She fumbled with the door, opening it just wide enough to slip through before shutting it quickly to shield her father’s sickbed from the sunlight spilling through the cottage’s front windows.
Wren sighed again, at full volume this time. It had been a particularly unpleasant night, her father complaining of a headache so searing he was unable to keep down even the smallest spoonful of water. She had finally lulled him to sleep with a warm mustard-seed compress and the hint of a song, her voice low and husky from her own lack of sleep.
“I’d be dead without you, little bird,” her father had murmured, minutes before falling into a fitful slumber. Wren wished she could chalk the sentiment up to feverish exaggeration, but it was the truth. You must promise never to leave me, Wren, her father had said, the day after her mother died, for without you, I do not think I would survive. In the five years since, he’d never let her forget it.
Wren ran a hand through her hair, her fingers catching in the tangled plait, the same fiery-red shade as her mother’s. Most days she wanted to chop it all off, but that would break her father’s heart. And so she kept her hair, the weight of it always on her shoulders. A memory she always had to carry.
She quickly washed her face and hands, the cold water shocking her senses awake. She retied her hair into a neat braid and pulled on her boots, lacing them with quick efficiency. She rolled out the crick in her neck and stretched her hands to the ceiling. Her pale fingertips brushed the bottom of the roof’s wooden beam.
Wren was beginning to outgrow her life.
Each day she struggled to fold herself up into the small, perfect pieces the world demanded. The freckle-faced village girl who peddled eggs at market to support her family. The dutiful daughter who spent every waking moment nursing her perpetually ill father back to health. The quiet girl who was trying not to drown in an ocean of her own secrets.
For sleep was not the only thing Wren had sacrificed for her father.
Wren gathered two large baskets and lined their insides with soft, brightly colored cloth. A basket on each arm, she headed outside, around the corner of their small, thatched cottage toward the chicken coop. The air smelled of freshly clipped lavender, the scent wafting across the morning in a purple haze. Of course, it wasn’t actually lavender Wren was smelling—it was magic.
Ignore it, ignore it, ignore it.
She couldn’t. The magic swirled around her even as she turned her back, caressing her cheek, light as a feather, while she shooed her hens away from their nests. She gathered their small, warm bounty determinedly, wiping the eggs clean and tucking them carefully between the worn tea towels. The magic draped itself around her like a scarf. Wren swatted at the air, trying to dispel it. It wasn’t like she could do anything with the purple haze of magic. She wasn’t a witch.
She was a source.
For years Wren had believed that everyone saw the world the way she did. That other people could see magic’s shining colors twisting through the sky like ribbons, could recognize its pungent scent. Wren couldn’t imagine life without magic’s soft, soothing whisper, without being able to touch its pillowy lightness or taste its hint of sweetness, like a ripe berry ready to burst. It wasn’t until she was met with the blank stares of her playmates that Wren realized that there was something different about her. That no one else could see the swirling, colorful cloud of magic that always hung above her head.
She should have gone straight to the Witchlands. The Coven required any ordinary folk who believed they possessed power to enter the Witchwood, the border of enchanted trees surrounding their country. Were they to make it through the Wood to the Witchlands, they would train with the Coven and carve out a place for themselves in the world of magic. Should they refuse to come of their own accord, they would be tracked down and taken by force, never allowed to return to the world beyond the Wood.
Wren was supposed to be there. Sources were highly valued: They housed pure magic, magic witches could draw from in order to supplement their own power. The Coven would have taken her in without a moment’s hesitation and kept her well compensated for the rest of her life.
But magic had torn her family apart once before. During the Year of Darkness, when her parents were young and newly married, they’d had a child, a boy who was only days old when he caught the sickness cast by the dark witch Evangeline. Wren came along nearly twelve years later. By then her parents were old and haunted, grief-stricken and set in their fear and hatred of all things magic. When her mother died, her father became even more delicate.
And so Wren kept her true self hidden. She would run a hand through her braid, tugging loose the plait so her father wouldn’t notice that when the wind blew, not a single hair fell out of place. She forced herself to shiver in the winter, despite the fact that she was never cold, not even when she walked barefoot through the snow. The world bent toward her, like recognizing like. Magic recognizing magic.
Her father could never know. So Wren tried to ignore the way magic pulled at her. She chose not to go to the Witchlands to train, the way the Coven’s edict required. She kept her distance from any and all magic lest she be found out and punished for her defection.
Wren
