The Witch’s Familiar

13 min read · Paranormal romance · Free, complete, 18+

The cat on Tamsin Ridley’s doorstep was the size of a spaniel, and before she had her boots on it had pushed a picture straight into her head: her own kitchen, seen from the floor, with every crumb outlined in red.

She stood there in her dressing gown; it looked up at her with yellow eyes and did not blink. It was the morning after the autumn equinox, the fell behind the house was white with mist, and she was thirty-three years old and had waited seven of those years for exactly this.

“Oh,” she said. “It’s you.”

The cat walked past her shins and into the house as if he had only been out for the milk.

Every other witch in the dale had been sent a familiar within a year of being corded. Aunt Win had a jackdaw that stole teaspoons from the chapel. Tamsin had been corded at twenty-six, and had since kept a seven-knot cord, a kitchen that smelt of rosemary and a gift the coven called kettle magic. She could tell heat where to go. She could keep a pan at a simmer all day with the gas off, or draw a fever out of a child and into a basin of water. Useful, Aunt Win said. Not the kind of gift a familiar comes looking for.

She rang her aunt with the cat on the table, eating her bacon.

“Black?” said Aunt Win. “Big? Pushes pictures?”

“All three.”

A long pause, with the jackdaw muttering behind it. “Well. They come to the witches who’ll need them. Mind what it shows you.”

She offered him Shadow. He sent her a picture of a hundred black cats in a row, every one of them called Shadow, every one asleep from boredom. Midnight and Grimalkin got the same picture with more cats in it. In the end he named himself, by sleeping on the warm lid of the Aga every night and glaring when she moved him. Hob, then.

He had opinions. On her housekeeping: the larder, with a mouse in it, waving. On her cooking: her own face, chewing, dutiful. On her evenings: Tamsin alone on the settee with a library book, seen from the ceiling, very small, like a woman at the bottom of a well.

“I don’t need advice about my love life from a cat,” she told him on the third night.

Hob sent her a door. It was painted blue, with a brass plate she could not read, and it was opening.

“Whose door?”

He sent it again. This time a light burned behind it, and the kitchen smelt so strongly of burnt cinnamon that she checked the oven.

On the seventh morning the lid of the Aga was cold and Hob was gone.

---

A familiar did not wander. She searched the house, the barn and the beck anyway, while the bond at the back of her mind went thin as cotton, stretched south towards town and stayed there all day.

At dusk a muddy estate car came up the lane faster than the lane deserved and stopped at her gate. A man got out with a cat carrier in his arms. Hob was inside it, entirely calm. The man had three long scratches down one cheek and the dazed, careful face of a driver who has done nine miles without being sure why.

“Is this your cat?”

“Yes. I’m so sorry. What did he—”

“He has broken into my surgery four nights running. Through a window I keep shut.” He set the carrier on her wall. “He sits outside the isolation kennel till dawn. Today he walked in at the front door behind a client’s spaniel, and when I tried to scan him for a chip, he—” He touched his cheek. “Then I was sitting in my car with the engine running and a picture of this house in my head. Your gate. That bent post.” He looked at the bent post. “I’m a vet. I’d like to know how a cat does that.”

“He’s been on my Aga every morning,” Tamsin said.

“Then he’s been commuting.”

His name was Kit Sowerby. He had the mixed practice on Market Street in Hawsby, where everybody’s dogs went, and he was thirty-eight and had been up since a calving at four. She made tea, because her kettle was always hot, and he held the mug in both hands at her kitchen table while Hob sat on the Aga and looked pleased with himself.

Familiars talked to their witches. Tamsin had never heard of one talking to a vet.

“What’s in the isolation kennel?” she said.

He looked into his tea. “Last Thursday the Metcalfes’ hay barn went up. The fire brigade found a bird in the middle of it. Size of a heron, red and gold, on fire, and not burnt. Jack Metcalfe brought it to me in a coal scuttle, because the cardboard box caught. It’s got a crossbow bolt through the wing root. Iron. I can’t get it out. Every dressing I put on it goes up. You could fry an egg on it, it’s getting hotter, it’s dying, and I don’t know what it is.”

Tamsin did. It was the first story the coven told you and the last thing you expected to meet. Hob sent her the door again, and this time she could read the plate: K. SOWERBY MRCVS, VETERINARY SURGEON.

“Mind what it shows you,” she said.

“Sorry?”

“Nothing. Can I see it?”

He studied her as he might a dog that had walked in on three legs and would not say why. “Are you a vet?”

“No,” Tamsin said, and reached for her coat. “Worse.”

---

The isolation kennel was steel, and the steel was too hot to touch. Kit had taped a card to its door: Unknown sp. Barn fire. 3.6 kg. NO GAUZE. NO TOWELS. NO JACK.

Inside, the bird lay on a bed of builder’s sand. Its feathers were red at the root and gold at the edge, and under them, where the down should have been, a low flame moved like the blue ring of a gas hob turned right down. The bolt went through the root of its left wing: black iron, square-headed, cut with marks that made her eyes water. The bird opened one eye, looked at her, and made a single note, low and clear, that she felt in her breastbone.

“Phoenix,” she said.

“Don’t.”

“It is, though.”

Kit put his face in his hands. “Fine. What does a phoenix need?”

She told him what the coven taught. When a phoenix is old or badly hurt it burns, and out of the ash comes the same bird, young. Cold iron stops the burning. With the bolt in, it could neither heal nor burn, only grow hotter until it died. And a phoenix that dies unburnt leaves feathers whose fire never goes out, which was what the bolt was for.

“Somebody shot it so it would die slowly,” Kit said.

“Somebody shot it so it would die whole.”

He went very still. “Then I take the iron out.”

“Then it burns. At once. Hot enough to take your roof off.”

“Can you stop that?”

She thought of the most heat she had ever held: a chip-pan fire at the chapel harvest supper, three seconds of it, and a sore wrist for a week. “Not in here. There’s a ring of stones up on the fell that was built for it. It belongs to my coven.”

“Of course it does,” said Kit.

They dressed the wound anyway. He could not touch the bird without his gloves smoking; she could. She put her hands either side of the wing and told the heat to go down into the sand, and it went, sulking, like a dog called off a sheep, and Kit worked between her hands with forceps and a strip of fire blanket. His forearm lay along hers. Twice he said, “Too hot?” and twice she said, “Keep going,” and the second time he looked up and went on looking for longer than the job needed.

By seven in the morning the bird slept. They sat on the kennel-room floor with their backs to the one cool wall, his shoulder an inch from hers, and Hob climbed into Kit’s lap, turned round three times and sent Tamsin a picture of two people sitting exactly like this, but closer.

“He’s doing it again, isn’t he?” Kit said. “I can feel it. Like someone leaning on the doorbell.”

“He’s editorialising.”

“What’s he saying?”

She was saved by the bell on the front door.

The man in the waiting room wore a waxed jacket so new it still had its fold lines, and a falconer’s glove that no bird had ever gripped. He had lost a hawk, he said. Big, reddish, last seen over Metcalfes’. Had anyone brought one in?

“What’s its ring number?” said Kit.

The man smiled. “I’d have to look.”

Kit leant on the counter. “Nobody who flies a hawk has to look. Nothing’s come in.”

The man left a card, R. Lister, Falconry, with no telephone number on it. Through the window Tamsin watched him stop at the corner and study the blue door for a long time, the way Hob studied a mousehole.

---

Aunt Win lived above the post office, with the jackdaw and a view of every car that came into Hawsby. She heard Tamsin out at the kitchen table with one hand on the teapot, and then said, “The circle, yes. Friday’s the full moon. All seven of us, and the first phoenix this coven has seen since your grandmother was a girl.”

“Thank you.”

“And you’ll bring your vet. We’ll tidy him before we start.”

She had known it was coming. She still had to set her cup down.

“He hasn’t told anyone. He won’t.”

“They never mean to.” Win poured. “He’ll lose a fortnight. He’ll wake up on Saturday thinking he’s had a quiet week and a scratch off a stray. It doesn’t hurt them, love. Whoever lets them see brings them up the fell, and we make it kind. That’s the rule.”

“He’ll lose me.”

Win looked at her over the teapot, and her face did not change, and that was the worst of it. “Then you’ll have lost a man you’ve known a week. That rule is why there are still witches in this dale. I don’t bend it for my niece. I didn’t bend it for your mother.”

Tamsin’s father had left when she was four: a pleasant, puzzled man who never seemed to know why he had married a woman whose kettle was always hot. She had not, until that moment, wondered why.

She told Kit that evening in the kennel room, with the bird’s note going up and down like breathing: the coven, the rule, what tidying took, and that he would never know he had been asked.

“But I’m asking you,” she said. “I won’t let them do it to you without that. If you say yes, I’ll drive you up the fell on Friday myself.”

Kit had been leaning on the steel table with his arms folded. He unfolded them. “And if I say no?”

“Then there’s no circle. We burn it here, with me holding it, and I’ve never held more than a chip pan.” She made herself finish. “And I’m out. They put me out of the coven.”

“For me.”

“For refusing.”

He was quiet. On the warm top of the kennel Hob sent her nothing at all, which from Hob amounted to a speech.

“I’ve been a vet fourteen years,” Kit said. “I’ve put down more animals than I can count. I remember every one, and I wouldn’t give one of them back. I’d rather keep things.” He looked at her. “I’d rather keep this week. I’d rather keep you, if that’s on offer. But I won’t have you lose your family over it. That’s your call. Not mine.”

She found she had crossed the room. She stopped a foot short of him.

“I’d like to kiss you,” she said. “Before I decide anything. So I know what I’m deciding.”

“That’s a terrible reason.”

“It’s an honest one.”

“Then yes,” said Kit, and took her face in his hands.

The first try was clumsy: her nose against his, a low laugh from both of them. The second was not. His hands smelt of chlorhexidine and woodsmoke, and he kissed her slowly, as if he meant to remember it in detail, and behind them the phoenix sang its one note and the heat in the room rose, and Tamsin did not tell it where to go.

When they drew apart, Hob was sitting on the steel table beside them. He sent her, very clearly, a picture of a clock.

“What’s he saying now?” said Kit.

“That we took our time.”

In the morning she drove to the post office, climbed the outside stair and laid her cord on Aunt Win’s step: her grandmother’s cord, seven knots, one for each witch who had stood round her cradle. The curtain moved. Nobody came down. As she reached the bottom of the steps she heard the jackdaw go in at the open window, and then the window shut.

That afternoon Kit found the padlock on his back gate cut through and laid neatly on top of the bin.

---

On Friday they carried everything wooden out of the kennel room, hosed the floor and filled every bucket in the building. Kit bolted both doors and laid the dart rifle he kept for loose deer and the Websters’ bull on the worktop by the sink, loaded.

“Dosed for a red stag,” he said, when she looked at it.

“Are we expecting a red stag?”

“We’re expecting R. Lister, Falconry.”

The bolt came out at ten past eleven. Kit cut down to it while she held the bird’s heat into the sand. Then he set the forceps on the square iron head and said, “Ready?” and she said, “No,” and he said, “Me neither,” and pulled.

The bird did not catch fire. It became fire: white, then gold, a column of it to the ceiling tiles, and the heat came at her like a furnace door opening on her face. She put out both hands and caught it. She told it here, here, not the roof, not him, here, and it fought her as a river fights a dam, and her palms blistered, and she held it.

Kit’s hand lay flat between her shoulder blades, saying nothing, going nowhere.

Then Hob, who had spent the whole business on top of the drugs cupboard with his ears flat, sent Kit a picture so hard that Kit swore. Tamsin caught the edge of it through the bond: the open gate, a man in a new waxed jacket raising a crossbow at the kennel-room window.

“Don’t let go,” Kit said, and went for the rifle.

The window came in. A bolt hit the side of the kennel and sang off the steel, and the man came over the sill after it, gloved hand reaching for the fire before it could finish. Hob dropped off the drugs cupboard onto his head.

It was not dignified: a stone and a half of black cat with every claw out, making a noise Tamsin had never heard from him, and R. Lister went backwards into the buckets, and Kit put a dart into his thigh from four feet away.

“That was for a stag,” Tamsin said through her teeth.

“He’ll wake up in a cell in Northallerton.” Kit came back and put his gloved hands over hers. The heat was no less, but it was easier to hold, as a heavy table is easier with someone at the other end.

The fire went down slowly, a long breath let out. It left a heap of grey ash the size of a loaf and warm as one, and in the ash something moved: a chick, wet and bare and gold, no bigger than a hen’s egg, which opened its beak and shouted at them.

Hob came and looked at it. He sent them both a picture of a plate.

“No,” said Tamsin and Kit together.

The kennel room lost its ceiling tiles and two panes, and Kit’s insurers had no box on the form for bird. The chick moved into the airing cupboard in Kit’s flat above the surgery and screamed for mince every three hours, and Hob, commuting again, took to sleeping across the cupboard door, like a sentry, or a cat outside a larder; it was never clear which.

On Monday there was a jam jar on Tamsin’s doorstep: Aunt Win’s green burn salve, labelled in Win’s hand, Twice a day. Gloves on after. There was no cord with it, and no note. Tamsin held it on the step for a long time, in the cold.

That evening she drove down to Hawsby with her hands in bandages. The blue door on Market Street was shut, its brass plate catching the streetlight, and she stood in front of it exactly where Hob had shown her, before she knew whose it was.

It opened before she knocked. Kit was in his socks. Somewhere up the stairs behind him the airing cupboard was shouting.

“Hob told me you were outside,” he said. “He also sent me a picture of you on my settee, which I took as a hint.” He stood back from the door. “Will you stay? Only if you want to.”

“I want to,” Tamsin said, and stepped inside.

On the stairs, Hob opened one yellow eye, sent her the blue door one last time, wide open with her on the right side of it, and went to sleep before she could argue.