The Hawkweed Prophecy

Book 1: The Hawkweed Series

by Irena Brignull

Genres: General Fiction; YA Wizards & Witches

Synopsis

Poppy Hooper and Ember Hawkweed couldn't lead more different lives. Poppy is a troubled teen: moving from school to school, causing chaos wherever she goes, never making friends or lasting connections. Ember is a young witch, struggling to find a place within her coven and prove her worth. Both are outsiders: feeling like they don't belong and seeking escape. Poppy and Ember soon become friends, and secretly share knowledge of their two worlds. Little do they know that destiny has brought them together: an ancient prophecy, and a life-changing betrayal. Growing closer, they begin to understand why they've never belonged and the reason they are now forever connected to each other. Switched at birth by the scheming witch Raven Hawkweed, Poppy and Ember must come to terms with their true identities and fight for their own place in the world. Enter Leo, a homeless boy with a painful past who – befriending them both – tests their love and loyalty. Can Poppy and Ember's friendship survive? And can it withstand the dark forces that are gathering?

Release date: September 6, 2016

Publisher: Weinstein Books

Print pages: 320

Sample

Table of Contents

PROLOGUE

The babies were born as the clocks struck twelve. As they finally slid from their mothers’ bellies, wet and sticky, their tiny faces scrunched up with the effort of being born, their fists clenched and eyes shut tight, a dark cloud crossed the full moon, and out in the forest the sky turned black. A bat fell from the air midflight. A silver salmon floated dead to the surface of the river. Snails withered in their shells, moths turned to dust on the night breeze, and an owl ate its young.

The spell had been cast.

This is how it came to be that two children, born at the same second of the same hour but on opposite ends of the land, changed places. It happened in the blink of an eye, as magic does. Too fast for anyone to possibly notice. The newborns spun through the ether, passing each other perhaps as they turned, and then arrived in different arms being handed to a different mother.

And when the two mothers—one at home on an old, sagging mattress, the other in a sterile hospital delivery room—first set eyes on those babies, they simply had no idea that it was not their own flesh and blood they were putting to their breast. They gazed at their bloodied, wrinkled infants and saw perfection. Miraculously, they recognized features and family traits that existed only in their imaginations.

“She has my mother’s nose!”

“My sister’s chin!”

“Your smile!”

A whole winter they’d been waiting patiently to see their child, and now they savored every detail. The bond had been made many months before. The love was already there. There was no chance of suspicion or doubt.

The witch, Raven Hawkweed, knew this. She’d been brewing and scheming and summoning every wicked thought and fear and feeling from deep inside her since the day her younger sister, Charlock, had told the coven that she was expecting a daughter. Until that day, Charlock had been cursed with boys.

No witch from their coven had sons. Not now, not ever. They stilled those babes in their wombs with a poison. The few who survived until birthing day were so weak and feeble that more than a few hours in the brightness and noise of life proved too much for them to bear. They closed their eyes and slipped back into the familiar darkness until they breathed no more.

But this time it was a girl growing inside Charlock.

Charlock had trembled as she told Raven. She had tugged on Raven’s sleeve, steering her away from the others. Her eyes were bright and her cheeks so red that Raven had put a hand to Charlock’s forehead.

“You look sick. Are you tired?” Raven fretted as she pulled down the skin beneath Charlock’s eyes to peer into them.

“I’m well, Raven. I’m more than well.” Charlock’s voice was almost breathless.

“Stick out your tongue,” Raven commanded.

Charlock opened her mouth to reply and Raven’s fingers instantly pulled out her sister’s tongue to examine it. Her eyes narrowed. Her forehead wrinkled.

“You’re pregnant?”

Charlock nodded.

With a slight shake of the head, Raven turned away. “I’ll prepare the mixture.”

“No . . . no poison.” Charlock had spoken so softly, almost a whisper, and yet the words thundered in Raven’s head. She stopped in her tracks, her whole being focusing on Charlock’s next words. “Not this time.”

Raven could feel Charlock’s smile. She could feel the warmth of it on her back and she knew what it meant.

“It’s a girl?”

“It is.”

The certainty hit Raven like a blow. A blow so hard that her teeth bit into her lip and she tasted blood. She pretended to busy herself at the washing tub. A drop of blood fell and mingled with the dirty water.

“A girl, Raven. At last. I wanted to tell you first. I knew how happy you’d be.”

Her sister had always been a simpleton, but for the first time ever, Raven hated her for it.

“You are happy, aren’t you?” Charlock asked.

Raven wiped the blood from her mouth onto her hand as she turned. “How could I not be?”

Charlock beamed. “I know—it’s a surprise. But think, you’ll have a niece and Sorrel will have a cousin.”

Spells were whirring inside Raven’s head, the kind that bubble with rage and desperation, and she had to use her breath to quell them. This was her sister. The sister she had cared for since she was born, to whom she had sung and told stories and taught to read. The sister who was so much softer than she, so weak that the edges of life knocked and bruised her, and it had been Raven’s job to mop up the tears. The tiny heartbeat of a niece she could hate. But not her sister. She loved Charlock, perhaps more than herself.

But not more than Sorrel.

Sorrel was a tall girl, all bones and angles, the spitting image of her mother—and Raven’s only child. Having endured pregnancy and birth once, Raven had determined never to try it again. One daughter was enough for her. Sorrel was all she needed.

From behind, mother and daughter were often mistaken for each other. Sorrel had inherited Raven’s crooked walk and hunched shoulders. They had the same long hair too, which they braided down their backs each night and again every morning. When they walked, the braids swung behind them like tails. Sorrel liked to chew hers, but the ends collected in her throat and it took Raven’s strongest brew to disintegrate the ball of hair that gathered there. Both wished their coloring was bold and dark like the witches in storybooks. But their hair was the dull gray-brown of mice fur, not black as coal, so it was only by length that they could distinguish it.

When her daughter was but a babe, Raven had presumed Sorrel would stand out, that everyone would be stunned by her talent and ability. It hadn’t taken long for Raven to realize Sorrel’s powers were not much more than ordinary. Taking a big gulp, she had swallowed the rancid disappointment, let it cramp in her stomach, and then vomited it into the compost heap by the old oak tree. As soon as she straightened, she decided to take matters into her own hands. What nature had denied her, nurture would supply. Sorrel would have to learn to be brilliant.

For Raven’s daughter was destined for greatness.

Or so the prophecy told.

It was centuries before that the die had been cast and the prophecy made—back in the day when witches flitted through the sky on whittled, wooden brooms and boiled their potions in heavy iron pots and when, if discovered, they were burnt at the stake on bonfires or tied to chairs and drowned in lakes and rivers. The coven that had the revelation was a hunted, persecuted bunch of spinsters and widows. But under the cover of darkness, out in the thick of the trees, together they decreed that the Hawkweed sisters, in three hundred and three years hence, would deliver a queen who would govern all of her kind.

The bones of those witches now lay lost in the earth under thorny brambles and hedges, their skulls full of sand under the water, their burnt ashes long since swept to the corners of the land . . . but their words lived on. The Hawkweed prediction passed from generation to generation until Raven and Charlock, as little girls at their mother’s feet, heard it for themselves.

One of their daughters would be queen.

Raven could still remember the thrill that had shivered through her when she first learned of the prophecy. The pulse pumped in her wrists and neck and the blood flooded through her veins. She was only six but suddenly she felt taller, older. Never before had she looked forward or back but had just been content to exist in the present. Now, suddenly, her future was mapped out before her and she already saw, far in the distance, signs with directions for her to read. Charlock had been too young to fully understand their mother’s words. She had looked at Raven with questioning eyes, wanting her older sister to explain, just as she had explained that cobwebs come from spiders, feathers from birds, and honey from bees. But this time Raven didn’t want to help Charlock. She didn’t want to discuss what their mother had told them. She didn’t ever want to talk about it. Her hopes and fears stirred inside her with the same steady rhythm with which her mother stirred her bubbling pots. She couldn’t let them splash and spill.

As the two sisters grew, Charlock overtaking Raven in height but not in speed of mind or skill, Raven brushed off Charlock’s questions just as she might crumbs from the table.

“Will she wear a crown?”

“Who?” asked Raven, pretending not to know what her sister was talking about.

“Our daughter.”

Charlock was yet to comprehend what Raven had grasped immediately—that it could no longer be “we” or “us” or “our.” The ropey knots of sisterhood had been unraveled and lay in coils around them, ready to trip them up.

“Will she have a castle?”

Under her breath, Raven muttered a spell and Charlock started to sneeze—once, twice, thrice. Raven handed her a cloth to wipe her nose. “Mother says you have to forage this evening,” she lied. “But wash your hands after picking the nightshade,” she added, to soften the falsehood.

“Aren’t you going to come with me?” asked Charlock in a voice scratched with disappointment.

“I have to study.”

“You’re always studying,” Charlock complained, turning away to mask her hurt.

It was true that Raven had turned from a wild, ungovernable child into the most industrious student. The coven was always remarking on her hard work. She had by far surpassed the other girls in her knowledge of plants and poisons, spells and curses. She read every book and text she could get her hands on, turning the pages well into the night. She drew diagrams of insects and reptiles, learning through her own experiments which eye of which newt and which leg of which toad would most enhance her spells. She knew which berry made your stomach ache so bad that your bowels broke and emptied themselves down your legs, and which caused rashes that itched and burned for days. There were weeds that made your eyes redden and water, toadstools that made the hair fall from your head, and snake venom that would take so long to kill you that you’d wish for someone to put you out of your writhing misery.

The more Raven learned, the less popular she became with the rest of the young sisters. More often than not, her success in lessons showed up their failings. She always had the right answer, and the other girls would roll their eyes and mumble curses that she would have to block and spin back at them. Without intention, Raven became a loner. She found herself an outcast from the circle of friends who laughed and played tricks and gossiped wickedly about the coven. Only Charlock wanted to spend time with her, and Charlock was the last person Raven wanted for company.

For all Raven’s studies were for one purpose: to ensure her daughter would become queen. And to ensure she herself became so strong and powerful that she could guarantee it. Without arousing any suspicion, Raven knew she must eliminate all other contenders. Killing Charlock would be the most obvious solution, but despite it all, she still felt a deep and ceaseless love for her sibling. Besides, murder was the way of the chaffs—the common people—crude and without magic. This was not the sisters’ way, and Raven was determined to be the best of witches—the mother of a queen, no less. She would concoct a spell that would astound any witch with its power and complexity. For witches judged not the act but the method.

So Raven dedicated her youth to finding the magic that would stop Charlock from giving birth to a girl. And it had worked. A drop of tincture measured to the exact milliliter and warmed to just the right degree, then slipped into Charlock’s tea, together with the right curse incanted at the desired second when the moon was at its slightest slither, and all of Charlock’s babies became boys.

But then the sickness struck. It came one winter when the ground was hard as stone and the grass crunched and crackled with a frost so cruel that the worms froze like sticks, then snapped in two. The coven told them it had been sent by the South, retaliation for a slight made against the eldest of that clan. For thirteen days they were plagued. Boils oozed with pus and blood trickled from their ears. Then it was over as suddenly as it began. Not a scab or a scar to prove it had even happened. Every woman and girl was just as they had been, as if they had never been sick at all.

Apart from Charlock.

She was pregnant—and this time it was a girl.

The rest of the coven celebrated the news. As with every prospective daughter, they lay Charlock down on the wooden slats and, with her bare belly exposed, formed a circle around her. They bent their heads over her, young and aged, handsome and ugly, all united by the same purpose.

Raven held the ring, suspended from a string, inches from Charlock’s womb. The ring, though centuries old, had been polished so it shone like new. It was the wedding ring of some hapless peasant girl who had thought to cheat a gray-haired, toothless peddler woman and who had paid for it with her fingers.

The witches started to chant. The whisper became a murmur, became a din. The faces had stopped smiling and were now distorted by their fierce intensity. The sets of eyes were like opaque glass, the mouths gaping open like wounds.

Then the ring began to move. Only slightly. First this way. Then that. Backward and forward, as if undecided. Charlock shut her eyes. Her body was tense with anticipation. The chanting was now a deafening percussion. “A girl! A girl! A girl!”

Raven hoped against hope. She said the words but willed them with all her might to be a falsehood. Then the ring seemed to make up its mind and it spun. Slowly at first. Then faster and faster until you could hardly see it spiral, it was so quick. Suddenly the thread snapped. The ring dropped, landing on Charlock’s belly, scalding her, hot as fire. The chanting stopped immediately. The room was silent. Raven’s mind and body hardened, both as still as stone.

Charlock opened her eyes and smiled.

CHAPTER ONE

The uniform felt like a straitjacket, secondhand and too small. Poppy’s father had learned long ago never to invest in a brand-new one. When she was a child, Poppy had been nervous about starting at a school, daunted even. Now, as a teenager, she was numb to all that. It was just the uniforms she hated—the idea that by wearing the same clothes, you’re on the same side, like a team, or an army, all with the same sense of purpose. More like inmates, Poppy thought to herself bleakly, as she regarded her reflection in the mirror. Maroon—the bright ones were the worst. It was like she was donning a disguise. But she knew she was different, always had been, and no uniform could hide that. For this was going to be Poppy’s eleventh school.

Poppy finally found her shoes in the bottom of a box that hadn’t been unpacked yet. Outside the window, litter and leaves were lifting in the air, leaping across the street, and she stopped and watched them for a while, wondering dispassionately how long she was going to last at this next place. A whole year was her record. Something always went wrong. Either intentionally or by accident, Poppy would break too many rules, cause too much disruption, or lose her temper, and disaster would strike. Like the time Mrs. Barker, her science teacher, slipped and fell, fracturing her wrist. Mrs. Barker had sworn Poppy had tripped her, and despite Poppy’s protestations that she’d merely looked at her teacher, this offense had been the last straw. Her father had been called from work, and Poppy had been expelled in disgrace. Other schools had been more kind about it, suggesting gently but firmly that theirs was not the right environment for Poppy and that she’d be better suited elsewhere.

John Hooper, Poppy’s long-suffering father, had tried everything. He’d sent Poppy to the most expensive, traditional boarding schools, to the most progressive and nurturing day schools in the country, and even once to a convent. (That had not ended well—a broken stained-glass window dating back centuries and a vast restoration bill.) But the last expulsion had been the worst yet—a series of prank fire alarms that unleashed the wrath of the fire brigade and the local police department.

Poppy remembered seeing her father emerge through the smoke. There was no rush or panic, just the slow, heavy footsteps of a man resigned to disappointment. In all the heat, his eyes were cold blue ponds; when he saw her, they iced over. On the way home Poppy tried to deny the pranks, but he didn’t want to hear it.

“Stop! Just stop!” he ordered.

“But I—” Poppy didn’t get a chance to finish.

“Not another word.”

And she knew he meant it.

They drove back home in the most itchingly uncomfortable silence. Poppy stared out of the car window at all the people busying themselves with the mundanities of life and wondered if a single one of them could understand her. Had any of them ever felt as she had? For Poppy hadn’t touched the alarm. And she hadn’t started the fire. Yet she knew as an inexplicable truth, deep down inside of her, that somehow she had been the cause of it.

She had been frustrated, angry, sad . . . the desperate urge for the day to stop had rushed up and out of her. She had needed a break, just a moment of change, and the next thing she knew, the alarm had been blaring and the teacher had stopped her tedious testing and kids were jumping out of their seats, and she had been outside in the fresh air, and for those next few minutes, she’d felt calm.

“I give up,” her father uttered suddenly after he’d pulled into their driveway. He was facing straight ahead as though he couldn’t even bear to look at her. They sat there, both as motionless as the car, and then the door was open and he was out, marching toward the house, keys clenched in his fist. Once he was inside he immediately fetched their suitcases and told Poppy to start packing. And that was how Poppy now found herself living in a new house, dressed in yet another school uniform, and about to start her eleventh new school.

Her father had left for work already. He and Poppy were beyond the usual niceties of father and daughter. No kiss on the cheek, breakfast on the table, no good luck or even good morning. Poppy knew he was trying hard just to tolerate her. He had already started his new job, the only one he could get at such short notice, one with an even lower salary than before. Their standard of living had been gradually reduced with each new move—but they had never traveled so far away from her mother before.

Poppy was more than used to her parents living apart. Her mother had spent so much time in and out of different treatment centers and rehab facilities that Poppy had stopped associating her with home a long time ago. Yet this move felt different, as though family ties would snap under the strain of all these miles between them. She packed her school bag in the quiet, empty house and admitted to herself how much she would love to turn and see her mother there, like other mothers, reminding her not to forget her books and to wrap up warm because it looks cold outside. And then Poppy felt like a fool for even imagining such a thing. She doubted her mom would even miss her. She probably wouldn’t even be conscious that she’d gone.



Melanie Hooper had been awake when Poppy and John went to say their good-byes. She had spent most of the last few years asleep or in a medication-induced stupor, but on this occasion, she was alert and even dressed in something other than pajamas. She was still lying on a bed—Poppy tried to think when she had last seen her mother upright—but the curtains in the room were open, and the light offered some hope in the otherwise dull and austere atmosphere.

John broke the news they were moving up north and Melanie shed a tear. Like a child, she repeated after John that it was “for the best” and she promised to be brave.

When John stepped out for coffee, Melanie grabbed Poppy’s hand. “What was it this time?” she asked feverishly.

“A fire,” Poppy mumbled.

“It’s not your fault,” her mother said urgently, squeezing Poppy’s hand more tightly.

Poppy couldn’t breathe; the sudden prospect of understanding had caught in her throat. She looked into her mother’s eyes and let her limp fingers softly squeeze back. Melanie’s nails dug into Poppy’s palm. Her lips pursed.

“It’s the devil in you,” she whispered.

Poppy flinched like she’d been struck and pulled her hand away just as her father walked in and passed Melanie a glossy magazine that she cooed over with delight. The intensity in her face vanished and her usual misty expression returned.

What Poppy didn’t know was that, after they left, Melanie woke in the night with tears running down her face. It took three members of staff to restrain her.

“My baby! My baby,” she wept in despair, and the tears kept falling until she was sedated and the drowsiness took hold.

As she fell back asleep, the dreams became hazy, less real—memories from a life long ago, lived by a person she could hardly recognize . . .

A woman with soft, blonde hair and pretty features was watching a baby as it lay in a crib. Herself and Poppy, Melanie realized faintly from the depths of her dream. She’d been watching Poppy for hours, she remembered, unable to pull herself away. The phone was ringing in the distance, but she chose to ignore it. She had dark circles beneath her blue eyes. She had pins and needles in both feet. Her lower back ached. She was tired—she’d never felt so tired.

Poppy, however, never seemed tired at all. Dressed in a pink vest with a bunny on the front that clashed with her dark, wild looks, Poppy stared back at her. Only a few weeks old and she showed not a trace of emotion—she seemed so in control, so independent.

A storm of thoughts tossed around Melanie’s mind.

She’s only a few weeks old and she doesn’t need me!

Is she normal? She’s not normal.

Why don’t I love her? Of course I love her!

Then, guiltily—what kind of mother am I to even think such a thing?

The next thought came out of her mouth as a scream. The words followed, words of shock yelled down the stairs, through the house: “John! John! Poppy’s eye just changed color.”

Melanie sprang to her deadened feet and, ignoring the pain, picked Poppy out of her crib, holding her at arm’s length so she could look more closely. Sure enough, one of Poppy’s blue eyes was now green and a black dot had emerged from it, a satellite to the pupil. She gave a shiver, quickly put Poppy down, and backed away from her daughter. Her husband was at the door, out of breath.

“What’s happened? What’s wrong?”

“John! You’ve got to come and see this.”

The pediatrician hadn’t been able to explain it. It was a strange phenomenon, but apparently babies’ eyes do change color, and Poppy’s had merely turned more quickly. Different color eyes were rare but not unheard of and, she suggested, rather an attractive feature to possess. Melanie smiled weakly, unable to express why she felt so unsettled by this development. The doctor, a young woman so polished that her hair and skin seemed to reflect the light and cast a shadow on Melanie, scribbled something down on Melanie’s notes.

“Are you getting enough sleep? Any sleep?” she asked with a smile.

Melanie wondered whether to come clean and then decided she was too exhausted to try to explain. “Sleep’s not really the problem,” she sighed.

It was only a white lie. Poppy never disturbed them. If she was able, Melanie could be having twelve hours of uninterrupted sleep a night. The brand-new baby monitor had never picked up a sound. So Melanie would lie in bed each night, the long, long minutes ticking by, wishing for just one cry from her baby.

The doctor added another sentence to the notes. “Isn’t your mom lucky to have you?” she said to Poppy in that voice grownups reserve for young children.

Melanie didn’t begin to weep until she was outside.

It wasn’t their last visit to the doctor, merely the beginning of a series of appointments that were to become more and more regular over the following months. Poppy did not smile. She didn’t laugh . . . or gurgle . . . or even cry. Other mothers envied such an easy baby, and their compliments made Melanie doubt herself even more. How could she ever tell them that Poppy wasn’t easy—she was different, strange, not . . . not normal?

Melanie would look into Poppy’s contrasting eyes and try to make some connection, but Poppy would stare back, unblinking, giving nothing away. Melanie loved her baby. She really did. But she knew it to be absolutely true that her baby did not love her. And no amount of baby books and teddy bears and musical toys seemed able to change that. The only thing that inspired a reaction from Poppy was the cats.

They came at night. At first just one, then a few, then more and more. They would sit on the roof and the windowsills and meow to the moon as if heralding Poppy’s arrival into the world. They left mice on the doorstep as an offering to her, even on one occasion a baby squirrel. Melanie screamed when she saw it and sent John outside to dispose of it. If ever a cat got inside the house, it would climb into the crib, and Melanie would find it curled around Poppy, encircling her head protectively. Poppy would look up at Melanie, and her eyes would be shining bright, happily almost.

So Melanie went back to the doctor with these various complaints, and the doctor would nod and jot things down and then ask again how she was coping and if she was getting enough sleep, until one day she prescribed her some mild antidepressants and sleeping tablets just to help her through this difficult time. Melanie wanted to protest, but the prescription in her hands felt like a relief. If she couldn’t find a remedy for Poppy, at least she could find one for herself.

So when. . .