Origins

Tears misted Agatha’s eyes as she watched from the cover of the trees as Hugh and her grandson left. She wasn’t crying for them, but for Constance. As they disappeared into the distance, she turned and strode through the forest, following an unmarked path she knew so well. She had trodden it for many years.

The weight of her grief pressed down on her like a heavy yoke. She stumbled and felt old and bent for the first time in her life. Her beautiful Constance, her wonderful, clever, witty, intelligent daughter, was dead. She couldn’t believe that her pride and joy had gone, taken from her by that man!

She muttered under her breath as she clambered over fallen branches, followed animal tracks through the undergrowth, walked along the banks of a stream and climbed uphill.

She descended into the next valley, came to another tributary that fed fresh water from the mountains to the town, and stopped to catch her breath, looking down to where the Keep guarded the harbour.

Her mind kept returning to the Malet family and Stephen, the patriarch. He was the reason her daughter was dead. His refusal of Hugh’s request to marry Constance and his insistence on his wedding to the de Vitot bitch had condemned her.

“Well, we’ll see about that plan,” she muttered.

“What has that family driven me to? They’ve turned me into an old, wizened, bitter crone,” she muttered to herself as she wandered the forest. “They’ve made me into what they suspect I am, not just a herbalist and healer… Well, I will show them what I can do. I know they think the townsfolk are superstitious and backward. They are so high and mighty in their castle, and they think they’re untouchable, unaffected by their actions. Well, I’ll show them!” she cried.

Tears of grief, mixed with a bitter dose of anger, rolled down her cheeks. An offering to the gods, she thought. Take my tears and add their salty sting to the earth, the stream, the river, and the sea. Take them far and tell the world how I have been undone and Constance has been denied the life that she deserved.

“But what of the boy?” she asked, as she clambered up the other side of the valley. “What will become of him? Had I known what was happening in time, I could have helped her have a girl… After all, what use is a boy to me and my kind? Certainly, there are men who do some of what we do, but they can’t do everything that we can. They lack the element and spark that we have… the divine right of conceiving, growing, and giving birth to life. They will never be as we are. We are the sisterhood, and we are stronger than they are… Men know nothing. They only know how to kill and destroy, but we, we women, we know how to create life.”

She reached the crest of the hill, but instead of carrying on over into the next valley, she turned left and followed a rocky path towards the summit. The trees thinned until it was just a craggy ridge.

She struggled over the steepening terrain, going as fast as she could; she had so little time to prepare. After climbing for twenty minutes, she reached a flat patch of ground encircled by ten massive standing-stones.

She knew she couldn’t have been followed, but still glanced around to check that she wasn’t watched. Then she ducked down, squeezed herself between two of the largest monoliths, and disappeared.

What looked like a shadow between their bases was, in fact, a narrow gap. It was an opening in the rock that led, via carved worn steps, down to a series of caves tunnelled out many centuries ago by water. As the hill had risen, the water had dried up, but not before burrowing deep into the rock. Even she hadn’t explored all the systems of caverns, as they were too many, and when she came here, she came for a specific reason, not for idle exploration.

She reached the bottom of the steps and picked up a wooden torch. She struck a flint to light the sulphur and lime-soaked cloth. The light illuminated the inside of the first cavern, but she didn’t stop to admire the prehistoric cave paintings that lined the walls with pictures of hunters and huge hairy elephants but moved into the next and then the next cave, going deeper down into the mountain.

Finally, she came to a hole, dropped onto her stomach and pushed the torch ahead of her, as she pulled with her elbows and scrabbled with her toes to inch forward. Having squeezed through, she picked up the light again and stood upright in the centre of the beehive-shaped cave, its conical apex high in the shadows.

She placed the torch into a sconce to free her hands and looked around at walls lined with shelves. They had been carved out of the rock by hand and held scrolls, papers, books, jars, metal instruments, and baskets of fried plants, herbs, and spices. She still admired the work that had gone into the room. Yet again she wondered at the chain of women who had found, created, and equipped this space over many generations, and how its secrets had been passed down from mother to daughter…

The thought brought a lump to her throat, and she sobbed. The deep sound reverberated overhead as she crouched down on the cold hard floor, placed her head in her hands, and wept.

“Who will learn the secrets of this place now that she’s gone?” Agatha wailed.

She wasn’t sure how long she spent crouched down, consumed by her grief, but when she went to rise, her bones felt like they’d fused together, and the cold of the rock had set her joints. She creaked and groaned as she moved and had to use one of the lower shelves to pull herself up.

She stretched for a moment, then hobbled forward and collapsed onto a stool set at a small square table. She looked down at the wooden surface, sighed, and shook her head. There was work to do, to get ready. She didn’t have time to spare, and willed herself into action.

“Get on, you old fool,” she told herself. “Stop messing around. There will be time for grief later. You’ve got curses to write, and things to do.”

She rubbed her hands together to warm them, then stood and, rotating on the spot, surveyed the shelves as she tried to remember where she’d seen the scroll she needed.

Nodding, she took the stool, placed it in position, climbed up, stretched for one of the top shelves, and grabbed the end of the document.

Carefully returning to solid ground, scared that if she injured herself in the cave, it would be the end of her, she unrolled the parchment on the table and weighed it down with a couple of vials to stop it springing closed. She scraped the stool back to the table and sat. Then studied the text before her, looking for the particular section she needed.

She knew, because she’d been told by her mother, that some documents were copied from an ancient text - the Egyptian Book of the Dead - but they had been added to over the years, by her ancestors in a complicated web that linked her back, not only to the time of the Pharaohs, but to the Minoan, Mycenae, and Shang Dynasties, the Greeks, and the Romans.

Agatha was looking for the spell that sped the path of the dead - not to the afterlife, but to reincarnation. She wanted her Constance, and she knew how to do it. She traced across the page with her finger and her lips moved soundlessly as she read. Suddenly, she tapped on the words and smiled. She’d found what she was looking for.

She reached behind her and took a small square wooden tablet of evergreen oak from a pile on the lowest shelf and grabbed a stylus from the basket next to her. She reached up and held the metal tip in the heat of the torch to cleanse it, blew on it to cool it slightly, then pressed the sharp nib into her left wrist, piercing the skin and pricking a vein. When she pulled it away, a bead of blood glistened red on the surface of her tanned arm and caught the light as the flame flickered.

She dipped the stylus into her blood and, using it as ink, copied the relevant section of the spell onto the wooden surface. As she wrote, the blood was absorbed into the wood and left barely a trace. Agatha continued until she had completed the full text. Then she set the tablet to one side and returned the scroll to its place. When she’d finished, she sat and pressed her right hand against the wound and applied pressure to stop the bleeding.

Agatha knew that to make her spell work, she would have to place the tablet in Constance’s coffin and bury it with her. So, the previous evening she’d prepared and dressed Constance’s body, and hidden her before Hugh had come to the cottage. She planned to retrieve her precious daughter later, so she could bury her that night, in an unmarked grave just inside the wall of the cemetery.

She sighed and wiped away a tear with the back of her hand. Then reached down to the knapsack that she’d packed before she’d destroyed the cottage. It now contained all of her worldly possessions, and she’d carried it with her to the cave. She rummaged around inside and lifted out the emerald necklace. The jewel caught the torchlight and glowed.

Agatha placed it on the table and studied it for a moment. She was preparing herself, as she knew the magic she needed to perform next would be much darker, more dangerous, and more costly than mere drops of blood.