Jan Siegel - Witch’s Honour

‘What is happening to me?’ he whispered, and inside his head a voice that was almost—but not quite—a part of his thought answered him. It is the Gift. Don’t fear it. Don’t fight it. It will guide you .

The Gift. In Atlantis long ago the aura of the Lodestone had infected mortal men, endowing the earthly with unearthly powers. The Lodestone was broken and Atlantis sank beneath the waves, but the mutant gene had already spread throughout the world, and it was passed on, dominant, often dormant, warping all who abused it. They were called the Gifted, Prospero’s Children, the Crooked Ones, the Accursed. Lucas did not understand what had altered him but he felt its influence growing, opening his vision on new dimensions, twisting his thought. But this was the way to restore his sister, the way to redemption. There was no other road.

It was one in the morning before he left the nursing home, walking towards his Knightsbridge flat as if indifferent to the distance and the hour, until a taxi waylaid him, and persuaded him to accept a ride.

Fern was in her office about a week later when the call came in. She worked for a PR company in Wardour Street with a short list of stressed-out employees and a long list of lucrative and temperamental clients. She had recently risen to a directorship, partly because of her diplomatic skills with the aforementioned clientèle. When she picked up the phone she was in a meeting to discuss the launch of Woof! , a new glossy magazine on celebrity pets, and it was a few minutes before she absorbed what the call was about. ‘Sorry? Say that again? You want me to…No, I don’t think we should have Coquette, she goes to absolutely everything these days, it’ll be news if we can keep her out…His sister? And who’s he?…Sushi’s always reliable, provided we get the best…Sorry?’ By the end of a confused conversation, she found she had written down a name and number with only the haziest idea of why.

It was several days before she got around to using them.

‘Hello? I’d like to speak to Lucas Walgrim. Fern Capel…’

Presently, a male voice said rather brusquely: ‘Miss Capel? I’m afraid I—’

‘I understood you wanted me to call you,’ Fern said with frigid courtesy. ‘A clinic in Yorkshire where I spent a brief stay a couple of years ago got in touch with me. I was a coma patient there. They said you had a sister in a similar condition…’

‘Yes.’ Even down the telephone, Fern detected the slowing of pace, the shift in focus. ‘I’m so glad you called. I may be clutching at straws, but Dana collapsed under circumstances which I’m told parallel yours—’

‘Really? Who told you?’

‘A doctor was indiscreet. He didn’t name you, but I pressed him to put you in contact with me. I hope you don’t object?’

‘N-no.’ Fern wasn’t sure. ‘It’s just—I don’t think there’s anything I can do for you. I lost consciousness, I was out for about a week, then I recovered. It didn’t teach me anything about diagnosis.’

‘There’s nothing to diagnose. She just lies there, hardly breathing. Her heartbeat’s slowed to hibernation rate. She’s been like that for months. Since New Year’s Eve.’ A pause. ‘I wanted to talk to someone who’s been there, who knows . Perhaps I could buy you lunch?’

His determination was a tangible thing, reaching out, compelling her.

‘I’m awfully busy right now…’

‘What about a drink?’

Fern hesitated, then gave in. ‘All right. But I really don’t see how I can help you.’

‘Tomorrow? After work?’

They agreed a place and time, and Fern hung up, preparing to put the matter out of her mind. But it nagged at her, though she did not know why, and she lay awake far into the night, picturing the unknown girl lying as she had lain, death-white, death-still, wired up to the mechanics of life support, heart monitor, drip, catheter, for month after month after month…

III

The hardest thing was being back inside Time. I had spent so long in a dimension where no time passed, where the illusory seasons revolved endlessly in the same circle, never progressing, never changing, where day and darkness were mere variations in the light. I had spent so long—but ‘long’ was a word that did not apply there, for in the realm of the Tree there is no duration. A millennium or a millionth of a second, it is all one. The Tree has grown and grown until it can grow no further, and it is held in stasis, bearing its seedless fruit, bending the space around it as a black hole bends the stuff of the universe. (I know about these things, you see. I have watched them in the spellfire, the witches and wizards of science, poking at the stars.) I glutted myself on the power of the Tree, and was reborn from the power of the river, after she burned me in the pale fire of sorcery. And then I could not go back. I called the birds to me: the blue-banded magpies, the heavy-beaked ravens, the woodpeckers and tree-creepers. I sent them across the worlds to the cave beneath the roots where I and my coven-sister had dwelt, to bring me my herbs and powders, my potions and crystals. I bound tiny waterskins about the necks of the woodpeckers and taught them to tap the bark until it bled sap, and return to me when the vessel was full. The sap of the Tree has a potency I alone have ever learned: from it I can make a draught that will drain individual thought, leaving the intoxicated mind to think whatever I desire. Last, I summoned the great owl, wisest of birds, and told him to find for me the single branch hidden in the cave, wrapped in silk, the branch I had plucked long before with many rituals, and to bear it carefully back. I planted it in my island retreat, fearing it might not root, but the magic was strong in it, and it grew.

I chose the island because of my coven-sister Sysselore, who lived there once. In those days she was Syrcé the enchantress, young and beautiful, and lost sailors came to her with their lean brown bodies, and she turned them into pigs, and grew thin on a diet of lean pork. I hoped the island would be a place of transition, where I could reaccustom myself to the living world. The sudden racing of Time made me sick, so there were moments when I could not stand, and I would lie down on a bed that seemed to tilt and rock like a speeding carriage on an uneven road. Even when the nausea passed, there was the terror of it, of being trapped in the rush of Now, snatching in vain at seconds, minutes, hours which are gone before you can take hold of them. I could not believe I used to live like this: only the iron of my need and the steel of my will kept me from flight. But as Time moved on, so I became habituated to it.

There were more people on the island than in ancient days; humans have bred like insects, and the earth is overrun. Many have strange customs: they lie in the sun and go brown like peasants, and the women show their bodies to all men instead of a chosen few. I do not lie in the sun; white skin is the acme of beauty, and I am beautiful again. The fire purged me, the river healed me, and I emerged from the waters of Death as Venus reborn, a Venus of the night, star-pale and shadow-dark. I turn from the sun now, preferring the softer light of the moon, the moon who has always been a friend to witchkind. In the moonlight I am a goddess. But when I look in the mirror I see the old Morgus there still, the power-bloated mountain of flesh not eroded but compressed, constricted into a form of slenderness and beauty. The lissom figure is somehow subtly gross, and the loveliness of my face is like a shifting veil over the face beneath. That realisation fills me with a joy that is not of this earth, for I know that the dark within is strong in me, and beauty alone is a shallow, insipid thing without the power beneath the skin. And sometimes, in that same reflection, I seem to see the Eternal Tree, winding its twig-tendrils and root-tendrils in my hair, and blending its night with the shadows in my eyes. That is the sweetest of all, for with the Tree I am immortal, both human and unhuman, and I can challenge even Azmordis for the throne of the world.