Summary
Anise, a girl marked by strange, green-eyed magic, is traded by her sister to a sinister suitor. While being transported by trolls, she taps into forbidden, innate power hidden within a torn grimoire page. Refusing to be a pawn, Anise rejects her family’s dark legacy to embrace her own destiny.
A Story From The Children of Jade
The carriage smelled of fear and boar musk, and Anise had learned, somewhere in the long dark of the ride, that the two were not so different.
She did not weep. The weeping had emptied out of her somewhere past the third county, wrung dry against the jostle of wooden wheels over sod. Now she sat with her spine pressed to the rattling slats and counted the things she still owned. Her mother’s eyes, green as crushed sage, which were not really hers to own but a borrowing from a woman long gone. A nettle tunic that itched at the collar. And, sewn into the hem where no troll thought to look, the last torn vellum page of a grimoire her father believed he had taken from her.
One page. She had torn it free the night before they came for Thistle’s sister—before they came for her—folding it small as a moth’s wing while the house slept and the grackles muttered on the sill. One page was not a book. But a single seed is not a garden either, and her grandfather had taught her what seeds become.
They stopped where the world went wrong.
Anise felt it before the wheels ceased turning: the particular hush of a place that does not want witnesses. When the trolls hauled open the door, the night beyond was not the bruised indigo of home but something paler and sicker, a fog the color of curdled lamb’s wool draped over a moor of broken stone. Skeletal birches clawed at a moon that gave no comfort. Somewhere, a goat-sucking nightjar screeched and went still, as if it too had thought better of being heard.
This was the suitor’s country. The dark-haired villain who oozed honey and showed his marble teeth. Thistle had bargained her own sister into a wedding to spare herself a third trial, and Anise—green-eyed, ill-omened, the child of Jade the whispering women called her—Anise was the coin.
A path of muted glow led up the craggy rise to a manor that crouched like a tick on the hill. Sage light. Viridian. The color of her own eyes thrown back at her by the land itself, and she did not know whether that was a mockery or a welcome.
“Walk,” said the larger troll, and prodded her between the shoulders.
She walked.
Halfway up the moor, where the molasses dark pooled thickest between uprooted trees, Anise did the only defiant thing left to her. She stopped, and she knelt, and she pressed her palm flat to the wet moss as if to feel the heartbeat of a thing buried.
“Get up,” the troll grumbled.
“In a moment,” she said, and her voice did not shake, which surprised her more than it surprised him.
She did not have her mother’s book. But she had the page, and she had the words, and the words had always lived in her mouth more truly than in the ink. She had spoken them three times into a viridian orb and watched molten hounds turn their hungry eyes toward her and slammed the book before they could leap. She knew now—kneeling in the cold that reverberated up through her saturated body the way Thistle’s pitcher-water once had—that the hounds had never been hunting her at all.
They had been waiting for her.
She closed her eyes. She thought of the creased-faced hexe on the fringe of the first county, the one who had breathed a stolen glow into a dead infant’s plum-stained lips and asked nothing in return but the thanks owed to Hekate. She thought of how the mother had kissed his feet. She thought: I have never wanted to take. I have only ever wanted to give back what the world keeps stealing.
And she spoke the page.
The rustic tongue came rough and right, scraping up out of her like roots tearing free of frozen ground. Bestla. Verdant. Una. Three times, the way her grandfather swore by, the way the festival keeper chanted to the goddess of the bow. On the third repetition, the moss beneath her hand went warm.
The troll felt it and stepped back. “Witch,” he said, and it was not an insult but a prayer of fear, the same word the women at the well had pressed between their teeth all her life.
The glow did not mushroom this time. It bloomed.
From the place her palm had touched, a perfect orb of green welled up like spring water, and within it Anise saw not the hounds but the source the hounds had served—a vast and patient thing, mossy and antlered and old as the war the coven leader sang of, the one that had ended a thousand years ago when a humble man on a humble boar smote the queen and was remembered ever after as Barnabas Brown.
You have the fire of Barnabas, her grandfather had told her, and you will go further.
She had not believed him. She was beginning to.
The thing in the orb regarded her with reddish-orange eyes that did not salivate or lunge. It only looked, the way the yellow-eyed imp at the Festival of Torches had looked—the imp that had charged her on all fours, breath steaming back her raven locks, and then fallen to its knees and fled. Everyone had run that night. Everyone but Anise, who stood erect as a newly planted tree, because some buried part of her had known there was nothing in that creature that could touch her.
The curse of Seris, the townsfolk said. The child of a god. Ridiculous, she had always muttered.
She did not mutter it now.
“I am not for sale,” Anise told the orb, told the manor, told the dark-haired man waiting at the top of the hill with his castles and his enemies’ heads. “I am not a payment my sister gets to make. I am not the thing my father locked behind shuttered glass to keep the family name from chipping.”
The green light climbed her arm like ivy, like the tulip-and-quail vines of her grandfather’s ladder, and where it touched her, the cold could not follow.
“My mother gave me a book,” she said, softer now. “He thinks the book is the danger. He thinks the magic took her. But the magic is the only thing that ever told me the truth about myself.”
The troll ran.
She heard him go—heard the panicked crash of him down the moor, the same sound her father made fleeing a ghost of his own desires, the same sound the citizens of Prickly Hemlock made scattering from an imp. Fear, Anise was learning, was a kind of weather. It blew through the strong and the small alike, and the only ones it could not move were those who had already met the worst it had to offer and found, on the far side, that they were still standing.
She rose from the moss. Her knees were soaked, her tunic ruined, her sister’s voice still cold in her ears: It is for the best.
It was not for the best. But it would be for something, and the something would be hers.
Above her, the manor’s blue shutters slammed in a wind that smelled of birch and mugwort and allspice—the smell of home, impossibly, the smell of her father tugging her window shut to keep her safe from a forest she was always going to fall into anyway. Anise turned her green eyes up the hill toward the waiting light.
She thought of the hexe who asked for nothing. Of the unseen ones, banished past the village edge, brewing life for the sick and the desperate. The most important, she had always believed. The air that breathes life into Prickly Hemlock. Browns had one option, her family said. Become a full member. Hunt. Take. Profit from another’s misfortune until you wear green velvet to your end.
But Anise had torn one page from a book, and on it was written another way.
She did not climb toward the manor.
She turned, and walked down into the bog myrtle and the sundew, into the ruddy tannin waters where the Hadras cooled and the Moss men slept in their black alder thrones, into the whole forbidden green dark her father had spent his secrets trying to keep from her—and for the first time in her life, with no one’s permission and no one’s name but her own, Anise went toward the thing she wanted.
Behind her, the light in the high window guttered and went out.
It would not be the last her family saw of her.
But it would be the last time she answered to anyone’s destiny but her own.
Tags
Fantasy, Magic, Witchcraft, Coming of Age, Defiance, Self-discovery, Folklore, Supernatural, Empowerment
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