Resolved

Resolved

The sun is hot on my neck as the grass grinds stains into my dress, a frivolous concoction meant for languid entertaining, not for toiling in the garden behind my home. I am not accustomed to performing these chores myself; someone else has always done it for me, this tiresome weeding and digging, but today I cannot sit in that house, alone, my son gone away from me. I plunge my hands deeper into the earth, manicured fingertips shredding, trying to calm this windstorm in my mind.

My son, my only son, doomed by The Dark Lord's desire to revenge himself on the families of traitors and enemies.

He was such a beautiful baby, blond and fair like myself, the pampered princeling of my household and of my heart. Hours I would hold him, watching him as he nursed and slept, sensing his life stretching beyond my own and resolved to make his future as bright and limitless as was within my power. My husband was disappointed that I never could bear any more children, and I pretended to mourn with him but, secretly, I rejoiced that my son, my firstborn, would never have to share his mother's love with another.

I have other secrets.

I can feel sweat pooling under my arms and running between my breasts; this dress is ruined and I am tired. I have been here for hours, squatting among weeds and ground covers with exotic names that sound like spells, Ajuga and Pachysandra and Hedera helix, digging barehanded in the ground like a starving peasant grubbing for roots. I have tried to cry, tried to shriek with rage and tear my hair and rave like Medea in agony. But dramatics don't become me and never have, and even today, when everything for which I have lived for eighteen years is surely doomed, I feel, instead of rising hysteria, a calming of my heart, a hardening, cold, yet fierce and purposeful.

My son is far from perfect, spoiled by my devoted upbringing. He has grown into a cruel young man, malicious and soft, diminished by the unprepossessing thugs he chooses for friends. But he has done nothing to deserve death, other than having relatives who have incurred the vengeance of The Dark Lord. And when he kills my son he will also kill me, and my husband, and what little remains of our family.

I will protect my son, or die trying. I am no longer young, and I have never tested my powers against an enemy. But his father cannot protect him any longer, and perhaps never could. It is my duty now.

So I stand, stretching the cramps from my back and knees, and return to the house. I pass for the last time through the hallways of my home, the only home I have known since my marriage. Marriage that sealed a future I willingly accepted, accepting also the allegiances of my husband, for the sake of convention and of my son.

Convention serves neither me nor my son any longer. I know of powerful wizards who will forgive me and welcome me, and who will teach me to fight. My family will be forced to disown me for their own protection, and I will never be able to face my friends again. And The Dark Lord, who never before considered me thus, will call me enemy and destroy me. But I no longer have a choice. I will not die in this home that was bought with complicity and appeasement. I will not die cowering and begging with my son wailing in my arms.

I climb the stairs to my room, to the bed I share with my husband, to the secrets which I don't. Falling ungracefully onto knees still sore, I dig in the bottommost drawer of my bureau, first purposefully, then frantically; has it been discovered, taken from me? Just as panic rises in my throat, I find it at last under layers of clothing unworn for many years, the long wooden box, my last furtive purchase before I turned my face from destiny and accepted luxury and tradition in its place. A cursed treasure that I could never bring myself to destroy.

The box still looks new, years of guilty concealment having preserved it even to the tiny inscription on the lid. It opens easily, so easily, and as I grasp the magic inside and hold it tightly, a cunning wind blows about me though the trees outside are still. My hand prickles and glows with the power that I repudiated decades ago, power I must now call back to myself and somehow learn to use.

My reflection glowers at me from the mirror above the bureau. I look a fright; usually immaculate blonde hair now snarled and sweat-damp, eyes darkened from anxiety, lines about my mouth and between my eyes that weren't there last year, before he came back. Muddied clothes hanging from my shrunken shoulders, clutching this wretched twig in my bloody hand, I look every inch the murderess witch I must now become for his sake. For the dearest love of my life, for my son.

For Dudley.