Young Writers Society

I didn’t go back to the pond after that. Bad memories breed bad magic and even if it was a victory on my part, I had no interest in reliving the past.

Instead I took up residence in a cracked boulder that had probably been home to some creature before, but who wouldn’t be back now. I slept for a whole night and a day and when I woke again the crow was pecking at the ground outside.

“Your next task,” the crow said, “is to build a crown of stone with five perfect points.” It cawed three times, already laughing at my imminent failure. I put a hand to the wall of my boulder.

“Your only rule is it must be made of all one piece,” the crow said. It dug at the ground with its talons, scraping up bugs which it pecked up with great efficiency. It cocked its head at me after swallowing a beetle of frankly, incredible size. “Good luck,” it said. It laughed at me as it flew away.

-

I don’t believe in luck.

-

But clearly luck believed in me because it started to rain that night. Soft little droplets soaked into my hair as I sat outside my boulder and watched the sky. The trees were light here. It wasn’t so much a forest as a casual gathering of trees. I had a full view of the billowing clouds above me.

My mother was in those clouds.

I climbed to the top of the boulder, my toes hooked into whatever tiny crevice I could find to hold my balance. Rain pooled gently in the hollow of the crown, on top of my scalp. If I tipped my head one way or another it would spill out, like wine from a cup. I could feel magic in my bones. This task would be easier than the first.

It isn’t easy to coax lightning, even if you’re blood related. Even if you’re magic. I called and called and the night was almost over before my mother appeared. She hovered above me in a cloud of electricity and spite, dangerous as a snake in the grass.

“Strike this boulder, mother,” I told her. “Build me a crown.”

“Spoiled wretch,” the lightning strike that was my mother hissed back. Thunder rolled in the distance. “Ungrateful, thieving, gash. You already have a crown, glimmering and stolen on your head. Why should you desire another? Why should I continuously indulge you?”

I gnawed on my lip as I considered a reason. Water trickled between my shoulder blades, rushed between my toes. Because I am your child. Because you threw me into the world and left me on my own. Because otherwise I will be forfeit to the Wicker Queen and her howling, inconsolable son. Because I am magic.

“Because I command you,” I said. “Build me a crown.”

The wind howled and nearly ripped the Wicker Queen’s crown from my head. Above me my mother screamed and the sky went white. Beneath my feet, the boulder split in half, ripping my perch away.

The world went, as it does, abruptly dark.

-

When I woke up the crown was sitting not a grass blade’s width from my face. It was a dull grey, imbedded quartz shining faintly in the sunrise. It had five perfect points, with the point in front higher than all the rest. It was covered in scorch marks.

When I went to the Wicker Queen’s tower this time, I found it almost immediately. She sat, again, on the stoop in front of the tower, her grey green brocade dress pooling around her ankles. Behind her, inside the tower, her son’s weeping had slowed into something terrible and dying.

The crown was heavy in my hands, heavier than the one I currently wore. When I put it on top of her head, I expected the weight of it to crush her down to the ground. The crown’s highest point lined up perfectly with her straight nose, directly between her closed eyes. When she opened them, her eyes were flecked with green and brown and orange gold. She smiled at me, and when she did I felt it all the way from my lips to my groin.

I could hear the crow in the surrounding trees—caw—caw—caw—before it landed at the queen’s feet. It looked at me with first one eye, and then the other. If crows could grin, this crow would have, and I think it would have lived in my nightmares forever.

-

The crow came to me in my dreams that night, because magic knows where your weak spots are and how to crack them like a mirror. It taunted me from the branches, cawing and laughing and by the time I found it was midway through eating itself—starting first at one wingtip and making its way from there to the tail feathers and from the tail feathers up to its laughing black eyes. When only the beak was left, it opened itself wide and told me, in a loud croaking voice, to wake up.

-

When I woke up in the middle of the field next to the burnt-out tree I was born out of, the crow was there, whole and uneaten and, sadly, alive. I would have liked to see the last of it but magic is not always so obliging.

Magic is never obliging.

“Your final task,” the crow told me, not pecking, not hoping, not flapping its wings, “is to build a crown of lightning.” It didn’t wait for me to respond, because whenever magic can betray you, it will. And it has. But magic is probably not to blame for this failure of foresight—I am. I have already used my trump card in the middle of the game. I am only a lightning child—I cannot wield it like my mother and I have already struck down that bridge past the point of reconciliation.

I have failed the third task. I will lose my crown.

-

There is never a point to delaying the inevitable. I walked back into the forest and to the Wicker Queen’s tower. She sat, as always, on her stoop, and behind her, the tower was silent. The Wicker Queen’s crown sat on my head like a useless, dead thing, and I was no longer sure why I had wanted it in the first place.

“Hello, lightning child,” the Wicker Queen told me. “Where is my crown?”

I am not a child. She knows this. She can smell the magic on me. I take her crown off and hold it out in front of me. I tell the Wicker Queen, “lightning never strikes the same place twice.”

-

Who wouldn’t, in the end, want a crown?

-

The queen stood up and brushed off the seat of her brocade dress. “Now, now,” she said, walking toward me. The hem of her dress whispered against the ground, already telling me, ‘shhhhh. Shhhhh.’ “Let’s not be so hasty.” She covered my hands with hers. This close, like the day we’d first met, I could smell her—sweet grass and dying autumn and the scent of dirt under fingernails and magic—always magic. She guided my hands back up to my head, lowered the crown back into place. “Who wouldn’t want a crown?”

She laid her cool hand against my cheek, smiled warmly at me, but not like a mother. I didn’t need a mother. She took me by the hand and led me to the tower.

The door wasn’t locked. Inside, it was dark and earthy and warm. A spiraling staircase led up and up and up to a room with the door locked by a crossbar. I could sense the tower sleeping—dying—dead. The prince’s lady love hadn’t come to set him free, and instead here was I, wearing the crown.

The darkness became complete when the wicker queen shut the door. Magic crawled up inside my nose and took residence in my head, fickle and wanting. The distance between the queen and I writhed like something alive and feral. She stepped toward me, that hand on my cheek again. We breathed in tandem.

Magic bloomed in my ribcage when the wicker queen kissed me. Wild and unpredictable, it fought against the bonds of my wildly flawed existence. It leaked out of my mouth and into hers and she swallowed it like honey as she leaned me back against the stairs, hovering over me, her dress caught between my legs. She hiked it up over her knees and out of the way, and the feel of her skin against mine set off sparks in the air. They touched down on the brocade, leaving behind tiny, gasping, burn marks. She fitted my hands over her waist and my fingers clenched down, holding her to me. Her mouth was still on mine, her lips softer than the moss I’d slept on the night before, silky and velvety and a more obscure magic than anything I’d ever experienced in my short life.

The crown fell from my head and clanged down several steps. I didn’t notice its absence.

-

Magic.

Magic is always like this — you would think it’s textbook sensible. Clear. The forbearer of facts. But if there is anything factual about magic its that it’s as nonsensical as, well—life. Its heartbeat is a heartbeat of chaos and it breathes in odd rhythms to prove itself as such. Truth is stranger than fiction, after all.

The Wicker Queen and I entwined our bodies there on the staircase. The world around us pulsed. She kissed me until I was senseless and then she brought me back to do it again. Enough time went by to make my body screaming hot. I was the place between the charge, that same place where my anima had been born, before my mother hurled me down into the world.

Magic boiled in me, growing stronger and deeper with each pulse of the world and each throb between my thighs. And then the world went white. Outside, I heard the crow caw.

When I opened my eyes, I held a crown of lightning in my hands.

-

I put the Wicker Queen’s crown back where I found it. Nestled deep in the underbrush in its filigree silver cage. I didn’t know if the queen’s son would ever leave that tower, regardless if his lady love came for him or not. I wouldn’t begrudge them the chance to try.

When I came back from hiding the crown, the Wicker Queen sat on the stoop in front of her tower. My lightning crown was still nestled in her hair, blinding white and impossible—like magic. Somewhere, nearby, that damned crow cawed. I let it be, and sat down on the stoop and put her hand in mine.

-

What use would anyone ever have for a crown?