Gramarye, if anyone does, knows the power of old stories. And while she may view herself largely as a fraud, some childish part of her hopes, as it always has, that late some night a rat will come creeping down from the rafters and fix her with red eyes wise beyond its station, or that an owl might light upon her arms outstretched beneath the moonlight and whisper owl secrets into her ears in a secret owl language.
A witch craves a familiar. Even a faux witch. A familiar, thinks Gramarye, would be good for business: it would cement her place in the eyes of the town as a woman worth seeking out, and no longer would she be the mere daughter of a witch, but a witch in her own right. And Gramarye believes with all her entirety that familiars are real, and that she deserves one.
Not a woman given to fondness for animals, Gramarye sees no harm in beating a cat ungently with a broom should it be attempting to piss on her herbs, or ending the life of a mouse with a well-tossed brick if it is interfering with her work. Then again, she is also not prone to wanton cruelty, and because she does not kick dogs in the street and because she tolerates the spiders that festoon her home with their webs because they do useful work, she feels on the whole that the animal kingdom owes her something.
But then, familiars aren’t just animals, either, and so Gramarye at some juncture decides to set herself about earning the favor of the spirits. She had always engaged in the perfunctory rituals her mother had taught her: the saucers of milk by the door, the buried rag once a month while the rest soaked in buckets of lye-soap water and bleached in the sun, the little hand movements when a person spilled salt or saw the moon when the sun was still up. But now she labors over the difficult words in her mother’s books, painstakingly sounding out the syllable-rich incantations: she spends two entire nights puzzling over the word “eternity.” She decides from the context that it is a sort of measure of fae currency—what else does one spend but currency?—but this only leaves her still more bewildered to the overall meaning of the page. She skips it and tries another.
As the weeks pass Gramarye’s porch sprouts blue glass bottles and she resorts to demanding saucers as payments for her services when she runs out of more places to pour out her offerings. Her shack is liberally adorned with red ribbon and she scrupulously removes everything green that is not living, per a suggestion hand-written in the margins of some apocryphal text her mother had left behind. This involves, to her private dismay, burning her favourite shawl. She scatters the ashes around the base of a year-old tree whose trunk she has splashed with whiskey, to attract the spirits that they might marvel at her willingness to relinquish her worldly goods.
“That was my favourite shawl,” she says aloud, to whatever lurking fae might be listening in. “My very favourite.”
And then one day as Gramarye sweeps up the path towards the town to buy glass bottles and ink and the other tools of her trade, she is held up in her progress by a grotesquely fat black hen who toddles across the dusty road and fixes her with a skeptical stare.
“Get,” says Gramarye irritably, making a shooing motion with her skirts. The hen merely stares at her. It is a magnificently ugly creature, with glossy bluish feathers and a resplendent breast that will undoubtedly be the pride of some dinner table come the next winter festival. No one keeps a hen like that for laying. Her flesh is as thick and rich as butter, and the comb atop her head is gleaming scarlet above her golden eyes. She flutters her wings in a useless, regal sort of way.
“Get,” says Gramarye again, unimpressed by such a clear display of magnificence. The hen makes the chuckling sound a confident hen makes, and seemingly from nowhere a frantic peeping emerges, and a dozen or so fluffy brown chicks spill out into the road from the brush, milling around their mother who lords it over them like the only man in a crowd with a horse. She eyes Gramarye again, this time distinctly threatening.
“Oh, for the love of--,” hisses Gramarye, and she moves to sweep past the chaotic churning of feathers, only to raise the ire of the hen, who flies into a majestic rage. A crowded moment passes before Gramarye finds herself with a stick in her hand—not even sure where the stick had come from—upraised to deliver a warning blow.
But she doesn’t. She knows, almost by instinct, that someone has crapped on her foot, right on the toes of her respectable stiff boots.
She looks down, the stick still hanging in the air above the leery chicken, and there is a chick seated on her toe next to a ridiculously large spatter. It is gazing up at her with a nearly human smugness.
For a moment she regards the chick, its head tilted at a jaunty angle. If Gramarye were given to thinking animals were cute she might perhaps be won over, but animals to Gramarye are even less attractive than people. After barely a moment’s thought she lets the stick lower, and the hen swarms off with the rest of her brood, satisfied by her victory.
And then, after a moment, Gramarye scoops her foot and with an expert flick tosses both the hapless chick and the worst of the s**t into the air, watching them fly with a feeling of accomplishment and continuing her journey towards town.
When she returns it is dark, and her purchases are tucked into a pail that bends her to the side slightly under its weight: a weight made more considerable by a quart of hard liquor, the gift of a farmer along the route who’d heard stories and knew when it was a good idea to ingratiate himself to his neighbors. It is very heavy, and so Gramarye has felt it the responsible thing to do to relieve herself of a bit of its weight by pausing in the road and taking a good guzzle every now and again, tossing out a drop for the spirits when she remembers. Her path has begun to weave ever-so-slightly, and so when she sees a brown chick seated squarely in the center of the road, amidst the tracks of a hen and a traveler, she believes for a moment she has perhaps over-indulged. She closes her eyes, opens them again. The chick remains, and it is fixing Gramarye with a red-eyed stare of surpassing scorn.
“Get?” attempts Gramarye, tentative this time. Something about the cold light of the moon, and her drunkenness, and the memory of seeing the chick flailing through the air in a graceful arc: all these things collaborate to make her more uncertain than she is accustomed to being. She is, inexplicably, very nearly afraid of the tiny thing.
“Peep,” says the chick. It sounds grave, which is ludicrous. She gives herself a shake.
“Get,” she replies, more authoritatively. She moves to walk past it, wobbling as she goes.
“Peep,” argues the chick, stiffly hopping behind her.
“Have it your own damned way,” says Gramarye.
And it does. Throughout the rest of her journey she turns, and each time the chick is framed in the road behind her, its down silvered by the moonlight, its eyes little gleaming beads of scarlet in its angry little head.
When she reaches her shack, nudging saucers and bottles aside with her boot, the chick clumsily scales the rickety steps.
“You shat on my boot,” she reminds it, feeling incredibly stupid to be talking to a bird. “I hope you get eaten by an owl.”
The chick, however, begins moving from saucer to saucer, and at each it takes a beakful of half-soured milk, each time never removing its eyes from Gramarye. As if declaring its right to them. She goes very still.
“Chickens don’t like milk,” she snaps. It downs another dainty sip.
When it has finished—and it does finish, decisively; it moves to each saucer once and then ceases its journey at her feet—Gramarye reaches into her pail and removes the half-empty bottle of liquor. She cups her palm, and tips a slosh into it; it runs through her fingers onto the boards but the chick waits as she stoops, bracelets clinking and hair swinging nearly to her knees when she bends, and extends her hand. The chick grabs her thumb in its talons, ungentle, surprisingly sharp for such a tiny thing, and it bends to drink as if she were a trough in a coop.
She spends a few minutes piling saucers and bottles and pails and books near one of the windows, creating a little staircase that leads in and out of her home; she slices a flap in the greased canvas that goes where glass ought to go, if she could afford glass and cared about having the light, and she places the chick on the windowsill, where it settles into a ball of down, its red eyes turned outward towards the path that runs to her door, like a sentinel, like a watchdog. It is bizarrely comforting.
When she rises the next day it is still there, waiting for her; she cleans up the rest of her offerings and puts the things away, leaving a final saucer of milk on her steps, feeling the chick’s shrewd eyes on her back as she goes about her work, slopping the yearly pig and scrubbing the slatted floors with sand, concocting convincing-smelling remedies and taking a turn at the scrying bowl.
And the next time she goes to town, she does not encounter fat hens. There is only a half-grown, gawky rooster that follows her with cocky strides, with spurs already like knives and a murderous gaze that she has by now grown accustomed to. And when she arrives in town, she buys herself a green shawl, and a bag of chicken feed.
