The next morning, I woke up feeling rested. My mind was surprisingly clear. Before going to sleep, my head was still filled by swirling thoughts about all the revelations that had accompanied the previous days. But now, all of the information I had absorbed was stacked in neat lines, ordered and not encumbering. I could still remember the stress, anxiety and incertitude of yesterday. Now, it was nowhere to be seen. I got up and got dressed quickly before heading downstairs. When I arrived in the kitchen, Mom was already busy preparing breakfast. Eiea was nowhere to be seen.

 

“Hi Mom!”

 

She turned her head halfway towards me and flashed a smile before returning to work. I walked past the table in the centre of the room and stopped on her right side.

 

“Can I help?”

“Of course!”

 

She handed me a knife and I started cutting fruits. I immersed myself in helping her for a while before hearing behind us the stairs creaking slowly. A few moments later, small footsteps came into the room. I turned to look and saw Eiea yawning, a hand in front of her mouth and another absentmindedly scratching the backside of her head. She was still in her heavy winter pajamas, her usually straight, black hair was… still completely straight and silky even though I was convinced she had done nothing to them after leaving the bed. She approached the counter slowly, sniffing the air.

 

“Smells good! Waffles?”

“Crêpes”, Mom said.

“Woo-hoo.”

 

Eiea swung her hands up towards the ceiling, just slowly and sleepily enough to make the gesture somehow funny. She turned back and sat at the table, looking outside at the backyard with hazy eyes through the glass sliding door nearby.

 

It took little time to finish making the breakfast and we went straight to eating it. Eiea was eating slowly but messily, making me wonder how she did not spread maple syrup everywhere that wasn’t her crêpe or plate. Actually, I did not wonder too long about it. After paying more attention to her movements for a while, I could see droplets of syrup either flying from her plate or dripping from her fork bending in the air swiftly to end up right where they started. She seemed to notice I was staring at her since she locked eyes with me an instant later. She flashed a grin, seemingly pleased with herself, before continuing her act. A mixture of amusement and jealousy welled up in me slowly. I convinced myself that I would absolutely succeed in invoking my fragment today.

 

Several minutes later, we were relaxing at the table in silence. Mom was drinking coffee and I had hot chocolate. Eiea only drank water and seemed to enjoy her full belly with eyes closed. She opened them and smiled at us.

 

“Well, thank you for the delicious breakfast. I’ll do the dishes then.”

 

As she stood up, Mom and I started to do the same, intending to at least bring our plates and utensils to the sink, but Eiea gestured us to stay sitting. She took all the plates from the table and brought them there herself.

 

“Not gonna use your fragment for that?”

 

I felt like teasing her a bit about her use of it while eating, but it seems that I utterly failed as she answered with both seriousness and sarcasm.

 

“Not this time. People won’t notice little splashes from far away but moving plates are a lot more obvious. And there are a lot of windows here.”

“You used it to clean the attic yesterday.”

“There aren’t many windows upstairs and no tall buildings in sight.”

 

True. I felt a little childish, not having noticed the obvious difference but I tried hiding it being an amused smile. I probably failed. Mom looked a bit startled, slowly understanding what was said, before perplexity mixed in.

 

“They already know that you are a witch, no?”

“Yes, but using it in front of you two implies that at least one of you is one too. Or not and I just told you about my fragment, which is almost just as bad.”

 

Mom nodded, convinced, but my mind’s gears began to turn at that last comment. Quickly, the thoughts of yesterday came back to me. Questions after questions rushed from the small space in the backside of my head where I had crammed them. But I couldn’t formulate any specific one. It was too early I guess, even if my brain was willing, my mouth felt lazy. Eiea finished rinsing the dishes quickly and slotted them into the dishwasher before shaking her hands, only once, into the sink. A surprisingly large amount of water droplets came off and I could tell from here that she was completely dry. The questions stopped coming, ebbing away from the arriving frustration. I was about to declare that it was time to train my fragment, but Eiea beat me to the punch.

 

“Today, I suggest we start with physical training.”

 

I was instinctively repulsed at the idea of exerting my body in the early morning, and from the expression on Mom's face it seems she was feeling the same.

 

“This early? Just after eating?”

 

She even sounded disgusted. Eiea scratched her head, looking troubled.

 

“If you don’t want to, we can do it later, but I have a good reason to do it now.”

“Which is?”

“All witches are different from each other when it comes to the factors that influence their proficiency in conjuring their fragment’s effects, but some are more frequent. Particularly, for young witches that have yet to do it consciously and those that have but not many times, there tends to be two well-defined camps. Some have an easier time when they are well rested and calm, and some prefer having a physical warm up beforehand. Since I can’t know which one Maria is, I suggest we alternate. One day we will do fragment training first and the other physical first.”

 

The acidic air behind mom’s expression faltered at the well-presented argument.

 

“Why not do it all this afternoon though?”

“We never know how long the fragment training will be, so we might run out of time if we start too late. That could be detrimental in the long run since there is also a trend of the first breakthrough being after a long, continuous effort.”

 

Mom hung her head, resigned and with no apparent motivation.

 

“You don’t need to come with us if you don’t want to.”

 

At my jab, she redressed her posture and placed a motivated mask on her face over the reluctant one.

 

“No! I said I would do it with you and that’s final!”

 

She quickly got up from her chair and practically sprinted upstairs in the direction of her bedroom. I exchanged a smile and a look of triumph with Eiea.

 

Once we were dressed for running and outside, Eiea explained what we were going to do today. We first jogged to an intersection slightly further down the road. This also happened to be the corner of a local park. The park was not very large. Placed in between 4 roads, it had the shape of a long rectangle. 

Eiea explained that the “assignment” today would be to first sprint the short side of the park, jog on the long side, sprint the other short side and then come back jogging. Overall, that was quite a bit less terrain to cover than what we did yesterday. We were confident. But the changes in pace were harsher and by the time we came back to our starting spot, we were already winded. Eiea ordered us to do it a second time, which we did. After that, we couldn’t do much more than groan as we came back to the house.

 

We reached home a few minutes later, having barely recovered. This was only the second day and I was starting to understand just how much improvement I would need to make. I couldn’t run very far at all with my current endurance. Going to school and back at a leisurely walking pace was by far not good enough. At least I could run somewhat fast compared to Mom, though saying that was probably unfair.

 

Eiea reached the front door and opened it for us, letting us enter first. We quickly removed our running shoes, and I was planning on starting an argument about who would get to shower first. However, Eiea’s behaviour stopped me in my tracks. As soon as she got inside and closed the door, she froze up. Her eyes narrowed in a suspicious expression, and she flashed us a sign to keep quiet. We tensed up, pinching our lips to not accidentally let anything out as she slowly walked further inside, seemingly searching for something. Her gaze was scanning every piece of furniture, every decoration in the room. There were less than before, after the incident, since the shockwave I produced broke a few glass decorations. She eventually reached a small lamp.

 

“You two can go take a shower first, I'm not that sweaty.”

 

She signalled us with one hand behind her back to move to the staircase. As we obeyed, I surmised that it was because there were no windows that gave a direct view of the stairs. Once we were there, she waited a few seconds and then lifted the lamp up, slipping one hand underneath. She fished out something. She then moved towards a nearby window and presented the hand that was holding the object to it. 

On it was a small, black object made of plastic. It was barely big enough to see from here, perhaps only a few millimetres in diameter. She approached her face so that her mouth was close to the object and her eyes were staring hard out the window at the other side of the street.

 

“Not in this house. Fuck off.”

 

It was the first time I heard her speak with a tone like this - A shiver ran down my spine. Her voice was dripping with hostility, deep and threatening and coloured with resentment. I understood at once what the object was. It was a microphone. She then approached her hand to the glass even more until it was pressed against it. The tiny microphone was lifted upwards silently by an invisible force, hovering a couple of centimetres above her palm, and was suddenly and violently twisted and crushed into a tiny needle-shaped piece of broken plastic and tortured, minuscule electronic components. At this distance, all I could hear was the barely audible shrill shriek of mistreated materials. She opened the window and, with a flick of a finger, the needle rushed out at high velocity, small enough to barely go through the holes of the mosquito net. At that speed it would probably effortlessly reach across the road. She closed the window and sighed.

 

“Alright. They shouldn’t try that again for a while.”

 

Mom and I went upstairs to take a shower while Eiea stayed in the living room, looking out of a different window from the comfort of a rocking chair with a thoroughly unimpressed expression.

 

“They really did try to bug the house…”

 

Mom was shocked by the development. Just like me, Eiea had told her that it might happen and that she wouldn’t let the witch hunters do it. But being told so and being shown it happening was very different. I felt a bit similar, the promise of the threat suddenly becoming a much more concrete prospect. 

 

It dawned on me just how careful I - no, we were gonna have to be. The witch hunters knew that Eiea was a witch, but they did not know if either me or mom were as well. We didn’t even need to be witches to trigger them to action, for all I knew. Just us knowing about the existence of witches could possibly be enough. Eiea’s notoriety was the only thing that kept them at bay supposedly, but maybe the occasion of getting multiple targets at the same time would goad them.

 

I took my shower quickly and donned some new clothes. Eiea asked If i wanted to train my fragment, but I declined today. I was too tense to do it right now. She didn’t argue. I retreated to my bedroom. The book on my bedside, “A Night in Walpurgis”, was tempting me to read it, but in the end I didn’t. Doing so now felt just as irrationally dangerous as training my fragment. I took it and hid it within my desk. It made me feel a little better, but not that much. I decided to ask my parents tomorrow to buy something I could lock the book in.

 

*****

 

Across the road from Maria’s house was a slightly smaller home. It was the home of a single elderly couple, a pair of septuagenarians that were much too old to take care of their property themselves. Thus, they regularly hired a small, local landscaping company to cut the grass, trim their hedge and, of course, take care of the trees. On the property around the house, there were several large trees, some maples and some oaks, along with a few token pines. The trees were luscious and well maintained, their tall, bushy canopies practically shining a healthy green hue under the summer sun.

 

In one of those trees was a single man. Wearing military-like clothes made for camouflage in forested environments, he was lying upon a large branch with a single, painted brown rope around his waist securing him to the trunk of the mighty oak. He held in one hand a pair of high-power binoculars, similarly camouflaged. Behind his back and strapped to his belt was a single handgun and in his breast pocket was a small military radio.

 

Several hours before, when it was still dark, he had climbed this tree, getting in position to do his job: watching the house across the street. He had stayed there since, watching the goings-on through the large window in the front of the house, regularly making check ups and short reports through his radio. He watched as the witch and her new family were having breakfast. He watched as they all changed and left the house to do what seemed like regular exercises for the second day now. He watched as one of his colleagues had broken into the house to plant a microphone in order to better monitor the situation of that family. They wanted to know everything happening in that house, or outside of it. That was their duty.

 

And now, he was looking at a small, black needle embedded in the tree trunk, close enough to his face that he could see the broken plastic form twisting ridges. He could distinguish the tiny circuit board inside, peeking through the breaks, and smell the acrid scent of the minuscule inner battery that had been broken. A small line of fire on his right cheekbone was pulsating and burning. He could feel one or two tears of blood crawling down his face and settling down on his chin.

 

He brought up his free hand and reached into his breast pocket slowly, fumbling for a moment, trying to grab his radio with trembling hands. He had been unbearably hot and covered in sweat but a few instants before. Now he could only feel cold.

 

“Treant reporting, come in. Over.”

“I hear you Treant, are you alright? Over.”

“Just a scratch. Did you hear what Heresy said? Over.”

 

As a watcher, he was trained in lip reading. And when the person was mouthing their words so carefully right in front of him, there was no way he would be unable to understand. But he had to ask even if he already knew. 

There was radio silence for a moment. His device made occasional screeching sounds, signs that the operator on the other side was switching his own radio on and off without saying anything.

 

“We heard. Continue your mission for the rest of the day and then return to base. We will change the watcher for the next few days. Over.”

 

The man took a few deep breaths, trying to take back control over his trembling body. Before long, the creeping cold left his nerves and the temperature of the midsummer day came back.

 

“Understood. I will continue watching for the moment. Treant over and out.”

 

He put the radio back in his pocket, took a moment to swallow the bitter taste in his mouth and raised his binoculars anew.