Page 2 of A Dance with the Fae (Mistress of Magic #1)

‘Annie, you can’t drink all the wine. It’s an offering for the sunrise.

’ Faye Morgan hugged the foil blanket around herself and pulled her scarf back over her nose.

It was December and Faye and Annie – best friends since they were children – were camping out on Black Sands Beach, waiting for the cold sun to break over the black night horizon for the winter solstice.

Annie drained the insulated travel mug of the home-made raspberry wine they’d brought. Faye made it from the raspberry bushes in the garden behind her family’s shop, Mistress of Magic; like any good witch, she maintained the ancient garden that had always been there.

Scabious, comfrey, lavender, dandelion, mugwort and nettles grew along the stone-walled edges of the long garden behind the house.

Two apple trees stood like guardians at the end, and the raspberry and bramble bushes dominated the east side of the garden, drinking the sun into their ripe fruit every summer.

On the west side of the garden, wild white and yellow roses clutched their wall like possessive lovers, not allowing anything else to grow there.

‘Cannae let these good offerings go unappreciated.’ Annie burped.

Faye and Annie usually came to the beach late on the night of the twenty-first of December, the shortest day, and camped there, ready to watch the sunrise and welcome in the new solar year.

Faye liked presents and turkey dinners as much as the next person, but she had always celebrated the old ways in private – when her mother, Moddie, and her grandmother, Evelyn, had been alive, they had, too.

Now, Annie had become her solstice companion.

Grandmother had died of a heart attack when Faye was twelve; Moddie had passed, suddenly, from a stroke when Faye was eighteen.

Moddie was too young to die. Everyone agreed on that.

Faye had found her mother in the garden, where she’d been picking fruit when she had been abruptly taken.

Faye had run out into the street, crying, and hammered on the doctor’s door – Please help me, please help me .

When it was clear there was nothing to be done for Moddie, the doctor had gently steered Faye away from where Moddie lay among the flowers and made her a cup of tea.

Strokes can happen at any time , she’d said, handing Faye a mug with a generous amount of sugar stirred into it.

I mean, it’s something that happens in your brain, as you know.

But it’s like a lightning strike. Something as fast and savage as heartbreak. Or, falling in love in the first place.

Faye, who suspected Moddie had been heartbroken over something in her past for some time, hadn’t answered.

But she thought of Moddie’s death at every winter solstice, when the days were darkest, waiting for the sun to return.

She thought that death was a door that seemed to swing open easily for some as soon as they approached it, but for others was slowly, creakingly pushed open after a long struggle.

And for others, it seemed that they danced with one hand forever on the door, daring it to open, until one day, it acquiesced.

Moddie, for some reason, had prompted the door into the next life to swing open suddenly and gather her into its velvety blackness at the first hint of her passing by.

Because Faye had been eighteen when Moddie died, and an adult in the eyes of the law, no arrangements had to be made to look after her; she had picked up sole responsibility for running Mistress of Magic.

But she was still young, and Annie had taken to dropping in more to help and staying over at the house a few nights a week.

Neither of them had ever talked about it, but Faye knew that Annie was substituting herself for Moddie in all the little spaces she had inhabited in Faye’s life. And that included the solstices.

Every year, Faye and Annie brought Grandmother’s grimoire with them and recorded their thoughts and impressions of the solstice in it. The grimoire was a book of old Scottish folk magic, added to by generations of Morgan women, who had always been witches.

In the blank pages at the back of the grimoire, after the pages of remedies, rituals and strange sigils, there was a handwritten section which was a combination of diary, recipe book and magical journal, where Grandmother and the Morgans before her had observed the moon and the seasons, and recorded the magic they did and how well it worked.

That aspect of the book was what people called a Book of Shadows nowadays: a kind of reflective journal of magic: a perpetual work in progress. Faye had found the grimoire a few years ago when she had finally cleared out Grandmother’s room at the back of the cottage.

It had been convenient for Grandmother to be on the ground floor when she’d started to find the stairs difficult.

Not that she gave up her mobility easily, Faye had remembered with a smile as she’d packed up the blankets, throws and nightdresses in Grandmother’s wardrobe after she died.

And, after walking became tough, Grandmother had taken up residence in the easy chair by the fire in the shop.

From that chair, Grandmother had told stories, read palms and dispensed advice.

Sometimes, Moddie had rolled her eyes, not wanting her mother in the shop all the time, but Grandmother wasn’t going anywhere. Not then.

Faye had learned to be independent – fiercely so – since losing her mother and grandmother.

She lived alone, she ran the shop, and she had grown accustomed to her own company.

But she was also desperately lonely, a secret that she never shared with anyone.

Despite her friendship with Annie, Faye longed for a deeper connection.

She longed to be seen, to be held, to be special to someone.

Life seemed to swell and embrace the people around her.

They had families. They had loved ones. Networks of support.

Faye had nobody, not apart from Annie. And it hurt.

At the bottom of a drawer containing woollen socks, scarves and various hairbrushes – Grandmother had kept her white hair long, and still brushed it a hundred times every night, just like she had done with Faye and Moddie’s deep auburn curls when they were children – Faye had found a large, brown leather-bound notebook.

It was plain on the cover and wrapped with a leather thong.

Inside, she found Grandmother’s neat, copperplate handwriting.

The Magical Record of Evelyn Morgan , it read.

It started with some passages that concerned local faerie lore.

At Midwinter one of the faerie kingdoms of Murias, Falias, Gorias or Finias takes a child and, at Midsummer, a willing woman.

The child must be under a year old so that it can be raised in the Crystal Castle with no memory of its mortal parents, and the woman must be fair and willing to join the faerie dance for evermore.

In thanks, the faerie king and faerie queen will bless the land and grant boons to the villagers of Abercolme for their generous offerings .

There was a song that Faye remembered from childhood:

Midsummer, Midsummer, Midsummer delight;

go to the faeries on Midsummer night

Take thee a maiden, take thee a wife –

Take thee a bairn for the rest of its life –

Midsummer, Midsummer, Midsummer delight;

go to the faeries on Midsummer night.

Grandmother had taught it to her, and they’d sing it together at Midsummer on the twenty-first of June every year. They’d sing and dance and have all of Faye’s favourite things to eat, and lemonade to drink, but Grandmother would always insist they were home by teatime.

Now, years later, on a different, darker solstice, Faye stared out at the black sea and sky. Grandmother had said that faeries were the reason that Abercolme seemed to have always been blighted – at least, for as long as anyone could remember.

According to Grandmother, anything bad that happened in the village was because the villagers no longer observed the old ways: the old rituals and observances that were put in place to respect the Good Folk.

That job, Grandmother lectured the young Faye, had been left to the Morgan women, and it was a hard, ongoing task.

The Good Folk must be propitiated with bowls of milk, libations of wine, flowers at their special places in nature; they must be kept happy, or they would wreak havoc on the land.

Cause droughts, famines, diseases, floods, fires.

In the oldest tales, the fae would steal baby girls to raise in the faerie realm, and, when they were grown , Grandmother had whispered, her eyes wide, breed with them. Fill them with their half-fae babies.

That phrase had always given Faye a sense of tingling disquiet.

Breed with them. As if a human woman was an animal, used only for her reproductive qualities.

The thought had filled her with horror, but she remembered Grandmother’s tone of voice when she had told her, which was low and filled with a strange longing.

But that is awful, Grandmother , the young Faye had exclaimed.

Yes, my dear , her grandmother had replied. But there are some things in this life that you can only understand when you are older. Some consider that being the lover of a fae is a great blessing.

When she was older, Faye had asked Moddie if she believed that the Good Folk bred with humans. She had expected her mother to say no, that it was one of Grandmother’s more fanciful ideas, but Moddie had looked away, a blush on her cheeks. The thought of it returned to Faye sometimes.

Grandmother had tried to teach her, as a child, the old ways to appease the Good Folk, but Faye had never witnessed any evidence of them, and she had lapsed in her observances over time.

But, sometimes, now that she was a grown woman, Faye would dream of a fae lover, like a man, but larger, taller: his chest was broad, hard and muscled, his forearms corded and strong.