in England without finding a place where some poor witch got tortured—but this country has seen more than its fair share of witches being burned alive at the stake, too.”

  “B-B-Burned alive?” Victoria stammered.

  “Oh, yes. The burnings took place primarily on the eastern seaboard, of course, but there’ve been lots of witch persecutions all over the country.”