“By the sweet Sisters of Fate,” the massive, black, pot-bellied hog roared at the cardinal, “her broomstick is gone, there will be no tracks!”
Fariyah bristled her feathers and turned from the dirt in the yard to the door. Their witch’s riding broom, usually leaning on the wall outside so she wouldn’t confuse it with her cleaning broom, was missing.
“Do you think she flew?” Fariyah asked.
“Do you think she took it with her so she could put it on her shoulder and walk?” Pultu retorted, throwing into his voice all of the emotions that he couldn’t show on his stiff pig’s face. Fariyah slumped. “When’s the last time you saw her?”
Fariyah blinked a few times in the dawn’s growing light. “Yesterday.”
“We just woke up, so obviously it was yesterday.” Pultu cursed again, then said aloud what he now saw that he had merely implied: “You never sleep the night through. Did you notice that she was gone?”
“Last night?”
“No, last month. Of course last night.”
Fariyah flew up to the ledge of the bedroom window to look in and jog her memory. “I don’t think so.”
Pultu cursed at her again and stomped back inside. Garba always started her morning with coffee, relighting the smoldering fire in the hearth, but the warm remains of last night’s fire were untouched. Maybe she had stepped out to run a quick errand and didn’t want to wake them? She must’ve thought she’d be back before they’d even notice that she was gone. Garba knew the emotional toll that nonconsensual separation could have on a witch’s familiar. The not knowing where she was, what she was doing, when she’d be back…
Whether she was in trouble and needed their help.
Outside, Fariyah was back on the ground, hopping around and searching the dirt as if she’d dropped something.
“What are you doing?” Pultu asked.
“Looking for tracks!” Fariyah exclaimed, flying through the door and landing on the kitchen table to hop around frantically. “What if she’s in trouble and needs our help?”
Exactly what he’d thought. Fariyah’s unease made Pultu inhale deeply and close his eyes to collect himself. He was the smart one. He needed to act like it.
“The places she’s most likely to be are the apothecary, Breyta’s, the provision store, and the Besom Inn—”
“You don’t think she’d be at Holishay’s?”
“What? Holishay’s? Why would she be there? They can’t stand each other. No, it’s one of those places, and they’re all in town except for Breyta’s. You fly to town while I go to Breyta’s cottage, then you meet me there.”
Fariyah flew off and Pultu trundled out to the road towards town. Pultu knew some pigs that could run. Some were quite fast.
Pultu was not one of those pigs.
There was a very good chance that Fariyah would forget where to go in town, look in every building that was open, forget what she was doing, get lost, remember to go to Breyta’s, and still beat him there.
He took the right fork when it split, glaring ahead at the distance before him.
Pultu grew more and more uneasy as the monotony of putting one cloven hoof in front of another settled in. He had been Garba’s familiar for nearly a year now, and couldn’t remember her leaving like this.
If she left of her own accord. Surely one of them would have noticed if she’d been kidnapped?
Pultu shook his head at the thought. It was ridiculous. He was just anxious from the separation, and being a familiar made him more prone to these outrageous worries about his witch.
But she’d never left like this.
Pultu lumbered into an awkward sort of canter that made his bulk juggle around uncomfortably. He nearly lost his balance and fell. Fifty yards later he was walking again. The lane entered the forest and the shade was much cooler than out in the fields, but he still didn’t try running a second time.
It was nearly midmorning of what was becoming a hot, sunny day before Pultu could first see Breyta’s cozy hut in the shade of the cedar grove. Firelight flickered on the walls inside and smoke curled from the little black chimney. As he approached, a brownish red blur landed on the ledge of the open window and Breyta’s face appeared alongside it.
“And there’s Pultu!” Breyta called from inside as he finally came close. “I just told Fariyah, Garba’s not here, sorry!”
“I think we should try Holishay’s,” Fariyah told them.
“Why are you so insistent that she could be at Holishay’s?” Pultu grunted, sweating and cranky and out of breath.
“Because Garba has sent me there with messages all week.”
Breyta’s shoulders shook, her hand covering her smile.
Pultu glowered. Holishay’s was the opposite way from home and, to add insult to effort, was much closer than Breyta’s. They had just wasted hours on a pointless journey, he was glistening with sweat, his throat was parched, he was hungry, his anxiety was getting worse…
“Why, you brown feathered heathen, didn’t you mention that before?” he roared.
“Oh now, Pultu…” Breyta scolded, but the pig didn’t hear.
Fariyah looked at the ground. “You said that Garba wouldn’t be there.”
“Because you didn’t mention these messages! They change everything. How could you not see that?”
“Pultu…” Breyta said, eyeing him carefully.
“Multiple times you went looking for tracks when it was clear that…” Pultu’s grumble became a growl. “How could you possibly not tell me she sent you there? You just wasted the entire morning! If your mind was any thicker you could put it on a fork!”
“Pultu! Enough!” Breyta shouted, swinging her arm in a silencing gesture that sent sparks from her fingertips. One of them sizzled on her windowsill, threatening to set it alight. Glaring daggers at the pig, she licked her thumb and quashed it. Then she turned to the cardinal, who was hiding her beak in her wing.
“Fariyah, sweety.” The witch picked the bird up in her hand. “The separation is making Pultu anxious, and that’s making him say things he doesn’t mean.” Pultu didn’t hear Fariyah’s reply, but it made Breyta coo and kiss the cardinal on the head. “It is not my place to reprimand another’s familiar,” Breyta said firmly. “Now, I don’t know where Garba is, but it sounds like she might be with Holishay. I think you two should sort out your differences on the way.”
Breyta gave Fariyah to the air, the cardinal glided down to land on the pig’s shoulders, and the mismatched pair left the cedar grove in silence. Breyta watched them go and heaved a sigh as they rounded the curve and went out of sight.
“No wonder Garba needed some away time,” said a deep, husky voice. “They are an unfortunate pair to be attached to.”
She turned to Jerome, her raven familiar, who’d watched in silence from his perch inside, and ran her fingers from his head down his spine. He shivered comfortably.
Breyta gazed out the window to where they’d disappeared. Her raven was right. Having two familiars was nearly unheard of, but she’d kept her nose out of it. All witches wondered what made certain witches attach to certain animals. Like many, she dismissed it as chance and smiled at her luck.
“You want a peanut before I send you to Holishay’s to let them know they’re on their way?” she asked Jerome. He squawked and batted his wings in his ironic cheer.
Pultu and Fariyah were not sorting out their differences. Pultu’s silence quickly made Fariyah uneasy, and that made her start to twitter in a meaningless stream of consciousness. Her inane chirping slowly overcame the remorse that Breyta had put in Pultu. As he tried to ignore her, he closed his eyes to keep from grumbling out loud.
In that darkness he found, again, the memory of the day he was called.
It was like a fog had lifted from his mind.
In the periphery, he sensed that he was in a herd of pigs. On a street. Into town. Following a man with a curved cane.
But all that was off to the side, now.
In the center of his attention was a woman, an older woman in a black dress and a black pointed cap and with a broom and a dull, brownish red bird on her shoulder. She had stopped in her tracks and was looking right back at him.
Her eyes grew wider and wider as if she recognized him.
Then the recognition turned to something else and her hands formed into fists and she yelled, “Shit!”
Pultu – he remembered hearing the sounds in his mind for the first time and knowing that they meant him – got pushed from behind by another pig and he rolled in the dust.
Even over the sounds of his tumble he heard the lady cursing some more.
He twisted himself on the ground in a desperate attempt to look up at her, only to find her face in her hands and her bird flying tight circles over her head.
“Nnnoooo…” the woman moaned, hands pulling her fingers pulling her eyelids down in agony.
“…look at that lonely apple tree,” Fariyah was babbling from his back, “the apples are just starting to…”
It was chaos. The other pigs were stopping, running, or obeying the man with the curved cane, who was trying to recover some order while also talking to Pultu’s woman. There was yelling and squealing on both sides of the street.
Pultu heard the woman’s words cut through the air as she pointed at him.
“That one.”
When the man responded, the shoulders of Pultu’s woman sagged, her face hardened, and she shook her head. But she said something to the man and they shook hands.
“…are you even listening to me?” Fariyah’s shout was right in Pultu’s ear.
It jolted him out of his reverie. Pultu tried grasping for the memory, wanting the good part that came next, but it slipped away like mist in the morning.
“No,” he snapped.
As the cardinal fumed, Pultu carried her slowly along the road through the hot, sweltering, sunny fields that he’d just come through, up the thrice-damned hill that he’d just climbed, passed by their house and crossed the bridge of stone, forced on by the anxiety twisting tighter in his gut. They reached Holishay’s quaint little cottage near the lonely elm tree only as the sun leaned into the afternoon.
The cottage’s curtilage was strewn with a stereotypical mess – several cauldrons, broomsticks, beakers of glass, earthen flower pots, and gardening implements among the rest. Holishay’s familiar, a black dog named Clevin, was curled up and asleep in the midst of it, a white mouse nestled against his side…
Except it wasn’t just a mouse.
“Who’s that?” Fariyah chirped loudly.
Clevin twitched awake with a start while the mouse actually leapt in the air and then burrowed out of sight beneath the dog’s armpit.
“Clevin, who was that?” Fariyah asked again.
“Who was… what?” Clevin tried.
“The mouse!” Fariyah exclaimed. “The other familiar!”
Pultu’s eyes narrowed. “Garba’s here.”
Disoriented from being woken so suddenly, Clevin’s expression changed several times before settling into one of resignation. “Yes,” he said, then yawned. “Garba is here.”
Immediately, the separation anxiety dissipated. As Clevin stretched, Pultu felt his shoulders settle back to where they were supposed to be. Fariyah cooed.
Then she asked, “But who’s the other familiar?”
“Agatha. But she won’t come out. Come. Holishay and Garba are in back.”
“Garba has two familiars, too!” Fariyah started excitedly as Pultu followed Clevin through the maze of junk in the yard. “Me and Pultu!”
“He knows that, Fariyah,” Pultu told her.
Clevin led them around the house and along a well-trodden path in the grass. It went down a soft hill and into the woods. “Just follow the path, there are no turnoffs. You’ll come to a little campsite, Holishay’s hideaway from her retreat. It’s not far.”
Once in the trees they found a little clearing ahead, a circle of stones with a fire glowing in the middle, and two witches sitting beside it.
Fariyah took off and flew to Garba’s shoulder with a twitter. Both witches looked up and smiled and Holishay rose.
“Thank you so much, Holishay,” Garba said, as Pultu reached the clearing. “This was very rewarding.”
“I got a lot out of it as well,” the other witch replied, then looked over the three of them. “You have a lot to talk about. Tend to the fire, but please don’t knock on your way out.”
The instructions made Garba chuckle as Holishay left the campsite. On her way by she scratched Pultu between the ears, right where he hated it. He shook his head and glared at Holishay’s departing back, then did a double take before glowering at Garba with narrowed eyes. There was only one person who could have told Holishay that he hated being scratched there.
Fariyah was flying in tight circles over her witch’s graying head and chirping questions in a frenzy.
“I was here, Fari,” Garba replied through her laugh. “I’m sorry I didn’t leave a note. Yes, it was very unusual…”
Fariyah landed on her shoulder, hugging the side of her face with her wings. But Garba was staring straight at Pultu, her gaze calm but calculating.
“I’m just so happy we’re back together!” the cardinal squealed, raising her wings above her and right in front of Garba’s eye. “Now we’re a happy family again!”
Pultu snorted: the cliché finality of a stage play for children.
“Yes,” Garba said, then she pet her cardinal on the head and added, “Let’s go home.”
But before they had even left the campfire Garba patted her pockets. “You know what I need for the road, though? My pipe. I must have left it at home. Can you fetch it for me, Fariyah?” The cardinal let out a happy chirp. “I don’t remember where I put it, so if you can’t find it just stay home.”
With another titter of chirping, Fariyah took off and eagerly flew for home.
Garba watched her go, and sighed, and turned to Pultu. She flipped open the pouch on her hip and drew out her pipe.
“Have you figured it out yet?” she asked, packing the tobacco into the pipe’s bowl with her thumb.
Pultu grunted. “You came here to talk about having two familiars.”
Garba crouched down to pull a flaming twig from the fire and light her pipe. “And why I would sneak off to do that?” she asked, kicking dirt into the fire. It had guttered out before Pultu had to admit that he didn’t know.
The witch straightened up as she took a long puff on her pipe and then, letting smoke seep from her nostrils, she took the stem from her mouth, pointed it at the massive pig and said, “You.”
Pultu looked at his trotters.
“The way you treat Fariyah has gone on long enough. That you would do it in front of Breyta takes it too far. It’s constant, Pultu, and she can’t help it.”
Garba gave the fire pit one last inspection to make sure it wouldn’t smolder back, then walked past the pig.
“Come,” Garba told him.
At the edge of the glade, Garba reached into a fold in the trunk of a tree, and pulled out her broom. She rested it on her shoulder, puffed on her pipe, and strode in silence into the trees.
Pultu followed.
They were past Holishay’s house and nearly to the road when she began.
“You’re smart, Pultu. Extremely smart.”
Pultu was smart enough to notice how she said it, too. For a familiar.
“But everyone has limitations,” Garba went on, not seeing his eyes narrowing ever so slightly. “And you’re smart enough to see them and respect them.”
When Pultu didn’t respond, Garba suddenly spun her broomstick between her legs, kicked off from the ground and shot into the air. Pultu watched as she shrank into the distance, then she turned and raced back until she hovered in the air above him.
“Come with me!” she called down. “Fly, Pultu!”
Pultu slumped to the ground, head down. “You know I can’t…”
“Fly with me,” she yelled again, though this time her voice was not as harsh – she knew her message was already sinking in.
The pig heard the dirt crunch beneath her feet as she landed in front of him.
“You see, don’t you?” she asked, her voice firm but warm.
Pultu sighed and nodded. One of Garba’s knees bent to the ground in front of him, but he still didn’t look up into her face.
“What do you see?” Garba asked.
“Limitations,” he mumbled, hanging his head in shame that he hadn’t seen it before. Except he had seen it. He just hadn’t felt it. Not from this side of things, at least. And that made it worse. This was how Fariyah probably felt. Because of him.
“We’re different, we three,” Garba told him. “There are some things we can do, and others we can’t. Fariyah and I can fly, but we’ve adapted to include you. You and I can figure things out, but we have to accept Fariyah even though she can’t.”
Garba stood and scratched his neck with her fingernails the way that made a warm shiver run down his spine. She walked off a few paces, her broom on her shoulder again. “Are you going to sit there all day?” she called back, with a smile in her voice.
Pultu heaved himself up and lumbered after her.
It was not until they could see the stone bridge ahead that Pultu broke the silence. “Could you have used something less cliché than pigs flying?”
Garba grinned mischievously. But then her eyes became sad. She sighed and put the pipe back in her mouth. “Yes. But I chose not to.” She took a couple of puffs, pipe secure in one hand, broomstick handle in the other.
“When you and I connected, it meant that I couldn’t travel anymore. Or at least not the way that I was used to traveling with Fariyah – flying around wherever and whenever I wanted. There’s nothing wrong with it, Pultu, it’s who you are, but it left me with a decision to make. If you were going to be my second familiar, I had to settle down.”
“Why didn’t you just leave me?” It wasn’t until he’d asked the question that Pultu realized that he had wanted to ask it for a long time.
“Because that’s not something witches do,” Garba told him simply. “A couple have, but they’ve all regretted it. It’s a piece of them that they’ve left behind. And it’s tortuous for the familiar.”
Pultu tried to imagine the anxiety that he’d just felt lasting for the rest of his life. He shuddered. Not that it would have lasted for long. He knew why he’d been brought to that town. It would have been sheer terror to go through that the way he was now, not as an animal.
“It wasn’t a decision, really. I had to settle down or travel by foot.” She cast a look at him from the corner of her eye. “Which would have been agony at your speed.”
The pig snorted at the joke.
“But the itinerant life wasn’t the same anymore. Traveling witches used to be welcomed. Those days were gone. People have bought into these rumors that we’re up to no good. Only a few days before I found you, a group of men followed me around a town, and then kept tailing me after I left. They didn’t have weapons, but… I finally just got on the broomstick and took off.” Garba took a long drag from her pipe and chuckled. “You should’ve seen their faces from fifty feet up.” She looked skyward and said in the voice of a moron, “Oh, right, forgot they could do that.”
Pultu snorted again.
“So, nothing happened, but it was still rattling. And connecting with you a few days later was a lot. Bonding is such a unique experience that it can’t be mistaken, but I’d never thought that I would feel it again. It really put me on my heels. But it was also terrifying. No more simply taking off to save my skin, confined to road travel, which made us all vulnerable. Everything changed, and at the worst time.
“But it reaffirmed how different things had become in another way, too. Time was, when witches connected with someone else’s animal, that person used to part with it. It wasn’t theirs anymore. But your farmer? That man gouged me.”
Ahead, the wind ran its fingers through a field of wheat. They watched as the stalks bent under the light gust, like the hairs of a dog being pet.
“Do you remember that day?” Garba asked.
“Yes.”
“What do you remember?”
“You cursing.”
Garba closed her eyes and swore.
“Yes, like that. Then you put your face in your hands and said, ‘No’.”
Pultu kept staring straight ahead, watching the waves of wind in the grass. He could feel her trying to apologize with her gaze, but he ignored it until she looked away again.
“I was hoping…” Garba stopped, put her pipe back in her mouth, then pulled it out again. “All this time, I hoped this version of you began when you first told me your name. I’m so sorry, Pultu.”
“It’s okay.”
“No it isn’t,” she retorted quickly. “I’m really sorry, Pultu. I wish we’d talked of this sooner.”
“It’s okay,” the pig said again, starting to believe it himself. “I didn’t know that you were going through all of that.”
“It’s been bothering you for all this time, hasn’t it?”
Pultu opened his mouth to respond but he stopped short. He realized that he didn’t really know. Had it? Pultu took a deep breath, then let it out.
“It’s in the past, now,” he told her. What Garba had said made sense. He didn’t like it, but now at least he understood what had happened, and why.
He could also tell that she was less uneasy. Garba chuckled. “All of this started over Fariyah.”
Pultu remembered, and he squirmed.
It was the hottest part of the afternoon when they arrived home. Fariyah flew out to meet them, of course, incessantly chirping questions and giving details about what she’d been doing all afternoon as she flew circles around Garba, not once mentioning the witch’s pipe. Pultu rolled his eyes and veered off the path towards the woods and the stream that ran through them. He could sense Garba watching him go, but she didn’t call.
In the woods, the stream filled a pool with clear, cool water. Pultu ignored it and fell into the mudbank on the other side, the chill of the mud reaching deep into his chest, perfect and wonderful after such a long day in the hot, hot sun. He slithered around to reach the spots he’d missed and then lay still, breathing deeply, his sweaty black hide now slick and cool and relieved. He was hungry, but he could wait a bit longer – everything in him felt like it was relaxing, uncoiling.
He opened his eyes to the leaves overhead. They were dark, and green, and after so long in the sun they were so calming.
He closed his eyes and sighed the deepest sigh of his life.
He wasn’t unwanted.
Whether he’d ever actually felt that way or not, he couldn’t quite tell. The intense relief he’d felt after Garba explained what had happened suggested he had. But that was gone, now.
Something light landed on him, small thin prickly feet sinking into his comforting coat of mud, and then Fariyah asked, “Hi Pultu, what’re you doing?”
Dancing a jig, what does it look like I’m doing? Pultu caught the words before they could leave the tip of his tongue. This was going to take some work.
“I’m cooling off,” he said. “I’m trying to relax.”
“Want me to sing a song to help?”
The offer was surprising. His interest was piqued. “Sure.”
Fariyah started to sing.
Pultu’s interest quickly turned to disappointment. Her songs only lasted a couple of seconds, and she only had three: a series of four chirps, another that went pyew-pyew-pyew several times, and one that had tweets and a quiet warble, like a cat’s purr. The only times he’d really noticed birdsong was when there had been an entire chorus of them going at it, their songs blending to make an impressive whole. When it was Fariyah, alone, it wasn’t much.
Pultu stayed quiet, though.
Fariyah was doing this for him. It didn’t really help him relax, but she thought it did. She was trying her best.
Unwanted. How he had made Fariyah feel. Whether he had treated her that way because he feared he was unwanted too didn’t matter anymore.
It only mattered that he do better.
