"Are you dumb?"

"Cut it out," I said.

"Elena's going to go apeshit."

It was true. What the hell, I'd already fucked it up so there was no point in moping. I kicked a rock and nodded at Jacinta.

"Damn," Jacinta whispered and bit her lip. "Maybe if we stick together the next few days she won't dare to hurt you."

"Yeah, I don't know about it."

"Or, if she tries to hit you and stuff, I'll go run and get your mom."

It didn't make me feel any better to think about running behind my mom's skirts to avoid Elena's wrath because then I'd have to confess I'd gone to see Mario. I'd get a good lesson from my grandmother for that. Not only had I discussed family business with an outsider, I'd put a man's safety before my cousin's quest for justice.

Don't get in a witch's path. Especially if you are the weaker witch. If you do, be prepared to face her. That's one of the first things you learn in my family.

Two days later, when Jacinta and I were reading comic books, sprawled on the hallway floor to keep our bellies cold, I knew I was screwed the moment I heard the click of Elena's high-heeled shoes.

I stood up as she walked down the hallway. Better to face her than to run. She'd catch me and it would be even worse.

"You little traitor," she said, jabbing a finger at my chest. "You told him. That lousy coward's left town with his bitch of a girlfriend."

At last Mario had grown a brain. That was nice. On the other hand, Elena was glaring at me.

"Elena, come on," I said, not even pretending innocence. "You can't just toss a maleficio into the air like that."

"Says who? Mario lied to me."

"What did the girl ever do to you?"

"Oh, so it's that whore that matters instead of me," she said, raising her eyebrows.

Jacinta glanced at me, then back at Elena, not knowing whether to hide or stay.

"No. It's . . . Elena, it's not fair. It's not right."

"Who the hell do you think you are?"

Elena's nails were long, lacquered and red. She raised them and scratched my cheek, making me wince. Oh, she was pissed.

"I'm going to cast such a spell on you," she said. "I'm going to make your fucking teeth fall out."

"Come on."

She opened her purse and took out the dried lizard, pressing it against my face.

"Lourdes," she whispered to the lizard and I shivered. "Lourdes, Lourdes."

I'd never done a maleficio before, but I'd read about it enough times to recognize it and damn, the lizard reeked of concentrated rage and power.

"Don't hurt her!" Jacinta screamed. She gave Elena such a shove that she tripped and fell to the floor.

Jacinta and I froze. We watched in horror as Elena lifted her head, blood pouring from her nose and tears in her eyes.

Elena wouldn't have really hurt me, direct bloodline connecting us and all. But that shove had altered the balance. If she had been pissed before, now she was furious. If she had meant to take revenge on me, now she was aiming for Jacinta. Poor little Jacinta who wasn't even real family; just the bastard daughter of one of the men.

Elena stood up, the lizard cupped in her left hand. She looked like an illustration in one of the old books, a scary convolution of dark, rigid lines.

"One," she muttered, wiping the blood from her nose with her right hand.

There had been a spell next to the illustration. It made me squint when I poured over the letters and tremble because it was not only a maleficio, it was my great-grandmother's maleficio. They said it was the kind of spell that drove her insane.

"I'm sorry," Jacinta said.

Elena pulled at a thread holding the lizard's belly close. "Two."

"I said I'm sorry. I'm really sorry!"

"Three."

Elena pulled at another thread. Jacinta was trembling all over and her bad eye, always darting in the wrong direction, had gone white.

I kept thinking of the letters in the book: black on white. Spidery writing extending to the margins and the words so knitted they seemed to flip in my head; turned white upon black, searing the world around me.

"Four," Elena whispered and a thread of saliva leaked from the corner of Jacinta's mouth. "Fi-"

Elena gasped. She choked and began to cough. She bent down, pressed her hands against her belly and opened her mouth into an O, spitting a long, black thread. The thread fell onto the floor, pooling at her feet.

The words poured from my mouth, loud and blazing white, like the chalk marks on the walls.

That's the last thing I remember. My mother said she found Elena on her knees and me standing next to her. It took three of the women to stop me from killing Elena.

Which I suppose proves two things: my mother was right about the late blooming, and don't get in a witch's path. Especially if you are the weaker witch.

Grandmother came into the city to see me afterwards and she nodded her head and gave me her blessing. It was all very odd, considering how happy everyone was and how much I'd hurt Elena.

As soon as I could I slipped out of the house.

I found Jacinta behind it, drawing stars in the dirt with a stick.

"What's up?" I said.

"Nothing," she muttered and kept on with her drawing.

I watched her trace row upon row of stars.

"You want to read a comic book with me?"

"No."

I scratched my head. "Nothing's going to change, you know."

"It is going to change," she said soberly.

Well, yeah. But I didn't want to say it just like that. Now I would get invited to all the gatherings and I'd never have to set a foot in a maquila, not even to sell spells because there'd be better places to hawk my stuff. I could even hex Patricia and twist Paco's dreams until he asked me to be his girlfriend.

"You're going to be just like Elena."

"No, I'm not," I protested.

Jacinta gave me a harsh look that made me feel like a cheat.

"Fine, crap," I said erasing one of the stars with the sole of my shoe. "Look, maybe I will be like Elena . . ."

"And I'll work at the factory and you'll never talk to me anymore."

"No . . . look, it doesn't matter. This whole bruja chica thing, it's inconsequential."

"Only it's not."

She returned to her pattern of stars, head bowed. At this pace, she'd draw the entire night sky behind our house.

My mouth felt dry and my skin was cold. It wasn't inconsequential and I already felt different. There was a feeling in the pit of my stomach that was half ache and half bliss.

"I'm always going to watch your back," I said. "You'll always watch mine."

Jacinta did not look convinced. She raised her head a fraction, like a deer peering through the trees.

"You sure about that?"

"Yeah."

"Even if we're not bloodline?"

"We are bloodline," I told her.

Jacinta smiled real big. She let me ride her bicycle that night while she sat in the back, holding on tight as I circled her mantle of stars.

"The Way Wind" is set in author Andre Norton's Witch World universe. In this alternate universe magic is performed (at first) only by female virgins; sex deprives a witch of her powers.

In much witchcraft lore, witches are involved with sex-love spells, magic worked to invoke or deny fertility or virility. Since the female witch was often an empowered single woman, in many cultures she was also seen as sexually alluring or intentionally seductive. By the Middle Ages, Western European Christianity equated witchcraft with serving Satan, an inversion of serving God. Sex, frowned upon by Christianity in general, was the Devil's turf, so witches were assumed to be lascivious. Witches supposedly sealed their deals with the Devil by copulating with him and frequently participating in orgies.

Still, the equation of virginity-or at least a life not dominated by love for a man-with magical power also has a place in witch mythos. Spinsters learn witchcraft in Mary Norton's The Magic Bed-Knob (1943), on which the 1971 Disney movie Bedknobs and Broomsticks was based. Elizabeth Burton's Miss Carter and the Ifrit (1945) has a similar theme. Gillian Holroyd in the 1958 film (and 1950 play) Bell, Book, and Candle sacrifices her magic for love. In Alice Hoffman's Practical Magic (and in the movie based on it) the sacrifice for loving a witch takes a different turn: if a woman of the witchly Owens family finds true love with a man, he is destined to die tragically.

The Way Wind.

Andre Norton.

The crumbling walled fortress and the dreary, ragged town, which had woven a ragged skirt about it during long years, stood at the end of the Way Pass. It was named l'Estal, which in a language older than legend, had a double meaning-First and Last.

For it was the first dwelling of men at the end of Way Pass along which any traffic from the west must come. And it was also the end of a long, coiling snake of a road stretching eastward and downward to Klem, which long ago it had been designed to guard. There could have been another name for that straggle of drear buildings also-End of Hope.

For generations now it had been a place of exile. Those sent from Klem had been men and women outlawed for one reason or another. The scribe whose pen had been a key used too freely, the officer who was too ambitious-or at times, too conscientious-the rebel, the misfit, those sometimes fleeing the law or ruler's whim, they came hither.

There was no returning, for a geas had been set on the coil road, and those of lowland blood coming up it might only travel one way-never to return. There had been countless attempts, of course. But whatever mage had set that barrier had indeed been one of power, for the spell did not dwindle with the years as magic often did.

Through the Way Pass there came only a trickle of travelers, sometimes not more than three or four in a season. None of them lingered in l'Estal; there was that about the place which was like a dank cloud, and its people were grim of face, meager of livelihood.

Over the years they had managed to scrape a living, tilling small scraps of fields they terraced along the slopes, raising lean goats and small runtish sheep, hunting, burrowing into the rock of the heights to bring out stores of ore.

The latter was transported once a year to a certain bend in the descending road, and there traded for supplies they could not otherwise raise-salt, pigs of iron, a few items of what was luxury to them. Then it was also that the Castellan of the fort would receive the pouch bearing the royal arms containing, ever the same, orders. And now and again there would be another exile to be sent aloft.

The trickle of travelers from the west were mostly merchants, dealers in a small way, too poor to make the long journey by sea to the port of Klem itself. They were hunters with pelts, drovers of straggles of lean mountain cattle or sheep. Small, dark people who grunted rasping words in trade language, kept to themselves, and finished their business as soon as possible.

Of the Klemish exiles, none took the westward road. If there was a geas set upon that also, no one spoke of such. It was simply accepted that for them there was only one place to be longed for, dreamed of, hopelessly remembered-and that lay always eastward.

There had been many generations of exiles, and their children had known no other place; yet to them l'Estal was not a home but a prison of sorts, and the tales told of the eastern land made of that a paradise forbidden, changed out of all knowledge of what it had been or was.

Still there was always one point of interest that stirred the western gate sentries each year-and that was the Way Wind. At the very beginning of spring, which came slowly and harshly in these gaunt uplands, a wind blew strongly from west to east, souring the pass, carrying with it strange scents. It might last a single day; it might blow so for three or four.

And by chance, it always brought with it one of the western travelers, as if it pulled them on into the line of the pass and drew them forward. Thus, in a place where there was so little of the new and strange, the Way Wind farers were a matter of wager, and often time not only, the armsmen at the gate but their officers and their women gathered, along with townspeople, when they heard the outer horn blast, which signaled that the wind herded a traveler to them.

This day there were four who stood on the parapet of the inner wall, not closely together as if they were united in their company, but rather each a little apart. The oldest of that company, a man who had allowed the hood of his cloak to fall back so the wind lifted tufts of steel gray hair, had the paler face of one who kept much indoors. Yet there was a strength in his features, a gleam of eye which had not been defeated, nor ever would. At the throat of his cloak was the harp badge of a bard. Osono he had named himself ten years before when he had accompanied the east traders back from their rendezvous. And by that name he was accepted, eagerly by the Castellan and those of his household.

Next to him, holding her own thick cloak tightly about her as if she feared the wind might divest her of it, was the Lady Almadis, she who had been born to the Castellan's lady after their arrival here. Her clothing was as coarse as that of any townswoman on the streets below, and the hands that held to that cloak were sun-browned. There was a steady look to her, as if she had fitted herself to the grim husk housing her.

A pace or so behind her was a second man. Unlike the other two he had no cloak, but rather dressed in mail and leather, sword-armed. But his head was bare also as he cradled a pitted helm on one hip. His features were gaunt, thinned, bitter, his mouth a mere line above a stubborn jaw-Urgell, who had once been a mercenary and now served as swordsmaster in the fortress.

The fourth was strange even in that company, for she was a broad-girthed woman, red of face, thick of shoulder. Her cloak was a matter of patched strips, as if she had been forced to sew together the remains of several such in order to cover her. A fringe of yellow-white hair showed under the edge of a cap covering her head. For all the poverty of her appearance, Forina had a good position in the town, for she was the keeper of the only inn, and any the Way Wind brought would come to her for shelter.

"What is your wager, my lady?" Osono's trained bard's voice easily overreached the whistle of the wind.

Almadis laughed, a hard-edged sound which lacked any softening of humor.

"I, sir bard? Since my last two wind wagers were so speedily proved wrong, I have learned caution. This year I make no speculation; thus I shall not be disappointed again. Think me over-timid of my purse if you will."