Mary frowned at first. And then she turned as white as chalk. She lowered her eyes and peered into the polished silverware on the table.
The witches around her started giggling quietly. They might all be sisters, but first and foremost they were women.
Mary raised her hands to her face and stood up. She took her hands away.
She was no longer an old crone but a blindingly beautiful young woman, with blonde hair and blue eyes.
‘Thank you, my sisters,’ Mary said in an icy voice. ‘Thanks to all of you who smiled at me this evening…’
‘Sit down Mary,’ said Ernesta. ‘Everyone knows how eccentric you are. I thought you had deliberately come to the meeting looking like that. Sit down and don’t disgrace yourself.’
Mary sat down, casting a dark glance at Ernesta.
I seized the opportunity to speak. ‘To get back to the question of help. We need your representative, either appointed or approved by the head of the Conclave. By the Grandmother of Grandmothers.’
‘And there we have a problem, for which you are directly responsible,’ said Ernesta.
‘Arina,’ I said, nodding again. ‘Yes, that’s right. I shut your Great-Grandmother away in the Sarcophagus of Time. In my defence, I can only say that I intended to while away eternity together with her.’
‘You joker,’ Ernesta snorted. ‘I won’t lie and say that I’m grieving for Arina. As you have probably noticed, we’re rather cool with each other.’
‘How could I not notice?’ I asked, twirling a little silver spoon in my fingers.
‘And therefore we reacted positively to the request from Gesar and Zabulon,’ the witch said, smiling.
‘But?’ I asked. ‘You have the word “but” stuck on the tip of your tongue. Spit it out quickly, before you choke on it.’
‘But we cannot choose a new Great-Grandmother,’ Ernesta sighed. ‘Since the previous one is still alive.’
‘Remove her,’ I said. ‘Can you not demonstrate some flexibility here?’
‘Can we not demonstrate flexibility?’ Ernesta queried, raising her left eyebrow and gazing at me intently. ‘We can. Flexibility is our middle name. How else could we have survived in a world full of coarse, bloodthirsty men? But do you know how we choose the Great-Grandmother?’
I shook my head, sensing that I wouldn’t like what I was about to learn.
‘The Grandmother of Grandmothers must be acknowledged by the Shoot,’ said Ernesta.
‘Hooray!’ I exclaimed sincerely. ‘I was afraid it might be something rather more… exotic.’
‘No, Anton. It’s nothing more than the Shoot. Here it is.’
She casually lifted up the napkin lying over a pot that was standing on the table in front of her. I half-rose to examine what the napkin had been covering.
I had noticed the pot before and had assumed that it contained some kind of food. But it turned out to be a flowerpot. With a wooden thing sticking out of it.
‘What’s that?’ I asked.
‘The Shoot,’ Ernesta said with a smile.
‘But from the look of it, I’d say it was a wooden—’
‘The Shoot,’ she repeated emphatically. ‘The symbol of the eternal life and vigour of our community.’
‘From the way the Shoot looks, I’d say your community is a little withered.’
‘Do not judge by appearances,’ the witch parried. ‘In the hands of the Grandmother of Grandmothers the Shoot starts to blossom. And that is the uniquely clear and evident confirmation of her position. In combination, of course, with a certain degree of authority and Power.’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘So have you chosen someone?’
‘The Shoot did not blossom,’ Ernesta said. ‘According to tradition, this has happened several times – when a clearly unworthy Grandmother of Grandmothers was selected, when the voting was carried out under duress, and once when an attempt was made to choose a leader while the previous incumbent was still alive.’
‘Is there no way you can remove someone from the position?’
‘Only by poisoning the jam,’ Mary commented ominously. ‘Good old arsenic…’
‘While Arina is still alive, we cannot elect anyone else to replace her,’ Ernesta said.
‘Then what do you want me to do?’ I asked. ‘Why did you invite us here?’
‘We hope that the Shoot will allow us to choose a leader…’ Ernesta said. ‘If the candidate is—’
‘Oh no!’ I interrupted. ‘Don’t even think about it!’
‘Then the world will perish,’ the witch retorted. ‘We are not joking, Gorodetsky. We are offering your daughter the position of Grandmother of Grandmothers.’
‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘Total and absolute rubbish.’
‘Why?’
‘I know a little bit about your rules,’ I said spitefully. ‘A future witch has to receive a gift, an initiation from a genuine witch, and it has to happen in early childhood – even adolescence is already too late…’
I stopped, looking at Ernesta’s smile. I’d suddenly remembered something.
After Arina kidnapped Nadya, Sveta and I had fought to get our daughter back. And then Arina had given Nadya a gift, supposedly as an apology…
‘But the initiation has already begun, Anton,’ said Ernesta. ‘Ten years ago Arina, the Great-Grandmother herself, granted Nadya the ability to work with plants – the very cornerstone of witchcraft.’
‘You’re insane!’ I exclaimed. ‘She’s only fifteen! Fourteen, in fact!’
‘Is it really a matter of age?’ Ernesta asked in surprise. ‘Arina is not the oldest among us.’
‘My daughter is a Light One,’ I reminded her, though I knew I had already lost.
‘Almost fifteen per cent of witches are Light Ones,’ Ernesta informed me obligingly.
‘She’ll age rapidly and become… become ugly,’ I said softly.
‘Like us,’ Ernesta said, agreeing. ‘She will have to live behind a mask and, if the men she loves are Others, they will know that they are kissing not a young woman but an old, withered one. All that is true. This is the price. But I thought we wanted to save the world?’
I looked at my daughter.
‘Dad, of course I agree,’ Nadya said.
She was very calm, her face set in an expression of imperturbable benevolence.
‘Nadya, the process is irreversible,’ I said. ‘And very rapid. You’ll grow old in just a few years. Well, ten or twenty at the most. Right now that seems like an eternity to you, but it isn’t. You’ll see that ten years fly past in an instant. I don’t know of course, maybe Kesha or someone else… but after all it’s easier for Others to live with Others… and only witches live with ordinary people, because they don’t know who they’re really kissing…’
The hall was silent. And the silence was deafening.
My daughter looked at me as if she was waiting for me to finish.
‘You won’t even be able to have a child…’ I said. ‘No, that’s not right, you will be able to, but only in the first few years after you become a witch… Dammit, you’re still only a child yourself!’
‘Dad, I realised immediately why the witches had invited us to the Conclave,’ Nadya told me in a soothing voice, as if she was the grown-up and I was a frightened little child. ‘I called Innokentii and we discussed everything. We’ll get married as soon as the Two-in-One has been dealt with. Of course, I’ll have to have a child as soon as I can. We might even have time to have two children. I know we’re not mature enough, especially in the psychological sense, but I discussed everything with Mum too, and she said you two would raise your grandchildren, so that we could continue with our education…’