The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches — Chapter no 5

CHAPTER FIVE

riday morning saw Mika driving right past the warded gates of Nowhere House once more. Backtracking, she wondered if this was going toF happen every time.

She guided the Broomstick up the pebbled driveway. This time, she drove past Ian and Ken’s cottage, past the barn, and stopped at the bottom of the little path in front of the actual house. Circe, who had spent most of the trip blissfully asleep on the back seat, now stuck her head between the two front seats, licked Mika’s ear, and proceeded to give the ivy and gables of Nowhere House a thorough once-over.

“What d’you reckon?” Mika asked her softly. “Does it seem like an okay place to live for a couple of months?”

And after that, she’d do what she always did. She’d go somewhere else, and then somewhere else, and then somewhere else after that.

Mika had barely had a chance to turn the ignition off before the front door opened and Ian flung himself down the path, with Lucie, Ken, and two young girls right behind him. Mika’s eyes went straight to the children: Rosetta and Altamira, the oldest and the youngest of the three girls. They hung back behind the adults a little, like they were either shy or unsure, but their faces were bright with interest and Altamira couldn’t stop bouncing up and down on the balls of her bare feet.

Mika was struck once more by the friendly, welcoming energy of the magic around them and the way it called to her. She could hear its song and she could see the gold dust in their hair, settling on the tips of their noses and curling around their ankles.

But where was the last of the girls? There was no sign of Terracotta, or of prickly, scowling Jamie, either.

“You’re early, my dear!” Ian said happily, beaming at her through her open window. “We weren’t expecting you until this afternoon. When did

you leave Brighton?”

“An hour ago,” said Mika.

Lucie and Ken glanced at each other in confusion. Ian screwed his forehead up like he was trying to make the math make sense. “I beg your pardon?”

“The Broomstick can get me places pretty quick,” Mika explained. “It’s a bit of a risk, so I don’t do it very often, but I didn’t want Circe and the fish to be stuck in a car for four hours.”

“Where,” Ian demanded, looking around, “is this broomstick?”

“I call the car the Broomstick.”

“Extraordinary,” Ken said from behind Ian, patting the bonnet of the yellow hatchback.

“I am a witch,” Mika reminded them, amused by their astonishment.

Had Lillian never showed them the kinds of things witches could do? “Isn’t that why I’m here?”

Lucie tutted at Ian. “Let the poor girl out of the car,” she said. “You’re in the way.”

Ian grinned at her as he backed away from her door. “Ready?”

No, Mika was not ready. She’d almost hoped Ian would stand by her door and keep her talking until next year.

As she got out of the car, her palms started to sweat and she was abruptly seized by the total conviction that this was, frankly, madness. What was she thinking? These girls were children. Meanwhile, she was a barely functioning adult. Was she really going to be one of the first grown witches to enter their orbit?

Christ, what if she became their Primrose?

The thought was so horrifying that Mika almost got right back into the Broomstick and bolted, but it was much too late for that.

Then, with impeccable timing, Circe nosed her way past Mika and bounded straight for the two girls. Their faces lit up.

“She’s very gentle,” Mika assured them. “And she loves a fuss. You’re more than welcome to play with her.”

Altamira squealed and flung her arms around Circe immediately, and Rosetta knelt on the path to stroke Circe’s back with a big, surprised smile on her serious face. Circe let out a contended bark, basking in the attention,

and the ice was well and truly broken.

Really, people didn’t deserve dogs.

“Her name is Circe,” Mika said, and remembered, somewhat belatedly, to add, “and I’m Mika.”

Rosetta tore herself away from Circe and politely introduced herself.

“And this is Altamira,” she went on. “Terracotta is, um, not feeling very well.”

“That’s a shame,” said Mika, privately wondering if Jamie had also been afflicted with this mysterious illness. “I hope she feels better soon.”

Satisfied that Mika had conveyed them to a place with excellent new friends, Circe trotted back to Mika’s side, tail wagging. Both Rosetta and Altamira took this as an indication that it was safe to come closer.

Mika glanced uncertainly at Ian, Lucie, and Ken, none of whom made the slightest attempt to intervene. She assumed this meant they wanted to let her decide how she wanted to handle her relationship with the girls, which was very nice and everything, but she hadn’t the faintest idea of what to do with children.

Okay, then. Maybe it was best to treat them like they were simply very small adults.

“Do you think you could help me move my stuff into the house?” she asked the girls. “There’s a lot, I’m afraid.”

The girls agreed to this with enthusiasm, possibly because they were just very kind girls or possibly because they were very curious about Mika’s possessions. Either suited her just fine.

“Let me get everything out of the car,” she went on, “and then you can show me where it all needs to go.”

Ian, who was peeking nosily through the car’s rear windscreen, ventured an opinion. “It doesn’t look like there’s much in here, my dear. Where, for

instance, is the pond we were promised?”

“Pfft,” said Mika, which made Rosetta and Altamira giggle. “I’m a witch! How long do you think my secret would stay secret if anyone could just peek into my car and see all my witchy possessions?”

At which point Mika proceeded to reach into the car and retrieve, in order: two quaint white wheelie suitcases made out of rattan; a scuffed trunk with the words CIRCE’S FAVOURITE THINGS embossed on the leather strap that buckled it shut; a collection of sturdy twigs; a cauldron made out of solid gold; her collection of tea jars; a box of teacups, teapots, homemade jams, dried herbs, and other kitchen bits; a smaller cauldron; thirteen wooden crates packed to the brim with books and potions; a spellbook bursting at the seams; a picnic basket filled with silver spoons, glass droppers, and tiny Pyrex measuring cups; a collapsible greenhouse that un- collapsed right there in the middle of the driveway and became an actual, full-size greenhouse crammed with pots, plants, and herbs; a stray sock; and, finally, a pond.

More precisely, a rocky, mossy pond that was a good six feet across on its shortest side, that seemed to be floating in the air, and that appeared to have somehow arrived, intact, with water, lily pads, and four koi fish swimming around in it.

Satisfied with a job well done, Mika dusted off her dress and closed the driver’s side door of the yellow hatchback with a final click.

“I . . .” This was about as much as Lucie could come up with. “Well, I . . .”

Her eyes very round, seven-year-old Altamira said, with perfect gravity, “That was some excellent Mary Poppins shit right there.”

Rosetta gasped. Lucie and Ken turned as one to Ian, who looked more than a little guilty.

And Mika, well, Mika just about died laughing.

“Thank you, Altamira,” she said, wiping tears from the corners of her eyes. “It was rather impressive, if I do say so myself. Now do you think you could show me where I’m going to be staying?”

Taking one of the wheelie suitcases by the handle, Altamira turned and trotted cheerfully to the open front door. Mika followed her, two crates of books stacked on top of each other in her arms, with Circe at her heels and Rosetta right behind them with the other suitcase in tow.

Inside, she left her shoes by the front door and let the girls lead her to the stairs, past the big, colourful front room, two closed doors, and the open door to the kitchen. The house was bright and airy and just a tad untidy, just as she remembered it from earlier in the week, and despite its enormous size, she was struck by how snug it felt. How cosy. Mika moved house so frequently that she’d never lived anywhere that felt well and truly lived in.

She’d lived in Primrose’s house for eighteen years, of course, but that didn’t count because it had always felt like Primrose’s house and, in any case, no one would have ever called it cosy.

But Nowhere House, for all that its name conjured up a place that was lonely and rootless, was anything but. It was, in fact, very lived in.

Giving the house a closer look than she’d had the opportunity to on her previous visit, Mika noticed that there were dozens of framed photographs on the walls of the girls at various ages from infancy to the present, the girls with one or more of the adults, and even a couple of lovely, chaotic, unstaged pictures of all three girls with all four adults.

Lillian, on the other hand, was barely present. Of the few photographs she was in (at least, Mika assumed it was her), she was on the edges, in motion and unclear, as if she hadn’t wanted to be included and had tried to get out of the shot at the last minute. Mika, who had not had any luck finding a decent picture of Lillian when she’d Googled her the night before, got the sense of a woman past middle age, with white skin, fair hair, and a slim figure, but that was about it.

“She doesn’t like having pictures taken of her,” Rosetta explained, correctly interpreting Mika’s confusion as they both examined the walls.

“She says it’s because of what she is.”

Mika nodded; she knew of at least two witches in the Society who point- blank refused to allow themselves to be photographed. She didn’t understand it, precisely, because it wasn’t like witches were ageless,

immortal creatures who were afraid someone might dig up an old picture of them from two hundred years ago and expose everything, but it wasn’t up to her to quibble with how other witches preserved their secrets.

At the top of the stairs, a large landing branched off into several rooms.

There was a single bay window set into the wall opposite the stairs, letting more light in, and Mika looked outside to orient herself. She choked back a giggle when she spotted Ian below, waving his arms slowly over the floating koi pond like he was determined to find the invisible strings holding it up.

“This is my room,” Altamira announced proudly, jabbing a finger through the open doorway of one of the rooms leading off the landing. Mika caught a glimpse of a rainbow-patterned play tent, a handheld game console, and an absurd number of stuffed animals before she was swept along to the doorway of the next room, a much more muted, calming room with piles of books everywhere. “This is Rosetta’s room. And this one is Terracotta’s.”

Mika noticed that Terracotta’s bold, bright room had Pokémon plushies, an intricate model train, and absolutely no Terracotta. She also noticed the mortified look on Rosetta’s face.

“She’s not ill at all, is she?” Mika asked.

Cheeks very red, Rosetta shook her head. “She didn’t want to come meet you,” she admitted. “She told me I could tell you as much, but I didn’t want to.”

“You were afraid it might upset me,” Mika guessed. “That was very kind of you, Rosetta. I promise I’m not upset. Terracotta can meet me whenever she’s ready.”

“Ahem,” Altamira cut in impatiently, her free hand scratching Circe’s golden head. “I still haven’t shown you the other rooms!”

“Woof,” Circe agreed.

“I’m so sorry,” said Mika at once. “Go ahead.”

“Well, that one is Lucie’s room, and that one is Jamie’s,” Altamira went on importantly. The doors of both rooms were only slightly ajar, so Mika couldn’t really see what was inside. “That’s the door to the upstairs

bathroom. There’s another one downstairs. And this,” she added, bouncing on the balls of her feet again, “is where you’ll be staying!”

The source of Altamira’s excitement was a white door at the end of the hallway. She opened it to show them a short flight of stairs, which presumably led up to a loft or attic.

“I’ll be in the attic?” Mika asked, thrilled with this turn of events. “I’ve never lived in an attic before! How romantic. A witch in an attic!”

“It doesn’t sound romantic to me,” said Altamira doubtfully.

But there was a tiny smile on Rosetta’s serious face. “I was afraid you might think you’d been relegated to playing the part of the madwoman in the attic,” she said to Mika.

“It didn’t even cross my mind,” said Mika, grinning. “I do appreciate a child with a literary turn of mind, Rosetta!”

With an enthusiastic bark, Circe decided she would be the first to examine their new room and vanished up the stairs. Mika let the girls go next, trailing her suitcases behind them, and she followed with the boxes.

The attic was a big space, enormous compared to the spaces she was used to living in. It spanned what must have been half the house, with the ceiling starting high at the peak of the roof and sloping down to the opposite wall. It was spotlessly clean, with polished wooden beams, hardwood floorboards, and walls painted a warm, sunny yellow. A fluffy cream rug covered part of the floor. Whatever had been stored up here before had obviously been moved because there wasn’t a single box, cobweb, or dusty treadmill to be seen. Instead, there was a desk, a rocking chair, a chest of drawers, a nightstand, and a double bed made up neatly with crisp white sheets, four pillows, and a duvet printed with a garden of large, clustered white daisies on a yellow background. It was simple, with all the essentials, leaving her plenty of space for her own possessions and the opportunity to decorate however she wanted. The faint scents of paint, new furniture, and citrus cleaning spray lingered, which meant the room must have only been sorted out the previous day, and Mika was touched by how much trouble they’d gone to.

But the real beauty of the attic was the balcony. It was beyond a pair of double-glazed glass doors set into the back wall of the room, both of which had been left wide open to let in the cold and the sharp, sea-salt air. As soon as she saw it, Mika dashed across the attic to get a better look. The balcony was small, with a busy little hive of bees thriving in the gables above and a simple white iron railing around the floorboards. The view was incredible.

If she looked left or right, she could see over the trees and along the coast, where the occasional house and boat broke up a landscape of yellowish heathery dunes. Ahead, she could see the back garden, with the glorious sunflowers and the girls’ tree house, and then, over the hedge, the wild dunes, the shrubs of vivid blue sea holly, the trail down to the empty white beach, and the sea itself.

“This is perfect,” she breathed, turning back to the waiting girls and stopping in her tracks.

Altamira was hovering about a foot off the ground. The gold dust of magic around her was brighter than it had been before. She’d obviously sat down at some point in the past few minutes because she was now floating in a cross-legged position, her chin propped on her hand as she waited impatiently for Mika to finish looking around the room. She didn’t seem to have noticed that she’d left the floor behind. Rosetta, also watching Mika, hadn’t noticed it, either.

Well, this wasn’t good. Mika had been five years old the first time she’d floated off the ground by accident. The next day, she’d had a new nanny and a rare unscheduled visit from Primrose.

It hadn’t happened much after that. She’d learned to quickly control that particular bit of magical mischief.

She’d also been alone. There had been much less magic around.

Altamira, just seven years old, in a house with two other young witches and more magic than Mika had ever seen in one place, didn’t stand a chance.

But that was why she was here, wasn’t it?

“Can you get yourself back down to the floor, Altamira?” Mika asked.

Rosetta turned, surprised. Altamira blinked, looked around, and burst into delighted laughter. “I’m floating! Look, Rosetta!”

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to be very boring and grown-up for a minute,” Mika said apologetically. “I know you’re having fun, but levitation isn’t safe if you can’t control it.”

Altamira gave her a puzzled look. “You mean because I might fall? But I’m only a little bit off the floor anyway. It won’t hurt.”

“It’s more about whether or not you can get yourself back down. Can you?”

Altamira uncrossed her legs and wiggled them. Nothing. She closed her eyes and screwed her face up, concentrating. Nothing.

“Have you ever cast a spell before?” Mika asked her. “On purpose, I mean?”

“I think so,” Altamira replied. “There’ve been a couple of times, haven’t there, Rosetta? Like that time I really wanted a plum off the tree, but it was too high for me to reach, so I just concentrated on it for a minute and wiggled my fingers and asked it to fall into my hand. And it did!”

Mika smiled. “That’s good! That means you already know that the first thing any good spell needs is intent. You want something, so you figure out a way to make it happen. In your case, you wanted the plum, but it wouldn’t have been enough to just look at the plum and think I want it. A spell needs the how as well as the what. You had to figure out how you might get the plum. Which is what you did. You asked for it to fall into your hand.” Mika was quite certain she was explaining this very badly, not least because her own understanding of witchiness was nebulous, but she knew she had to try or there was simply no point in her being here. “Sometimes, for simple spells, that’s all you need. How and what. And all the magical energy that’s inside you and around you will do what you asked.”

“So you’re saying that when we cast a spell, it’s pretty much just us talking to magic?” Rosetta asked.

“More or less,” said Mika. “The tricky part is getting magic to listen.”

Altamira was now upside down, her braid dangling about an inch off the floor. She looked like she was having the time of her life. “So how come I can’t get myself back down?”

“Have you tried asking again, like you did with the plum? Instead of thinking, I want to get back down, try something like, I’d like to be gently lowered back to the floor, please.”

Once again, Altamira closed her eyes, screwed her face up, and tried to cast the spell. Mika had been using magic so long now that casting simple spells was second nature to her, but it hadn’t always been. Learning how to use magic was unwieldy and unpredictable, with no easy incantations or shortcuts. The spells jotted down in a witch’s spellbook weren’t spells so much as snippets of conversation the witch had either figured out for herself or had learned from another witch. Spells weren’t tidy, clear commands to wave your wand and say “Abracadabra!” so much as they were friendly tips like, If you want the spider vanished from the corner of your bedroom, make sure you ask the magic to put it somewhere specific or else you may find that it’s been deposited under your pillow instead.

Mika had discovered that the hard way.

“I can’t do it,” Altamira said at last, not sounding particularly bothered

by this. She was still upside down.

“That’s okay,” said Mika.

She narrowed her eyes at the glimmers of gold around Altamira. The child was returned to the floor at once.

“The thing about magic,” Mika explained as Altamira bounced to her feet, “is that it really likes us. There’s a little inside all witches, which is what makes us just a bit different from other people, but most of the magic we use exists as energy outside us. You can actually see it if you pay attention. It looks like gold dust. And it’s attracted to us because we can use it. It wants to be used. But it’s also mischievous, like a naughty puppy,” she added. “And if we forget to be very firm and bossy with it, it has a tendency to run wild.”

Altamira found the puppy comparison hilarious, but Rosetta’s face brightened with the interest of someone eager to learn more. “Is that why we keep losing control and accidentally casting spells?” she asked.

“Because we haven’t been bossy with the magic?”

“It’s mostly because there’s so much here that it’s a lot harder for young witches like the three of you to control it,” Mika said. “Ever since I arrived, I’ve been keeping the magic in check. I’m so used to doing it for myself that at first I didn’t even notice I’d started doing it here, too, but I can feel it when I stop to think about it. It’s like I’m keeping one hand on the puppy’s leash at all times.”

“But it can still slip away,” said Rosetta, gesturing to Altamira. “So you have to grab the leash before it goes too far.”

“Exactly.”

Altamira had flopped down on the rug to stroke Circe, like she’d lost interest in Mika’s explanations and dubious metaphors, so Mika decided to cut the unexpected lesson short. Circe, she noticed, had wasted no time in making herself at home; she was stretched out on the rug and looked ready to doze off.

“I figured out a lot of this on my own,” she said to the girls, “but hopefully you won’t have to. You can ask me anything you like, any time.”

“You never did say why it wasn’t safe for me to be floating,” Altamira said, surprising her. So she was paying attention. Her bright eyes looked up to meet Mika’s. “It was fun.”

“I know,” said Mika, “and you would probably have been okay because we’re indoors. But if we’d been outside and you’d started to levitate and couldn’t get yourself back down to the ground, you could have floated too high, past the wards, and someone could have seen you. Or, worse, the wind could have gotten hold of you and tossed you who knows where.”

“Well, shit,” said Altamira.

Mika bit her lip to squash a smile. Why were rude words always so unfailingly funny when they came out of a child’s mouth? It was so terribly hard to look disapproving! Rosetta sighed. “You have to stop saying that,” she said to her sister.

“I’ll stop when Ian and Jamie stop,” Altamira said cheerfully, which seemed fair as far as Mika was concerned. She scrambled to her feet. Like Ian, she seemed to have the inexhaustible energy of a bouncy ball. “Let’s go get the rest of your stuff!”

“Are you sure you don’t mind that this is the attic?” Rosetta asked Mika, a little anxiously. “Jamie and Lucie wanted you to use one of their rooms, but I told them you might actually prefer it up here.” Her eyes dropped shyly to the floor and she added, hesitantly, “Because of balcony. And the view.”

Mika looked at her in surprise. “I do prefer it up here. How did you know?”

“None of us like it when we’re closed in,” said Rosetta. “I mean, I love being tucked up in my bed with a book, but I always have the window open.

Even in the winter. And Altamira likes the outside so much she doesn’t even wear shoes unless someone makes her.”

“I like to feel the dirt between my toes,” Altamira explained, halfway down the stairs already.

“Ian says it’s probably a witch thing,” said Rosetta.

It probably was. The natural world was where magic thrived, after all.

Casting her mind over the rest of the Very Secret Society of Witches, Mika could see the pattern there, too. She knew Belinda refused to live in big, industrial cities, for instance, while Primrose gave her rose garden more attention and affection than Mika had ever seen her give another person.

Like Rosetta, Mika loved curling up in her warm bed, and she also always had a window open. Even in the winter.

But right then, as she followed the girls down the ladder, the thing that Mika found most interesting was not Altamira’s fondness for the feel of dirt between her toes. It was what they’d said: Ian says it’s probably a witch thing.

It sounded like Ian knew a lot more about witches than he should.

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