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With open doors and dusty shelves, the atelier welcomed back its tenants.
Moonlight came in through the open window in slow ripples, laying pale bands across the floor and the foot of her bed. She sat quietly on her bed, turned toward the night, a stack of books leaning against the wall, wobbling slightly under the added weight of her presence on the mattress. She drew one free, an old volume on transmutational correspondences, its pages dense with sigils tracing the passage from one form to another, and opened it without much intention of reading straight through. The winds of the late hours of dusk read the books along with her, how sad and lovely to memorise the poems without a voice, she thought, the right poem settled near the breast at just the right temperature, warming each other through the passages.
Her hands still bore faint stains of ink, a dull shimmer at the creases of her fingers: silverwood sap, refined for spellwork, meant for binding and healing and careful craft, now darkened by memories she wished could be erased as easily as lines on a page. She looked down at her lap, at the unresponsive fabric of her robes, and thought of the girl she had been before she learned that magic was not a simple division between good and evil, but a weaving of choice and pain and consequence. The world of witches spoke in laws and ancient prohibitions; beyond them stood others who called for freedom, for magic unbound. What frightened her was that she could hear the truth in both. The path ahead branched endlessly, each fork opening into another, and the gift of knowledge only widened the world. The wider it grew, the lonelier she felt inside it.
She let out a small sigh, light as a leaf slipping loose in air. She wanted… she did not know what she wanted. Somehow to bring back those who were lost, and to recover the meaning magic had once held for her. At the same time, she feared what her desire revealed: that the certainty she had carried so easily as a child was gone, and that her heart might no longer be brave enough to meet the truth in its place.
The door clicked open. A blade of light cut straight through the room, running the length of the bed and disappeared as the door was closed with careful haste. In that brief interval Coco had already quietly drawn the quilt up around her shoulders, the warmth settled over her heavily, coaxing, and for a moment she nearly forgot someone was in her room: socked feet pausing at the threshold, a small hollow knock of something against wood, the sound of someone standing still and waiting for their eyes to adjust. She squeezed her eyes shut and slowed down her breathing to a drowsy rise and fall. Whoever it was might leave, she thought, once they were convinced.
"Stop pretending to sleep,” said a voice she knew all too well in an unneeded whisper, as if she was mindful of the sleeping figure, wondering if she truly was asleep. “It's just me."
She kept pretending, though, forcing her hand to relax and form a loose fist, slowly shifting her leg diagonal to her torso so it slipped out the blanket and drew her eyebrows together, as if the light and sound had disturbed her sleep. She felt, rather than saw, Agott sit at the foot of the bed. After a few minutes of pondering, she swiftly stood up as if remembering something. Footsteps steadfast and echoing in the breeze-quiet room, she heard Agott make her way over to her, standing beside her head. A presence hovered above her exposed cheek, and she gave a displeased huff as something registered in her seeing the silhouette of the girl supposedly asleep.
The bed dipped once more and there was a sudden unexpected feel of a finger poking her cheek. At first it was light, digging in a small dimple in the skin, then she started repeatedly doing the same thing, each prod more intentional than the last, the calloused fingers rough but familiar in their eternal warmth.
“You never sleep like this,” Agott asked, blurred amusement at the edge of her mouth when she peered at her with half-opened eyes. “What’s with your hands? And why are you still dressed?”
When Coco fully opened her eyes looking upwards and directly at Agott, her hand froze mid-air in the middle of another poke into her cheek, “and how would you know that?”
Her cheeky grin and open eyes visibly flustered Agott who jerked back at once, retreating until her shoulders met the wall, eyes unblinking in embarrassment, colour rising fast in her cheeks. Not waiting for an answer, she crawled over to sit on the bed close to Agott, who had settled down after the shock and was now vaguely tepid but in a moment or two her attention was grabbed by something else. Her subtle side-glance without the turn of her head let her know that Agott was aware of the dip in the mattress, the elbows parallel in position to her own, hands close without touching, fingers of each girl tapping the quilt in uneven rhythms that did not match and yet somehow belonged together.
Coco splayed back on her elbows, bringing her knees up and crossing her legs. Her shin brushed stilled fingers. Agott sprawled back, her head meeting the quilt with a soft thump, bouncing lightly. Her eyes stayed fixed on nothing, thoughtful and strained, as though she stood at the edge of a bridge, uncertain whether to cross. It was then Coco decided to do something she could have chosen any other moment to do so, but it was now or never and Agott was so engrossed in her own thoughts that it filled her with such a keen devotion that she leaned down in close with an eager gratefulness bright in her eyes, almost a sparkle that could leap out any moment, and it did, a quick kiss on the cheek, lingered for a second and then five and she pulled away at once, back on her elbows, immediately looking at the embellished ceiling.
“You—” Agott came back to herself a moment too late, voice faltering, soft and thick like dew clinging through the end of winter. “What…” Her voice squeaked, which made Coco finally look at the other apprentice, her mouth agape, red high on her cheeks, finger lightly grazing over the cheek she had kissed and she laughed, quietly, the sound drowned by the ticking clock just finding its way to their consciousness. Agott turned her head towards the carpet, swinging her legs slightly. Her hand dropped limply into her lap, closing around something she had been holding, obscured by the dim light casting shadows of their silhouettes stretching and overlapping across the room. Coco could tell it was something flat from the motion of Agott’s fingers: smoothing, pressing, the absent gesture of someone comforting a small and restless thing.
“What’s that in your hand?” Coco simply said.
Agott’s hand stopped the restless back and forth, the fingers that had been tapping along with the fidgeting as if counting something uncountable froze, and for a moment she did nothing at all. Then she opened her hand slowly, as if revealing a secret. Hair fell over her eyes, bashful to let her eyes be seen.
A pair of fingerless gloves lay in the middle of her palm. They were a soft, muted purple, slightly smaller than Agott’s own hand, singed a little at one edge perhaps by the mess of magic equipment scattered around her workplace, but beautiful still. She could see dogwood flowers stitched crudely on the palm. On the backs ran small, uncertain glyphs all made with untrained eyes and clumsy hands, the stitches loosened in places, petals pulling apart, holes left where the needle had paused too long, but in those hesitations, she could see the determinate perfection the other girl had wanted to master but hadn’t then. “I meant to give you these earlier,” Agott said, making a small, dismissive gesture. “But I was too preoccupied with the festival.”
“Did you learn to knit?” She laid the pair of gloves in her hand. Coco turned them over slowly, her fingers tracing the uneven seams, the places where the yarn had tightened too much or slipped loose. Her thumb lingered on a small knot left untrimmed, when hands unfamiliar with needles grew tired and pressed on anyway. For a witch accustomed to pen and paper, it must have been a difficult effort. Agott nodded.
“Just to make this?” She asked quietly, smiling with a translucent discernibility. “Then you learned how to knit just for me?” She had grown up watching her mother sew care into every stitch. To see that same love here, clumsily but faithfully, made her chest ache.
“Ugh, whatever,” her mouth mocked into a dejected pout. “Of course I did idiot, we are friends are we not?” The giddiness inside her stomach simmered up to the tip of tongue, and to let it shrink back she walked over, turned on the lamp, flooding the space with warm light, and pulled the gloves on. They were loose at the wrists, too long in the fingers, bunching over her knuckles. She flexed her hands, laughing quietly. It came to her, like a fog lifting, how the affection she had received from Agott again and again defined her thoroughly; sure, she had built herself up over the past months, but it had never been alone. Joy puffed up in Coco’s chest like bread frying and teetering as it rose in hot oil.
“There’s also this,” Coco turned back in time to see her fumbling in her pocket. “I had some help from Professor Olruggio and Richeh.” She stepped closer and threaded a pale blue ribbon through the tops of the gloves, winding it around them, like a vine weaving and climbing its way upward. When the glyphs stitched into the fabric aligned with those drawn into the ribbon, warmth bloomed beneath Coco’s skin, spreading outward from her palms like sunlight seeping into stone. She recognised the sigil now, it was the same one drawn on Professor Olruggio’s snugstones. “Your hands are always cold and you took my snugstone so,” Agott said, too quickly. “Anyway, it keeps the ink from staining your hands, I don’t know if you noticed but you can be very messy,” To prove it, she caught one of Coco’s fingers and gave it a wiggle. “I didn’t make the fingertips fully closed because I figured it would be difficult to draw a spell–don’t grin at me like that, I’ll take back my gift.” Coco did not trust her voice with the fondness rising too fast in her chest. Besides, she had grown far too fond of Agott’s cherrying ears to risk frightening it away.
She lay back down beside Agott, yawning as tiredness overtook her. She reached into her pocket and drew out the snugstone, placing it in Agott’s hand. Agott frowned at once and, with quiet insistence, pressed Coco’s fingers around the stone instead, guiding it back until it rested against her own chest. She did not let Coco withdraw her hand. An ancient riddle surfaced in her mind and she wondered, not for the first time, whether she was allowed to feel such gentleness. The gratitude is what her mind often returned to again and again as the Romonons leaned into the warmth she had given them and let themselves die. As if she had done them a kindness beyond measure. As if the gentle heat that eased their final moments outweighed the years of cold solitude that had come before. Forever suffering, never knowing solace. Just like her mother. She pressed the stone closer to Agott and felt the faint warmth of the gloves answering in her palms.
Those trained to become witches were taught very early on, to draw themselves close to the world, body and soul, emotions and senses. They learned to hear the snap of twigs beneath their heels and the rough give of bark beneath calloused fingers; to feel the crumble of old architecture, the fuzz of moss tickling the hollow of the throat as they breathe. They were taught the smell of water before it is seen, whether it lay beneath the ground or hung above it in waiting clouds. Such lessons were meant to sharpen the senses for spellwork, and prepare the body in any given circumstance. Yet when it came to comforting one another, the touch of an apprentice and the touch of a witch wasn’t much different – awkward hands floundering as they searched for something to hold. Human connection, often forgotten to be performed through words and actions by the masters, then came from small acceptances: a word spoken in cushioned delight for the future, fingers loosening not in rejection but in trust, a touch light enough to acknowledge the presence of another without claiming it.
Though the calm lay dreary, her mind was full as was her heart. The soft fabric of the gloves held warmth in the night; even with the window ajar and the hearth long gone cold. It was in these hazy, simple moments—lying down beside Agott, both spurred silent by their own thoughts and the wind passing over their bare feet like a low tide—that she grasped the tendrils of hope. Not miraculously appearing from the flat heights of the sky or hanging like warmed lanterns around her, but something given. Hope, split bare by the heartbeats of two girls staring at the same ceiling in the black night.
She wanted to cry. Coco would very much rather spend her time in the thousands of places she wanted to make a space in, a space that she could call her own: in Agott’s heart, between the walls of the atelier, between the books in the Tower of Tomes, without stumbling away in fear but rather tripping forward with a brave aim, no matter how absurd, no matter how the fear borne by a foolishness could hold her captive any moment. If she was a child of hope, then she would have to learn what that meant by walking where hope did not yet know her name.
“Are you alright?” She was already drifting toward sleep. When Agott turned her head to brush the hair from her eyes, fingers moving on their own without hesitancy, an unnameable fondness rose in Coco. Her eyes closed at once. She breathed out, long and deep, as if absorbing the warmth from her fingers. She wanted nothing more than to be held in the presence of another, the lulling movement of Agott’s hands made her feel loved as quietly as winter received the sun.
“A lot happened,” Agott murmured, yawning. “I can’t imagine what you must be feeling.”
The wind pressed faintly at the window. Coco’s hands trembled, and she folded them into the sleeves of her robe to still the nervous twitching. Her ruffled hair was more than an indication of her flurried state; she felt suddenly too visible, as she often did in the market streets or the long corridors of the Great Hall. “I will be,” she said. “I have to be.”
“You don’t have to be anything,” the lopsided grin on her face hadn’t shrunk an inch, even in her drowsiness. “Just be Coco.”
At that, Coco caught Agott’s hand where it rested against the snugstone, holding it as if it might slip away. Agott looked down at her then, and her gaze wavered, as though she saw how tightly Coco was holding herself together. It felt as if she had swallowed back her heart into her stomach seven times for enough surface area to remain on the tongue, for words to make room and to speak with each other before the air from the throat uttered them out. In such moments, her heart thickened, a layer of guilt and shame settled on the surface. It was then that for her there appeared an imaginary figure of herself within that unnameable illusionary thickness— a retelling, a rebirth, a reincarnation; all spread neatly into tales, and she did not know if she was supposed to follow where it walked or turn her head away.
Since becoming a witch, her life had been decided in rooms she was not invited into. Between the pointed hats and the brims, there had been no space to stand and say yes or no. Even becoming a witch had not been her own decision. Perhaps leaving was her first true choice.
Magic was as definite as hope was an indefinite thing. Magic was water, divided into a series of threads made of droplets, each one clear, each one held apart, swelling to reach the hand of another strand, joining where it could, bearing weight together. Hope was a stilted voice, calling from the length of a road that led toward a home she could no longer return to. She had not yet learned how hope worked; unkind where they carried the young apprentice, yet she held them firmly under her fingers - waiting for the egg to crack open without being poked incessantly. If one could wait for magic to peer around the corner when the witch stayed put in a gentle smile, gentler heart, then to wait for hope to come around was perhaps not much different.
It’s naive, but as young as her heart was, it was laden with a curiosity to fill the uneven shapes which seek for an answer known to none, or none she can stand eye to eye with. A few months into the world of magic, the sting of not knowing came with the hurt of being kept in the dark too long; the dispassion with which she was welcomed into the world the more she walked on the path of apprenticeship was not unknown to others but the silence was loud and large. The hope, when given to her, was snatched in intervals too short when the road she confronted stretched like sap extracted from trees. Those are all parts of the world of witches that dismissed her, but nonetheless to learn came from a determination to know what one wanted and why one wanted. So she must learn to look outside, to know what was without her and to listen to that which bonded the fear to her, in places where the weeds and algae irregularly grew, a tickle against the cracks in rocks, where the echo of the bird songs reflected against the green leaves, the leaves echoing songs to the next fruits which grew on the branches, the sweet song of the fruits a part of the meal brought to the reddened mouth of satisfaction, where the grass greeted the rising dawn.
The borrowed gramophone from Tetia turned softly in the dim room, its sound wandering and thin, like the echo of nuts and branches striking the cool trunks of trees. Coco wished then that this moment might last a lifetime. The simple peace of knowing that youth carried with it this strange grace: the ability to love without armour. It was all made of a hunger she would never be able to eat through alone. The shared space she had searched for without knowing its name had come to her at last, unasked.
Agott’s fingers closed around Coco’s, the snugstone the only witness, held between their palms like a small heart. “Promise me something.”
Was it worthy to hope? She knew that worth did not define what was given or taken, the sweetness of friendships she had built. What has come to her will keep returning, as long as the simple line of love is retained. "What is it?" They were close now, closer than she had intended them to be, breaths filling the space in between.
“That you’ll stop carrying everything by yourself,” Agott lifted their clasped hands and pressed them to her brow. “Because you can tell me about it too, if… if you think it would help. I don’t know how much I can do… but I will do what I can. I always will.”
Coco bowed her head forward to meet the promise where Agott held it between them. “I will,” she said softly. “Whatever I can tell you.” A promise shaped by two voices, given and received, then held in common. The sleeves of her night gown brushed against Coco’s fingers. There was a newness to the promise, not hope, but something more than.
Hope may not be graspable, but it lingered in the small space between their breathing hearts. Shuffling closer to Agott, she pulled the quilt over herself and the other girl, the light of the room still switched on. Sleep came gradually, like snow gathering on branches. Just as their breathing fell into rhythm, a shooting star dove past the window, white light illuminating the room brighter.
By the very next morning, the atelier was absent one witch.