The first time the witch sweeps into the butcher shop where Amel works, she brings a cold breeze with her. Her long brown hair is loose, swirling around her shoulders, and every part of her face looks sharper than the small silver knife Amel keeps sheathed on the chain around her neck—chin, cheekbones, even the slash of her thin mouth.

She waits to catch Amel’s eye before she speaks.

“Have you a heart?”

Amel blinks and looks away. Her left hand is bloody, grasping between the ribs of a rabbit, and her right hand is beginning to cramp around the handle of her butcher’s blade. “I beg your pardon?”

The witch swallows, and Amel watches the pale line of her throat, follows the silver chain that disappears into the neckline of her dress. When she speaks again, the witch’s voice is clear and deliberate. “Have you any hearts to sell?”

Oh.

Amel does sell hearts, as she sells everything, but often enough they get bundled with the other organs and sold in a bunch at the end of the day.

“Yes,” she says finally. She puts her knife down and wipes her left hand on the front of her apron, reaches for her brown paper. “What do you prefer, Mistress?”

The witch hesitates—the first and only sign of uncertainty. “What’s freshest?”

Amel gestures at the rabbit in front of her. “I can have this ready for you in minutes.”

The witch nods and steps back. “I will wait, thank you.”

Amel works as quickly as she dares, the weight of the witch’s gaze heavy on her shoulders. The heart is warm when she extricates it from the rabbit’s ribs, and she can almost imagine that it still beats. She wraps it in brown paper. It’s too light to merit more than a twist of the paper on the top, but Amel sees the witch’s eyes on her and pulls twine from the roll overhead for a careful knot.

The witch draws out a bag that looks empty, but when she reaches her hand inside, there are three coins between her fingers. She looks up at Amel. “Is this sufficient, Butcher?”

It’s more than double what Amel’s master would charge, which the witch must know. And Amel knows better than to anger a witch. “An overpayment, Mistress. One cilik will do.”

The witch smiles. Once again, she waits for Amel to meet her pale eyes before she speaks. “I’ll offer you something else, then, for your honesty. Three ciliks, or a favor.”

Amel could use three ciliks. There are her parents to think of, three cities away, as close as she can bear them to be, with a leak in the roof. There’s the matter of new blades, a new tunic, a never-ending list of should-haves. But, all the same, trunkdays are the only days her master takes off. She may never earn another favor.

“A favor,” she says. “When I know what I want to ask for.”

The witch nods. “I’ll return next week. I’ll be grateful for whatever heart you have for me. Something new, maybe.”

The witch doesn’t look at the small paper package as she walks to the door, but Amel sees the way she pulls at the string as soon as she crosses the threshold.

After Amel closes the shop and washes up, she ignores the scores of things she should do—write to her sister, return the pamphlet on forest mushroom types to the innkeeper’s son, read the latest letter from her parents—to lie on her straw pallet above the shop and think about the witch’s favor.

Amel smells like blood all the time, and the edges of her fingernails are always stained reddish pink. What’s worse, she doesn’t mind it. She left Zomin to apprentice to a butcher because she likes the smooth cut of a knife under skin, between sinew and bone. There’s a shiver of recognition there, when she slices down the center of some poor mammal’s chest—and almost of jealousy. It scares her; the idea of giving up the knife scares her more. Butchering isn’t enough, it’s not what she wants, but it dulls the edge. Even with the knife in her hand, she feels the vast, unyielding pull of clifftops and the centers of lakes and still forests. She still feels weighed down by what’s in her chest, driven nowhere and everywhere at once.

Amel should ask for something practical, something worth more than three ciliks but not by much, not enough to anger the witch. Instead, she wants to ask the witch to reach her thin pale hands into Amel’s chest, between her ribs, and pluck out her heart, to put the cool spring breeze in its place. Her heart is heavy; it holds her down, holds her back. She is sure she would be more complete without it.

When the witch returns, Amel has a heart ready for her.

“A goose,” she tells the witch, wrapping the heart, paying extra attention to the knot. “Fattened all year for the feast, I’m told, but brought to us at the last minute instead.”

The witch’s eyebrow twitches. “A goose,” she says, half to herself. “Well, I suppose we’ll see.” Her hair is pulled back today, a brown braid studded with early spring flowers. Amel stops herself from telling her how pretty it looks.

The witch gives Amel one cilik and raises an eyebrow at her before she leaves. “I haven’t forgotten my debt,” she says.

But the shape of the words aren’t formed yet. Amel still stands on the edge before the jump, wondering whether the fall is as beautiful as it seems.

The next week, Amel gives her the heart of a hart, and the witch smiles at her, wry and amused, when she takes the package from Amel. This time, the light seems to almost shine through her. This time, she does not bother waiting to pass through the door before she begins untying her bundle.

When Amel next sees the witch, it is not at the shop. It’s the Redbud Feast, and the hunters have brought back boars and deer and smaller game and insist on cooking them whole. After a hard morning and afternoon’s work, Amel’s master has given her the evening. Amel has cleaned up her nicest tunic as best she can, but she still drifts around the edges of the crowd on the city green, wandering half in shadow, barely feeling the warmth of the bonfires.

The feast is celebrated the same in Tremon as in her hometown. Amel feels so different from the genial, glowing groups of people clustered around the bonfires, who are here to celebrate and be warm and connect. There is nothing stopping her from approaching one of the groups of young people. It is only that she doesn’t want to. It should make her miss her sister Lora, who always spurned her admirers to dance with Amel when they were younger. But even that, Amel cannot want. However Lora is spending the feast day, Amel knows she is happy and well loved. And so all the desire Amel should have sits cold and heavy in her chest, unused.

Amel watches for the innkeeper’s son with mild anticipation of a friendly face. He loans her his books and pamphlets and always stops to chat when he picks up the day’s orders. If Amel wanted a real friend, he would be her best bet.

When she spots him, the innkeeper’s son is watching a group of girls. A moment or two later, he approaches and draws one of them to the side. From her poorly lit position at the sides, Amel watches the girl’s friends watch the two of them, giggling, no doubt joking about swapping necklaces and starting lives together, and she wishes that she wanted to be one of them. She watches the innkeeper draw his own necklace out—a key, Amel thinks, though from this distance she can’t be sure—and the girl laughs and tucks a lock of her hair back behind her ear and shows him hers—something round.

Amel is happy for them, in a distant way.

When she turns away, she catches sight of a knife-sharp smile and shivers with recognition and fear and delight. The witch’s hair is piled in messy, complicated knots on her head, and her neck seems almost inhumanly long, flickering in the low light of the half-dead bonfire others have abandoned. Her dress is loose around her shoulders, and Amel can see that she’s twisted dandelions into a plait that hangs around her neck, a green and golden necklace layered over her silver chain. When she looks at Amel, she smiles.

“There you are,” she says. “Have you decided what you want as your favor yet?”

Amel swallows. There is no good way to ask someone to carve out the parts of you that drive you toward the edges of cliffs and blades and lakes. It is quite probably impossible. “I want you to kiss me,” she says, only realizing she means it once the words are spoken.

The witch’s smile grows. “Very well,” she says. She steps forward, graceful, and reaches over Amel’s shoulder to hold the base of her neck. Amel dips her head down, and—

The witch doesn’t pull back when Amel expects her to, the way a few girls have in the past. Instead, she opens her mouth and welcomes Amel in, and there’s something dizzying in the kiss, something in the taste of the witch’s mouth that Amel can’t quite put a name to until she steps back, breathing hard, putting a hand to her mouth.

The taste lingers in her mouth still: blood.

When Amel finally makes it back to her room, she curses herself for her stupidity. She could have done any number of things with a witch’s favor, and instead she has thrown it away over a kiss. A kiss means nothing to a witch.

But still Amel puts her hands to her lips and wonders if they are any redder than they were when the evening started.

The next trunkday, the witch doesn’t come until Amel has started cleaning up.

“Butcher,” the witch says. She stays in the doorway, something nervous in the tilt of her chin and the set of her shoulders. “Do you have a heart I can make mine?”

Amel reaches for the brown paper package she tied an hour ago. “A cow, today, if it pleases you, but it is not quite fresh.”

The witch’s mouth twists to the side. Her lips are pale pink. “I can make do,” she says finally. “You will come with me when you finish closing the shop.”

It is not phrased as a question, but Amel hears it as one in the way the witch’s tone rises, the way she does not settle back onto her heels until Amel nods.

The witch watches Amel clean up from the corner of the shop by the window, silent and mostly unmoving, and does not offer to help. Still, Amel sees spots disappear from the floor before her mop ever touches them. The salt sweeps itself into piles. The work goes quickly.

Amel locks the door and sticks her head in the house next door to tell her master’s wife she won’t be in for dinner before she falls into step beside the witch.

“Where are we going?”

The witch’s fingers pick at the strings of the package as they walk toward the edge of town. “Not here,” she says, eyes skittering away from Amel. “Not yet.”

So Amel stays silent as they reach the edge of the forest. The days are lengthening still, and the sun lights their way as the witch picks her way through the trees to a deer path, which leads them to the edge of the river. The sun sends soft light through the leaves on the trees and over the water, and there are wild roses in the bushes on the other side of the river. The witch sits down on a fallen tree trunk, and Amel sits beside her and focuses on the warmth of the air on her skin.

When the witch finally pulls the cow’s heart out of the parcel, Amel almost doesn’t recognize it. It’s clean, almost pristine. Amel remembers cutting it out of the cow’s ribs, remembers its warmth, its rush of blood, but now it’s just a red lump in a hungry woman’s hands.

“Did you know,” the witch says, “that a witch has no heart of her own?”

Amel swallows. Her own heart she is suddenly too aware of—a frantic, thumping thing distributing fear all through her body. But still she doesn’t move, doesn’t even think of it.

The witch takes a thoughtful bite of the heart, and Amel sees the flash of her teeth through the deep red of the flesh, watches her pause and tear at the white fatty streak before she begins to chew. A slow trail of blood rolls between the witch’s fingers and down her pale wrist. There’s blood under her fingernails to match Amel’s. When the witch swallows her next bite, Amel offers her her own water bag to wash it down.

The witch smiles and takes it. “All magic comes at a price,” she says. “And I am very powerful now. But it is lonely living without a heart.”

“It is lonely enough with one.”

The witch eats the rest of the cow’s heart with a sort of gentle focus, unhurried and thorough. When she has swallowed the last bite, she wipes her mouth on the corner of her apron. Her lips are dark, now, almost red, and there is pink in her cheeks. She is vibrant, the color so strong it strikes Amel as something like a warning, the brightness belying danger. The witch looks at Amel with purpose clear in her pale eyes.

If the first kiss was a favor, the second is a gift. The witch’s hand is cool on Amel’s cheek, but her lips are warm, and she presses against Amel with barely constrained hunger.

When the witch pulls back, she leaves her hand on Amel’s shoulder. Her thumb has hooked under the chain holding Amel’s knife. Amel swallows, and the salt and iron are sharp on her tongue, a dangerous, familiar taste.

“Your name is Amel,” the witch says. “I had to ask it off some boys at the festival.”

Amel nods.

The witch contemplates her. “You don’t know my name.”

“I don’t.”

“And do you often kiss women whose names you don’t know, Amel?”

“No.”

“You’ll not have to do so again. My name is Seren, though only my sisters and the trees have known it before you.”

“Seren,” Amel says, aware of every movement of her lips, her tongue. “Seren.” She leans forward. “Seren, you did not pay me three ciliks for that cow’s heart you ate just now.”

“And what would you have for payment instead?”

“Take my heart,” Amel says. “Have it for yourself. It is no use to me.”

The sun sinks below the horizon, and the witch’s eyes gleam in the grey of the evening, pinning Amel to her seat on the log. “And how do I know your heart will suit me?”

There on the log in the deepening of the dark, the witch sets Amel three tasks. Amel has never liked being told what to do, but Seren does it so sweetly, her fingertips cool on Amel’s face, that Amel can’t quite bring herself to mind. Three tasks, only one of them truly difficult. Amel squares her shoulders against them. She will be ready.

Amel completes the first task on a day just before midsummer, a grey stemday that threatens rain and never delivers, holding the water heavy in the air instead. She sneaks out early, leaving a note behind for her master’s wife to find, and makes her way into the forest with a basket in the crook of her arm. She wanders until she finds a meadow where the dew still hangs on the grass, and the touch of the sun is mild. There she spreads her blanket and rests her head. Her jacket she repurposes as a pillow, and she eats the remnants of yesterday’s bread and a handful of smoked fish hunched over her book, which is a fifty-page collection of astronomical observations because that was what the book cart had, the last time it came around.

When she tires of her book, she leans back and sleeps again in the warmth of the late morning sun. She should be in the shop, should be wrestling slippery flesh beneath her fingers and weighing packages, but instead she is here, doing whatever she is inclined to.

Amel wakes and wanders around the forest. She wants—

She doesn’t know what she wants, exactly, but dissatisfaction presses at her, urging her over the forest floor until she reaches the pines at the edge of a lake. The trees are tall, and the lake is deep, and there is a breeze at the edge that didn’t make its way into the forest. Amel climbs one of the larger trees, which has convenient branches and a slight lean over the lake, until she’s high enough to see the tops of the trees behind her. She inches across one of the branches over the lake and looks down at her reflection. She’s just a blur of brown skin and dark red clothing from this height, but she likes seeing herself all the same.

There’s something about the combination of it—the height, the breeze, the dig of bark into Amel’s palms—that eases the irritation and dissatisfaction she felt. But it’s not enough. It won’t be enough.

Still she keeps going.

It’s only when Amel gets hungry that she realizes her predicament. It was easier going up than it will be going down. At least if she wants to avoid the obvious answer.

She shimmies down a few lengths before she gives up. From here she can see the features of her face in the lake’s surface. She knows it’s deep; she won’t break her neck. She can swim all right, and she’s not far from shore; she won’t drown.

Amel makes her way farther along the branch, until she’s sure she’s above deep water, and lets go.

In the single drawn-out moment in which she falls, Amel almost feels free of her heart. She hits the surface of the lake hard, so hard she feels it in her whole body, and she lets herself stay underwater for a few minutes, enjoying being weightless, before she drags herself to shore.

Seren emerges from the forest, a basket on her arm.

Amel fetches her bag from the base of the tree, spreads her blanket out again, and sits next to her witch, who has brought thick slices of bread with butter, a handful of peas, fresh carrots the size of Amel’s pinky, and boiled eggs for their dinner. Amel watches Seren take a bite of a crisp carrot before she turns to her own food, and Seren catches her.

“What?”

“I thought perhaps you only ate hearts.”

Seren smiles into her bread. “No. Those I only eat when I have to.” She tilts her head. “And if I were to be given a human heart, I would need them no longer.”

“Is that so?”

“Oh, yes,” the witch says. “The heart of a sturdy woman should serve me for years and years.”

“And have I passed the first test?” Amel asks.

“What did you do today?”

“Whatever fancy told me to.”

“And who did you think of?”

“Only myself.”

Seren moves her hand to Amel’s cheek, leans in. “And how did it feel?”

Amel pauses. Seren’s face is only a hand’s width from her own, but she makes no move to scoot closer, just looks back at Amel, curious and patient.

“It felt incomplete,” Amel says finally. “Like the recitation of a poem unfelt.”

“Oh dear,” says Seren, utterly unsurprised. She leans forward for a brief kiss. “You passed the first test.”

Amel smiles.

“The next one will be harder,” the witch says. Amel leans forward to be kissed again.

“I know.”

Amel waits and waits for the second task. She waits past midsummer, when Seren joins her at the edge of the bonfire, lets Amel slide her hands beneath her dress, and presses hot kisses up the line of Amel’s neck. She feels almost unreal beneath Amel’s hands, a little insubstantial at the edges. Amel brings her another heart, a larger one, and waits another week. Two. Three.

And then Amel wakes one morning on her day off and the sun is shining through her window, and she knows that today is the day she will break her sister’s heart.

The witch’s instruction was as simple as it was confounding: gather me the tears of the one you have loved longest and most deeply.

It is not that Amel thinks she can’t. Indeed, she fears how easy she might find it, in the end. To be rid of her heart? Anything. But her sister will suffer, and Amel has never wanted that.

She catches a ride on the mail coach to the town where her sister lives, making awkward conversation with another woman going to visit her parents the whole way. From the town square, she makes her way to the pastry shop where her sister works. Amel’s bag bumps awkwardly against her thigh with every step, thrown off balance by the silver jar the witch gave her for the tears.

Lora’s face lights up when she sees Amel, and Amel feels a twinge of guilt. She stands back and lets customers stroll through until Lora has a break. Eventually Lora emerges without her apron and takes Amel to a hidden courtyard, waving to a smiling boy who lets them in.

When Lora unpacks her basket, revealing berries, two fine buttery pastries, a hunk of cheese, and a cucumber salad, Amel laughs.

“Every farmer in sight still in love with you, then? Any thoughts of trading necklaces?”

Lora laughs and dimples and shakes her head. Her hair is longer and darker than Amel’s, and her skin is clearer, her face rounder. She looks made for happiness. Amel’s heart—so soon to be excised—sinks.

Lora waits until they’re halfway through the berries to ask. “Why did you come, Amel?”

Amel freezes. For all the planning she’s done—getting here, getting back, collecting the tears—she never thought about what she would say. What is there to say? She does not want to lie to her sister. But then, she does not want to hurt her sister, either, and she is going to.

“You never understood why I took to butchery,” she starts, only knowing what she means to say as she says it. “Because you are made for good things. And I … I’m not.”

“What do you mean?”

Amel can’t look her in the eye. She looks down at her pastry instead, presses a fingernail along the flaky outside shell. “Have you ever walked up to Fool’s Ridge for the view below?”

“Yes,” Lora says, confusion creeping into her voice. “I think we went together.”

“I want to live on the rock at the top of Fool’s Ridge,” Amel says. “That’s the simplest way I can explain it. I want to live in fear of falling. Nothing else is enough for me. Not the butcher’s blade or the festival bonfire or the next book wagon that comes to town. This thing in my chest drags me down, Lora. It catches on everything it ought not, and it beats like a funeral march. Sometimes I want to carve it out of my chest, just to see if it would free me. If it would allow me to feel life the way everyone else does.”

Lora’s eyes are fixed on Amel’s, hard as iron and still dry. “But I love you,” she says. “And I want you to be happy. Mama and Papa love you too—in their way.”

“I know,” Amel says. She tilts her head up so she does not have to look at Lora. “And it is not enough. I don’t think it ever will be.”

The sound Lora makes is so soft, so gentle, so defeated. Amel almost misses it. But when she looks back at Lora, her sister is crying. Amel grabs the silver jar and holds it up to Lora’s cheeks, gathering what the jar cannot capture in her palm.

“I’m sorry,” she murmurs. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I love you.”

But she still means it.

After Lora has to go back to the shop—after Amel hugs her, and hugs her again, and apologizes, and keeps her silver jar of tears—Amel considers the edge of the forest, visible beyond the fields. It is the same forest, she knows.

The third task is the easiest and the hardest: find the witch’s cottage, which has no address, no settled place. Seren’s paths simply lead there for those who are ready, those whose hearts are pure, or desperate, or unwanted.

When Amel enters the forest, she feels the tree-darkness fold around her with dizzying speed. She concentrates not on directions, or what she knows, but where she wants to go and who she wants to see. When she reaches a clearing, Amel closes her eyes and walks forward until the heat of the sun ceases, and when she opens her eyes, the path is clear before her.

Seren’s cottage does look cozy. It’s built of wood and clay, the same as most houses, but it seems to catch the light from every direction, emanating warmth and welcome. As Amel approaches, the front door opens, and Seren steps out. She has her apron on, and there are purple stains on it and on her hands. Her hair is down around her chest and arms again. Amel wonders if it’ll catch in her chest, if it’ll get sticky with blood, when Seren eats Amel’s heart.

“Well,” Seren says, when Amel stops in front of her. “Here you are.”

“Here I am.”

Seren frowns, a quick, affectionate movement of her lips and eyebrows, and reaches for Amel. “You’re crying.”

“Am I?” Amel reaches her hand to her cheek. “Oh. I talked to Lora.”

“You can change your mind, you know,” Seren says. “I can live on goose hearts if I need to.”

Amel reaches back into her bag, brings out the silver jar of tears, and presents it to Seren. “I want to. I did this, and I didn’t regret it. Please, witch, take my heart.”

Seren nods. “Come inside.”

She leads Amel to the kitchen by the hand. She’s prepared a pile of straw, though Amel also notices a cauldron of jam bubbling away over a green fire.

“You didn’t bring a butcher’s knife,” Seren notes. “And I don’t trust mine for our task. Unless yours is in your bag?”

“No,” Amel says. She reaches for the chain around her neck and pulls it over her head, letting the thin knife dangle. She removes the sheath and gently presses the tip of the knife into the pad of her middle finger, blotting away the bead of blood that swells up instantly. “This will do,” she says. She finds herself still staring at her finger. “I don’t suppose I’ll bleed after this.”

“No,” Seren says. “You’ll have silver in your veins instead.”

Amel looks up. Seren is taking her own chain off her neck, freeing the silver piece that hangs on it—a thumb-sized anatomical heart.

“Lie down,” Seren instructs, nodding at the pile of straw. Amel does, propping herself up on her elbows as Seren kneels in front of her and slips her own chain over Amel’s head.

Amel takes off her tunic, anticipatory. The air is warm, but it still prickles on her skin. Seren opens the silver jar and spreads Lora’s tears between and below Amel’s breasts. It burns like mint, then numbs. “For the pain,” Seren says.

Then Seren picks up the knife. Amel understands somehow that this is the moment she has yearned for every time she has looked into the blank eyes of a pig or a goose before slaughter. She has turned dirty, hairy beasts into perfect family meals, and now it is her turn for transformation. Heartless, perhaps she will be able to hold steady on the knife’s edge.

“Not like that,” Amel says when Seren presses the point of the blade against her ribs. “You need the angle to be more … here.” She places her hand over Seren’s, adjusts. “Like this. And push once you start. With a blade this small, you have to be precise and forceful.”

Seren nods. And then, angle perfect, she pushes.

The pain rips through Amel, hot and clean. She doesn’t scream. Perhaps her sister’s tears are helping; perhaps the pain is tinged with relief. Instead, she holds perfectly still and watches as Seren carves out a space between her ribs, Amel’s knife flashing silver beneath the red, and reaches her thin hand in—wrist just so—and pulls out Amel’s heart.

Finally. Amel tilts her head back. Her heart is nothing but red flesh, still warm, pulsing in Seren’s hand. Everything hurts, of course, but her life has been one long ache. This is a pure pain. When she takes a breath, the air comes crisp and easy. Amel closes her eyes and lets herself revel in the way every nerve in her chest cavity is alive and screaming and unburdened.

When Amel looks back down, Seren’s necklace is burning into the hole in her chest, small but growing to fit its space, pumping silver through her veins. Amel fancies for a moment that she can feel the difference, that it feels cooler, cleaner, and it makes her feel—sharper. Lighter.

Seren eats as delicately as she can, knelt between Amel’s legs, and wipes her mouth on her apron when blood threatens to overwhelm her. She takes small bites, nibbles at the vessels and vents, bites down hard on the fleshier bits. She is dripping blood onto Amel’s trousers, onto Amel’s bare stomach, and Amel, transfixed, can only watch.

Seren wipes her mouth when she finishes, but her lips and chin are still smeared red. She is breathing hard. Amel is not sure she is still breathing at all. In this half-moment, she is perfectly still and perfectly aware, her skin prickling and sensitive—beyond pain now and open to the touch of the air and the sensation of Seren’s hand on her thigh as the witch settles the chain of Amel’s silver knife around her own neck.

Seren’s hand shifts, and Amel leans forward. There’s something different in Seren, something realer and rounder; the press of her hand has an uncertain new gravity to it. Amel can feel it all, now—the blood on her stomach, the silver in her chest, the fervent press of her own heart in another woman’s body. And Amel knows—she could wander down any path in the great forest in perfect comfort. She could dance blindfolded on Fool’s Ridge. Those wild, sharp places belong to her now as much as she has always belonged to them. Nothing holds her down; nothing holds her back.

Seren presses her back against the straw, heavy in a way she never has been before, real and substantial and hers. Amel tastes blood on Seren’s lips, and she opens her mouth for more. She and her heart are just where they ought to be.

Editor: Aigner Loren Wilson

First Reader: Jean McConnell

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors