"Passion," Faye said throatily, smiling her old, slow smile around the group as she dripped wax on the road and stuck the candle in it.
"Is that a virtue?" Melanie asked skeptically.
Faye raised an eyebrow. "It's an aspect of womanhood. It's the one I want to celebrate."
"Let her have it," Laurel said. "Passion's okay."
The red candle burned like a star.
"Next comes orange," said Diana. "Who wants that?"
"I'll take it," Suzan said. The orange candle was close to the titian of Suzan's own hair. Suzan sniffed at it.
"Peaches," she said, and Cassie could smell the sweet, voluptuous fragrance from where she sat. "All right: beauty," Suzan said. She lit her candle in the conventional manner, with a match.
"Beauty definitely isn't - "
"Well, it's not a virtue, but it's something women have," Cassie argued. Melanie rolled her eyes. Suzan stuck the orange candle in its own wax on the road, beside the red one.
"Here, let me go next. I know how to do this," Deborah said. She snatched up the white sack and rummaged in it, coming out with a yellow candle.
"Matches," she said commandingly to Suzan, who put them in her outstretched palm. Deborah lit the yellow candle.
"Courage," she said, clearly and distinctly, tilting the candle so a transparent stream of yellow wax ran onto the road. Cassie smelled a clean lemony sharpness and thought that it smelled like Deborah, like courage. The flame of the yellow candle lit Deborah's dark hair and flickered madly off her leather jacket as it burned by the other two.
"Okay, green," Diana said, retrieving the bag.
"Me," said Melanie, and took the dark green candle. She was sitting right beside Cassie and Cassie leaned in to smell the wax when Melanie did. It was scented with something woodsy: pine, Cassie decided. Like a Christmas tree.
"Wisdom," said Melanie, her cool gray eyes steady as she lit the wick. She breathed in the scent for a moment, then placed the green candle on the road. The four burning candles formed a semicircle.
"Now blue," said Diana. Cassie felt a jolt of nervousness and excitement. Blue was her favorite color, and she wanted it, but she wasn't quite sure she ought to speak out. Still, Diana and Laurel weren't saying anything, and she remembered that Laurel liked amethysts and often wore purple. Cassie cleared her throat.
"I'll take it," she said, and reached for the pale blue candle Diana offered. She was very pleased to have it, to represent blue in the coven's rainbow - but she hadn't thought of anything to say. What's blue like? she asked herself, sniffing at the candle to gain time. What virtue do girls have that I want to celebrate?
She couldn't quite identify the scent, which was sweet but sharp. "It's bayberry," Melanie told her, as Cassie kept sniffing. "A smell with a history. The colonists all used to make bayberry candles."
"Oh." Maybe that was why it smelled familiar. Maybe her grandmother had burned bayberry candles - her grandmother had done a lot of old-fashioned things. Cassie knew what virtue she wanted to celebrate now.
"Inspiration," she said. "That's imagination - or like the flash of an idea, you know. When my grandmother was helping make my muse outfit for Halloween, she said that's what the muses were for: They gave people inspiration, the ability to think of new things, to have brilliant ideas. And they were female, the muses."
Cassie hadn't meant to make a speech, and she looked down, embarrassed. I didn't get the matches, she realized - and then she had an inspiration. Cupping her hand around the candlewick as Faye had, she concentrated hard, thinking of fire, bright leaping fire - then she pushed with her mind, the way she had with the doberman and with Sean. She felt the power leave her like a blast of heat and focus on the wick and suddenly a flame shot up, so high that she had to jerk her hand away to keep from getting burned.
"An idea - just like that," she said, a little shaken, and she dripped wax on the road to stick the blue candle in. The other girls were looking at her wide-eyed, except Faye, whose eyes were narrow and hooded.
Deborah grinned. "I guess we've got more than one fire-handler around here," she said. Faye looked even less amused.
"Ah - purple," Diana said, giving herself a little shake and taking a lavender candle from the bag.
"That's me. How did you do that, Cassie? All right; I'm going on with the ceremony. I just wanted to know," Laurel said. She looked at her candle. "I don't know how to get mine into one word," she said. "I wanted to do environmental awareness - sort of like, connectedness to all things. We're a part of the earth and we should care about all the other things that live here with us."
"What about 'compassion'?" Melanie said quietly. "That would cover it, I think."
"That's good; compassion." Laurel lit the purple candle.
"What's it smell like?" Suzan whispered as Laurel stuck the candle in the road between Cassie's blue candle and Faye's red one, completing the rainbow circle.
"It's sweet and floral; I think it's supposed to be hyacinth," Laurel whispered back.