Anya laughs shortly. “I think Titus would rather I didn’t say anything at all.”

“Anya…”

“You know it’s true,” her cousin insists, “I’m barely a Woods, god forbid I have any opinion that doesn’t reflect the coven’s.”

The truth sits uneasily on Lexa’s chest. She twists the braided silver band on her ring finger, feeling responsible.

“I’m here to watch you and that’s it,” Anya continues, “next year I’ll be out of a job.”

Anya is the outcast of their household. She’s prickly at the best of times, with all of angles and sharp lines of the Woods and none of the softness Lexa inherited from her mother. Lexa doesn’t think Titus ever forgave Anya’s father for his illicit liaisons with a witch from another coven, or for his disappearance – lord knows why, but Lexa has learnt that Titus is more paranoid old man than wise advisor she thought he was when she was seven-years-old and hanging iron off her bed to ward away fairies. He ostracised her when they were younger, and is even more reluctant now to give his twenty-two-year-old niece the responsibility that a witch of her age should have – especially considering their family name.

In turn, Anya has fully embraced the role of black sleep, vintage leather jackets and all.

“You’ll always have a job as long as I’m in charge,” Lexa vows, reaching across to take her cousins hand in hers.  

She couldn’t call her childhood conventional. Since her mother died her care had been transferred to Titus and the coven to raise her as they saw fit, which had meant a rigorous regime of magical theory, and strict practice on top of trying to maintain a normal existence. The normal existence part still has her stumped, but there’s never an excuse not to perform. She is after all, the eldest direct descendant of the Woods line, as far as the coven is concerned, she’s their property and amongst all the craziness, sometimes she thinks Anya is the only thing keeping her sane.

“Sap,” Anya accuses. The show of affection makes her squirm and she disentangles their hands to cuff Lexa around the head, feigning indifference. “Anyway,” she changes the subject swiftly, tucking her hands into her pockets and scanning the empty square while Lexa tends to her mussed hair. “It’s not about that. Titus can shove it up his own as far as I care. You’re going to be eighteen next year.”

“Is that why you’re walking with me?” Lexa prods.

Anya stiffens before she can help it and Lexa knows she has struck a nerve. It takes a conscious effort to disengage every muscle in her body, but when she does, she elongates her strides and Lexa jogs to keep up, hands tucked inside her pockets as the wind picks up. “You’re lying,” she accuses calmly.

Her cousin shifts under the scrutiny, “how’s Costia?”

“Anya!” Lexa snaps, taking her by the arm and forcing her to stop in the middle of the sidewalk. They level their stares at each other, unflinching for a moment before Anya gives up the childish competition and snatches her wrist back. “Fine,” she relents ungracefully, massaging the skin, then nodding in an indication they should keep walking.

Lexa acquiesces but eyes her warily with each step it takes to formulate her answer.

“There’s been another incident.”

“An incident?” Lexa pounces on the word.

Anya nods. “Titus and Indra didn’t want to tell you.”

Frustrated, she stifles a biting comment. For all they drill this ridiculous sense of responsibility into her – ‘you’re almost of age Lexa, the coven must be your focus from now on’ – Titus and the others tend to censor what she is told like she’s still the eight-year-old she was when her mother died. Hypocrisy at its finest.

Anya is agitated again as she glances around. She puts a hand on Lexa’s back and guides her roughly down the nearest walkway between the second-hand bookstore and the coffee house where it smells like decaying paper and stale dishwater. Anya’s hand twitches, then goes up to smooth her hair behind her ear and Lexa tries to regulate the uneasy throb in her chest.

For as long as she can remember Anya has never been afraid of consequences, especially where it meant disobeying Titus and her discomfort now is unnerving.

“Lincoln found a dead raven on the back steps this morning,” Anya relays quietly when she seems satisfied they aren’t being heard.

Lexa’s breakfast curdles in her stomach.

Anya pauses to fish something out of her pocket. “Next to it was this.”

The odd object sits against her hand as Anya holds it up for Lexa to see, the black ribbon it’s strung on tangled in her fingers as Lexa takes in the intricate design. It looks like a seal stamped into a round of metal, a pentagram inside three rings of tarnished Latin that, for all of her afternoons cooped up in the dining room translating ancient texts under Titus’ trained eye, Lexa can’t decipher.

“What is it?”

Anya shrugs but hands it over and Lexa lets it sit in her palm. She thinks the pattern is familiar.

“Titus thinks it was the Griffins.”

Lexa’s head snaps up in alarm. “No,” she argues stubbornly.

“Lexa…”

The door a few feet further down the alley opens and an acne covered teenager emerges with a black trash bag at his side. Anya falls silent while he throws it in the trash can and gives them a confused glance before returning inside. “It had their magic all over it,” she informs Lexa curtly when the boy is gone.

The only other magical – but not non-mortal – founding family of Polis, Connecticut, the Woods had been stuck in a power battle with the Griffin’s since the town was founded. Every other non-mortal family in the area had fallen into an alliance on either side, and the magical violence that was said to have gone on between them got so bad, the fatalities rivalled the Salem Witch Trials. Gustus used to tell Lexa stories of when he was young to scare Lexa into practicing her magic even though every part of her body felt drained and rubbed raw. Apparently, four mortals had to end up as collateral damage before Titus enacted the truce.

Any act of violence now would be like an act of treason.

“They wouldn’t dare,” she insists confidently. Titus has had her involved in magical politics since she was old enough to understand it; both covens agreed to the truce, neither would risk the consequences. The Griffin’s might be altogether too liberal with their magic but they aren’t stupid.

Anya purses her lips like she doesn’t agree. She keeps her eyes trained on the spot where the alley opens out onto the square like she’s worried hellfire will erupt out of the cobblestones if she continues to explain. “Did you know Clarke is back in town?”

Lexa’s heart leaps and she pretends it doesn’t. “You can’t be serious?” She scoffs instead, understanding what Anya is implying. “You think Clarke did this?” It’s ridiculous and not just because the Clarke Lexa knows is too preoccupied with practical magic and floating bottles of vodka from her parents’ stash up to her bedroom to be sending malicious omens to the Woods’ doorstep.

And then there’s the other thing.

Lexa doesn’t talk about the other thing.

Anya throws her hands open in an aggravated ‘who knows’ gesture and Lexa fights not to get defensive.

“I’m not saying she didn’t,” Anya retorts. “She’s a Griffin, Lexa.”

Lexa hates that that’s an accusation in itself. Mostly because ‘she’s a Woods’ has plagued her entire life; the excuse for lab partners and dodgeball team mates rejecting her. More than any of the curses that are cradled in the aging pages of the books Titus keeps in the upstairs hallway, Lexa thinks having your identity boiled down to nothing but your last name is the worst curse of all.

Anger at Anya simmers into frustration in the pit of her stomach and she slips the seal into her pocket and shoulders past her cousin onto the main street.

“Lexa,” Anya grouses, quiet guilt colouring her tone as her steps clack in her effort to catch her. “Wait.”

Lexa shakes her head. “I need to talk to Clarke.”

Polis is just as insignificant as Clarke left it four months ago, but somehow, it still feels better than the draughty colonial of her grandmothers that she spent the summer and then some shut up in. She’s pretty sure the only thing of note that has happened in four months is her poor house plants ultimately death on her windowsill – apparently the half-hearted self-watering charm she had uttered on her way out wasn’t long range. That, or her mother walked into her room one day to see her dinky tin watering can hanging in mid-air and had dismantled the thin spell with an eye roll.

Her parents have always had a liberal attitude to magic. As long as she wasn’t spell casting in the front yard or enchanting her stationery to write her biology essays, they were content to let her explore her it on her own terms.

She hadn’t known magical theory was something people practiced as actively as they did until her parents got tired of her quote unquote behaviour and sent to her study under the tuition of her mother’s mother. Or that’s what they told her when she came home on the last day of school to find her bags packed in the hallway – ‘you’re the heir Clarke, you need to learn to control your magic’.

In reality, she knows it was really a ploy to get her out of town after Abby interrupted Finn kissing her goodnight after homecoming.

Her parents had never been phased by her frivolous magic use in the past, and the Collins are notorious for being unreliable allies – evidently magical politics doesn’t take a break for school girl crushes.

The bell rings for the end of the period and Clarke rises from her desk, rubbing her thumb over the braided band on her ring finger. She doesn’t know what excuse her parents gave the school for her absence but she can feel the teacher’s hesitancy to bring the subject up as he waves her to the front of the class and it’s suffocating. The Griffins are formidable figures in the eyes of the town, and it feels like Mr. Walker is handling her with kid gloves as he hands her a sheet covering the last few weeks, tells her to read Macbeth and suggests she borrow a classmate’s notes. It feels too stiff and formal, and suddenly her whole life is being played out in front of her; a clinical rotation of coven meetings and maintaining magical politics that she isn’t ready for.

She nods into the panic bearing down on her chest and leaves as quickly as she can.

The building used to be a private residence before it was the high school. Like everything else in Polis the high arched ceilings, wrought iron embellishments and stained glass were leftovers from the gothic revival period that her history teacher – as old as the town itself – loves to go on about. In Junior year a rumour went around the back staircase was haunted by the ghost of the last owner, who’s grisly death in the late 1880’s had been enough to give The Tribune content for four months straight.

People seem to have gotten braver over summer though, because the staircase is packed again – likely because the ‘haunting’ stopped as soon as Bellamy had been busted by an Octavia intent on revenge for her broken curling iron and suspended from magic use for the summer. Either way, Clarke is unhappy to collide with a trio of rowdy Freshman with their shirts shredded and fake blood soaked. Agitated, she curses at them loudly for getting the concoction on her sweater, trying to pick it off with her finger nails to no avail before looking up in defeat and freezing.

Lexa stands halfway down the corridor, head in her locker as she diligently switches out her books and Clarke watches, feeling abruptly guilty as she tucks her hair behind her ear and twists the lock to scramble the combination.

She didn’t tell Lexa she was back.

She didn’t know if she was supposed to tell Lexa she was back.

There text conversations had switched abruptly from numerous and emoji filled, to once a week at most and strangely formal at the end of Sophomore Year. It left them in an awkward twilight zone of ‘just friends’ that neither of them quite knew how to navigate correctly.

When Lexa turns to walk to class Clarke raises her hand in a static wave, and an urgent expression passes over Lexa’s face.

“Clarke!”

Whipping her head around, she sees two girls narrowly miss being taken out by the backpack Octavia has slung over one shoulder as she barrels down the stone staircase, flinging it to the harlequin tiles to throw her arms around Clarke’s neck. The girls mutter something crude and following behind, Raven flips them off aggressively. “Freshmen,” she mutters, picking Octavia’s backpack up off the floor.

“Ignore her,” Octavia disentangles herself from Clarke and when she looks back down the hall, Lexa has gone. Octavia cards a hand through her hair, taking her backpack from Raven with an exasperated glance. “She’s cranky because her car got scratched.” Her fingers are full of stacking rings and black nail varnish chipped down to the cuticle, but the sight of her friend, in her Champion tee and black jeans ripped at the knee, just as chaotic as usual, is familiar in a way Clarke didn't know she needed. She feels the vestiges of irrational terror slink away.

Raven gives Octavia a pointed look. “Last time we take my car to the lake,” she informs the brunette curtly as she leans in to give Clarke a hug.

Clarke is appalled. “You went to the lake without me?”

“You dyed your hair back,” Octavia retorts smartly and Clarke winces.

“My grandmother wasn’t exactly a fan of cotton candy pink.”

‘Not exactly a fan’ is an understatement. The woman, who was still as spritely as Clarke remembered her being when she was five years old, had rolled her eyes at the audacity of ‘teenagers these days’ and marched Clarke into the dining room to sit her down and mutter Latin until the home done dye job leached out of her hair.

She hadn’t heard someone do a verbal spell in years.

“Boo,” Octavia pouts, reaching up to twist a lock of Clarke’s hair around her forefinger. “I’m not ready for serious Clarke.”

Pink starts to crawl up the coil but Clarke bats Octavia’s hand away in alarm, looking around wildly to check if they had been seen, the strictness of her grandmother still sits weirdly ingrained in her immediate reactions. She adjusts her hair over her shoulder and tucking the now pink-ended lock behind her ear where it isn’t noticeable. “I’m not serious,” she argues, “I’m Clarke. I am!” she insists when Octavia makes a comically sceptical face. “Look, we’re still going to Atom’s tonight, right?”

“His parents are out of town, everyone is,” Raven confirms and Clarke sits back on her heels, satisfied. “Great,” she decides, “then I’m going to be one hundred percent fun Clarke.”

Raven snorts, “God help us.”

Costia has a polaroid of them tucked inside the metal slit of her locker that Lexa notices as she listens to the redhead grumble about the Chemistry pop quiz sprung on her by an unsympathetic teacher, humming and then nodding when she is accused to not listening.

She doesn’t know what to make of them exactly. Her and Costia that is. A witch herself, she understands the complexities of the situation Lexa has been born into, and despite all the ways that that simple fact makes her more likeable, it also makes the prospect of “them” infinitely more complicated. Which is probably why they are hanging in an awkward dimension of hugs that last too long and walking each other to class every other day.

“I’m sure you did well anyway,” she says mindlessly.  

There are dollar store witch hats strung on fishing wire from the arched ceiling and poster paint cut outs of ghosts and the school initials tacked to the walls. She fixates on the stylised pentagram inside the ‘o’ of ‘All Hallows Eve’ on a poster advertising a Halloween party in town that no one will attend, and lets the trepidation that’s been clawing at her chest all day swell to a boiling point. The seal sits in her front jean pocket, conspicuous enough that she untucked her sweater from her waistband as she walked into advisory for her own piece of mind.

“Lexa?”

She straightens, “yeah?”

“You’re really out of it today,” Costia’s brow peaks in concern, as she dips her chin to try and catch Lexa’s eye. “Did something happen? Or…”    

Shaking her head, Lexa wills herself to engage. She hasn’t seen Clarke since Octavia and Raven had interrupted their almost-reunion but the need to speak to her grew more urgent with each minute the seal gathered weight sitting in her pocket. “Just a lot going on,” she explains pathetically and Costia slides a hand up her arm.

“Anything I can help with?”

Lexa opens her mouth to assure her that ‘no, it’s fine’, when a blonde firecracker struts up to them with a melodramatic sigh and a faux-hurt expression.

“Are you cheating on me Lexa?” Clarke demands flinging her hand over her heart like she’s in a soap. “Does this ring mean nothing to you?” She thrusts her ring finger under Lexa’s nose, indicating to the familiar silver band, and Lexa struggles to hide the amused quirk in her lips.

Costia rolls her eyes, taking her cue to leave, “I’ll see you tonight, Lexa,” she says sweetly, squeezing her hand, then looking over, “bye Clarke.”

“Bye, Costia.”

Clarke twists her ring like it isn’t sitting right under her knuckle and leans a shoulder against the locker. “I’m sorry,” she apologises when Costia has disappeared. “She likes you.” Lexa doesn’t know how she is meant to respond to that, grappling for a reply feels like reaching out into a muddy pond in search for answers.

“She’s not my fiancée,” she drawls instead.

Clarke snorts.

It’s ironic, Lexa thinks, that, for the amount of weight their so-called “engagement” holds within the magical community, it has become such a joke between the two of them. Since the ceremony four years ago – a date which Clarke likes to ironically mark in her calendar as their “anniversary” and give Lexa cards with ‘To My Loving Husband’ embossed across the front in scripted letters – Clarke in particular has taken every available moment to mock the sanctity of the fealty they swore to each other and their rival covens in a bid to stop the violence. And after a while, compelled by the ridiculousness of all of it, Lexa joined in.

“How was Maine?”

“Four months shut up in a library translating…” Clarke glances around, then lowers her voice, “incantations that haven’t been used since Salem isn’t my idea of a good time. I lit a sparkler on the Fourth,” she perks up, “but my grandmother was worried it would set fire to her herb garden so she put it out.”

All at once, Lexa remembers being five-years-old and standing on the front lawn with a kiddie-sparkler in hand. The sparks burn stone-cold and morph into technicolour from the spell her mother recites in her melodic voice – purples, blues, greens and oranges twisting in and out of each other wonderfully. It isn’t the Fourth, she thinks – they didn’t celebrate holidays like that before Lexa was school aged – but the sky is a watercolour of dusky pink. Midsummer perhaps.

Then, as quickly as the memory came, it vanishes, leaving an echoing ‘whoosh’ in the vacuum of her head. She blinks, dizzy.

“Lexa…”

“We need to talk.”

“Oh?” Clarke sings flirtatiously.

“It’s serious.”

Her face drops, “oh.”

The bell trills but Lexa learns into the nearest classroom to find it dark, the desks empty and blinds pulled, and she wills Clarke inside, waiting until she is perched on the edge of the nearest desk before pulling the seal out of her pocket.

“Do you know what this is?”

It looks oddly mundane hanging from her fingers. In this light, it’s hard to make out the tarnished Latin or the pentagram inside it, but it’s ice-cold despite the hours it has been sitting in her pocket and that’s enough to make her sceptical.

Clarke’s eyes saucer. Lexa takes careful note of her reaction.

“Where did you get that?”

She opens her palm and the seal sails into her hand.

Lexa has always been taken back by Clarke’s liberal approach to magic. While Titus has drilled into her that magic serves a purpose and that purpose is not her own personal needs, Clarke seems to find a need for it in every situation. Quietly, she thinks she admires the easiness she wields it with because, the truth is, Lexa is too scared of magic to do the same.

“Do you know what it is?” She dodges the question. “The Latin’s illegible, but it looks like a penta –”  

“It’s not,” Clarke shakes her head. She puts the seal flat on the desk, ribbon at the top, then turns it one hundred and eighty degrees so the pentagram is inverted. Suddenly, Lexa knows where she has seen it before. “This is dark, Lexa,” Clarke warns her, “like, black-magic-devil-worshipping dark.” There is an element of awe in her voice that twists in the put of Lexa’s stomach. “Where did you get it?”

“There was one on the cover of that book you used to have,” Lexa says calmly.

“Lexa.” Clarke insists.

She sighs. “Lincoln found it on the back steps.”

Clarke scrutinises her. “There’s more.”

“Anya thinks it was you.”

“What?”

“Did you do it?”

Clarke straightens, growing stony at the accusation. “Do you think I did?” She fires back.

There’s a whole host of replies Lexa could give, all of them laced with the political idiocy that Titus likes to spout around the dinner table, elitist bullshit about how the Woods are magically superior in the traditional sense of their craft, how the Griffins are liberal pretenders, imposters and manipulators. But none of it has ever translated to Clarke in her mind. When she looks at Clarke she sees herself, a freer version of herself maybe, but still, someone stuck in this mess other people have made for them and she can’t knowing blame her for something she doesn’t have the capacity to do.

“No,” she admits, hoping she is right.

Clarke deflates in relief. She lets out a heavy sigh and sifts her fingers through her hairline, shaking out blonde locks until Lexa can see a pink streak, the colour glimmers slightly like a mirage in a way she knows isn’t drugstore hair dye and fixates on it. “I didn’t,” Clarke promises in a voice so soft it’s barely there.