Chapter Text
Rovaniemi, Finland. 1675
Death was padding through the crisp, early spring snow in the far north of Europe when she felt it. A spark, flaring into life all the way on the other side of the world.
She paused, hand resting on her familiar’s soft white fur as the fox looked up at her with curious patience. A single shooting star trickled across the sky before them, a raindrop on glass. Death shivered, but not from the cold. The wind wrapped her green cloak around her legs and drove needles of loose snow against her skin, but she never felt the weather as any source of discomfort – it was just another element of everything living and moving as it ought to, in an unbroken cycle.
No. This was the sensation of something entirely new coming into being. Something she had never sensed before, that tugged at the very nature of her being and the veil between life and death.
Her eyes glistened in the starlight, while she strained as though she would somehow be able to hear what had changed in the world. Who had just joined her.
Someone interesting had just arrived. Someone that Lady Death knew she would have to meet.
Salem, Massachusetts
Evanora rested her damp forehead on her crossed arms, exhausted by her labours. Leaning forward from the birthing stool to rest her weight on the edge of the sturdy, well scrubbed table around which much of their cottage life revolved, she allowed the midwife to deal practically with her squalling daughter beneath her. Even through the haze her body was undoubtedly imposing to keep her conscious, she could sense that something was wrong.
“Is the babe healthy?” she asked Maeve, who she knew would give her a trustworthy answer, as the green witch of her coven.
“As an ox,” said Maeve, distractedly, as she bundled up a wriggling child still attached to an umbilical cord. “But your work is not yet done, my dear.” She gestured to where the cord still hung from Evanora, with her afterbirth yet to be delivered.
“You may hold her while I do the rest.”
Suddenly her tiny daughter was in her arms, regarding her with the alarm of the newly arrived and the most piercing blue eyes that Evanora had ever seen. She let out an involuntary cry as Maeve reached around to press firmly on the rise of her still rounded stomach, and she felt a gush of blood leave her.
“Nearly there, my lovely. Start her feeding and that will help.”
Evanora felt breathless as she clung to the child with one arm and the room began to swim before her. The babe felt too… heavy. Too present. As the small cries stilled and those alert eyes watched her mother, Evanora felt a shudder move through the protective runes she had used to ward the house. As though something tested them. From the inside.
“Someth… so… s’wrong,” she managed, as she collapsed heavily into Maeve’s arms and the world before her waking eyes went dark.
Salem, 18 years later
Agatha ran. Freed of her daily chores, and with enough sunlight left to gather some dogwood in the forest before supper, she practically floated along the path by the river with her hair and skirts streaming in her wake.
Her mother frequently scolded her for not wearing her hair neat enough, or minding the manner of her dress, and alerting the townsfolk that she was not like every other young woman her age – in search of a godly husband. Agatha banished the thought wildly, casting her arms wide as she crested a small hill and the first of the trees came into view.
She had come into her magic the previous winter, and still delighted at the feel of it sparking and humming through her veins. As the burnt ends of summer gave way to fall, life felt bolder and brighter now that she wasn’t confined to memorizing runes and studying plant names. She could feel the world alive around her, as the meadow seethed with millions of tiny heartbeats going about their work. She could sense the cold, slow, methodical lives of the frogs in the water below, and the bright, silver flashes of passing fish.
Catching her breath as she passed the border of the forest, she revelled in the stillness that seemed to accumulate there, as though time itself pooled in its depths. The short, sharp grasses pulled at her bare feet but she didn’t care – she wanted to sense the forest beneath her, feel the connection that thrummed between each of the trees, even as she tilted her head up towards the sky where their golding crowns were too shy to touch.
Humming a tune mildly to herself, she knelt and began gathering leaves and stems in her apron – regarding each of them for size and shape as she made selections that she hoped would please her mother. Something she rarely seemed to do.
Nothing in her senses alerted her to the strange woman’s presence, yet Agatha didn’t startle when a green hood entered her peripheral vision. The woman simply… was not and then she was. Her lithe form was partially obscured by the sage folds of her cloak, from which her dark brown hair cascaded across her shoulders. She was very beautiful. Perhaps preternaturally so. By Agatha’s standards? By any standards.
“Good afternoon,” Agatha said politely, taught as she had been that any woman confidently wandering the woods alone was more likely to be her kind than not.
“Hello,” the woman replied simply, head tilted to the side with a look of curiosity that reminded Agatha of her mother’s silky black cat, Ebony. As if to confirm her initial suspicions, the healthiest looking fox she had ever seen wound its way between the woman’s bare legs as she moved closer.
If that wasn’t a familiar, Agatha would eat her seldom worn cap.
When the stranger didn’t offer any further greeting or explanation for her presence, Agatha rose and offered one of the leaves from her pocket.
“Have you come for dogwood? This is the best patch for some miles around, though I had thought it was my secret…” she trailed off as the woman reached out and took the leaf from her, their fingers barely brushing. The spark of deep, old magic seared through Agatha like hot flame, wildly eclipsing any feeling she had ever gotten from using her own powers. Her nipples pebbled although the day was not cold, and she crossed her arms self-consciously over her chest, rubbing her bare toes anxiously together - half surprised there weren’t scorch marks where they met the ground.
This was power the young witch knew she was not yet trained enough to understand. Yet the woman was turning Agatha’s dogwood leaf over and over as if it was something brand new under the sun. Abruptly, she tucked it away and held a bare palm out towards Agatha, from which bloomed a perfect purple flower. Lilium. Agatha recognized it from her many hours of study, but she had never seen one so ornate or such a deep colour.
“For you,” the woman offered, simply. Her deep brown eyes met Agatha’s and they spoke of the forest and time and the sky at night, yet they were also kind and open. Trust me, the offering said. I am showing you who I am. Agatha’s breath caught in her throat. She didn’t even know it was possible in the craft to create something entirely out of nothing. This woman was surely more powerful than any green witch Agatha had ever heard of. Yet here she was, paying attention to her; Agatha, whom none in the coven wanted to mentor, nor saw any promise in. Who studied the only worn herbals she was permitted for hours on end, yet never seemed to be good enough.
She reached out hesitantly and accepted the flower, careful not to touch the stranger’s skin this time. The woman smiled, pleased, and sat down in one fluid movement – her fox climbing languidly into her lap as she began to pet it absent mindedly. Unsure of what else to do, Agatha gathered her skirts and sat down too.
“Thank you,” she gestured with the flower, even as she turned it over in her hands. It seemed impossibly delicate, each thin petal a fragile miracle.
“Have you ever made something like this? With the craft?” the woman asked. Agatha blushed and looked down to where she twisted her hands in her lap. “I can’t. That is to say, I’m not a green witch. Or at least… I don’t know yet. Mother says my skill will be revealed when I am old enough to be taught.”
This seemed to amuse the woman, which sent a bolt of shame down Agatha’s spine, followed by the inevitable trickle of anger, which she tried to temper. She knew that others her age were further along in their studies, and didn’t understand why she hadn’t been taught anything beyond common household spells and a handful of simple remedies. The coven treated her differently, and she had always assumed that it was because she showed less promise. But it frustrated her that she wasn’t permitted to study even harder to make up for it. Several sharp arguments with her mother had taught her that there was little use in bringing up the subject, and she would be schooled at the pace that Evanora saw fit.
“Would you like to practice now?” the woman asked.
Agatha peered up from behind the curtain of her hair in mild disbelief, tinged with suspicion. “You wish… to teach me? Why?” Then, realizing that sounded a little ill-mannered, she added, “Do you know my mother? My coven?”
“I have known of you, Agatha, since you were born. Come.” She gestured impatiently with the hand that wasn’t rubbing her fox’s ear.
Unable and frankly unwilling to resist the woman’s command, Agatha drew closer until their knees almost touched. At this proximity, she felt the totality of the woman’s power, humming beneath her skin. It felt similar to the way she had learned she could sense the thrum of all living things, but now as though they were all condensed into one. The very weight of the forest seemed to bend around the woman’s form, as though every individual blade of grass was aware of her in the way they were of the sun’s warmth. That this stranger knew her name seemed the least surprising thing about her.
The woman held out her hand expectantly, and Agatha made to offer hers without hesitation, then caught her wrist with her other hand – remembering the effects of their last contact. “May I ask your name, since you know mine?” If she was going to break the rules, and there was no doubt in her mind that she would accept what was being offered here, since nothing was forthcoming from her coven… she wanted at least some sense of what she was getting herself into.
“You may call me... Rio.”
The woman drew Agatha’s hand away from where she had it clasped to her chest, and she felt the same burning sensation of raw power surge through her again as the woman ran gentle fingers up her forearm. Noticing that she had flinched, Rio drew Agatha’s fingers to her lips and blew on them gently. A cool, calming sensation suffused through Agatha’s arm, though as she met Rio’s eyes she felt a new, burning tug deeper in her stomach. One that she had only ever felt before when a group of girls from the village had dared to go swimming in the lake, their skirts floating around them like clouds, and which, she surmised, had little to do with magic.
Rio just smiled at her, gently cupped Agatha’s hand in hers, and placed the dogwood leaf in it.
“Nature seeks balance. If you take life away, a new life will seek to take its place. To bring something new into being, the old must make way for it. So it is simplest to start by asking something already living to alter its nature. Ask this leaf to become a flower.”
Agatha turned her focus towards their joined hands. The few spells she had been taught required runes and words, study and practice. She had never ‘asked’ an object to do anything in her life. She stared at it intently for several moments. The leaf began to wilt slightly from the heat of her hand.
She could feel Rio’s mirth before she saw it, the other woman’s hand trembling slightly with laughter beneath hers. Trying vainly to school her expression, Agatha knew she must look foolishly indignant.
“I’m sorry, I don’t know how.”
Rio recovered herself and looked momentarily apologetic. “Let’s try a different approach. Agatha, tell me how you sense things. The world. It hurt you to touch me at first, didn’t it?”
Agatha nodded. “Like… like fire. But good? Like when I got my magic, but so much more than that.”
Rio smiled. With her eyes this time, Agatha noticed. “You can feel the lives around you, yes? Birds in the trees, animals in the field? Even other people?"
Agatha nodded. She had never told anyone about that aspect of her power, not even her mother.
"The cycle of all living things flows through me," Rio continued. "If I do not take, others cannot give. That is what you are sensing.”
Agatha stared back, wide eyed. Was she speaking with… the original green witch?
Rio met her stare levelly, one eyebrow raised. “Focus on the leaf, Agatha. It is recently picked, so it is still living. Single it out, and then ask it to be different. Hold the new vision in your mind.”
Agatha concentrated on where their hands met. She could feel the tiny frenzy of life that the leaf contained, all of its green growth storing the last of the summer’s energy. She asked it to change, to something smaller and more fragile. Something familiar to her, that she had held in her hands innumerable times since she was a small child.
“Yes, Agatha,” Rio’s tone was warm and triumphant. Agatha hadn’t realized she’d closed her eyes. When she opened them, a small, perfect daisy lay in her palm. She dropped her hand in shock, but Rio plucked the daisy from it and twirled the stem between her fingers, assessing it.
“Perfect.”
Rio reached out and tucked the daisy into Agatha’s wild hair. Agatha’s breath hitched as the other woman leaned in close to do so. Her heart rattled around beneath her ribs, drowning out any sensation of ebbing life that the small flower might still retain.
“You have power, Agatha,” Rio smiled at her, taking both her hands. “It is not being trained as it should be, but you are special.”
“Am I a green witch? Is that what this means?” Agatha asked.
Rio shook her head. “You are something so much more than that.”
---
Evanora was even more enraged than usual when her wayward daughter breezed through the door at dusk, with flowers in her hair and barely a handful of dogwood to show for herself.
“Discipline, Agatha. That’s what it takes to cultivate your powers. How do you expect to learn when you wander off for hours on end?”
There was a new defiance in her daughter’s eyes that she hadn’t often seen before, and didn’t like.
“Was there something more you were planning to teach me mother, or just another spell for cleaning the stable and banishing a headache?”
Evanora narrowed her eyes suspiciously, and strode over to grab her daughter’s hands. Turning them over carefully, she drew them close enough to scent the deeper magic that had touched them recently.
“What have you been doing out in that forest, girl?”
There was a dark note of warning in her voice, and Agatha’s newfound confidence visibly faltered. From the corner by the hearth, Ebony stretched made a low growling hiss in her throat, sensing the disapproval of her mistress.
“I… practising my runes. That is all, Mother." Agatha dropped her gaze. "And harvesting dogwood, look.” She pulled the remaining leaves out of her apron pocket and began to fan them out gently on the table. Evanora cast half an eye over them. The girl had a knack for picking good specimens. Uniform and a deep shade of green.
“You are always saying I must practice – I made sure there was no one in sight.”
Evanora Harkness was no fool. But she also knew her daughter to be innocent, thus far, of her true nature. She planned to keep things that way. If Agatha’s power could not be contained she would have to be bound, and Evanora preferred that as a very last resort at a time when witches needed to close ranks and protect each other more than ever before. Not with this new, beady eyed preacher in town.
What the child did not already know, no one in the coven would teach her. Evanora had seen to that. She absently patted the outline of the grimoire that she always kept on her person, lest wandering eyes get hold of it, and began seeing to supper while Agatha washed her hands.