25 YEARS EARLIER . . .
The night before the summer solstice, five girls hid in a treehouse. The shack, much too nice to call a shack, was sturdy enough, cradled in the arthritic branches of a three-hundred-year-old oak. Below, in Vance Hall, preparations for tomorrow’s festivities were finalised. It was more an excuse for the grown-ups to fetch up the dustier wines from the cellar two days in a row than it was a planning meeting. Their elders, quite some way past tipsy, truthfully hadn’t noticed the girls were absent.
Up in the tree, the youngest of the girls, Leonie, was upset because the eldest, Helena, said she couldn’t marry Stephen Gately from Boyzone. ‘I’m not playing,’ Leonie said.
A congregation of candles burned in the treehouse window, wax trickling off the ledge into lumpy stalactites. Skittish amber light danced up the walls, casting campfire shadows across Leonie’s face. ‘Why does Elle always get to pick first?’
Elle’s bottom lip quivered, her baby blue eyes filling with tears. Again. That was why Elle always got to pick first. She really could turn the waterworks off and on at will.
‘I think they can both marry Stephen,’ Niamh Kelly said, ever the peacemaker.
‘No they can’t!’ her twin sister said at the top of her voice. ‘How’s that going to work?’
Niamh scowled at her. ‘I don’t think we’re actually going to marry Boyzone, do you, Ciara? We’re ten!’
Helena said with authority, ‘When Elle is twenty, he’ll be thirty, so that’s OK.’
Leonie stood as if to leave the treehouse, her fists balled tight.
‘Oh, if you’re going to storm off like a kid, fine!’ said Helena. ‘You can both have Stephen. Poor Keith.’
Leonie nudged the trapdoor with her toe. ‘It’s not even that, Helena. It’s just a game. It’s stupid. Anyway, I said I’m gonna marry the Fresh Prince, so it don’t even matter.’
There was a moment of hush because they all knew what was really troubling her, for it troubled them all. The candles sputtered and there was a drunken hoot of adult laughter from inside the house. ‘I don’t wanna do tomorrow.’ Leonie said what she meant at last. She returned to the carpet and sat cross-legged. ‘My dad don’t want me to do it. He says it’s evil.’
‘Your dad is an eejit,’ Ciara bellowed.
Niamh, the elder of the Kelly twins by three-and-a-half minutes said, ‘In Ireland, we’re considered lucky.’
‘Is he saying my grandma is evil?’ Elle added. ‘She’s, like, the nicest person in the whole world!’
It was harder for Leonie; the first in her line, at least in living memory, to exhibit the traits. How could Helena hope to understand? Her mother, her mother’s mother and all the Vance mothers before that had been blessed too. ‘Leonie,’ Helena said with the absolute certainty only a bossy thirteen-year-old could possess. ‘Tomorrow is easy peasy, just like an assembly at school. We’ll line up, swear the oath, Julia Collins will bless you, and that’s all. Nothing actually changes.’
She really emphasised the ak-shully, but they all knew, in the honesty of their hearts, that it was a lie. There were so few of them left now, fewer with every generation. This life, this oath, wasn’t like when Ciara cut her fringe with a pair of nail scissors. That soon grew out, but there was no turning back from tomorrow. The bell had sounded, and playtime was over. Leonie was only nine.
‘I’m nervous too,’ Elle offered, taking Leonie’s hand.
‘Me too,’ said Niamh who then turned to her sister.
‘I suppose,’ Ciara agreed reluctantly.
Helena brought one of the candles into the centre of the filthy old rug. ‘Here, form a circle,’ she said. ‘Let’s practise the oath.’
‘Ach, do we have to?’ Ciara groaned but Helena shushed her. She wasn’t intimidated by the twins, no matter how much the elders swooned over their potential.
‘If we know it off by heart, there’s nothing to be nervous about, is there?’
Niamh understood this would help Leonie and chastised her sister. The girls gathered around the candle and joined hands. It’s hard to say how much was in their minds, but the girls would all later swear they felt a current flowing through their human circuit, sharing and amplifying their own latent gifts.
‘All together,’ Helena said, and they launched into it.
To the mother I swear
To solemnly uphold the sacred sisterhood
Her power is mine to wield
The secret ours to keep
The earth ours to protect
An enemy of my sister is mine
The strength is divine
Our bond everlasting
Let no man tear us asunder
The coven is sovereign
Until my dying breath.
And they all knew it off by heart. Every single word.
The following night, they were allowed to wear their midnight-black velvet capes for the first time. They smelled brand new, of the plastic they came wrapped in. Too long (you’ll grow into them), they lifted them up to stop the hems trailing along the undergrowth as they climbed Pendle Hill.
The procession snaked uphill into the heart of the thick forest that smothered the valley like a fur. They each carried a lantern jar to light the way, but the uneven path was a real ankle-snapper by night. Eventually, charcoal trees parted to reveal a moonlit clearing, a flat boulder at its centre. There was power in this place, any fool could feel it.
It was scary for the girls, of course, to be surrounded by all the elders. A hundred of them, faces half-hidden by their hoods. Scarier still to watch each of them, in turn, approach the stone slab to leave their offering. They pricked their thumbs with a silver blade and deposited a tiny red pearl of blood into the yew tree cauldron. Julia Collins, her matronly face peering out from under her cowl, summoned the girls one at a time. They drank from the chalice until their eyes turned black and, when that happened, she dipped her finger into the yew bowl and drew the mark of the pentagram on their young foreheads.
And as the clock dolefully struck one in the village far in the distance, they stopped being girls, and finally became witches.
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