After that the doors of the Nightjar coven were open to her, and she assumed her natural position among them as if it had always been there waiting. Still, some cultural differences prevailed for a time. The Nightjars shared the space with spiders, and Mistrial’s attic room had a ceiling bowed with silky curtains of webbing that bellowed softly with the changing air pressure of the house. She asked Valorie what to do about spider bites and Valorie’s curt advice was “endure them.” Evidently they all wore red spots across their body that were traces of this peacekeeping resolution. Outside the infested accommodations, life was fairly mundane. She made no real friends, and the only enemies she made were naturally inclined to make enemies with everyone so it all seemed highly impersonal. Most the time was ate up in working the gardens, which they all did a miserable job on. But somehow it was always enough to get by on. There was good store of fermented, pickled, dried, potted, salted goods as well as beans and onions and rows of big belly jars full of applejack to punish yourself with the world’s worst hangover. Any extra they traded for tobacco, which they all smoked to the point of personal torment. Kate ruled through a sort of libertine hand-waving. Any situation that would arise, she’d gesture to some principle of self-determination. If the negative energies persisted, she’d lay a hand on the offending party, and where she touched some strange affliction would take place. She could be extraordinarily cruel in the execution of her office, and Victory and Valorie told Mistrial that even Kate’s most preferential creature, the little girl named the Canary that was often curled up with her on the couch, reading a book, was not immune to its prejudicial execution. Apparently the Canary had a tendency to whisper secrets into nooks and crannies, and the witches, naturally being sensitive to such magical thinking, warned her against it. After enough relapses into this peculiar behavior, Kate Hex took her hand-in-hand and aged that girl’s hands sixty, seventy years in an instant - a trait that Mistrial confirmed on closer inspection. The Canary tended to keep them in long purple sleeves of her threadbare sweater, but she did indeed have little granny hands. “Ain’t gonna happen to me,” Mistrial said. The twins scoffed, “Everyone gets it,” they said. “Not me,” Mistrial felt certain, “Not a pushover no more. I’ll smack her like a dog in the street if she tries that one on me.” And at that instant she felt a finger run delicate down her wrist and pulled away in time to see Kate Hex ducking into the house. All along the part Kate touched coiled and sprouted up into a carpet thick with warts. So Mistrial changed her ideas about resorting to violence, and strongly insisted from thereon that peace should prevail upon the house of Kate Hex, in perpetuity, in accordance with God’s will. “So how’d you two get all fucked up? What’d Kate nab you for?” Mistrial asked. “What you mean,” they asked. “I mean, is that why y’all’re like, herky-jerky and all?” They stared at her with dark, hostile eyes, their involuntary vibrations narrowing down on her in unsettling fashion. Kate later informed her that theirs was a self-incurred affliction. Apparently their supernatural faith had led them to microdosing poisons. But it had become a bit of a sore subject with them so the matter ought to be dropped altogether. “There’s another thing you ought know about them,” Kate said, “they think they’re becoming werewolves. I have tried to beat this predilection out of their fool heads but the time I found out they’ll go so far as to drink rainwater from the footprints of wolves on the night of a full moon I said to myself there is no divorcing them from this stupidity. All I can argue is that it bears no trace of my fine stewardship.” With that in mind when Mistrial passed them by one day, and they looked up with porcine, distrusting eyes, still affected from her earlier remarks, as they raked muck in the garden, she floated the gentle suggestion that they looked a touch hairier around the neck and she was certain their teeth were different too. The effect it had on poor Valorie was heart-breaking, the poor bird lit up in a sort of full-blown aesthetic orgasm. After that they absolutely loved her and in turn she made a small profit here and there in trading them werewolf balms she made out of oil, some fixatives, horsetail, nettle, alfalfa, and purple dye that they painted on one another lavishly so they were always in some ways lightly purple. “Nice witchin’,” Kate winked, observing this strange transaction evolve, and Mistrial felt she had opened the door on something, and in her dreams in fact saw herself and her very image morphing into that matriarch. She still didn’t feel like a witch, hoodwinking rubes just being a small part of it, but she got up the resolve to crack this nut and begin casting spells in earnest. She inferred from Kate’s laissez-faire attitude that direct instruction must not be the path to witchcraft; that the system must necessarily be somewhat illiterate in process. She felt, too, that there’s power in being illiterate, having known a true illiterate who was most lively and more vigorously sociable than anyone she had met. With this notion coiling around in her head, she picked up on what she felt must be her next great advancement in the process, noticing a series of sigils around the mansion’s grounds. Without really understanding them she started on building her own sigils, and tested them on her attic spiders, eventually crafting one that reasonably kept them at bay, at least according to her trials, and that one she took to her skin with a needle and inked it in to her satisfaction. Thereafter she was the one occupant in Spider Heaven that didn’t get her eight a year (though the incidence of eating spiders in their sleep in that place was far higher than the global average of eight.) Suffering slightly less, she thought to herself, kicked back in her slouchy queen, that’s what it’s all about, and enjoyed the gauzy beauty of the living, breathing environment, with its delicate hunters and trappers that looked down at her with a thousand eyes, disappointed to no longer afflict her with big juicy welts.