Deborah Harkness - A Discovery of Witches

The witch was attempting to raise a heavy wooden slab in the floor with her hands. I closed my eyes and braced myself for a fall. Instead Satu grabbed my hair and aimed my face into a dark hole. The smell of death rose in a noxious wave, and the ghosts shifted and moaned.

“Do you know what this is, Diana?”

I shrank back and shook my head, too frightened and exhausted to speak.

“It’s an oubliette.” The word rustled from ghost to ghost. A wispy woman, her face creased with age, began to weep. “Oubliettes are places of forgetting. Humans who are dropped into oubliettes go mad and then starve to death—if they survive the impact. It’s a very long way down. They can’t get out without help from above, and help never comes.”

The ghost of a young man with a deep gash across his chest nodded in agreement with Satu’s words. Don’t fall, girl, he said in a sorrowful voice.

“But we won’t forget you. I’m going for reinforcements. You might be stubborn in the face of one of the Congregation’s witches, but not all three. We found that out with your father and mother, too.” She tightened her grip, and we sailed more than sixty feet down to the bottom of the oubliette. The rock walls changed color and consistency as we tunneled deeper into the mountain.

“Please,” I begged when Satu dropped me on the floor. “Don’t leave me down here. I don’t have any secrets. I don’t know how to use my magic or how to recall the manuscript.”

“You’re Rebecca Bishop’s daughter,” Satu said. “You have power—I can feel it—and we’ll make sure that it breaks free. If your mother were here, she would simply fly out.” Satu looked into the blackness above us, then to my ankle. “But you’re not really your mother’s daughter, are you? Not in any way that matters.”

Satu bent her knees, lifted her arms, and pushed gently against the oubliette’s stone floor. She soared up and became a blur of white and blue before disappearing. Far above me the wooden door closed.

Matthew would never find me down here. By now any trail would be long gone, our scents scattered to the four winds. The only way to get out, short of being retrieved by Satu, Peter Knox, and some unknown third witch, was to get myself out.

Standing with my weight on one foot, I bent my knees, lifted my arms, and pushed against the floor as Satu had. Nothing happened. Closing my eyes, I tried to focus on the way it had felt to dance in the salon, hoping it would make me float again. All it did was make me think of Matthew, and the secrets he had kept from me. My breath turned into a sob, and when the oubliette’s dank air passed into my lungs, the resulting cough brought me to my knees.

I slept a bit, but it was hard to ignore the ghosts once they started chattering. At least they provided some light in the gloom. Every time they moved, a tiny bit of phosphorescence smudged the air, linking where they had just been to where they were going. A young woman in filthy rags sat opposite me, humming quietly to herself and staring in my direction with vacant eyes. In the center of the room, a monk, a knight in full armor, and a musketeer peered into an even deeper hole that emitted a feeling of such loss that I couldn’t bear to go near it. The monk muttered the mass for the dead, and the musketeer kept reaching into the pit as if looking for something he had lost.

My mind slid toward oblivion, losing its struggle against the combination of fear, pain, and cold. Frowning with concentration, I remembered the last passages I’d read in the Aurora Consurgens and repeated them aloud in the hope it would help me remain sane.

“‘It is I who mediates the elements, bringing each into agreement,’” I mumbled through stiff lips. “‘I make what is moist dry again, and what is dry I make moist. I make what is hard soft again, and soften that which is hard. As I am the end, so my lover is the beginning. I encompass the whole work of creation, and all knowledge is hidden in me.’” Something shimmered against the wall nearby. Here was another ghost, come to say hello, but I closed my eyes, too tired to care, and returned to my recitation.

“‘Who will dare to separate me from my love? No one, for our love is as strong as death. ’”

My mother interrupted me. Won’t you try to sleep, little witch?

Behind my closed eyes, I saw my attic bedroom in Madison. It was only a few days before my parents’ final trip to Africa, and I’d been brought to stay with Sarah while they were gone.

“I’m not sleepy,” I replied. My voice was stubborn and childlike. I opened my eyes. The ghosts were drawing closer to the shimmer in the shadows to my right.

My mother was sitting there, propped against the oubliette’s damp stone walls, holding her arms open. I inched toward her, holding my breath for fear she would disappear. She smiled in welcome, her dark eyes shining with unshed tears. My mother’s ghostly arms and fingers flicked this way and that as I snuggled closer to her familiar body.

Shall I tell you a story?

“It was your hands I saw when Satu worked her magic.”

Her answering laugh was gentle and made the cold stones beneath me less painful. You were very brave.

“I’m so tired.” I sighed.

It’s time for your story, then. Once upon a time, she began, there was a little witch named Diana. When she was very small, her fairy godmother wrapped her in invisible ribbons that were every color of the rainbow.

I remembered this tale from my childhood, when my pajamas had been purple and pink with stars on them and my hair was braided into two long pigtails that snaked down my back. Waves of memories flooded into rooms of my mind that had sat empty and unused since my parents’ death.

“Why did the fairy godmother wrap her up?” I asked in my child’s voice.

Because Diana loved making magic, and she was very good at it, too. But her fairy godmother knew that other witches would be jealous of her power. “When you are ready,” the fairy godmother told her, “you will shrug off these ribbons. Until then you won’t be able to fly, or make magic.”

“That’s not fair,” I protested, as seven-year-olds are fond of doing. “Punish the other witches, not me.”

The world isn’t fair, is it? my mother asked.

I shook my head glumly.

No matter how hard Diana tried, she couldn’t shake her ribbons off. In time she forgot all about them. And she forgot her magic, too.

“I would never forget my magic,” I insisted.

My mother frowned. But you have, she said in her soft whisper. Her story continued. One day, long after, Diana met a handsome prince who lived in the shadows between sunset and moonrise.

This had been my favorite part. Memories of other nights flooded forth. Sometimes I had asked for his name, other times I’d proclaimed my lack of interest in a stupid prince. Mostly I wondered why anyone would want to be with a useless witch.

The prince loved Diana, despite the fact that she couldn’t seem to fly. He could see the ribbons binding her, though nobody else could. He wondered what they were for and what would happen if the witch took them off. But the prince didn’t think it was polite to mention them, in case she felt self-conscious. I nodded my seven-year-old head, impressed with the prince’s empathy, and my much older head moved against the stone walls, too. But he did wonder why a witch wouldn’t want to fly, if she could.

Then, my mother said, smoothing my hair, three witches came to town. They could see the ribbons, too, and suspected that Diana was more powerful than they were. So they spirited her away to a dark castle. But the ribbons wouldn’t budge, even though the witches pulled and tugged. So the witches locked her in a room, hoping she’d be so afraid she’ d take the ribbons off herself.