by Eve Langlais
“But you and everyone else seems to think it was,” Katherine said as the winds around her died out and she looked over at the hard–partying mix of college and high school teenagers around her.
Connor sighed. “Look Katherine, no one’s blaming you.”
Katherine stared over at him with a tic on her face. “I blame me.”
Connor shrugged in resignation. “I’m going to get a drink. You want one?”
She shook her head and let her hair blow into her face as she watched him walk away. Then Katherine did some walking away of her own. There were two places she could be tonight. She didn’t want to be here with her friends. Might as well see if the company of family improved her already sour mood.
She quickly texted Connor she’d see him later and rushed through the windswept back towards the town center where she knew her mother would be waiting.
As Katherine pulled open the door to the local bar and went inside she caught the eye of the Queen of Sandersville. She stood surrounded by admirers while enthusiastically gesturing in a modest three–piece suit. It was pure luck that Katherine caught her eye as several individuals were jostling for the queen’s attention.
But still her mother gave a small smile of acknowledgment and a nod. That was enough for Katherine.
Katherine gave her mother a conspiratorial grimace in return and started looking for a place to stand while she waited for her mother to approach her. It wouldn’t do to interrupt a queen in session, after all.
Katherine needed that quiet space to think before she stepped into the role of the daughter of the Queen.
So she people–watched as fae and witches came together under one roof to celebrate their own version of the rebirth of the human savior. In their own way the magical folk enjoyed the winter evening as merrily as the humans they shared a small town with.
Outside, Katherine knew, the bonfire was just beginning. A mix of young adults from all the three major species, fae, human and witch, would be enjoying a rousing party under the stars. Here, their more adult brethren, but witches and fae only, gathered in a mirror fashion.
Witches didn’t follow the same holiday rules as their human kin, although they would tolerate and even appreciate the humans love all things ‘merry’. They never attended the same gatherings or spoke of the same rituals in excited tones. Even though they walked the same streets, ate at the same tables, and learned at the same schools, they couldn’t be more different. As such, winter’s eve and Christmas were wholly separate functions, serving two disparate groups but bringing together both in joyous festivities. The humans had their evergreen trees with strands of tinsel that a fat man would inevitably trip over as he waddled out of an impossibly small chimney before dawn claimed the skies, and the witches had their candle–lit ceremonies with blood and darkness on the moon’s rise. And the fae? Well, the fae had their own rituals, secret and separate even from the witches themselves. It was just as well, because the witches didn’t consider the fae kin at all anyway and as such were glad to be excluded. Bonding over the use of magic only went so far to create networks of fraternity and unity between the two primary species on Earth, after all. Nevertheless, the one thing that the fae and witch species did have in common, magical power, kept them together on a semi–unified front. At least for last hundred years or so.
Magic came in multiple forms, natural and unnatural, elemental and cosmic, but at its core it was power. Power that the fae and coven shared, however distastefully. So watching this co–mingled gathering of snooty witches sipping on rum and cider while were–creatures knocked back six–packs and centaurs got high on fermented oats in a mixture that smelled from three feet away made Katherine highly amused.
Not because they had all been awkwardly sidling around each other up until about two hours ago, when the mixture of alcohol and opiates had finally managed to lower the inhibitions of everyone present, but because it was darned funny watching Ms. Carmichael, an elderly witch, get down and do the jig with a fully transformed phoenix as a her partner. A phoenix, who, despite his best efforts to dampen his flames, had managed to light a sidelined Ms. Brewster’s floor–length floor monstrosity of a dress on fire with the little embers that were drifting down from his flapping feathers as he shook his behind to music that bore a passing resemblance to early rock and roll.
Katherine took a sip of her purloined drink and watched the festivities with an interested air about her. Because it suddenly had become interesting. Where else could you possibly so many drunk fae and witches in one setting?
“Nowhere else but a cross–species funeral,” Katherine said in satisfaction with a small grin. The whole night was taking on a decidedly festive air for her.
Better festive than dour, she thought to herself.
The party was off to a roaring start and she knew it was precisely because it lacked the most vulnerable population around–the humans–which suited Katherine just fine at the moment. She felt warmth rise up from her belly, warmth at the laughter and joy but also the distinct lack of rage and fear. Two emotions that were seemingly unavoidable when dealing with the strictly human population.
She couldn’t help but flash back to her encounters with her human peers recently, and they hadn’t been pleasant. For her or them.
She’d just started her freshman year in high school and it sucked beyond belief. For two reasons: human jerks and warlock idiots. Men, in other words. Being here took away from the petty trivialities of being a witch in a high school that was eighty percent human. That was a problem in itself since the majority human population resented–hated–being ruled by witches and the fae. But add on top of that simmering resentment to her presence in the school, was the fact that she also happened to be the surlier half of the Queen’s two daughters and didn’t have as a good a grip on her powers as her sister did. So from week–to–week things were quickly turning from bad to worse as far as Katherine was concerned.
Being a witch was problematic in human eyes. Being the daughter of a queen witch was worse. It wasn’t that the townspeople hated her mother. In fact, she was pretty much beloved as a pillar of the community and a good queen, which was harder than it sounds. But it was the fact that most human nightmares centered on the witch population. Katherine couldn’t say she blamed them for it, either. Her witch ancestors had done some pretty distasteful things to the human community, including convening mass trials to purge certain sectors in the Old World when the population grew too large and running prison ships to unpopulated territories for new colonies, voluntarily or not. So hate was something Katherine knew to expect, but she wouldn’t be herself if she didn’t try to at least challenge some of those banal assumptions about her. Unfortunately, fighting the status quo was kind of hard to do when your sister was going to be in charge of the town you lived in by default as soon your mother died. To make matters even more complicated, said sister also hadn’t minded using that status to get whatever she wanted and humiliating whomever she wanted for the past three years as she ran the high school like her own personal kingdom.
Chapter Two
Enter Katherine, little sister extraordinaire, spindly, unpopular, ominous, and way too weird, even by a witch’s standards, who hadn’t stood a chance. It had taken Katherine the entirety of her first semester to find a refuge from Rose’s cliques, the stares and the distrust.
The students were right to distrust her, Katherine knew, not because of whose daughter she was but because of the magic she couldn’t control. Katherine didn’t like to think about the tangible dark aura that followed her around like a shroud of death. Her magic wasn’t natural like her mother’s and her sister’s. It was dark, it was different, and it wasn’t something she really understood. She didn’t think anyone did–not the faith healer specialists her mother had brought in to chant over her at ten, not the concerned psychologists who thought her magic was blocked by repressed memories, nor the therapy instructors who used everything from yoga to horseback riding to get her to ge
t in ‘touch’ with her inner magic. It had gotten so bad that Katherine had just shut it down over the summer. Begging her mother for a reprieve during the first year of high school. Katherine remembered telling the queen that if she couldn’t be considered a witch, then she should at least let her be normal. Unfortunately her human classmates rejected her as thoroughly as her coven brethren pitied her inept attempts at controlling her gifts. It wasn’t just pity, Katherine knew. It was fear. They didn’t talk about what she saw or what happened around her, but they knew and her family knew.
Katherine swallowed and banished those memories. Instead, she decided to crowd–watch by taking in the mingling people and thinking about false assumptions. Assumptions about her and assumptions about the similarities of coven and human societies. It was a fact that no matter how alike witches and humans looked, they were very different. If one was neither witch nor fae, Katherine supposed it would be fairly easy to assume a witch was human. Without their magical gifts, they looked no different from poor souls, after all. But it was humans and not fae who were excluded from this gathering. Because no matter the fact that one species had smooth skin and another was known for everything from flaming feathers to scaly knobs, one thing united both witch and fae in a way no human could ever understand–magic. So tonight the coven of Sandersville and its queen had called together a celebration of traditional winter rights. And it was the fae that stood by their side. The fae that drank wine at their tables. The fae that danced to the woefully inept, in Katherine’s opinion, music.
As the night had gone in and more people had relaxed Katherine couldn’t help but begin to enjoy herself. It wasn’t often you saw the two groups of witches and fae together, and until three–quarters of a century ago it would have been all but unthinkable. The grudges between witches and fae had lasted that long and both sides had remarkable memories for injustices done to them. But for tonight they celebrated their traditional Winterfest a full month before the traditional Christmas pageantry that took hold of the town in late December.
It was past midnight, and the local bar was packed with all kinds of fae and coven elite. It was one of the few gatherings during the year where fae and witches co–mingled to the exclusion of their human brethren and did so without bloodshed. Nine brutal years of intense battles, assassinations, and interference from old–world empires in the new world that fae, witches, and humans called home. It was only a new world in a sense that up until three centuries ago no one in the citadels of Europe or the castles of North Africa had truly believed an entire continent could exist. Independent of their fractious conflicts, unspoiled by overpopulation, and ripe for magical conquest. When true wealth of the new world’s magic had been revealed, veritable gold mines of untouched power in nature for queens to tap, well, a horse race would be the politest term for old–world witch queens’ eagerness to claim new territories. But they were not the only magical beings to realize the potential that could be unlocked in a new land, where land connections had not been locked down by centuries of blood ties to individual families and the use of their natural gifts wasn’t heavily regulated by the queens’ courts.
The fae. The fae in their numerous species and hordes of eager settlers had centered on one thing. Freedom. Migration to the new world represented freedom from the old–world contracts that bound them to the land like serfs, freedom from tyrannical and immortal witch queens who owned them body and soul, and the change to start anew with power of their own. The fae were usually a disparate bunch of races that couldn’t agree on much of anything. But when faeries, unicorns, kobolds, dragons, trolls, sylphs, and dozens more agreed in dark pacts to do whatever it took to claim this new land for their own, the queens of Europe knew they were in trouble. They had agreed then and there to cease plundering each other’s ships on the way to the new world and refocusing on settling and binding the land to their own bloodlines immediately. An easy truce lay between the queens as they claimed territory after territory in the thirteen colonies and later…in the prime central valley territories that lay east of the river the native peoples called the Mississippi and west of the Appalachian mountain trails.
What had happened next was inevitable. War. Fae against witch queens with humans stuck in the middle. Old imperial witch blood against old imperial fae blood. As it had been for centuries. The witch queens of the new world were sure of their certain victory. How could they lose, after all? Since the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of the Dark Ages they had ruled Europe, the Maghreb Alliance, and the Ottoman territories with iron fists. Nothing would change for them. Nothing ever changed. Until it did.
The humans who came over the cross–ocean voyage with their coven mistresses and masters realized something amazing. An idea so fundamental to who they were now, but Katherine knew was a profound change of direction from what they had previously thought.
They realized they had a chance to no longer be indentured vassals of their witch queens. Never able to rise above the rank of servant and chattel because magic didn’t flow in their veins. So they had risen up and sided with the fae peoples as well as convinced the native peoples–shaman and human to join in their cause as well. The shamans, though witches themselves, were not pleased with the European witches domination of their ancestral lands. They also didn’t feel the witch queens respected the land so much as drained it dry for her own intents and purposes. The native humans had nothing to lose and much to gain. They didn’t like the European fae, but they detested the witch settlers even more.
Together the fae, the humans, and the shamans had stood against the witch queens. For eight long years they had pushed the queens back in territory after territory. Until the witches were forced to accede their land and plead for truce or face being run into the sea in a battle they could not win. The concord of the Fae–Coven Wars acceded the thirteen original colonies to the witch queens to do with as they pleased, and everything west of those pre–established boundaries to a joint rulership between the native peoples and the fae.
Katherine shivered just thinking about it. It was said that in the centuries since, the territories west of the coven boundaries had descended into darkness.
“It’s also said that the territories west of coven rule have lands so bountiful that an ocean stretches to meet their shores and fields so rich that crops rise from their folds unbidden by witch spells,” she whispered to herself, careful not to let anyone overhear.
It was blasphemy to say such things where a witch could hear them. Katherine was a witch herself and she knew her mother didn’t care. Tall tales such as that would probably amuse her, a mid–level witch queen who only ruled a county and had no dealings with the boundaries or the court machinations of high queens. But for other witches, even poor ones with only a farm to their name, such talk was forbidden. Old habits die hard and old prejudices were even harder to eradicate. To this day, some witches would look the other way before dealing with a fae. And others wouldn’t even speak the name of native peoples who had taken up against the witch cause. It was true…there had been peace between the witches, fae peoples, and humans in the coven territories for some time. But peace and friendship were two different things. The witches had forced out any lingering natives who would not swear allegiance to them, although they were very careful not to kill those displaced people in order to assuage the wrath of the fae–native alliance that watched them mistrustfully from across the border. But they also had gone to war with themselves, new world witch queens against old world witch queens, and that was another story entirely.
But tonight was time for friendly banter, laughter, and, Katherine would hope, no bloodshed. It had been almost two centuries since Fae–Coven Wars in the New World. Just before the humans celebrated the resurrection of their own saints and mortal gods, witches feasted in the name of coven queens gone before and prayed for a new spring to clear the land of death’s touch.
Katherine Thompson had spent all her life trying to bridge the divide between human ritual
s and coven practices, often unsuccessfully. She didn’t have her mother, the Queen of Sandersville’s, knack for setting human officials at ease, or her sister’s talent for smoothly gliding into a room and setting every person’s face to smiling.
Katherine wasn’t beautiful, she didn’t speak three languages, and she hadn’t been attending coven mistress classes since she was five. But she was one thing. Powerful. It was the power that emanated around her like a dark, muted glow that she couldn’t escape that had witches who happened to be caught in her presence shuttering. Even the humans, who didn’t have more talent than a wet–nosed pig at recognizing magic could sense the dark aura around Katherine. They didn’t know what it was but she was sure they felt a shiver go down their spine and goose bumps rise on their flesh whenever she was around. They certainly cleared the room as fast and politely as they could when given the chance.
“Not that I can blame,” Katherine said wryly as she lifted the second glass of eggnog up from her waist and took a longer than necessary sip of its delicious and rich concoction.
“Now this, this is the drink of the gods,” she said with a delighted look in her eyes as she closed her half–lidded gaze and took another long sip.
She didn’t have drinks made of pure fat often. She had alcohol even less. Her mother’s rules. A witch must always be aware after all and alcohol was one of the few things that had the ability to knock a person on their ass with equal opportunity–be they witch, human, or fae.
She sighed in pleasure as she listened to the music wafting over from speakers in the corner of the room with a keen ear. Then Katherine felt a hand slip around her waist. She startled and her eyes flew open as she tilted back her head with a giggle. It was official: she was tipsy. It was true that this was only her second glass of eggnog, but before that she’d managed to sneak up to the garland–cloaked bar and grab some rum punch from an open bowl while the bartender, also known as her friend Trick, wasn’t looking. She didn’t regret the action then and she certainly didn’t now as the hand tightened perceptibly at her waist and drew her back into the arms of her boyfriend.
