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My brother didn’t share my mirth.
“Are you mad, Kat?” he asked, all furrowed brow and discontent.
“Mad that my brother is such an idiot, maybe,” I said unkindly. “I hope you’re happy. Now we’ll both be killed.”
“But we won’t be,” he said with a gleam in his eye that struck me as particularly insane. “She’s going to change her mind. I know it.”
“You’ve said this every single time,” I reminded him. “Every time. And every time, we are no closer to the heir than we were when we started. When will you see that if you could persuade her to your cause, you would be together by now?”
“You don’t know her like I know her. This is it, Kat,” Mark insisted. “I can feel it.”
“That’s the problem with feelings,” I said, my own rising to the surface bearing Sal’s face.
“She’s the one, Kat.” His eyes had turned molten bronze, and that’s when I noticed the giant black holes of his pupils.
“Have you been licking toadstools for real? Or did that foul harpy slip something into your beer?”
“I slipped something into this beer.”
From her position by the bubbling cauldron suspended above the crackling hearth, Hanna the witch shot me a triumphant look. “Can you honestly blame me? He nearly cost me one of my best hunting spots.”
“Hunting spots?” I widened my eyes and regarded her with my very best naive expression. If there’s one thing my father’s foul friends had taught me, it’s that not a single villainous bastard holds an exploit but that he loved to brag about it.
“Yes indeedy. How else am I supposed to keep this girlish figure?” She brought her hand to the waist of her green velvet cloak and tossed her head of russet curls.
“I’ve always found a diet of wild game improved my constitution considerably,” Mark said in the lecturing tones that always made my eye twitch. “That and plenty of fresh air and exercise. If it be changing your shape you’re after, you can always find stones of a proper size to heft about.”
The witch and I fixed my brother with matching looks of vexation.
Though we were at cross purposes, we clearly shared an exasperation with the male of the species’ tendency to believe that even hypothetical questions should and could be answered by them and them alone.
“That’s not quite the diet I found to be most effective,” the witch said, the corners of her mouth curling up in a mischievous smile. “But I certainly appreciate the effort. I do try to eat organic when I can get it.”
Mark’s thick eyebrows raised in confusion, and I wondered precisely what Hanna put in his potion.
“She means to eat you, you titanic git,” I explained.
“Not all of you,” Hanna clarified. “Just your soul.”
I stared into Mark’s eyes, trying to resurrect the ancestral connection that used to allow us to communicate without words. Did you see where she put the keys to the cage? I silently asked him.
I felt a sizzle of the old connection, and then his voice echoed inside my head.
Doesn’t she look great in emerald green?
“Bleeding Christ.” I stuck my leg through the bars and kicked his cage, which earned me a swift retaliation. We’d devolved to slapping each other between the bars when Hanna strolled over and whacked Mark’s knuckles with the giant wooden spoon she’d been using to stir the bubbling cauldron. “Children,” she said, “that’s enough.”
But it wasn’t. Not by a long shot.
If I could get at my brother right now, I’d pin him down and wail on him as I had when we were children during the few times during my cycle I was able to overpower him.
I want him to see me. To hear me. For my opinion to hold as much weight in his world as his does in mine.
But it never has. And I’m beginning to understand it never will.
I can’t blame him entirely. Raised in our father’s home account among the kind of men that treated women like chattel, Mark was already considered a revolutionary merely for suggesting that I should be able to decide who I married. Implying that my opinion should carry weight equal to his in all realms might melt his mind right out of his head.
We’re still poking at each other when Hanna returned with something clutched in her fist.
