Toil & Trouble: 15 Tales of Women & Witchcraft

by Jessica Spotswood

Amethyst, for emotional balance. Rose, for an open heart. Obsidian to ward against people who look at me with envy—and trust me, there are plenty of them.

The real magic. The kind that’s bound to blood and culture. To history. To violence I say a thousand thanks a day for never knowing.

Before I knew I was born to hear the song of the stars.

That our magic is restless and wild and trouble-bound. But I don’t know if I agree. Maybe we were just two people chasing numbness because we didn’t know what the stardust inside us was for.

Maybe she was tired of feeling different. Tired of the magic and the way it made everything seem so significant. Tired of the way someone was always watching, waiting to see what we would become.

I was just looking for a little oblivion. A little normal. A little of the dead-eyed shimmer the girls at school wore through the cafeteria after a night in the desert—the kind that made people look at them like they were women.

That’s when a voice somewhere deep down whispered that I belonged.

I’m a star-child. A bruja with magic sparking from my perfect pedicure to my massive barrel curls and everywhere in between.

Magic and the starsong and the guiding hands of my girls in the sky spin stories in the cozy angles, draw glittering threads from the anchor points that will build the foundation of their life together.

Like fighting your own shadow.

But there’s a galaxy of spirit sisters and grieving ancestors and a million intersections of stars between us, unreadable even to me.

That song is filled with knowledge, with care, with the distant but benevolent spirit of a universe that knows every heart beating and flower blooming within its boundaries. I was chosen to hear that song, and to interpret it for people who can’t.

This is where she lives, and there’s beauty in the order of it all. In her passion for it. But between those inexorable lines, I’m filling in the color. The blues and greens of nebulae. Solar flares refracting against frozen metals we can’t name. It feels like dancing. It feels like painting. It feels like magic.

For the first time all night, my blood’s warning is back, siren-loud.

She treats me like the girl I’ve been trying to be. I close my eyes again, surrendering to this feeling, the influence of a new constellation pulling at me. Every one of my candle flames is blazing, casting warbling gemstone lights and streaky glass-shadows on the wall.

She will never let anyone control her again. Not even Fate Herself.

Scared of the spell she crafted that burnt decades of magic from her skin as if it were nothing. And Bette was angry enough—her grief a gushing wound inside her—to like it. Now they know better than to cage her.

Sometimes, during her twice-weekly healings for Elder Lee, when Bette brushes her fingers over the braids and the metal slithers in an almost liquid coil into her palm, she wonders how many of them see her as a tool first and a girl second.

Bette loves her mother. And she knows her mother loves her. But her mother hasn’t ever bothered to get to know her. She’s never asked and she certainly hasn’t seen and she’s never listened and Bette’s never corrected her, but now she has to.

This is the thing about falling: It’s tricky. Sometimes you’re tumbling down into love before you realize your feet have left the ground. But it’s a choice, too.

Bette’s never felt like any of her was missing, let alone half

He can’t fill the empty spaces in her because there are none. There is no emptiness in a devoted heart.

“I will always love you,” Bette goes on, and it’s more than a promise in that moment as she looks at Auggie, all the love, all the fight, all the power sparking between them like a cut wire. It’s a spell, the purest kind of magic. Born from love and truth and unshakable belief.

Before, her magic had been bright, rushing through her like dawn racing across a field at daybreak. It had been tough and always trying to climb free, like wild grapevines twining up trees in the deep, cool parts of the forest. But now, her power is not bright. There’s a slick bubble of heat rising in her where light and forest should be. It is gummy and too hot, sticking to her bones like scorched jam, and her skin burns as blisters spread up her arm, swelling by the second.

Is Bette the opposite of herself now? Or is she who she’s always been: someone who chose the right path, not the easy one?

Maybe those choices made her grow to a woman in a breath. They surely made her heart battle-worn and ready. But they made her her.

She has that look on her face. That I’m going to solve this with food or fury face, and any other time, it’d make Bette’s stomach flip and her cheeks flush, because she loves that look.

It is a curse only if you let it be one.

You broke free of their petty ideas before, my child. Are you strong enough to do it again?

In all our time at the Conservatory, I don’t think I ever saw her without the armor of that smirk, but with it gone, she looks impossibly young. Savannah was always the girl blazing a trail on sheer force of will and cold-bloodedness, and it served her well.

Worn-velvet booths cluster around parqueted wood tables under enchanted lights that dazzle like constellations, a classic but accessible look.

The dark root of my old urges spreads. It coils around my limbs, my neck, my thoughts.

I do it for me, because if I don’t accept all the parts of myself, how can I be who I really am? I’ve spent all this time worrying about the damage I may have caused instead of focusing on the good I could do.

Shalini wished there was a spell for silencing the doubts in her head. Some things, though, you had to do without your sisters.

When she wrote, Shalini reached deep into the fertile field of her imagination, digging until she found the roots of her story, then grafting branches grown from many different seeds onto the plant—and sometimes undoing the grafts—and finally pruning until she reached the desired shape.

“Anyone can be beautiful and put on makeup, but there’s no concealer good enough to cover up an ugly heart.”

She didn’t realize that all her roaring, living, breathing anger could create so much light.

slow. I was a poison night-flower blooming on black, not righteous, but vengeful.

At the bottom, I made a circle, because the oldest deepest magic is a story, and all the best stories are a circle.

The moon is full, and even the stars are scared of me.

Mam told them that Campbell means crooked mouth in Gaelic. That Campbell witches lie as easily as they smile.

“That’s you letting your fear speak for you.” She tucked a spray of bluebells into my braid. “If you let fear be your voice, you will never have sure hands.”

She was never one to have faraway crushes with longing looks. She fell as she got to know someone, when they made her laugh and proved they could show up.

Sometimes she stares at the kettle and imagines that it’s her anger—not the stovetop burner—that creates the steam. She transfers the heat, releases it.

she can yell at her older sister because Novy’s love is not conditional on Rosie’s behavior.

“Doesn’t it freak you out sometimes, how badly love can break you?” Willa whispers. “Mmm,” Ingrid says. “You could hurt me like that, you know.” Willa means it, too. She handed Ingrid some vital part of herself earlier this year and trusted her with its safekeeping.

If you don’t feel safe enough to yell back, you’re not safe enough.

Destroying a girl is one of the easiest things in the world.

Here’s how to fulfill a prophecy: you are a woman, you speak the truth, and the world makes you into a liar.

When I strike my axe, my rage becomes a living thing that writhes inside me, and I welcome it. Then I think of witches, and understand that there are too many people in this world who would rather see a woman burn than wield power.