Museum of Magic, page 21
“Oh, yeah,” Puck said casually, shrugging. “I know Orddu.”
Emmi’s head snapped up. “What?” She realized that while Gwyn ap Nudd had asked her to find Orddu and she had no idea who that was, she hadn’t actually told Puck that she was uncertain. She’s just been musing on it silently. “You know this witch?”
Puck leaned against the wall, his shoulder on the map, tilting the frame until Emmi pushed him off it. “Orddu’s not a witch,” Puck said, readjusting his position as if he’d meant to be there all along. “Orddu’s a title.”
Emmi shot him a look which Puck accurately interpreted as, Get to the point before I hit you.
“In the early times, witches were more…” He bit his lip, thinking of the right word. “They were closer to magic. It’s not that they were more powerful, exactly, but they were more in tune with magic. And, okay, look.” Puck pushed off the wall, spreading his hands out, leaning in as he got more impassioned in his speech. “So magic is kind of like on a spectrum. And the spectrum lines up with the different elements and types of magic. And also life and death.”
Emmi knew her face was twisted in confusion. Puck glanced at her, screwing up his lips as he tried to think of a better way to explain.
“On one side,” he continued, shaking his left hand toward Emmi. “There’s black magic.”
“Black magic?” Emmi said. “Like…evil?”
Puck shook his head. “No, no, black magic is night magic. The spells that work better in the dark, or under a certain moon. The creatures that are nocturnal. And spells involving death.”
“Death? Death sounds evil.” Emmi was envisioning the red caps again, as well as every superstition she’d seen cycled through media.
But Puck was even more emphatic in his answer. “No, death isn’t evil. It’s just a thing. A part of the spectrum.” His arms were still spread apart, and he shook his right hand. “On the other side of the spectrum is white magic. Daytime stuff. Sun spells. Diurnal animals.”
“And life.”
“Well, healing spells are white magic. But it’s not like black is evil and white is good. It’s just day and night.”
Emmi frowned, still unsure about this description. “Well, where is Orddu in all that?”
Puck spread his fingers out, as if he were gripping the air. “Witches and fae—any creature that taps into the magic—they’re also on the spectrum. And it is a spectrum. Some creatures are strictly on one side.” Puck shook his left hand again. “And some are on the other.” Puck shook his right. “But there are a lot of creatures that are sort of in the middle.”
Emmi’s brow furrowed. “Like how Joan came to us in the night,” she started.
Puck nodded. “Wills-o’-the-wisp and Joan are black magic, nocturnal.”
And they’re known for killing, Emmi reminded herself. Wills-o’-the-wisp weren’t just pretty lights that only appeared in the dark; they were mischief makers who’d guide nighttime voyagers astray, leading them to their deaths.
“Meanwhile,” Emmi said slowly, “in the Otherworld, through the portal…it was like it was twilight there.”
“Crepuscular.”
“What?”
“Crepuscular—creatures that aren’t akin to the night or the day, but instead prefer twilight and dawn hours.” Puck spread his arms even wider. “It’s a spectrum.”
“Okay, fine, it’s a spectrum, but where is Orddu?” Emmi said, losing her patience.
“Most witches fall in the middle—they’re not necessarily linked to black or white magic. They’re neutral. They see things, but they’re not inclined toward one action or another. But,” Puck said, continuing when it looked like Emmi would interrupt him, “some powerful witches are on the edges of the spectrum. A black witch is known as an orddu.”
“So… an orddu is basically the manager of the night shift of magic?” Emmi asked.
Puck smirked. “That’ll work. And a white witch is known as an orwen.”
That name again…Emmi knew she had heard both “orddu” and “orwen” before, and not like how Puck was describing them. She pushed the thought from her mind, focusing on Puck’s information. She supposed she herself was somewhere in the middle ground, a person who could see magic but didn’t really have an affinity toward any specific type of spell. She was a neutral observer, in the middle of Puck’s spectrum.
But that meant some witches weren’t. Some were powerful enough to do more than see. Emmi’s eye roved around the botany room. The samples of flowers and handwritten books had always felt…comforting to her. But Elspeth seemed to be more powerful than Emmi had realized before. Was she a white witch or a black witch? Even if “black magic” was more about a specific affinity than anything monstrous, it was hard for Emmi to shift the years of subtle messaging in everything from The Wizard of Oz to medieval texts that “black magic” meant an evil witch.
Puck finally dropped his hands, satisfied that Emmi understood him. “Honestly, though, I’m surprised this information got lost in time. Powerful enough witches to be called an Orddu or an Orwen are rare, true, but I would have thought there would at least be stories…”
“Stories!” Emmi shouted, snapping her fingers. “That’s it!”
Puck’s eye grew wide at her outburst.
“I’ve been trying to think of where I heard those names before—they’re from a book I read!” Emmi turned and headed to the door, Puck at her heels. “I used to love those books as a kid. And they made a movie! A cartoon—no one’s ever heard of it, but I was obsessed as a kid.”
“A movie?” Puck mused. “I’ve always wanted to see one of those.”
Emmi stopped in her tracks, and Puck crashed into her. “You’ve never seen a movie?”
Puck shrugged. “Why would I have?”
Fair enough, Emmi supposed. Puck was so modern compared to the other fae she’d met. He almost seemed like a regular teenage boy.
But he’s not, she reminded herself, the words twisting inside her. She swallowed them down, the taste bitter.
“I forget you’re fae sometimes,” Emmi admitted.
Puck raised his eyebrows.
“It’s just…you at least know about movies, right?” Emmi asked. Puck nodded, and she continued. “I don’t think Joan or Gwyn ap Nudd or the sprites are aware of anything so…human.”
“No.” Puck’s voice was low. Sad. “I don’t think they are. They spend more time in the Otherworld.”
“And you’ve been blocked from it.”
Puck’s jaw was tight. Emmi wanted to ask more, to press him for information, but she waited, silent. They were in a dim corridor, partway between the botany room and the library, probably the area of the house furtherest from a window and any natural light.
Weariness settled over Emmi like a blanket. She needed sleep, food. Rest. A moment to think and reassess. But she reached toward Puck, grabbing his hand, her thumb running over his knuckles. “Where have you been?” she asked. He hadn’t been in the fae lands, but he hadn’t really been here, in the regular world.
Puck cringed. “A sort of…in-between place,” he said. “Not in the Otherworld, not in this world. But I was more in this world than the fae world, and I got impressions as time passed.”
So he picked up on the idea of movies, without ever seeing one before.
Emmi’s heart thudded. “How…how much time passed?” she asked.
Puck pulled his hand out of hers. “A lot.” He looked over her shoulder, as if he wanted to push past her, but he wasn’t sure what direction to take. Elspeth’s house could be labyrinthine, especially this corridor that wasn’t a part of the regular tour of the Museum of Magic and therefore had no helpful signs pointing out where to go.
“What was it like?” Emmi asked.
Puck didn’t meet her eyes. “A dream. A nightmare.” His mouth moved, as if he wanted to speak more, but the words were gumming up his teeth. “I’d go in and out of awareness. I picked up some things, but time was…different.”
Asleep for centuries, drowsy and just on the edge of consciousness. Emmi couldn’t imagine it. But looking at Puck’s face now, she thought it must have been horrible, wherever he was. Under a spell, I suppose, she thought. She wanted to ask him how he broke free, how he winded up, of all places, in her house. But Puck looked as if he were going to be physically ill as he spoke of it.
Emmi rearranged her face into a sunny smile. “Well, I’m pretty sure the king of the fair folk wasn’t talking about a cartoon from the eighties. When all this is done, you and me are going to watch that movie together, okay? Popcorn’s on me.”
One corner of Puck’s lips twitched up as he focused on her. “Deal,” he said.
“It’s a date,” Emmi said, tentatively, watching Puck’s face for a flicker of recognition at what her words may connote.
Puck, however, seemed oblivious. “So…the library?”
“Yup!” Emmi said with forced cheeriness. “This way.”
She pushed open the door and looked at the shelves of books. It wasn’t always great, living in a museum, but having access to her own library whenever she wanted it was probably the best perk there was.
She crossed over to the shelves against the north wall, where fiction was kept. It took her only seconds to find a copy of the Prydain Chronicles by Lloyd Alexander, a large book that collected the first three volumes of the series into one binding. “Here,” she said, tossing the book to Puck. “This is the story I was thinking of. The movie is called The Black Cauldron, and it’s about a boy who’s an assistant pig keeper, and he becomes a hero by the end. It’s really good.” Emmi’s voice trailed off as Puck turned the book over in his hands, his fingers running across the cracked and worn spine.
This wasn’t just any copy of the book; this was her copy. The pages were soft, some of them bent, some of them smudged from her finger running over the ink.
These were the books Emmi had read after she lost her parents. Grandfather had given them to her on the first night he had tucked her into bed, not her mother or father. He told her how he first read the books to her mother when she was a little girl, how they’d stayed up late at night together, sneaking past Emmi’s grandmother in order to read just one more chapter together.
Emmi hadn’t let Grandfather read them aloud to her. “I know how to read!” she’d shouted at him. As a child, she had been ignorant of anyone’s grief but her own, cognizant only that her father and mother were gone, one after the other, without realizing that meant Grandfather had lost a daughter and son-in-law of his own.
Grandfather had left the book on the nightstand for her.
And Emmi had started to explore Prydain. She’d gotten lost in the pages of that book. That book, the one in Puck’s hands now. It wasn’t just the story, it was that specific book, the one her grandfather had read to her mother as a child, the one she had plunged into in order to escape her life, and instead found a new one.
Part of her wanted to snatch the book back. It was too precious. It held not only the story, but also a part of her heart.
But Puck held the book gently in his hands, like a woodland animal that needed help. He tucked it into his pocket carefully, patting the material of his pants. He must have used a form of magic as the book was too large to fit in a normal pocket, and this one seemed to disappear inside.
When he looked up, Puck’s eyes were sincere. “I promise to take care of this book and to read every word inside it,” he said reverently. For all that Puck joked and for all Emmi knew of how fae twisted words, this was a vow she knew without a doubt Puck would keep.
Her story was safe with him.
Three of Cups, Transposed
misfortune, stagnation, and untrustworthiness
The system to organize books in Elspeth’s library was odd, to say the least, but Emmi knew it like the back of her hand. It was a system she had made, after all.
“Huh,” Puck said, looking at an old leather bound book curiously. The Banishing and Summoning of Powerful Fae was scratched on the cover, almost invisible due to age and wear.
Emmi plucked the tome out of his hands and slid it home on the shelf. “We need this section,” she said authoritatively, leading him to the far side of the wall. She didn’t recall Knaresborough specifically, but there were books on York here, and that was close enough. She pulled down a few appendices and catalogues, including a handwritten pamphlet of herbs that Elspeth had made, the pages crisp with age, prone to crumbling.
Emmi carefully opened it up, peering at the index her ancestor had carefully printed in the front. She saw nothing in there about colchicum flowers, in real life or made of stone.
“This is probably what we’re looking for,” Puck said, reaching over Emmi’s shoulder and pulling a thin book down. Emmi was about to snap at him—she knew this library better than anyone—but then she saw the title on the spine: The Witch of York.
“Ah. Yeah. I suppose that might be it.” Emmi took the book from Puck, and they sat down next to each other on the floor, the book open between them.
Emmi read as quickly as possible. The book was a biography of a woman named Ursula Sontheil who had been born to a young fifteen-year-old girl who never revealed the father. Orphaned, destitute, and with no one to aid her, Ursula’s mother lived in a cave and gave birth alone.
“It’s so sad,” Emmi said, touching an engraved illustration in the book of a young woman holding a bundled baby at the mouth of a cave. Ursula’s mother had been at least two years younger than Emmi was now, and, according to the book, died not long after her baby was born. The townspeople called the mother a witch and the daughter the spawn of Satan. Meanwhile, Emmi couldn’t help but think, whoever had sexually abused Ursula’s mother got away with it. Or at least never faced the same punishment they did.
Mother and newborn daughter spent two years living in the forest, scavenging, barely surviving, before an abbot intervened, separating them. The mother was sent to a convent where she soon died; Ursula was given to a foster family and never saw her birth mother again.
Emmi turned the page of the book, where a crude illustration of a woman peered back at her. With a large nose covered in pock marks, dull eyes, scraggly hair, and even a pointed hat, this portrait of Ursula seemed to illustrate every cliché of a witch there was.
“Do you think she really looked like this?” Emmi asked Puck, unable to take her eyes off the illustration.
“Who knows?”
The text described Ursula as having crooked legs and a hunched back. That could have been the result of her birth or malnutrition or injuries she had as a young child, barely surviving in the woods. Or it could be exaggerations, the smallest flaw blown up to hyperbolic proportions to excuse the cruel behavior of the townspeople who never accepted her. Emmi was struck by the futility of it all; Ursula had been doomed before she’d been born.
“Descriptions like this could be a response to her power,” Puck said. “I’ve seen that sort of thing happen before. She was called the Witch of York for a reason—her power was renowned. And if a woman has one type of power…”
“People try to take away her other type.” Loathe as Emmi was to admit it, there was power in beauty. Superficial, yes, but a beautiful woman could leverage her looks in astounding ways. Anne Boleyn was proof enough of that, as was Helen of Troy and Marilyn Monroe. So if this Ursula Sontheil had respect for her witchcraft, it was shockingly unsurprising that the locals would try to tear her down in other ways, mocking her appearance and exaggerating her every flaw.
Emmi’s stomach soured. Here, once more, was a woman who was treated cruelly, all because she was different. Just like Joan Wytte, whose toothache sent her to jail, or Agnes Sampson, an easy target after being widowed, Ursula Sonthiel had been cursed by her gender, her status in society, and misfortune.
Even when Ursula married, she was dogged by loss. Her identity was changed, and she became known as Mother Shipton. When her husband died soon after, the townspeople blamed her for the death, driving her out of town and back to the very cave she’d been born in.
The next page showed a twist to the story. Mother Shipton, as she’d become well-known as, carved a spot for herself in the society that had rejected her. She took the claims of being a witch and wore the label with pride, turning simple charms into a business, making herbal potions, telling prophecies, and becoming so well known that records of her witchcraft reached the king of England. When she died, she died of old age in her early seventies—not on a stake or in a prison cell.
She survived, Emmi thought, smiling. She had been given the worst possible cards in life, and she had survived it all.
“Do you think she had real magic?” Emmi asked, staring at another picture of Mother Shipton, this one a kinder portrayal.
“Maybe.” Puck sounded noncommittal. His eyes were not focused on the illustration, but Emmi couldn’t tell what he was looking at.
Emmi stared at the portrait in the book, shifting her eyesight. It was almost like those Magic Eye renderings Grandfather liked, where Emmi could see a leaping dolphin or a floating heart amidst a chaotic mess of patterned colors if she just let her eyes unfocus. Mother Shipton’s face blurred in her vision, and she almost…she almost…maybe she did see something there? A bit of a sparkling sheen, a golden halo clinging to the image…
“Maybe she really did have magic,” Emmi said softly. “Or maybe she got it.”
“Got it?” Puck asked. “Magic cannot be transferred without a tool like what the Hunters use. Do you think she—”
“No, not like that,” Emmi interrupted. “I mean, the fact that she wasn’t killed for being a witch came in part because she claimed the title. People were going to be afraid of her, so she just made them afraid in a way that kept them from killing her.” Emmi nodded to herself. “Their fear gave her power, and she used it.”
“Are you saying because they called her a witch, she became one?” Puck asked in a flat tone.
