Double Double Read online

  Double, Double

  by Hannah Blume (as Alicorn)

  “There’s something I have to tell you… I really should have told you before,” she said, wringing her hands. “It’s… it’s about the baby.”

  “What about her?” he asked.

  “Well - well, when I was a girl -”

  This was backwards. Completely backwards. Forget dramatic timing. I opened the door and swept in.

  “Witch!” the father exclaimed.

  “…That’s not my witch,” said the mother.

  “You had a witch, too? I had to promise her -” he said, pointing at me, “the baby - darling, I didn’t realize she’d collect, I didn’t think she could possibly really want the baby, I thought she was trying to frighten me -”

  “But - but I had a witch - a different witch -”

  “Oh, both of you shut up,” I growled. “Yes, I’m actually collecting, what would I have let you get away with my singing roses for if you had nothing I wanted? I could have kept you for a pet or a statue, and instead I’m taking the child. The other witch has apparently declined to appear -”

  “I most certainly have not!” exclaimed a fourth voice behind me. “Goodness, this is a mess, isn’t it? D’you suppose that you could just relinquish your claim - after all, surely the mother’s right is stronger than the father’s, what with the three quarters of a year involved in the baby-making and such - I’ll trade you a singing rosebush if that’s what your business is about? I haven’t got one but I know a -”

  “Oh, nightshade,” I hissed. “I don’t want another rosebush, I have enough rosebushes at this time, the man stole a few cuttings years ago. I want the baby.”

  “Well, so do I, and I’ve been promised it just the same if not better. Is it a boy or a girl, dear?” the newcomer asked the mother.

  “…Girl,” whimpered the mother.

  “Well, the little munchkin is clearly not staying here, whatever she’s doing,” the other witch said. She was younger than me, by at least a few years, no gray in her dark gold hair, dressed scarcely more like a witch than a milkmaid in dusty rose, no hat, no robes over the dress. She made a preposterous figure and I would have said she was no witch at all if the mother of the child didn’t seem to recognize her. “We’ll go figure this out somewhere besides your front hall, shall we? And you can get on with having another one without quite such a mess of owings on it.”

  “If you’d settle for the secondborn,” I suggested.

  “No, no, it’d never work,” said the other witch. “Letting alone the possibility that they never want to repeat the process! You’re more than welcome to wait -”

  “Look here, I made my deal when the boy was twelve, I certainly have prior claim, she’s got to be five years younger than he is -”

  “And she’s the one who carried the babe, isn’t she, it’s hardly my fault that this boy paid more than ten minutes’ attention to her and you were able to track them down!”

  “Weren’t you going to have this argument somewhere else,” said the father weakly. Probably hoping we’d duel, kill each other, and leave the little family in peace, bargain or no bargain.

  “If you think I’m going to let you carry off the child -” I began.

  “You can hold her, but I’m not letting you out of my sight,” the other witch said. “Go on then.”

  I rolled my eyes and scooped up the infant out of the cradle. And promptly dropped a smoke globe, which brought me straight home. If she was fool enough to let me be the one to lay hands on the contested baby, so be it -

  And she was standing in my living room.

  “Tut, tut, aren’t we impolite. We haven’t resolved the question. Oh, this place is nice, isn’t it?”

  “How did you do that?” I asked.

  “I’m a witch.”

  “So the hell am I -”

  “Language! There’s little ears about!” cooed the intruder.

  “You still seem under the impression that you’re going to have any say in what happens to the owner of those little ears. You may have followed me home, but now you’re in my domain -”

  “Yes, mind your hospitality obligations.”

  “I didn’t invite you in!”

  “Of course you did.”

  I went back over the sequence of events and - yes, I sort of had. Implicit agreement to the rules of engagement that included continuing our little custody battle somewhere else. She’d let me choose the ground, and then followed me right to it. I should have gone somewhere else.

  “Look,” I said, “I need this baby. I don’t have any others lined up, I want to turn her into my apprentice, and the sidereal arrangements I need to seal the deal are only coming up once in the next thirty years, six months from now, too soon to trawl the continent for needy pregnant peasants. What would it take to get you to go away?”

  “I’m not going away,” said the other witch.

  “You -”

  “Look, let’s do this civilly. I’m Millicent. What’s your name?”

  I looked up at the ceiling. I needed to string some more garlic. The baby fussed in my arms and I started swaying to soothe her.

  “Orawne. What do you even want her for?”

  “Same thing. I haven’t got a time limit, but I do have to stick to the first child I pick. I’m not giving her up any more than you are.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake -”

  “But I can share.”

  I stared at Millicent.

  “You can share?”

  “I can. Look, I haven’t got a permanent residence at the moment -”

  “You were going to raise a baby apprentice while homeless?” I exclaimed.

  “While nomadic, thank you, and with plenty of people who have roofs and owe favors! But you’ve got lots of room. I’ll take a spare bed and save you childrearing time and she can learn both sorts of witching.”

  “You’re mad. You’re completely -”

  “I bake.”

  “I’m sure you do, but -”

  “I will do all of the laundry.” This with a significant look at the baby in my arms.

  “Upstairs, first door on your left,” I sighed. “I keep early hours, don’t clatter around after nine in the evening unless the baby needs something.”

  “Thank you, Orawne,” smiled Millicent.

  “Don’t mention it,” I growled.

  “We’re going to need to name her,” she said.

  “Vercari.”

  “I was thinking Linda.”

  “What in the world kind of witch is named Linda? For that matter, what kind of witch name is Millicent?” I said.

  “Oh, I come from a long line of witches with ordinary names. I’ll settle for middle name placement if you’ll let her switch what she goes by later should she like to.”

  “Vercari Linda,” I mused.

  “Oh, and I must insist on using my last name. Apprentice reasons.”

  “…Vercari Linda what, then?”

  “Murk. Acceptably witchy?”

  “Yes. Fine. Whatever.”

  “We’re going to get along famously, Orawne, I just know it,” beamed Millicent.

  * * *

  She did the laundry. She made pie. Vercari liked the milky potion she fixed up better than mine. Meanwhile, I made preparations for what I was going to need to properly dedicate the baby as my apprentice - Millicent didn’t seem to need any such ritual, and it made me nervous about whether mine would take, properly, with a claim on her like that. But it was too late to trawl the continent for peasants willing to bargain away their imminent children. It was hard enough to find someone who’d make the promise when they weren’t already expecting.

  “Honestly, what were you planning to do with a baby and all this work to d
o?” Millicent asked, rocking Vercari while I made straw figurines to burn.

  “Not sleep much,” I muttered.

  “Do you even like babies?”

  “They’re all right. I won’t be able to teach her much until she’s four or so, maybe three if she’s precocious. She’s still cute, just - this isn’t the part I was planning for as much.”

  “I’ll have a bit of a head start, then, I have a rattle that she’ll be able to get some use out of soon, not to accomplish much, just to train the right reflexes.”

  “How soon?” I asked. Straw crunched in my hand.

  “After you’ve dedicated her. Don’t worry, Orawne, I’m not going to kidnap her out from under you, we agreed on sharing, didn’t we? I keep my promises.”

  “She likes you more. She -”

  “I hold her more. In six months you’ll be done with your straw… things… and you’ll -”

  “Watch her wave around your magic rattle. What kind of magic do you do, anyhow?”

  “I don’t know if the tradition strictly has a name. I’m from the westlands, anyway.”

  “And in the westlands you can follow other witches’ smoke globes and make magic rattles to train babies’ reflexes when they’re less than a year old and make better potions?”

  “But I couldn’t actually use a smoke globe, let alone make one,” countered Millicent. “We’re differently specialized, I’m hardly omnipotent.”

  “Still.”

  “The baby will have both kinds,” Millicent smiled.

  “…That’s why you were willing to share, is it? And to do all the laundry to get it done amicably. You want your apprentice to be two kinds of witch.”

  “Your apprentice too. And splitting the childcare doesn’t hurt. I get up in the evening and you get up in the morning when she’s crying, I do the cooking and the laundry but you’re still giving her baths -”

  “I have to dunk her in herb water anyway. It just makes sense.”

  “Are you saying you’ll stop giving her baths when she’s six months old?”

  “Well, no.”

  “There you go.”

  Vercari was, as babies go, fairly ordinary. She developed brown hair, when she grew any at all - Millicent commented that it looked like mine, though mine was half gone gray from some combination of age and potion exposure - and her eyes stayed blue even past the point where they’d have darkened if they were going to. Like Millicent’s. One could almost imagine that she was in fact our baby, despite the fact that this was on several levels impossible.

  Millicent looked over the text of my dedication ritual once I’d written it out with all the names and star signs and so on filled in.

  “This says that you’re giving her to the stars and taking her from the moon. What’s that supposed to mean?”

  I looked up. “What does it sound like?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t touch astronomical mumbo-jumbo. What does it mean?”

  Well, it wasn’t like Millicent would be able to use any of my spells even if I told her, since no one had dedicated her as an appropriately astronomical mumbo-jumboed apprentice when she was little. “If Vercari was a boy I’d be taking him from the sun instead, does that help?”

  “…No?”

  “…My kind of witch can’t have children. Can yours? What are you doing getting them from mundanes, if you could just have the homemade kind?”

  “My kind of witch can,” said Millicent softly. “I can’t.”

  “Oh.”

  “But Vercari won’t be able to?”

  “No. Unless you have a way of giving her back to the moon after she’s taken what she needs from the stars.”

  “Well, I can see if there’s something to be done, anyway.”

  “So, wait - Millicent - were you homemade or taken?”

  “Homemade, if that’s what you call it. There’s entire witch villages in the westlands.”

  “And you’re out here with a half-share in my taken baby because the moon wouldn’t have you to begin with.”

  “If that’s how you want to put it.” She didn’t sound like she wanted to discuss it.

  I let it drop.

  * * *

  “Aside from the rattle to - train her reflexes - what is it you’re going to be doing with her?” I asked, while I was feeding Vercari milky potion and Millicent was rolling out biscuit dough.

  “Well, the rattle will be it for about a year, but then simple illusions are next. Then since she’s a firstborn she can have a familiar, probably I’ll find her a kitten or a fox pup; I don’t have a familiar because I have an older brother.”

  “What are they for?”

  “They aren’t exactly for anything. Well, status symbols, if you’re in a witch village, but they aren’t much practical use. Don’t you have anything just for fun?”

  Garden and chickens for food and potion ingredients, telescope for stargazing and divination, a self-operating spinning wheel and loom to make my own robes and have something to trade to those mundanes who didn’t do anything that gave me leave to extort them, nothing really for fun. “No.”

  “Poor Orawne. Who taught you, anyway?”

  “She died. Dueling, five years ago. I wouldn’t have called her fun. I had a decent enough childhood, anyway.”

  “Took you when you were a baby?”

  “I was two, actually, and she bought me outright. Story was that my mother was in a bind when my father died.”

  “And your mundane mother named you ‘Orawne’, did she?”

  “I presume not, but I can’t remember what it was instead. I like my name. I wouldn’t want to be called Millicent.”

  “I like my name too,” said Millicent tartly.

  “Much good may it do you. While you’re looking for a way to let the moon have her back one day maybe I’ll look for a way to make her familiar able earn its keep, shall I?”

  “Lest she grow up complaining ‘Orawne doesn’t understand the point of my dearest bestest friend!’, yes, by all means, work out a spell to teach cats to read or serve as divinatory focuses or whatever it is you’d have one do.”

  “You think Vercari’s going to grow up calling me ‘Orawne’, do you?”

  “As opposed to?”

  “Mother.”

  Millicent blinked at me.

  “There are two of us,” she pointed out.

  “We are in my house, and the stars will have her before you give her that magic rattle -”

  “So I suppose,” Millicent interrupted, “that I’ll be Mummy or something like that, and that should be clear enough when she’s screaming for one or the other across the garden.”

  “Oh. All right.”

  “Hear that, Vercari dear, Mother says I’m Mummy and she can have the stiff formal name,” cooed Millicent.

  I snorted.

  Millicent finished painting egg onto the last circle of dough and put the biscuits in the oven.

  * * *

  I was stitching together a little dress for Vercari, so that Millicent could more easily keep up with the laundry and because it was a break from making straw things to burn. Millicent poked her head into the sewing room.

  “What are you going to start teaching her, when she’s four or what have you?”

  “Constellations. She’ll have to learn to read, too. Potionmaking has to wait for good motor control.”

  “But what do you do with the constellations?”

  “Learn to interpret them. Much easier to make enchanted objects if you know when to do it, though actually artificing will have to come later, again.”

  “Oh! The spinning wheel and loom are working by themselves?”

  “Of course they are. You didn’t think I was operating them myself all day long, did you?”

  “I did,” admitted Millicent. “I was very impressed.”

  I snorted. “I do most of my magic with magic things. And some potions.”

  “I suppose that suits you.”

  “Better than havin
g a pointless animal following me around and following someone else’s smoke globe into their house. And making illusions.”

  “Illusions can be very useful if you know how to use them. And obviously so can following certain witches home.”

  “Obviously,” I said. “What were you planning to do if I’d been living with someone?”

  “Does your kind of witch even get married?”

  “Not to anyone who assumes that pregnancy is the intended outcome,” I said dryly. “But I could have had a lover or a co-apprentice I was living with or another taken child - though if I’d already taken one I’d have been less insistent about this one, I suppose - or could have still been living with my teacher.”

  “I cannot a bit imagine you with a lover. You’d chase him off with a stick.”

  “Him?”

  Millicent blinked at me, and then either Vercari made a noise or she decided of her own accord to flee the room.

  * * *

  “I was married once,” Millicent told me, while I was giving Vercari her bath.

  “Oh, I’d been assuming you found out the moon wouldn’t have you by magic.”

  “I don’t even know how I’d do that by magic. No.”

  “Is that why you aren’t married anymore?”

  “Well, it’s more complicated than - yes. It is.”

  “More fool him. You make very good scones.”

  Millicent laughed, and I almost smiled.

  “He didn’t want to go to the trouble of taking a baby. It’s a little frowned on, in the westlands, taking babies.”

  “If you can homemake them I suppose it would seem like a lot of hassle, and unnecessarily antagonize the mundanes, who never seem to think ahead how they’ll feel about the deals when they come due…”

  “Yes, exactly.”

  “But if you can’t homemake them -”

  “Well, he can. He has done. Our handfast expired and he married someone else and they have a baby and another on the way. My brother wrote.”

  “You’ve been receiving mail at my house?”

  “I live here, don’t I?”

  “I suppose.”

  “I told my brother about Vercari Linda. He might come visit.”

  “Might he.”

  “I can introduce them out in the front garden if you don’t want him past the threshold.”