If Ever I Would Leave You

If Ever I Would Leave You by Katherine Heath Shaeffer

3500 words, ~17 minutes reading time
Issue 6 (Fall 2024)

Spring

New growth is just pushing its bright green heads out of the earth when I first pad my way to you. You spit on your witchfire match, startled the call works so quickly, and you kneel down to gather me up in your skirt. I am a bundle of fluff and dress-hook claws; you are a tangle of long silky hair and blunt nails that scritch scritch scritch all down my back, with a little extra just above the tail.

It is all wonder and play-hunts, with us. Your power exploding into firefly motes or raining down on you in fantasy costumes of silver starlight. Will you grow into a princess? A warrior? A bride? A bear? Sometimes you give yourself stripes and whiskers, a tail like mine, and we chase each other in timeless circles in the clearing by the river, past a stretch of wood that hides our play from the rest of your village. I am all yours, and you are not ready to share me.

You give me gifts: sachets of pungent herbs, braided threads from your mother’s sewing basket, gulps of your power suspended in drops of blood.

I give you gifts: still-twitching mice, infant rabbits, and an open channel for your spellcasting. For your firefly-bursts and your ghostly shapes that flutter like linens on the line. For the stripes and tail and claws of you, fun fun fun games of pounce and bat and nuzzle and release.

You lose me the same way most new magi lose their companions. Kitten-untrained, bursting with joy that you can force starlight through your hands, that you can braid and unbraid the root systems below the earth, you cast your spells with too much force and too quickly, cascading them into wondrous chains.

I feel the wonder with you, love it with you, purring as your power surges through me, butterfly-chase leaping after sparks of flickering magic. The trees bud into sun-catching leaves as your power grows within you, sparks into stars. And as your focus, your helper, your guide, I gambol with pride as I pull my witch’s dreams into reality.

I do not live long. Most first familiars do not live long.

You try to save me – what witch wouldn’t? But by the time you see I’m fading, I am too worn from all your spells, wrung out like an old rag.

It is a hard lesson learned, but every witch has to learn it.

Summer

I wait for you in the Stony Mountains, keeping watch for you in long, loping sweeps of the peaks below, practicing my killing strike against other birds on the wing, honing my agility. This time, I will be strong for you.

You come with an old man and a young woman. The old man is gray-grizzled and bear-large, with muscles like knotted oak. The young woman is as fresh-faced as an apple, and she glances at the man for her every move. Even from above, I can tell that this is not fear, but kindness. You act as a guide to them both, with unerring poise, as if you belong with the cliffs that surround you. You are taller than you were before, your hair darker, with a new streak of steel in it.

But I still know you.

Of course I know you. The power inside you is even stronger now, like a cluster of stars. I am stronger too, and I am ready.

When you make the witchfire, sending up your first hesitant summons in years upon years, I swoop from the sky to land primly on your shoulder, where your leathers are thickest. I do not wish to pierce you with my talons, though I have missed you.

Your companions laugh at your owl-blinking expression, teasing, friendly, trying to crack your stone. Dazed, you bring out bits of dried meat and feed them to me. I am a good hunter, but I accept your offering with grace, sealing our bargain.

The days are hot but the nights in the mountains are cold. I join you around your campfires, sometimes with offerings of my own – rabbit, squirrel – and I learn about your journey. The gray-grizzled one is an old palace guardsman, the apple-fresh girl, the rightful queen of this nation. The old warrior snuck her from the palace in her infancy, exchanging her for another child to be sacrificed in her place. Killed but not eaten: a waste of tender flesh.

And now, on the cusp of the true queen’s adulthood, he wishes to roust the usurping regime and return his mistress to the throne. And for herself, she wishes to make her father proud.

And for yourself, you wish for pay.

There is a legend of a flower that grows in the tall cliffs of the Stony Mountains, and when the rightful ruler of this land plucks this flower, its roots pull up the King’s Stone. This stone glows with such brilliance that it will fill the hearts of the true queen’s followers with courage while blinding her enemies.

The sitting king has not tried to find the Stone, says the guard, because the sitting king is not legitimate. Were he to find the flower and pluck it, he would pull up only empty roots.

The little deposed queen smiles quiet dimpled smiles as her father talks of this magic rock. She does not believe in it, but she would do anything he asks.

You do believe in it. More importantly, you believe the flower whose roots pull up the King’s Stone is the most potent potion ingredient in the world. The guard and his little queen can keep their rock, so long as they give you the flower.

Eventually, you start to scratch my feathers with your deliberate hands, reaching out with hesitant affection. The hesitance is new, but the affection is the same as it was, once, when you scritch-scritched into my fur. I nip at you gently. 

I scour mountaintops for your flower, though it goes against my nature to hunt out something so still and bloodless. You ride behind my eyes to guide me.

When I spy figures in the current king’s livery beginning their own climb into these mountains, we know we have entered into a race: will we find the King’s Stone flower first, or will they find us?

By the time they figure out what I am and what I am doing for you, I am already circling the flower in low, languorous loops, showing you its location through my eyes. Here, here it is, a tiny thing with ruffled leaves and drooping white petals, growing in a patch of weeds a few feet down a steep cliffside. It will be difficult, but not impossible, for our little queen to reach.

The king’s men shoot me through too late. I spiral downward, bursting with pride as the pain blossoms from the arrow’s shaft, and though it is your enemies who find my fallen, failing body before you can reach me, I know I have done you well.

Fall

The little queen pulls the flower. Gripped in its roots is the King’s Stone – now the Queen’s Stone. She wraps her fingers around it, and you think you might pinpoint the very moment she goes from apple-fresh youth to the rightful queen of your nation. Her grizzled guard is already on his knees, as she transforms from daughter to queen. The mantle of her office falls over her, shading her eyes with understanding. Delicately, she unwraps the tangled roots of the flower from the Queen’s Stone and passes the flower to you, bowing in solemn thanks for your loss. You take it in both hands, tearlessly cradling it.

The touch of the roots shocks your magic like lightning, and you feel a tug from a nearby cave.

You did not know there was a cave. You follow the tug to find an egg, the last in an abandoned clutch. The shells of its hatched siblings lie around it like broken shards of dinner plate.  

I do not have to wait for you this time.

You wreathe the egg with witchfire and I answer with a peck, peck from inside the shell. My first sight is a spiderweb-etching of your familiar light. Surrounding me. Reminding me. I must meet you again. Peck, peck. Peck, crack. I hatch into the warmth of your flames, our contract sealing with my first breath in the open air.

You brush my damp fur and hold my talons, trace the feathers of my wings, marveling at the size of me. How small I am now. How much I will grow.

I nip at you in an echo of what I was before, and you swat at me. Because I will grow. I understand. I learn new things. No nipping with this beak. I can learn new things for you.

We begin the long journey out of the Stony Mountains.  I grow to the height of your knees. I cannot fly and I cannot hunt. You hunt for me and hold me against you through nights that grow ever colder. At first, you have to carry me over the treacherous rocks, but by the time we leave the mountains, I can walk beside you, headbutting you at your hip. Fallen leaves crunch under my taloned feet.

We follow the little queen and her guard and her Stone to the hidden pockets of resistance, and she shows the gleaming proof of her power. Day after night after day, at your command, I become more deadly with my beak, talons, and paws. I bring meat to you, small prey and then larger prey, and you scratch the place where my wing feathers meet my fur. I bring you little birds and rabbits, then foxes and a baby manticore. 

I grow until I reach your waist. I am learning to hop and glide. The little queen is growing, too, becoming broader of shoulder and firmer of step, her jaw setting into certainty. You get more steel in your hair.

You do not use the Queen’s Stone flower. It is not yet time.

News of the true queen carries. We gather enough power to face the usurpers in the palace. I reach your shoulder now, and I have learned to fly. You have a saddle made for me, and armor forged in witchfire. I look very handsome.

We go into battle with your little queen, who is no longer little. Her Queen’s Stone gleams from a crown of white gold, filling her army with courage and flashing blindness into the eyes of the sitting king and his supporters, who have waned fewer and fewer as our queen grows in strength.

We soar above the battle, you and I, shrouded in your power and raining death upon your enemies. Vines of lightning crackle from your hands and wrap around the soldiers below. Some are stabbed by thorns of light. Some are incinerated. Some are immobilized but not hurt, protected by magical armor. You spur me down to them and I snatch them up in my talons. I tear them apart and eat the tenderest chunks. I drop the rest back to their fellows on the battlefield.

Soon the true queen’s place is secured, the queendom stable.

But there will always be some pockets of resistance. Minor rebellions, incursions, those who doubt the evidence of the Queen’s Stone. And the queen, who more and more must stay seated on her throne, must send her warrior mage in her stead.

The queen's enemies are the resisters now, as she was then. Some surrender, agreeing to an audience with the queen, where they stare into her Stone until they bend at the knee. The ones we cannot capture, we kill.

You do not use the Queen’s Stone flower, though it would shorten some battles for us. You have scried a greater need for it in your future.

So many happy years we spend, always together, death in the sky!  Sometimes I worry you are not as happy as I am, so I nuzzle your armored breast and tug at your swaying braid, which has gone all steel, now. You clean and oil my feathers, brush out my fur, and it seems to make you feel better.

My muscles and fur, speed and armor, protect me from most harm, while your magic and quick wit protect me from the rest.

Until one day, it is not enough.

Our enemies bring magic-absorbing bolts and shoot them from mounted crossbows. A single bolt hits true, piercing through armor and sinew. Though you cannot know it, my thoughts flash to the arrow that downed me in the Stony Mountains. Do you remember the same thing? Do you remember watching me fall, from behind my own eyes?

This bolt does not make me fall. I twist to pull it from my side, tossing it up and snapping it in two with my beak. The enemy surrenders instantly after that. I make a show of staying in the air until they are rounded up and I am hidden inside our tent. There, I collapse, unable to fly or stand. You cannot stabilize the wound with your healing magic, for the wound, like the weapon, is immune to magical power.

You try poultices and wraps, yet the wound festers underneath them. The skin around the wound is hot. I am hot. Heat radiates from the lance of pain in my side and spreads throughout the rest of me. It rolls off my fur and feathers, warming you in terrible waves. And there is the bad-meat smell. I try to stand, once you have wrapped me, stuffed my wound. I try to hide the odour under my wing. But you command me to rest, and it hurts to move my wing. We have both seen many battles, you and I together, death in the air. And on the ground, we have seen and smelled many injuries.

Our medic died in the fight, but our enemy’s medic is now our prisoner. You threaten to take his hands if he cannot heal me. He says he cannot, with the rot spreading so far so quickly.

My lion-chest flutters as rapidly as a small bird’s.

You take three of his fingers, slicing them off cleanly with your magic. He repeats that he cannot help me. You give his fingers back. He kneels at your feet and thanks you for your mercy. And in a trembling voice, he tells you there is one thing you can do for me. One last thing.

You recognize the signs of infection worsening. So do I. We know what will come if you do nothing.

You hold the Queen’s Stone flower in your hand. It is the most powerful magical ingredient in the world. Might it even be powerful enough to combat the weapon’s immunity? You do not know. How could you justify using it now, when you are not even certain it would work? When you have scried an awful fate in our Queendom’s future, and you know that only the Queen’s Stone flower will be able to save you then.

With your magic, you take the medic’s hands, replacing them with smoky portals to nothing at the ends of his wrists. You say that if he saves me, you will give him back his hands. He raises his smoky portal-stumps to you in surrender and repeats that he cannot. He repeats that there is one last thing you can do for me, if all your magic, oh sorceress, is not enough.

You warn him to leave our tent before you take his head.

And then, you and I are alone together.

Coolly, evenly, you explain what is about to happen, wondering if I can understand. You have your men dismantle the tent around us so that I can see the sky.

With your magic – star-cluster grown bright and fierce – you can do it quickly, easily. And before I know what is happening –

Winter

I find you in a cabin at the northern edge of our queen’s empire, in a broad meadow next to the Witchwoods. The kind of cabin a queen might grant an old, loyal sorceress who saved her queendom from famine, plague, and enemy armies, and then turned down a place at court by her queen’s side. The grass and flowers of the meadow are painted over by a layer of frost that crunches under my aching paws. I limp toward your door to scrabble-claw at it until you open up for me.

The door rips open and I flinch at the sudden movement, tail between my legs.

You look down, steel hair long and tangled now, as much as it was when I first met you, and I tremble under the weight of your disappointment. You rode your last familiar into battle on the air, and now here comes this cringing, scarred-nose thing, made of hurt and whimpers.

The inside spills over with smells of fire and food and you. There is witchfire in your cabin, yes, but you are using it only to warm your hearth. You did not summon me.

You close the door in my nose and I whine. You answer with the sound of locks and bolts sliding to.

I whimper, scratch at doors and windows until I tire, and I tuck my bruised body against your front entryway, getting what protection I can from the cold while the you-smell seeps out from beneath the door, taunting me. As night falls, the wind picks up and the stars cloud over, and I curl into as tight a ball as I can. I drift not into a sleep, but into a haze.

Muffled curses rouse me, and a series of thump thud clicks, and you let me inside to your witchfire hearth.

I lift my face to you, offering my soul up in a clumsy, tongue-lolling smile. My half of our contract, ready to seal. You do not meet my gaze.

But even so, you throw me your scraps after dinner and let me use the witchfire to get warm.

The next day, I follow you from task to simple task: prepping meals, adding logs to your witchfire. You have taken up the sewing you hated as a girl, to keep your fingers nimble and mend your clothes.

You wash the fleas off me and use your magic to purge the parasites and heal the mange, but I am worse off than you think at first. Some old bad treatment, magical or mundane, changed me in my core, and I am endlessly leaving messes, dirtying your front hall, your bedroom, the hearth. Scowling, you put down old towels and blankets, and you launder them while scowling more. You take me out eight times a day into the crackling winter sunshine, just to keep down the messes as much as you can.

I think it is eight times a day more than you were leaving your cabin before.

While you mend by the fire, you weave your threads of power into blankets of protection by your feet, then pretend not to notice as I settle myself under them, flopping a warm ear over your cold toes.

At first, when you take me out, it’s all business, but then one day, seemingly on a whim, you waft a glowing firefly-mote past me. I stumble after it with yaps of pure joy. You give me more firefly-motes to chase that day, sometimes bursts of them, and I circle-hop after the familiar sparks, hobbling in as close to a run as I can.

Your star-cluster of magic starts out stiff and crusted over, but slowly, it cracks and limbers.

You start to comb out your tangled steel hair.

You make a nest of blankets beside you in your bed, and we live in one another’s warmth.

In my other lives, I never cared much for names. I was a tone of voice, a gesture, an artless grin or a quirked smile. Last time, you called me from the air with whistles that cut through the noise of clashing weapons on the field. But now, when you give me a word that means me, I hold it as precious as a Queen’s Stone.

It is not a very kind name. Mutt, you throw at me, the same careless way you throw me scraps from your plate. Meaning I am not purebred – and I am not – meaning, I think, that I am a hodgepodge of things.

I cannot tell you how much I love my name. I thump my tail whenever you snap it at me and you shake your head, wishing I would be offended by your contempt.

Never.

Our bond, this time, forms by inches, by stitches, sealing us together with a ragged seam. But form it does. And the seasons change and change.

The last time I meet you, I cloak your sleeping form with my wings, nip gently at your fingers, and lap drool onto your face, tail thumping love.

I knead my dress-hook claws into your lap and purr you through your dreams, to follow after.