Slate and Earth Chapter 4.2

Despite the delicate herbs left drying from the ceiling and the smudge of incense she left burning, Esther’s cottage smelled sick. When she returned from the forest, Ana remained curled beneath the goose down duvet from Esther’s bed and two or three other blankets Esther had crocheted over the years. The fire in the hearth burnt to coals, but still the room felt hot.

“If you’re alive in there, girl, you’re going to drown in this heat,” Esther said by way of announcing her return.

Ana didn’t stir, and Esther sighed.

First, she went to the girl and pressed the backs of her fingertips to her forehead. Then, to the curve of her neck, just beneath her chin. Ana was hot, slick with sweat and sick, but her pulse tapped out a message. I’m here.

Esther held her breath and listened. Beneath the weight of the blankets, Ana’s ragged pulse only served to amplify the narrowband frequency of the girl that grew inside her. I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.

She removed her hand from Ana’s neck and reached across her to force the window open. “I hope you’re giving thanks to all the gods you know the names of,” she murmured under the awful creak of the window sticking in it’s frame. “You made a bargain with that little one inside you, and that may be all that’s keeping you alive.”

The window released and slid easily to the top of the frame. Esther stepped back and brushed dust and bits of displaced wood from her hands, considering the other end of that sort of bargain. The forest was known to be true, but never fair. One day, perhaps soon, Ana would give birth and present the human the forest had welcomed. There was no saying what the forest would, then, want to do with Ana.

The notion of it pricked at her heart, and Esther steeled herself. It wouldn’t do to let the girl give birth in the forest. She would simple have to ensure she was well enough to leave well before that became an issue.

“I’m going to put on a kettle of tea,” she announced, though Ana would not - as she had not for many days now - respond. “Perhaps this time you’ll actually drink some.”

Esther’s cottage had a little gas range, which she preferred for all her cooking, fed by an unsettlingly large propane tank set out by Jane’s stable that never seemed to run dry. She filled a kettle from the sink and set it on the range, relishing the moment the pilot click-click-clicked as the burner ignited. Then, she took down a small glass and poured herself a glass of bourbon.

It burned her gums, but she relished the feeling. When she swallowed, it singed the lining of her throat. Many people drank to drown a thing inside their own heads but Esther-- Esther drank to drown the taste of glass and ash that lingered on her tongue.

The kettle whistled, and Esther set the bourbon on the edge of the sink. She moved the kettle to an empty burner and took a fresh tea bag from the basket she kept on the counter. Healing things were not hard to come by. What she could not find with Jane and a little directional magic in the forest, she grew herself in her garden. All of it she dried in the rafters overhead and decanted into mismatched glass jars she’d collected from antique malls and roadside garage sales. Occasionally, she would walk the lane from her cottage to the highway, where she kept her pickup truck parked in a drive marked private and find little offerings of used spice jars from the nice grocery store wrapped with paper notes filled with wishes.

Less occasionally, she would walk the lane from her cottage to the highway and find one of the windows smashed in on her truck, or a substance suspiciously like blood used to scrawl the word witch across her windshield. Esther preferred it when she returned to her truck and there was nothing.

She surveyed her overstuffed cabinet of healing things, sorting through bottles and bags and scented sachets she’d picked up from a woman pretending to be a witch in the city the singular time she had visited since coming to live in the forest. She far preferred the town that bordered the forest to the city where she’d grown up. It had been so long since anything was the way it was when she was a girl. Going there only served to make her sad. Esther did all she could to avoid dwelling on things that made her sad.

The cabinet was full, but Esther found it lacked inspiration. She turned to the overstuffed jar of chamomile next to the range and filled two tea bags that she dropped into two teacups with cracks on their brims. Chamomile to calm a troubled mind, she recited to herself.

A cool dusk breeze hung in the window over Ana’s down cocoon when Esther returned with two cups of tea. She set them both on the sill and settled into a wooden chair positioned by the head of the couch. The inherited grimoire sat open on the coffee table, which she closed and shifted aside to take the battered mystery novel underneath. She cracked it open, flipping the pages to find her place, when Ana shifted beside her.

“I,” she started, her voice dry and catching in her throat. She moved to sit, to stand, but the duvet and several days spent in bed kept her back. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m not supposed to be here.”

Esther closed the book over her thumb, pressed to the page to save her place. “No, you’re certainly not,” she said. “But you are.”

“Who are you?”

She studied the girl a moment, the way her hair frayed around her face and the way her eyes were not as afraid as they were curious. “I’m Esther.”

Ana settled back against the couch. “Are we in the forest?” she asked.

“Yes,” she answered. “I live here.”

This seemed to tickle her, whether from exhaustion or the fever that still clung to her brow. “When I was in high school, the boys always said there was a witch in this forest.”

“Yes,” Esther repeated.

Ana rested her head against the overstuffed cushion on the back of the couch. She looked up out the window, through the steam that rose from the cups of tea. “Has my husband been looking for me?” she asked, her voice quiet and far away.

Esther uncrossed and crossed her legs again, paperback still balanced on her knee. “No man’s been through here,” she said.

Ana nodded. She sunk down in her duvet and Esther could see her hands shift to cradle the child in her womb. “My grandmother used to dry wildflowers,” she said, her gaze drifting to the herbs hung in Esther’s rafters. “She would press them between pages in old books and give them to me as presents.”

“These aren’t flowers,” Esther said, opening her book. She curled half of it behind itself so as to hold the book in one hand. “They’re magic.”

The girl laughed, soft and sweet, and turned to curl into the back of the couch. “Flowers are the only magic I ever believed in.”