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Pearl’s not quite sure when it happened, but the village has gone mad.
The change must have been too subtle, too gradual to notice. Whispers and stray glances turned to scowls and muttered comments, and before she knew it, everyone had turned their backs on her. Tilly’s jumps of excitement, once laughed off by passers-by, became met with fear and scorning. She walked alone on her side of the street.
A trail of bad luck followed her wherever she went, and nobody let her forget it. Witch, they called her, scarlet devil.
She weathered the pain of being frozen out like this for a while. Weeks, at least, bleeding into months. But it is cold and it is lonely, when nobody will give you the time of day, when they stop offering jobs, when they gingerly take what little money you have left as if it’s going to burn them dropping from your hands. More than that, it becomes deadly boring, to sit and spin for hours because you have nothing else to do.
(Her mother always worried she’d grow up to be a spinster. Pearl hadn’t seen much misfortune in that - a wheel is just as constant as a husband, and it wants for less besides. Now she wishes things were not as they are.)
Finally, though, confusion and frustration itched under her skin, and Tilly’s fur grew thin and ragged without sustenance, and something snapped inside her. She let her girl to her devices, by the farmhouse at the edge of town. She let her animal hunt to her satisfaction.
Needless to say, the ranchers had positively lit alight in fury. She hadn’t meant to destroy their livelihoods - and really, what was a few chickens, all things considered - she didn’t want to make any more enemies than she already had. It was the hunger, gnawing from the inside out, threatening to leave Pearl a cold and hollow husk, and she’d had to make it stop, she’d had to give her girl a second chance.
Witch! the mob had called after her, bloody harpy! Demon, sorceress, wretch!
Hunger and anger pulled her taut. She was skin stretched across a growing emptiness, and her dog was snarling at her heel, and it was only a matter of time before they started calling her murderer too.
Well. If they’d wanted vitriol, then vitriol they had bred indeed. Pearl turned to go. She would find her means of revenge.
Their village brushes up against a thick of untouched woodland. Even the dandelions dare not grow past a certain line, and they are wise not to do it. Here, the veil is thin, and the fae well know it.
Pearl steels herself against the pain of pricking brambles as she steps across and through the thicket. It’s nothing worse than what she’s felt before.
She finds what she’s looking for - a clearing, flecked with wildflowers and guarded by oaks - without too much struggle at all. Perhaps the forest wanted her to find this. Perhaps it has been waiting for her.
A figure steps from behind one of the trunks, and Pearl pulls in, defensive. Behind her, the darkness shifts, like there are unseen attendants in the faerie’s wake, ready to take Pearl out with one wrong step. And this, the lady with shadows at her heel… Her hair fans unnatural pink. Her eyes are blue, just like Pearl’s, but with an oddness about them. A spark, cold and curious, that darts across their shine; something gives Pearl the feeling that this glimmer is more than just a liveliness of mood.
“Greetings, stranger,” the faerie purrs.
“Good evening,” says Pearl.
“That it is,” she says, nonchalant, “might I have the pleasure of your name?”
Pearl chuckles mirthlessly. “I’d rather keep my name if I can help it. I am looking to make a deal, though.”
“Oh,” her eyebrows shoot up, “are you now?”
“Well, I’m not here to…” Distracting turns of phrase aside. “I know what I want.”
“And what is that?”
“The people in the village. They’ve turned on me. Driven me out, my dog out -” she gestures to Tilly, standing at attention by her side “- we want revenge.”
“Well, you can set a fire with your own tinder. Your dog could take out a throat or two with her own teeth. What do you need me for?”
“I want more than fire. I want magic.”
The shadow lady sucks a breath between her teeth. “That’s not going to come cheap.”
“They call me witch. They tell me I’ve been sent from Hell to curse the village. They -” she tries not to choke on the sting of it “- say that there’s something wicked within me. Something that I can’t absolve.”
“You do realise that magical revenge is only going to prove their point?”
“I thought - I thought maybe if I take up the mantle. If I let witch be what I am.” Pearl swallows. “I thought it might be name enough that you’d take it from me.”
Her eyes flick up and down Pearl’s form. “Not enough to pay for magic. You know as well as I do that your body isn’t made to hold it. You need space for the reservoir. I need something with deep roots so that I can make a well.”
She’s right; Pearl can feel it as she speaks. As horrible as the claws of hunger at her core might feel, that space is not enough for magic to settle comfortably.
“So, your actual name.” She clicks her tongue. “Or another thing that makes you you. I’m not so much picky as I need to work to a standard here.”
What makes Pearl Pearl?
It’s not this loneliness. She was loved, once. She was happy. This pain has not been following her for long enough that it’s all that she is. Sure, it feels like it sometimes, but given time this wound may heal.
It might be her emotions, though. Pearl is Pearl because she feels so deeply, all the way down to her core. She feels love for her dog - she feels pain from the people who’ve spurned her - she feels rage at being tarred as what she’s not. She could give it all up and fill the space with unfathomable power.
… She won’t, though. She won’t trade her love for victory. She can’t leave Tilly behind.
Well, perhaps she doesn’t need to trade it.
“I could give you my love,” she starts tentatively, “if that works. If we can share.”
“Hope springs eternal,” says the shadow lady. “Love bleeds dry. If you split a tributary, you’ll find it hard to care about other things.”
That’s unhelpful. “I won’t give up Tilly.”
“Then you’re running out of options here.”
Ugh. “I guess you were right. I can start a fire with my own tinder.” It won’t be everything she wanted, but it will have to be enough.
The faerie grabs her arm as she turns. “Ah-ah-ah, we’re not done here. You said you’ll make a trade. You’ve gotta give me something.”
“I never promised anything,” Pearl fights, “I said I was looking to trade.”
“You can’t just come to my side of the trees and then leave me empty handed!”
She thinks, for a second, and then - “Would you trade me the tinder, then?”
“Hm?”
“For the fire. I’d be willing to give you something smaller. And you could just give me the spark.”
Suddenly, the answer comes easy: that spark that’s glimmered in her eye, sharp as knifepoint, all this time. It flickers in its recognition, dances across her iris in a way that doesn’t match the shifting of the fading sunlight overhead.
Pearl follows it with her own eyes. Doesn’t let them dip below the nose. Wouldn’t dare.
“Hmm,” the faerie frowns, digs her nails in, not letting Pearl forget who she’s dealing with, “hard bargain.”
“What’s your price?”
“For a spark?”
Pearl holds steady under the weight of the pause.
“Something of equal value, obviously,” she muses, “or something to replace it.”
It strikes Pearl - she knows how to put a light behind someone’s eyes. “I’ll give y’a kiss for it?”
The shadow lady blinks. The glimmer in her eye flares. The corner of her lip quirks. “Deal.”
When they break, what could be hours or days later, Pearl has to take a second to check that her breath wasn’t stolen away in the trade. It still sits steady in her chest, next to the hunger for love that - heaven help her - might be scabbing over, just a bit. In her hand, the white-hot flicker of a flame sits waiting. Not burning her, but ready to burn a village that has not embraced her.
The spark is gone from her shadow lady’s eyes. Instead, there is something softer there, a warmth that smoulders through them. Behind her, the shadows lie still and unalert.
“So we’re even?”
“Use it well,” she tells Pearl. “And I’d like for you to come back soon. Tell me how it went.”
Pearl doesn’t promise anything more. Even now, she’s careful with her words.
She will, though. She already knows it. Perhaps it’s the oldest trick in the book, being drawn by the face and the voice of a beautiful woman - perhaps she will be dashed against the rocks like a wayward ship - but somehow, in the moment, the fall sounds worth it.
Pearl doesn’t want to become the witch that everybody said she’d be, to follow the path that the shadow lady was happy to provide for her at first. But she wouldn’t mind a few more kisses like that.