Even Magic Has A Price
Every kid in the village is a frog catcher. The marshy swamps on the edge of town are full of them, big and little, warty and croaky, from dark green to deep emerald. Their songs fill the twilight and groan deep into the evening. Every day, I rush out with the rest of the children, with my sister Jannie and my friends Grint and Harnish, and we sneak through the long grasses with little nets and shovels and buckets, and we collect frogs until we can’t carry them anymore. My shoulders ache from lugging them out to the small cottage set up away from everyone else where the frog witch lives.
She pays a half-penny per specimen. The others think she’s scary, but I’ve always liked the frog witch. Her face is kind and her unruly, curly hair is pretty, and I like her flowy skirts with the moon patterns stitched along their seams. She always calls me Cellie, even though my name’s Cenlin, and I like that, too. My sister tugs on my sleeve, but I tell her to go on without me, that Harnish and Grint will make sure she gets home alright. Jannie’s got a pale face and she’s so skinny, and all she does is nod her head and hug herself real tight.
After the other kids run away after they get paid, but I stay behind to watch the frog witch work. “Everyone thinks you’re old,” I tell her. “They’re scared of you.”
The frog witch moves around her cottage like a fish in water. Dried herbs hang from the ceiling and pots bubble on her massive stove. Little clay jars sit in the corner, curing. She’ll sell those to the villagers. The pastes and potions fix all kinds of problems, from sun burns to ugly rashes. I help skin the frogs and toss their meat into a cooking pot, then the frog witch grinds their bones into powder. She talks about how some plants make happy things happen in the body, while other plants make sad things happen, and how it’s not always easy to tell the difference. She talks about biting creatures and insects, fevers and chills, and how nothing happens without a hard work. Everything has a cost.
“Jannie’s sick,” I tell her. “But we don’t know why.”
The frog witch just nods her head and keeps her hands busy. She tells me about stars, about cooking, about the proper temperature and the precise timing. Her hands never stop moving.
“Everyone says you have magic,” I tell her. “But you never use it.”
“Magic’s about wanting something,” the frog witch says. “And if you want it enough, you can make the world give it to you. But even magic wants something in return.”
“I want Jannie to feel better. That’s all I want.”
The frog witch says that’s a good reason for magic, and maybe if I’m lucky, I’ll find a way to make it happen.
***
“Where’s your sister?” Harnish walks next to me through the long grass, our buckets banging against our knees as the captive frogs scramble at the walls, croaking away. I feel bad for them sometimes, but I need the frog witch’s pennies and her stories and her magic. Everything’s got a cost.
“Too sick,” I say and he just nods. Everyone knows Jannie’s dealing with something. Most mornings she’s okay, but today her face was sallow and her body ached, and Mom said she should stay behind.
The frog witch doles out the payment. When the boys scamper off, I join her in the kitchen. She puts me to work and starts talking. She says the frogs are just a vessel for power, and the power’s in their bones. Nothing gets wasted though: their skin to leather, their meat to soup, their organs to feed her garden out back. I smash their skeletons with a mortar and pestle, and the frog witch nods and moves around her cluttered workshop, barely looking where she’s going, reaching for herbs by feel. When the potion is done, she gives me a sip, and says to pass the rest around the village to keep the mosquitoes from making everyone sick.
“If I tried hard enough, could I use magic to make my sister feel better? Could you brew me something?”
The frog witch’s eyes are round and sad when she touches my shoulder. “You can try, but magic isn’t easy. Sometimes, it takes a lot of want, and that kind of want isn’t always good.”
I think I’d do anything for Jannie, even if it means paying a price bigger than I can even picture, bigger than the whole village. Bigger than the swamp the frogs live in. I’d drain the whole thing and let all the croakers dry up if it meant Jannie smiling and laughing again. I think about her running through the long grass when we were little, back before she got the sickness, and how good it felt to hear her whoop and holler.
I miss that sound like a hole in my body.
***
Jannie leaves the house less and less over the next few weeks. The skin under her arms grows thick and swollen, and her knees are like bulging melons. Mom says the fluid makes it hard for her to move around. I sit with her at night and tell her stories and feed her drinks the frog witch brews, but nothing helps. I want it so much, but the magic’s not giving anything in return. I think Jannie’s paid enough of a price and suffered plenty, but she gets worse and worse, until she can barely peer out from under a mountain of blankets, her eyes sunken and gray.
I catch frogs and spend time with the frog witch, grinding bones to powder, and trying to find a magic that’ll fix Jannie’s sickness. Except the frog witch keeps saying magic is bigger than that. Wanting is only one part. There are the rituals, the sacrifices, the energies spent and rejuvenated, the cycle of birth and death and rebirth interrupted only for the briefest of moments.
I don’t know what she’s saying, but the more I see the frog witch, the more I think I understand.
It’s in the way she moves. She knows what she wants and she gets it. There’s no hesitation, no worry. If there’s magic, it’s in the frog witch’s easy laughter and her smile, and the way she seems to know before anyone else exactly how the world’s going to be. She makes decisions and she doesn’t worry about them.
I make my own decision that night. I leave my family’s hut when the moon’s hiding behind some clouds and kiss Jannie’s forehead before walking across the black village and into the marshy swamps. My feet get stuck in thick mud and the forest looks bigger and deeper without any good light. But I know this place better than my own body, and I reach the frog witch’s cottage without trouble.
I’m dead silent as I sneak in the back. Her workshop is empty and dark and still, which is strange. I’ve only ever seen it bright and warm with the frog witch making it feel like home. The herbs are where they should be, the mushrooms and the grasses, and I start to mix them together.
I learned things from the frog witch, like how I shouldn’t ever mash this berry with that fungus, or how some venoms and other herbs are dangerous on their own, but help lower fever when put together. I choose my ingredients with care, and I choose them with confidence. When it’s done, I’m left with a thick paste. I take the little clay vessel into the frog witch’s room and stand very still.
She’s asleep. I can’t believe how small she looks in her bed. I linger at her dressing table and watch her breathe before I make my decision. I spread the paste over my right hand, not the left one, but the hand I use for catching and writing and most things. The skin goes numb; the frog witch doesn’t wake, not even when I pull the sharpest knife my mother keeps in the kitchen and start cutting.
It’s too late by the time she wrenches the knife from my hand. “What have you done?” she asks, eyes wild and big, her skin so pale and beautiful.
“It’s okay, I don’t feel anything,” I tell her. “You taught me, see?” I hold up the bloody stump of my palm with its missing fingers. “You said it’s in the bones, and now you have my bones, and that has to be better than frogs, right?”
The horror in the frog witch’s eyes makes me wonder if I was wrong. But she wraps my fingerless hand in cloth, and together we go into the workshop. She lights a fire, sets a kettle, and tells me how to cook. “It has to be you,” she says as I strip the flesh from my severed fingers. “I’m sorry, little one, but I can’t do this part if it’s going to work.”
I grind them like she taught me. They’re frog limbs, but better. Magic has a price, and I’m willing to pay it, no matter what. I follow her instructions and it takes all night and the following day, but by the time we’re finished I have what I need.
Exhaustion nags at me. I stumble back into the village with the jar filled with a potion so deep purple it’s nearly black. People say my name, but I don’t respond. My hand throbs, and I can still feel my missing fingers. They’re trapped in a fist that won’t open. I go into my house and find Jannie, only half awake in bed, and I make her drink.
She looks at me from somewhere far away. “What did you do?” she whispers.
And I don’t answer. Magic’s about wanting it bad enough. Magic’s about giving something up. I brush the crushed flower of my hand across her forehead and I curl up beside her and let the blankets bury me, and I wait for the magic to work.
Thanks as always for reading! If you made this far, hit the heart button. Every time someone likes a post, I get a little email alert, and those email alerts are all printed out and pasted into a massive scrapbook, and my kids keep asking me why I have thousands of printed out email alerts but they don’t understand, and they never will. Have a great week!