As usual, I don't own the characters or the setting or…anything really. All typos and spelling mistakes are completely my own fault.
My mother was the most naïve person I had ever met. Her presence was unmistakable, her knowledge and advice irrefutable, but she never understood the advantages of subtlety or the minds of others.
That day, when my father died, she began to learn. She began to see that others had minds or their own where they held opinions that may not flatter her. But she never learned fast enough.
When Van Garret came, he didn't see that her eyes were red with tears, that her heart was ripped open and left to bleed, the shards of dreams laying broken on the floor, that our hearts and stomachs were empty of wealth, warmth, food…
All he allowed himself to see was the decapitated and discarded bat, the empty chains, the toppled chairs and the broken plates. He saw the signs of witchcraft and the results of madness. He saw a husband murdered by a wife, not overwork and undernourishment. He saw the opportunity to kill a witch.
I tired to explain it to him. I tried to tell him. In the end, I found myself screaming from the doorway while my sister held me back and he rode away. Is it so wrong we wanted to say good-bye? I screamed over and over until my voice shook with the strain. Is it so wrong that we love him? I screamed and screamed until even to my own ears the words were meaningless and I made no sense. Screamed at him long after he had disappeared into the woods. Screamed until I couldn't scream anymore. And then I screamed even louder.
They came that night. A group of men, all friends of my father, men who had sat long into the night with him, drinking and laughing. Men who had never once failed to compliment my mother and pat us on the head as they left.
But they came that night with murder in their eyes, the same look I'd seen them ware when we were told the redcoats were coming through. In their voices I heard steel, the same sound they held as they shouted back and forth between themselves while firing and giving orders. Only that night, it seemed that the enemy they fought was to be my mother.
She saw them coming and told us to go to bed. I tried to protest, but she showed a strength I had never known she possessed and I had no choice but to join me sister in huddling beneath a quilt in the corner in which we slept. I hated hiding while my mother did nothing.
She stood in the doorway and spoke to them quietly. Submissively, it seemed. Her face was blotched with tears and her shoulders trembled with grief and exhaustion but they didn't seem to notice, just as Van Garret had ignored it. When they left, there were no pleasantries, no remorse's expressed, no questions of well-being or offers of aid.
The next day, we watched as dark clouds rolled in, thick with cold and despair. While the clouds built themselves up into sculptures of gruesome devastation we packed our lives into tiny trunks and bags, hoping against hope that the three of us could carry our belongings to our new home. Except that we didn't have one.
My mother made the second of her most popular mistakes as we left that night. "I'm glade we're leaving." She told us. "A new family needs that house more than we do. I know a place were we can put our things and you two can play there tomorrow. Just imagine! All day in the woods. Maybe you'll see the redcoats on the run."
"But mama, where will you be?" She asked. My sister, my twin, equal in everything except intelligence. Couldn't she see that we now had no home, no food, no father, no protection, no lives left to live? Couldn't she see the hole our mother was digging for herself by leaving our home and yet having no place to go? We had nothing but that empty word 'evicted'. Nothing except my mother's mistake.
It was her mistake, the one she loved to make. The mistake of underestimating peoples ability to think for themselves, as if she were so much cleverer than they.
"I will go into town and find us a new home." She had said. "It would be good to live in the town. It will be safer, with so many men around, and we will be able to visit our neighbors."
"Will it be a bigger house? With a feather bed?"
Where had my sister even heard of a feather bed? Didn't she understand that mother intended us to become nothing more than a charity case living in the little attic room of someone else's home, scraping by just enough to pay them rent?
"Much bigger." She had said, ignoring reality in favor of pleasing her own fantasies. "With a feather bed for each of us. There will be a piano and rooms full of big glass windows. You'll be able to sit at that piano and watch the redcoats' march back to England wile you play and the birds sing. We'll have parties with a cook who will make cakes and sweets for everyone. You'll learn to read Latin and French and we'll all live just like the fairy tales. And chocolate! There will be chocolate for you on every birthday, in a little hand painted box tied shut with a satin ribbon…"
"A blue one?"
"Yes, and you can wear it in your hair and everyone will know that you are one of the luckiest girls in the world. We'll all have gowns and silk stockings to wear. Someday, you will be a mother yourself and you will raise your daughters there too. And they will have even better lives than you have, because you will be able to tech them all about…"
"Mama?"
"Yes?"
"Mama, what's chocolate?"
I said my mother was one of the smartest people I'd ever met. Naïve, but smart. Her largest stroke of genius was found in our names. My sister was called Agatha. I later learned its origin and have found it suits her all to well. It's derived from agathos, Greek for good. But more than that, it was the name of a saint who was tortured and killed.
Even then I knew she was forever going to be haunted, tortured even, by the life she would live. That she believed my mother's lies only convinced me of that. As for death…I knew that I would kill her. One day she would get in my way and I would kill her. It was fact.
My own name meant more to me than I could ever know. It meant 'black' or 'dark' and that was something I knew I could live up to. I would find a way to escape my miserable life of mourning by putting those who had wronged me in to mourning. That too was fact.
But my mother, in reality, couldn't find us a place to live and so we inhabited the cave we spent that first night in. That was when her real learning began. She knew there would be no hope for us unless she taught us to call the Other for ourselves. For a year she schooled us: plant names, healing, spells, charms, incantations, potions, cursing, calling, possessing, hexing…everything she knew.
When I wasn't learning from her, I went back to our home and watched them making it their own. A man, balding at twenty, and a woman…girl really. She was younger than my mother, but I saw her doing some of the same things my mother was teaching me to do. She had skill, but she did not seem interested in doing harm. When my fathers' friends came to visit, she was kind to them. If it had been me, I'd have cursed them.
But she did not. I watched him prosper; I watched her stomach swell with child. I watched him amass a wealth of deals and agreements that would make a powerful man in latter life and I watched her teach her daughter the same things that I myself had already mastered. I hated them. And with the weapon I now possessed, I would kill them. I would be the one to have the money and power that was coming to that little girl.
On the day that girl had been born, my mother died. I was five. When I was seven, I sold my soul to the devil. I damned myself to get what I wanted.
I stayed in those woods, putting up with my crazed sibling until it was safe. I went into the town I lived in yet had never seen before when I was twenty-two. No one recognized me and I never told my name. I said I was an orphan, that I didn't know my family name. They accepted me.
With my marriage, I resolved to be the woman without a name. When my repugnant husband introduced me to his friends, the same men who had once lulled me to sleep with their laughter, I left the introduction at 'Lady'. Looking at them, I vowed that I would drag them into my revenge, weather I had to or not.
For two years I played my part, but when it looked like Van Garret was becoming too happy with his life I could put up with it no more. I did that which I had asked at the age of seven.
I raised the horseman from his grave.
I killed the basterds who had so wronged me.
I killed the people who got in my way.
I killed her fiancé. And she barley batted an eyelash. I wish I could have seen better when I killed her father. Hiding in the trees from a distance while he rode down on the town, crouching behind a tombstone as Baltus lost his head…it wasn't enough.
That's why I went there that night. I had driven off the pathetic little constable and he had come back. He saved her. So I went to the tree to watch as Katrina lost her head. To watch and see my life come to me. I knew the horseman could handle it, but I came anyway.
That was my mistake. Without me, the horseman would have killed them and I would own the town. I would be in the middle of telling everyone how Baltus had left my twin sister to die when he saw the horseman. Tell them she was a witch who had trapped me and then died in my stead.
But I had had to watch them die. Instead I killed myself.
Damned if you do…
I had damned myself to hell for nothing. In the end, that little girl got what should have been mine. I went to hell without tasting vengeance to it's fullest.
But if I hadn't, I would have ended up like my sister. Crazy, alone, dead while I still drew breath. Hell would have surrounded me, endlessly tormenting me with the thought of doing nothing about the atrocities that town had committed against me. I lived my entire life knowing I was damned.
…Damned if you don't.
I gave myself to the devil and I don't care. Even As I feel myself thrown into indescribable agony, I fight for enough of my soul to cock my finger in invitation. Someday they will find themselves here with me. I want them to know that I am ready.