Chapter 1
Breathe.
Was it in through the mouth, out through the nose? Or the other way around?
Some way or another, breathing was supposed to ease my anxiety. Except it didn't. I must've been doing it wrong. Every breath felt as though I were breathing under water. Which would have been fine if I were a mermaid.
But I'm not.
I'm a witch.
And I was about to find out my fate.
"Come on, Harper. We're going to be late." Lacey grabbed my hand and pulled me from the tall grass to my feet. Of course she was excited about today. No one in her family had ever failed the Choosing. "And we can't be late to the Convocation Circle."
I brushed the soil from the back of my black dress and forced a smile. "Oh, goody," I said, under-enthusiastically. "I can't wait."
"It'll be fine. Just breathe."
Oh, Mother, not her, too. "Breathing," I said through my teeth. "In and out, all day long." And it's not working. "Any other tips?"
"Yeah." She strode across the clearing and started on the path to the Convocation Circle, the Gathering place the witches had used for the annual Choosing for hundreds of years. "Don't be a smart ass."
I tipped my head back to stare up at the Mother's sky as I followed her. Great advice. Why didn't I think of that?
I rolled my eyes, certain that Lacey would barely notice if I didn't keep up with her. She—along with all the other witches on the island—were rushing to the Circle for the most important day of the year.
The words echoed in my mind, taking on an ominous cast and interfering with my breathing. Convocation. Choosing.
All the witches in my crèche swirled around me, their voices bright as they rushed forward, chattering in the chill autumn air.
I could barely concentrate on what any of them were saying. As I stumped toward the clearing, dread settled into the pit of my stomach, as if I had eaten a cursed apple. One of the kind the littlest witches practiced trying to slip by the magic monitors—not rough enough to truly hurt anyone, but not pleasant if what you really wanted was a nausea-free day.
"Harper." Lacey's voice was even more impatient than before. Apparently she wasn't going to forget me at all. Not this time.
Not today.
Despite her concerns, we were far from the last ones to arrive. It was a short hike to the Gathering, and when we arrived, more than half the girls from the island were already there, with even more flowing in after us. The older girls from the wild, unruly third crèche came stumbling and tumbling into the clearing with seconds to spare before Mother Jonas began the ritual.
Lacey and I sat side-by-side on one of the split logs made into a bench around the central clearing—the space that held the stone altar for most Gatherings. Dusk was rolling in; it wouldn't be long before the elders arrived and we began.
"Don't listen to them," Lacey said, taking my hand and smiling at me.
I figured she meant all the whispering going on around us. I'd already blocked them out. Plainly, I didn't need to listen to them. I already knew what they were saying: Will she pass? Or will she be marked and banished from island, the way her parents were?
Five of the elders moved into the clearing, wearing full robes and carrying the traditional fire starters. Oak, elm, aspen, apple, and the final stick, not yet glowing like the others. The one that no one talked about—the one we were supposed to find out only about after our formal initiation. After the Choosing.
For those who got to stay, anyway.
I was fairly certain that there wasn't much chance of that for me.
I remembered the last full Convocation I'd attended. It was the night my parents had been banished from the Circle forever.
The truth is, the elders let me stay when my parents were banished because I was so young. Mother Jonas let me stay only because it would look bad to the other elders if she banished a child. I was sure of it.
Oh yeah, and the rest of the coven would have revolted, rebelled against her if she had sent a child out into the wilderness.
"She should remain here. Just in case," the elders had said. "It'll be a better life for her, so long as—"
So long as I didn't turn out like my parents. That's how the story went. Really, we all knew my banishment was inevitable. I didn't fit in. Never had. So instead of feeling hope, I felt a looming dread. I wasn't waiting to find out my fate so much as waiting to find out how they were going to implement it.
I still dreamed about my mother as she gave me one last kiss, the tears streaming down her face, swamping her blue eyes.
Sometimes in the dreams I could feel the way she'd shoved her raw power into me, filling up my chest and head so I could barely breathe and whispering, "Don't tell them you have this."
As I thought about that at this moment, my magic—now an odd mix of hers and mine—swirled in my gut, sharp flickers of fire questing upward, looking for a way out. I clenched my jaw and shoved it all back down, imagining cooling water hitting it, quenching the flames with a hiss and plume of smoke.
But the fire wasn't out. It never went out entirely. It retreated deep into the heart of itself and smoldered, waiting for the next chance to flash outward.
Once I had my power under control, I raised my gaze to the center of the clearing, where the ceremony was beginning, with the littlest witches performing the opening chant. When they were done, their monitors would take them back to their crèches, where they would fall asleep dreaming of the day of their Choosing.
As my eyes flickered across the crowd, I realized that Mother Jonas watched me, not the events in the center circle.
This time, the only thing that shot through me was fear.
Our coven leader had wanted to get rid of me since that night with my parents, and if she had ever been able to find a way to do it without raising the wrath of the rest of the coven, I knew she would have.
Tonight was the night she would finally get her wish.
The High Council elders fanned out to circle the bonfire the committee had spent the last three days building. It had to burn all night, so it was carefully constructed to require a minimum of effort to keep it going.
Holding the fire-starter tapers vertically in their hands like candles, four of the five elders stepped forward at precisely the same moment and, raising their voices in chant, set carefully placed twists of paper alight.
A group of hand-picked children moved in solemnly to light the remaining kindling. It wouldn't do for the ceremonial bonfire to sputter out before it even caught. As usual, a cheer went up seconds after the fire whooshed toward the sky.
"What assignment do you think I'll get?" Lacey asked, using the cheer as cover for her hissed question. "How will I be Chosen?"
I shook my head. Leave it to Lacey to focus entirely on herself, when I was certain that I wouldn't even be here by the next day.
That's not fair, Harper, I scolded myself. Of course Lacey was anxious about her own future, too. I leaned in close and breathed into her ear, "You'll get Battle Circle duty."
Lacey glanced at me wide-eyed and clenched her fists in a gesture of hope. The Battle Circle was the most prestigious Choosing possible. If I was right, she would spend her days crafting the spells that kept us safe from the evil Fae on the mainland.
In the circle, the monitors were gathering up the little witches and herding them off toward their crèches, where they would have their own celebrations.
This was as long as I had ever stayed at any Convocation other than the one that had banished my parents. The fifth High Council elder waited until the chattering voices of the children could no longer be heard echoing down the path, and then she moved forward with her taper. She held it into the flames and the end of it flared. Pulling it back out of the fire, she blew out the flame, leaving only a glowing ember and a trailing cloud of smoke.
Slowly, she began pacing around the Circle. All of those eligible for the Choosing sat in the front row, leaning forward eagerly. The Council member, I realized as she drew closer, was Sister Susana Lawson. Gently, she blew the smoke from the taper into the initiates' faces. When she got to me, I made eye contact. She nodded encouragingly, so I inhaled the smoke deeply—Sister Susana had always been kind to me, and I trusted her.
The world began to swirl around me, and I found myself staring more and more deeply into the heart of the bonfire in front of me. Sounds lengthened, deepened, and I seemed to withdraw into myself at the same time that I floated free above the Circle.
I glanced at Lacey next to me—and somehow, also far below me, sitting on the split log next to the me down there. Her face—both our faces—softened into blissful expressions. The High Council elders, all five of them this time, paced around the bonfire. Their chanting voices retreated into a buzzing drone, even as their figures, backlit by the leaping flames, grew larger and darker and more ominous.
Minutes passed, then maybe hours, and I heard whispers from the woods behind us—from all around—and from the other initiates, though when I looked at them, their mouths didn't move. The hissing voices froze me in place, too terrified to even twitch.
After a long interval, I realized that the elders were pausing in their pacing chant to gather around an initiate, murmur a spell, and then whisper a few words.
That's what I was hearing. Not hissing. Choosing.
When they finished with one girl, the elders moved back to pacing and chanting. One circuit of the fire, then on to the next initiate.
Coven members were moving into the light of the bonfire and taking the newly Chosen witches by the hand, leading them off along the paths to their new Circles, where they would live and work for the greater good of all witches.
Whatever that fifth taper had been, the effect of its smoke began to wear off and I could see clearly again. When I glanced at Lacey, though, she still sported the same stupefied expression, so I did my best to emulate her.
I watched as one by one, the initiates left the Choosing as full-fledged witches. As the number of initiates dwindled, my stomach clenched again, the nausea exacerbated by the smoke and the late hour.
Before too long, Lacey and I were the only two initiates left in the circle.
When they gathered around us, it was all I could do to maintain my vacuous expression.
They started with Lacey.
I was to be the last initiate examined?
The better to exile me.
No. That didn't make sense. Exile was performed in front of the entire coven. Was I to be allowed to stay?
The spell they chanted over my friend was unfamiliar, but I knew some of its components. It used parts of spells for truth-seeking and of divination, along with several others. A piece of one phrase came from an incantation to communicate with someone far away. The spell used some sort of herbal mixture as well, but the only thing I recognized by smell was peppermint.
Wherever I might end up, it would never be the Herbal Circle. I'd given up on tinctures and essential oils halfway through my first rotation within their crèche training and never gone back.
All five elders laid their hands upon Lacey, and the magic glowed a dull red color. After a quick consultation, too quiet for me to hear, Sister Susana turned to Lacey and said, "Battle Circle."
I knew it!
I wanted to catch Lacey's eye, let her see how happy I was for her, but she didn't even glance at me as one of the last two waiting witches came to guide her to her new room.
Without me.
My chest constricted as I realized it was finally my turn. It was all I could do to keep from wheezing with anxiety. But by the time the elders turned to me, I'd managed to adopt a blank, slack expression.
They focused their attention on me and spoke their spell in unison as Susana used a single swipe of her thumb to anoint my forehead with the scented oil.
Their magic sank into my body like a mist settling into my skin. Once it made its way into me, it spread out, finding its way into my bloodstream, hitching a ride through my veins to every part of me. I could feel it searching, questing for... for whatever it was looking for. My own magic?
Yes. That was it. The spell found its way to my core, that place where I held everything I wanted to hide. The part of me where I kept my own magic, and where that magic had become intermingled with my mother's gift—the last thing she had given me, that she had passed on with her kiss.
Over the years, her gift to become a part of me and had intermingled with my own power so that it was almost indistinguishable from my magic.
Almost.
But in the face of Council magics, I learned just how independent it could still be. With a jarring wrench, that power that was not really my own unwound itself from what I had been born with and retracted into a tiny ball as heavy as lead. That metallic thud into the pit of my stomach sent a shiver trembling all the way through me, from my head to my toes and out to the ends of my fingertips.
The unexpected movement caught the elders' eyes. I had dropped my eyelids to half-mast in an attempt to maintain my drugged demeanor. But I still saw them glance at one another. Mother Jonas narrowed her eyes and held her hand out so that it almost touched my skin, directing the spell to keep looking. And it did, following the reverberations of that densely packed wad of power.
But my magic and I had had years to learn to protect the only inheritance my parents had left me. With a single thought, I sank into myself, holding out the mental equivalent of a calming hand to a skittish pet.
I didn't know if I was the only one who had ever considered my power to be in me, but not of me, or if that kind of visualization was a side effect of what my mother had left behind with me when she'd been banished. I did know from my coven training that thoughts become things, that the way we conceive of our world becomes our reality. So when I began visualizing holding my magic and stroking it, it responded by winding itself around me and purring, becoming the living thing I imagined it to be. And when I told my living magic to protect that frightened, leaden ball, it flowed away to drape itself over the other power, then melted across it and coated it.
Thus, when the Council spell surrounded my own power, it found nothing but the quiet, apparently content magical ability of an unremarkable 19-year-old girl—the same initiate who had been unable to complete Herbals, too squeamish to direct killing spells, and too anxious about her place in the coven to ever really fit in.
"I told you there was nothing here," Susana said in the tone of someone continuing a long, tiresome argument.
Mother Jonas grunted. "So we will implement our backup plan."
The other elders murmured their agreement, but Susana said, "Please note that I am voicing my dissent one more time. Officially. If this goes awry, I will explain to the entire coven what happened here."
"So noted." Mother Jonas's voice was sharp, dismissive.
Wait. What kind of plan could leave one elder so at odds with the others?
I started to open my eyes, to abandon my pose of acquiescence in the face of these comments.
Then their second spell hit me, digging into my body like pointed barbs burrowing deeper and deeper. Until that moment, I had managed to at least appear mostly relaxed and loose. With the sudden, sharp pain of this mystical intrusion, though, I stiffened, unable to hide my physical reaction.
None of the other initiates had shown any sign of discomfort during any of the process. Whatever was in the smoke of that last taper must have dampened any pain they felt—assuming anything painful had been done to them. But for whatever reason, its effect on me had worn off sooner than expected.
My eyes watered in agony, and I managed to gasp out one word before the pain contorted my muscles and I fell to the ground writhing. "Please."
Please stop. Please don't hurt me.
Please don't force me out of the only home I've ever known.
Please.
The elders—other than Mother Jonas—glanced at one another, their worried expressions suggesting that they hadn't expected this. They moved forward, but by then I couldn't tell what they were doing. Everything around me blurred together into a blackening haze that seemed to stretch out forever.
When the fog cleared from my vision, I was sitting on the split log again, with Sister Susana sitting next to me as she gave me sips of water from a small, wooden cup. The other elders still stood around me.
"Harper," Mother Jonas announced, "you are Council-chosen. You shall be our eyes and ears in the wider world."
I had just enough time to realize that was how they would banish me without a true banishing—with this unorthodox Choosing—before Mother Jonas placed her hand on my forehead, sending a jolt of magic through me, and blackness again coated my vision.
The last thing I saw as I lost consciousness was Susana watching me with tears in her eyes.
Two words floated through my mind.
Help me.
"pkp_obser�fr:�?�