The sound of rain woke her, spping heavy against a waxed cloth tarp. Her face was pressed into the ground and everything smelt of loam. The air was so easy to breathe that it felt thick in her throat. This was a green pce. The breeze on her left side was cold and wet and when she opened her eyes, she saw out into a forest. All the trees were covered in moss, and ferns grew as tall as she was. Chickens pyed between the fronds, chasing each other in competition for the best beetles.
Voices caught between the raindrops, from beyond the single wall of her tent. Low, light tones in a mix of Kari-Parenian, with a lot of Hardic vowel sounds. Kate thanked again the old men who traveled with the merchant caravans and had taught her how to identify someone’s accent— and how to hide hers, which meant she could travel without everyone knowing where she came from; better for them to assume she was newly from the north than the colony towns— and the voices were the same as in the Karonil border town she’d been asked to protect. Wherever she was, it wasn’t far from where she had been.
Parting some of the ferns revealed more, since just beyond the trees were distant hills, where there was evidence of the fire. It must have come close, but not touched these trees.
Moving to a sitting position caused the whole world to reel around her. Nausea forced her back to the ground. Footsteps came closer, and heavy boots appeared in her field of view.
“Do not throw up,” said the boots. It was the old woman from the fire. She was dressed the same, in thick clothes, den with belts and bags. Her gloves shone with magic, the kind that showed her long work with them. With a groan of effort, she sat down and made Kate look at her, peeling her eyelid back to open wider. She was even older than Kate had realized. Wrinkles and folds that had settled into pce so long ago you couldn’t even imagine the younger woman who had once been beneath them. Her eyes were bugged and her nose was broken in three different directions. The little hair she had was thinned and far up on her head, but still braided into a respectable pit.
“The fire,” Kate managed. The old woman just shook her head at her.
“Gone.” She snorted. “You can not take it. It would be stupid.”
“How?”
She sat there, just watching Kate for a while before answering.
“I borrowed time. That nice day you saw me in is next week. Sad that Dorrish and I will miss it. The fire too must be paid back. It will still have to burn, but in candles over years. Not all at once. The vilgers will tend to that— useful, really. No need of matches for a decade! Sad for the matchmaker, great for the candleman. That they both live to see their turning fortunes, they won’t be grateful for. They never are.”
Another pause. There were more voices in the distance, equally old and sure as the woman standing above her. “If you had stayed, it would have consumed you, eaten you up from the inside out. You would have burned, fire-boy.” It hurt more than usual, to be called a boy while she was lying at this woman’s feet, helpless. “Bad to follow your nature so much. You might have become another specter, like the big bats. I saw you with those. You too would have lost all form but pure magic. Be a beast of destruction.”
“I’m not-” she choked out.
“Not like the bats? Fine, greater, greater then. A king of destruction. Bent on turning the world to ash, huh?”
“-not a boy.” It was one of the first times she’d asserted it since leaving the Goddess. Tiny victories.
The old woman leaned in. This close up, her face was shadowed. Only her eyes reflected the light, two foggy stars that watched her. She was clearly waiting for Kate to say something else. Decre it all a joke. That was what people usually expected. She wouldn’t like it if Kate was trying to make a joke, but it would be a good time to go back on it. It was stupid anyway, why did she need to be telling this random old woman anything. Right when her resolve was about to break, the woman swung away from her.
“Oh. Fooled me.” She got back to her feet, nodding and looking over Kate’s body with a stiff expression. Then she turned to leave.
“Wait!” She caught the hem of the woman’s dress as she was about to step into the rain. “The vilge, the one past the creek. Did they survive?”
Kate watched the woman nod her head and slumped back down in relief. “You’re talking about Ferrier? Yes, it’s fine. That was you that protected it?”
“Yes,” she said, slowly.
“Good work. They refused our help. You must have fooled the old man too, because he was far less keen to work with women or witches. All of my girls tried to offer our protection and he said no.” She popped her knuckles while she talked, each one clicking back into pce with a loud snap. “You have the look of an old statue, not man nor woman. Were you born this way? It has been known to happen.”
There was a second where she considered going along with that story. That her body was just born wrong. Then, Kate told a bit of the truth, only a small part of it, but the truth.
“I was born a boy, but I’m not one. I knew as soon as I understood what it meant that I was supposed to be a girl.” A lie, paving over the years she spent dreading puberty without a clear reason why. It seemed so important to present herself as being certain to the old woman. As if anything less would not satisfy her. Kate continued, “I ran from home, and wandered for a long time. Until I found a pce, somewhere that helped me… There was a Goddess, deep in the forests, who gave me the chance to match my body to my soul. I begged for her help and she gave me water from a magic spring, in a tiny vial, and as long as I never drank the st drop, it would refill in the night, and I stopped looking more and more like a man every day, and started to change into a woman.”
The woman’s eyes were hard iron, driving stakes into her, pinning her down and examining her. “Down below as well?” The same question, with more polite phrasing, as what the merchants had kept asking her over and over.
“No.” It hurt to say it. “The Goddess, she could give me a girl’s puberty, but not a girl’s body.”
“You were fine with this? A half measure?” An underpinning of venom crept into her voice.
“I would have taken anything.” Who cared if she couldn’t fix that, when the rest of Kate could have looked correct. A wave of regret smmed her, that she had ever dared to want for more, and fallen from the Goddess’s grace.
“You look like a girl becoming a man, now.”
“I lost the vial. It was… taken from me.”
“Pshh, this is why you do not trust so called goddesses. Perhaps you could have been happy as a man, had this spirit not interfered with your growth. Perhaps.”
“I don’t know.” A grin spread over the woman’s face.
“Now, maybe, we can help each other. Do you know what the job of a witch is, young… dy?”
“No.” She hadn’t even known the woman was a witch. She didn’t have any of the typical signs of one, except for being old and ugly. Witches were rare, and in all her travels Kate had only heard rumors of them. They lived in castles, servants to Lords and Ladies. She’d sooner see the Lost Queen than a witch, sequestered as they were in their dungeons, cursing and beguiling anyone so hapless as to be thrown to them.
“They say all sorts of things about us,” she chuckled, almost as if she’d seen Kate’s thoughts. “And I will not deny any of them, but before anything else, it is a witch’s job to manage the flow of magic. We prevent it from becoming too saturated where it isn’t wanted, which in these times, is most pces. Your goddess sounds like a spirit born from one such dense gathering. Lucky, you then, to have found us. We are the experts in these matters which have shaped your body.” She held up a crooked finger. “If you allow us to study you, and you tell us about your pce of magic, then we will find a way to help you.”
“To help me stay a girl?” Even this in between state was better than becoming a man.
“If that is your goal, then we can try. I do remain unconvinced, however, that this is what you want truly. You will find that such magical influences can coerce one's thinking. If that is the case, I will help you remain a man. If it is not, I will do what I can to help you along with this half-womanhood.” It wasn’t, Kate thought, half anything, but she didn’t argue. If this woman was willing to help, then she would cooperate. This, at least, would be a productive indignity, unlike the st ones.
“Thank you.”
“Alright. Me and my fellows will be watching you, but we have apprentices, girls your age, and they need not know of your troubles. Simply behave yourself around them, and they do not need to know what you are or are not.” She left unsaid that Kate would be judged as a boy around girls, and not as one of them. “When you can stand, come and eat with us, fire-girl.” She barely stumbled over the “girl” this time.
To be mindful of her nausea, she waited another hour. More voices joined in with the ones outside the tent, young voices. The early morning haze had dissipated as the rain subsided, and the destruction became clearer to see. It was massive; the ndscape had been rendered down to just the bare earth. Rolling hills and the paths of old rivers, normally hidden by the cover of foliage, were exposed in charcoal colors. Rain was bleeding bck into the soil, making a fierce mud that a few messengers tried to walk through, their letter boxes held above their heads, no doubt den with miraculous or terrible news for distant friends and family.
It all looked alien. A nd totally devoid of life, made even greater by the stark line where the destruction ended and this forest began. Clearly, whatever the witches had done to put out the whole fire in one night had also protected this pce. There wasn’t enough magic here by itself to do so, not when even the ancient tree was easily destroyed.
When she was drawn out of the tent, it was by the smell of cooking meat. Kate stood on shaky legs, walked around the tarp, and looked out at the campsite. There were a dozen women sitting around two fire pits. A central rge one, burning logs the size of Kate’s torso, around which a group of five women sat, all of myriad ages, drinking from wooden or cy cups. A separate cookfire was set off to the side, around which the younger girls were gathered.
Two had long metal tongs and thick aprons, to protect them while they were plucking hot coals from the rger fire and pcing them into the cookfire. A third, a few years older than the rest and with her hair loose and down past her waist, was watching the pan and scraping at the meat to keep it from sticking. Three more sat in a triangle away from the rest, removing wooden ptes and utensils from a rge leather bag. Despite the rain, the area around the fires was totally dry. Whatever conversations they were having stopped as Kate approached. Everyone was looking at her.
There was another girl, not with the group, a ways back into the trees. This lone girl had short hair, shorter than Kate’s, and she had been cutting it regurly to keep it acceptably androgynous. She was dressed differently, too. The other group wore some variety of heavy dresses in dark colors and all wore rge boots, mirrors of the older witches, but this girl had on a rge thin coat over a thin, summer-y dress made from a light blue fabric. Her hands were busy brushing the donkey that the old woman had been riding the night before, who was pcid and unmoving under her touch.
The long haired girl with the pan cleared her throat, and Kate’s attention snapped back to her. She’d asked something, and seemed annoyed to be repeating herself, flicking the spatu in Kate’s direction.
“I said, do you want ham?” A fleck of fat dropped onto the ground at her feet. When Kate didn’t immediately answer, she looked to her friends with the tongs. “Is she stupid?”
“He got one of Rhea’s spells right to the face, Joanna,” answered the tongs-girl with the trio of braids and the scar on her upper lip. “You’d be out of it too.”
“Didn’t hold back, either,” chimed in the old woman, Rhea, from where she was sitting between two other old women, though they looked decades younger than Rhea herself.
Joanna raised her eyebrows. “Okay then… and what do you mean ‘he?’ That’s a girl, at least I thought.”
“Talks in his sleep, I heard him. That’s a boy,” said one of the girls organizing ptes.
“Do girls not talk in their sleep?”
“I wish that were true.”
“None of us talks in our sleep, though? …No!”
“Sorry, but it’s true.”
“I hoped we’d have a new girl.”
“She’s a girl,” said Rhea, after a long sigh. With that decration from Rhea, they thankfully stopped debating her gender. Some of the girls looked at her funny, studying her, but they must have found enough corroborating evidence to believe Rhea’s statement.
The ptes-girl muttered that Kate was “butt-ugly, then.” It’d have hurt if Kate didn’t agree. The way she looked now, she’d accept ugly, as long as she was an ugly girl.
“I’ll uh, have some ham, please,” she said, hoping to pull the subject back to more mundane topics. She also used the very top of her voice, which made her words come out quiet and slightly buzzy.
“Oh, she can talk! Eva, you need to be around boys more, because they don’t ask so nicely,” said the other tongs-girl with delight, the one with green eyes and hair paler than her skin. The cssical Wellose look. Joanna just nodded and flipped another piece of meat onto the pan from the bag at her side. “Sit down, sit down,” ushered the Wellosian girl, waving her tongs around until the other girl stopped her. “Cut her some bread,” she said to the ptes-girl, who like most of the women except Joanna— who was, judging by her name and her slightly darker skin, Hardic— were all local Karoni.
“Can you tell us your name?” asked Joanna, her tone even and slow since she had learned that Kate was apparently still being affected by Rhea’s magic. Only, she wasn’t. Whatever Rhea had done to make her sleep through the fire, it had worn off. If she was hesitant, it was because Kate hadn’t been around this many women since she was very young. Even the few who travelled with the merchant caravans kept to themselves, and associating with Kate was a good way to catch the stray attentions of the men who liked to torment her. A few of those girls had learned the hard way, and after that Kate tried not to make any friends.
Well, since they’d decided she was in fact a girl— barring Eva, who was obviously trying to hide her skepticism— then there was no reason not to tell them her name. Careful with her voice, which had been getting steadily deeper as the Goddess’s magic drained from her, she spoke again, managing to look Joanna in the eyes. “It’s Kate, or uh, Katherine.”
“Do you have a surname?” Joanna asked.
“I don’t,” said the green eyed girl. “I’m just Ida. No family, no hometown, not for me.”
Kate had, once, before the grove. She’d left that with her old name, buried and forgotten. “No, just Kate.”
Ida smiled wide, showing all her teeth. “Good to have you, just Kate.”
The other girls made their introductions one by one. The one with braids next to Ida was Phillipa. The two with Eva, who looked identical despite their repeated insistence that they weren’t reted, were Marta and Marsil. Kate thought that if it mattered so much that they not be assumed to be reted, that they could at least do their hair differently from the other. Marta shook her hand and held her gaze for several seconds, staring deeply into her eyes. Marsil watched Marta the whole time, and then did the same, but without the same intensity. No one introduced the girl with the donkey, they didn’t even act as if they noticed that she was there at all, except when she came to take a pte and some food, before blending back into the trees without a word.
The older women didn’t introduce themselves.
After the meat was done, and everyone had their ptes, Joanna brought around food. Bread with butter, cured meats crisped in the pan, and a rice porridge seasoned with some fresh herbs that Kate couldn’t pce. Ida and Phillipa talked eagerly while they ate, sitting down on either side of Kate, so close their legs were touching. They asked her a thousand questions that were easy to reply to, trivial things like her favorite foods and, after she told them how far she’d travelled, about her favorite pces. Joanna chimed in every so often with something that was harder to answer. Her family lived in Uzar, the old capital of Harduza, so as soon as she learned that Kate had been born there too, she started asking more about Kate’s family. She tried to answer in ways that made it seem hard to talk about, hoping that whatever had made Ida decide to drop her surname would keep the others from prying too deep. It wasn’t exactly nice to py off of what was probably some terrible trauma of Ida’s, but there wasn’t another way. Besides, her time at the grove might not have been traumatic— she didn’t count the nightmares as trauma— but besides Rhea’s insistence that she not tell anyone her secret, she didn’t want to talk about it with a group of girls she’d just met.
“Were you really in the fire?” asked Eva, from where she was curled around Marta and Marsil. She stared at Kate the whole time she was eating. “How did you not burn up?”
“I don’t burn.” Kate took her hand and pced it directly into the fire, turning it over and feeling only a small warmth. This was nothing compared to yesterday. “It feels warm, but not hot.”
“Your clothes don’t catch either?” asked Ida, reaching as far as she dared to tug Kate’s sleeve out of the fire.
“They will if I want them to, but anything close to my skin is safe.” There was a trick she could do, that she’d tried one other time, when she’d still believed that the caravans might be somewhere safe. If these were all witches, then they might appreciate it more than the merchant’s sons had. She met Ida’s eyes, and the other girl smiled at her. She’d caught on to what Kate was implying. “Ida, can I have your hand?”
“Absolutely!” she replied, and Kate interced their fingers. It took a small amount of her focus to adjust her perception of herself, what was safe from the fire, to include Ida’s arm as well. When she was sure she’d gotten it right, Kate moved back to the fire, and slowly waved her arm over it, not getting close to the actual fmes, but close enough that it would have started to burn Ida if she’d done it wrong.
They all watched her. The girls with fascination and the women with a shrewd and protective eye. Rhea was looking in her direction, but her eyes were unfocused. Concentrated on the magic, and not the spectacle. With their hands over the fire, Ida said, “It’s not even hot…” and plunged them both right into the heart of the fire, between the stacked logs. “Woah.” Phillipa stood up, and reached out over the fire, then pulled her hand back before she got within a foot of the fmes themselves.
The witch next to Rhea hummed with satisfaction and asked, speaking for the first time in a rough and reedy voice, “Does that require active concentration?”
“At the start, and only when I do it with other people. I don’t have to think about it at all when it’s just me.”
“Sounds like one of yours, then, Rhea.”
“I will take care of it,” answered Rhea, distracted.
With a gentle tug, Kate extracted their hands from the fire, and let go of Ida. Phillipa grabbed her arm before she could even say anything and turned it over, looking for any burns. “You shouldn’t trust strangers like that, idiot.”
“I trust a fellow no-st-name girl.”
“You shouldn’t. That’s the worst possible reason to trust someone,” added Joanna, who in their proper introduction, had called herself, “Joanna Octonenses, first daughter of the Uzar Octonenses, direct descendant of the great General Octoneshelli, who ended the Orchid War.”
“Sorry Ida, but I think you’ll be off of tongs duty from here on in,” said Marta.
“Kate won’t even need the apron, or the tongs,” said Marsil. They even spoke with the same rising tones.
“Is that all you can do?” asked Eva, who’d extracted herself from her tangle of Marta and Marsil.
“I can make fire too. When I travelled with the caravans, I tended their fires.”
“We usually alternate that chore.”
“It’s easy when you don’t need a starter and can’t burn yourself.”
“Show us! Make some fire.”
“Not here,” said Rhea, alert again. ”Go out to the rocks and do it there. A good and proper demonstration. I want to see how big you can go, fire-girl.”
