Page 4 of A Dance with the Fae (Mistress of Magic #1)
‘So. Are we all ready?’
It was past closing time in the shop, and Faye looked at the other women in turn as they sat in a circle on the sheepskin rugs in front of the hearth, candles flickering around them, sweet incense in the air.
Annie, her many-ringed hands folded in her lap, sat cross-legged, the firelight reflecting on a pair of oversized reading glasses.
Next to her was Aisha, wearing a vest top that said WITCH, PLEASE in bright pink on stretchy black fabric, grinning excitedly.
‘I can’t wait! This is awesome. We shoulda done this years ago,’ Annie cooed.
As it was, it had taken Annie a month to persuade Faye to enact the love spell they had found in the back of Grandmother’s grimoire, and another two weeks to wait for a propitious new moon to occur. A new moon was the time to wish for something new; a dark moon was the time to end something.
Faye’s mum, Moddie, had made the downstairs of their family home into a shop in the seventies.
Flower power had made its way to Abercolme, a tiny village in Fife, and, stubbornly, despite Grandmother telling her that no one would come, Moddie had filled the windows and wooden shelves with crystals, her home-made incenses, books about witchcraft and tarot packs.
Faye remembered standing behind the glass counter as a child, watching Moddie talking to her customers about astrology, spell casting, runes and the phases of the moon.
Tonight, Faye had laid out a circle of candles and three cushions in front of the shop’s tall stone hearth, blackened on the inside and topped with the original stone mantle.
‘Let’s do it,’ Aisha muttered. ‘I have needs, ladies.’ Aisha had been working part-time in the shop for the past year, while working on her PhD at Edinburgh Uni, job-sharing with Annie.
It worked well, as neither Annie nor Aisha could commit to full-time hours and, anyway, Faye couldn’t afford to pay them both to always be there.
Aisha was a huge music fan and had slowly been trying to educate Faye, playing new bands in the background as they worked.
Usually, she came to work in jeans and scruffy band T-shirts, although she couldn’t ever quite disguise her small waist, delicious curves and glossy black hair, which she usually tied up in a knot. Tonight, though, it was loose.
Annie gave her a long look. ‘Scrubs up well, this one, aye.’ She raised her eyebrow at Faye. ‘Seems like my troubles might be over.’ She winked theatrically at Aisha.
‘I wouldn’t stop your search just yet.’ Aisha grinned. ‘Faye said to come in the mood for love, so I thought putting a bit of lippy on wouldn’t hurt.’
‘Your hair is lovely, though, Aish. You should wear it down more often,’ Faye said.
Aisha blushed, but looked pleased. ‘Thanks,’ she said shyly.
Faye had always had certain abilities . Like Moddie and Grandmother, she had precognitive dreams: she would dream something, and then it would happen, a week or so later.
She had inherited her grandmother’s healing hands, being able to lay her hands on people and channel what felt like high vibrational pure love into them.
Annie swore by it when she had a headache.
She was able to see energies in nature as well as in people, too.
Sometimes, particularly at the local beach – Black Sands Beach, so named for the darker colour of the sand to the beach around the corner from it which was called White Sands Beach – Faye saw figures moving at the edge of her sight, sometimes shadowy, sometimes in light of different colours.
Sometimes, she heard things: singing, words spoken in a language she could not recognise.
Sometimes, it was a glimmer or an energy haze in the air; sometimes, it was just a feeling, a change in energy somewhere that could be like a click, a sudden transition of vibration.
And Faye had always been able to detect the colourful auras that hovered around people.
Tonight, Aisha’s aura was bright orange, and Annie’s was blue.
As well as colour, there was a kind of frequency that Faye could detect in the energy of others.
There was also a feel – sometimes energy could feel buzzy and fast, sometimes slow and hot, cold and rigid – all people had a feel, a weather, a combination of colour, texture and sound that made them who they were, from moment to moment.
Some people were always the same; others were changeable.
‘Come on! Let’s do this. The night’s auspicious.’ Annie wriggled her shoulders in excitement. ‘It’s a Friday, the best day for love spells. And it’s a new moon. Ach, I’m horny. Bring me someone, moon! I’m not even fussy by now.’
‘Hey. I thought you wanted your next great love?’ Faye raised her eyebrow at Annie.
‘I do. Just saying, nothin’s off the table. Or floor, in this case. Shall we get started, then? You going to clear the space, call the powers in?’
Annie knew almost as much as Faye about witchcraft; Moddie and Grandmother had taught Faye, and later, when Grandmother had passed on but Moddie was still alive, she had treated both of them as her daughters.
Ah, my witchlings, come in and learn , she’d say sometimes when they tiptoed into the kitchen, trying to get a glimpse of Moddie’s spell-making.
Moddie had relied more on the modern witchcraft books that she stocked in the shop than Grandmother’s family wisdom, though Faye never knew why.
When they were teens, Moddie had taught them how to cast a circle according to modern witchcraft; Grandmother sniffed at what she considered her daughter’s modern notions.
No point calling in the powers like you’re in the theatre, standing there, waving your arms like an idiot.
The powers would be there all the time if ye were living rightly with them , she’d say, glaring at the purple-and-blue-covered paperbacks that featured elegant women’s profiles against crescent moons.
Hell mend ye if ye conjure some kind of foreign spirit in the house…
Faye practised a combination of magic that Moddie and Grandmother had taught her, though she tended more towards the modern.
Some of Grandmother’s old ways, like her fervent belief in the Good Folk – and the perils that would come by not observing their traditions – seemed archaic, but Faye still used a lot of the recipes from Grandmother’s grimoire in the shop to make incense, magical teas and body washes and spell candles.
Tonight, Faye was following the ritual in Grandmother’s grimoire at Annie’s insistence. She picked up a rose quartz wand – the stone for love – and walked around her friends, imagining herself drawing down moonlight and starlight from the clear black Scottish sky.
She felt the power fill her from above, then brought the power up through her from the earth: the rich black earth under the worn flagstone floor, the wet green of the woodland, and the dark, rained-on sand of the beach that she had felt between her toes so many times that she almost missed it when it was gone.
The power of earth and stars filled her and met in her middle, spiralling into each other and building heat through her body.
Faye felt the power flow through her, through the wand, and, with her eyes half-closed, she saw it light up the stone-flagged floor, making a circle of light that glowed in the same pink as the crystal wand.
Next, Faye called in the elements: north for earth, east for air, south for fire, west for water.
Going to each point in the circle where she had already placed the candles inside their glass lamps, she spread her arms wide and called out to the spirits of each element to protect them in their work.
When she turned to west to invoke the power of water, she envisaged a wall of water, like a waterfall, flowing to her; to the south, a wall of fire that crackled and spat.
When she faced the east and opened her arms to connect with the power of air, she imagined standing on top of a mountain with the wind pushing at her from against the drop below.
And when she turned to the north, she felt the steadfast power of earth spiralling around them.
The women gripped each other’s hands. In the middle of their circle Faye had set up an altar for their love spell.
In the centre she had placed two carved wooden figures, inherited from Grandmother.
They usually stood on the stone mantlepiece above the hearth, but she had taken them down tonight.
One of the figures was a horned goat-man, with a shaggy chest and cloven hooves on an otherwise human man’s body, covered in leaves.
The other was a naked feminine figure with long hair that swirled around her body, holding a goblet in one hand and a flower in the other.
Grandmother had always called the male figure Old Hornie, and the female one was called merely Queenie, for she was the Queen of Elphame, the faerie queen, Grandmother said.
Around the deity figures Faye had scattered shells and pebbles collected from the local beach; a vase of red and pink roses stood behind them.
It seemed appropriate to use Old Hornie and Queenie in their ritual, representing masculine and feminine energies.
Faye knew that putting them there wasn’t about representing men and women in heterosexual relationships, per se – Old Hornie epitomised one force of nature, the masculine, and Queenie represented the feminine.
Grandmother had taught that everyone held both energies within themselves, and both were the stuff of life itself.