Two and Twenty Dark Tales by Georgia McBride

was her life, to find anything— anything —that could breathe some magic into her endless, dreary days.
    Today she walked slowly, stepping over a fallen sapling, aware that there were worse traps than the constricted life of a princess. At least a princess could dream of something different. A mouse could not dream at all, could not even think past the next bite of food or the next place of safety or the next burst of terror. Every single second of its life was a cage.
    Amarind shuddered all over, then set her chin and kept walking. She turned around a bend in the path, and there it was.
    Today it wasn’t a cottage. It was a house, tall and stately, made of yellow bricks with crystal windows. The Witch’s home was never at exactly the same place on the path, and it never looked exactly the same either.
    Amarind left the path, tramping through ferns. There was no sign of the Witch, and that was also the same. The Witch couldn’t leave the house. Someone had trapped her there long ago.
    The door swung open as she raised her hand to knock. Amarind took a deep breath and walked into the empty front room.
    It was the only room in the Witch’s home she had ever been allowed into, and it never changed. The wooden floor lined with rushes, the long table and elaborate brocade chairs, the pot in the corner where she had spent so much time stirring and stirring. Amarind’s upper arms ached just looking at that pot.
    And at the far end of the room, so immense it should not have fit, a grandfather clock of wood and gold and diamonds. Its base and sides were carved with runes that, Amarind knew from experience, made your vision blur if you stared at them too long. The clockface was carved of diamond, but had no arms. The pendulum and weights were solid gold, and despite the glass covering, the power leaking out of the clock was enough to make Amarind shiver.
    “Stepmother?” she said carefully.
    “I’m here,” the Witch said. And she was, sitting in the chair at the head of the table.
    Amarind dropped into a curtsy. Her heart was pounding, but that, too, was nothing new. Despite all her years of tutelage, the Witch still terrified Amarind.
    As a child, she had secretly liked that rush of fear, that sense that anything could happen to her at any moment. It was part of why the Witch’s home was the only place she had ever felt truly alive, away from the sameness and boredom of every day at court, where it felt like nothing new could ever happen.
    That had been before she learned what true fear was. Before it was driven into her that anything really could happen, including unthinkably terrible things.
    When Amarind rose from her curtsy, the Witch was staring right at her, eyes large and dark against her unnaturally white skin. She was as cold and beautiful as ever, and as unmoved by whatever she saw on Amarind’s face. Aside from insisting she be called Stepmother—for whatever reason, that amused her—the Witch had never acted as if she cared what Amarind did, or who she was, or why a princess was willing to stir her cauldron and run her errands in return for a few scraps of spells.
    Right now, though, there was anger on her face, vast and terrifying. She looked Amarind up and down and said, “You bring a weapon into my home?”
    Amarind’s hand flew to her leg, to the hardness of the knife hilt beneath her skirts. “No. I don’t even know how to use it. I’m just keeping it because it was here when I… when it…” And then the question flew up her throat and out. “Did you turn me?”
    “No,” the Witch said.
    But she didn’t bother to ask what Amarind meant.
    There were no hands on the clock face, and that always meant a spell had been cast, a spell so powerful that the Witch had drawn on the power of Time itself. Transformations were powerful spells. The Witch had taught Amarind how to do them, and Amarind had spent many days turning cats into birds and dogs into cats. Once, in a fit of spite, she had turned