Witch Fire (11 page)

‘Yeah . . . I’m hoping my dad’ll have fixed something up by the time I graduate.’ Jenna lowered her voice. ‘He’s got, like, contacts. I mean, there’s always another option, right? Look at this place.’

True enough. The rich and powerful had many ways of getting out of trouble. But Endor had special contacts too.

As soon as Glory got to her room, she went to her desk and opened her laptop.

She dashed off a holiday-postcard-style email to her dad, and an equally brief, but jokier, message for Troy. Her update to WICA was sent to a fake email account for a fake friend called Christy. All messages would be read by Wildings staff before being released from quarantine in the academy’s server, but she was able to use an arrangement of code words and phrasing to convey that, so far, things were going to plan.

Afterwards, she stared at the empty inbox.
All my family and friends
. She was down to two now – not that her original collection was much to boast of. The hangers-on and toadies at school. Patch and Earl, the Cooper Street old-timers who’d taught her how to hot-wire a car and cheat at cards. Her coven rival, Nate, and his two dim-witted sidekicks. Auntie Angel. Patron, protector, traitor.

Glory had many messages in her head, but none that she could send.

Dear Mum –

How are you?

Where are you?

I wish you were here.

Chapter 11

Lucas and Glory didn’t have any real communication until towards the end of their second day. But on the way out of morning assembly, Lucas managed to brush his arm against Glory’s, and her heart jumped.

‘How’re you doing?’ he asked under his breath.

‘Super-bloody-duper.’

‘Yeah.’ He smiled crookedly. ‘Me too.’

Later, they managed to have an actual conversation during their art class. The teacher, a thin and watery woman who described herself as a ‘creative enabler’, encouraged, ‘free expression’.

‘I want you to imagine a safe place,’ she told them, turning on the stereo and flooding the studio with the sound of pan pipes. ‘I want you to visualise yourself in it. Then I want you to make that vision of refuge real. Craft it! Shape it! Make it your own!’

After a decent pause, Glory wandered over to the table where Lucas was attempting a wigwam construction out of coloured twigs. For several minutes they talked together, as strangers, wary and stiff. Yet both felt the comfort of their shared secret.
Whatever else I’ve lost
, Glory told herself afterwards,
I am not alone
.

During the next week, they began to settle into Wildings’ routine. They soon discovered that Principal Lazovic’s cheerful wink-wink, nudge-nudge attitude to the fae was not the academy norm. When the other staff referenced a student’s ‘trouble’ or ‘deviancy’, they did so with deadly seriousness, though none of them seemed to take a special interest in any of their charges. If there was an Endor agent among them, he or she was keeping their distance.

There was the double enclosure of the wire fence and forest, the patrolling guardians, CCTV, curfew, lights out and locked doors. Yet Lazovic was right to say no one was held at Wildings against their will. His charges knew that this place was their best chance to delay public exposure until adulthood. In the meantime, the academy protected them and their families from the kind of people who might try to take advantage of their condition – whether professional or personal enemies, government forces or criminal ones.

Even if Wildings’ inmates did not rebel against their confinement, they still showed signs of strain. Raphael chain-smoked. Yuri spent most of his free time pumping iron in the gym. Anjuli had an obsessive relationship with food. Mei-fen was smiling but silent, covering rolls of paper with incredibly small and intricate labyrinth designs. Jenna, meanwhile, took refuge in denial. After her initial conversation with Glory, she never referred – directly or indirectly – to her ‘trouble’ again. She prattled on about her boyfriend, plans for college and hopes for a modelling career as if she really were on an extended European holiday. Any attempt to challenge this was met by a look of blank incomprehension.

It was a surprise to find that witchkind studies was a feature of the curriculum. In normal schools, these classes would involve discussing the best methods for detecting witchwork and protecting oneself against it. Students would look at inquisitorial practices, and study the history of witchkind, including the persecutions of the Burning Times. However, Wildings’ approach was more old-fashioned – or ‘a load of pyro-fascist brainwashing’, as Glory put it.

In the first lesson she and Lucas attended, the subject was witchworked plagues. In the second, they studied the casting of banes to induce madness. Stroking the small silver crucifix around her neck, Senora Theresa Ramirez described how witches rotted their victims’ bodies with infected air, and their brains with visions of demons. The message was that the fae was not just a disability, but a disease; something that corrupted everything it came into contact with.

The other students had clearly heard it all before. They sat in blank silence, letting Senora Ramirez’s rasping voice wash over them. Lucas kept his eyes fixed on his desk. Glory’s attempts at challenge were immediately quashed. The Senora had both the look and manner of an inquisitor, with her black dress, and gaunt, haughty face.

For Lucas and Glory’s third lesson, which came towards the end of their second week, the class gathered in the academy’s film theatre. Their teacher announced she was going to show them the methods by which a witch-criminal was identified. First off: the exposure of the Devil’s Kiss through witch-ducking. To fully understand the procedure, they were going to watch a documentary film.

Glory was two seats down from Lucas so she couldn’t see how he reacted to the news. As the screen crackled into life, she found she had tensed up on his behalf. The setting was a concrete bunker. Puddles on the floor, rusting manacles on the wall. Foreign voices could be heard off-screen. It was somewhere in Eastern Europe, perhaps. Moments later, three men in military uniform dragged in a fourth, dressed in prison garb. The camera swung round to an iron tank of ice-water and the ducking-stool.

The prisoner was tied into the leather straps. He was trying to fight his captors, cursing and thrashing, his voice hoarse. Glory saw that Lucas was gripping the arms of his chair so hard the knuckles had turned white. The camera honed in on the witch’s face. Lucas’s was strained, and sweating.

As the witch crashed backwards into the ice-water, his muffled scream turned to choked gurgles. Lucas got up abruptly and blundered out of the auditorium. Senora Ramirez didn’t try to stop him, but watched him go with a tight little smile. Glory burned with rage and helplessness. But she couldn’t go after him. It would draw the wrong kind of attention to them both. And in any case, she didn’t know what to say.

‘I gather there was an unfortunate episode in Senora Ramirez’s class today,’ said Dr Caron, later that afternoon. Her tower room was warm with sunshine and the smell of fresh coffee. Lucas kept his eyes on the sand-tray. He was building London’s rooftops, trying to fill his head with images of a pale primrose morning, as he shaped the chimneys and smoothed the slopes.

‘You must have spies everywhere.’

‘Senora Ramirez was concerned.’

‘Funny. I got the impression she was enjoying herself.’

‘
The Senora takes pride in her vocation. She spent many years working in a charity for the rehabilitation of witch-criminals. As a result, her methods can be, perhaps, a little extreme.’ Dr Caron’s brow creased regretfully. ‘It is possible she went too far on this occasion.’

‘Must be an occupational hazard. When dealing with witches, I mean.’ The icy pressure had returned, squeezing his lungs.

‘Do you object to the Inquisition and its techniques?’

He had to wait until his breath came back to him. Damp sand clung to his fist. ‘Not when they’re conducted correctly.’

Dr Caron’s voice was gentle.
‘
Then what was it that particularly disturbed you about the film?’

He shrugged.

‘Are you afraid you might find yourself in a similar situation to the prisoner you saw?’

‘Well, presumably that would only happen if I did something wrong. Illegal.’

Gideon Hale’s face flashed before his eyes.
Look at you
. . .
Look at the dirty hag
. Glancing at his hands, Lucas almost expected to see the inky witch-stain bleeding from under his fingertips.

‘So you’re saying it is an irrational fear?’

‘I don’t know. My “trouble” is irrational too.’

‘In what way?’

It was an unexpected relief to say the words out loud. He was already sick of
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
. ‘Nothing about it makes sense. How it works . . . why it happens . . . who it happens to.’ His hand swept over the sand rooftops, crumbling the parapets and chimneys together, turning London into a desert waste.

Dr Caron nodded.
‘
This is why you feel constricted, yes? You are a victim of circumstances beyond your control.’

‘I suppose.’

‘Yet some might say you have more options, now. A different kind of control. A different kind of power.’

‘But it’s not something . . . that is . . . I don’t always feel in control. Of it. Of myself.’

‘And how does that make you feel?’

The cold sweat was still on his brow. He couldn’t answer.

On his way out, Lucas passed Dr Caron’s next patient, Yuri, waiting at the foot of the stairs. The hulking Russian was bouncing a tennis ball against the opposite wall with repetitive and ferocious force.
Thud, thud, thud
.

‘
The head-shrink is ready for me?’ Yuri asked.

‘Yeah.’

‘It is she who is the crazy one. She talks to herself – I have seen.’ He tapped his head. ‘Everyone crazy here, but most of all the teachers.’

If Endor was in fact recruiting at this school, Lucas thought, then Yuri would be the perfect target; not a doubting, dithery witch like himself. The trouble was, he had wanted to talk. Unburden himself.

The castle walls closed in around him. He had nowhere to go, nothing to do. Pausing on a landing, he became aware of music floating down the corridor. It sounded like Mozart. He went down a flight of stairs and found Mei-fen at the piano in one of the music studios. She was so small her feet barely touched the floor. Aged thirteen, she could almost pass for eight, if it wasn’t for the look of absolute concentration on her face. It gave her an air of maturity far beyond her years.

After a while she became aware he was standing in the doorway and stopped.

‘Sorry. Am I bothering you?’

‘Not at all,’ she said.

‘You’re very good.’

She smiled faintly. ‘I have had a lot of time to practise.’ Till now, Lucas had never heard her speak more than a couple of words at a time; the fluency of her English was a surprise.
‘
That is the stereotype of Chinese people, is it not?’ she continued. ‘Industrious, obedient.’ She played a little trill on the keys. ‘I was not like that as a child at home. I was very spoilt.’

‘It must have been a shock coming here.’

‘My family was afraid that if the Party found out about my trouble, they would put me to work.’

China’s official line was that it didn’t have any witches at all. But, as everyone knew, if its witches weren’t imprisoned in the labour camps, they were engaged in government espionage.

‘And why are you here, Lucas?’

‘Because – because my dad’s an inquisitor.’

‘
That must be difficult,’ she said gravely. ‘He is angry with you?’

‘He’s worried.’

Mei-fen idly fingered one, two, three notes. ‘My father is afraid for me. I am his only child. But he underestimates me too.’ The notes became a scale, up and down.
‘
That is why I practise, why I study hard. When I leave here, I need to be as strong and clever as I can be.’

‘And what will you do then?’

Her neat little fingers danced over the keys. ‘I will find new things to practise, and new kinds of work.’ The music came effortlessly now, loops and ripples of melody. ‘And when I do, I will be the very best.’

None of Lucas’s classmates referred to his abrupt exit from the witch-ducking film, at least not in his hearing. But he wasn’t the only student to have an ‘episode’ that week.

On Saturday, the school was taken on an alpine trek, accompanied by three guardians and led by the sports instructor, a meaty slab of a man named Brett Peters, who’d been in the US Marines and liked everyone to know it. The morning was grey and misty as they set off through the pines, following a winding trail up the mountainside.

As the day wore on, the mist burned off and the weather became blue and blazing. The scenery was magnificent, but they were not given much time to enjoy it. Peters discouraged idling. The guardians discouraged conversation. Soon, everyone was too hot and breathless to talk, even if they’d wanted to.