Slate and Earth Chapter 5.2

Ana settled back into her nest of couch cushions and considered the cottage. It was a cute little thing, the kind of place you rented for a vacation after arguing over whether tent camping was the purest way to experience some trees, but not the kind of place you expected a person actually lived. There was a fireplace built of mismatched grey stone, with a mantle of unfinished wood where stubs of candles and pocket size photographs in little frames had been arranged. On either side of the fireplace were enormous built-in bookshelves floor-to-ceiling full with paperback mystery novels and clothbound books with spines so faded Ana didn’t suspect she’d be able to read the titles even up close.

The rest of the room was like all the open-concept ranch homes Mike had taken her to see back when he’d promised they would move before the baby came. It struck her as sterile; these long, white washed rooms with kitchens that bled into dining rooms which bled into living rooms. They were always decorated, those homes no one lived in. Couches with their backs turned, barstools crowded around kitchen islands.

Nothing in Esther’s cottage had its back turned. Instead, the couch where Ana slept straddled the grey area between kitchen and living room. There was no dining room, but a tall wooden table situated in the center of the kitchen. Ana had never seen anyone eat there, but Esther was always propped on one of those chairs working her fine, old fingers into something she called magic.

Ana swivelled on the couch so that she sat cross-legged, her tailbone kissing the back cushion. It was not so much that she was a skeptic. The notion that there was more to the world didn’t bother her, though she had worked hard never to believe too hard in anything. What bothered her was that she suspected this woman, Esther, was not telling her the whole truth. And Ana had become an expert at cultivating a lie.

With a deep breath, she pushed the duvet from her legs and stood. The cottage floor was made of old wood and it was warm on the soles of her feet. She walked three paces from the couch to the table in the kitchen and caught herself on the edge of it for balance.

Esther had left the cutting board - slate stained with oil from the garlic she’d been cutting - where she’d been working. She’d been working with a small chef’s knife, which she’d left perfectly parallel with the side of the board. Ana reached for a basket of herbs sitting in the center of the table. Earlier in the morning, she had watched Esther mince thyme and rosemary and mint and pile them one by one in the same cast iron pan as the garlic.

She plucked a basil leaf from a bunch lying at the top of the basket and rolled it between her fingers. Later, Ana would begin to understand Esther’s magic as something less quantifiable. In the scheme of things it was more like cooking than baking; there were no precise measurements, no spells like the storybooks. To practice Esther’s magic was to practice a feeling. To learn the terms of a bargain ever changing and recite them back. Now, Ana studied the leavings of Esther’s latest magic and felt eerily like she surveyed a spice cabinet and nothing more.

Ana leaned into her elbows on the table and pressed the basil to her nose. “Whatever you do, do not leave this house,” she repeated, mocking. “Where on earth else am I meant to go.”

She sighed and surveyed the cottage from her new perspective. If she thought hard enough - and relied heavily enough on Esther’s account of what happened - she could remember falling in through the window. She remembered fear so hot it burned her skin like fever. Nausea clotted like a memory in the pit of her stomach. It was how she’d felt in the cab, hot and sick and desperate. She remembered getting out of the cab and not knowing where to go, just that she needed to get as far as she could from anyone who knew her face. Regret had begun to build in her bones and she couldn’t remember why she’d left Mike to begin with. He was the only person who loved her, the only one who had ever taken care of her. He’d given her a home and a marriage and a little human growing inside her. Who did she think she could be without him?

Ana dropped her head into her arms, fingers hooking into her knotted, unwashed hair. She breathed, deeply, in the smell of her own skin and pushed herself back from the table.

Esther’s cottage was made primarily of two rooms: the main room that Ana had lived in since she’d arrived, and a bedroom with a door tucked behind the wide, open pantry shelves beside the range. Ana rarely saw it open unless Esther was going in or out of it. Ana steadied herself by a hand on one of the tall kitchen stools and walked across the room.

The door opened easily, the hinges well oiled, and Ana was disappointed, almost, to find nothing spectacular inside.

It was a bedroom. She wasn’t sure why she expected anything different in a witches cottage. All that stood out, really, was that the large four poster bed in the middle of the room seemed entirely out of place with the rest of Esther’s style. It was old, like many of Esther’s belongings, and looked like it had been made by hand from actual wood unlike the flat packed particleboard things Ana’s husband brought home from the WalMart. There was no canopy, but long swaths of delicate cream muslin were tied up at the corners. They draped elegantly to the floor, and fluttered in the cool air that drifted through Esther’s open windows.

Ana wound her fingers in the muslin and lowered herself to sit on the edge of the bed. The big leather book Esther carried laid where she’d left it in the center of the bed. Ana pulled it into her lap, positioned awkwardly on her knees to compensate for her belly, and opened it. Like many things about Esther Keeling, the book she called her grimoire was unexceptional.

It was more a diary than a spellbook. There were no incantations or long lists of ingredients for potions that might have changed her fate. Instead there were fragments, long entries on the properties of rosemary or honeysuckle. Notes scribbled in margins of entries crafted like poems. Take the silver spoons from the hope chest your mother keeps beneath the blanket at the foot of her bed, while she rests at midday in the salon where she parades suitors before you as if one more well bred young man could make the difference. Bury them in the rose garden for two more years of innocence. Split them: one beneath the kitchen window and another in your father’s drawer for a long and happy marriage. Around the edge, in a pen with a thicker stroke, someone had added: If you take them to the forest, offer your mother’s silver with your father’s genes and ask the wolf for a lesson. And later, more hurried, in the same script: The catch it this: the test is always harder than the lesson when every question is a trick.

Ana closed the book and set it aside. She didn’t think she understood it, but the book had energy bound up in its pages. It bled into her fingers. Thrummed like a second heart inside her chest. She stood and walked through the cottage, compelled by the energy she couldn’t name. She walked to the front door, laid her hand on the knob, and pulled it open.

Outside, Esther held the cast iron pan in the crook of her arm. She paced along what might have been the property line, if the cottage had been built in Ana’s neighborhood and not the middle of the forest. She let handfuls of chopped herbs drift from her palm. They coated the grass behind her as she walked. A crow had landed on her shoulder. There was something electric in the air, lifting the ends of Ana’s hair and sending a shiver across her spin.

“Esther,” Ana said, the witch’s name sticking in her throat.

When she turned and saw Ana standing squarely outside the cottage, the cast iron pan dropped from her arm. “What have you done?” she hissed, and ran toward her.

The air grew taut as the crow lit from Esther’s shoulder and careened into the sky. Something was out there, approaching them between the trees. Esther pushed Ana back inside the house, knocking her off balance and sending her tumbling to the floor.

“Esther,” Ana tried again, easing herself to her knees. “What’s happening?”

But Esther didn’t reply. She threw the wooden front door closed and pressed her fingertips to the grain, words rushing from her lips that only rose like mad static to Ana’s ears. The wooden door glowed, splintering around Esther’s fingertips, and the static whined. Louder and louder it went, threatening to shatter Ana’s eardrums, and then in a moment it was gone. Esther dropped to her knees and extended a hand behind her.

Ana took it, pulling herself against the door, within Esther’s thin embrace. Crouching there, her calves ached and the little human turned anxiously in her womb, but Esther kept her firmly in place. Then, a creature emerged from the forest. Ana would never be able to explain what she saw, or how she saw a thing that happened beyond her sight, but she saw it clear as she could see the down duvet spread across the couch on the other side of the room. An elk the size of a moose stepped across Esther’s half-formed line of thyme and garlic and wished-for magic. He wore a crown of enormous antlers, a stole of white fur around his neck. He approached the cottage and bent his nose to the ground, huffing a cloud of white breath into the dirt. Ana felt it hot and damp, as if he breathed directly onto the back of her neck.

“What is it?” she whispered, one hand lifting to cover Esther’s where it clutched at her shoulder.

“The King of the Forest,” Esther breathed, and squeezed her tighter. “He knows you’re here.”