“You’ve noticed, I suppose, that I avoid saying that.”
“Why is that?”
“Ah. You’re making me think about it.” Harriet lifted the amulet so it caught the candlelight directly, its two halves glowing gold and violet. “Witch should be a beautiful word, signifying wisdom and knowledge and discipline, but it isn’t used that way. It’s been made an insult, implying evil, causing fear. The word has been perverted.”
“Will it always be that way?”
“I can’t claim to know the answer. It would mean seeing rather far into the future, which is a magic I don’t possess.”
“And the cantrip?”
“We speak the cantrip to express our intent. The intentions of our kind have more force than those of ordinary people. If we’re successful, we make things happen.”
“So if we’re witches, a cantrip is a spell.”
“You prove my point. Words are powerful things.”
Harriet lifted the amulet’s chain over her head and bent forward to set the ametrine between the two electuaries. When she stepped back again, she watched Annis unclasp her choker and lay it next to the amulet. The jewels glistened in the flickering light of the candles, the creamy moonstone, the yellow and violet of the ametrine.
“Now,” Harriet said softly. She and Annis stood shoulder to shoulder. Harriet felt the power flowing between them and around them, the beginning tingle in her belly and her bones as she gathered her energy.
“Now,” she repeated. “Let us begin.”
She recited:
Stem and leaf and root and flower,
Witch’s blood and witch’s power,
All the wicked art unmake,
And, in its place, the good awake.
She felt Annis’s shoulder brushing hers, and her throat tightened with emotion. How long since anyone had touched her, beyond shaking her hand? Grace brushed her hair sometimes, but it was not the same. No one had really touched her in years. Despite the grim circumstances, it was a blessing.
This was not the time to think about it, though. There was work to be done, work already begun. She swallowed away the constriction of her throat and fixed her gaze on the amulet, waiting for the sign that her rite had been accomplished.
She tried not to think of the risks, but she knew they were there. Two powers were about to go to war with each other, with two innocent young people caught between them. It was a conflict she would have preferred to avoid. It was a conflict, she feared, that had been building for a long time.
She felt the faint tremor of Annis’s shoulder against hers. She supposed the child was anxious, and that was proper. She should be.
Harriet waited for the sign, but the ametrine did not respond. When she had waited fifteen minutes, twenty, with nothing happening, she repeated her cantrip. Annis stood steady beside her, watching, listening, her eyes glinting ice blue in the candlelight.
The waiting began again. It had happened before with difficult rites. The sea whispered through the darkness. Night birds called now and then. The breeze through the folly grew chilly, but the thrill of energy through her blood kept Harriet warm.
Annis was a different matter. Harriet became aware that the girl was shivering. Although it meant starting again, Harriet said, “Annis, get your shawl. There’s no need to catch a chill.”
Annis, her eyelids dragging with fatigue, nodded, and stepped to the side of the folly where she had left it.
“You can sit,” Harriet said. “You can watch from there.”
“But I want to know when it’s done,” Annis said, hesitating. She pulled the shawl around her shoulders and knotted the ends together. “How can you tell?”
“It’s easier to show you than to describe it,” Harriet said. She hadn’t thought about the cold or her tiredness until this moment, seeing them in Annis. Now her feet felt chilly, standing on the stone floor of the folly, and her neck began to prickle with the predawn mist. She found her own shawl in her basket and wrapped herself in it.
“One more time,” she told Annis. “Don’t despair. Sometimes it’s like this.”
Annis came to stand beside her once again. They were of a height, the two of them, similar in their dark hair, their slenderness, both with the prominent Bishop chin. It occurred to Harriet that this could have been her daughter, hers and Alexander’s. She had once longed for a daughter of her own, a daughter to love, a daughter to teach.
She straightened her shoulders. She knew better than to allow random thoughts into her mind at such a moment. She needed to