Seven times, at twenty-year intervals, the wood was fresh coppiced, but only for two or three years in each cycle were the saplings right for the wizand’s needs, and no possible host came near while that was so. By the time the timber was carted away it was long poles, thicker than a man’s calf, and the wizand, safe in the bole, waited without impatience for the next regrowth.
The economics of forestry changed again, and the coppicing ceased. It was another hundred and ten years before the ash tree was once more felled. This time it happened with the clamour of an engine, and hooked teeth on a chain that clawed so fast into the trunk that the wizand needed to wake almost fully from its torpor and hurry past before it was trapped above the cut. More engines dragged the timber away, and the shattered wood was left in peace. Next spring, as always, fresh shoots sprang up, ringing the severed bole.
Phase B
A man’s voice.
“These look about the right size. Which one do you want, darling?”
Another voice, petulant with boredom.
“I don’t know.”
The second voice triggered the change. Instantly the wizand was fully alert, waiting, knowing its own needs, just as a returning salmon knows the stream that spawned it. It guided the reaching arm. Through the young bark of the sapling it welcomed palm and fingers. The hand was very small, a child’s, about seven years old, but now that the wizand was properly awake it saw how time was running out. There was little chance of another possible host coming by, and none of the ash tree being coppiced again, before the appointed hour.
“This one,” said the child’s voice, firmly.
A light saw bit sweetly in. The wizand stayed above the cut.
“I’ll carry it,” said the child.
“If you like. Just don’t get it between your legs. Or mine. Now what we want next is a birch tree, and some good hemp cord. None of your nasty nylon—not for a witch’s broom.”
When the children came in from their trick-or-treating the several witches piled their brooms together. As they were leaving, a child happened to pick out the wrong one. She let go and snatched her hand back with a yelp.
“It bit me,” she said, and started to cry, more frightened than hurt.
“Of course it did,” said Sophie Winner. “That’s my broom. It won’t let anyone else touch it.”
They thought she was joking, of course, and later that evening Simon and Joanne Winner found it gratifying that Sophie was so pleased with her new broom that she took it up to bed with her, and went upstairs without any of the usual sulkings and dallyings.
Sophie dreamed that night about flying. It was a dream she’d had before, so often that she thought she’d been born with it.
The wizand was always cautious with a fresh symbiote. The revelation, when it came, was likely to be a double shock, with the discovery both of the wizand’s existence, and of the symbiote’s true self. But hitherto the girl had always been around puberty. It had never dealt with a child as young as Sophie, with her preconceptions unhardened. If anything, it was she who surprised the wizand.
A fortnight after Halloween she took her broom into the back garden, saying that she was going to sweep the leaves off the lawn.
“If you like,” said her father, laughing. “They’ll blow around a bit in this wind, but give it a go.”
He went to fetch his video camera.
The wizand could have swept the lawn on its own, but with her parents watching through the patio window Sophie kept firm hold of it, following its movements like a dancing partner, while it used the wind to gather the leaves into three neat piles in places where they would no longer blow around.
“It’s wonderful what a kid can do by way of work, provided she thinks she’s playing,” said her father. He was the sort of parent that hides from himself the knowledge that his relationship with his own child is not what it should be by theorising about the behaviour of children in general.
When she’d finished, Sophie went up to her room and sat cross-legged and straight-backed in the middle of the floor, with the broom across her thighs and her hands grasping the stick at either end. She waited.
“Yes?” said the wizand.
Sophie heard the toneless syllable as clearly as if it had been spoken aloud, but knew that it hadn’t come to her through her ears. She answered in the same manner, inside her head.
“I knew you were there. The moment I touched the tree. I felt you.”
“Yes.”
“What are you? A demon or something?”
“Wizand.”
Sophie accepted the unfamiliar word without query.
“Am I a witch?”
“Yes.”
“I thought so. Can we fly?”
“Yes.”
“We’d need to be invisible.”
“No.”
“But . . . Oh, you mean you can’t do that? Couldn’t I?”
“Not yet.”
“You can fly, and you can sweep. Anything else?”
“Power.”
“Oh . . .”
“Not yet.”
Sophie felt relieved. She didn’t know why.
“We’d better wait for a dark night,” she said.
Sophie chose a Friday, so that she could lie in on Saturday morning. She went to bed early and waited for her parents to come in and say goodnight. As soon as the door closed behind them she fetched her broom from the corner beside the wardrobe.
“They won’t come back,” she told it. “Let’s go.”
“Sleep,” said the wizand.
“Oh. It won’t be just dreaming again? We’re really going to do it?”
“Yes.”
Sophie climbed into bed with the broom on the duvet beside her, closed her eyes and was instantly asleep. The wizand waited until it sensed that the parents were also sleeping, then woke her by sending a trembling warm sensation into her forearm where it lay against the ash wood. She sat up, fully aware.
“Can we get through the window, or do we have to go outside?” she asked. “I’d need to turn off the burglar alarm.”
“Window.”
She pushed the sash up as far as it would go and picked up the broom again.
“Naked,” said the wizand.
“Oh, all right.”
Her parents considered Sophie a prudish child, but she unhesitatingly stripped off her nightie. As soon as she touched the broom again her body knew what to do. Both hands gripped the handle near the tip. She straddled the stick, as if it had been a hobby horse, and laid herself close along it, with the smooth wood pressing into chest and belly. A word came into her mouth that she had never before spoken. She said it aloud, and as the broom moved softly forward and upward she hooked her right ankle over her left beneath the bunched birch twigs. Together they glided cleanly through the window and into the open.
It was a chilly February night, with a heavy cloud layer releasing patches of light drizzle, but Sophie felt no cold. Indeed her body seemed to be filling with a tingling warmth, and as their speed increased the rush of the night air over her skin was a delectable coolness around that inward glow. Flying was like all the wonderful moments Sophie had ever known, but better, realer, truer. This was what she was for. Thinking about it beforehand she had imagined that the best part would be looking down from above on familiar landmarks, school and parks and churches small and strange-angled beneath her; but now, absorbed in the ecstasy of the thing itself, she barely noticed any of that until the lit streets disappeared behind her and they were flying low above darkened fields, almost skimming the hedgerow trees.
The broomstick swerved suddenly aside, and up, curving away, and then curving again and flying far more slowly.
“What?” it asked.