The Breaker Queen

by C. S. E. Cooney

  Covering her head with a pillow helped.

  After nearly twelve months, he’d ended up apologizing. More or less. In that ineffable Alderwood style. Probably at Elliot’s instigation. Elliot was the peacemaker among them.

  And they’d been friends again for a while. If you could call it friends. Whatever they were. Neighbors.

  But their troubles leaked back in. Short spats. Acid insults. Doors slamming. Yelling through the walls.

  Then that thing with the toilet paper.

  And now the statue.

  The statue.

  Which, in the moonlight, looked as if it were made of frozen quicksilver. She thought of the love and care and attention lavished in the lines of it. She thought of his hands coaxing the shape into being, building it up from slabs of clay and toilet paper, calling it forth, and she wondered how he dared. How did he dare annihilate something so beautiful?

  That was just like him.

  Analise moved closer to lay her hand against the statue’s cold cheek. Gideon must have laid his own hand there, just so.

  Would probably swing the hammer just so, tomorrow.

  That was when the statue opened its eyes.

  They were huge, glassy, black pools with a green glow at the bottom.

  What Analise felt was not shock, but recognition. This. This was why he killed them. Because of that pleading look in their eyes.

  “Oh, what shall I do?” she whispered. “What shall I do?”

  A single tear fell from the statue’s left eye, a streak of slow-moving mercury that spattered down its sealed lips. She moved her hand to wipe the tear away. Her fingers glittered silver.

  Analise felt her face settling into an expression her father used to say could bully the cows into producing pure cream.

  “I’ll save you. Wait here. The landlord has a dolly.”

  ***

  Excerpt from The Witch in the Almond Tree

  CHAPTER ONE: AMANDALE

  The first time Mother wrote to tell me she’d married again, I ignored her.

  The second time, when she commanded me in her usual peremptory way to come out to the country, be polite, visit, meet my new stepfather, I wrote back and said sorry, but I have work and school and a boyfriend, and third-trimester Assessments pending, but I’ll write again later in more detail, maybe, don’t hold your breath, and by the way, congratulations; I hope he’s attentive in bed.

  The third time she wrote, she said please.

  Please, Mar, she said. I need you.

  It gave me pause.

  ***

  I’d always gotten high marks in school. That year was no exception. After my Assessments, my teachers told me I had great promise as a witch. No Hedge-Witch you, they said. No swapping hexes for a handful of copper poppets, or hawking herbs to local villagers, or cackling in a candy house. No, a Sorceress for Queen and country!

  If I but applied myself.

  I’d spent the last three years doing nothing but applying myself. I held down two jobs to pay for room and board. Warlock Antonius, Head Administrator for the Conservatory of Spellbinding and the Beguilement Arts, agreed to defer the debt for my education until I had an establishment of my own and a steady source of income. I even budgeted time for a social life, feeling that a large network of friendly professional acquaintances would come in handy as I built the bright empire of my future.

  My boyfriend was a year ahead of me. Top of his class. He had tattoos, too: a raven on each wrist that sometimes spoke up during poker games or tricky incantations to offer advice; a dragon rampant regardant across his back that occasionally manifested as a familiar during fistfights; and vines of flame and rune and ivy twining round his shoulders and neck. (During lovemaking, I could hear them rustling and whispering.) He flew his own magic carpet and had once, he boasted, struck a two-headed ogre dead with a single blow from his ax.

  Most girls in my class—and several of the boys— had something to do with Icanthus at one time or another.

  I didn’t mind. At least I was one of them. I was someone a young warlock with a dragon tattoo and a dangerously fringed carpet paid heed to, and flirted with, and fucked.

  I was a Witch of Doornwald, the Queen’s City. No longer under Mother’s roof and prey to her whims and moods. Never again would I have to dodge whatever wild spells she took it in her head to practice—without, may I add, proper preparation or sufficient protection. Without even (in my humble opinion) the benefit of any great degree of talent.

  But Mother kept writing, begging me to join her.

  She sounded so lucid, so earnest. And then summer came on. My Conservatory jobs at the student laundry and cafeteria ended with the trimester. Summers in Doornwald were expensive. She suggested I sublet my little room to tourists for more than it was worth, and live at her new place in the country at no out-of-pocket cost.

  As desperate as I’d been to leave Mother’s house when I went off to college, the idea of starting out my last school year in the black was enough to seduce me out of the city.

  I reflected that the good thing about living in the middle of nowhere was that nowhere was probably big enough to hide in. Especially if Mother started acting restless again and went a little too far in her “dabblings,” as she liked to call them.

  So I wrote that sure, I’d come out for a few months.

  I booked a ticket on the mail coach to a place called Amandale, and then it was so long, Doornwald—try not to forget me while I’m gone!

  ***

  The trip took the better part of a week.

  Hours, days, being jounced and jolted in a mail coach crammed with a variety of such cranky, moist, travel-bruised people as myself, all clamp-jawed in anticipation of our next (too infrequent) rest stop, who smelled variously of salted fish, sweat, sour olives, last night’s beer, and—from one particularly noxious commuter—the sweet dankness of opium. Any time I didn’t spend napping or reading or chatting with the inescapably garrulous woman with the knitting needles and the knowing look in her eye, I alleviated my boredom and discomfort by reliving the lengthy goodbyes Icanthus and I had enjoyed before I left Doornwald.

  I will say this for him: as fickle as he is when he is not by your side, when he is with you, Icanthus gives himself entirely. Tirelessly. His fingers slipping between your thighs, finding your folds, your center knots, your secrets. His mouth rooting, suckling, nibbling, seeking. His long body slick with his aerobic efforts. His skin like the finest fever, the inky images scrawled upon it whispering, whispering. . .

  Thrice our last night together had he spent himself in me, upon me. He had brought me to the shattering more times than I had fingers to count. These multiplied even as I recalled them, as if each act of remembering were another snip of the Hydra’s head, begetting ten more memories of might-have-beens, of longings unfulfilled.

  Icanthus could ring me like a bell, strum me like a lyre, could make one kiss outlast the candlelight and herald the dawn, then be ready to go again before we’d quite brushed the crumbs of our late, lazy brunch from the rumpled sheets. His final farewell. . .

  I reddened and swelled in that stuffy little mail coach.

  Thankfully, the days were warm, so nobody could tell.

  Except maybe the woman with the knitting needles. She was, I thought, some kind of witch herself. Once, after catching my eye, she reached out and patted my knee. “Be good for you, getting away a bit. Let him feel what he’s missing.”

  “Yeah,” I said ruefully. “Except he won’t.”

  “Ah. Even better then, maybe. You getting away.”

  Sighing, I let the thought of Icanthus fade out to white heat, white noise, to a murmuring pulsation, a ragged rhythm at the back of my mind. I turned the conversation to the baby blanket she was working on. It was enough to keep her going until her stop.

  ***

  When I finally arrived after a week of travel, it was worse than I’d imagined. A one-street, one-anvil, blink and you’ve passed it, sticks-and-straw ham
let in the backwoods of beyond. Its main attraction was a sort of shrine, a juniper tree a little ways outside the hamlet’s timber fortifications, where pilgrims went to hang prayers from the branches.

  The Amandale blacksmith told me that back in the olden days, a murdered child had been buried beneath the juniper tree. Since then, the tree had been the site of several miracles.

  “Yeah,” I said, “Doornwald has its share of macabre tourist traps, too. I lead ghost tours all over the city in the autumn. Rakes in the bronze.”

  Grinning through his singed beard, the blacksmith held a forefinger to his lips.

  I smiled back. “Right. I’ll be sure to check it out. Always up for a shrine.”

  As far as I was concerned, Amandale was still stuck in its olden days. Icanthus would have extolled the place as “typical ogre breeding ground.” Thinking that made me miss him, so I tore the end page from my trashy travel novel, squiggled a quick and crude impression of Amandale on it, scrawled, “Kisses from Cannibal Country, Lover Boy. Yours, M,” and sent it as a postcard back with the mail coach.

  It might reach him by the time I got back.

  Or not.

  The likelihood of him remembering what “M” stood for was slim as a spindle’s end.

  I would not, I told myself, I would not under any circumstances use blood magic and the black opal Descrying Lens tucked beneath my jacket to contact my boyfriend just to say I missed his face. It would be needy and creepy and clingy, and I would not. Not. Not. Not.

  I resisted.

  But it was hard.

  ***

  Amandale, sadly, was not the place where Mother kept her current address. It was merely the closest any civilized contrivance could bring me to it.

  She had written that it would be a reasonable walk from the coach stop. A mere matter of hours for a sturdy girl like me. Only mind that I walk while it was daylight out, as these woods were not tame or friendly, but full of spirits both perilous and mischievous, not but what I couldn’t handle them (quoth she), an educated Witch of Doornwald such as myself.

  I had packed accordingly, but when I finished my lunch in the blacksmith’s kitchen, which was the closest thing Amandale had to a public house, and trudged outside to get my bearings, I found a red-bearded man perched in a cart near the roadside. His fat mule looked equally twinkly-eyed and at ease.

  “Miss Mar?” he asked tentatively when my gaze met his.

  I’d always preferred “Mar” to “Marline,” my given name. My boyfriend referred to me as his “Marlinspike,” because he said the nickname was “kicky as a high-heeled boot.” I’d tolerate it, I told him, so long as he spiked me long and hard. Which he did whenever both he and I were mutually available. Given my grueling school schedule and his increasing spell-load, this was not nearly as often as I liked.

  “Yes! Hello!” Laughing, I held out my hand. “You must be Mother’s husband. Sorry—she wrote of you as ‘her fine new fellow’ and never by your name.”

  “Oh? Huh. It’s Brentwell.”

  We shook hands. I climbed into the cart. “I didn’t think to meet anybody here. I was all ready to walk. I wore my good boots.”

  Brentwell raised his red brows and squinted down at my feet. “It’s near fifteen mile to Anaia’s Grove.”

  “But Mother said . . . ”

  Brentwell’s mouth twitched. “She was joking, I ’spect.”

  “Perhaps,” I replied dubiously.

  “A very funny lady.” Brentwell whistled the mule to action.

  “Oh, yes,” I agreed.

  We rode in silence for a while. He had a nice silence, warm and interested, as if he were listening far and wide into the green. I started to relax, wondering idly what he’d seen in Mother. I could see why she’d want him. Those kind eyes. Those hands. Those shoulders.

  Shoulders like that, my friend Gretchel liked to say, could really fill a doorway.

  “You’re a witch?” he asked presently.

  “In training.”

  “My first wife, too,” he said. “My Anaia.”

  “You’re a widower?”

  Anaia might have left him, I supposed. It happened. My father had left my mother, after all. But Brentwell had a widower’s eyes. Even as I watched, they filled with tears.

  “Childbirth.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “‘Twere twenty year back now. But she left me a fine boy. My good boy. About your age.”

  I turned my head to stare at him. “You have a son?”

  “Oh, ayup. My lad Wraith. Didn’t your mama say?”

  “No, she . . . Not a word.”

  “Well, now.” Brentwell cleared his throat. “Well, now. Wraith’s a strange boy. A good boy, but . . . strange. Touched, you might say. Always has been. His birth was . . . It was difficult. The whole pregnancy. It was all”—he waved the hand not busy with the reins—“difficult. And your mama, well, she’s mighty strange, too. A fine woman,” he assured me. “But with some funny ways. Difficult. And what with Wraith’s funny ways . . . Well. They don’t get along as well as I’d hoped. Between you and me.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said again. “That must be awkward.”

  “Oh, ayup, awkward. Ayup.” He sighed. “But now you’re here, Miss Mar. And you’re a good ’un, I can tell. My first wife, too. I know a strong woman when I meet her. A strong witch.”

  My cheeks grew hot. “You married one.”

  “My first wife,” he concurred, nodding. “Yes. But your mama, well, maybe she’s strong, like you say. In her own way. But when I met her, I just thought she seemed a bit sad. Like me. A bit broken. Like me. Lost, maybe. Sweet on the eyes, though.”

  “Like you,” I put in.

  He laughed and shook his head, looking shy.

  We passed the rest of the journey in increasingly heavy silence. I chewed on my thoughts. Six letters in six months and not one mention of a stepbrother. It made me uneasy, to say the least. I was all over in prickles. The kind that start in the thumbs. The witchy kind.

  When we turned off the main road through the wood to a far narrower and more rickety path, Brentwell cleared his throat again. “Don’t stew, Miss Mar. Don’t fret so. It’ll work out. Don’t—don’t speak sharp to her when you see her. She’s so excited for your visit. It’s maybe put her a bit on edge.”

  Mother on edge. Fantastic. Wasn’t that just kicky?

  I bit my lip, imagining all the razor-edged eggshells I’d shortly be negotiating. Time to change the subject.

  “You’re a woodcutter?”

  “Farmer,” Brentwell replied with pride. “Almonds. Look there, home. Anaia’s Grove.”

  That was when we broke upon it, a grove of trees bursting with such silky profusions of pink-and-white blossoms that my breath blew away on their sweetness. “Oh, Brentwell! It’s gorgeous! Scrumptious! Delicious!”

  When he beamed at me, I couldn’t help laughing again. “And all those other words I associate with ice cream and sunsets and sex.”

  “My wife,” he explained. “My first wife. Anaia. She planted them. All these here. They don’t normally grow in these parts. Winters too cold. Summers too wet. But she could make anything grow. And they kept right on growing, even after she . . . ”

  The tears running down his face glowed pink in the tree-light. I leaned over in the cart and kissed his cheek. I’m rarely that demonstrative, even with my boyfriend, but I couldn’t help myself. “She must’ve been wonderful. This kind of greenwitching is a mighty magic.”

  Then Mother ran out of the tiny cottage that stood in the shadow of the biggest almond tree—the biggest tree, hands down—I’d ever seen. Her hair like angry flames flew out behind her. Her face was white and strained, her green-blue eyes wide with fear.

  “Oh, Marline! Marline!” she sobbed, dragging me down from the cart into her embrace. “I’m so glad you’re here! I’m so glad you’ve come!”

  ***

  The Witch in the Almond Tree is available on Amazon Kindle!
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