The pearlescent potion boiling placidly in the cauldron was still not ready. It had been brewing for more than eleven days, but Rowena knew better than to look or sound impatient in front of her glorified pot. She knew perfectly well that it was easily angered and that it would ruin a potion on purpose, no questions asked. She wondered, while diligently stirring counterclockwise for the third time that day, if she would ever find out where that vainglorious imbecile, she unfortunately had to call husband, was.

  No matter. The scrying potion would be ready soon, she hoped. The cauldron had only huffed and puffed a few times, old as it was, and it seemed pleased when she fed a log of dark wood to the fire. It had been hard to come by, but many people owed her favors, and she certainly wasn’t above the use of vague threats to get what she wanted.

  Cassius, after all, had once been drawn to her particular way of doing things. He called it untraditional; she knew it was, admittedly, criminal. But as it turns out, you can do a lot of things when you’re under the employ of the royal family. They had to make up for the subpar salary in some way. The cauldron spluttered, then, probably annoyed by her continuous stirring and her loud thoughts.

  “Sorry,” she said, “Do you think it might be ready soon?”

  A large bubble exploded right in her face. Her eyebrow twitched. “Alright then.”

  She took a deep breath and left the room, for fear she’d melt down the old boiler and never find out her husband’s whereabouts. Cassius the Cretin, he should’ve been called; he certainly didn’t deserve the name Cassius the Wise anymore. Not after losing his mind due to a quite excessive use of dark magic. She dabbled in the Art herself, but she always knew when to pull back, detox and pick it back up later.

  Rowena, he would say when she expressed concern over his well-being, remember your place. Her place as a wife could be compared to a narrow, humid cupboard taken over by rats and spiders, while, as a husband, he lived upstairs in a warm, carpeted room with a private fireplace and a bathroom. If only he could see her now, she thought; he would’ve never thought his loyal, devoted wife to be the one looking to bring him to justice. Cassius the Idiot would pay for every small, slicing, snappy, wretched comment he had thrown her way during their marriage. But she had to find him first.

  And find him she would. A lock of hair (expertly cut during one of the rare times he had fallen asleep next to her) went a long way.

  The cauldron growled and let out a high-pitched hissing sound. Rowena’s head snapped towards it so fast she almost pulled a muscle, “Is it done?” she asked, re-entering the room with quick, anxious steps.

  Silence answered her. The potion sat in the boiler, still and luminescent in the moonlight, waiting.

  With a sigh, she twirled the lock of hair in her hands and looked outside. The forest surrounding her little, hidden hut was dark and silent, almost in wait. The War hadn’t yet reached the calm of the woods and she had vowed that she would never let that happen. Stopping her husband from wreaking anymore havoc meant that it would never reach it.

  Determination renewed, she narrowed her eyes in concentration and her red hair immediately crackled with barely contained energy, each wild curl swishing in the air in a serpentine manner. She hovered her husband’s hair over the potion, and she visibly swallowed when the candles in the room all started swaying in her general direction. Rowena was being watched. She knew, then, that what she was about to do was largely more significant than what she thought it to be.

  Swallowing her fear and her grief and a tiny bit of bile, she watched the lock of hair as it fell inside the cauldron, barely breaking the surface tension of the potion inside it. “Ancestors,” she said, voice cracking, “Show me my husband.”

  After a beat of silence, the potion started swirling violently inside the cauldron, spilling over the side in translucent rivulets. The boiler huffed and groaned, suffering under the force of this hefty, ancient magic.

  All of a sudden, a strong wind coming from the open windows blew all the candles out. The witch held her concentration, muttering protective incantations under her breath, for fear that she had inadvertently invited a malevolent ancestral spirit inside her house. She didn’t dare look away from the spiraling potion, from which she could see bits and pieces of her husband. If only she could piece something together, just enough to-

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  The candles came back to life, alight with singular, fluorescent green flames and the potion stilled, right as the wind stopped its furious ministrations towards her home. The moon herself, noticed Rowena with a shiver, cast a singular ray of light over the cauldron.

  “Why do you shield yourself from us, daughter?” hissed a voice. It came from everywhere and nowhere, from up, from down, the left and the right. Rowena felt it inside her head and over her skin, twirling her hair and stroking her cheek. “You request our aid, but you don’t trust us.”

  The witch stayed still; her eyes tightly shut, for she was still mortal, and it was awfully impolite to gaze upon her dead relatives before due time. “I apologize, mother. Precautions are never enough.”

  Rowena felt the voice slither all over herself, each singular hair on her body coming alive in the worst case of goosebumps ever felt by a human being. “You want to know where to find your husband.”

  “Yes, mother. I do” she said, clenching her teeth. “It is of the utmost importance.”

  The voice tittered and giggled, which was remarkably the scariest thing she had ever heard in her life. “Then look, child.” It hissed, close to her left ear, “And pay our price after.”

  Rowena looked down inside the cauldron and watched as her husband Cassius paced around in a scarcely furnished room. He looked unkempt, his beard now overgrown and his clothes dirty and rumpled. There was no trace of the put-together, impassible man she had come, not to love, but perhaps to respect. Black veins throbbed violently from his temples, and she sighed when she noticed them snaking down to his cheeks and neck in angry little rivulets.

  The disease, she noted with a pang that resembled, suspiciously, grief, was too advanced to cure. Refusing to feel sorry for herself, she waved a hand over the potion and willed it to change, “Show me more.”

  She saw the furious sea first, and the dark sky then. It rippled and rumbled with thunderous rage, waiting to unleash it upon the land. “What did you do…” she murmured; the spirits themselves seemed to be unhappy with him and she knew that he had to be stopped. For good. No matter how it made her feel.

  That’s when she saw it. Perched upon a steep cliff and reminding her of an eagle’s nest, was a stone lighthouse, covered in moss and flowers, as much part of nature as the grass surrounding it, unshakable and immovable in spite of the wind and the waves lapping angrily on the cliff’s side. Cassius had always liked high places.

  When you are up high, he would say, you are both bird and ant, in equilibrium, right in the middle. And then he would pick her up and twirl her around, stopping only when she found herself in a fit of laughter, unable to calm herself. But that was before their marriage. That was the past.

  “Thank you, ancestors.” She said, waving a hand over the image of her distraught husband, willing it to disappear. Now milky white, the potion stared back at her, expecting payment. Rowena took a deep calming breath and looked at the night sky for guidance, for she desperately needed it. It wasn’t every day that a wife had to go against her husband. Maternally, the moon shone a ray of light right on her face, making her smile and renewing her resolve. The side she chose was, for once, the right one to stand in.

  She grabbed a knife from her belt and stood in front of the cauldron. Thinking of her husband and his slow decline into madness only heightened the deep sense of loss that had germinated within herself, without her willing it to. Cassius had been a lackluster husband, so why? She wondered if one could truly start being fond of someone just by forced proximity alone. What they didn’t possess in romance, after all, they made up for in intellectual conversations and passionate debates. But again, Rowena reminded herself, that was before his hunger for power began to matter more than their life together. And she certainly could not condone being made a stepping stone to the podium for a mediocre man.

  “A lighthouse, huh, Cassius?” she said to nobody and everybody. To herself, maybe. To him. “You do not know how much I will enjoy throwing you off it.”

  The knife’s blade glinted in the moonlight when she brought it upon her ring finger, where her husband’s family stone still resided. Rowena’s vision swam from the pain and the blood loss, but she willed herself to stay awake long enough to watch the potion turn black. She needed to know that the payment had been accepted and that her ancestors had been honored and appeased.

  The voice hissed and slithered over her wounded hand, stopping the blood, and searing her open flesh with a singular, ancient word of power. The potion transformed into an inky well of blackness, and Rowena sighed, letting herself crumble on the floor of the hut in a heap of flesh and bones. She felt so terribly, weakly, human.

  But she would fix it, she thought. She would fix everything and then, he would pay.