The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches — Chapter no 22

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

n the days before the Winter Solstice, while Ian and Lucie made shopping lists and bought enough food to feed the entire county, and Jamie and KenI set about the decidedly perilous task of stringing fairy lights all over the tall peaks of the house, Mika squeezed in a few extra lessons with the girls.

While there was no way to tell what effect the stress and nerves of Edward’s visit would have on the children’s control over their power, Mika knew from experience that the only way to maintain any control at all was to practice so much that it became second nature. So she set the girls the task of animating an enormous metal horse Mika and Ian had made out of wire. The sheer size of it made it a good progression from the little wooden dolls and paper swans that the girls had been working on previously; it was the size of a real horse, jointed in about twenty different places, and she asked the girls to work together to make it gallop up and down the pebbled driveway.

So far, the poor horse had been pulled in three different directions, distorting its frame terribly, and Mika had had to magically restore it.

Altamira, who had been in an unusually morose mood before they’d even begun, now abandoned the horse, flopped down on the grass beside Mika, and looked up at the house, which was half-decorated with fairy lights. “Nothing feels wintry and festive this year,” she admitted. “Ian forgot to post my letter to Santa. There’s no snow. And there are still sunflowers in the back garden!”

“He has posted it now, so Santa should still have time to make you a present,” Mika assured her. “The lack of snow is a pity, I grant you. As for the sunflowers, they do seem very stubborn for a flower that should not be blooming past August.” She tugged affectionately on the end of Altamira’s

light brown braid, and added gently, “I think it’s just difficult for us to think about anything but Edward’s visit right now, what with it being so close and all. But I promise we’ll forget all about it for one day and have a perfect Solstice together. If you’re lucky, I may even brew you a cup of very special fairy wine.”

“Fairy wine?” Altamira squeaked, her hands flying to her mouth.

“What’s that?”

“You’ll have to wait and see, won’t you?”

“Oh, I’m so excited!”

Rosetta and Terracotta joined them. “Excited about what?” asked Rosetta.

“Mika says she’s going to brew us fairy wine on the Solstice!”

“Is it really something fairies drink?” Rosetta asked eagerly.

“Is it really going to be wine?” was what Terracotta wanted to know, even more eagerly.

Mika bit back a laugh. “Like I told your sister, you’ll have to wait to find out. Why aren’t you two practicing on the horse?”

“That horse is stubborn,” Terracotta said roundly.

“You’re stubborn,” Rosetta corrected her. “We’re supposed to be working together.”

“We always got told not to cast spells together, remember?” Terracotta replied. “Before Mika, we never would’ve even tried.”

“Before the three of you, I’d never tried it, either,” Mika admitted. “In the Very Secret Society of Witches, we share spells with one another, but we never cast them together. The four of us are unusual that way. In fact,” she added, as a thought struck her, “one might even say we’re irregular.”

“Irregular?” Altamira repeated.

“Primrose always says I have the most irregular ideas,” said Mika. “It occurred to me that maybe it’s time to embrace that. We can all be irregular together.”

“Maybe we could have our own Very Secret Society of Witches,”

Rosetta offered.

“Yes!” Altamira cried. “Just for the four of us!”

“The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches,” Terracotta said, grinning. “What do you think, Mika?”

“I think it’s perfect,” said Mika, her heart too full to say anything more.

It was a beautiful moment, but it was also proof of just how badly she’d failed at the one promise she’d made to herself for almost all her adult life: don’t get attached.

She wanted that promise not to matter anymore because, after all, this place and these people were not like any of the others she’d known before.

They knew who she was. They knew her secrets. Here, she was accepted, understood, and even liked. So would it really be so bad to get attached?

Would it really be so bad to admit to herself that she really fucking loved it here, and she loved these people, and she wanted nothing more than to stay?

But she couldn’t stay, could she? This was Lillian’s house, and when she came back, she might not want Mika here. And even if she did, even if she decided that Mika’s lessons with the children were worth the risk of having another witch living in her house, who was to say that the others would feel the same way? In a month or three months or six, who was to say they wouldn’t decide, like everyone else she’d tried to love before, that she was simply not worthy of being loved in return?

These were thoughts that crept in when it was dark, and the sea was too quiet, and she got trapped on the hamster wheel of her own mind. She tried not to think of them in the light of day, but there were some things she couldn’t ignore even then.

Some irksome, devastatingly attractive, Jamie-shaped things.

She’d hardly seen him in the days since the woods, and they hadn’t been alone once. This could admittedly be a coincidence, but Mika was quite certain he’d deliberately pulled away and had gone back to avoiding her.

When they’d got back to the house that day, there had been something like panic in his eyes. Panic, and guilt.

They were adults. If he regretted what had happened in the woods, he could just say as much. So why hadn’t he?

Once the mayhem and festivities of the Solstice were done, she decided, she’d ask him.

And it did indeed promise to be full of mayhem and festivities. On the eve of the Solstice there was still so much to do that Mika’s mind boggled.

There was a winter-themed paper tablecloth for the girls to paint and decorate so that it could adorn the table on the day; they hung up a bird feeder and filled it with a winter feast of nuts and berries; and a large, fluffy spruce was lugged in from the garden and promptly decorated in the ugliest, most ostentatious manner possible. The house and garden were festooned with fairy lights, porcelain ornaments in the shapes of penguins and polar bears, and metal statues of reindeer that lit up when plugged in (or when spelled by a witch, thereby removing the necessity of needing them to be in range of a socket). Ken, having never had the privilege of an enchanted greenhouse before, was over the moon about harvesting all kinds of unseasonal herbs, veggies, and fruit; Jamie cloistered himself in the library to plan a snowflake hunt; and Ian and Lucie’s activities in the kitchen led to the entire house smelling wonderfully of apple cider, boozy pudding, a slow-roasting ham, and cinnamon. For her part, Mika helped whoever needed it at any given time, finding it the most natural thing in the world to fit into spaces that seemed to be made for her.

Circe, on the other hand, was most displeased. She was a sweet, placid, lazy creature who loved her routines, her companions, and, above all, her naps. She disapproved strongly of all the noise and activity, and expressed her displeasure by retreating to the relative peace of the library to sulk and demand Jamie’s attention.

At the stroke of midnight, the very beginning of the Solstice day, Mika set two different potions bubbling in her cauldrons to make the most of how much stronger each infusion would be on this extra magical day. (One of the potions was the fabled fairy wine, a treat that had by this point reached the proportions of a hallowed myth akin to Excalibur. She did not, of course, tell the girls that the fairy wine was just a sweet, syrupy lavender and stardust tea with added Solstice pizzazz.) She went to bed, then woke up early to bottle her completed potions and set two new ones going. By the time she got downstairs, she found that

despite the early hour, everyone was already awake, the promise of presents being too great to keep the girls in bed a moment past dawn.

But the atmosphere was perilously fraught. Mika walked into what looked like Terracotta and Jamie in a towering row, and it was only when Rosetta edged closer to her and whispered in her ear that she found out what she’d missed: Altamira had, happily, found the jigsaw puzzle she’d been missing for weeks. Terracotta hadn’t taken it after all. Unhappily, this discovery had come a smidge too late because Altamira had already placed a basket of rotting fish in Terracotta’s bedroom.

To Mika, this sounded like a lot of silliness and tomfoolery, the kind that could be expected from children of the girls’ age, but it seemed that Terracotta had then taken it a step too far. Infuriated by the injustice of being accused of something she hadn’t done, and by the persistent smell of rotting fish in her bedroom even after the fish had been disposed of, she had dumped a colour-shifting potion on Altamira’s head, turning the latter’s brown hair a lurid, ghastly shade of green.

Which was how Jamie and Terracotta had come to be arguing in the middle of the festively decorated front room.

“You get a lot of leeway, Terracotta, but I draw the line at you hurting someone else on purpose!”

“Pfuee,” said Terracotta scornfully. “It’s just her hair.”

“That is not a word, and that is not the point!” Jamie snapped. “Don’t ever do anything like that again! Are we understood?”

“No, we’re not,” said Terracotta, crossing her arms over her chest. “I’m not promising anything.”

Jamie, obviously, seemed to feel that such impertinence deserved some kind of clever and quelling retort, but before he could come up with one, he was distracted by the fact that Altamira had wrapped her arms around his waist and was bawling into his jumper.

This proved to be more effective than any cross words; Terracotta’s face transformed instantly. “Oh, no, don’t cry, Altamira! I was just so cross with you because my room smells horrible, but I’m sorry! We can fix it! At least, Mika can fix it, can’t you, Mika?”

“I can,” Mika said at once, crouching down to Altamira’s eye level.

“Why don’t you go wash off the worst of it, and then I’ll spell the colour away, okay?”

Once Altamira was gone, Terracotta looked at Jamie out of the corner of her eye and blew out a breath. “I know I shouldn’t have done it. I am sorry.”

“Are you?” Jamie asked shrewdly. “Or are you just saying you are because you think it’s what we want to hear?”

“I’m not terribly sorry right this minute,” Terracotta admitted, a little sheepishly. “I told her I didn’t steal that puzzle, but she wouldn’t believe me. But I went too far, and I know I’ll be sorry in a little while, so I didn’t see any harm in getting a head start on the apology part.”

Rosetta tried and failed to stifle a giggle. Even Jamie’s mouth twitched.

Mika, biting her quivering lip, managed somehow to maintain a straight face. “That’s very efficient of you,” she choked out. “If nothing else, you’ve

saved so much time.”

“Exactly,” said Terracotta, pleased.

“Come on,” Rosetta said to her, still giggling. “Let’s go make sure Altamira’s okay.”

As the two of them trotted out of the room, it struck Mika that she was alone with Jamie for the first time in days. He looked down at the tearstains on his jumper and gave her a wry look. “It was too much to hope we might have a day without some kind of dramatic upheaval, wasn’t it?”

“I’m sorry,” Mika said sheepishly. “I’ve been so determined to teach them that magic can be fun that I’ve obviously neglected the part where I teach them to be responsible with it.”

“They’re happier than they’ve been in a long time,” Jamie said, his voice

low. “Don’t be sorry for that.”

“Jamie, if you—”

But it was impossible to say anything more because it was at that precise moment that the front door opened and Ian torpedoed in, shouting “Haaaaapppy Solstice!” so loudly, it was doubtful anyone in the county could have failed to hear him.

So Mika left the conversation with Jamie until later, and went upstairs to fix Altamira’s hair and spell away the stench in Terracotta’s bedroom.

And indeed, once these torments were removed from their lives, the girls forgot they were cross with each other and launched themselves wholly into the festivities. Apple cider and fairy wine flowed freely, and Ian presented everyone with striped rainbow sweaters he’d knitted himself (and lest they worry that any of them might outshine him, he assured them, he had elevated his own outfit somewhat by adding a Santa hat to his head).

Gifts were passed around: books, video games, toys for Circe, new wool for Ian specially from The Lost Sheep, and much more. Mika, deeply touched by the lovely potted plants and gorgeous vintage journal she’d been given (“Your spellbook looked like it was running out of pages, so Jamie and I thought you’d like this,” Rosetta said shyly), barely had the presence of mind to hand over the jars of tea leaves she’d concocted for each of them, labelled with their names and a silly, whimsically inaccurate list of the ingredients that had gone into them.

Mika watched Jamie, more than a little nervous, and saw the way his mouth kicked up on one side as he read the words beneath his name on his label.

12 of the most attractive scowls

1/2 tablespoon of sandpapery laughter

the best heart and a whole lot of stardust

He looked up at her then, and the expression in his eyes took her breath away. Her heart stuttered.

Around them, as everyone else read their own labels, there was a chorus of sniffs, laughter, and even the sound of Lucie noisily blowing her nose.

Both moved and embarrassed at having provoked such a response, Mika ducked her head, cheeks glowing warm, and ran her fingers over the old, crisp pages of her new spellbook.

After that, it was time for the snowflake hunt: Jamie had constructed a hundred beautiful, delicate, unique snowflakes out of thin craft wood, painted them with iridescent paint in shades of silver, white, and pale blue, and come up with clues to point the intrepid seekers to where they’d been hidden all over the front and back gardens.

As he’d hidden the snowflakes himself, with Lucie’s help, Jamie and Lucie felt it was only fair that they sit out the actual hunt. Mika pointed out that their absence made the teams very uneven, so she joined Ian and Ken with the children’s blessing, and a happy hour was spent scrambling around the frosty gardens trying in vain to find more snowflakes than the kids did. (No, they didn’t try very hard, but Mika couldn’t help feeling that finding eleven snowflakes compared to the girls’ eighty-nine was a tad mortifying.) Pink-cheeked from the cold and a sense of well-earned triumph, the children rushed inside to lay out the tablecloth they’d painted, and then it was time for Ian’s labour of love: a deliciously salted roast ham; mashed potatoes; fries; a crisp salad straight from the greenhouse; roasted parsnips with a honey glaze; a handful of perfect, fluffy Yorkshire puddings; homemade candy canes; and two gooey, dome-shaped cakes with chocolate, sea salt, and, in the one that was only for the adults, a lot of brandy.

After all this, a food coma was inevitable, so the rest of the afternoon was spent watching snowy, wintry movies about lost sticks, penguins who befriended lonely boys, and other sweet, soppy stories. Then there were leftovers for dinner, board games late into the evening, and at last, when the girls were pretty much falling asleep on the sofa, bedtime.

Mika and the other adults stayed up a little longer, drinking far too much apple cider and eating an awful lot of boozy pudding, and when it got to the point that it looked like Jamie might go to bed before the others did, Mika decided it was time to take matters into her own hands.

“Can we talk?” she said to him, and made a swift exit from the room before he had an opportunity to refuse.

The instant Mika left the room, Ian was drunkenly, unapologetically ecstatic. He was about to say so when he encountered a steely, grey-eyed glare, at which point he decided it might be best to wait until Jamie had followed Mika out of the room before crowing.

Their trip up north should have led to something, but Ian still hadn’t recovered from the disappointment of Mika and Jamie coming home and proceeding to say nary a word to each other. It was downright obnoxious of them.

So when Jamie followed Mika out a moment later, Ian had every intention of trailing after them and eavesdropping from a decorous distance, but Ken and Lucie, those long-suffering bastions of good sense, would not let him. Ken even went so far as to threaten to make Ian sleep on the sofa if he persisted (when he knew that Ian’s back needed the perfectly springy memory foam of their bed!).

It was with a distinctly sulky air, therefore, that Ian sat back down to finish his glass of cider, resigning himself to the agonies of ignorance until the morning.

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