The Witch Who Forgot Her Spells

At Birchwood, you were expected to master three spells per term.

By the middle of the autumn term, Willa had mastered zero.

This was not for lack of trying. She tried very hard. She said the words correctly. She held the wand at the right angle. She thought the right thoughts and wore the right hat (a pointed one, black, slightly too large, which she'd inherited from her grandmother and which drooped over one eye in a way that she felt undermined her credibility).

The results were consistently, spectacularly wrong.

When she tried to light a candle, the candle wrote her a small polite note saying it didn't feel up to it today.

When she attempted the growth spell that was supposed to make a seedling sprout, the seedling sprouted — but underground, and came up three gardens away in someone's vegetable patch, confusing their carrots.

When she tried the simple invisibility charm — the one every first-year was expected to get by week three — she made herself visible in seven places at once instead, which her classmates found funny and her teacher, Madam Crowe, found deeply tiring.

"Willa," Madam Crowe said, on the seventh occasion, closing her eyes briefly. "What did you intend?"

"Invisibility," said Willa (six of her seven selves).

"And what did you produce?"

"Visibility. But more of it."

Madam Crowe opened her eyes. "Indeed."

The rest of Willa's class was doing beautifully. Petra could summon weather. Bram had already mastered two advanced memory charms. Even Flynn, who was considered the second-least-talented student, could reliably turn water into something other than water, even if it was not always what he was aiming for.

Willa sat in the back of every class and paid careful attention and understood everything she was taught and could not do any of it.

She was not unhappy, exactly. She liked Birchwood. She liked the smell of the spellwork classroom and the feel of the wand in her hand and the sound the library made when you opened its oldest books. She liked her classmates — most of them. She liked Madam Crowe, who was strict but honest and never pretended Willa was doing better than she was.

But she was puzzled. She was a witch. Magic ran in her family like water in a river. Why didn't it run through her?

The answer came on the night of the autumn examination.

Each student was given a specific task and had to complete it in front of the full school. Willa's task was the candle spell — the simplest one. The one that even the first-years managed.

She stood at the front of the great hall in her droopy hat. All the teachers were there. All the students. Her mother and grandmother, who had come to watch, were in the front row.

She looked at the candle.

The candle, she was fairly sure, looked back.

She raised her wand.

She said the words.

Nothing.

The candle sat there, unlit, completely unbothered.

She tried again. Nothing.

She tried a third time, and the candle — she would have sworn this happened — sighed.

The hall was very quiet.

Willa lowered her wand.

She looked at the candle. She looked at it very carefully — the way she always looked at things, which was closely and with genuine interest, even when the looking didn't produce magic.

"I don't know why you won't light," she said to the candle, quietly, almost to herself. "But I think maybe you don't need to. You're interesting even unlit. The wax has a really nice colour. Like honeycomb."

She looked up. The hall was still silent.

But something had happened.

All around the room — on the walls, on the tables, on the high stone windowsills — candles she had not touched had lit themselves. Dozens of them. Hundreds. The great hall blazed with warm, golden light, every candle burning without being asked, as though they had all simply decided to at the same moment.

Madam Crowe stood very still.

"Willa," she said. "Did you do that?"

"I don't — I don't think so," said Willa. "I only lit one candle—"

"You didn't light one candle," said Madam Crowe. "You spoke to one candle as though it mattered. And all the others listened."

The hall was quiet again, but differently quiet — the kind of quiet that comes just after something significant.

Willa looked at the candles burning all around her.

Her grandmother, in the front row, was smiling in a particular way — the way that meant she had known something for a long time and had been waiting for it to become obvious.

"There is," Madam Crowe said carefully, "a branch of magic considerably rarer than spellwork. Much older." She looked at Willa. "It is the ability to cause things to choose to help you. Not by force, not by formula — by genuine regard." She paused. "We have not had a practitioner of that particular art at this school in forty years."

"What is it called?" Willa asked.

Madam Crowe's mouth did something unusual. It smiled.

"Kindcraft," she said. "And it cannot be taught. It can only be lived."

Willa looked at her wand. She looked at the candles. She looked at her grandmother, who was still smiling that particular smile.

She thought about all the spells that had gone wrong — the candle that had written her a note, the seedling that had taken a different route, the seven visible versions of herself.

She thought: Maybe they didn't go wrong. Maybe they went a different direction.

She put her wand in her pocket.

She looked at the room full of burning candles — every one of them burning freely, warmly, without being made to — and felt the most powerful she had ever felt in her life.

The End.