As one of the few authentic witches at the magical academy, Ermine could tilt her head and see the fabric of how everything connected. One tug on the right thread would make things happen. Often, entertaining things. Which is why, when the headmistress expelled her for making the most beautiful, most annoying girl in the school’s hair fall out, she didn’t care. Flora had irritated her once too often and deserved it. She shoved her hissing, spitting cat up onto her shoulder, strapped her carpetbag to the end of her new broom, and flew away.
All went well for ten miles. Then the broom sputtered. She’d bought it for cheap off an untrustworthy-looking traveling wizard driving a caravan full of “self-washing cauldrons, guaranteed to do all the scrubbing!” They were likely to explode if you left them alone too long. Ermine had cast a doubtful eye on the broom and scowled. This caused him to reduce it to almost nothing.
She did not appreciate the sudden detour. Her dying broom swerved left, increasing speed as it plummeted through a thorn thicket. It zipped over a lake and headed for a dismal bunch of trees that hid a castle. Her cat dug his claws into her shoulders. She slammed on the brakes, which involved sticking her feet straight out in front and tilting the handle upward. It helped. Trailing clouds of smoke, she collided with a stone wall. The broom handle splintered in half. She careened to the ground. All she owned (or that owned her, in the cat’s case) scattered in all directions. The carpetbag sank in the mud. Her wet tomcat emerged from the lake, ready to murder someone. Ermine staggered to her feet and snatched up the sodden carpetbag. It tried to bite her fingers.
In a foul mood, wringing water from her hair, Ermine stormed around the wall, searching for the entrance. The infuriated cat stalked in her wake. The main gate appalled her. It had roses and hearts all over its bars. After kicking it open, she squished her way to the immense wooden castle door. On her way past them, she glared at the rose bushes full of crystal flowers.
She banged her fist on the door. The sound echoed inside the hall. The thirty seconds it took for anyone to answer it felt eternal. A wet puddle gathered on the step beneath her. Ermine shifted from one damp foot to the other before the door opened, and a haughty young man stared down his long nose at her in irritation. His blue eyes swept from the top of her hat to the drenched stockings lying in a pathetic heap around her ankles.
In an altogether unfriendly tone, he demanded, “What do you want?”
An accusing scowl on her lips, Ermine held up the two pieces of broom and pointed at his fence. “Your wall got in my way,” she snapped.
They glared at one another, she full of contempt and him with a lack of interest. Finally, he asked, “What do you want me to do about it?”
Drawing up to her full five-foot height, Ermine snapped, “Seeing as how your bloody wall busted my broom, I think recompense is in order.”
“Seeing as your bloody broom hit my wall, I think not,” the young man shot back. “I have more important things to do than fool around with a witch. Don’t you know how to steer that thing?”
Her scowl deepened into murderous hatred. He tried to slam the door, only to find her foot wedged in it. In her opinion, Ermine had given him a chance. She had taken the headmistress’ words to heart: most people are nice and do not deserve a hexing.
But there are always exceptions.
The thought she might curse him never crossed Rudolph’s mind. Despite his terrible cleverness, he could be rather dimwitted. His skill extended to inventing things without a practical purpose. His stupidity failed to take in the seriousness of a newly evicted witch wearing a hat that had seen better days and toting along a mangy old cat. He kicked at the beast as it shot past him into the house and regretted it when his expensive shoe fell off his foot in thin, tattered leather strips.
Ermine walked in without an invitation and stared at a ceiling decorated with wolves. She wore an expression of vague disinterest.
“Out! Get out!” he roared. Forgetting his lack of protective footwear, he stomped the stone floor and hopped in pain, swearing under his breath.
Ermine did the only thing she could do under the circumstances.
She cursed him.
Creating curses takes a little imagination, but nailing the details requires focus. The finicky nature of curses relies on the witch involved, and even when Ermine got angry, her curses still went exactly the way she wanted.
The castle interior grew dark. Smoke drifted from her fingertips, its eerie green glow reflected in her eyes.
“Stop whatever you are doing,” Rudolph snapped. Though he wanted to drag her to the door and heave her into the garden, he suspected touching her might send him flying. “Stop this instant!”
Her gaze flickered to the ceiling, where the magic curled and bubbled. It frothed in all directions, climbing the walls and across the ornate décor. It set the chandelier to swaying. To his disbelief and annoyance, all the roses turned to thorns, the poetic inscriptions to garbled insults, the cherubs to gargoyles, the hounds to beasts. He heard splintering in the garden and rushed to the door, horrified as all but one delicate crystal rose shattered into dust. He covered it with his hand, but his nails lengthened into claws. Rudolph felt his spine ripple and his hair grow at an unnatural rate. His remaining shoe split when an immense paw tore through it.
A glimpse in a cracked mirror revealed she had turned him into a beast. Ermine tucked her carpetbag under her arm, picked up her cat, and set off up the garden path. Rudolph stared at her in disbelief. She kicked open the gate adorned with serpents and stinkweed and passed through it.
Magic is unpredictable. It plays tricks on those who use it. Since Ermine hadn’t listened to anything her teachers ever said, she neglected to see the importance of leaving aloophole for herself. How else do you get out of a curse if you’re standing inside it when you cast it?
She walked through the gate and found herself halfway to the castle. For the first time in her life, she blinked. Rudolph stared at her from under his matted forelock, wondering what she would do next. Ermine squared her shoulders, pivoted on her heel, and strode toward the lake… only to be five steps nearer the castle. The cat snarled and leaped away.
Then, the most unlikely thing happened.
Rudolph burst into uncontrollable mirth. He laughed until he howled. Bent over double, he collapsed on the top step, his muzzle in his paws.
Mad enough to spit, Ermine flopped down on the road. She studied the gate with an annoying suspicion she could do nothing to change her fate. Her spells were so… well, permanent. They had a note of finality. Her scowl deepened. She thought over the exact wording of her spontaneous curse. If the last rose disintegrated before the Beast found love, the castle would remain forever under an enchantment.
Now, she just hoped he was too stupid to know how to end a spell: kill the witch who cast it. Curses often unraveled if you did that. This rarely happened, since everyone mad enough at the witch to kill her landed in her spell. Ermine cast a discreet glance at him. Her eyes narrowed. Until the arrogant numskull found someone to love him, she could not leave. It had seemed an excellent idea, but in retrospect, she regretted the details. She pursed her lips, got up, stalked over to his side, and sat down beside him. Ermine ignored his pungent dog-odor. “So,” she said.
Rudolph lifted his wolfish head, his gaze accusing. “So,” he answered.
They considered one another. She glared at him, defiance in her brow.
Rudolph frowned at her. “You didn’t graduate from the academy, right?”
Not the start of an amenable friendship. She bristled. From her smoking ears, he knew she understood the insult.
“You should have thought of that earlier,” she retorted.
Both lapsed into a sullen silence. It occurred to them they needed each other. Ermine needed him not to think the fastest way to lift the curse involved dropping a gargoyle on her head. She sneaked him a sideways glance and muttered, “Pesky things, spells. Unpredictable. No telling what might happen if anything should befall me. Might turn you into a frog…”
Rudolph arose and entered the castle, slamming the door shut behind him. Little puffs of dust eked out of the corners. He took the crystal rose.
Ermine found it unlocked when she went inside several hours later.
They passed a considerable amount of weeks together, in which neither spoke. They glowered at each other across the dinner table. A fine feast appeared if they sat down and disappeared once they left. She had left out a cleaning clause, assuming she would not have to live inside the curse, so cobwebs and moss grew in inconvenient places. Ermine used her broom to clear them from her path. Since the broom did not like it, it bucked until she threatened to set its bristles on fire. She noticed the severe lack of servants and assumed Rudolph had fallen on hard times, or bought the place cheap to conduct his experiments.
The cat gorged himself on the abundant rats that inhabited the stables and spent his days sunning on the roof. At night, he terrorized the two of them by stalking them in their sleep and pouncing on their heads. This produced roars of disapproval from Rudolph and angry shrieks from her. He felt bored. Castle life bored them all.
Worse, not a single person stumbled across them, because Ermine had closed all the loopholes with an annoying sub-clause: no one can see the castle except at night, under a full moon. Ermine had also specified in her curse Rudolph would be a beast every night except on the full moon.
This irritated him. Much as he wanted to break the spell, he also liked to tinker among his many inventions. This involved bendable fingers, which meant he had to be human. On the first two full moons, he rushed into the dungeon and spent all night doing things that produced strange noises, puffs of steam, and the odd cracking noise.
By the third month, he had shown no interest in breaking the curse.
Ermine sat in the tower, staring down at the road, which only appeared at low tide. Her scowl deepened at an unpleasant noise on the night air: singing. It took a full three seconds before she realized it meant a woman wandered nearby. And Rudolph had become human again. She scrambled to her feet. The cat tried to tear off her leg when she ran past him, but only shredded her sock. Ermine burst through the dungeon door and skidded down the stairs, scattering anxious spiders in her wake. She fell head over heels into the laboratory in a flood of fresh dust. Once it cleared, Rudolph peered at her around his bulbous machine.
“Girl… on the road,” she wheezed.
He blinked. Then he stepped over her and went upstairs.
Ermine yanked her wretched hat straight and followed him to the gate. They peered out at a countryside bathed in a romantic glow. A dainty figure skipped into view, her long curls unmistakable. Ermine’s lip curled in disgust. “Flora,” she snarled. Her golden hair had grown back.
The curse did its work. The gate opened, and luminous flowers unfurled, luring a curious Flora toward the castle that appeared. To avoid being seen, Ermine dove into the nearest thicket, leaving Rudolph alone. Ermine suspected, while she picked rose thorns from her teeth, that Flora would find him handsome, despite his personality. She had low standards.
The girl halted outside the magnificent garden and cast him a suspicious look. “Where did this castle come from?” she asked.
Dumbfounded by her beauty, Rudolph did not answer her. Had Ermine been any closer, she would have kicked him into action. The cat acted for her, by sauntering up to him and sinking his claws into Rudolph’s foot. Tears of pain in his eyes, Rudolph stammered, “It’s hidden… from all eyes but yours, on this fairest of all nights. Why do you walk alone, my beautiful lady? Are you not in danger of thieves?”
Ermine rolled her eyes so hard she nearly concussed herself.
Flora twirled a perfect ringlet and swung her basket to her other arm. “It would be for any mere maiden, but not…” She glanced behind her, leaned forward enough to tantalize him, and lowered her voice, “a witch.”
“A witch!” he exclaimed. She jumped at his irritation. “You?”
She pulled back, looking cross. “Yes. Why? Do you doubt me?”
Rudolph parted his mouth, but the cat gave him another warning swipe. He closed it so hard his teeth ground together, nudged the animal aside, and put on a dazzling smile. “I did not expect a witch to be so beautiful. Where are my manners? Please, come inside. It’s damp tonight. I would not want it to damage your beautiful voice!”
Her sweet laugh set Ermine’s teeth on edge. “Oh, I couldn’t. Father says not to accept anything from strangers. You could be a real beast!”
“I assure you, my dear,” he answered with a scowl toward the thicket, “this is my true face. But I will be honest with you.”
This did not sound like a good plan to the witch in the thornbush. She could not stop it, since the cat had lost interest and disappeared.
Rudolph stepped closer to Flora and lowered his voice. “I am under a curse. I can neither leave nor resume my true form. Will you help me?”
Flora heard gagging sounds but saw no one in the gloom. “How?”
Rudolph took her hand and leaned in. This forced Ermine to crane her neck to hear him, not that she cared. “As a witch, can you undo the spell?”
Alarm caused her rosebud lips to tremble. Flora looked past him at the castle, and the color drained out of her perfect cheeks. “I couldn’t,” she stammered. “I’m not a real… I mean, I dabble in less… uh, formal kinds of magic… enchantments are not my… um, area of expertise… but you poor thing. I can see your misery in your eyes. I wish I could help you, but I cannot stay. I was on my way to the next village and must hurry.”
Rudolph looked so deflated, Flora entered the garden to grip his hand. “I will inform the headmistress. She will know what to do. Tomorrow, she can come here and…”
“That won’t do,” he said. “The castle is only visible under a full moon.”
Flora’s face fell, then wrinkled in confusion. “Where are you going?”
He strode up the steps and opened the door. “Back to work,” he threw over his shoulders. “I must do what I can before dawn changes me into a beast. Please excuse me, but make yourself at home.”
She snapped her mouth shut and stamped her foot. “I shall do nothing of the sort! You can’t keep me here against my will. I am going home!”
“Then you shouldn’t have entered the garden,” he answered.
Silence hung in the air like a bad musical note. Flora’s lashes fluttered. She pivoted on her heel, stormed out the gate… and wound up halfway to the house. Worse, she saw Ermine standing to one side, her crooked hat impaled by thorns. She wore the same scowl as the last time they had met. Flora’s hands flew to her abundant blonde hair. She shouted, “You!”
It was the first in a long succession of shrieks that reminded Ermine of why she had hexed Flora. She screeched at everything, from the cobwebs outside her door to the mushrooms growing wild in the kitchen. Flora cried over the cat, pouncing on her in the middle of the night. She yelled at her shadow when it scared her on the landing, and at the black widow spider who tried to make friends with her. The loudest screams came when Rudolph reverted to his “normal” state. She locked herself in the tower and refused to emerge for days. The cat, Rudolph, and Ermine sat at the top of the stairs, listening to the racket from her room. It included her banging doors, kicking the furniture, complaining, and loud sobs.
Rudolph glanced at her sideways. “I take it you know each other?”
“Yes,” Ermine said, in the voice of someone who resents her existence only slightly less than she resents someone else’s.
His paw tapped the stair, his eyes knowing. “Hexed her, did you?”
The memory made her smile and kindled warmth in her shriveled heart. He caught her gaze and didn’t say another word. He didn’t need to.
Once Flora stopped shrieking, she started cleaning, which Ermine hated even worse. First, she tackled the library with a fervor that scattered all the bugs into the dungeon. She organized the books according to how pretty they looked on the shelves, opened the draperies, and let in the sunlight. Ermine found this torturous. She enjoyed wandering through a dank, dusty place, her fingertips sweeping decrepit covers until one begged for her to pluck it from its obscurity. There was no sense of mystery, wonder, or excitement in not knowing which book had chosen you until you carried it outside. Flora even took down and washed the window draperies.
Ermine found it downright disheartening.
Though Rudolph said nothing, he had a similar reaction to the overall cheerfulness of the place since Flora had arrived. He wandered past Ermine one afternoon, his waistcoat singed from experimentation, and saw her staring dismally up at the corner. “I liked that cobweb,” he said.
She sighed. He continued downstairs.
It did not end in the library.
Flora confiscated the remnants of Ermine’s broom and made it behave. She swept down every cobweb so many times, most of them gave up and stopped appearing overnight. The spiders went into a full retreat, leaving the corridors empty of their scuffling. This enraged the cat and made him even more disagreeable, especially when he found out Flora had washed his special pillow. He expelled it from his usual sleeping place with such violence it ricocheted out the door and wedged in a banister rail. There it remained. Flora decided if the mangy creature so hated her hard work, she would ignore him. This enabled them to reach a level of mutual loathing.
Flora left no nook or cranny untouched by a broom and a bucket of water until she reached Ermine’s room. She bustled in, singing a cheerful tune. Ermine sent her back out again, threatening a second hexing if she ever waved a wet rag anywhere near the windows again. Flora banged into Rudolph’s chambers instead. Disgusted by the mess, she set to cleaning.
Magic goes forgotten until you remember it. It lurks in the back of your mind and becomes so ordinary, you overlook it until you see something so obviously magical you can’t help noticing it. This happened to Flora when she found the crystal rose on the wardrobe, behind a stack of dusty books. It had an iridescent shine in her fingertips, glowing faintly in the gloom. She stared at it. It bore a heart in its center, a single drop of blood. A tiny fragment disintegrated when she put it aside. It made her ponder the spell, their solitude, her home, and how much she hated magic.
Her heart changed toward Rudolph. If she could love him, she might get to go home. It never occurred to her that if she loved him, she would not want to leave him. So, she tried. She found it hard to look past the rough, furry exterior and the snarl that ordered her out of his laboratory and away from his nasty, complicated machine full of its nozzles and twitching gears, but she tried. Beast Rudolph did not differ from Human Rudolph in terms of temperament. Both were rude, inconsiderate, and sullen. Flora found it easier to like him on moonlit nights when she could sit at the top of the stairs and gaze at his human form. But morning always came.
He made a few halfhearted attempts to woo her with poetry at dinner. Ermine left the room to gag but lurked in the hall, in case it worked. Not that she cared, but it was in her best interest if it did, and she needed to know things. She sat there, her arms tucked around her knees, chewing on a strand of her hair. The murmuring stopped, replaced by a squishy, wet smacking noise. A few minutes later, Rudolph emerged, wiping his mouth on his hand. Shooting her a horrified look, he shot through the dungeon door and shut it. Ermine emerged from a hiding place to sit on the stairs, glaring into the spider-less, dustless corners. Her heart felt hollow.
“I don’t understand!” Flora emerged from the dining room, giving out her trademark wail. “Why hasn’t the spell broken? I love him! Ermina, I do! I am nice even when heisn’t—he doesn’t listen to half of what I say!”
Suddenly aware of her presence, Ermine stared at her. “What?”
“I stopped trying to dust his laboratory! I left the garden alone after he yelled at me not to dig out the thorn bushes! When we kissed, I felt a real flutter in my chest.” She pressed a hand to her heart and sighed. “So why doesn’t the spell lift? I love him! I must! Why would it flutter otherwise?”
Flora scooted over on the step. Flora flopped down beside her and put her head into her hands, her golden curls spewing in all directions.
Ermine frowned. “Are you sure it’s love?” she asked.
Flora shot her an indignant look. “Yes! The headmistress says love is doing things for other people, and not wanting them to die a horrible death, and not hexing them even if they deserve it, and wanting for them to be happy when it doesn’t involve you. I feel all those things, especially the last one, but it didn’t work. You did something wrong with the spell.”
Flora shoved off the second step and went upstairs to bed.
An unpleasant thought slithered into Ermine’s head. She contemplated the corner, absent of spider webs. Her wording had been too specific, she decided, because he had to find love. Not someone to love him, but he needed to love someone else. And that someone had to be Flora, the most annoyingly cheerful witch ever born, whose sweetness made her toes curl, because she was the only choice. It would never work. Rudolph avoided her and wore a tortured expression whenever he heard her singing in the hall.
Flora’s irritating humming started again. Ermine covered her ears. Since she could only not hear Flora in the dungeon, she took a book and went there to read in the semi-darkness. Rudolph looked up when she entered, but continued tinkering. Ermine didn’t ask with what. She didn’t care. He didn’t ask what she was reading. He didn’t care.
They lived like this for months.
Flora never touched the crystal rose, just admired it, but as she stood in contemplation one day, the unruly broom in her hand rustling its bristles, the rose disintegrated. The drop of blood glistened before it disappeared. For once in her life, she didn’t shriek. The sound halted in her throat.
She felt tangible magic in the air as the curse lifted.
Had Ermine been paying attention, she could have tilted her head and seen the threads unravel and spin in new directions, but she wasn’t. She stood on her toes, her hat dusty and forgotten on a shelf. Rudolph had asked her to help. She peered over his shoulder as he fitted the last spring into his machine. His paw couldn’t fit, so she did it. It clicked into place. The house went silent. Roses replaced the thorn thickets. Magic crackled and sizzled in the castle. Neither of them saw Flora bolt out the front gate through the dingy window. They both stared at the machine.
Rudolph never noticed his hands return to normal. He did not feel the sensation up his spine when his fur retracted. The finished invention had his full attention. He took a breath and pushed the lever. At first, nothing happened. Then springs sprung, cogs toggled, smoke billowed, and clock hands turned. Ermine’s mouth twitched in a faint smile. He found it unfamiliar, since it had no malice behind it.
Aware of his shock, she asked in a casual tone, “What does it do?”
Not that she cared.
He shrugged. Did it even matter?
Their fingers touched. Without looking at each other, they held hands. Whether either noticed the curse as it unraveled, neither said.
Upstairs, a spider spun a web in the library, scrambling across the books and stringing silken strands in all directions. The drop of blood in the ash pile grew into a new crimson crystal rose. Carved beasts turned back into their original cherubs, and the scrambled words realigned into poetry.
But most of the gargoyles remained.
A suspicious-looking peddler driving a caravan wagon rumbled past the castle. It held brooms, self-cleaning cauldrons, and knickknacks. He saw Flora racing toward the magical academy, her locks whipping in the wind. A whirring sound sliced through the autumn air. He thrust out his hand and a broom handle flew into it, followed by its tattered pieces. They grew together in a whiff of green magic. The wizard threw it in the back among the other brooms. He drove away, the wagon rattling over the ruts. Cauldrons shook. Colored bottles full of potions tinkled together. Smoke leaked from the pointed hat stowed under the seat.
Neither Rudolph nor Ermine knew which of them had broken the curse first, and if you’d asked them, both would have denied it. They liked their life together. Rudolph enjoyed the use of his fingers anew. Ermine didn’t mind looking at him, after all. He shed less. She swore less. The delighted spiders spun webs in all the corners. The library fell into a glorious chaos, and the cat re-embraced his pillow once it grew disgusting again.
Otherwise, nothing about the castle or their lives inside it changed.
And that suited them both just fine.
© Charity Bishop 2025
