‘Or affordable,’ Rav added. She knew Rav owned his own company, and he didn’t seem to be short of cash, but she wasn’t sure just how well off he was. Her eyes flickered to the mirrors opposite, but there was nothing there. See, nothing but your imagination, she reassured herself, although her instinct knew better.
‘If you ran for the bus after, it’d probably burn off the calories,’ Rav deadpanned, his eyes twinkling.
‘I get to come to the most exclusive hotel in London for afternoon tea every day, but I have to take the bus home?’ Faye pretended shock; she’d become adept in masking her emotions over the years, but, more to the point, she wasn’t going to tell Rav about the shadow of apprehension in the pit of her stomach. They were having a lovely time together, and she wasn’t going to spoil it. ‘I’m appalled.’
‘We’ve got to budget for this champagne lifestyle somehow, Miss Morgan.’ Rav raised an eyebrow archly at her, and she giggled.
‘But we’re not drinking champagne,’ she mock-protested, reaching for the delicate white and gold china teapot and tilting it to pour herself another cup, but nothing came out. ‘Oh. I need a top-up.’
Rav nodded to a waiter, who approached their table with a pleasant smile.
‘Yes, sir?’
‘My beautiful companion has just reminded me that we should be enjoying some champagne with our cakes, if you wouldn’t mind?’ Rav took a wine list from the waiter, trailed his finger down it and pointed to one of the champagne names written in flowing script; Faye’s eyes widened as the waiter nodded and went off with Rav’s order.
‘I didn’t mean… I was joking, Rav. Tea’s fine,’ she whispered when the waiter had gone. ‘This is already lovely. You don’t have to—’
‘I know I don’t have to. I want to.’ He winked at her as the waiter reappeared with the champagne bottle in a silver ice bucket and two crystal champagne glasses. They were the wide, saucer-like ones that made Faye think of the roaring twenties. Rav took the bottle from the waiter. ‘I’ll pour; thanks a lot.’
Rav handed her a glass and raised his to meet hers.
‘To us,’ he said, meeting her eyes across the table. ‘To Faye Morgan, who has enchanted this lowly creature.’
‘To us. You’re not a lowly creature, silly.’ She tapped his glass lightly with hers, and sipped her drink; the bubbles fizzed pleasantly on her tongue and against her nose. ‘You’re lovely.’ She felt her cheeks flush a little. ‘You’re my…’ she searched for a silly phrase like his, but couldn’t think of one. ‘You’re my knight in shining armour,’ she replied, shyly, but meaning it. It was corny, but it was true.
Rav seemed touched, but looked away, embarrassed.
‘I’m not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but thank you.’ He gave her a rueful smile. ‘I’ll do my best to… err, you know. Ride horses and… fight stuff for you? Now that I’m saying it, I don’t really know what knights do.’ He tapped his finger on his chin.
‘Hmmm. Save princesses? Wear uncomfortable armour?’ Faye laughed. ‘Those metal face-grilles on the helmets do look quite difficult. You know, for daily wear.’
‘I’ve heard they’re being re-engineered for today’s knight on the go. Mesh face-grilles. Breathable fabrics,’ Rav replied, poker-faced.
‘Kind of sounds like a balaclava, if I’m being honest.’ Faye giggled. ‘Are you planning to rob a bank?’
‘I might have to if this continues.’ He gestured to the gold arches that supported the Renaissance-style friezed ceiling in the room set aside for afternoon tea; the pianist, sitting at the white piano in the corner, launching into Moonlight Sonata. ‘I’m joking, I’m joking. It’s fine.’
‘We have been… I mean, we’ve been to some very expensive places since we’ve been in London.’ Faye felt the champagne warm her. ‘Are you sure it’s okay?’ She couldn’t help making the comparison to being in the faerie kingdom, which, when she was there, felt exactly like this: slightly soporific, slightly fuzzy, in a pleasant languor. But this was the ordinary world; this was real, and she was here with Rav. Perhaps the ordinary world can feel like the faerie when you know how, she thought. Yet she averted her eyes from the mirrors opposite; she didn’t want to see what waited for her in them. Instead, she focused on Rav.
‘Of course it is. You’re in my world now. Let’s enjoy it.’ Rav took her hand across the table, and Faye let the happiness of the moment overwhelm her.
Later, the dream came again. She was back in Abercolme on Black Sands Beach, and the Faerie Queen of Murias, Glitonea, was asking her something, over and over again. In one hand, the faerie queen held decapitated human heads by their hair. With the other, she reached out for Faye’s belly: Faye, in the dream, realised she was pregnant, and the beach behind her was on fire.
Faye understood that the faerie queen was demanding a bargain. Life for life, a child to save many human lives. In the dream, Faye knew that this had already happened; she’d already pledged a child to Glitonea in a bargain to save the people of Abercolme from a fire. She’d had no choice; she’d hoped that, somehow, the faerie queen wouldn’t come to claim what had been agreed.
In the dream, Faye fell to her knees at the edge of the tide. Please, please don’t take my baby, she begged, but Glitonea picked up Faye’s palm, forced the fingers open and handed Faye the bloodied, twisted hair of the dead.
Now I will have what is mine, she cried, and Faye woke, crying.
Three
‘Cut!’
A woman in black dungarees with crimson red hair in plaits pinned to her head walked out from behind one of the tall TV cameras which were pointed at the set.
From where Faye was standing, the set looked shabby and obviously artificial. It was supposed to be a witches’ shop, but nothing like hers. Her shop was the converted downstairs of her family home; its white walls were uneven and bumpy in the way that old Scottish stone houses were. It sat in an old terrace on what was now Abercolme’s high street; Muriel’s bakery and a small supermarket were among the few independent businesses left in the small coastal village; many had been closed, driven out of business by a long recession and the bad luck that had plagued Abercolme for decades.
Her mother, Modron Morgan, had opened the shop in the psychedelic 70s, when the world was experiencing a wave of interest in the unseen and unusual. Grandmother had disapproved, saying that magic should be private, that no good would come of sharing the things that had been family traditions for hundreds of years. But Moddie, like every Morgan before her, was stubborn and saw the way that the world was opening up.
Mistress of Magic was glass-fronted and cheery; Faye often garlanded the window with seasonal flowers and plants, celebrating the year as it passed along. Inside, the old hearth was still there, and customers liked to settle themselves in one of the two flowery easy chairs beside it to read or, often, have a cup of tea with Faye and have their cards read. Faye made and sold her own loose incense and magical tea blends, packaged in shining jars; she sold tarot cards and crystal wands, books, home-made candles and other witchy supplies to locals and tourists.
The set for the TV show that her best friend, Annie, had left Abercolme for – the one she’d begged Faye to come and visit – was nothing like that. The walls were painted black, and reversed silver pentagrams shone dully from nails. From behind the camera, where an assistant had told her to sit until they’d finished the day’s filming, Faye could see that the pentagrams were quite light and blew around in the lightest breeze; she thought they were probably made from plastic tubing, painted dull silver.
The set featured a shop counter, rather more baroque than her own, atop which various human and animal skulls sat. Faye wondered if they were real or fake. Animal skulls were easy enough to find if you knew where to look, especially in the countryside, though London was far too noisy and overpopulated for the quiet ways of the land. Faye had a goat skull in the shop, on top of the mantelpiece over the hearth, which had been there since her grandmother’s day and
perhaps before. The Morgans – she, her mother Moddie and her grandmother – had called it an Gobhar, sea goat. It had the long horns of the goats that ranged freely on the rocky shores of Arran, and all of the Morgans had rubbed it on the nose for good luck at some point in their lives. When Faye was a child she’d asked Moddie why do we have a goat’s skull on the mantelpiece, none of my friends at school have one, and Moddie had said more fool them.
There were shelves of books on the set, but their spines were painted with bright white and gold symbols in the way that no real books were – no doubt, to make them look like ancient grimoires and recognisable as ‘black magic’ to the TV audience.
Faye allowed herself a smile. Her grandmother’s grimoire was a green leather-bound notebook, foxed and aged, full of Grandmother’s faded, spidery writing. No upside-down pentagrams there; indeed, as well as old spells and Grandmother’s record of the success or otherwise of her spellwork, there were jam recipes and snippets of village gossip.
Annie had called the week before and asked her to visit her on the set of Coven of Love. It would have been difficult if Faye was still living in Abercolme, a small village on the Fife coast in Scotland where they had both grown up, but Faye had made the decision to close up the shop and move down to London with Rav for a while.
To get away. To make a fresh start.
Life in Abercolme had been very quiet since the night of the concert where eight people had disappeared in mysterious circumstances; Faye’s friend and employee Aisha among them. Faye had reopened the shop for a while after she and Rav had recovered from the whole experience, but without Annie for support, and having lost Aisha, it wasn’t easy; some days it was hard to summon up the will to get out of bed at all.
Rav was selling the house in Abercolme he’d so recently bought, and one day, in her herb garden at the back of the house, he’d suggested moving away. For a while. Just a while, to get some perspective. To live a normal life together.
Could she be normal? A part of her craved it: the normal, everyday life other children had had. Cheese sandwiches, the crusts cut off. Parents that worked at the post office or the bank and didn’t give tarot readings at night to the other villagers; she’d yearned, sometimes, for a family that no-one looked at twice in the street.
Waving at Annie, Faye’s fingers played with the ring Rav had given her. She’d never told Rav about the rose gold and opal ring that Finn Beatha had used to transport her to and from the world of faerie. He knew that Finn and Faye had been lovers, but that Faye had been under a faerie enchantment. That’s over now, he’d said, that day in the garden, helping her prune the rose bushes. Now we can move on with our lives.
Faye had smiled in acquiescence and pushed her doubts away. Rav was a good man; a man with an ordinary life who loved her.
Yes, she’d said to Rav. Let’s try normal. She’d meant it. And they had laughed, because nothing between them had been normal until then.
While Faye was catching up with Annie, Rav was spending some time at the London office with his business partner. It’ll do us good to have a change of scene, he’d said, and Faye rationalised that he was right, of course he was right. Abercolme had meant nothing but destruction for both of them. So she choked down the part of her that didn’t want to leave; the part of her that wanted to return to the faerie realm, even though Finn had betrayed her, and despite the fact that he’d made it impossible for her to return. And she choked away the part of her that wasn’t normal; she silenced the voice of the child of the witch family, the child who knew how to draw protection sigils and brew mugwort tea from her grandmother’s recipe; who knew the plants to heal a burn and which berries were poisonous, and which weren’t.
‘Sweetheart! Ach Faye, I’m so glad to see yer face!’ Annie ran to her, picked her up and twirled her around before Faye had the opportunity to react. Faye held on to Annie and hugged her tight. Annie had always been her best friend, since the first day of school when she’d taken Faye’s hand unobtrusively and guided her away from Bel McDougall, who had pointed and yelled she’s a witch, she’s a witch. Faye remembered the hollowness in her stomach, the shock at being singled out for something about herself she’d never known was different.
She hadn’t thought Moddie understood – Moddie, who had recruited villagers to join her coven, who had taken out an ad in the village newsletter at Samhain – what was now called Halloween – that said Support Your Local Witches. Moddie, who refused to tell her who her real father was, saying she preferred being a single mother. Her mother had said, about Bel and the others like her ignore it, they don’t understand; and we don’t need their understanding, Faye, they need ours. Moddie had expected Faye to be a fearless cat, ready with her claws, but it wasn’t in her daughter’s nature – and the Bel McDougalls of the world knew it.
Yet, after that first week at school, Bel hardly seemed to notice Faye; her eyes slid over Faye’s auburn plaits and blue eyes, seeking fresh bait. Faye had thanked the stars for Annie, who never tired of hand-clapping games, gathering wildflowers for Faye’s homemade press, and making up stories in the dark when she slept at Faye’s house. Annie, who did voices and accents, making up songs and spells as she and Faye traced careful circles and stars in the wet sand at Black Sands Beach and wished for the things that small girls wish for – treasures, riches, and friends that last forever.
Moddie had died in her early forties when Faye was twenty-two. There was something typical about Moddie’s early passing; she’d grabbed death as she’d taken life, with a sureness of touch born of impatience. She’d refused to believe that she could be at risk, and when death came, she swung herself into its saddle with a kind of relentlessness. Moddie had ignored what didn’t suit her, and hissed and clawed at the things that wouldn’t be silenced by her turned head.
A year or so after Moddie’s death, Faye was defrosting the freezer in the back room; the room had once been used for laundry in the days of mangles, tin baths and scrubbing boards. At the back of one of the freezer drawers, she found ten scraps of paper, folded into small squares. Some of them only emerged when the last of the ice had melted and disintegrated almost immediately between her fingers.
But there were some she could save. Inside the ones that could be unfolded, names were written in Moddie’s slanted handwriting. Some names she didn’t recognise, or dimly remembered as being adults when she was young who had moved away now or passed away from old age. But there was one name that she knew: Bel McDougall. Moddie had written her full name and, underneath, a tiny command that made tears spring to Faye’s eyes. To stop picking on Faye. Moddie’s pen had underlined this multiple times before she’d folded the paper up tight and buried it at the bottom of the freezer.
All those years, Bel’s name had sat frozen along with, Faye presumed, others who had tried to single out the Morgans or make their lives unpleasant. Moddie’s freezer spells were a more modern magic than Grandmother’s, Faye guessed, though perhaps in Grandmother’s day the same could have been done by leaving the paper outside in the freezing Scottish winter. Whichever way, the slips of paper had worked. But, the wet paper disintegrating in her hands as she stood there, Faye had cried. Because Moddie was as afraid as everyone else, and she’d been afraid like everyone else when death came for her, too.
‘You look well,’ Faye commented with a smile. Annie was in costume for her character in the show. Faye knew Annie was playing a witch, but she couldn’t help laughing at the very low cut black velvet dress Annie was wearing; it was so different to her usual fashion-forward, asymmetric block printed dresses, vintage jewellery and statement designer pieces. ‘Though I see the costume department seems to be stuck in medieval times.’ Faye was keeping things jolly, but she’d missed Annie so much – Annie was the only one that understood her.
‘Aye, shut up. It’s dramatic, innit?’ Annie rolled her eyes. She’d grown out her short hair which Faye was accustomed to seeing blue, orange or black, and it was now shoulder length and coloured a lux
urious blonde. ‘I had to wear a wig until they could make ma hair sufficiently glam. Gimme another hug, then.’
Annie bear-hugged Faye; Faye fought back tears. She’d been so lost; Annie had left Abercolme to come to London to work on this show just before everything had happened: before her faerie lover, Finn Beatha, had enchanted a whole audience at the Midsummer music festival. Before Faye had had to rescue Rav from certain death there. She shivered and pushed the memory away. That wasn’t for now.
It was the first time she’d seen Annie since then; they had spoken on the phone and written, and Annie had poured out the whole story to her friend. Faye felt relieved that she didn’t have to tell her the whole, strange story now, in the middle of a TV set. Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction, she thought, her eyes resting on the Coven of Love set.
‘Well, you look good, anyway. London’s suiting you, innit.’ Faye extricated herself from Annie’s fierce embrace and repeated the London slang on purpose to cover her awkwardness. ‘Are you still staying with your ex? What’s her name again?’
A peachy flush spread to Annie’s cheeks. ‘Susie. Aye.’ Annie evaded Faye’s gaze.
‘What’s up with you?’ Faye asked, bemusedly. ‘Why are you blushing…?’ She frowned. Annie was never shy about anything. Then it dawned on her.
Queen of Sea and Stars Page 2