The Cauldron
My esteemed colleagues warned me she would turn on me one day. Erenay, they said, this is a fairy story. It cannot last.
“Why?” I challenged them. “Because I am a witch?”
Yes, they said, but more to the point, because you belong to the empire, and because you are a Turk and a Zanj. Your father was a Zanj and his father before him. This peace is fragile, Erenay, so be careful. Be watchful. She will turn.
I didn’t listen. We were in love. The witch and her princess. The witch and her queen.
And our son. We brewed him together.
†
We made certain that he would be known on sight, from the metallic thread of his hair and the jewels of his eyes and his teeth like two rows of pearls. No prince of woman born, sprung instead from a cauldron and a witch’s spell. He was made of all that was rare and beautiful that could be bought or stolen or compelled: pearls, rubies, sapphires, silks; a great gushing goblet of blood ennobled by centuries of careful inbreeding; and above all the infinite desire of his maker, his mother, our queen.
The cauldron was mine. A gift from the smith of my village in Anatolia. New brides took these squat iron vessels into the houses of their husbands, but with my father’s blessing I carried mine to Vienna. In my academy years, I filled it with bread and coffee and flowers. During my exams, I made it bubble with acid, and with what proud delight did I convey it to my first posting in Bledawater!
When the princess of Bledawater came to see me in my cozy flat—the witch the empire had bestowed upon her, forced upon her—I let my cauldron steam with a little soup.
“Is it poison, Witch Irena?” she asked me. “Or a love potion?”
She smiled as she renamed me. I will never forget the soft black gleam of her eyes.
“It’s supper,” I said. And so: she joined me. And so: we fell in love.
†
Our son grew in my cauldron. His mother grew stern. There was war in Bohemia, in Carinthia; there were spies in our midst. Anarchists bombed Bledawater Parliament and the Hexentreffen in Porosz. Separatists sent a golem to wring the Prime Minister’s neck. My lover was afraid of the golems and persecuted their makers. Erenay, my colleagues said—witches all, in posts across the empire, sending their tidings by bird and wolf—it has begun, she is turning.
“Why shouldn’t I turn?” my lover demanded. “I am a descendant of Matthias Corvinus. I hear the voices of my people clamoring to be set free.”
“But you suppress them,” I said. “You condemn them and lock them in their homes. You draw false lines. These are my people, these are not. You define your borders with an iron wall and your country is now a cage.”
“If you don’t like it,” she snapped, “you can go back to Zanzibar.”
“Zanzibar?” I said, stung. “Because my father was a Zanj? No. My homeland is the steppe. The massif and the high plains and the salt of Tuz, the lake of glass.”
My lover scoffed.
Erenay, my colleagues whispered, your time is running out.
After that, they no longer spoke to me. The tentacles of empire withered and withdrew.
†
Here is what my lover’s chosen people began to say of me: “Her father was the devil himself, a blood-drenched Moor. Her skin is as dark as her purpose, her hair is the night sky when hope and stars are lost; her eyes are burning pitch. She is the lying, spying, fork-tongued servant of outside forces, of evil forces that seek to destroy us.”
Our nine months were at an end. As I lifted our son from the cauldron, my lover’s soldiers came to kill me. She followed, dressed in the style of Matthew the Crow with a laurel wreath set upon flame-red ringlets. She looked at me through a sea of silver pikes with eyes as hard as coal.
“Unhand him, witch,” she said.
Though it broke my heart, I did. She clutched him. She kissed him as if she were starving. She held him to her breast.
“My son! My heir!”
“For the rest of his life,” I warned her, “he will be a symbol of the obscene excess of the old regime. Each of his exquisite body parts could fund a nation. He will be hunted. You must take care.”
“You will be hunted,” my lover spat. “You, the Black Witch of Bledawater!”
My cauldron belched flame. We were gone from her in an instant, witch and cauldron, arriving smokily in the slums. For weeks, the golem-makers sheltered me while her soldiers combed the city. Then, combining our powers, we escaped together.
In Bukovina, we stole aboard a freight train to the East. After snow choked the rails, we walked and stumbled and crawled. We forded the Black Dragon River and circled west toward the steppe.
†
When the sun rose over the plain in midsummer, I lifted my daughter from the cauldron. Half fair, half dark, mottled and misshapen: my patchwork princess, made of all the scraps her mother trimmed from her brother.
She has her mother’s eyes. Her mother’s name. One day, I will give her my cauldron.
Little news reaches us from the dictatorship of Bledawater. The steppe sings its own songs. Our horses tell their own stories. Fairy stories, they do not linger. They are carried away by the wind.
In the cauldron, there is grief. In the cauldron, there is the memory of fire.
© 2023 Simo Srinivas
About the Author
Simo Srinivas lives in Colorado with their spouse and two senior tabby cats. Their short fiction has appeared in Wilted Pages: An Anthology of Dark Academia, Fantasy, Strange Horizons, and Archive of the Odd, among others. Find Simo online at srinivassimo.com or on Twitter, Bluesky, or Instagram @srinivassimo.