by Isobel Bird
Cooper took a swig of the cappuccino she’d ordered. She was angry at herself. She’d allowed herself to imagine that her friends would readily agree with her proposal and that everything would suddenly take care of itself. Instead, she had shown them just how upset she was about not being part of a coven, and still she wasn’t getting what she wanted.
“We can still work together,” Annie said to Cooper.
“Just don’t,” Cooper replied. She looked at her friend. “I know you’re trying to make me feel better, but it’s just making me feel worse,” she said. “I already feel like the kid nobody chooses for their softball team.”
Cooper drank the rest of her cappuccino in three quick gulps. She knew she would regret it when the caffeine hit her system, but she needed to get out of the coffee shop.
“I really have to go,” she said, putting money down. “I’m sorry I made you guys feel bad about this.”
She grabbed her coat from the back of her chair and left before her friends could stop her. Outside, she walked quickly, anxious to get to her car.
What was I thinking? she asked herself as she walked. She felt like a fool. And it’s all Sophia’s fault, a voice in her head reminded her. If it hadn’t been for Sophia and the others, she would be looking forward to initiation with Kate and Annie instead of going home alone to lick her wounds.
Suddenly she stopped walking and turned around. She began to go in the other direction, walking quickly and purposefully. She turned the corner at the wharf and headed directly for Crones’ Circle. Before she could think about what she was doing, she pushed open the door and went inside. She hadn’t stepped foot in the store since running out the night of her rejection. It felt strange being there again.
Sophia was standing behind the counter, helping a customer. When she saw Cooper standing in the store she smiled at her. Cooper didn’t return the gesture. She stood, pretending to look at a stack of new books, until the man Sophia was waiting on left.
“It’s good to see you here again,” Sophia said, coming up to Cooper.
“I just want to know why,” Cooper said, facing her. “I want to know exactly why I wasn’t offered initiation.”
“I thought we’d been over this,” answered Sophia. “We just don’t think you’re quite ready.”
Cooper nodded. “But you don’t have any real reason,” she said angrily.
Sophia bit her lip, regarding Cooper for a moment. “There are some things you can’t measure,” she said finally. “I can’t say that there’s any one thing you did or didn’t do that influenced our decision. It’s just a feeling we had.”
“Oh, a feeling,” Cooper said. “Well, I have feelings, too, and what I’m feeling right now is that the whole bunch of you are full of it. I worked my butt off in this class. I know I’m ready to be a witch. And I don’t need you or anyone else to say that I’m ready.”
“Is that what you came here to say?” asked Sophia quietly.
Cooper nodded. “And just so you know,” she added, “I don’t need to be initiated to know what I am. You can keep me out of your covens, but you can’t stop me from being a witch. And even if Kate and Annie don’t want to start a coven with me, that doesn’t mean I can’t find people who will.”
“You were thinking of starting a coven with Annie and Kate?” said Sophia.
“Yes,” Cooper told her. She hadn’t meant to drag her friends into the conversation. She’d only wanted to give Sophia a piece of her mind. But now that she’d said it, she had to continue. “I asked them to forget about initiation and start a coven with me,” she said. “But it’s important to them to go through with your stupid ritual, so that’s what they’re doing.”
Sophia nodded. “I see,” she said. “Do you really think our initiation ritual is stupid?”
Cooper looked at her former teacher. Sophia had done a lot of nice things for her. She’d helped her on more than one occasion, and until being turned down for initiation Cooper had respected her as one of the smartest, kindest people she knew. But now she had said something cruel to Sophia, and she felt bad about that.
“No,” she said, trying to sound less hostile. “I don’t think it’s stupid. But I don’t think it makes anyone a witch, either,” she added stubbornly.
Cooper was surprised to see Sophia smile. The smile grew until Sophia was laughing. Cooper didn’t understand what was so funny, and she felt as if she were being made fun of, which irritated her.
“I have to say,” Sophia said when she’d stopped chuckling, “your timing is perfect.”
“What do you mean?” Cooper asked, confused.
“It’s just like you to wait until almost the last minute,” Sophia told her.
Cooper still didn’t understand. “Wait for what?” she said.
Sophia took a deep breath and nodded toward the back of the store. “Come with me,” she said. “We need to talk.”
Sophia turned and walked into the back room. Not wanting to, but curious about what was going on, Cooper followed. Sophia sat in one of the armchairs and motioned for Cooper to sit in the other. Cooper did, but sat stiffly, still wary about the situation.
“It’s true that we didn’t think you were ready for initiation,” Sophia told her in a gentle voice. “You didn’t exactly meet your challenge.”
“What do you mean?” Cooper said, getting angry again. “I stood in front of all of those people during the play and forgot my lines! But I got through it. I faced my greatest fear.”
Sophia shook her head. “That wasn’t your greatest fear,” she said. “It was a big one, but it wasn’t your greatest one.”
Cooper shook her head. “If that wasn’t it, then what is?” she asked, totally confused.
“Not being initiated,” said Sophia simply.
Cooper stared at her. Slowly, she began to understand what Sophia was telling her. “You mean you told me I wasn’t going to be initiated because you knew that was what I would be most afraid of,” she said.
“Yes,” Sophia said. “Cooper, all year you were one of the strongest students in the class, perhaps the strongest. But your one stumbling block has always been your tendency to be a loner. You’ve made great strides in working with others. We’ve all seen that. To tell the truth, at first even we weren’t sure that the incident with forgetting lines wasn’t your challenge. But the more we thought about it, the more we knew that a student with your abilities would never be given such an easy assignment. Something just wasn’t right about it.”
“So you decided to make up another test for me,” Cooper said.
“We decided that for you a real test would be being told you couldn’t have something you’d worked so hard to achieve, something you wanted even though in many ways it was totally against everything you’ve always stood for. For you to want to be part of a group, and to want the acceptance that an initiation ritual implies, you would have to overcome all of the things you’ve built up to keep yourself safe from being hurt. And that would be the greatest fear, and the greatest challenge, you could face.”
Cooper was stunned. She couldn’t believe what Sophia was saying.
“I was set up?” she said.
Again, Sophia laughed. “In a way,” she said.
“That is so not fair,” exclaimed Cooper angrily.
“No one ever said magic was fair,” said Sophia.
Cooper shook her head. “So what are you saying?” she asked. “What’s the deal?”
“You passed,” Sophia told her.
“Passed?” repeated Cooper.
“Yes,” said Sophia. “You came here to tell me that you were willing to go ahead with your journey even though we’d told you you couldn’t. You recognized that the initiation ritual is largely symbolic. You saw the witch within yourself and you let her out with no help from us.”
“I did, didn’t I?” Cooper said. Somehow when Sophia said it, it all made sense.
“You faced your greatest fear and you didn’t let it stop you from doing
what you knew in your heart you needed to do,” Sophia told her.
Suddenly, Cooper realized what it all meant. “Does this mean I’m back in?” she asked excitedly.
Sophia nodded. “If you’re interested, we’d love for you to be part of the initiation ritual.”
Cooper’s heart was pounding in her chest, she was so excited. She’d passed! She was being offered initiation after all. She wasn’t a failure.
Wait a minute, a voice in her head said. Five minutes ago you were saying that initiation wasn’t important.
She thought about that. No, it wasn’t important to her to have someone else’s approval. She was pleased that she’d met the challenge of facing her greatest fear, even if she hadn’t realized that’s what she was doing, but it didn’t change how she felt about things. She still didn’t think being initiated along with the others would make her any more of a real witch than she already was.
Still, it might be fun, she thought. She had to admit, there was a part of her that would really like to stand with Kate and Annie and finish what they’d started together a year and a day before. She didn’t, however, want to give Sophia the satisfaction of saying yes too easily.
“I’ll think about it,” she said, trying to sound cool.
Sophia smiled. “You do that,” she said. “But think fast. Tomorrow is the last class.”
Cooper nodded. “I’ll be there,” she said as she stood up and prepared to leave.
“Oh, and Cooper,” Sophia said.
Cooper turned around.
“Good work,” Sophia said admiringly.
CHAPTER 14
“Welcome to your last class before initiation,” Sophia said the following evening. She looked around the room. “The next time the seven—I mean eight,” she corrected herself, looking at Cooper, who was seated between Annie and Kate on the floor, “of you are all together it will be as fully initiated witches.”
The class members gave little cheers and smiled at one another. Annie looked at Cooper. She still couldn’t quite believe what Cooper had told her and Kate that morning at school. At first she’d thought that perhaps Cooper was joking, but when she’d realized that her friend wasn’t kidding about now being one of the initiates, she’d been thrilled to death. They were all going to be initiated together after all. It was so exciting.
Well, maybe not together, she reminded herself. She stole a glance at Kate. If Kate was set on joining the Coven of the Green Wood, they still wouldn’t all be together. While Annie liked the coven, she was fairly sure that it wasn’t the place for her. She also couldn’t imagine Cooper there, which meant that Kate would be the only one of them to join it.Thinking about that made Annie a little sad, but it wasn’t her biggest problem at the moment. Even more disconcerting than the idea that she might not be in the same coven with either of her friends was the fact that she wasn’t sure what coven she would be in. She’d been doing a lot of thinking about that, and the fact was that none of the covens she’d heard about seemed right for her. The one that appealed to her most was the Daughters of the Cauldron, and she had sort of settled on them as her fallback choice in case she really couldn’t decide.
I can’t believe you have a safety coven, she told herself. She’d been trying not to look at it that way, but when she was honest with herself she knew it was true.
Still, there were two more covens for them to hear about that evening. One of them will be the one, Annie told herself. I’m sure of it. She decided to push her fears to the back of her mind and trust that everything would work out fine.
“We have a lot to do tonight,” Sophia said to them. “After you hear from our last two presenters, you’ll be asked to think about which of the covens you’re interested in. Each of you will then speak to the representative of the coven you’ve chosen and discuss the possibility of initiation. It’s a big night, so let’s get started. Our first presenter is a very dear, very old friend of mine. His name is Owen.”
A man with short brown hair and an equally short beard walked to the front of the class. “I don’t know that I like that old part,” he said, smiling.
He seems nice, Annie thought, looking at the man. She realized she was looking for a reason—any reason—to like Owen and, by extension, his coven. Still, she couldn’t help it. She was feeling pressure to choose a coven, and there were only two possible candidates left before she had to go with the Daughters of the Cauldron.
“My coven is called the Starhaven Coven,” Owen said. “We’re a Gardnerian coven. As most of you probably know, the Gardnerian tradition of witchcraft is named after Gerald Gardner. Gardner is generally credited with revitalizing the Wiccan movement and establishing many of the rituals and invocations and chants in use by a lot of covens today. So what is a Gardnerian coven, you might ask? I’ll start by saying that it’s a fairly formal style of Wicca.”
Sophia gave a little laugh, making her cover her mouth and causing Owen to look at her in mock annoyance.
“Okay,” he said. “Compared to Sophia’s style of practicing, it’s extremely formal. We tend to use the same chants and invocations at each ritual. There’s a set order to our rituals, which we follow very closely. We also have a strict hierarchy within the coven. Initiates go through three different levels of initiation, each one lasting for a fairly long period of time.”
Owen paused, seeming to consider what he was telling them. “Wow,” he said. “When I put it all into words it sounds sort of like joining the army or something.”
The class members laughed. Owen smiled. “It’s really not like that at all,” he said. “But it definitely is a form of Wicca most suited to those who like order and systems.”
I like those things, Annie told herself. It sounds sort of scientific. She knew about Gardnerian witchcraft from her reading. It was one of the most popular forms of Wicca, and there were numerous covens all over the world that owed their beginnings to Gerald Gardner. Maybe it would work for me, Annie thought.
“One more important thing,” Owen said. “In our coven we work in partnerships. We believe in the polarity of the sexes, and whenever possible we try to pair up our male and female members. We think it makes the magical work we do stronger because it brings opposing energies together. Now, your partner doesn’t have to be your actual partner. It doesn’t have to be a wife or husband, or even someone you’re in a romantic relationship with. But it does have to be someone you can work closely with and be comfortable with.”
“What if you don’t have a partner?” asked Laura.
“We prefer new members to enter the coven with partners,” Owen said. “So it is best if you have a classmate of the opposite sex you can join with.”
So much for that, Annie thought. Although she liked the guys in the class, there were none that she wanted to partner with for magical work, at least not in a one-on-one setting. Also, when she thought about it, she really liked working with many different people. And she wasn’t sure she agreed that combining female and male energies made magic any more strong. She had accomplished amazing things with all kinds of combinations of people, and she didn’t like the idea of restricting herself to one working partnership.
One down, one to go, she thought grimly as Owen returned to his seat at the back of the room. This had better be it.
Sophia appeared before them once more. “And now for something completely different,” she said. “Our final presenter is also a great friend of mine, although not quite as old as Owen is.”
Owen hissed at Sophia jokingly. “Watch out,” he said. “Or I’ll tell them how old you really are!”
“Forty-five next month!” Sophia shot back. “And I want presents!” Then she got back to business. “Anyway, our last presenter is Hunter. I’ll let him explain what his coven is all about.”
Annie found herself immediately intrigued by the last presenter. He was a young man, perhaps in his early twenties. He was tall, with long dark blond hair that was tied in a ponytail. He was wearing a T-shirt with a Celt
ic knot design on it, and Annie noticed he had a similar design tattooed around his right arm.
“I’m Hunter,” he said. “I’m a student at Jasper College, where I major in English. I’m also the head of the student pagan group there.”
I didn’t even know they had one, Annie thought.
“There’s a large student group at Jasper,” Hunter continued. “We hold open rituals and monthly moon gatherings. But we aren’t a coven. We’re just a group of people interested in exploring pagan spirituality. However, I also belong to a real coven.” He smiled, as if saying that his coven was real somehow made the student group nothing but a big game. “That didn’t come out quite right,” he said. “What I meant to say is that I also belong to a smaller coven apart from the student group. How was that?”
Annie laughed. Hunter had an easy way of speaking. He seemed relaxed and comfortable talking about Wicca. It would be interesting being in a coven with him, Annie found herself thinking.
“We call ourselves the Children of the Goddess,” said Hunter. “We’re a very diverse group, and because we’re mostly college students, we’re a young group.”
Sounds good to me, Annie thought.
“We meet pretty regularly throughout the year,” he told them. “But obviously we take breaks when school is out.”
Maybe it’s not so good, Annie thought, changing her mind. School was out at times when her favorite sabbats—like Midsummer and Yule—occurred. She didn’t want to miss those things. So although she found Hunter interesting, and although she liked the idea of being in a coven with people close to her own age, she didn’t think his coven was right for her after all.
Hunter told them a little more about the Children of the Goddess, but Annie had already decided that the group wouldn’t provide her with what she needed. So when Hunter thanked them for listening to him and returned to his seat, Annie felt the knot that had been forming in her stomach solidify. The presentations were over, and she still didn’t have a definite winner.
