The Challenge Box

by Isobel Bird

  Several people went into the back room and came back, joining Kate. None of them said a word to one another, but Kate was pretty sure that at least one of them—a girl who had missed several of the class sessions—had not been offered initiation. She seemed upset, and Kate wanted to say something to her, but she didn’t.

  Then it was Annie’s turn. As she walked to the back, she tried not to let any doubts enter her mind. You’ve done the best you could, she reminded herself as she entered the office and sat down across from Archer.

  “Are you ready to learn of our decision?” Archer asked her, as she had asked Kate.

  “Yes,” Annie said simply, receiving the candle Archer offered to her. Like Kate before her, she held the wick of her candle to the flame and watched. When it exploded into light, she let out a cry of relief and joy.

  “You may add your light to those of the others chosen before you,” Archer said.

  As Annie set her candle among the others, she couldn’t help but notice that there weren’t as many candles as there were people who had entered the room. Who had failed? Was it Kate? She’d tried to read her friend’s expression when she’d come back, but Kate had been looking away from her, so she hadn’t been able to tell. She prayed that the absent candle didn’t belong to her friend.

  “Return to the others,” Archer said.

  Annie nodded and left the room hurriedly. When she joined Kate and the others who had gone before her, she saw Kate looking at her anxiously. She made it, Annie thought happily, noticing that Kate was trying way too hard to appear calm and collected. She made it. We’re going to be witches together. Now they just had to wait for Cooper to go through the motions of lighting her candle and they could all celebrate.

  Finally it was Cooper’s turn. She walked quickly to the back room, where she sat down and faced Archer. She noticed the collection of candles on the table before her, and guessed—before Archer even asked her if she was ready to hear their decision regarding her initiation—that the candles had something to do with people passing or failing.

  “Sure,” Cooper said in response to the question. She took the candle that Archer handed her and unhesitatingly plunged it into the flame of the central candle.

  It didn’t light. She removed her candle from the flame and tried again. She held it there for a long time, sure that it would soon begin to burn. When it didn’t, she looked at Archer.

  “I’m sorry,” Archer said. “We’ve decided that you are not ready for initiation.”

  “What?” Cooper said, not believing what she was hearing. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Not all are chosen,” said Archer. She reached over and gently took the unlit candle from Cooper’s hand.

  Cooper could only stare at her. “What do you mean I’m not ready?” she asked again. “I passed my challenge.”

  “It is time for you to return to the others,” Archer said. “Your questions will be answered later.”

  Cooper stood up. A mixture of disbelief, anger, and sadness raged through her. “I’m not going back in there,” she said. The idea of seeing her friends and telling them that she hadn’t been chosen was more than she could bear. She just couldn’t do it. She’d failed. But how? How was it possible? What had she done wrong?

  She gave Archer one last look, then walked from the room. But instead of joining the others, she headed for the front of the store. She needed to get away from there, away from her friends and from the people who had decided that she wasn’t ready to become a witch. She didn’t understand what had happened, and she couldn’t face anyone. She had to be alone.

  As she pushed open the front door she saw Annie and Kate coming after her.

  “Cooper!” Annie called out. “Where are you going?”

  “Yeah,” said Kate. “Wait up.”

  But Cooper couldn’t wait. She left the store and started running. She ran as hard as she could, away from Crones’ Circle and away from her friends. She could hear Kate and Annie coming after her, and she doubled her efforts. She ran faster than she ever had before, and when she looked over her shoulder a few minutes later she saw that her friends had given up on catching her.

  Still she kept running. She didn’t know where she was going or what she was going to do. But running kept her from thinking about what had happened back at the store, kept her from thinking about the candle that wouldn’t light.

  Follow the

  with Book 15:

  Initiation

  “I know a lot of you are looking at your upcoming initiation as the end of a long journey,” Sophia said to the seven people seated in the back room of Crones’ Circle. “You’ve all worked very hard for the past year, and now the final destination is in sight, right?”

  The three men and four women all laughed and nodded.

  Sophia smiled. “Well, you’re wrong,” she said. “This isn’t the end; it’s the beginning. It’s the beginning of a lifetime of learning and exploring and discovering. Why do you think they call your graduation from high school a commencement service? Because it’s the beginning of the rest of your life, the start of the journey you were really preparing for when you suffered through algebra and gym class.”

  There was more laughter from the class members in response to Sophia’s comment. Annie and Kate, the only two members of the class still in high school, looked at one another knowingly.

  “Your initiation is really a commencement,” Sophia continued. “Your year and a day of study taught you a great deal about yourselves—about your abilities and your weaknesses. You’ve come to know yourselves better, and you’ve come to understand Wicca better. But you’re still just beginning. I was initiated more than twenty-five years ago, and I still don’t know all there is to know about Wicca, or about myself.” She paused, looking thoughtful, and then added, “I think probably there are some things about myself I don’t want to know.”

  Annie listened as Sophia continued her speech. It was the first of four preparatory classes before the initiation ceremony itself. When they’d begun their year and a day, the thought of initiation had been a distant one. Annie hadn’t really even allowed herself to think a lot about the actual event itself because it had seemed so far off. But now that it was just about there, four weeks seemed almost too short a time to prepare. Suddenly, Annie could only think about everything she didn’t know about witchcraft. It was the same feeling she sometimes got before a big test, like she had forgotten to study something really important and would be asked to write an essay about the topic, or she’d learned the wrong list of events or formulas and would have no idea how to work out the problems.

  Relax, she told herself. You made it this far. She looked around at the other six people who had been selected for initiation. Of the nearly twenty people who had started the class, the seven of them were all that remained. Several people had dropped out and others had not been offered initiation.

  Like Cooper, Annie thought sadly. She still couldn’t believe that Cooper had been one of the people whose candle hadn’t lit during the choosing ceremony. She still recalled the look of pain, anger, and sadness she’d seen on her friend’s face as Cooper had rushed from the store that night. Annie and Kate had gone after her, but Cooper had been determined to get away from them. Kate had wanted to keep chasing her, but Annie had stopped her, knowing that Cooper wasn’t angry at them but just wanted to be alone for a while.

  Although the three of them had talked briefly about Cooper’s failure, Annie and Kate had talked about it extensively in private. Neither of them could figure out what had happened. Annie had even tried to bring the subject up with Archer once, but Archer had kindly but firmly informed Annie that the decision was a private matter between the dedicant and the teachers, and refused to say anything else. Since then the subject had become one that no one mentioned in front of Cooper, although it was always there, waiting for one of them to trip over.

  And it’s only going to get worse, Annie thought sadly. The fact was, she, Cooper,
and Kate were best friends. There was no way Annie and Kate could immerse themselves in Wicca the way they would be doing after initiation and not be able to talk about it around Cooper. That just couldn’t happen, which meant one of two things: either Cooper was going to have to deal with not being initiated with them or . . . She couldn’t allow herself to think about the other option. But try as she might, she had to. Or the three of us won’t be able to be best friends anymore, she told herself.

  That, however, was a possibility she couldn’t even imagine. Not be best friends with Cooper? Well, you barely knew who she was a year ago, she argued with herself. That was true. The first time Annie had even spoken to Cooper was after Kate had enlisted Annie’s help to correct the effects of a botched spell and the two of them had in turn had to ask Cooper for assistance. Thinking about the moment when she had confronted a reluctant Cooper in one of the school’s music rehearsal rooms, Annie couldn’t help but smile. She’d been so intimidated by the tough-acting Cooper, with her sarcastic responses and her cool demeanor. It had taken a lot for Annie to stand up to her and break through Cooper’s wall of reserve. But she had, and she had quickly come to appreciate Cooper’s unique personality. Thinking that maybe she wouldn’t be spending as much time with her friend saddened her.

  “We won’t be discussing any details of the initiation ceremony itself,” Sophia said, bringing Annie’s attention back to the subject at hand. “The real purpose of these last four classes is to get you to think about covens. As you all know by now, many—but not all—witches work within covens. You’ve seen several covens in action, at least during public rituals, and you have some idea of how things differ from coven to coven. Every coven has its own way of doing things, from casting circles to working magic to celebrating the sabbats. It’s important that you align yourself with a coven that you think will both be a comfortable place for you to work and also challenge you to grow in your own practice of witchcraft.”

  Annie snuck a glance at Kate. Did Kate care whether or not they were in the same coven? Was it important to her to continue working with Annie? Annie realized that she was basing her decision, at least in part, on what Kate wanted to do. But was that the right thing? Annie had assumed that with Cooper gone she and Kate would want to stick together. But maybe she’d been wrong. Suddenly the little circle of three that she, Kate, and Cooper had made seemed to be falling apart, and that scared her more than she wanted to admit.

  About the Author

  Isobel Bird has been involved in the world of paganism and witchcraft for many years. She lives and dances beneath the moon somewhere in New England.

  Follow the Circle:

  Book 1: So Mote It Be

  Book 2: Merry Meet

  Book 3: Second Sight

  Book 4: What the Cards Said

  Book 5: In the Dreaming

  Book 6: Ring of Light

  Book 7: Blue Moon

  Book 8: The Five Paths

  Book 9: Through the Veil

  Book 10: Making the Saint

  Book 11: The House of Winter

  Book 12: Written in the Stars

  Book 13: And Harm It None

  Credits

  Cover art © 2002 by Cliff Nielsen

  Cover © 2002 by HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.

  THE CHALLENGE BOX. Copyright © 2002 by Isobel Bird. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  ePub edition. January 2002 ISBN 9780061756436

  First Avon edition, 2002

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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