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Chapter Text

In the years to come, what Caleb Wittebane will remember about the day his younger brother was born is this: the blood, of course, and his father’s stony anger, but mostly the overwhelming helplessness he felt watching his baby brother scream in the arms of a wet nurse while the life slowly slipped from his mother where she lay in her bed.

Phillip’s mother. 

Not his.

And what will never leave Caleb’s mind is the feeling of his little brother’s tiny fist grabbing tight around his own thin fingers as he whispered to Phillip that he too knew how it felt to be left behind by a mother, but that he would swear to never abandon Phillip. He would be as true a brother to Phillip as any of the same mother might, and they would be The Brothers Wittebane, and there would be none who could cleave them in two.

This is a promise that he will repeat to Phillip many times in the years to come, but it’s a promise that begins here, on an unseasonably hot night in April, as the sun sinks low over the islands and the inlets of the Massachusetts Bay.

So this is the story of The Brothers Wittebane - promises, and love, and the bright red of blood.

—————

Had you asked any of the good folk of Winthrop, in that balmy spring of 1638, which child might one day grow to have a statue of them placed in a city square, few if any would have answered, "why, the poor abandoned waif of Goodman Wittebane, whose rebellious wife hath so lately fled to Rhode Island with the rest of Anne Hutchinson’s heretical rabble." 

’Twas a shame, they clucked, when Goodman Wittebane was forced to hire on a servant girl just to put dinner on the table for him and his son, forced to ride the ten miles to Charlestowne to beg Reverend John Wilson on hands and knees for his marriage to be annulled. 

There was naught to be done for the boy of course. Little Caleb Wittebane was surely like to have suckled heresy at his mother’s breast, and sure to grow up with strange notions. He was a queer, quiet little thing as it was - too close with his mother even in his youngest years, self-assured in a way that could only have been the result of his mother’s failure to instill in him the proper awe and reverence a child owed to their parents, the same respect their parents owed to The Lord.

No, it was no surprise to any of the folk of Winthrop when Goodman Wittebane remarried scarce a six-month after his marriage was annulled, nor when the new Goody Wittebane grew wide with child scare a month after that. You could hardly expect a man like Abel Wittebane - educated, wealthy, devout - to watch his hard-earned estate fall entirely into the hands of a boy like the son who had been born to him by a wild woman - a woman near to being a witch. 

Aye, and "witch" was what they muttered about the first Goody Wittebane when the second, so young and of seemingly fine health, died within an hour of giving birth to her first child -  a son, a boy that Goodman Wittebane named Phillip, after his own father, who had served God and country well and born arms against the Popish rabble on the fields of Kinsale. 

It was hard to even be believed, that so fine a citizen could see two wives lost in the space of a single year. It was a shame, and not a single soul in Winthrop could consider themselves surprised when Goodman Wittebane withdrew from public life, leaving the running of his store to his apprentices and his farm to his servants. Goodman Wittebane locked himself in his study, reading the Gospel and writing, and his sons were left to be raised by dour tutors and wet nurses from the village.

’Twas a shame.

—————

The first thing Phillip believed in, from his earliest years, was how closely his brother would always stay by him. He knew, in the vague way that children do, that his mother had died giving birth to him and that it had made his father so sad that he never left his room full of books. He knew that Caleb had a different mother, who had left and made their father almost as sad. He knew that the other boys didn’t like Caleb much, and that their father didn’t either. He knew that their father loved them - loved him at least - or so his nurse always said. 

But what he believed, with all the horrible and reckless weight of a child’s heart, was that Caleb would always be by his side. Caleb, who threw rocks at the older boys who would steal his handkerchief. Caleb, who wiped away the blood and dirt when he fell and skinned his knees. Caleb, who swore to him every night that they were The Brothers Wittebane, closer and more true than any who shared a mother, and that none could ever cleave them in two. 

This fact, that The Brothers Wittebane were one, was the first thing Phillip ever believed. 

—————

And then came June of 1642, and word from England that Parliament had directed the Earl of Essex to raise an army of 10,000 men, and with it rescue His Majesty King Charles’ person out of the hands of those desperate souls who were about him, to save the royal family from those advisors who poured evil into the King’s ears and led him to mistreat the English people so cruelly. 

By summer’s end the King had declared Essex a traitor, by New Year’s Day thousands of soldiers lay dead across the plains of England, and by March Goodman Wittebane and five score other upstanding men of the Massachusetts Bay Colony had set sail, intent on enlisting in Parliament’s army and defending the common rights of England and its Dissenters from Anglican absolutism. 

Behind him, he left his two sons - entrusting them into the care of his late wife’s brother, the Reverend Obadiah Smith.

When he left, Abel Wittebane placed his hands on his son Phillip’s shoulders, and bade him to be good - to honor the memory of his mother, to obey his tutors and his uncle, and to trust that The Lord had great plans for him. 

When he left, Abel Wittebane would not look at his son Caleb. 

—————

On their first night in the household of their uncle, The Brothers Wittebane snuck out of the bedroom they shared and sat by the woodpile behind the house, staring out at the distant ocean and the moon shining down upon the waters. It was a cold night, an oncoming late frost in the air, and Caleb wrapped his thin arms around his younger brother to keep him warm. 

Phillip was shivering - perhaps to keep from crying, Caleb thought - and so to comfort him Caleb recited the promise he’d been making since the day Phillip had been born: that there was no power on God’s Earth that could make Caleb abandon him, not the way their mothers and their father had, not any way at all. He would love Phillip when all others had left, and if they were ever separated by force then Caleb wouldn’t rest until he found a way to come back.  

It was their catechism, and that night on the Massachusetts coast Phillip swore it in return - he would love Caleb no matter who had left him, no matter what his mother was accused of, no matter who jeered at Caleb in the street, no matter how many times their father refused to acknowledge his oldest son. His voice was fragile in the cold March air, his limbs still shaking in the cold and his grief, but he promised his brother that he believed in The Brothers Wittebane as much as Caleb did, and that if anyone ever were to take Caleb away he wouldn’t rest until he had rescued him and they were safe and together again.

And Caleb had laughed, and pulled his little brother closer against him, and said that he was still but a wee thing yet, and that it would be many years before he’d even have to think about being the Wittebane brother who needed to save the day. 

And when a servant, risen early to set the fires that would warm the house, found them sneaking back inside, it was Caleb who swore that he had forced his brother to accompany him out into the cold, and that the fault was his and his alone, and taken the beating that might have been given to them both - little Phillip watching, the words of his own promise burned bright into his memory. 

—————

This was how The Brothers Wittebane spent the next three years: Phillip, flesh and blood of Obadiah Smith’s dear, departed sister, was raised how Obadiah might have raised his own son. He was a smart lad, Phillip, and Obadiah took control of the boy’s learning himself. At every breakfast he would read to Phillip from the Gospel, and the boy would not be allowed to leave the table for any reason until he answered his uncle’s questions about what had just been taught. He was harsh on the boy, for he knew that Phillip’s birth had likely been cursed by his brother-in-law’s witch of a first wife, and yet he knew just as well that difficult births often foretold glory for those who could overcome their curses and find the light of The Lord. There were great things in store for young Phillip, if only he could be taught to harness the intelligence God gave him for some good and not evil. He did this out of love, he reminded the boy, for he only wanted to see him succeed. It mattered not how many times he raised a rod, nor how many times he quizzed Phillip on impossible questions until the boy cried from exhaustion and embarrassment - the Lord had big plans for his nephew, and he was lucky to have such a devoted uncle. 

Caleb, the abandoned spawn of that witch herself, was another matter. It seemed that the fears of the good folk of Winthrop had been realized and the boy had indeed sucked heresy and impudence from his mother, for he was oft tardy for prayers and forever arguing with his tutors, asking all sorts of questions that ought not be asked. He whittled when he was meant to be doing chores and did Phillip’s chores when he was meant to be studying Bible; he sang too loudly in church and too loudly on his errands into town; his clothes were always tattered where he had torn them chasing down some bird or other in the marshes and the bramble. 

Worse yet, Obadiah noted, Phillip was utterly devoted to his brother. When he struck Caleb for some misdeed or another, Phillip would be sullen for days. When Caleb fell ill one Christmastide, Phillip refused to leave his bedside for three nights straight - he sat there, whispering, “never in two,” until he was lifted bodily from the room and made to stay sleep in his uncle’s bed. 

It was a failing that Phillip did not grow out of, and as the years went by with no news of his brother-in-law, Obadiah found himself wondering more and more frequently what to do with the boy he could not stand to raise. 

Phillip grew. Caleb grew. They gathered blueberries in the woods and mussels at low tide; they fought with the boys down the lane who called Caleb a witch’s spawn and Phillip an orphan; and they swore their private catechism whenever they were alone. And the years went by. 

—————

The summer of 1645 was violent hot, and a dry wind and drought killed half the crops grown across the Massachusetts Bay. There had been little snow that winter, and without snow to melt the fields and farms were parched - it was said that cows as far afield as Virginia and New Hampshire dropped dead where they stood, so thirsty they were. 

The summer of ’45 brought letters from England: a man named Matthew Hopkins had declared himself the Witchfinder General of Parliament’s soldiers, and indeed, he had already found and destroyed dozens of witches across the counties of East Anglia. The war, the great Civil War, was sure to be ended soon, for the last Royalist army had been smashed at Langport, and the King must sue for peace or be taken by Parliament’s forces. And Goodman Abel Wittebane, long gone these three years, was dead. He had died, along with half of the Earl of Essex’s army, on the blood-soaked fields of Lostwithiel the summer before. 

Without a body there was no funeral, but Obadiah Smith led prayers for his lost brother-in-law and all the other Massachusetts Bay men who’d died defending England from perfidy.

And Caleb and Phillip, The Brothers Wittebane, snuck out once more to watch the moon where it rippled and danced along the dark blue sea - crying for the father they had hardly known, who had left them to die far on the other side of the empty and open sea. 

—————

With his brother-in-law dead and gone, Obadiah Smith felt less inclined than ever to continue feeding and educating his willful miscreant of a “nephew.” It would be better for everyone, he decided, Caleb included, if the boy were sent back to England to be apprenticed to some harsh and tireless master, perhaps in a trade with very little artistry, to crush once and for all the boy’s vanity and impertinence. Perhaps a butcher. Yes, a butcher would do nicely - some large and violent man, in a large and violent task, where Caleb might accidentally lose a finger and never be able to whittle his sinfully exuberant wooden birds again. Perhaps the boy might even lose all desire to sing if he were treated harshly enough and worked to the bone. Certainly one could hope.

And most importantly, he would be far, far away from the rapidly growing Phillip, whose intelligence shone brighter than ever - and who was ever at greater and greater risk of being led astray by the brother he loved so well.

—————

Phillip awoke to the sounds of muffled footsteps and the slam of the cellar door. Someone - or something - was in the yard. He looked across the room that he shared with his brother, hoping that Caleb had heard the noises too and was already up, ready to tell Phillip that was all okay, and that they were safe. But even in the early-morning darkness he could see that the bed was empty. The sheets were pulled taut, the pillow placed with care, but his brother was gone. A chill ran through Phillip. His brother was gone. Had he been taken? Was that the noise he heard outside? Were the kidnappers come to steal him away too? 

Phillip slipped out of bed, his feet bare and cold again the wooden floors. There, there was the noise again. One voice for sure, quiet and angry, and a series of thumps. From the trunk at the foot of his bed he grabbed the wooden sword that Caleb had carved him for his 6th birthday - if someone had taken Caleb, he would fight them off. 

Sword held aloft, he crept downstairs, taking care to step lightly so that the wooden steps wouldn’t creak under his weight. The crescent moon shone weakly through the windows and the trees outside, casting a web of shifting shadows on the floor. Phillip made his way to the door, which was open a crack, and slipped through. He had promised Caleb that if anyone took him away he wouldn’t rest until he had rescued him and they were together again, and he intended to keep that promise. 

The September leaves were just beginning to change, and a wind rustled through the trees, sending splashes of red and orange spiraling down onto the dirt beneath. The cellar door was around the corner, and Phillip crept along the side of the house, wooden sword raised, taking care to keep himself in the shadows. At last he reached the end of the wall, and he took a deep breath. His brother might be in danger - might be tied up and gagged by the thieves, or whoever was there. He needed all his wits about him if he was going to save the day. He took another deep breath, and flung himself around the corner, his sword at the ready.

There, caught in the moonlight against the open cellar door, was Caleb - rubbing his stubbed toe and surrounded by a dozen or more apples spilled across the ground. 

Phillip gasped. “Caleb!” He clapped his hands over his mouth, letting the sword clatter to the ground. Caleb winced and rushed over to him, dropping to one knee so that he was Phillip’s height and grabbing him with both hands.

“Shhhhh, Pip, be quiet!” 

The brothers held their breath, but no lights stirred in the house above them, no angry uncles or servants rushed out into the moonlit night. For a moment, the only sounds in Phillip’s ears were the beating of his own heart, and the soft hooting of some distant owl. 

And then, his anger came rushing back. He flung Caleb’s arms off of him, knocking his brother off balance. 

“What are you doing? You promised you would never leave! You promised!”

“Pip, I —“

“You can’t, I won’t let you! I’ll wake uncle up! I’ll wake the whole town up!” 

“Phillip, stop it!” 

“You said we’d always be together. I thought robbers had taken you! Or wolves! You lied to me, you were going to leave me here all alone just like papa did — ”

“Stop it!” His brother grabbed him by the shoulders once more. “Just…stop. I’m sorry. I’m sorry Pip. I swear to you, it’s not what it seems.” 

“Then what is it?” 

His brother took a deep breath and sat down, pulling his legs up to his chest. “Uncle wants to send me away.” 

Phillip gasped.

“I overheard him making the plans with Goodman Williams. Next week I’m to be sent to England, to learn how to be a butcher.”

“But you can’t go to England, Caleb! It’s so far! And you’d be a horrible butcher, you’d ruin the beef and cut off all your fingers.” 

Caleb laughed at this, and gave him a gentle shove. “Doesn’t the Bible say to treat your elders with respect, young Master Wittebane?”

Phillip giggled - despite the panic still rushing through his veins, he loved how his brother teased him. “Aye, but you’d be terrible at it. And it’s a sin to lie.” 

Caleb laughed again. “That I would.” Phillip sat down next to his brother, leaning up against him. 

“So can’t you just tell Uncle no? You’re going to be an artist and carve birds for fancy ladies and the bows of ships!”

“You know it’s about more than that. Uncle…doesn’t like me.” Phillip started to protest, but the words died in his throat. Their uncle had scarce said three kind words to Caleb in the years they’d been under his roof, and had whipped him many more times than that. 

“He says my mother was a witch, and an evil woman, and that I must be just like her. But she wasn’t like that Pip - I remember her, from when I was even younger than you are now. She was…kind. She loved me, and she would hold my hand and walk with me in the garden and sing songs about all the different plants that grow and the birds that love to eat them. She can’t have been evil, not even if she left.”

Ever since the summer’s letters, Phillip had been obsessed with the news of Matthew Hopkins and the hunt for witches. He was always begging his uncle and the other men to teach him more about what the Bible said about witches - he loved to scare himself imagining what they could do, all the ways they could arrive in the little village of Winthrop by the sea and wreak a havoc that only he, Phillip, could stop - just he, with some help from his trusty sword and his brave big brother. And now an idea was forming in his brain. 

“Caleb, maybe your mama was cursed by a witch! Maybe that’s why she left, but why you’re so good.”

Caleb smiled down at him. “Mayhap she was.”

“I bet she was. I bet the witch that cursed her is still out there somewhere.” He stood up suddenly, eyes blazing with the sudden righteousness that this idea offered to the world. He stuck out his hand for his brother to take. “I promise Caleb, I’ll help you hunt down all the witches in all of Massachusetts and Connecticut and Virginia, all the way to the far Western Ocean, until we find that one that made your mama leave you. I promise, as your brother.” 

Caleb flung his arms around his brother, pulling him down onto his lap and ruffling his hair. “Oh Pip, what a good lad you are. Aye, if it turns out she was cursed by a witch then we’ll track them down together, I promise too.” 

For a moment, the world was right again - and then Phillip was seized once more by fear. “But Caleb, you were going to run away! Without even telling me!”

“I was going to tell you! I left a note in code under your pillow. It said that I was running away, and that you should search out the other letters I hid beneath the big rocks by the barn. And those letters said that Uncle was going to ship me off to England, far away from you, and so I had to leave before he discovered I knew and locked me up, but that I’d come back for you as soon as I was full-grown, and then I’d take you away with me too.” 

“But where are you going to go?” 

Caleb shrugged. “Anywhere, as long as it’s far from here. Hartford maybe. ’Tis barely two weeks walk, and I could claim I'm an orphan, my parents dead from sickness and all our neighbors too, and find someone who needs another pair of hands around the farm. No one would question it.”

“Then we’ll go to Hartford.”

Caleb shook his head. “No, Phillip, I’m going to Hartford. You deserve more than an orphan’s life. Stay here with Uncle, keep reading, go to school. I’ll come back for you in a few years. I promise.”

“I promise! I promised you I’d never let anyone or anything split us in two. We both did. If you’re leaving, then I’m leaving as well. We’re The Brothers Wittebane, and no one can keep us apart.” 

“It’ll be dangerous, we probably won’t have enough food, we —

“Caleb I’m going! I don’t want to stay here without you! I can’t!” 

“Phillip —“

“No! I’m going with you!” 

Phillip crossed his arms and stood up, tearing himself from Caleb’s lap. Without looking back at his brother he began to gather up the apples that still lay scattered in the dirt, tears tracing slow lines down his cheeks. Silently, Caleb stood up as well and began to help. They gathered the apples, and took potatoes and dried salt-pork from the cellar as well, wrapping them with all their other supplies in big blankets tied to the ends of sticks. Caleb took his whittling knife and a small brass compass, stolen from a sleeping servant. Phillip took his sword. 

They worked together in silence as the moon sank lower and lower in the horizon, until, finally,  everything they thought they could carry was brought together. They stood at the end of the lane that led from their uncle’s house to the main. 

“Phillip,” Caleb said quietly as the smaller boy heaved great silent sobs, “you don’t have to come with.” 

“But…but… I do. I do, and we’re going together, and nothing is ever going to keep us apart. Promise?”

Caleb threw an arm around his brother’s shoulder. “Aye. I promise. Truer than true?”

Phillip sniffled, wiping his nose on the sleeve of his shirt. “Truer than true.” 

“Then let’s go, before we lose any more of the moonlight.” 

And so The Brothers Wittebane took to the road, two small figures, hand in hand, waving one wooden sword and one small knife in the air, the brothers who would never be cleft in two. And the moon shone down on the country lane and the house they had left, and the early morning air was full with ocean-salt, and they were on an adventure, and nothing would ever stand in their way. With every step their Uncle’s house and the little village and all it meant grew farther and farther away. 

“You know,” Caleb said after a moment, “we ought to go through the forest, Pip, at least until we’re past Cambridge. Uncle might send riders out on the road to look for us.”

Phillip tried to nod bravely, but his voice still came out as a squeak, “But aren’t there wolves?” 

Caleb laughed. “What is it with you and wolves? First you thought they had dragged me from my bed, and now they’re the first thing you think of.” 

“They’re wolves Caleb! They eat people!” 

“They’re noble, Pip! And they’re wonderful fierce parents. They never abandon their pups, not unless they’re killed. I think I rather love them.” 

“Unless they eat you!” 

“I’ll eat you if you aren’t quiet!” 

And so they went, for miles out into the Massachusetts countryside. 

“When we’re grown-ups Caleb, we’ll track them all down. The witches I mean.” 

“Aye. If there are witches to find, and if they truly need to be found, we’ll find them.”

“We’ll track the wolves down too, and I’ll make one of them be your pet!”

They walked until the sun came up and then they kept walking, stopping only to share apples cut with Caleb’s knife. Two pieces for Caleb, and four for Phillip. And then they walked again. 

“Do you think you’ll get married someday, Caleb?” 

“I suppose I might, if I found a girl who thought for herself. And who didn’t mind marrying a poor artist.”

“A rich artist! Doing portraits of famous people, like Governor Winthrop himself! Or Lord Cromwell!” 

“A poor artist more likely, Phillip. Painting signs for taverns and foolish sketches of the forest.” 

“Well I’m never getting married. I’m going to have a big house full of books - no, a castle! - and it’ll be filled with all sorts of relics and tapestries and I won’t even need a wife because I’ll have you to keep me company, and —“

The Brothers Wittebane. Truer than true.

—————

On the first day of October, 1645, two small boys emerged from the woods outside Ephraim Barrowes’ farm. They were young: the elder was no more than eleven if he was a day, and the younger could hardly have been more than six, and their clothes were torn and stained. 

They were orphans, they said, and they had walked for four days straight. Their parents, god rest their souls, were dead. Their father had worked at John Winthrop’s isolated lead mine, miles and miles to the northeast, but two weeks ago he had taken sick from the polluted air and passed the illness on to their mother, and within days they were both dead. Their father, having had pieces of an education back in England, had raised them to be good, God-fearing folk, and so when the food on their little farm had run out and their choices were to seek the company of their only neighbors - rough, single men who had worked the mine with their father - or strike out for Hartford and the Connecticut Colony, the boys had packed as much as they could carry and set off into the woods. It was a miracle, Ephraim marveled, that they had made it five miles, let alone all this way - and fairly close to Hartford no less. The older boy had been smart to bring his father’s compass. He seemed a goodly child, and it was clear from his every action that he doted on the younger boy. Such a shame, that such terrible things should happen to children. 

It was a shame, Ephraim Barrowes reflected, as he set wood into the fireplace to make a stew, that terrible things should happen at all. He had no clean clothes to give the boys - none that would have fit them anyway - but he had encouraged them to wash in the creek that ran behind his clapboard farmhouse, and he could hear them now, shouting and laughing and making sport in the way that only the youngest children still feel free to do. It had been many years since he had heard such a noise, and it made his soul ache for the memory of his own sons, long dead these twenty years and some forty-odd years gone from being children. Forty-odd years and an ocean betwixt them, aye, and a world away. He had been a carpenter in Bristol, and that was where he had raised his sons - raised them into fine young men who had taken to sea, one to be a fisherman and the other a gunner aboard one of His Majesty’s finest vessels. He had loved his boys more than life itself, loved the men they grew into, but Providence had seen it fit to take both sons away from him in the same year. 

First John, struck down along with 70,000 others by plague, and then Hezekiah, lost - whether to disease, to accident, or to Spanish cannon fire he would never know - when the great ship Constant Reformation took part in the Duke of Buckingham’s foolhardy expedition against Cadíz. Their deaths had set his wife into a spiral that only the balsam of Gospel could alieve, and so she, like so many others, had taken comfort in the Calvinist doctrines sweeping England and their unflinching belief in the inevitability of fate and the ineffability of The Lord. For his own part, he had admired too these Puritans’ quarrel with the King and his advisors who had sent so many boys like his own to their deaths against the wishes of Parliament. 

And so, when their church had put out a call for souls to follow John Winthrop, son of the Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and a veteran of the failed Cadíz expedition himself, to a new expanse of land along the Connecticut River, Ephraim and his wife Constance had sold his business, sold his tools, sold their possessions, for the money to join the Winthrop’s latest fleet and start a new life far away from the troubles of England and its overreaching King. That had been ten years ago, and despite their age he and Constance had managed to build a fine life for themselves - a little farm, a little creek, a little woodworking for his neighbors in the nearby town of Gravesfield, and miles and miles of woods to comfort them - a sea of trees, far from the ocean-going world that had claimed their sons. But Constance had passed the year before last, and now Ephraim was alone - though perhaps, he reflected, as he tossed the last of the wood into the fireplace and struck a flint to set it ablaze, straining his ears for the shouts and laughter of the boys out in the creek, he wouldn’t be alone for much longer. 

—————

Sometimes, currents that are set in motion take months or years to reach far off places - and yet when they land, they may have just as much force as that with which they began. 

So it was with the witches. 

In January of 1647, the great witch hunter Matthew Hopkins - having already found and executed over 300 witches - published a guidebook for all those who might follow in his footsteps. The Discovery of Witches spread like wildfire throughout England and her colonies, and by spring, villagers across New England were turning on their neighbors, accusing their friends and family of all sorts of foul misdeeds and hunting apparitions through the woods with torchlight and pitchforks. 

And from the very beginning, the Colony of Connecticut was at the heart of this conflagration. For it was in Connecticut, scarce 10 miles from Gravesfield, that a woman named Alse Young found herself accused of using magic to orchestrate the wave of untimely deaths that had - ever since she and her husband had arrived in northern Connecticut - plagued the regions’ new mothers and their babies. For this, Alse Young was dragged before a court by her former neighbors, tried, and hung - the first victim of New England’s witch hunters.

First, but nowhere near the last. 

—————

In that fateful month when Alse Young was hunted down in her home and sent to the gallows, The Brothers Wittebane had lived with old Ephraim Barrowes for near two years. Near two years of picking apples in fall and swimming in the creek in warm weather, of waking up extra early twice a week to get their chores done before trudging the four miles to Gravesfield and its little one-room school house - for although Caleb was nearing the age when all but the most academically-minded boys left schooling to take up a formal apprenticeship, and although he had little mind indeed to continue much longer for his own sake, both Ephraim and Caleb were convinced that Phillip needed to be in school. His uncle’s early lessons had instilled in him some sort of desperate thirst for knowledge, some desperate hunger to know how everything worked and why and what the point of it was. Ephraim, who could count on a single hand the number of books he had ever bought in his lifetime, now found himself begging the merchants of Gravesfield to send for whatever books from England they could get their hands on, just to give little Pip something to sate his mind. At eight he could already grasp Latin and Greek, and Goodman Hodgekins - the schoolmaster in Gravesfield - had taken Ephraim aside after the boys’ first month and informed him that his youngest ward might very well find a space someday at the newly-founded College in Cambridge. 

And Phillip, as stubborn as he was inquisitive, refused to go to school unless Caleb went too. 

It was not, in all ways, an easy life for The Brothers Wittebane - as kind as Ephraim was, he was old, and kept abed more and more hours as the years went by. There were many early mornings spent churning butter in the ramshackle barn, late evenings darning socks and patching trousers and shirts by the fire, days and days of bending and hoeing and weeding from sunup to sundown, of gathering wheat, of sweeping and cooking and milking the one old goat that graced the Barrowes farm. 

But there were evenings gathered around the fire while Ephraim told stories of England, or played his old fiddle, soft afternoons spent fishing and lounging in the golden August sun, Christmas gifts (a book for Phillip and a sheaf of crisp white paper for Caleb - for his drawings in charcoal and the designing of all the little birds he carved), footraces down to the village square to watch the blacksmith at work, or to greet the mail-carrier on his fine roan horse. 

And, like so many other children in the summer of 1647, there was the playing of witch hunters. In the years since that night they had fled their uncle’s house, when Phillip had promised his brother he would one day track down and punish whatever witch had cursed his mother, Phillip had only grown more and more obsessed. Phillip loved to learn about witches, about the magicks they could conjure, about the tools and tricks for finding them, about famous witches already long discovered and destroyed in England and across the Continent. He was convinced that they were afoot in force in the New World, same as Matthew Hopkins swore they were in England, a belief that only grew even stronger when the town crier announced news of the fate of Alse Young. Sometimes, Caleb worried, his little brother had few things he found joy in other than his all-consumptive desire for learning old languages and cataloguing witches’ curses. 

But oh, the games they played! Hours and hours spent traipsing through the woods around the farm, setting traps, Phillip waving his wooden sword, Caleb cheering his name. Caleb went so far as to sew a pointed black witch’s hat out of fabric scraps, so that he could wear it in their games and be caught by Phillip, greatest of all the Connecticut witch hunters. 

Caleb worried, he did, but in his heart he was just glad to see his brother smiling at long last. All those years in Massachusetts he had been such a serious boy - their uncle had kept him studying night and day, and the other children teased him, and there had been none who loved Phillip the way Caleb’s own mother had loved him, none to make him laugh and to tell him fanciful stories before bed, none who would let him be the child he was, full of questions and imagination and wild fantasies and jokes. None, of course, except Caleb - who suffered many a beating at the hands of his uncle, for the sin of being a corrupting influence on his innocent brother. So this was good, Caleb thought, these wild witch-hunting games. Phillip was an intense lad, but he was only making up for lost time. A few years of being a child, allowed to wonder and wander as much as his chores allowed, would do him well. 

And then, one autumn night, a rider came knocking on the Barrowes farmhouse door. 

The man was frantic, out of breath. 

He came, he said, only long enough to deliver a message. Silas Hopewell, the blacksmith’s son, had been found wandering senseless in the woods, unable to speak. Even now he lay somewhere between alive and dead in his parents’ bed, pale and shaken and silent. The blacksmith had called together the town and it had been agreed: a witch was afoot. A hunt would commence that very next Sunday. Little Silas would have his justice. 

And as quickly as he’d come, the rider moved on - off to warn the other families who lived on the edge of town about the danger lurking in their very midst. 

Ephraim was pale as he watched the rider’s dark form disappearing into the moonlit night - the faces of his two young wards peering out from the doorway beside him.

“Caleb,” he said, “get your brother abed. We’ll discuss this tomorrow.” 

And Caleb took his brother by the hand and led him, protesting, to the room they shared. He tucked him in, and kissed his forehead, and assured him over and over that Ephraim truly would answer all his questions in the morning. He climbed into the bed himself, and was circling the edge of a deep sleep when he heard Phillip’s voice in the darkness.

“Caleb? Caleb are you awake?”

“If you insist - I wouldn’t be if it weren’t for you.” Caleb rolled over and snuggled deeper into the blankets, trying to keep his hold on the sleep that was so close to overtaking him.  

“I’m scared.” 

This awoke Caleb immediately. He turned to face his brother, rising to one elbow to look down at him. 

“What about, Pip? About the witch?”

In the darkness he could just barely make out Phillip’s silent nod. 

“Perhaps it isn’t a witch at all. Perhaps Silas only got lost. And besides, Ephraim is here. He’s always been kind to us - he wouldn’t let a witch get you. I promise.”

“But Caleb, what if the witch knows about my promise? What if it knows I’ve sworn to hunt another witch down?”

“Phillip, half the countryside has sworn to hunt witches down. It’s in the Bible, remember? Thou Shalt Not Suffer A Witch To Live. There’s no reason for a witch to be after you.”

“But what if they are?”

Caleb though for a moment. “How about this: in the morning, you and I shall go and fetch a strong piece of wood from the forest and I shall carve you a mask, a wonderful mask, so that even if the witch sees you they won’t know that you’re the one they’re looking for.” 

“Will you make it a scary mask? To scare the witches right back?”

“Aye Pip, I’ll make it the scariest mask you’ve ever seen. Dark holes for eyes and devilish horns, the lot.” He bent and kissed his brother’s forehead once more, now sweaty even in the chilled air. “Now sleep. Okay?”

“Thank you Caleb.”

“Of course Phillip.”

For a moment there was only the sound of the wind outside, and the distant howl of a wolf in the woods. And then:

“Truer than true?”

“Aye Pip. Truer than true.” 

————-

Here, accounted as best as they can be, are the facts of what happened in the days that followed. 

In the morning, Caleb kept his promise to his brother and together The Brothers Wittebane found a piece of wood large enough for a carved mask. Caleb carved it just as he had described, with dark holes for eyes and long horns halfway between the devil and a deer, and Phillip declared it the finest thing he had ever seen, and put it on immediately and refused to take it off. They had played the rest of the morning, and Phillip had twice caught Witch-Caleb in a circle of thick rope. 

In the afternoon, Ephraim sat the boys down and told them that under no circumstances would he be letting them tag along with the witch hunters. It was a violent and horrible thing, and they were too young by far. 

Phillip cried, and threw his mask on the ground, and begged over and over for Ephraim to let them go, to let them go and see the real live witch hunters, that it was the only thing he had ever wanted, and for the first time in their life at Ephraim Barrowes’ farm, Ephraim spanked Phillip. 

It hurt Caleb so dearly to see Phillip so distraught, to see him inconsolable, that he made a promise - brother to brother - that he would sneak them out and take Phillip to tag along with the witch hunters, no matter what Ephraim said.

And when Sunday evening came, as the sun was setting, after Ephraim had retired to his room, Caleb and Phillip grabbed sticks of firewood as weapons, and took Phillip’s mask, and snuck out the window. They sprinted down the road towards Gravesfield, coming across the crowd of hunters along the road. All the men who lived the village were there, and many of the boys, and a number of the women and girls as well. They bore torches, and pitchforks, and when Goodman Hopewell handed Phillip a pitchfork and Caleb a torch, they were thrilled with the thought that they were men now, that they were a part of the town of Gravesfield as much as anyone else, that they were about to be a part of history. 

But no witches were found that night, though they confronted and tested many a woman and man throughout the countryside, nor the next, nor the one that followed that. The fourth night, Ephraim didn’t retire to his room after dinner. He stayed in the kitchen, smoking his pipe quietly while Caleb and Phillip shared anxious, frantic glances and the hours ticked by. Caleb sketched, and Phillip read, and by the time Ephraim went to bed they knew it was too late to seek out their fellow witch hunters of Gravesfield. 

The next morning, word came: the witch had been found. She was to be tried that very evening, in the town square. 

This, Ephraim also refused to let them attend. 

And so they snuck out.

When the reached the Gravesfield square that night, the crowd was already gathered three or four deep. A wooden stage had been erected, where the local magistrate sat behind a small desk. On the other side of the stage was an iron cage - empty now, but even as the boys forced their way to the front of the crowd they saw the constable bringing someone up to the cage in chains. 

The figure in chains was shoved inside the bars, and the cage was bolted shut. The figure turned to face the crowd, their hood falling down about their shoulders. 

Caleb gasped. There, locked in a cage before a roaring crowd, was Goody Rigby - an older woman who made her meager living taking in laundry and mending for her neighbors. More than once Caleb had helped her wash clothes in the river for a ha’penny or two, money he put towards new charcoal or sugar plums for Phillip. She was kind, if quiet, and she had always had a good word for him. 

“Phillip!” He whispered to his brother between gritted teeth. “That’s the witch? That’s Goody Rigby! She wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

And Phillip had just looked up at Caleb, still wearing the mask, and shrugged. “They must have tested her,” he said, “so she’s a witch.”

And from the depths of the mask, his brothers eyes had shone with a strange and horrible…hunger. 

That night, Goody Rigby was found guilty of witchcraft, and of using her magicks to curse Silas Hopewell out of jealousy, for she had never been able to have children of her own. 

By the next Sunday she was dead. 

And that was the year, bit by bit, that Caleb began to refuse to play witch hunters with his brother. Any other game, any time of day, but not…that one. 

Phillip understood, or he swore he did, and they still swore that none would cleave them in two, that they were The Brothers Wittebane, truer to each other than any brothers could be, and they meant it. But beneath it all things were different, different by just a shade. They had disagreed, a disagreement that couldn’t be smoothed over with apologies and a new game, or a sugar plum. 

Inseparable, they were, but not the same. 

—————

When old man Barrowes passed, he left his farm and all his possessions to his wards. They were the talk of Gravesfield then, those strange Wittebane boys -  the elder, Caleb, nigh on eighteen now, defied the customs of his neighbors and wore his hair long as vagabonds and varlets did, though even the most curmudgeonly of Gravesfield’s souls would have been hard pressed to find any other examples of vanity or incivility in Goodman Wittebane’s presentation. 

Perhaps, they whispered, he was secretly a Royalist, longing for a day when the King would return from exile in France and put the roundheaded dogs of Parliament in their place. But Goodman Alleyne (who often carried letters and packages back and forth from Gravesfield to nearby towns) swore that Goodman Wittebane had, but three months before, paid him to carry a letter containing payment in advance to a certain printing house in Providence - a printing house, it was whispered, that disseminated horrible texts published in England and the Dutch Republic, dangerous pamphlets like Winstanley's horrid Declaration from the Poor Oppressed People of England and the devilish ramblings of George Fox, a press which - most recently and most shamefully - had even stooped to printing secret copies of the treasonous Killing No Murder. 

There was, of course, no way for Goodman Alleyne to prove that Goodman Wittebane had read any of these radical texts, nor indeed to prove that he had paid for Alleyne to visit the printer, nor that the printer was as horrible as Alleyne said in the first place. But it was true that Goodman Wittebane kept no servants, nor did he seem to love church except for that his brother loved it, and on the rare occasions he attended town meetings he spoke out only to advocate for common pasture on the town green, and a common storage of grain against famine, and a common fund to provide for the widows and orphans of Gravesfield as long as they might need it.

He was always civil, always willing to lend a hand to a neighbor in need; kindly and caring to the children of the town, though he was scarce much more than a youth himself. But he kept to himself mostly, preferring wandering in the woods sketching birds and flowers to having a drink at the tavern with the other landholders. 

It was not inconceivable, the townsfolk of Gravesfield thought, that Goodman Wittebane did indeed harbor hidden and subtle Leveller sympathies, or - God forbid - was inclined towards Quakerism, but it was just as likely that he was but a troubled young man, still traumatized from the loss of his parents at such an important age and tasked with a heavy burden in raising his younger brother almost entirely on his own. He was a good farmer. A good woodworker. A dedicated brother and a tireless laborer. What he really needed was a few more years of experience, and a wife to occupy him and prevent outlandish beliefs from finding any foothold in his brain, and surely in time he would come to be a full and Godly member of Gravesfield. 

The younger of the Wittebanes, Phillip, was in many ways just as queer and standoffish. He was haughty almost, a strange, quiet lad who knew as much book learning as half the town put together, who loved no one as well as his brother, who had few if any friends in town. He was thirteen, and the only boy in the village considering boarding at the grammar school in Hartford next year over taking up an apprenticeship and settling down and preparing to start a family. He wanted to go to Harvard College, he said, to prove that he was one of the smartest men in all of New England. To meet with Phillip Wittebane was to quickly gather the sense that perhaps he was looking down his nose at you, even if he stood a full head and half shorter than any man in town. 

But he too was a hard worker, and just as devoted to Caleb as Caleb was to him. When the other boys in town repeated - in extravagant exaggeration of their parents’ whispers - that Goodman Wittebane was a devilish heretic who sought the downfall of Parliament, Phillip fought them all. No matter how many there were, no matter how many times Caleb begged him not to, no matter how many times he was dragged home by one townsman or another, breeches torn, nose dripping blood, covered in bruises, he would not hear a single ill word spoken of his brother. 

Unlike his brother though, Phillip Wittebane adored attending sermons. He would listen, rapt with attention, hanging on to every syllable, and forever bothering the Reverend Cartwright with questions afterward. 

And - most unlike his brother - Phillip Wittebane took great pride and joy in joining each and every one of the three witch hunts Gravesfield had taken part in since the Witch Rigby was first found and destroyed. Indeed, where other boys his age had long grown out of playing make-believe in the woods, Phillip could still be found wandering the woods in many of his free hours, waving a small wooden sword and slashing his way through hordes of imaginary apparitions and demonic phantoms. It was his intention, he told anyone who would listen, to become Witchfinder General of New England after he attended Harvard, and to make sure that no witches were left to curse mothers and abandon babies and bring ill-luck to all the good souls of this brave new world. 

Strange, the both of them, living alone in their farmhouse outside of town. 

The Brothers Wittebane, beholden to none. 

Loving. Inseparable. 

Truer than true. 

Chapter Text

Here’s the thing about moments that change your life: most of them are so utterly and horrendously mundane that you’ll never know what they were. There are certain obvious moments, of course - accidents, deaths, sudden limelights thrust upon you - but by far and away, most of them seem a moment like any other. Just a book you read, or a food you ate, or an apartment you rented. Nothing special. Nothing unusual. 

And then, one fine day, it’s twenty or thirty or forty years later and you’re married, or you’re not any more, and you live in the same city you’ve always lived or someplace you’d never have dreamed of, and somewhere, somewhere down a long thread of decisions and birthday parties and lazy afternoons in the dog days of summer, is the moment that first set you down whatever path you’ve ended up on. 

Sometimes we can trace our selves back along that thin wire into the past, can piece together how one ordinary moment changed it all. Sometimes we can’t. It hardly matters. What matters is that for a little while the moments all feel the same - something simple. Something forgettable. A moment like any other. 

——————

Gravesfield, the height of summer. Fireflies brushing across the tall grass, setting the creek aglow. The stars burning silver in the folds of velvet above. Smoke on the evening breeze. 

Laid on his back, feet dangling in the water, Caleb Wittebane watched the thin, curling line of smoke still visible against the darkening westward sky. This, he assumed, was all that remained of Fort Good Hope - the last Dutch outpost on the eastern shore of the Connecticut River, watching the road into Hartford. They’d received word in Gravesfield a fortnight prior, a call to furnish a dozen men for the militia gathering to take Good Hope once and for all. For a year there had been an uneasy peace along the Hartford Road - for all the cannon fire and splintered wood between the Royal Navy and the Dutch fleets, for all the thousands of men staining the Channel red with their blood, the war had stayed in Europe. Until now. 

When the word came, a dozen men from Gravesfield had shouldered their muskets and moved out - so had hundreds of others from across the Colony. Phillip, now a year into his learning at the grammar school in Hartford, had come home, both of the Masters of Study having temporarily traded quill and ink for musket and shot. He’d return when the fighting was over and the road to Hartford was safe once more.

And now Good Hope was burned - or so Caleb assumed. He had heard no fire from down the Hartford road, no injured militiamen had been dragged into town on the back of a comrade’s saddle. Most likely, the fighting was long over - if there had been any fighting at all. There were scarce two dozen Dutchmen at the fort, they hardly could have believed it would be worth their lives to hold out against unassailable odds. As far as he knew, the war in Connecticut was over. But… 

He didn’t know. There had been no word one way or another, and the smoke was fresh and the fire still burned. Maybe the road to Hartford was safe, but maybe it wasn’t. 

And… it had been so long since he’d had Pip at home. 

Caleb tore a tufted handful of grass from the riverbank and tossed it into the air, letting the limp green blades trace the evening breeze down and onto his lips and his neck and his chin. A year, whole year. Their first year apart in, well, in ever. 

Hartford was hardly across the Atlantic of course, and he’d gone into Hartford a handful of times in the months since Pip had left - buying a new chisel he couldn’t get in Gravesfield, hauling his meager collection of apple varieties to the trading post come the autumn market days, things like that. He’d seen Phillip then, met Goodman Brinklow - the farrier Phillip was boarding with while he attended the grammar school - and his wife and their six children, marveled at the way Pip could spout entire lectures in Latin about all sorts of evils in the world and all the wrongdoings of Man.

Well. Marveled was perhaps one word for it. 

He was so very proud of Phillip. So very proud to be able to look at his brother and see the dear little boy who’d needed him to chase away bullies and sing him to sleep, and see just as clearly the fine young man who helped the younger Brinklow children with their schoolwork and helped Caleb with his market stall and offered Goody Brinklow assistance without being asked. 

Phillip was brilliant, and he was polite, and when Caleb returned home to Gravesfield all the men would clap him on the shoulder and congratulate him on raising such an upstanding and God-fearing brother, and all the men with daughters would invite him for dinner, laughing and telling him it couldn’t be good for him to be so alone in that big old farmhouse. 

But alongside all his joy in younger brother’s accomplishments, Caleb Wittebane harbored a secret and sinking suspicion that his brother was in danger of becoming the kind of man he knew Phillip would never truly want to be. A spiteful man. An angry man. A man sure of nothing more than the righteousness of his beliefs, the failings of others, and the infallibility of his own two hands. A man like their uncle.  

It was a fear that Caleb had had ever since the first witch hunt, all those years ago, but it had long been a fear he had kept dormant, brought out only in his most melancholic moments and sleepless nights. 

But…it wasn’t just playing at witch hunter any more. It was the hours that Phillip could spend talking about sin, about all the things he saw wrong as the walked through the streets of Hartford, about all the ways Goodman Brinklow and his wife and their children failed in their duty to God. It was the way the letters he’d received every fortnight for the last two months had been filled not with gossip the way Phillip’s first letters had, or questions about life in Gravesfield, but with Scripture and joking admonitions for Caleb to not become a heathen like the townsfolk whispered without Pip there to keep him in line. 

It was the way Phillip ignored the elderly beggar-woman who’d approached them for alms at the last market day, sneering at her hobbled gait and ratty dress. 

It was the way he’d refused to sell their apples to a Mohegan man at the market, and the way Pip had seethed with silent anger and disgust from afar, even after Caleb had reprimanded him and sent him away from the stall. 

That had been the first time Caleb had ever yelled at Pip in public, the first time he’d ever made it clear - where everyone could see - that sometimes Caleb was Phillip’s guardian first, and his brother second. 

Pip had been…cruel. Caleb knew the man, Oneco - he’d traded him cherries and flax the past July, in exchange for furs to make Phillip something warm for the coming winter. 

For his own part, Caleb knew barely a handful of words in Mohegan, or any other language that wasn’t English, and even now he shuddered, hoping that Oneco’s English - more than enough to trade fruit and very casual gossip with Caleb - was still too incomplete to understand all the things his brother had said. 

Lord, not that it should have mattered, but Phillip had refused to take back what he’d said even when Caleb had pointed out that Oneco had once mentioned he’d fought alongside the Colony’s troops in the Pequot War - that he and his nation had taken up arms against their own neighbors and allied themselves with Connecticut and Massachusetts. And while Phillip had been born after  the war had come and gone, Caleb was just barely old enough to remember the all encompassing fear that had gripped the entire region. Indeed, he reminded Phillip, if the war had gone poorly - if nations like the Mohegans and the Narragansetts hadn’t fought alongside Englishmen and given the Colony strength of numbers - all of Massachusetts might have burned, and Winthrop along with it, and Phillip would have never been born at all. 

Military service was hardly a requirement for treating another soul with respect, and yet Phillip had been unable to muster up even an ounce of humanity for someone who looked nothing like him. 

Honestly, Caleb thought, as he sat up from his reverie amongst the cattails, as the sky continued to darken and the air still hung heavy with the scent of smoke. I don’t care if they say it’s safe in Connecticut now, that the war here is over and life can get back on its way to normal. I won’t send Phillip back, not tomorrow. I’ll keep him another day or two. We’ll take a walk in the woods, like the old days. Go fishing. He’s a good boy still, he’s just…he’s around the wrong sorts more often than not. He just needs some time at home. He’ll come around. 

Back in the farmhouse he could see the light of a flickering candle in the long summer shadows - Phillip still up reading at the table, same as every night since he was sent home. 

Perhaps I’ll join him. I’ve been meaning to finish carving that raven I’ve been working on anyway. 

Leaving the creek and the cattails and the fireflies behind, Caleb made his way back to the farmhouse. His farmhouse, he supposed, though it was still hard to think of it that way. It belonged to him, much as any piece of paper could make a thing belong to a man, and he was the one who restored the beams when they’d began to rot the summer before, the one who tended the little garden, who fished in the creek behind it and raised chickens in the back of the clear-cut plot. But it was hard to feel like something belonged to you when it felt like you didn’t belong. 

Gravesfield wasn’t home. It was a place he lived, a place he wandered through. It was…empty. Without Phillip around everything felt a little empty, but Gravesfield especially so. Sometimes, he found it hard to believe that this was all life was. As a boy, beaten and scared and angry, he’d imagined that one day he’d run off from Massachusetts and make a name for himself - or if not a name, at least a life. He’d get a farm, rescue Phillip, settle down in some town and set about meeting people and picking fruit and painting the birds he saw in the woods. He’d grow up, and life would be better. And now he had a farm, and he had an orchard, and he had a town and his brother and his paints, and still it felt like a shade of a real life, like a placeholder. 

Like nothing he came across fit the world in his head, like life was slipping past faster than he could catch it.

It wasn’t even, he reflected, as he made sure the chickens were penned in to their coop, just that he was so very different from his neighbors, with their faith in obedience and their barely-hidden anger at the world. It was more of an impossible weight, a heavy coat of melancholy that settled upon his shoulders whenever he imagined spending the rest of his life in Gravesfield - getting married, growing up, watching the same sun setting over the same slowly-shrinking woods as the town grew and farms were cleared. 

But that was a problem for the rest of his life - for tonight, he had Pip home again. He’d carve, and Pip would read, and it would be just like old times. They’d wander in the woods tomorrow after chores were done and pick blueberries beneath the towering elms and he’d watch the anger and the fear slip off from Phillip’s shoulders like a cloak and they’d be one again, just like they’d always been.

Things would feel better in the morning - somehow they almost always did. For now, it was enough that they were together. 

 —————————-

“Caaaaaaaaaaleb, come onnnnnnnnnn!” 

Caleb shook his head as he made his way over a fallen log, following his brother towards a small clearing in the woods. Lord, Phillip was awfully spry for half seven in the morning.

“Caaaaaleb you’re lagging! You aren’t keeping up with me at all, you’re getting so old.”

Caleb laughed. “Aye Pip, I’m ancient. I’m your relic of a brother, all creaking bones and boring stories. In fact -” an idea took hold in Caleb’s mind, a wonderful, awful, brotherly idea. He paused to lean against an outcropping of stone, damp with moss and the morning fog that still hadn’t quite burned off, “I’m so old I might just take a little nap right here. You go right on ahead, I’m too old for adventures.” He shut his eyes and leaned back against the stone, trying not to giggle imagining the look on Phillip’s face.

“Caaaaaleb! Stop it!”

A tiny laugh escaped Caleb’s lips as he felt a handful of thrown wet leaves make contact with his cheek. He kept his eyes shut, and added in an enormous snore for good measure. 

“Caleb wake up! It’s not funny! You promised we’d have an adventure in the woods! You promised!”

“I’m afraid it’s an ancient curse, Phillip, one only you can lift. Long ago I was a brave knight, but my armor rusted shut with age and glued me fast to this rock. Now I lay here, unable to move, waiting for a kind soul to take pity on me, and fetch me an apple from my haversack so that I might feast and be freed.”

“Caleb. Are you really going to make me get you an apple from the bag that’s at your feet?”

“Feet? What feet? Alas, I’m one with this rock and have no feet to speak of. Rescue me, oh brave Sir Phillip!”

He could hear Phillip trying not to laugh at his overly dramatic swooning, and he felt a touch of warmth in his chest at the thought. This was good. His brother deserved to laugh more.

“Alright, alright! I’ll fetch thine apple posthaste, Sir Caleb.”

Even without sight he could tell that Phillip had walked back towards Caleb’s rock, and that he’d bent down to grab the haversack from where Caleb had dropped it. He heard Phillip pause halfway through rummaging through the sack.

“But…Sir Caleb, did you not first say you were glued fast to the rock? And now you say you’ve become one with the rock? Methinks I sense trickery! Dost thou speak in truth?”

At this moment, Caleb could see that a number of options lay before him. And yet, when it came down to it, was there really any option but one?

“Yaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh!!!!!” 

Caleb flung himself at his brother, knocking him to the ground and playfully holding his hands down against the leaf-strewn forest floor.

“Submit, Sir Phillip! Thou hast been bested by the ancient knight of the deep woods! 

“Caleb get off!”

“Dost thou surrender?”

“Caleb!”

“Surrender, or be tickled!

“I surrender, I surrender! Just let me up!”

Caleb sat up, offering his brother a hand to help pull him to a seated position. The boys were both covered in dirty and sticks and leaves, and after the briefest moment of grumpiness from Phillip, they both burst into laughter, falling over each other and trying to catch their breath.

“Oh Pip! You should have seen the look on your face when I leapt at you.”

“Because you leapt at me! You’re a grownup Caleb, you’re not supposed to roughhouse, you’re supposed to be in charge!”

“I am in charge you saucebox, that’s how I could knock you down so easily.”

“You only knocked me down because I gave up! I didn’t want to hurt your ancient bones.” 

“I knocked you down fair and square!”

“Did not!”

“Did too!”

“Did not!”

And with that, Caleb flung himself once more at Phillip, and the brothers’ laughter echoed across the clearing and through the misty morning air.

———————————-

For Caleb, the most wonderful part of any walk in the woods came after they’d stopped and had their few apples and their handful of oats, when he would sit with his charcoals and the paper he’d carried from home and draw whatever came their way. Most of the time it was birds - he loved drawing them more than anything else, loved their strange little feet and the way their feathers puffed and turned as they sang. He wished charcoal could be mixed the way paints were to create color - how he longed to capture the silken green of a mallard’s head, the joyous yellow chest of the goldfinch. Most of all, he longed to capture the bright red cardinals that whistled throughout the woods - there was nothing else like that red in the world, not even the red tongue of flames. What he’d give to hold that red in his hands just once! 

He always let Phillip go wander for a while while he sat and drew - sitting still was hard for the boy, and it was good for him to have time to sink into his imagination from time to time. He was still so young, and for all he knew and all the books he read and for all the ways he seemed as smart as any full-grown man, Caleb knew that his brother needed to still be a child - to still be his little brother, to know that Caleb would always be there to have his back.

Caleb sighed, pausing his sketch of the rabbit that had emerged from a fallen log in order to nibble cautiously at a nearby root. He was not a fan of rabbits. Who could be bothered to draw ears that big when they’d already had to learn how to draw human sized ears? But today the birds seemed to be staying far away from the clearing they’d chose to have lunch in. What a shame. He hoped Pip was having a good time exploring at least.

And then, he heard it.  

A low and heartrending call, coming from further into the woods. A turtle dove, the mourning bird. 

Caleb knew that turtle doves were hardly anything to look at, just dull brown and and dusty grey, but he’d never had the chance to draw one before. He’d never had the chance to draw anything that sounded that beautiful before - how could he put that sadness to the page? Could it be? 

Without even pausing to gather any of their scattered goods, Caleb set off into the forest, charcoal and paper in hand. The call came again, closer this time. There, there at the edge of another small clearing surrounded by tangled vines, there was a tall oak. Caleb could just barely make out the rustling feathers of the dove in the foliage, but as it called again and again he knew that’s where it sat. 

He stood at the base of the tree, peering up into the branches. Pip would have to forgive him for running off. This was far more exciting than drawing bunnies for the hundredth time. 

Caleb turned over a blank page, his fingers smudging charcoal across it in his hast. . The sun beat down on the gentle green of the forest. The call came again, soft and low.

 ———————————

Phillip hated to sit still after eating, so, like so many times before, while his brother drew he grabbed a fallen branch to use as a walking stick and set out into the woods by himself, telling little stories and making up games along the way. He knew how much his brother loved to draw, and even if he couldn’t bear to sit still he loved their lunchtime breaks as well, because he knew that drawing made the creased lines of worry on Caleb’s brow disappear better than almost anything else he knew.

There were more and more lines on Caleb’s brow every time he saw his brother, and he hated how much Caleb worried - how much he worried over him. Why couldn’t Caleb see how happy he was? 

For as long as Phillip could remember, for his whole life long, there had been a voice in the back of his mind telling him that he was bad - that he as a bad person. The kind of horrible, unlovable son whose father didn’t care about enough to stay, the kind of miserable, ungrateful nephew who ran away from home, the kind of weak, scared coward whose brother had to worry himself sick over. Only Caleb had ever really loved him, and he had repaid his brother by needing to be taken care of at every turn. 

Only now he had something he was good at. Not just good at - incredible at. Something that everyone, an entire school full of people, knew that he was incredible at. But it was more than that: now he knew, deep in his heart of hearts, that there was a way for him to be good. 

He’d always loved church, loved the stories and the lessons and the order they provided to a world that made so little sense, but once he’d gone to Hartford, once he’d gone to a proper school with a proper teacher, once he’d read the things he’d read - the great logics of Aristotle, Cicero’s oratories, Aquinas and Calvin and the centuries upon centuries of brilliant Christian men with thousands of things to say about the holy words of Jesus Christ himself - he knew. So many men, over so many centuries, could not be false. They knew how to be good. If he were to devote himself to this life - this life of strict goodness for the sake of fulfilling God’s plan for Men - he would be good too. 

Caleb had always told him not to take things so seriously, told him that he was a kind and caring boy, and that being good meant treating other people with kindness. But for all of Caleb’s words, and all of Caleb’s love, the voice in the back of Phillip’s head had never gone away. Only now, now that he saw that he was bad, that the whole world was full of bad people doing bad things but that he could triumph over them, was the voice stilled. 

It was like with the witches. How much damage they caused was hardly relevant - they had to be destroyed because to not destroy them, to not destroy evil when it was found, was letting the evil win out within yourself. And when evil won out within oneself, the little voice returned.

This, his schoolmaster had told him, was the mark of a good Christian, and it was called a conscience. 

Phillip swung his walking stick branch against a tree in frustration, relishing the way the woods resounded against one another, sending a flock of starlings twirling into the sky in sudden surprise at the loudness of the blow.

He just wanted Caleb to see that he was on his way to being good now. Finally. 

———————————

In the soft, cool stillness of the woods there was a flash. A flash of swirled lights, the colors echoing off the dark granite of gravestones, followed by twin flames of red - one the orange of brightly burning candlelight, the other the deepest ruby’s maroon - as a young woman stepped through the shimmering center of a silver gate, a cardinal on her shoulder. 

She breathed in deeply, relishing the way the way the cool forest air filled her lungs, the sharp taste of the damp earth on her tongue as the miles and miles of loam and mushrooms and root-beds surrounding her flooded her senses.

Now this, Evelyn Clawthorne thought to herself, this is what adventures are all about. 

Back home on the Boiling Isles, the sulfur smell of the sea-shore carried itself even to the furthest snow-bound forests of the Knee. Every spring came with the citric taste of the acid rain. But here, here in this strange and foreign realm, nothing was at it seemed. The rain destroyed naught; the flowers were still and unmoving. The waters, even at the shores of the great sea, were frighteningly cold to the touch. It was…beautiful. 

And dangerous! Greatly dangerous! Came a chirp from her shoulder. 

Yes, Evelyn thought, a smile playing over her face as she strode through the clearing of scattered gravestones and into the woods beyond, and dangerous. The most wonderful part of it all. 

———————————

Pfft, pfft, pfffft, ack! Ick! Ughghghgghfffffflllllllllfff! 

Grimacing, intrepid explorer Evelyn Clawthorne plucked the remaining gossamer strands of a spider web out of her mouth and from the tresses of her long red hair. Disgusting, absolutely disgusting. Were Human Realm webs somehow even stickier than webs back on Boiling Isles? She spit a gob of web out, shaking her head to try and brush the last of the crawling feeling off of her skin. 

She was only a fifteen minute walk from the Gate, but already she’d seen a dozen of the oddest stretchy balls of tree-climbing fur she’d ever seen, a beautiful creature with spikes as fierce as any gryphon’s talons, and three strange and marvelous beings with long branching horns - not to mention the countless plants and other flying beasts she could hardly even begin to categorize. (At first, she’d assumed that the ones with iridescent wings were most likely variations on the Boiling Isles’ own fairies, but after brandishing her staff at a striped and fuzzy being the size her little finger - fully prepared to have to fight to prevent it from ripping her skin off - and facing nothing fiercer than a gentle buzzing sound, she felt that fairy was unlikely to be an apt comparison.)

It seemed that with every journey she made to this strange land, with every drawing she took of her horrifyingly beautiful surroundings, she only found more and more to love. She knew the stories of course, the tales of how the Human Realm was no longer friend to witches - how for a decade now at least, fewer and fewer of those who set out to make contact had returned home without some horror story to tell - but this place, it…it felt right to her.

Or not right, even, but…correct. 

It was as if, even if she was fated to be back on the Boiling Isles, even if she could never imagine leaving her home for good, could never imagine fitting into a world as strange as this one, she was, somehow, supposed to have made her way to this realm, for at least these few stolen moments. 

Mostly, she thought to herself as she continued through the woods, it was the birds. God how she loved the birds here, so much like all the birds of the Boiling Isles and yet so different. Not a single one was made of wood, not a single one could speak the way a Palistrom could, and yet they were so equally alive. She loved all birds really, their strange little feet and their puffed out chests and their love songs. Lord, isn’t it a wonderful thing it was to be alive?

She tickled the little talons of the cardinal perched on her shoulder, answering her own question as he burbled and chirped with joy. “What a wonderful and beautiful thing indeed.” 

In time, she came to a knotted thicket of bramble and vines, surrounding an old and hunched-over tree. Beyond the brambles, she could just barely make out what seemed to be a clearing, or perhaps a little meadow. And away on that far side beyond the brambles, from up in the canopy of the trees, came the most plaintive, mournful bird call she had ever heard. Evelyn leaned up against the gnarled tree, resting her back against its sun-warmed bark and digging her feet into the soil beneath the tangled undergrowth around her legs. She stayed like that for a while, listening to the bird call - letting the pinpricks of the peeling bark grow calm against her, letting the sun heat her fiery hair, letting all the things she had left behind in the Boiling Isles melt and pour from her grief-iced heart: all the moments as the odd one out, all the moonless nights spent waiting for her father to finish throwing mugs and plates and chairs and anything else he could get his hands on at walls and at windows and, on his worst days, at her, the slow sinking feeling each and every morning when she awoke and realized she was already counting the hours down until the evening. 

The bird called; the sun shone.

It could be worse, Evelyn supposed - she had food on her table, she’d grown up in a beautiful mansion, she’d even been allowed to finish her schooling despite her father’s opinions on the matter. And she had these trips - these few precious hours spent in an another world, an actual whole other world - when she could sneak off to the corner of her family’s estate where the Gate lay hidden beneath vines. 

And one day, some day, she would grab her things and run to somewhere on the Isles where no one would bother her, and she’d build a house on the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea and make it a home - stained glass windows, a cozy little house demon to keep her company, a turret maybe. 

There were worse things than growing up with a father who loved you, deep down inside. She liked to think that her mother had loved her without condition - without grief, without hiding it - but in all honesty, she wasn’t sure she could remember any more. But even that wasn’t so bad - plenty of people grew up without a mother. Plenty of people grew up in houses haunted by laughter that they could only just barely remember hearing. Plenty of people spent their days wishing they were exploring some far off strange land. In the end, she wasn’t so sure any of it mattered. She couldn’t leave her father, and the Human Realm wasn’t home, and that was simply that.

The sun shone; the bird called from the thicket. 

It truly was the most haunting birdsong she’d ever heard, all low and distant and achingly hollow. What sort of bird could make a sound like that? She had to find out.

Slowly, Evelyn began to hoist herself up into the ancient branches of the tree she’d been leaning on, straining her neck to see if she could catch a glimpse through the leaves. She made her way up onto a higher branch; she could just see beyond the thicket that hid the clearing from her view. She pulled herself up a little higher, and then a little higher after that. She could hear the bird calling from the clearing, maybe from the tall tree on its edge? Maybe somewhere in its branches? 

And then, scarcely ten feet away in the clearing below, along a little patch of green and white and pink where flowers bloomed along the edges of fallen logs and moss shone wet on a few large rocks, she saw a man. 

A young man, her age about, or maybe a little younger. A man, in clothes that would hardly have looked out of place in Bonesborough. A man with his long blonde hair pulled back, grey cloak spread at his feet, a pad of paper in his hands. A man with rounded ears beneath the flyaway wisps that unfurled down from his brow. 

It took her brain a moment of fits and starts to catch up, her mind racing as it tried to put all of these things together. A man. Round ears. A human. 

A cute human, came the thought, unbidden. Where had that come from? 

And then, as Evelyn’s brain tried to hold all these things at once, tried to process what to do in the face of those long fingers that elegantly grasped at the charcoal they held, tried to process the many miles back to the Gate and the rumors of burning witches she’d heard at the pub in town, tried to process this human and the way he was staring up into the trees, almost as if he was looking for the same bird she was, the last branch she had pulled herself up onto cracked, and broke, and Evelyn Clawthorne tumbled down through wood and leaves and vines and landed, rather unceremoniously, in a heap in the clearing below. 

At the crack, the man had startled, whirling around with panic in his eyes as he sought to find the source of the sound. When his eyes landed on the figure of Evelyn Clawthorne, red hair filled with twigs and spider-web, a bright-red cardinal flitting about her and pecking anxiously at her cloak, he startled again.  

And when Evelyn sat up, the chirps of a cardinal ringing in her ears along with the ringing of her fall, he was by her side, looking concerned and saying something that she couldn’t quite hear.

And when she sat up and leaned back against the rock she had just barely missed, when he handed her the staff she’d dropped, when she looked up and saw the man looking down at her with the warmest brown eyes she’d ever seen, when he looked down at this woman who’d just fallen out of a tree and was still the most beautiful person he’d ever seen, when the calls of a cardinal and a mourning dove wound together in the shocked silence of the forest, Evelyn Clawthorne, witch of the Boiling Isles, and Caleb Wittebane, of the town of Gravesfield, beheld each other for the first time.

The sun shone. The birds sang. 

You see, here’s the thing about moments that change your life: most of them are so utterly and horrendously mundane that you’ll never know what they were. There are certain obvious moments, of course, but by far and away, most of them seem a moment like any other. Just a book you read, or a food you ate, or an apartment you rented. A bird you wandered after to try and draw.

Nothing special. Nothing unusual. 

Like magic.