Paper Confines

i. Seven Years and a Name

PAPER CONFINES.
01. / Seven Years and a Name

✶

       On the thirty-first of August, 1938, Amoret was tugged by her sister's hand onto the narrow street, clinging to the walls of the duplexes and the Van Deusen saltbox, which she thought was the nicest house in all of Lower Slaughter. Gabled rooftops eclipsed the moon in silver acmes, pockets of candlelight on the cobblestone where those still awake left their curtains rayed. Sybil raised her hand so her silhouette could cup the light, and Amoret was distracted by the sight of the extended shadows against the cob. How they seemed to move faster than her feet could keep up, a rippling quickness in the long-legged dark. They looked like they were walking on stilts.

Amoret sleepily recalled the court jesters from Kensington's Olympia, the lions and elephants, their fangs and flailing trunks, clowns with chalky blue stars painted over their eyes. Reid, the oldest of the three, paid the shadowed circus no mind, and Sybil, four years her junior but still older than Amoret, giggled as she made them dance and leap.

The sisters reached the fence that bordered the Slaughters from the moors and climbed over. Amoret's feet were sore two minutes into the trek.

Reid nudged her lightly. "Go on, Bitsy. We made it this far, didn't we?"

Sybil shrieked with excitement and ran parallel to the woodland, close enough that her outstretched arms brushed the lowest leaves of the willow trees.

They would keep walking until the houses looked like blurry haystacks behind them, coiled around the River Eye, slowly blinking to sleep. Amoret wanted to turn around and sleep too. Instead she trudged to keep up with her sisters and clung to the small mercy of white heather growing among the weeds. Her father had told her once that it only grew where blood had never been shed.

The path to an obscured mouth of the river parted the thick line of trees when they were finally far enough. That was where Amoret had washed the coppers the last six Sundays while the muggles were at church and her family tended to magical affairs that couldn't risk being done any other day. But for the creatures she'd been warned hid in charms and bramble, Amoret hated going alone. There was the comfort now of being with her sisters—three was a sacred number after all—and Reid and Sybil's learnings at Hogwarts were a small reassurance. Earth and sea and sky, so the druid rituals said, but they were witches, not druids, and the creatures here had seen far more imposing visitors than a triad of girls too meddlesome for their own good. Amoret hadn't even been chosen for a wand yet.

"Come on, come on!" Sybil grinned, her nightgown a lilac cloud in the wind.

At the precipice of the woods, there was a low, scratching hum; the phonographic prick of needle on record, set loose in the atmosphere. Despite the warm summer dusk, Amoret shivered.

Her fear halted only to appreciate for a moment how beautiful her sisters were in the foggy light before her. She couldn't remember if they'd always been so and she hadn't noticed, or if magic would make her beautiful too; less grey, more bronze like married rings in the sun.

"Not too loud, Syb," said Reid. "You'll draw all the wrong sort."

"You said there were no monsters here," Amoret squeaked.

"I said there were none like the ones in your muggle books. None that'd ever dare come out of their burrows, anyway."

Amoret's eyes went wide. She thought of running back home, if she dared to move her feet.