The Witch’s Tears. Katharine Corr

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      MERRY WAS SITTING against the trunk of the oak tree in Gran’s back garden, eyes half closed against the mid-afternoon glare, the bare skin on her arms and legs prickling from the grass and the heat. Her fingernails still ached from the surge of magic she’d just unleashed, and the back of one hand stung. When the potion had exploded, it had sprayed across the kitchen, a few drops escaping Gran’s hastily conjured protective screen. Gran had been testing her, watching her make yet another healing salve. Twenty-plus herbs that all had to be correctly prepared and added in precisely the right order, supposedly. Merry had merely tried to … speed things up. It hadn’t exactly gone to plan.

       But it might have worked. If Gran had just let me finish what I was trying to do.

      And if Gran hadn’t suggested – for the second time in the last fortnight – that Merry needed to go back to the Black Lake. Right at the moment when she’d been trying to concentrate.

      She ripped a tuft of grass out of the dry soil. Being a witch meant becoming familiar with hundreds of years’ worth of spells and techniques and history. Merry understood the necessity, sort of. She had to be able to cast spells with the other witches so that she could become a full member of the coven. Witchcraft was a team sport. Or at least it was supposed to be.

      But the endless, picky details were driving her crazy: a spell must be cast, and the results recorded, and each member of the coven involved in exactly this way, and this way only. Merry had done stuff by herself in the spring that none of the other witches in the coven were capable of. Not even Gran. Yet even spells that she could do almost without thinking had to be relearnt ‘the proper way’, which usually meant – at the very least – some sort of chant in a language that Merry didn’t speak. Because that was how everyone else did it, and that was how it had always been done. No shortcuts allowed.

       Even if you’re powerful enough to use them …

      Her fingernails were tingling again. She took a few deep, slow breaths, letting the frustration ebb away.

      A tuft of dandelion seeds floated past, and Merry reached up to catch it. ‘Wishes’ – that’s what Leo and she had called them when they were kids. They used to chase them around the garden. She examined the cluster of delicate filaments, remembering the sorts of things she used to wish for – more pocket money, blonde hair: all the really important things in life – and trying to decide what she would wish for now. Right this second.

      Being allowed to concentrate on the types of witchcraft she was actually interested in – that would be her first wish. Healing was obviously important. Selfless, and all that. But it wasn’t the kind of magic that she wanted to spend her life doing. Flying, or becoming invisible: those were the kinds of spells that made her heart beat faster. Or the Cinderella potion, one drop of which would transform the user into an utterly gorgeous version of herself. Gran kept promising they’d get on to the exciting stuff, but it never seemed to happen.

      Her phone buzzed: a calendar alert. Probably reminding her about a coven meeting, or a practice session …

      Merry grimaced. Being left alone for a bit – that would be her second wish. Because almost as soon as she’d recovered from the ordeal of fighting Gwydion – physically recovered, at any rate – her proper witch training had started. And the testing. Gran wanted to know why Merry’s power was still unpredictable. That was why she kept trying to get her back to the lake: to see how Merry’s magic reacted near the place where she’d first learnt to harness it. And the whole coven seemed obsessed with figuring out exactly how powerful she was, and whether the power would start to wane as she got further from the events of the spring.

      Further from Jack.

      She closed her eyes, СКАЧАТЬ