Two by Two by Two by Celia Winter
3600 words, ~18 minutes reading time
Issue 6 (Fall 2024)
Content Warning: Child Grooming, Gaslighting, Emotional Abuse, Death
Enid disappeared when Manon was twelve years old.
“The witch’s life is not for her,” Gwendolyn told Manon over breakfast, her hand steady as she poured a stream of tea into her cup. “She’s gone back to her mother.”
Manon frowned.
Enid was four years her elder and so close to marrying the dead. She never once seemed like she didn’t wish to be a witch. She loved magic, patiently helping the younger Manon learn the ways of the dead, the ways of the living, the ways of the undead, the ways of the unliving. There was so much weft to all the definitions that Manon had trouble keeping them straight.
“The secret is: you can’t,” Enid informed her when Manon was nearly in tears over it. Enid’s bright green eyes twinkled kindly in a way that soothed Manon whenever she felt particularly stupid. “Straightness is overrated anyway. Life is full of magic, and magic defies rigid definition.”
Even though magic defied rigid definition, Enid chose the unliving life—to return to her mother’s house of rules and expectations, of starched crinolines and marrying the living to make more life. Enid had always seemed excited to plumb the secret depths of life, death, and undeath; the return to unliving mundanity seemed contrary to everything that inspired her. Maybe she’d kept secrets from Manon, left her behind, in the dark, alone.
“There, there, dear,” Gwendolyn said, patting her arm as a tear dripped down Manon’s cheek. “Loss is hard, but chin up.” Manon lifted her head obediently, trying to keep her lip from trembling. “You will walk the path of the living and the dead, and you will marry the dead, even if Enid did not. You will be a witch in your own right.”
Manon swallowed. She would become a witch. Maybe Enid had something to go back to, but she didn’t; the sea had taken everything from her, and Manon did not want an unliving life.
She squared her shoulders and Gwendolyn’s face softened into an understanding smile. She had taken Manon in, given Manon everything. She knew the fear in the depths of Manon’s heart and reached across the breakfast table to take Manon’s hand in hers. “You still have me, and you will one day know all the power of the sea.”
The dreams began a week after Enid left.
For two weeks, Manon had the sensation of waking up lost, confused, and lonely.
For two months after that, she woke cold, afraid, and uncomfortably dry.
For two years that followed, Manon dreamed of the echoing call of crows, the exact moment the sun set behind the horizon, and a forest full of dead pine trees.
And then, at fourteen, Manon woke with the distinct sensation that she’d heard a voice.
Manon.
Manon, like the crashing of waves on the rainy night when the ocean washed her parents’ house away.
Manon, can you hear me?
Manon, like the whispering of the breeze over a calm sea as though that storm had never happened at all.
Manon?
“The thing about voices,” Gwendolyn told her after Manon explained what she was hearing, “is that just because something has a voice doesn’t mean it has anything to say. It could be singing or humming.”
“It’s not singing,” Manon told her. Gwendolyn pushed her half-moon spectacles further up her nose and adjusted the cushion on her overstuffed armchair. It was raining, and Gwendolyn’s joints always got stiff when it rained. “It’s asking if I can hear it.”
“It could be lying to you. Trying to lure you away from your studies. Power likes to lure—it’s a way of controlling, and you are at an impressionable age. For example,” Gwendolyn sat up straighter and Manon did too; when Gwendolyn imparted knowledge, she liked Manon’s full attention, and straightening the curves of her back was the easiest way to show it. “The dead know our power. I have long suspected that in their own realms, we augment them as they augment us. You have the power of the sea in you—austere and brutal. What might some dead soul gain from claiming you?”
Manon hadn’t thought of that and bit her lip nervously.
“A suspicion, not a fact. I cannot prove it,” Gwendolyn said, her tone gentler. “But a suspicion with merit after a lifetime of observation.”
Enid would have known, even without the lifetime of observation. Enid always inherently understood the things Gwendolyn researched so meticulously.
“Ours is a shadowy life,” Gwendolyn continued, so used to Manon’s obeisance that she didn’t question her silence. “There are witches of the wind who will throw their voices across continents. They might see your power,” she gave Manon a proud smile, “and try to lure you to their teachings—or worse.”
“Worse?” Manon asked. She did not like the sound of that.
Gwendolyn sniffed. “One who understands the criss-crossing of the living and the dead makes for a fine dead bride. To take you from me, kill you, and marry you—” A chill climbed Manon’s straightened spine. “I dread that most of all.” Gwendolyn closed her eyes, grief etched upon her face. “I do not wish to lose you like Enid.”
“You won’t lose me,” Manon promised her. Her heart hammered like a storm-tossed ocean, but she wasn’t drowning. She wasn’t dying.
Gwendolyn hummed, looking at Manon over the tops of her lenses. No words, yet she said so much with that one little noise, and Manon decided that she wasn’t going to bring it up again.
Manon, can you hear me?
Two weeks of that question became two months dreaming of a figure dressed in white. A ghost, it seemed.
Dreams of the living were clear, the lines cut straight through even the wildest notions that the sleeping mind put forth. The dead though—the dead were full of bends and twists, their edges were fluid, hazy, and indefinite like the tide which never crashed the same way twice. But the ghost wore a long white veil that obscured her face whenever she called to Manon.
My bride? Manon wondered. She was supposed to marry the dead, after all. That was the final initiating rite to becoming a witch. Curious anticipation always filled her when she thought about it—sharing magic with another soul, power amplifying to send tingles across her skin, vibrations throughout her body like a cat’s purr. Gwendolyn’s lessons had always been more clinical: life and death fasting hands, binding the power of thresholds. Where land met sea, where forest met field, where sleeping met waking—those were the most powerful places of all. Was this to be her bride? Her ghost forevermore?
Two years of the ghost until one night—
“Manon, can you hear me?”
The whisper didn’t come when she slept, but rather in those twilight moments between sleeping and waking, when the wind could carry you to the stars and back. It wasn’t a whisper in her mind, it was a whisper in her ear.
And the whisper wasn’t just any ghost’s—it was Enid’s.
“What happened?” Manon asked the next night when the rolling waves of dreams tried to break against the last remnants of her wakefulness.
“I don’t have the time to tell you,” Enid replied. She rippled like flower petals in the breeze, washing in and out of the threshold. “You have to come to me. That’s the only place it’s safe.”
How she had missed her. It was lonely with only Manon and Gwendolyn in the house. “Where are you? I’ll come right away.”
“I don’t know,” Enid said, her voice echoing and empty.
“Then how will I know where to go?” Manon asked.
“I don’t know.” Then, quieter, like a shout reverberating from forest trees, “I don’t know.”
She spent her days digging through Enid’s old room, trying to find a clue of some sort. The space was covered in a thin layer of dust, neglected and disused in the lack of an occupant. Gwendolyn had said many times after Enid abandoned them she wasn’t interested in taking another apprentice. “Not until you have wed,” she said to Manon. “I cannot suffer another heartbreak, and I will ensure that you are a proper witch first.”
She opened the closet and found Enid’s untouched old dresses. Manon frowned. Enid hadn’t brought these back with her to her mother’s house? Or perhaps her mother would have thought them improper, unfashionable, or, worst of all, poor.
Enid had favored pale clothing, pastels with delicate flowers embroidered on sleeves and skirt hems. “This will prevent you from fading in the shadows,” Gwendolyn told her sternly, shrouded in one of her signature blacks. “And shadows are the border between light and dark. We are stronger in weaker light.”
Enid simply replied, “Magic is not one for rules.”
“Then you’re just going to get your dresses dirty,” Gwendolyn groused as Enid lightened the dark blues, purples, and browns that had been acquired for her. There weren’t clear paths around their household, the underbrush was thick and sure enough, whenever Enid returned, there was always dirt on her hems, brambles on her sleeves, and a sparkle to her eyes like she had learned some new secret of magic.
Manon had forgotten that, or maybe had never really understood it—how Gwendolyn was always trying to tame Enid. It was the job of a mentor to train and guide, but sometimes it felt like Gwendolyn was trying to catch the wind.
A wind witch might have lured her away, throwing her voice to make Enid think it was her mother calling her. Maybe that was why she’d left the dresses behind.
I don’t know, I don’t know, Enid’s ghost had told her. If the wind witch had lured and killed her, then surely she would have married her too, and Enid’s wandering soul wouldn’t have been able to find Manon again.
Manon closed her eyes, a precise pinprick of pain needling its way behind her forehead. I don’t know either. But she would try.
The dresses still smelled like Enid, faintly cinnamony with a hint of fresh dirt after the rain. Enid couldn’t be kept out of the gardens; her magic was of the woods, drawn from the roots of trees and climbing to the flight of birds. In the four years since she’d gone—died, it seemed—the only plants that Manon found in the house were dried and withered, untouched since Enid disappeared. Sachets of herbs for potions, bundles of wildflowers for a decoration that was already beautiful, pristine, complete in their death.
Manon ran her fingers over the muslin and reached for the unreachable. “Where is she?” she asked the dress. Her magic was of the sea, but the scent of cinnamon gave power to the rain in the dirt on the dress, and that was enough.
Where the pines meet the birches meet the maple.
“You’re in the woods,” Manon said breathlessly that night as she walked the line between sleeping and waking. “That’s what your dress said.”
Of course Enid was in the woods. Where else would she be?
“Yes,” Enid said slowly, as though she were trying to see through dense fog. “Yes, that sounds right.”
“Where the pines meet the birches meet the maple,” Manon continued, heart in her throat.
Enid’s voice grew quiet, confused. “That sounds wrong. I am in the forest, but there aren’t trees.”
“How can there not be trees if you’re in the forest?” Manon asked. But Enid faded before she could answer, because Manon was more awake than twilight.
Manon had never felt drawn to the woods. Each summer, Gwendolyn took her to the coastline and that was where Manon felt the calling of the unknown, the moon and waves and salt air vibrating in her soul. She feared the ocean for all it took from her; she loved it too, for all it gave her. This, Enid might have once told her, was one of the many contradictions of magic.
“I want to live by the waves when I marry my dead,” Manon had told Gwendolyn two weeks before Enid returned to her mother.
“A wise choice,” Gwendolyn had replied. “The sea is full of life and death. Only the powerful can harness its magic.”
“I want to be powerful,” Manon had responded dutifully. Gwendolyn wanted her girls to be powerful.
So when Manon came back from the woods for the first time at sixteen, Gwendolyn looked at her with sharp eyes. “Have you changed your calling?” she asked from the porch where she sat with her cat and her quilting.
“What?”
“I thought you were a witch of the sea, not a witch of the woods.” Gwendolyn’s spine was straight as a rod, shoulders squared as though preparing for a fight, as though Manon had done something wrong.
As though Manon had found something.
“The sea is far, but the brooks feed the river which feeds the lake,” Manon told her as if she hadn’t noticed. “There are many things I can practice.” It wasn’t quite a lie; Manon did practice as she traipsed through the underbrush.
The answer satisfied Gwendolyn, and Manon entered the house, climbed the stairs, and stripped off a dress whose darkness hid the dirt stains on the fabric by her knees.
“The trees seem wrong,” Enid insisted, but the unknowable kept telling Manon the trees were right; the berry bushes she asked mentioned birch trees, the untouched swallow’s nest was convinced of an intersection. Maybe near the water? the dead sticks suggested.
“It is cold and dark,” was all Enid said.
Maybe that is just death, Manon didn’t reply as she bade her ghost goodnight.
“Who are you talking to?” Gwendolyn asked her on the next rainy evening. Manon had spent the day running around and emptying pots from the leaking roof. Her woolen leggings were soaked, her hands were puckered, and somehow despite it all Manon was thirsty.
“Talking to?”
“When you fall asleep,” Gwendolyn took a crisp bite of a cookie. “Did something find you in the woods?” To the unfamiliar eye, she appeared curious, perhaps even worried for her charge she feared might be snatched up by witches of the wind. But there was a stiffness to her jaw that Manon recognized, a practiced crease to her eyebrows that made her a mask of her concern.
Lie. This time, Enid’s voice was in her head, not in her ear. Was it actually her voice, or just the voice of instinct, the living and the dead showing you the way when you are good at being a witch. Lie because you know the truth, don’t you?
“I talk when I fall asleep?”
For two weeks, she dreamed of a trail of berries, eating each of them like a bear in the woods.
For two months, the berries turned to blood—a whole river of it. There was a river that ran through the forest, but it did not bend the way the blood river did in her dream. It was lined with berry bushes, though.
For two years, she harvested dewdrops and mudwet to follow the calling of birds singing of a dead girl, but they always flew off too quickly for her to pursue them.
And then, at eighteen, Manon found a cave lined with birches, covered with pine trees, facing a maple grove.
Enid was in there, her ghost sitting above a corpse whose pastel pink dress had faded to white. The flesh had been picked from her bones, by bugs, by foxes, or perhaps by magic. Condensation lined the cave walls, glimmering in the angle of the setting sun.
“Thank you,” Enid said as Manon sank to her knees by Enid’s bones. “I knew you’d find me.”
Manon looked up, eyes filled with tears. “What happened?”
“Don’t cry,” Enid said with a smile that Manon had forgotten could be so soft. Had her lips always had such a graceful bow to them? Her lips were long gone from the skull at Manon’s knees but in her mind’s eye, the ones on the ghost were pink somehow in their gray. “This will be better now. It’s been lonely, and cold.”
“But—” Manon began, looking between the bones and Enid’s spirit. She swallowed, not knowing what to say.
“Will you bury me? Then I’ll be truly safe, I think.”
“Safe from what?” Manon asked. Enid was dodging her questions—perhaps dodging them since she first came to Manon’s dreams.
Even in death, Enid’s eyes were so vibrant Manon felt like she could see the green in them, which meant she noticed very starkly when they went cold.
“She wanted to marry me.” Enid’s voice rattled like a breeze through dry autumn leaves. “She said I would be more powerful dead than alive and she would be more powerful for harnessing me. She told me I would be safe, and all would be well, and she gave me berries to eat that slowly stopped my organs. She left me in the clearing. She said she’d be back at sundown.” She took a breath that now whistled like an icy wind. A curl of her translucent hair looped in the cradle of her neck. “I ran. I was dying, but I ran. I hid myself from her as best I could and then I died. I didn’t want to marry her, I didn’t want her to have my magic. I was supposed to marry the dead, not be the dead she married.”
“Gwendolyn.” Not a question; the only possible answer.
Enid nodded. “Will you keep me safe? Will you bury me?” She paused and there was a nervous sheen to her green-turned-gray eyes. “Will you marry me?”
Two minutes to find the burial site, two hours to dig the grave in a night that had begun to rain. She laid Enid’s bones in the earth and reached her hand across the hazy lines of unliving and undead to hold the ghost’s, swore words of duty and faith before sealing it with a kiss of life and a kiss of death.
Manon returned to the little house as though nothing had happened but this time, the house didn’t feel lonely. Enid’s ghost followed her, curled around her like a cat, like a dress, like a hug as Manon smiled placidly into Gwendolyn’s face, waiting for the right moment.
Two weeks later, Gwendolyn told her it was time to go to the sea, to find the ghost of some mariner to marry, and so they took a coach to the coast. The shore was deserted at this time of year, too cold for swimmers and barren of shellfish.
“Would you like some berries, my dear?” Gwendolyn asked her as they sat by at the water’s edge, the sun dipping towards the horizon making the underbellies of the clouds bleed. She extended a little black bowl towards Manon, who did not need Enid’s hiss in her ear to recognize them.
“Thank you.” She took one and rolled it between her fingertips. It was so innocent, a light gold bead, but it held death within it. “I like berries.”
“Yes, I know,” Gwendolyn said, patting her knee. “I raised you. Worse than a little bear cub after blueberries.”
“They’re of the earth but they hold so much water,” Manon continued. Saltwater crashed a few feet away. It was cool and lightly misty. A threshold of water and air, Manon thought as she pulled the water out of the air and threaded it through the berry’s skin.
“A fine observation. Creative. You’ll make a very fine witch,” Gwendolyn told her. Manon could almost hear the hunger in her voice.
The berry swelled until it filled Manon’s entire palm. It would dilute the poison, but she didn’t much like the idea of using Gwendolyn’s weapon to begin with. Gwendolyn looked at her fondly. Did she only see a curious student stretching her wings, flexing her power? “Can you harness the sea if you’re already married to a different dead?”
“No.” Gwendolyn said, unconcerned. “Why?”
Liar, Manon thought as she brought waves into her hands, brought the full might of the coast into her muscles, brought the bright and dark fury of the sun setting behind the trees into her voice. “Because you’ve lied to me more than once and you’re lying to me now.”
Enid’s arms wrapped around her middle from behind, her chin on Manon’s shoulder, her cheek to her cheek as the berry floated like a dark golden star between them, hovering inches from Gwendolyn’s lips. That was the first moment that Manon saw fear flash in her teacher’s eyes. Do you wish you hadn’t made me powerful now?
“I’ve never lied to you.” Gwendolyn croaked, nervously licking salt-dried lips.
“Then why did you kill my wife?”
But Manon didn’t wait for an answer. She didn’t need one. As Gwendolyn inhaled to make her excuses, to weave her lies, Manon let the berry go, pushing it towards Gwendolyn’s open mouth. Gwendolyn resisted, but they were by the sea and Manon was strong.
For a moment, Gwendolyn gagged at her, eyes wide, waiting for Manon’s next words.
Then the water broke through the berry’s skin, pouring down Gwendolyn’s gullet. The witch clawed at her throat, trying to get the water out, but she knew nothing of the unliving and undying of the sea, the lakes, even the streams near her own house. Enid’s arms tightened around her and the berry’s tiny golden skin flew back out of Gwendolyn’s lips, expanded, and clamped itself over her mouth and nose.
Two minutes for Gwendolyn’s heart to stop as she drowned in her own poison.
Two hours for the tide to carry her out to sea, where her bones would be eroded to sand as the sea always did to the land.
Two charges, hand-in-hand, watching in silence as the sun descended below the cresting horizon and they melted into the afterglow.