The next morning was quiet. The girl rose with the sun and made a feast of pastries, meat, and eggs. She wondered what Vaani was doing in town, but steeled herself against such curiosity. To follow her mother's one direction would lick the wounds of her scarred conscience. She rationalized her choices endlessly --- she was poised to gain more than she gave Vaani. She had obscured the presence of her mother. She did not share more of the townspeople than she was willing. Her mother's leaving had left an opening that felt like a sign. What she learned from the enchantress could help her protect her home. The capacity for witchcraft. More often than not.

She gathered her hatchet and went on a short walk to the grove of silver birch. Their smooth, speckled trunks hid soft wood, the best for whittling. She ran her hands over a few in search of a suitably large branch. As the mottled bark pressed back she closed her eyes to listen.

The humming was more difficult to find today. Vaani's magic had acted as a conduit. Without her, enveloped in wood, the girl was in her old world. The previous night was already beginning to haze like a dream.

She pressed her eyelids together. She could feel the dirt beneath her, the tree in front, the wind above. The air was dry and light. It hadn't rained in half a moon. Sweat pooled where her shirt met her hips. The forest was quiet.

She breathed. A finch trembled somewhere behind her. It chirped shyly then fluttered off. Below that, her own breathing. A deep inhale, as if preparing to submerge in water, a deep exhale, as if flattening her stomach to slip between trees.

There. A humming soft like rain on leaves. Warbling like the finch, higher in pitch than the alder. A harmony of many voices, neat and parallel, each in its place. The birches.

The girl whooped with success. The voices stopped.

"Sorry," she whispered. She lowered her forehead against the birch and bits of bark smeared against her skin. The magic was easier to find now --- an even, calming murmur. She smiled. She had always been taught to be silent in the woods, yet the woods had been singing. "Thank you for your bounty."

She bowed her head, looked nervously at her hatchet, and waited for some shift. Nothing. She aimed at the branch she desired and brought the blade down hard to reveal wood flesh light as flour. The girl listened. She feared a chorus of screams, of pain, of retribution, but there was no change. She finished hacking through the branch until it was clear.

The hum of the severed limb in her palm was far quieter --- it strained her to listen for it. When she ceased focusing all noise stopped. Her head felt like it had been split by the axe. As she massaged the pain away she noticed the shadows of the trees had moved far more than she'd thought. She hefted the branch with one arm and continued to rub at her temple with the other as she walked back.

At home, she sectioned the branch into neat, even lengths. She sat in the grass and took the thickest into her lap with her carving knife. Whittling had always come easy to her. She pressed the blade into the wood with her thumb, the first notch smooth like clay. She peeled pale strips like potato skins, short at first then long, longer.

She wanted to try the listening again but her head was pounding. She had exerted herself too widely in the birch grove. She paused for a few minutes to empty her mind and breathe. In. Out. Again. This time she focused only on the wood in her hands. She had made a rectangle the size of two fists. She quieted the world outside her lungs expanding, her thumbs moving, her knife carving through wood. It was there, yes, but it was different. As she carved, the wood seemed to buzz. Quietly, faintly, as if vibrating so tightly she couldn't feel it in her hands. It wanted something. She kept slicing but the feeling remained at the same pitch and rhythm, trilling with desire. Becoming smaller and smaller, unsatisfied.

She took breaks often, tried to cut one way or another, thicker or shallower, but there was no change in the wood's song. By the time she looked up from her project, the sky was darkening into a blush, the sun demure as it retreated beyond the edge of the world.

The girl held a small wooden finch in her palms. She had carved similar birds before, but she hadn't paid much attention to the shape. She was so focused on the noise. And yet it snapped beyond her focus. She could not find it again.

Famished, she slipped the carving in her pocket and ran inside for food to eat on her way to the alder. The day had escaped her.

"You're late," Vaani sang as Fig entered the clearing.

"I know," she panted. "I got caught up in the listening today."

"Oh?" This evening Vaani was draped in deep red silk. It melted like the sunset against the grass. "Do tell."

"There was a grove of many trees and I heard them all at once. My head fell open."

Vaani nodded. She had pooled all of her sleek, dark hair in a pattern of braids upon her head like a crown. "You should start slowly as you begin searching for magic," she advised. "Trees and other old, natural forces are a constant."

"So it's the magic I'm hearing? Not," Fig paused, thinking of her hatchet, "their voices? Their souls?"

"If the trees were speaking to you, you would know," Vaani laughed. "There are witches who specialize in such things. Perhaps you will in the future. But for now? We use the word 'hear' loosely as you learn to flex a sense that is new to you."

"I saw your magic yesterday. An orange cloud around your illusion in the market."

"Good."

"But I didn't see it around you in the alley," Fig continued. "You looked real, you felt real. But you disappeared. That was an illusion too, wasn't it?"

"When you make observations, never assume thoughtlessness from the observed," Vaani smiled. "This goes for magic, but also the peddler with three cups and a stone. Consider what you see as what you have been allowed to see."

"I don't understand." Fig frowned.

Vaani's eyes, darkened by red pigment, glittered. "Dazzle me."

"What?"

"Dazzle me," she repeated.

"What does that mean?"

"Whatever you think it means."

Fig took stock of her linen shorts, sweaty shirt, and mud-stained suede foot wrappings. Without her mother to brush her hair, medium brown like an acorn, she often left it to tangle. She thought of herself as many things --- strong, resourceful, focused --- but dazzling was not among them.

"Will you give me some fabric or something?" she asked.

Vaani pulled a heavily embroidered jacket from her bag.

"Stars, not that," Fig choked. "I'm too dirty to even be looking at that."

Vaani let out a stilted breath then impassively folded the jacket back into its trappings.

"What about," Fig shook out her legs. Wood shavings fell from the folds of her clothes. She turned her back to Vaani. "This?" She tucked her thumbs to make her arms appear long and locked her knees. She straightened every part of her to jut outwards like a starfish. When she whipped her head over her shoulder, she tried to mirror the kohl-darkened intensity of Vaani's stare.

Vaani sucked in her lips, trembled for a moment, then finally broke. She let out loud, guffawing laughter far from the demure tinkling Fig had heard before. She fell onto her forearms laughing, choking back only to wipe at tears.

Fig folded her arms and huffed. "I hope that is the laughter of sheer dazzlement."

"It is," Vaani hiccuped, recovering only to look up and set off a new fit of laughter. "You were amazing."

"Oh, shush," Fig scowled. "It's not like I live alone in the woods or anything."

"You're right," Vaani patted her wet lower lashes with bent fingers. "I'm sorry. I asked as something of a test to see if you have the makings of an enchantress. I don't believe that is the case."

"What makes an enchantress?"

Vaani centered herself, cheeks still flushed. "It varies widely based on who you ask, of course. You'll find that is the answer to many of your questions. It is not my intention to be vague, but rather to communicate the vastness of witchcraft."

Fig sat across from her in the grass.

"To me, enchantresses are magnetic," the witch continued. "Each has their own undeniable pull. The way they look, the way they speak, the way they hold themselves, the way they smell. Each meticulously curated. We take easily to magic of illusion, transformation, manipulation." With each word, Vaani waved her fingers and summoned a new appearance --- first her traveling clothes, then a velvet dress, then Fig's outfit with short, cropped hair. "There's much performance. Stages, courtrooms, throne rooms, they're all the same." With another wave, she was back to her red silk. Fig squinted at the fabric, questioning if it was real. Vaani grinned. "In sum, we're good with people. Let's say that."

Fig could count the number of people she'd spoken to between her hands. "I don't think I'm one of you."

"I don't think so either."

"If I'm not an enchantress, what kind of witch could I be?"

"That's not for me to say. It could take you months or even years to get in touch with your magic. It will come naturally to you, if it comes."

"If it comes?"

"Yes, if. Some people sense the magic around them but do not shape it. Others do not sense it, but shape it through force of will."

The words entered Fig's ears and dropped to the base of her stomach. "How long did it take you? To do something with your magic."

Vaani considered it. "I'm a bit of a different case. Remember you asked if I was born? I was. My mother is an enchantress and my father was a silk trader." She gestured at the fabric pooled beneath her, lacquered like a ladybug's wing. "One does not become so extravagant and tasteful without it in her blood." She fell again into the cadence of story. "They met quite far from here, in a land of vast sand. Legend says it was once a wide and despicable sea, but the water was evaporated by powerful magic. The Wastes are not for the faint of heart. My father's prices were exorbitant, including the fee of being the only trader brave enough to traverse the desert with his wares. My mother adored his silks. She would do anything," Vaani summoned a handsome couple intertwined in orange vapor, "even fall in love, for a deal."

"If you asked her, she would say it was a wise political move. By controlling the quality silk trade she amassed a wide network of power amongst her peers. But I know better than to listen to a honeyed tongue. She loved him fiercely."

"Loved?"

"Yes, he's passed." The vaporous couple dissipated. "Witches live longer than people, you know. Some say their unions are rare because they can be so painfully brief."

"I'm sorry," Fig said. She had never known her father. Though she did not know what it meant to have one and lose him, she understood the loss was meant to gape.

"Thank you. I had him for many years. It scared him, at first, to grow old while my mother and I hardened. It scared him also that I began shifting shape before I could speak," Vaani laughed. "He would say, 'Is that you in there?' and I would peel off some face or elaborate costume to surprise him. He said it to a few nobles around court before my mother forced him to stop. That's all to say, I found my magic early because of my environment." She gestured to the woods looming behind them. "You are on a path of your own."

Fig retreated into disappointment. She had no magical mother or courtroom of nobles to encourage her evolution. She had trees and animals and dirt. Her life with her mother was stagnant and safe in its stagnation. Yet she felt deeply, strongly, in the marrow of her insides, that she was meant to align with this power. That she must. The idea that this new world may open with Vaani's coming and shut with her going terrified her.

Vaani spent the rest of the evening asking innocuous questions about the townspeople. What crops they grew, how their market had evolved, how they governed themselves. Fig shared as much as she had observed. Much of it she was sure Vaani had gathered from conversations earlier in the day, but still the witch seemed curious and thoughtful.

When she was satisfied, she looked at Fig with pity. "I know you're frustrated. I wish I could help more."

"No," Fig said, strained. "You've changed my life. It is up to me to continue its changing."

"That's quite a witch-like thing to say." Vaani grinned. "Tomorrow, for our final night together, I will do my best to teach you some magic. Something simple, no dazzling required. Alright?"

Fig brightened. "Alright. Can I give you something?"

"A gift!" Vaani's aura glittered. "Why, I welcome no non sequitur as fondly as a gift."

Fig pulled the wooden finch from her pocket and handed it to her tutor. "It's nothing much."

"It's something very much." Vaani took the figure with care. Though she beamed as she accepted it, something in her felt far away.

Fig stood to leave and the witch waved her off, face oddly taut.

That night, Fig dreamed she was back on the beach. Her feet were ankle-deep in the sand and she could not raise them no matter how she strained. In front of her, the jade witch was up to her chin in the ocean. She turned to face her. Fig saw something in the carved sockets of her eyes.

The ocean rose. The jade witch opened her mouth to reveal a pale green tongue. Her lips were moving. She was trying to speak.

"I can't hear you!" Fig called, cupping her hands to her mouth. "Walk closer!"

She pulled her feet but could not move. The jade witch continued to speak. Seawater filled her mouth and came seeping out of her lips, crashing noisily at her nose and throat.

"Please, come to shore!" Fig called again. Salty wind whipped at her face.

The ocean rose and rose, waves whipped to foam by an oncoming storm. The sound of the water was deafening. Fig squinted through the wind to see a half moon of green, then just a slice. The jade enchantress's head dipped underwater once, twice, then disappeared.

Though the girl and her mother usually took turns keeping watch while the other bathed, the next day she washed in the river alone. While she scrubbed at herself she thought of where in the journey her mother could be, what she was eating, how she slept. The edge of the wood was four days away on foot. What kind of disturbance would drive her so far?

She took additional care to pull the dirt and wood dust from beneath her fingernails because that's what her mother would do. She scratched at grime behind her ears, her knees, at the hollow of her ankles. She twirled the wet waves of her hair around her fingers.

Her mother was comforted by preening. She took pride in it. They spent hours in the evening braiding and unbraiding, weaving patterns from colorful string to adorn their necks, wrists, ankles, making little charms of bones, bits of metal, feathers, insect carapaces. The girl never wore these things to town. They were private things. She made sure to dress plainly to visit the enchantress, though Vaani's slick beauty made her especially conscious of her bare limbs and the forest gunk atop them.

While she bathed, she practiced her listening. It was difficult to hear to the river below the scramble of its current over stones and fallen logs. Perhaps its magic was tied up in that --- the rush and crash, the bubbling foam and slippery vibration of fish. The girl did not need to be attuned to respect and fear its power.

When she was clean, she submerged her soiled clothes in the water. Though she searched, they had no voice she could decipher. She found the magic in living things most easily --- trees, plants, flowers, animals. Beneath that, far quieter, different kinds of stone or the detritus of the earth. She practiced focusing on one being at a time, on controlling her search so as not to overwhelm herself. She had slept in that morning, far later than she could ever remember doing. The listening tired her. It ate at her energy. She was sleepy even now.

She yawned as she made her way home, her wet clothes piled in a cattail basket on her back. She was caught off guard by a sudden squelch beneath her foot. Blood. A bright red sludge smeared over the suede of her shoe. She lifted it to reveal a small pool of viscera, broken flesh streaked with hair. Something had found its supper here, probably a fox. There was a trail of blood dotting away from her path. Whatever it had caught, it had dragged off.

She returned her focus to the mess beneath her. When she looked at it, really looked at it, it blurred. Her eyesight crossed and darkened. The redness began to chant in a deep, guttural voice. It grew louder. She fell to the ground and dirtied the newly clean skin of her knees. She pressed her palm into the pool of blood. It deepened in color with each moment it was exposed to air. The chanting pounded inside her head. It was isolated, somehow. Incomplete. There was something missing.

She cried out. Everything stopped.

Her ears rang in the silence as if in the space between wake and sleep. She raised her hands to see them better. She had smeared blood between them both.

Dazed, she stood and turned back to the river. Even the roar of rushing water could not pierce the silence. She watched herself wash her skin clean as if her body was someone else's. Felt none of it.

She took a different route back to her home. She crawled into bed. She slept.

When Fig woke, the sun was just starting to melt orange, then pink. Her hearing was back. She listened to a few deep breaths to be sure. She wiggled her fingers and toes as if to prove there was life in them. She had touched blood before. Hundreds of times. Though she was forbidden from the actual killing, she often helped to gut and debone their meat --- fish, rabbits, boar, deer. She had skinned all sorts of animals and cleaned their flesh. She had cut her own skin falling on sharp rocks in the river, missing a vegetable peel with her knife. She had never felt like what she had felt on her walk.

She was scared of it, of herself. Not the scene, or even her reaction, but how wrong it felt to stop. How disjointed she felt to have walked away, as if each of her limbs had popped out of their sockets. Vaani's magic was deceptive, surely, but clean. Elegant. Almost sparkling, soft to the touch. What had happened to her was foul. Perverse. She didn't want to be here, lying in a nest of skins, thinking of blood pooling in her palms. Missing the sound of it.

She shook herself out of bed and out of her mind. She began her final trip to the alder.

"Much of magic is deeply tied to your individual experience." Vaani was fired up this evening. "Attempting to mirror my glamour magic won't be of much use to you. Even two witches who produce the same result, like summoning a bit of light, likely approach the task in completely disparate ways."

"Really?" Fig forced herself to feel normal again. She was sitting here in their spot. She was meant to soak up as much knowledge as possible. She pushed the events of that morning from her mind.

"Yes. For example," Vaani twisted her wrist to produce a small, glowing orb. It shimmered as if there were multicolored dust beneath its surface. "This isn't really light at all. It's an illusion. A reproduction of something I have at home. The fact that it casts light is because I am creating each highlight and shadow, replicating a sensation from my memory." She closed her hand and the light disappeared. "A different kind of witch might produce light the way a firefly would, or create a bit of real fire. The way those apparitions are summoned and interact with the world around them is highly variable."

Fig held out her own hand and turned it back and forth. She shuddered.

"I can't prescribe you a path, but I can guide you through the feeling," Vaani said. "Is there anything you've done that has felt different in the past few days? Especially while you were feeling for magic?"

Fig felt sharply that what had happened with the blood was not to be shared. Vaani watched her expectantly. Her face was open and excited. She radiated a kind of shimmering light. There was none of that in what Fig had felt.

She thought instead of the wood finch's buzzing insistence from the day before.

"Yes, while I'm whittling. It sounds different than the wood does alone."

"Good!" Vaani clapped. "Do you have your supplies with you now?

Fig shook her head.

Vaani removed the wooden finch from her pocket and handed it back to the girl.

"We'll use my new friend to try and access it for now."

Fig took the bird gently. It felt familiar. The wood was roundest at the belly, sharpest at the tips of the beak and wings. It still smelled sweet like cut birch.

"Focus," Vaani whispered.

Fig closed her eyes. She ran her fingers over the finch's surface and confirmed all that she had with her eyes open. She brought it to her nose, even parted her lips to taste it with the tip of her tongue. Just wood. She brought her mind inward, then out through her palms. She tuned out Vaani's breathing, then her own. She listened.

Softer, much softer than before, she could hear the trembling. Trembling as if the wood had an inner core that shook against the walls of its surface.

"It's shaking. I can feel it shaking."

"Intriguing," Vaani mused. "What could you do to stop it?"

Fig opened one eye. "Stop it?"

"Make it stop shaking." Vaani leaned forward with interest. Here, close, Fig could see a dusting of freckles across her nose. She had faint lines at the edges of her eyes and across her forehead. Fig wondered how old she really was.

The enchantress raised her manicured brows. "I can tell you're not focusing."

"Sorry." Fig flushed and returned to the darkness inside her head. She pictured the bird there, wooden and lifeless. She found the sound of its trembling. In her mind, its wings shook until they broke away from its body. The wood parted and stiff, birch feathers began to flex with a series of snaps. They swung upwards, then down, smooth and no longer shaking. "It wants to open its wings. To fly."

"Let it fly."

Fig felt her thumbs move to the underside of each wing. A part of her, the part that existed in the darkness with the bird flapping, felt with utter sincerity that her nails would slide between the wood. That she would part the wings from the body like pulling crust from bread. She felt a distant pain but kept pushing.

"Fig. Fig, stop." Vaani's voice was quiet at first then loud, louder. She was shaking her.

Fig returned to herself and looked down. Her thumbs dug at the wood of the bird's wings but met resistance. She had pushed until her nails had bent and pulled from her skin. She was bleeding.

Vaani took the bird from her as soon as she released it. Her face blanched.

"I'm sorry," Fig whispered, unable to process what had happened. She bent her thumbs and watched with fear as blood rose from the tender skin at their tips. "It felt real."

Vaani reached for her with concern. "I---"

She paused. Her entire body tensed. In a flash of silver, a knife appeared at her throat and sliced.

Fig screamed as her mentor's eyes widened then flicked to the side. Instead of blood, orange mist fogged from the cut to her jugular. It flowed up and out of her body, dissolving skin and clothes, until only Fig's mother stood snarling and holding a knife to the air.

"Mother?" Fig choked, "What are you doing?"

Every muscle in her mother's legs pulsed. She let out controlled, quick breaths. She had run here. Her eyes narrowed to search the clearing with ravenous focus. Her arm snapped like a whip as she threw one, two, three slender daggers into the boughs of the alder. Shimmering images of Vaani parted into clouds of orange around the blades.

"Now, now." Another Vaani appeared and leaned against the alder's trunk. "Surely you can do better than that."

Fig's mother let out a guttural shout. She dove forward to plunge her knife between the enchantress's ribs. Vaani doubled over and choked a stream of blood onto the grass. Fig could feel herself screaming. Vaani lifted her head to Fig's mother, blood coating the edges of her teeth. Her body disappeared into fog from the bottom up, her lips last. "Try again."

Fig scrambled to her feet as her mother threw blade after blade at illusion after illusion. She couldn't move her head fast enough to keep up. The clearing became densely clouded with orange powder. Fig coughed and retched at the flavor, piercing and bitter like oversteeped tea. She could just make out the form of her mother in front of her, panting hard.

From the smoke, Vaani appeared a final time at her mother's side. An observer might think they were embracing. Her lips, glossy and dark, almost caressed the other woman's ear.

"Down," she whispered. Fig's mother's knees collapsed. Vaani pressed a silk slippered foot to her throat. Her ankles chimed with gold bangles. She pulled a jeweled cane from the draped sleeves of her dress, impossibly long. She used the end to push aside tangles of hair from the woman's eyes. "Who do we have here?"

Fig stepped forward, coughing. "Stop it! Both of you!"

Vaani ignored her. She studied the lines of Fig's mother's violet tattoos. Her eyes widened. "Fig, do you know this woman?"

"Who is Fig?" her mother spat. She strained to move but her limbs fell like lead.

"I can explain," Fig panted. She wasn't sure who she was talking to.

"Ah." Vaani blinked, her focus on Fig's mother. "You've disposed of it somehow. All of it. Doesn't that fill in some gaps? Of course your girl knows nothing." She looked up at Fig with pity. "I had hoped you weren't who I thought you might be."

Fig felt a chill like her bones had turned to ice. "Please, we can talk about this."

"I am afraid you are not the one who must talk."

Fig felt pressure at her wrists that pulled her back. Two illusory Vaanis held her, gentle but firm. Golden masks covered their faces. She could hear the pure magic of them, hazy and orange at the edges, singing.

Fig's mother seethed, "Free and fight me honestly, enchantress."

"Oh, you can call me Vaani. I'm not a criminal or a coward. So pathetic you didn't even give your girl a name."

"Do not speak of what you do not understand," Fig's mother growled.

"I understand loyalty, honor. You're a traitor, kinslayer. Your people trusted you. You're lower than dirt."

"Mother," Fig cried. "What is she talking about?"

Her mother's voice softened. "Don't listen to her, my heart. Don't listen to anything she's told you."

Vaani's expression was serious. No charm, no knowing grin. "Fig, we've shared three nights now. I have never once lied to you. Your mother has done something woeful. You are faultless. Leave now, and I will keep you out of it."

"There's been some mistake." Fig felt hot tears run down her face. "My mother barely leaves the house. She can't be who you think she is."

"My dear one," her mother strained, movement returning to her limbs. "Ignore this cretin. Go home. Wait for me there."

"Cretin!" Vaani screeched. Fig's mother pushed her ankle away and rolled free. She leapt to her feet and lunged at the witch with her knife.

"No, no, no," Fig repeated, her hands to her ears. The bitter clouds of Vaani's magic made her nauseous. "Stop it! Stop it!"

"Go!" both women screamed as they danced around the clearing, dodging each other's blows. Fig's tears welled up and blocked her vision. She did not look ahead as she turned and ran.