The Broken Circle: Yarns of the Knitting Witches Read online

  The gnome raised her dark eyes hopefully as her mistress scanned the horizon, searching for signs of sun.

  “Everyone knows,” Aubergine said. “Everyone knows to leave the glacier alone. Let it dwindle to the south as new snow packs it from the north, as nature intended.” Her eyes sought out the gnome’s. “When I was young, each year the glacier would disappear a little further down the rock-strewn valley and fossickers would collect the slow trail of treasure it released. And that was true and good.”

  “Fossickers would pan the rivers,” Smokey Jo added, remembering. “Some would follow the trails of mineral-colored freshets that spilled each spring from the Crystal Lakes to pool behind the Teardrop Dam at the Top of the Notch. And that was true and good.”

  A gust ripped the magic wrap from Aubergine’s grasp, leaving it held only by the amber stickpin at her throat. The shawl fluttered behind her like a cape. “The Lowlanders don’t care what they unleash from the frozen past.”

  “That is why it is time,” the gnome repeated, gently.

  Aubergine nodded. Summoning what power she could muster, nothing like what she had known when all this began, she ran her fingers over the box until they remembered how to release its top. An inner spring clicked, allowing her to pry the cover.

  The gnome leaned over to look closely at the fiery crystals inside. “I wish I could do that,” she whispered.

  “You have other talents,” Aubergine said softly, her face rosy in the light. Was this enough? She asked herself. Could a broken-down band of aging women silence an army led by a traitor, formerly one of their own, who thought she could conquer all? “The day will dawn red as it has not for twenty years,” she said. “And then we must wait to see who will answer its call.”

  Aubergine gathered the small handful of crystals in her bare hands. They glowed through the cracks formed between her fingers by her swollen knuckles. The colored shards felt strangely light and alive with cold fire. With a deep breath, she threw the jagged bits into the air. For a moment, nothing happened. Smokey Jo gazed skyward helplessly, and then looked up at Aubergine in confusion.

  “The spark’s gone out!” Smokey Jo cried. “The crystals have gone old and useless, like us!”

  Aubergine’s breath caught in her throat. “No, little one,” she said. “No, they haven’t.” Both felt the warm rush of fire before they saw it. One by one, each blood-colored crystal burst over the horizon, wresting dawn from the day.

  “Red sky comes morning. All take warning,” the gnome whispered, her face shining pink with each flash of light as she bent to lift the empty tinderbox from the snow.

  “I doubt there are more than nine of us left,” Aubergine said, as they picked their way carefully down the icy hill to the yarn shop.

  “Nine or all Twelve, we have to make ready.” Smokey Jo cheerily blew a frozen cloud into her mittens. “Maybe enough of us will come that we may yet circle the great pot and meld crystal to fiber as we once did.”

  “It is time for a simmer,” Aubergine nodded.

  “Luck of the dye pot,” the gnome said. “May we have the luck of the dye pot.”

  This reversible wrap requires a beginner skill level, and size after blocking measures 30" by 55".

  Get the pattern from PotluckYarn.com/epatterns

  “Keep this mohair covered.”

  CHAPTER 1

  SKYE THRUST THE LAST BURLAP SACK of colored fleece through the doorway of her mother’s dye shed, and waited for her father to pull up with the wagon. It was early and chilly even though spring had recently touched the mountains of the Middlelands.

  As her father approached, the only sound Skye heard was the soft chuff chuff of the two mountain ponies hitched to the wagon. The pair wore no silver bells this year, for they did not want to call attention to their journey.

  “Whoa,” Kendrick called, halting the dun geldings, Chuffer and Shep. Steam rose from their broad backs and their breath looked like the ragged smoke that rose from the unseen chimneys of the lower valley.

  As Kendrick jumped down from the bench seat to help Skye load the wagon, the sun crested the eastern slope of Top Notch. It bathed their narrow pass in white light that glinted from the icy outcroppings at the base of the Teardrop Dam, sparkled across the Lavender Rill and struck the drifts of rotted snow that dotted the pastures like sheep. Skye blinked in the glare, her eyes beginning to water. She looked at her father, who had pulled out his handkerchief to wipe the tears that streamed down his face.

  Before them, the freshly washed fleeces shone brightly, for the mohair locks were tipped mauve and baby blue from the crystal-swirled waters of Lavender Rill, which flowed past their farm. Swollen with the spring run-off from the colored freshets of the Northland Glacier, the rill had grown from a stream to a river. It thundered through their valley from the Teardrop Dam above. Their mountain goats favored the icy glacier water and the colors of the river clung to their fleeces. While the crystal shadings might fade with age, they never washed out completely. These whimsical stains had never been a problem before.

  “Keep this mohair covered,” Kendrick warned. “You don’t want it confiscated before you get to the fair.”

  “These fleeces harbor no magic,” Skye grumbled, securing the tops of the burlap bags and pulling the flaps tight. “It’s not like they can spin and knit themselves.”

  The whole family was trying to pretend that this year was the same as the last. In truth, it could hardly have been more different. Over the winter Skye’s older brother, Warren, not two years her senior, had been conscripted by the Northland Guard to help defend the glacier. The Lowland raiders ventured north to burn out glacial ice for its crystalline mineral water, at the same time that they searched for plunder and ancient secrets. Warren had been gone now from Top Notch for two passes of the moon. No word of him had traveled up the river valley to relieve their anxiety. Skye’s younger brother, Garth, slight for his fifteen years, proved no substitute for his brother. And Skye could see that he would never be, at least in Kendrick’s eyes.

  Absentmindedly, she twisted her corn-silk hair into a loose bun and turned in the doorway, adjusting her eyes to the dim light of the shed, where she and her mother had toiled through the long winter. Sierra’s dye pot was dormant for once, and the air now held little of the heavy lanolin odor of sheep and mohair. The spinning wheel stood silent, and warped wooden drying racks stretched bare before the cold hearth. Skye had piled the hanks of homespun yarn into split-twig baskets that now leaned against the porch rail outside.

  Even the ripple-stitched afghan that usually lay rumpled on the window bench sat neatly folded on the rush stool. Skye had spent much of the previous winter on the window bench, tucked into the afghan, preparing for the Middlemarch World’s Fair. In the disarray of her cozy nest, Skye passed the evening hours with a mug of honeyed cinnamon tea, spinning crystal-dyed roving into yarn before the fire. Nearby, her mother felted garments by boiling them in a pot brimming with the colored waters of the high glacier ponds. As they worked, Sierra told fanciful tales of the legendary Potluck Twelve, stories Skye and Garth loved to hear. Sierra called them her yarns. Each day as she listened, Skye knit row upon row of headscarves, vests, hats, and mittens, as well as clogs, slippers, shawls, mufflers, and the odd cardigan or pullover. The stories seemed to become part of the knitted fabric she made.

  Now they were ready for the fair, which should have been simply a joyous prospect, yet this year was not like any other.

  Working side by side, father and daughter loaded bags of raw fiber shorn from their alpine goats into the wagon bed. Each snowy fleece was skirted and tagged, the long silky staples tinged with color, the exact shade depending upon which glacier-fed freshet each mountain goat had drunk from. They made space behind the bench seat for the prepared fibers, the batts, and the rovings, all ready to be spun into yarn. These were shaded aqua, teal green, lavender, and light blue. The natural hues were random, products of the rock flour that
tumbled ceaselessly through the ponds and streams each spring. As the tinted run-off melted from the Northland Glacier, it flowed through a succession of Crystal Lakes, deepening in color as it went, until finally it ran down the Lavender Rill.

  These days, dyeing anything with glacier crystal was forbidden, Skye knew. She wondered if the judges at the Middlemarch fair would be learned enough to distinguish between Sierra’s fleeces, tinted through the natural effects of the animals’ grazing, and other fiber, illegally dyed with ground-up stone. During the war, all forms of crystal use had been outlawed by the Northland Guard, lest someone mistakenly unleash bad magic that the invading Lowlanders could harness. Because of this risk, the Northlanders had decided to stop the Southern raiders with armies of men unaided by witchery, especially in the form of crystal magic. The regulations had much support in the Northlands, but were considered foolish here in the Middle-lands, where using the odd crystal to hex or heal had been a way of life for generations.

  The Northlanders’ approach was not working. With almost nothing to hinder them, bands of Lowlanders boldly raided north. As they burned out the frozen underbelly of the glacier, it was said that they left behind pestilence and disease and worse.

  As if real magic even existed any more, Skye thought. The ponies snorted. If there was magic in the air or water, or in the rose quartz crystals she kept on her bedside table, she would certainly like to see it. No amount of pink crystals under her pillow or blue crystals in her bath had been able to rescue her from the constrained life of Top Notch this past fall and winter. Even though she enjoyed the fibers, the yarns, and the stitching, she was so starved for conversation after Warren left that she felt like screaming.

  Skye glanced at her father, afraid to voice her fears, lest he confine her to the farm. At daybreak, as they breakfasted quickly on goat’s milk and porridge laced with dried berries, Kendrick had made a sudden announcement. Neither he nor Garth would accompany them to the fair, a family outing that Skye had not missed in her seventeen years, nor Garth in his fifteen.

  Although he seemed surprised, Garth had not raised his voice to complain; he never did. Garth was slight and wiry compared to Warren, who had been as tall as Kendrick when he left for the Northland Guard, and was an avid outdoorsman. Last year, Kendrick had allowed Warren to compete in the Winter Games in the Northlands, where he had placed first in the bobsled division, outrunning grown men. As soon as that happened, Warren Blue became known far and wide as the best sledder in all of the Middlelands. Youths from all over had asked to train with him.

  But that had been before the war began again. Not even this fame had kept Warren from being one among the many boys taken from their homes against their wills to defend the northern border.

  Only Sierra had questioned her husband’s decision. “Kendrick,” she protested, smoothing Garth’s sandy hair away from his face, as was her habit. “The boy has not set foot off this farm since last fall. Surely he can spend a day or two days at the fair?”

  As Sierra raised her face to look at Kendrick, Skye noted the flecks of gold that stood out in her mother’s irises. They reminded Skye of a mountain cat’s eyes. Sierra’s children had always called the knowing look she gave them her lion eyes, for little escaped her notice.

  Kendrick shook his head. “How can we all go?” he asked, begging Sierra to understand, or so it seemed. “The goats are not down from the highlands, and the Teardrop Dam threatens to flood the Rill at any moment.” He lowered his voice—not angry, Skye could tell—just afraid. “What will become of the farm if the Rill floods the valley and we are all a day’s ride away?”

  While what he said was true, what remained unsaid was their shared uneasiness now that Warren had been taken from them like a convict. The Guard had put him, along with other boys they had rounded up, into a rolling cage that waited on the Military Road. Later a rumor had reached them, even as high as this small valley at the top of the Notch, that one male from each family to serve the Glacier Guard would not be enough. The Northland Border Patrol threatened to pick up any man or boy who dared to show his face along the main track into Middlemarch. Skye thought of Katarina, her friend, whose family owned the Mill on the Rill in the village at the bottom of the Notch. Katarina’s brother, Averill, was no older than Skye herself. She wondered if he was still safe. She wondered if she would see him this day.

  Skye handed the final bag, stuffed with pale lavender fleece, up to her father and waited until her mother went inside to gather their traveling cloaks, out of earshot. Then she asked the question that had been burning in mind her all morning. “Do you think the Lowlanders really mean to harm us with bad magic, father? Or do they merely come to burn out the glacier for water, as the Northlanders say?”

  “I do not doubt the folk of the Lowlands are already here among us,” he replied. Grunting, Kendrick loaded into the back of the cart three forkfuls of hay and a bucket of sweet feed for the ponies. He brushed off his sheepskin coat before he continued. “Southerners want the water—they need it badly. They will do whatever it takes to free the ice and funnel fresh water down to their parched lands.”

  “But it is said that melting the glacier will unlock old secrets,” Skye replied, giving her father a troubled look. “According to mother’s yarns, it could unleash dark things, too, things that have lain buried since the last age of ice.” Skye lowered her voice. “Such ancient magic could destroy us all, mother says. Is that why magic is forbidden in all the lands?”

  Kendrick shrugged uneasily, sweating so that he had to push up the brim of his Potluck hat and give his forehead some air. “Some say the world will end in fire,” he admitted. “Others say yet again in ice.” He sucked in a deep breath. “Mean times, you do what you feel you must.”

  Her father’s Potluck hat was one of the originals, Skye realized. Only recently had she been blessed with the discernment to tell the difference between the old and the new. The rare, hand-painted, crystal-dyed fiber in her father’s hat came from a shop called Potluck Yarn, located in Bordertown, a city on the northern border. There, it was rumored, a much younger Sierra had apprenticed at a dye house, intending to forsake farm and family to master the magical dye crystals.

  Skye had never been able to prize from Sierra what had prevented her from following that path farther. The deep, multicolored blues and greens of Kendrick’s hand-knit hat melded together in a swirl of jades and teals that made Skye think of the calming strength of deep, still waters. Her father, who otherwise often had an air of worry and of not trusting his own instincts, always seemed strong and sure of himself when he wore the hat, which had lately become all the time.

  “Have you ever seen the Lowlands, father?” Skye asked.

  Kendrick looked away from her, as if looking at something she could not see. Finally, he said, “It is a wasted place.” He sighed. “A burning dustbowl with all the goodness of the land used up. It is no longer a place to grow crops or to hunt or fish for food.”

  “You have been there,” Skye said. This time it was not a question. Kendrick took off his hat, turning it around and around in his hands before giving a slow nod. “Don’t tell your mother.”

  Then the rumors might be true, Skye thought, biting her lip. But it all could make sense, couldn’t it? Someone had been leading bands of Lowlanders past Top Notch, up the far shores of Teardrop Lake, and then to the base of the Northland Glacier. And back. Once last fall and then again this winter before the Glacier Guard had come for Warren, Kendrick had set out fully provisioned to hunt elk and had come back over a week later from their hunting lodge, known as the Sleep Out, with nothing to show but grimy clothes and an empty pantry sack. I wonder if Warren knew, Skye thought. I wonder if that is why the soldiers came for him so suddenly.

  The door of the farmhouse creaked, and her mother came out carrying their alpaca traveling cloaks piled atop more bags and bundles. All I want is a little fun, even if only for a day at the fair, Skye thought,
dismissing her dark conjectures as she hurried to help Sierra. Carefully, she had packed the sky-blue ribbons she planned to wear to the Spring Carnival dance, hoping she would meet up with Katarina and entice her bashful brother Averill to join them for the Sugar on Snow. But maybe he was gone, too, Skye worried, as her mother handed her the basket of potato bread and goat cheese with dried apples, and then the flask of mulled cider. Skye stored their food beneath the plank seat of the pony cart. Or maybe Averill was hiding at his family’s mill-side farm at the bottom of the lower valley, just as afraid to drive the family’s wagon into Middlemarch as her father seemed to be.

  Skye had not been away from the Notch since the road filled with snow the fall before. Since then, the only other folk she had seen were sledders, rangy youths from the Northlands who climbed the Notch trail with Warren, a master at guiding the quick runner sleds through the narrow mountain passes. The hunters came up, too, to drink hard cider in the Sleep Out and track the elusive alpine moose with her father. But they came less often, and now not at all since the Glacier Wars started. Sometimes Garth would trail along to help clean and quarter the moose, and to skin the precious gray-white hide that could later be sewn into windproof garments that made their wearers nearly invisible.

  The mountain ponies stamped impatiently in their black leather harnesses that gleamed with dull silver. Sierra slipped back into the house and returned with her rucksack, which contained a precious bundle wrapped in waterproof cloth.

  None of the family needed to ask what was rolled in the cloth. For their quality of workmanship, the garments inside were prized more that any other handcraft in all the Middlelands. The traveling cloak and cinch bags and knapsacks were virtually seamless; the caps and mittens fit any wearer. Sierra’s hand-knits lasted forever. There were those, too, who said that her glacier dyes gave the garments certain qualities. Surely not magical qualities, for no one that Skye knew took magic seriously any more, but unusual qualities nonetheless.