We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The Sapling Cage by Margaret Killjoy, a powerful story of trans witchcraft publishing with the Feminist Press at CUNY on September 24th.
Lorel has always dreamed of becoming a witch: learning magic, fighting monsters, and exploring the world beyond the small town where she and her mother run the stables. Even though a strange plague is killing the trees in the Kingdom of Cekon and witches are being blamed for it, Lorel wants nothing more than to join them. There’s only one problem: all witches are women, and she was born a boy.
When the coven comes to claim her best friend, Lorel disguises herself in a dress and joins in her friend’s place, leaving home and her old self behind. She soon discovers the dark powers threatening the kingdom: a magical blight scars the land, and the power-mad Duchess Helte is crushing everything between her and the crown. In spite of these dangers, Lorel makes friends and begins learning magic from the powerful witches in her coven. However, she fears that her new friends and mentors will find out her secret and kick her out of the coven, or worse.
It wasn’t hard to figure out how The Gate got its name. The gatehouse of the old giant’s castle still stood, a stone arch braced thirty feet up between cliff walls at the entrance to the valley. The rusted remains of an ancient iron door lay against one cliff face. We went through it into the town beyond.
A small market bustled just inside the gate. I tried not to let disappointment creep across my face. I wanted to see new things, amazing things. Nothing could compare to Port Cek’s market, filled to overflowing with people and goods from across the world. The Gate’s market, which was plenty big considering the small town, was full of livestock and tools and all things mundane and sundry. Nothing new. Nothing surprising.
At least I’d left the barony for the first time. Plus, I was headed to the highlands, where the fields were rich and the people were rich and it was all sunshine and good crops instead of mist and rain like we had in the lowlands. The highlands were paradise, according to every highlander I’d ever met.
Heads turned at our passing, which I suppose made sense enough. A coven will draw eyes anywhere, even without the spears and swords and shields we carried. It wasn’t polite for visitors to travel armed, pretty much anywhere. In Ledston, we’d let knights get away with it, or the occasional brigands or witches who were too stubborn to conceal their weapons, but we were never happy about it.
Whispers surrounded us, faint shadows of words. Were people afraid of us? Were they angry?
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The Sapling Cage
One man came close to us, clearly curious. He was young, maybe eighteen or twenty at the most, and he wore the plain garment of a working peasant. In his hand, though, he held a basket full of egg-shaped rocks. He saw me looking and caught my eyes with a smile. He was handsome. He looked so sure of himself as he strode past us in the market.
“Hold there, coven,” I heard, then turned to look for the source of the voice. “The market is closed to you.”
Three tax knights barred our path. New ones that we hadn’t seen before.
The witches fanned out into a line, facing off with the knights. Hands hovered uncomfortably close to weapons.
“You’ll be on your way, out and through town,” one of the knights said, her voice strong and unwavering.
“No tax knight will bar my passage,” Dam Alectoria said. She didn’t shout, but her voice carried unnaturally strong.“We have no quarrel with the Order of the Vine,” the knight said.
“Then we’ll buy provisions.”
“We have no quarrel, but I am under orders to prevent you from commerce.” She sat up straighter in her saddle and towered over the crowd.
“You see how those two statements contradict one another?”
“You may return the way you came or you may be on your way, but you will not linger and you will not trade.”
“Great Mother, you people are insufferable.” Alectoria actually raised her voice this time, putting a hint of magic into it, and her words echoed so loud they hurt my ears.
Some in the crowd cowered at the display of power, though many others seemed pleased to see Alectoria shout down the knights. To their credit, the tax knights maintained their composure.
“How can a woman claim to run a town she doesn’t live in?” Dam Alectoria said, her voice returning to its regular, still remarkable volume. “Whelps, come here, it’s time for a lesson. I will teach you how to lay a curse. What would be most appropriate? Pox? Clumsiness? Maybe a slow petrification?”
“I assure you, you will not survive the casting.” The knight’s two companions had crossbows leveled at Alectoria’s breast. I wanted to see Alectoria destroy them for that. I wanted to help her do it. After what I’d seen and heard the other knights of the same brotherhood do at Umbrin, I wanted revenge.
“Hey! You lice! Eat Ilthurian rocks!” A voice cut through the silence. I turned—I think we all turned—just as the young man with the basket threw one of his rocks. All eyes followed the stone as it struck the lead knight square in the forehead of her helmet. She fell to the ground.
With that, the peasant took off into the crowd, his basket still in hand.
The two remaining knights tried to charge after him on their horses, but the gathered crowd didn’t seem fond enough of them to clear their way.
“We aren’t going to help that man?” I asked Rose.
“He’ll be fine,” she said, pointing. I looked, and the rock-thrower stood on top of a nearby house, making rude gestures with one hand while tossing a stone with the other before sprinting away and leaping to another roof.
The fallen knight lifted her head and looked around confused, so Dam Ilma knelt down and whispered something into her ear. The tax knight moaned and closed her eyes. Her snores receded into the distance as we walked through town as quickly as Dam Lament could manage. There was no time to buy provisions.
We left the market behind and traveled a narrow path between rows of shanties before reaching the edge of town, well away from the road. We walked between plowed fields to the forest beyond.
We caught our breath in a small grove of fir trees alongside a wide and deep creek. Dam Alectoria set down the child’s casket from her back, then she and Dam Ilma paced a circle widdershins, chanting. I wasn’t sure what magic they worked. I wasn’t sure whether the casket was part of it, or why she carried a casket at all.
“We ought to have killed them,” Araneigh whispered to me and Hex. Hex nodded. “If you meet a predator in the forest, and it decides to hunt you, you have to kill it. Otherwise it’ll hunt you every time you leave the house.”
“We probably shouldn’t have confronted them at all,” Dam Alectoria said. Her hearing was uncanny. “I was just angry. I acted on that anger, which is rarely the right plan.”
“Who was that man with the rocks?” I asked.
“He was an Ilthurian,” Hex answered.
The Ilthurians, the outlaw knights, were a strange bunch. I’d only met two the entire time I’d worked the stables, but each had left an impression. They had their own individual codes of honor, and they spent at least as much time thumbing their noses at the nobility and the other knightly brotherhoods as they did righting wrongs and defending the weak. Instead of “Sir” or “Dam,” each took the title Ilthura, regardless of their gender.
I’d never been tempted by knighthood, not even when Lane had gone on and on about it, but watching that man today had been wonderful.
Dam Lament was shaking, and she clutched tight to the haft of the battle-axe hidden beneath her cloak. She paced the circle, muttering, leaning heavily on her crutch. She wasn’t casting magic, it took me a moment to realize, she was just trying to release her anger and fear.
“Alright, let’s not get ourselves over-worried,” Dam Alectoria said. “They didn’t try to hurt us.”
“No,” Lament said, “they just want to starve us out. That’s not better. We should have killed them.”
“Even if we’d managed to kill them without any of us getting hurt,” Alectoria said, “it would just make everything worse.”
“If we’re to join this coven, then it’s only right that you tell us what danger we’re in,” Araneigh said with an enviable confidence in her voice. “Why are tax knights trying to starve us out? What was the bad hunt my father spoke of?”
The four witches looked at one another, each in turn, silently determining who ought to speak. Then they turned to look at Rose, but she looked down, shaking her head, and Dam Lament spoke up.
“No one’s quite sure,” she said. “We’re trying to figure it out. It’s never been safe to be a witch, not really. Superstition says we’re evil, and some people put their faith in superstition. But lately, it’s been more than that. Since we broke up last Endsmeet, at least three covens have been destroyed by Helte’s tax knights. Each time, the pretense was some blight on the land. Two times it was just regular dead crops, but one coven was blamed for what your father called the colddead. Like the knights at Umbrin were starting to do to us before we left.”
“We’re convenient scapegoats for everything, ever, always,” Rose said.
“And you’re worried that the Order will be outlawed outright?” I asked.
Dam Lament nodded, and I beamed with pride about being right even as I realized the implications of what I was right about.
“It’s not going to help anything that this coven stopped a company of tax knights from making us the fourth before we picked you whelps up,” Dam Alectoria said.
A smile grew across Dam Lament’s wounded face. “They tried to arrest us, but we told them we wouldn’t live in chains. So they tried to kill us. We killed ten of them before they ran off.”
“They’re not entirely wrong,” Dam Sorrel said. Though I hadn’t spoken much with her, she reminded me of my mother—relaxed, hardworking, and often happily staring at clouds. “The thing we’re being blamed for, it’s a real thing that’s happening. The cold blight is everywhere. You saw it. When the knights found us, we’d just stumbled upon a dead forest.”
“Who would blight a forest?” Araneigh asked.
“All we have to do is find the cause of the blight, and then we can clear our name before things get worse?” I asked.
“It’s not as simple as that, whelp,” Dam Alectoria said.
“It could be,” Rose said. “And I hope it is.”
1
We set up camp by the creek when the sun was down near the horizon. A few of the witches and both other whelps went down to the water to bathe. I couldn’t join them, of course, so I sat with my back to a tree on the bank and tried not to stare.
Rose and Araneigh were beautiful, and I felt guilty for thinking so. I’d known for a long time that I was attracted to girls and boys both, but back in Ledston I’d figured out quick that I wasn’t nearly as interested in dating as most teenagers. Lane had talked about boys all the time. Myself, I just figured it would happen or not and there was no hurry. I’d wanted to kiss Lane, because I knew her so well, but she hadn’t shared my attraction so we’d just stayed good friends.
There were only two other people besides her that I’d wanted to be with. One was a sailor’s son in Port Cek. He’d been a couple years older than me, and his friends had called him Honey but I never learned his real name. He’d smiled at me when he thought I was a girl. He was all business with me once he figured out I was just a boy, and nothing ever happened between us. The Great Mother approves of anyone who wants to be with anyone, but he clearly hadn’t wanted to be with me.
The other was a girl who had passed through our stables and stayed a week last fall. Her name was Kenosi. Her mother was a merchant from the Kingdom of Oxley. She told me stories about half the world while we ate pears under my favorite tree, and she kissed me, then she told me to forget about her. Honestly, it had sort of worked. I’d mostly forgotten about her. Sometimes I thought that my crush on her had just been jealousy of her life—she was a girl and she was seeing the world.
I tried extra hard not to watch Araneigh when she swam. I didn’t succeed. I wanted to be with her. Or maybe I wanted to look like her. Maybe both.
She caught my eye as I sat on the bank, and she smiled, and my heart lifted in my chest for a moment, like I was falling. She looked away and I was myself again. I’d never felt that way before. I wasn’t sure I liked it.
When Hex took off her dress, instead of an undershirt, she wore a bandage that bound her chest down. I could do that. I had no breasts to bind, but if I wore bandages like that, then people would assume I had breasts and just didn’t want them showing or getting in the way. It didn’t solve the problem of the bulge between my legs, but it was a start.
“Want another chance to bring back dinner?” Lament asked me while I was watching the witches and thinking.
“I don’t know that I’ll do any better this time,” I said.
“We’re not going to hunt anything,” Lament said. “Just going to buy it.”
“Oh,” I said. “Sure. Why me?”
“Because you can pass for a boy, almost. No offense.”
“None taken.” My thoughts on the matter were far too complicated to be described as simply having taken offense.
“Just wear your hair different, in a topknot, maybe.That’s what boys are wearing right now?”
“Yup,” I said. I’d worn a topknot every day for years, while working the fields, only taking it down at home. As Lament watched, I tied my hair up, trying my hardest to make it look like I didn’t know what I was doing.
“Great,” Dam Lament said.
“Who are you going to be, then? My mother?”
She laughed. “I was hoping to be your older sister, but I guess, yeah, I probably look more like your mother.”
She went to a nearby pine tree and picked at the air near it as if she were picking fruit in an orchard. Once she had enough of the nothing she was collecting, she rolled it between her hands and smeared at her face. When her hands came away, she was the picture of unscarred beauty.
“There,” she said. “That’ll do until dawn.”
“You look amazing,” I said. That was the sort of magic I was going to need. “Why don’t you…” I cut myself short.
“Why don’t I do it all the time, disguise the wounds while they’re healing?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Then I realized it was a stupid question.”
“What’s the answer?”
“You don’t do it all the time because you have no shame in your wounds?”
“And no pride in a countenance unmarred by the weight of my actions, yes.”
I emptied my basket of clothes and Dam Lament led us away from camp. Not ten paces away, I turned and saw no sign of the coven. More illusion. I wanted that power as badly as I’d ever wanted anything.
Dam Lament walked without the crutch, once again sipping her potion for strength. We entered town on the main road, but no guard hailed us and no bell tolled our coming. A young man and his mother—or maybe older sister—drew no undue attention at all.
Excerpted from The Sapling Cage, copyright © 2024 by Margaret Killjoy.
