Sophie peered ahead and saw a skeletal structure against the glow from the motorway service station.
“Pylons,” she said. “Dad says they carry electricity around.”
The broomstick flew along the line of the wires, keeping well clear of them, then circled for height and crossed them with plenty of room to spare. Beyond them it descended and skimmed on westward, rising again to cross the motorway as it headed for the now looming hills.
It rose effortlessly to climb them, crossed the first ridge and dipped into a deep-shadowed valley. Halfway down the slope it slowed, circled over a dark patch of woodland, and settled down into a clearing among the trees. The moment Sophie’s bare feet touched earth the broom became inert. If she’d let go of it, it would have fallen to the ground.
She stood and looked around her. It was almost as dark in the clearing as it was beneath the trees, though they were mostly leafless by now. An owl was hooting a little way down the hill. Sophie had never liked the dark, even in the safety of her own bedroom, but she didn’t feel afraid.
“Can I make light?” she said.
“Hand. Up,” said the wizand.
Again her body knew what to do. She raised her right arm above her head, with the wrist bent and the fingers loosely cupped around the palm. Something flowed gently out of the ashwood into the hand that held it, up that arm, across her shoulder blades, on up her raised arm, and into the hand. A pale light glowed between her fingers, slightly cooler than the night air, something like moonlight but with a mauvish tinge, not fierce but strong enough to be reflected from tree trunks deep in the wood.
There was nothing special about the clearing. It was roughly circular, grassy, with a low mound to one side. A track ran across in front of the mound. It didn’t look as if it was used much. That was all. But the clearing spoke to her, spoke with voices that she couldn’t hear and shapes that she couldn’t see. There was a pressure around her, and a thin, high humming, not reaching her through her ears but sounding inside her head, in the same way that the wizand spoke to her. She wasn’t afraid, but she didn’t like it. She wasn’t ready.
“Let’s go home,” she said.
“Yes,” said the wizand.
On the way back the rapture of flight overcame her once more, but this time there was a small part of her that held itself back, so that she was able to think about what was happening to her. It was then that she first began to comprehend something central to her nature, when she saw that the rapture arose not directly from the flying itself, but from the ability to fly, the power. That was what the wizand had meant, when it had first spoken to her. Power.
Sophie was an intelligent and perceptive child, but hitherto, like most children, she had taken her parents for granted. They were what they were, and there was no need for her to wonder why. The coming of the wizand changed that, because of the need to conceal its existence from them. This meant that Sophie had to think about them, how to handle them, how to make sure they got enough of her to satisfy them, so that they didn’t demand anything she wasn’t prepared to give. Soon she understood them a good deal better than they did her, and realised—as they didn’t, and never would—that there was no way in which she and they could ever be fully at ease with each other. It wasn’t lack of love on their part, or at least what they thought of as love, but it was the wrong sort of love, too involved, to eager to share in all that happened to her, to rejoice in her happinesses and grieve for her miseries. It was, she saw, a way of owning her. She could not allow that.
Obviously this wasn’t anything she could explain to them, but just as obviously it would be no use her shutting herself up in her room for hours, alone with her broom. She mustn’t even make a particular fuss of it—no more fantastic feats of leaf-sweeping—so she wrote a label for it, “Sophie’s Broom. Do not touch,” and propped it into the corner behind the wardrobe. She made a point of being around whenever she guessed her parents would like her to be, so that they’d be less likely to come looking for her at other times. To minimise intrusions in her absence she started to keep her room clean and neat, and to fold her clothes and put them away.
Her moodswings became less marked, and she went to bed at the right time without making a fuss—or mostly so, because sometimes she’d throw a minor tantrum, enjoying it in a rather cold-blooded way, so that they wouldn’t start to feel that they no longer had the daughter they were used to. So family tensions eased, and life became more comfortable for all three of them. Her parents, of course, believed that this was their doing, and congratulated themselves on their patient handling of her.
They were delighted, too, by her sudden hunger for books. She had been slow to start reading, but now caught up rapidly with her age group and overtook most of them. It barely mattered what the book was about. Anything satisfied the hunger, at least momentarily, and then it was back, strong as ever.
“I suppose witches have to read a lot, to learn how to do stuff.”
“Yes.”
“The trouble is, there don’t seem to be that sort of books any more. And there aren’t any witches to teach me, either. I mean, not my sort. There are those ones on TV who dance in circles and do chants to the Earth Mother, but that’s different.”
“Yes.”
“I suppose what you’re used to is someone like me going to grown-up witches to learn stuff.”
“Yes.”
“Well, there aren’t any. Not anymore. You’d feel them, wouldn’t you? Anyway, I would. I don’t know how I would, but I would.”
“Yes.”
What the wizand in fact sensed was a change far more profound than the mere absence of active symbiotes, and more profound too than the obvious physical changes—the chain saw that had felled the ash tree, the huge contraptions that could fly far higher and faster than any broomstick, the flameless warmth in the houses, the night-time glow over the cities—those were superficial. The major change was in people’s minds, their hopes, fears, understandings, beliefs, disbeliefs. The people who had burnt Phyllida Blackett hadn’t known about wizands, but if they had found out they would not have been astonished. To them a wizand would have been something classifiable, a species of wood-demon, to be feared, perhaps, and if possible destroyed, but not incredible. To the people of Sophie’s time a wizand was literally that—incredible. There was no place in their minds for such a concept.
So the wizand’s first task in this new cycle was to discover as much as it could about those minds, and the only channel through which it could do this was Sophie. Hence her hunger to read. The wizand was not in fact troubled about her education as a witch. Her powers would come.
Time passed. The family moved south. When Sophie was thirteen her mother came into her room one evening and found her sitting cross-legged on the floor with her eyes shut and her old broomstick—the one Simon had made for her for that Halloween party at the Cotlands’—across her thighs, and her hands grasping either end. The pose looked otherworldly, hieratic, and in a curious way adult, or possibly ageless.
Sophie opened her eyes and smiled, perfectly friendly, but made a silent “Shh” with her lips. Her mother returned the smile and backed out.
“Sorry to shoo you out like that, Ma,” Sophie said when she came downstairs. “I was just meditating. Belinda does it, and I thought I’d give it a go.”
“With your old witch’s broom?”
“The woman who explained it to Belinda says it’s sometimes useful to hold onto something—something natural’s best—Belinda uses a rock from the beach—and you sort of put your everyday stuff into that and tell it to stay there while the rest of you gets on with meditating. Anyway, my broomstick feels right. I knew it when it was a tree, remember.”
“Maybe I should try it.”