[Schwammerl: A dialect term for a big, most often edible mushroom used in Bavaria and Austria]

‘I’ll return with the Schwammerl,’ said the young witch to the old witch as she shouldered her travel bag. ‘Then you can show me how to cook the Schwammerl stew you always make when I’m sick.’

It was a peculiar little place that Kajsa was leaving behind – a wind-warped witch’s cottage hidden deep within a dark and swaying forest. The hut was so overgrown with moss, toadstools and oak saplings. It could very well have grown out of the fertile earth itself like a wayward tree that one day had decided not to sprout into branches, nuts and leaves. Instead, it had grown into a flameproof wooden chimney, snoopy windows and a cosy bedroom with a perfect little nook for old Edna’s respectable collection of herbs and cooking spoons. 

Kajsa had spent some of her happiest days in the cottage, learning all a capable young witch needed to know about potions, curses and the ancient art of befriending black cats and spooky owls on a midnight stroll. In their years together, she and old Edna had fought off sleep by hunching over strong fennel seed brew all night to nurse a litter of abandoned badger cubs. On other days, they had crawled through bramble bushes and stinging nettles all day, cuts and burns be cursed, to find the most timid and hidden among the Caesar’s mushrooms, boletes, and russula for a feast of roasted Schwammerl. 

But a hut was a small place for a growing witch, and the world beyond was wide and full of eccentric people Kajsa had yet to meet, whimsical places she had to see and countless faux pas and muddy puddles waiting to be tripped into. 

‘What will you do?’ old Edna asked Kajsa, although she didn’t need to consult her battered crystal ball to predict the answer.

‘Please don’t ask me,’ Kajsa answered. 

At the castle in the bordering kingdom, they grew pumpkins. Big and small, thick and thin, red and white, some to flicker like stars in the night, others for steaming pumpkin bread and viscous juices. As November came, so did the time for harvest. And Kajsa was right in the middle of it all. 

She hollowed out the pumpkins and carved bats in orange skin. She dried the black seeds and experimented with pumpkin innards for her new snuff tincture. And in the corner of her small, barren room, her black travel bag lay ready in wait for the next adventure ever since she had arrived. 

The month of December Kajsa passed in the deep valley with the trolls, who spent their days searching the forests for pinecones and their nights lighting them up with flames to listen to their crackling and blazing tales. Only during Christmastime did the burning cones speak of the white peaks of the earth, whispering the intangible vastness of the sky’s canopy right into the soul of whoever held them close. But still, Kajsa was already thinking of January and the icicles that would come with it. So lost in her impatience was she that she forgot all about the fire in her hand and had to drop the pine – just as the princess in the story ran into an ambush with her army – because she had burnt her fingers. 

‘You shouldn’t think so much of what is coming; your thoughts have to be here!’ said the old troll who was cooling her wound. ‘We’re running out of moss for your bandages.’

Kajsa only nodded. During all her time at the castle, she had looked forward to the pine legends. But now that she was here, she hadn’t listened to a single one all the way to the end.

Then January came, and Kajsa set off to marvel at the great icicles of the mountains. Her whole life she had dreamed of seeing them with her own eyes, ever since her father had told her about them when she’d been a little girl. He had spoken of a great battle for the sunlight where a whole legion had frozen into pointy spires. There was a spine-chilling graveyard now where the knights had once fought, tombs sharp and cutting as if their souls had been caught in place halfway up to the sky. They arched up so high it looked as if they’d missed the clouds by no more than a finger’s width.

But as she finally reached them and settled at their feet with a wafting mug of thistle-stinger tea to look up to their sparkling peaks, the earthy smell of Schwammerl suddenly drifted past her nose and the towers appeared cold and lonely to her.  

She wanted nothing more than to turn back, but she had set her mind to admire the beauty of the icicles for a month, and so she stayed and waited every morning to finally discover the magic of her childhood deep inside the glaciers. Her gaze, however, kept wandering straight through the ice’s transparent blue, drawn to frozen mushrooms in a forest far, far away. 

Finally, February arrived. Kajsa packed up her patched-up tent, shouldered her big witches cauldron and wandered southwards. She had been so busy with not thinking about Schwammerl that she hadn't even considered where she should go next. Half of February she spent roaming over fields and being afraid of making the wrong decision, wasting the month just like the last. Eventually, she met a kind carpenter who invited her to his home in a small village. 

The village laid in the middle of a barren steppe, and Kajsa couldn’t even find the necessary herbs for a simple sleeping draught. The carpenter, however, showed her how to plane table tops and saw chair legs to size, and after a week Kajsa had taken such a liking to this work that she almost became his apprentice. 

But then March came, and with it a terrible longing for the big city and the royal library, and so Kajsa left the carpenter and continued her journey. She had only been in the library once; when old Edna had found some baking books underneath her mattress that had been due for three decades and took Kajsa with her to return them. It had been the most beautiful place she had ever seen – overflowing with books as far as the eye could see. Rectangular and round books, those that only consisted of a stack of loose papers and others with spines made from pure gold.

She was so excited to let the precious pages glide through her fingers again and read about the darkest secrets of the preceding witches that she could hardly eat. At least until she reached the city, that was, and passed the countless tiny bakeries on her way to the library. They sold a delicious range of dough snails, from poppyseeds over nuts to witches’ snails with shimmering shells and minuscule eyes made of red marzipan.

Originally, she had planned to stay until the end of the month and broaden her knowledge on curses and counter-curses. But on her second day she found a treatise about the winter migration of unicorns and was so fascinated by the subject that it was mid-April when she shut the pink leather cover of The Horn Always Points Southwards with a dusty thud and left the city with a heavy heart and even heavier provisions.

In theory, Kajsa had an April appointment set with the reverend Potion Master – a sorcerer so old that with a pinch of luck you could still find the soot of the last dragon fire in his beard, even though the majestic creatures had died out a century earlier because of a nasty water flea. But Kajsa felt so haunted by her delay that she couldn’t leave from under her blanket on the morning of her first rest. Instead, she endured April by teaching herself to skip stones on the small pond next to her tent without any magic at all. As May came along, she managed eleven skips.

May was widely known as the witches’ month, and so Kajsa met all her friends for Walpurgis Nights in the Gloomeyed Forest as she always did. All year she had looked forward to the reunion and the dances and the medlar roasts. She could hardly wait to tell all the other witches of what she had seen and learned in the past months. But only few showed any interest in unicorn migration or the difference between cherry and apple wood, and although her snuff tincture was received with slightly more supportive sniggers. Kajsa started to worry whether she had spent the last months uselessly lounging around. The remaining nights, she practiced her counter-curses while her friends laughed and sang and danced next to her.

The lack of sleep caught up to Kajsa, and when June emerged she couldn’t think of anything but old Edna’s schwammerlstew. There was nothing she would have loved more than to pack all her things and head back. But Schwammerl time hadn’t arrived yet, and giving up was out of the question for Kajsa. Therefore, she headed eastwards, where rumours promised a war against the great wolves. For the tenth time. 

Time and time again, Kajsa caught herself searching for mushrooms in shady nooks and under tree stumps on the way there, but she didn’t find as much as a brown cap. When she reached the battlefield, she dug up her broken Wolfish knowledge to bargain for peace between men and wolves. She almost succeeded. The last hurdle before the signing of the contract had been a big feast, to which both parties and Kajsa, as the mediator, were invited, when she found herself introducing the menu for the evening to the wolves. 

‘Today we learn the terms for different kinds of meat,’ her teacher had said to her many years ago, when Wolfish had been on the timetable. Kajsa had shrugged her shoulders and spent the lesson scribbling rude runes into her book because she didn't eat meat anyway and didn't need to know whether she was rejecting rabbit or deer. Now, to her deepest regret, she couldn't, for the life of her, remember the word for goat meat. In fact, she couldn’t remember anything within the food vocabulary section – except for a single term. So, the wolves left enraged, assuming they had been served carrot puree for the peace banquet and resumed the fighting on the next day, just as Kajsa secretly slipped away. 

In July, Kajsa returned home to her family. The first week she did nothing but eat and sleep, and soon the world looked much brighter and more exciting. She went on long walks around her home, played with the pet monster and told her father all about her visit to the icicles, which – in retrospect – had actually been quite pretty after all. 

After her failed war excursion, she considered staying for the rest of the summer. One day she got up, wobbled drowsily into the kitchen, reached for her mug, and saw a small, brown circle on the table. She had put down her mug in that same spot far too many times. Suddenly, Kajsa felt choked by the visual illustration of her tentatively forming habits, like a dog stuck in an endless cycle of chasing its own tail. That very evening, she said her goodbyes to her family and embarked on another adventure.

The August adventure turned out to involve more rags than thrills. Kajsa had heard of a splendid cauldron crafter in the dungeons of the Old Wall. The cauldrons were adorned with runes and spells to ensure they could hold the right fire temperature all on their own, or that every potion had the same toxic green colour. Kajsa wanted to learn this art at any cost.

The first weeks, however, she was only allowed to wipe out the bottoms of the freshly poured containers and polish them to shine like a mirror, until she was finally called into the workshop. As fascinating as the craft had sounded in the reports and tales, as soon as she had found out all the tricks and turns to burn the runes nice and straight into the pot, Kajsa started missing even the wolves and their puree. She had since remembered the right word and would’ve loved to get a second chance. So, when she was shown the door because – lost in thought – she had created a whole set of cauldrons that turned every ingredient into carrots, she wasn’t even too sad about it. Now, at least, she had enough time to restock her herb stocks before Schwammerl time came.

September went by rather unspectacularly, since Kajsa got lost first on her way to the herb shop and then on the way back. She did, however, meet a couple of very friendly giant spiders who showed her how to mix sage soap out of the herbs she had brought along, and so Kajsa marked the month down as overall successful.

‘Tell me, how was it?’ old Edna asked as she stirred pepper into her stew on a fine October morning.

‘Exhausting,’ said Kajsa from her usual spot in the brown wing chair. ‘I don’t know why I even do it. Nowhere is as beautiful as here.’

Old Edna chuckled. ‘So, you will help me with chopping the wood this year?’ she teased.

‘No, I can’t,’ answered Kajsa. ‘It’s pumpkin time by then.’