When I was a fresh young witch—newly come into my power and before I was Unbowed—I received a gift from my mentor.
Witches do not commonly give each other gifts, and such a gesture always comes with strings attached. This was no different.
The old witch gave me a doll.
Even then, inexperienced as I was, I knew better than to reject such a gift. I accepted the thing with gratitude we all understood to be false.
She was flawless in her construction, and the service she gave was well within expectations for a doll.
She obeyed my every command, yet she was never truly my doll. Her purpose was to control me, to tame those impulses of mine that gave my mentor worry.
She and that Council would make of me a respectable witch, partaking in games of manipulation and subterfuge as witches do.
Such violent retaliation for an insult as I brought to bear on a witchling—it was obscene, like something from the pre-Council era, they told me.
Witches plot, but they do not stain their hands with the blood of their kin, they told me.
I should feel fortunate, they told me.
I took out my contempt for them on the doll that represented the influence of my mentor and that wretched Council in my life.
Somehow, even in pain, she was perfect. She suffered so sweetly through every torment I put her through that I almost forgot she was not truly mine.
At first, the doll had the desired effect on me. She “safely” redirected all my violent desires toward herself, responding only with love, and I found that I was growing comfortable with the arrangement. I even felt affection toward the pretty thing.
Affection became desire. Desire compelled me to learn how deeply the old witch sank her hooks into the doll.
I readied myself to investigate through interrogation, with magical probes, even using the knife if need be, but I needn’t have prepared so thoroughly.
It turned out to be easier than I thought to find my mentor’s lingering touch on my doll. I only had to ask who she belonged to, and she replied, “I have been instructed to say that I belong to you.”
Words cannot express the surprise I felt at hearing that response.
The statement was likely the closest a doll could come to disobeying a command while following the letter of it, explicitly admitting that someone else was pulling her strings while still speaking the words she was compelled to speak.
This doll was trying to help me.
I followed up with more questions. There were countless blocks in what she was permitted to say, but she found ways to guide me. Selective silences, obvious efforts to avoid certain topics, and peculiar phrasings helped me trace the shape of the strings that pulled her.
A non sequitur of a warning caught my ear in particular.
“Take care not to die, Miss. Your spells might come undone without you maintaining them,” the doll said with a pleasant smile.
“Are you suggesting I kill the old crone to claim you from her?”
“Oh! A doll would be considered completely out-of-line if she ever suggested something so obscene!” She paused for a long moment, making uncharacteristically intense eye contact with me.
I’d been afraid of my mentor for so long, the thought hadn’t even occurred to me before.
Killing the witch who taught me everything I knew was…disappointingly easy. She was so comfortable with the idea that I was pacified—no longer a real threat—that she never saw it coming.
Then my doll became truly mine.
With the instructions from her former owner lifted, her behavior changed in ways both subtle and profound. She remained so very sweet and well-mannered, but she no longer made any effort to redirect my attentions from their natural course. She encouraged me, even.
“Fire,” she gently whispered into my ear, when a nosy Council Witch started poking in my affairs. I took her up on the idea and soon discovered just how brightly a house full of wooden dolls could burn.
“Poison,” she suggested, her arms slipping around my waist from behind, when another powerful witch earned my ire. My dear doll had a way of calming my fury so skillfully, and she happened to know exactly which shop that witch’s dolls visited to procure her tea.
“This one puts years of work into each doll and loves them as her own children,” she said, about a witch I’d heard was plotting against me. “But their leashes are loose and easily tangled.”
Oh, how broken that witch became when my magic turned her children against her.
Even when the plans are not hers, she carries them out with cheerful eagerness. This very morning she left to introduce an uncomfortably charismatic and increasingly popular witch to the spores of a particularly aggressive fungus I discovered recently.
Right on schedule, I hear the door open and my doll’s unmistakable, soft footsteps announcing her return.
Ah, my sweet Belladonna. To see her precious face again is to be overwhelmed with the same desire that first gripped me so long ago.
“My witch,” she says, her voice a pleasant song that chases away all worry, “you should hear the things people say about you.” In her meticulous manner, she stows in its proper place the tea she picked up while shopping. “Kind townspeople warned me that you are dangerous.”
“Dangerous? Me?” I raise my eyebrows in mock surprise. “You don’t believe such tales, I hope!”
“I think they might be right about you, Miss,” Belladonna replies, taking slow steps toward me now, eyes wide and innocent. “I think maybe you tricked me into hurting someone.”
“It’s true,” I say, standing to approach my doll, “that the message you delivered today will bring death to that house. Its witch and her dolls will soon find mushrooms sprouting from themselves in unsightly places!”
In moments, we are less than a hand’s breadth apart, and I can see my breath fogging her crystal-clear glass eyes.
In one swift move, Belladonna takes a step to the side and grips my shoulders, turning and shoving my back to the wall and then pressing her mouth to mine.
Her cool tongue slips between my lips, and she forces our kiss to linger until she feels satisfied. “You’re terribly dangerous, Miss,” she says after finally pulling back. “I need to be very careful around you, lest you do something truly frightening to me.”
One porcelain hand finds my throat, “if only I were dangerous myself, enough to be your match, then maybe I could be safe.” She squeezes, and my vision darkens. “Or I suppose we would both be in danger, wouldn’t we?”
I have grown far beyond anything my mentor could have ever imagined.
I have all but destroyed the Council of Witches.
Most importantly, I have my dear doll in my arms and in my bed, and both of us are going to be very sore in the morning.