The Coven
Prologue: Witch Maclay, continued
Installment rating: PG
Two months later…
Xander sighed and unconsciously picked at the small dots of the strawberry scab on his forearm—three weeks old, from when Connor pushed him to the pavement after school as the latest of the ongoing payback for the incident two months ago. Will was late again.
She was probably hanging out with Mack, as she seemed to do more and more these days, helping out with her mysterious projects, or if not, in the library where she lost track of time buried in the dusty stacks of books too old and fragile or too out-of-date—deemed useless or irrelevant today to have been digitally transferred and made portable, freed from its paper (or in some of the most rare cases, parchment) restraints.
Regardless, it seemed Will had forgotten him again. He would give her just five more minutes before he gave up and went home. Waiting for him was the most recent release of a shooter-immersion game that they had been, up until two months ago, just before the incident with Kev and Mack, anticipating with barely controllable nine (Willow) and just-turned-eleven (Xander) year old impatience. It had taken all his strength of will to not tear the box open as soon as he’d gone home after school last night to find it had arrived in the day’s mail. Instead, he had vowed to behave and wait for Will to share the honors after school today. Even being a year-and-a-half older than her, gaming was the one thing he could consistently hold his own on with Willow. Shooting aliens was often more instinct than intellect and he had plenty of the former, even if Willow outclassed him in the brains department—as she did most of the older kids at school. Also, his larger hands and quicker feet made manipulating the controllers easier. It made gaming one of the things that balanced out the relationship between the two very different friends, though sometimes she’d insist on taking apart the game after they’d played through it. Xander didn’t mind too much, since she usually put it back after she was done. Will was a little weird that way. Plus she had a way of having her tongue peek out from the corner of her mouth when she was really deeply involved pulling the guts out of a chipboard that was kind of cute…
Xander shook his head fiercely. He had to stop thinking like that, or else he might slip and scare Will off. She didn’t seem into those things. Not yet, anyway.
The allotted five minutes came and went, then five more. Finally, as he gathered his bag to really (really) leave this time, Willow came barreling around the corner of the main building, weighed down as usual by her own bag, out of breath. “Xan! You waited!”
“Of course I did, Will.” He stood patiently as Willow dropped her bag at her feet and bent over, her hands on her knees, taking deep gulps of air. When she straightened a minute later, they wordlessly traded bags with practiced ease and started out of the courtyard toward Xander’s home.
“So, what was it today? Library or dungeon?” Xander referred to Mack’s basement office with the latter.
“Ms. Mack,” Willow admitted sheepishly. “We started some, uh, advanced maths last period and kind of didn’t hear the bell.”
Xander nodded and said nothing, though the back of his neck felt a little hot, and not, he knew, from the afternoon California sun. Jealous, he realized. He was jealous of Mack, and all the time she was getting to spend with his best friend. Finally, in a quiet voice, he said, “Don’t know why you need to study so hard, Will. Last time I checked, they were talking about bumping you up a couple grades again anyhow.” Out of your league, Harris, he thought. She’s out of your league, too.
Willow felt the slight undercurrent in her best friend’s voice then a sharp stab through her heart. She didn’t ever want to lose Xander. He was the best thing to happen to her in… well, forever. Before Xander, she’d had no friends. Without him, she’d have none again, except, maybe, now, for Ms. Mack, and possibly Wood, in the library. But two adult non-parent authority types didn’t really count for friends. She had to explain, make things right. Plus, the secret she had been keeping was threatening to make her head explode. Surely Ms. Mack would understand if she let Xander in on what they had been doing? Maybe she could even tutor Xander as well, then it would be like having the best of both worlds… She realized that Xander hadn’t said anything, and in fact, had been waiting for her to respond. She hesitated a second more, before deciding she couldn’t. Not without saying something to Ms. Mack first. They continued awkwardly a while before she thought of a compromise. “The kinds of stuff we do isn’t so much class stuff. More like, um, arts, I guess.”
Xander frowned. “Arts? Like what? Painting?”
“With our minds,” Leigh said. “Knowledge isn’t just what you find in books and files.”
“Are you talking about experience, too?” Willow ventured.
“Well, experience is its own category that produces knowledge, yes, but the distinction between written knowledge and practice is often overstated. After all, everything that’s been written has already been experienced, contemplated, filtered, then presented in the author’s own words, own interpretation of the event. Do you understand?”
“I-I think so.” Willow thought about it some more. She was only nine and a half, but the brain capacity she’d been able to unlock and put to use was already incredible. Something she’d read recently came to the forefront of the cacophony of thought. “You mean, like, pure reason?”
Leigh paused a moment as her own mind re-aligned to the line of thought to which the young girl had connected. She thought of the book Willow had been toting when they officially met, the one the librarian had given her—Wood. Like herself, a recent addition to the school faculty. She got a strange vibe from him and she knew, by use of her Talent when she visited the library after her curiosity about the fellow from Willow’s constant mention of him got the better of her, that he got the same from her. He had given Willow the book on the neo-Kantians. What had Wood been thinking giving her a book like that?
Willow’s eyes had become so bright at the connection, Leigh didn’t want to quash it. On the contrary, she needed to nurture that desire for deeper understanding. “Yes, something very like that, but push it beyond, if you can…”
“Beyond?”
“Beyond reason altogether…”
“Not exactly,” Willow said evasively. They walked on. Xander’s house was six blocks south from the school, Willow’s two blocks further north from the Harris home. Both were well inside the lower-middle-income zone, though Willow’s was better kept. Xander’s mother wasn’t much one for housework. They crossed the street to the midway point of the short travel. “It’s kind of hard to describe. It’s more like… mental arts.”
Xander’s look was clearly doubtful, and Willow sank back into deep thought, to find a better way to phrase it.
“Through the years, humans have had a number of names for what lay beyond comprehension. Most of those names referred to a Divine or a group of divine beings. After we outgrew our god-parents, left their home and set ourselves up in our own, the perspective shifted. The old mystics and philosophers described it as the Sublime, the A Priori. When we were outstripped by our technology, it became self-perpetuating technology, or the perfect machine, with perfect intelligence. In digi-speak, it’s the Code before all codes, the one that unlocks the rest and gives them meaning. Still others took a little of all the definitions, including the primitive ones, and identify it simply as the Cosmic, and leave it at that. That’s how we describe it in my own tradition.”
“Your own tradition?”
Leigh hesitated just briefly before beginning. She had already decided, when Willow began visiting just a few days after the incident with Connor and her friend Xander, that honesty would be the best route to take with handling the young prodigy. Not long after the visits began, Willow had overcome her initial shyness—indeed, had shown little fear in asking whatever question came to her curious mind. “In my own family, along my mother’s line, we follow a tradition that favors animism and a general respect for all of nature. When I grew older, and started a life on my own and a family of my own, I joined an organization that tolerates a number of different, though ultimately similar or at least compatible views on the underlying purpose of human life to see, experience, interact, feel our connections, our smallness but our ability, yet not to rule. We call our group the Coven.”
Willow frowned. “Like a coven of witches?”
Leigh did not hesitate on this question. “Yes,” she said firmly. At the girl’s suddenly concerned expression, she laughed. “But not bad witches.” She grinned and added, “At least not all of us.”
“Kind of like… doing puzzles,” Willow said, “like, uh, brain teasers.”
Xander’s dark eyebrows shot up, still skeptical that any extra time spent in school that wasn’t mandatory could be anything but punishment. “And that’s fun?”
“It is, sometimes,” Willow defended, though she was a bit deflated that Xander still didn’t understand, and didn’t appreciate the value of her after-class sessions with Ms. Mack. But she didn’t completely blame him. Her explanation had been pretty lame. She hesitated, knowing she was treading in dangerous waters as far as disclosing the secret she’d been asked to keep. “Ms. Mack is actually pretty funny. She says she’s a witch. She even showed me a little magic.”
The point of light hovered between them, dancing briefly to Willow’s delight before Leigh snuffed it by closing her fist around it, then opening her hand to prove its disappearance.
“How’d you do that?” Willow asked. With a nine year old’s lack of tact, she grasped Leigh’s hand in the both of hers to examine it more closely.
Leigh laughed and let herself be inspected. “It’s just a parlor trick. Any witch in her second year could do it. I’ll show you some time.”
Willow looked up at Ms. Mack with awe clear in her eyes. Her expression shifted then, to one of concern. “It didn’t burn?”
Leigh’s heart leapt. And just like that, she softened to the girl and to her assignment. She recalled that Leda had had the same expression on her face once when she was five or so, after an incident, one of the earlier ones, when Tom restrained her from leaving an argument and had left a bruise on her wrist. Until then, she had been able to hide her marital problems from their young daughter. It was only when the concern on their daughter’s face had turned to fear a year later that she truly started to resent her husband’s need to control, then eventually despise the man himself. Willow’s gentle probing manipulation brought her back to the task, literally, at hand. “No. Tickles, actually.” You’re a good kid, with a big heart, still. I hope your parents know how lucky they are, and keep you that way. If they can. As long as they can.
“Magic?” Xander’s expression was still a little mystified.
Willow nodded, knowing the explanation wasn’t sufficient, but bound by her promise to Ms. Mack to not provide more—at least not without asking her. “You know, uh, tricks with lights and stuff. But mostly it’s serious stuff… reading and-and extra math and world history… That kind of thing.”
Xander said nothing though the somewhat disgusted look on his face at the last made his position known. Willow accepted that, and just hoped he was okay with the explanation, for now.
They crossed the final street to his block. His was the third house down. Xander held the fence door open for Willow and the two friends made their way past the side of the building to the back entrance. It was closer to the stairs to the basement where Xander’s play room with his various consoles set up on the family’s throwaway wraparound multi-screen with the blown television tuner was.
“Is your mom home?” Willow asked. She wanted to be polite and say hello to let Xander’s mother know she was visiting. Else, Mrs. Harris might never know she had anyone else in her home since she never seemed to interact with her son when he got home after school. That suited Willow fine. She got along with Mrs. Harris well enough. It was Mr. Harris she found a little scary, with his loud voice and boisterous manner and sometimes smelling of alcohol. But he worked a late shift as a mechanic in the Uni-Train depot and thankfully shouldn’t be home until late, Xander had told her.
“Nope. Not today. Do you need to call home?”
Willow shook her head. She had already told her mother she would be staying late for a school activity—which was mostly the truth, as she did visit and in fact extended her session with Ms. Mack. The visits were never scheduled but somehow had become regular, and she visited Mack’s basement office at least twice a week, from fifteen minutes to an hour. Today’s visit had been fairly short and she still wouldn’t be expected for at least another couple of hours before dinner. She hadn’t mentioned going to Xander’s house to pass the time until then. Her parents weren’t fond of Xander, or more to the point, the Harrises. They headed for the basement.
As Xander was loading the cartridges and Willow read the blurb and screen-shots on the back of the now-empty product box, he unexpectedly picked up the previous conversation again. “So you do all this studying, that’s really not studying?” He thought some more about it. “You know, word is she came in from some private school in Montana or Arkansas or Brazil or someplace like that… Some kind of weird alternate-method school or something.”
Xander handed her a hand controller and booted the game. “Yeah. I heard that, too.”
Xander’s voice became suddenly soft. “You gonna transfer, Will?”
Willow laughed. “What?”
But Xander didn’t say anything back.
“Transfer? To her school? No!” They watched the backstory of the game scroll past, both only paying half their attention to it. The backstories were always the same or similar for urban shooters like this program. Either you played the undercover cop, the mercenary hired by the victim’s family to take revenge, or, if you had the right codes, the soldier in the crime syndicate. The narrative ended and Willow opted for the cop scenario. She always played that one, while Xander favored the mercenary. Later, they might try the other roles, though Willow never played the soldier. The warnings on the product box about the particularly adult nature of the violence and graphic sex of that scenario scared her more than it tickled her childish curiousity, as it did Xander’s. Plus you had to pay extra for the special code that unlocked that narrative, so Xander, restricted by a boy’s typical lack of funds, often just got the clean(er) version. Regardless, his parents never checked. “It’s nothing like that, Xander. I’m not going to transfer. In fact…”
“I, um, wanted to thank you again for taking the time to tutor me. The things we talk about… They make things so easy. The Regents… we’re taking them this year, in a couple months, and what you’ve shown me… it makes everything so clear. Like I know the question before it’s even asked.”
Leigh nodded, remembering a similar feeling when she was in Willow’s position many years ago when her own mother had started taking her on walks together through the woods around their family farm. Of course, she would not have put it in the same terms Willow was using.
“Or-Or it’s like the answers are written in the questions.” Willow hesitated, then found she couldn’t continue.
“What is it, Willow?”
”It’s just that… I’m not sure what the point is, anymore. I mean, I’m grateful for you showing me what you’ve shown me, but now that I know what the game is, is there anything else but to play it out?”
Leigh frowned. “I’m afraid you’ve lost me, sweetie.”
“I mean, everything makes sense, now. But will it make a difference? After the Regents, I’ll place into the next levels of school, have a scholarship, and take a few degrees, like my father. Then I might get an internship at one of the big companies, be hired, work until I retire, then watch the teevee or game all day long as I live off my retirement plan. Isn’t… Isn’t there anything else?”
The question momentarily stunned Leigh. Aside from Willow’s conception of what one did as a retiree in the late years of one’s life, it was an adult question, yet it was not. And how do you provide an honest answer to a question you hadn’t found the answer for yourself? It would be easy to become flippant, advise Willow it wasn’t a question for a nine-year old, but that would tip her hand to the perceptive young girl. She would know Leigh was just like all the other adults in her life. Her father and mother. Her teachers. Snyder. Leigh had to tread carefully. “Well, I can’t tell you the answer to that, Willow. The truth is, I’m not sure. What we talked about before, remember? I’ve had experiences that you wouldn’t understand, would never understand, and vice versa. In my case… I told you, I have a daughter? She’s a few years older than you. Everything I do now, she’s always the first thing I think about, my first consideration. I think what works in my situation is that if she can exceed me, that would be enough. I would think the sacrifices I’ve made were worthwhile, if she exceeds me.”
“Exceeds you?”
Leigh considered it before answering, “In whatever she does that gives her joy. Her craft, for example. A husband and family, maybe, though that better be many years down the road.” She smiled at her musings. “Whatever. It would be enough if she was happier than I was. Or am.”
Willow frowned. “What if she doesn’t want to be happy that way?”
“What?”
“What if being... uh, unhappy suited her more?”
Leigh found her mouth opening and closing a couple of times before she huffed, “Well, that’s just ridiculous.”
Willow’s expression let Leigh know what she thought of that answer.
Reluctantly, Leigh relented. “You know what, Willow? You’re right.”
“I am?”
“I don’t know what I was thinking, putting that kind of pressure on her. She needs to live for herself first. Even if that means the choices she makes aren’t ones that make me happy. Thank you for pointing that out to me.”
Willow smiled sheepishly and shrugged, but enjoyed the acknowledgment. “Does she go to the school you usually teach at?”
“The Coven…? Well, yes, I guess you could say she does... attend there.”
“It sounds like a nice place,” Willow said.
This is way too soon, Leigh thought. But if she handled this correctly, perhaps she could make more headway in her assignment today than she had in the months she’d already been here… “I think it is. It’s, um, not anything like Sunnydale.”
“And you miss it.” It was a statement.
“I certainly do. It’s where my daughter is. But more than that… ” Leigh hesitated. “I left this society some years ago. It’s… difficult being back here. In this way of life, I mean. The things we just talked about? About what’s expected of you here? It’s very different in the Coven. There are pressures there, too, of course, though I find them more tolerable than the ones I had with the life I used to live here. And it’s not possible to cut off these two places from each other…” Leigh trailed off, more inside herself than out. She had not had to think about these things in a while.
Willow noticed and let the woman sit with her own thoughts. But she was a child still and began to squirm, the silence making her feel a little bored.
It brought Leigh back to the present. She shook her head in embarrassment. “Sorry.”
Willow smiled and shrugged. “It’s okay. I daydream sometimes, too.”
“Do you really—?”
Willow quickly inserted herself before Mack could ask the next obvious question. “Maybe I could visit?”
“The Coven?” Beat. “Why not? Yes, you might like it. It may suit you.” Leigh paused again to consider it further. “We even have an accredited high school and college degree program for a number of disciplines, believe it or not, though from what you’ve told me, your parents are more the traditional type and would probably not favor our… free form approach to education.” Leigh realized she was sounding more and more like a college brochure and tried to ease back out. “But you’re more than welcome to just visit. In fact, let me extend a personal invitation, and my formal offer. If you decide to visit, ask me, and I’ll make the arrangements.”
“Okay.”
Had it been anyone else—child or adult—Leigh would have thought she’d been blown off. But she was satisfied with the answer because she knew Willow was sincere and would at least weigh it seriously.
“We talked about the Regents and where I might end up after, and I’m pretty sure her school is not for me.” Unconsciously, she began playing her story as Xander set up the mercenary on his own screen.
“So she’s just helping you prepare for the Regents next month?” There was a little color back in Xander’s voice.
“Kinda…”
“Gods, I hate taking that thing. Why do they have to give it to you every year?” but Xander was back to being good old Xander. Willow was relieved.
Leigh checked the clock on the wall. “We still have some time left. Did you want to try the meditation again?”
Willow smiled and nodded. She enjoyed meditation. It was when the most extraordinary ideas came to her. She was beginning to see patterns in the quiet. At first, Ms. Mack had guided her in the white space with her soft voice, had set the context for the wanderings. She would bring them into forests dense with old-growth trees, or barren, icy mountains incapable of supporting life of any kind but the hardiest and most primitive. Or again, caves lined with the dark leathery skins and pinpoint eye-lights of bats and filled with the crackling whisper of centipede feet. Gradually, the silence itself was enough to start the journey, and she no longer needed the assurance of Leigh taking the lead.
Oddly, it was also usually the time she felt the woman opened up to her the most, when she knew her teacher was sincere in genuinely enjoying Willow’s visits, else Willow might have ceased coming long ago. Ms. Mack seemed a bit… lonely. Even in talking about her home at the mysterious Coven, or her brief mentions of her daughter who she shielded from any or all prying eyes, certainly not when she was lecturing in a classroom full of students in various degrees of attentiveness or lack thereof, she seemed… not completely there. Had Willow been more experienced, she may have thought that strange, that the woman’s priorities were, more often than not, somehow askew…
“Did you have anything in particular you wanted to bring into the quiet time?” Leigh was a practiced empathic witch, and sensed that she was the object of Willow’s meditation. She wanted to stop that, reassert the boundaries between mentor and student, adult and child.
Her softly worded intrusion worked and Willow ceased that exploration. She shook her head and returned to the quiet. But she took the hint. No matter. Lately, meditation had been very enjoyable. She felt like she was on the edge of something in the quiet time, all her own. A breakthrough was waiting for her.
“We, um, do some reading, and discuss things. There’s some really good practical things. Like shortcuts. They make understanding math problems easier.” She thought back at how easy it was now to grasp the Calculus concepts that had made her pause just three months ago. Yes, she had been able to do them before, but they took a lot of time. Now, she could actually see the solutions. They seemed to instantly fall into place as she looked at the equations, as if she could see the concepts behind the theories, down to the level of the symbol—the glyphs and characters making up the mathematical language. Surely it would help in the Regents next month. Maybe if Ms. Mack agreed to tutor Xander, he’d score well enough to get into some accelerated courses next year, too. Then they could study together.
Willow’s eyes had closed as she recalled another topic of conversation, the one from last time when she had first felt it, that thing that had stirred something deep within her soul. “Tell me more about your brand of knowing.”
“What do you want to know?”
“By your tradition, in your Coven, you seek understanding. What do you do with it when you’ve found it?”
Leigh considered it, then said, simply, “The best you can. Unfortunately, for most that means simply surviving.”
“But there’s more?”
“Honestly? I wouldn’t know.” Leigh shrugged apologetically. “I count myself among the majority on that.”
Willow nodded at the honesty of the response. She left Leigh’s side and went on. She thought she understood. The pleasure of Knowing filled her, and Knowing seemed just as pleased back. It was warm and happy to find a child in its home, after so long alone. “And, uh, if it finds you? What should you do with it if if finds you?”
“Do with it?” Leigh had to pause at that.
In her mind, Willow reached out…
“Oh gods…” she heard Ms. Mack mutter. “What did you… How did you—?”
“Holy shit, Will, what the fuck was that?” Willow opened her eyes to Xander peering at her, hovering next to her, concern all over his face. “Are you alright?”
“I’m fine… why? What happened?”
“You went all glowy! Then the program played through to the end, in, like, 10 seconds.” He ejected the cartridge and peeled back the cover to look at the disc, as if he could see a physical flaw that would explain what he had just seen.
“I… went all glowy?”
Xander put down the cartridge and frowned. “Well, your hands did, at least. And some of your arms, too.” He reinstalled the cartridge. It booted as normal. “I guess I’ll return it for an exchange. Bummer, though. Now we know how it ends, and how to fight the Boss… You sure you’re okay? How are your hands?”
“Th-They’re fine.”
Xander was still frowning. “Maybe it was the controller and not your hands?” He took the device from her slightly trembling grasp. It seemed to be functioning normally enough. As he fussed with the buttons he did not notice how Willow had become pale, her eyes closing again as every bit of information from the program replayed itself in her mind in excruciating detail—not just the cop scenario, but the mercenary and the soldier, too, all within seconds, simultaneously. The product box warnings had not been exaggerated. The soldier’s story was particularly violent and gory, the fucking explicit, and—oh, so cold because both were pointless. She felt nauseous, about to pass out…
Willow opened her eyes. Ms. Mack’s entire basement office, was, in direct contrast to its normal poorly lit gloom, brilliant in the glow of thousands of pixie lights hanging and dancing around them.
“Oh,” said Ms. Mack, finally. “You don’t need me to show you how to do this one, then.”
+++
TBC
_________________ When you find the good kind of magic, when you find your true partner in casting it, don't let her go into the Nether Realm alone... Interludes. The rise of the greatest Seeyo in the history of Humanity in the Cosmic. The Coven. I doodle too. GRAPHICS
Last edited by binky on Sun Apr 20, 2008 4:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
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