Sorceress of Faith

by Robin D. Owens

  “I am the boy. I have the pretty feathers. You are the girl and are a peahen.”

  Sinafin ignored him.

  Everything Marian had ever wanted was here, even though she’d never known it, could never have imagined this life. She’d been right to return. Her heart and future lay here.

  On Amee she’d learned to open herself to more people than Andrew—to trust and love. Her adventure had forced her to become an integral part of a vibrant community engaged in an awesome task, instead of a distant, academic observer of life. Relationships with people, particularly these people, would be fascinating and ever-changing, expanding the knowledge of her heart and leading her to wisdom instead of mere understanding.

  “You’re my friends,” she said.

  They cheered. She curtsied.

  A breeze feathered against her skin. The last, blessed lesson of the day floated over her, into her—the knowledge that she was perfect in her own unique way.

  She laughed. “I won against the Master Mahlyar. We won against the Dark.” Marian looked at her twin Towers and flung out her arms and whirled in complete freedom. They were hers. Her new home and school. But who knew what condition they might be in? Whether there would be furnishings or food? She didn’t care.

  She said something she’d never said impulsively before, because before it had needed to be planned, it had needed to be perfect and right and tidy. But this moment was perfect in itself, as were all moments. As she was. “Let’s party at my place!”

  Jaquar scooped her up and spun her around and they lifted off the ground in a rush of air.

  Another perfect moment. She’d live a lifetime of perfect moments.

  Shaking her head, she chuckled. That sounded very Zen. But she was an Exotique Circlet, ready to add another melodic line to the symphony that was Lladranan culture.

  Marian slipped from Jaquar’s arms and took his hand. She Sang her Song as she ran to her Towers, and her lover and friends and brother followed.

  CUT SECOND SCENE FROM ORIGINAL CHAPTER 1

  Socreress of Faith

  All rights reserved; copyright © Robin D. Owens.The text contained within may not be reproduced in whole or in part or distributed in any form whatsoever OR SOLD without first obtaining permission from the author.

  Note: Marian's name was originally Brandy (and her hamster, Soda), changed at the request of Luna. I picked Marian because it's a derivitive of Mary, the perfect woman...and Jack's first name was Richard, but I have a good friend who is NOT a jerk named Richard who might read the book, so I changed it to something that sounded more like the hero's name Jaquar.

  You'll be seeing a lot of different scenes that were cut from the front of the book...here's one with Jack Wilse, Marian's ex-lover, who's mentioned in Sorceress. I rewrote this scene a couple of times adding and subtracting magic...

  Enjoy!

  Mistake. Brandy squinted at her monitor as the table of figures swam. At the end of this project she'd need glasses for sure. After four months as the Assistant to the Dean of Engineering at the University, she knew her lateral transfer had been the wrong thing to do. Not the worst blunder she'd made in the past few years, but definitely traipsing down a false path. She hated making mistakes. One of the reasons her thirst for knowledge was so great was because she didn't like correcting stupid errors.

  She huffed out a breath and glanced at the scrawled paper beside her. Was that a 7 or a 2? She peered closer, "7." Right. To clear her mind, she pinched off a sprig of mint from the verdant plant on her desk and chewed the leaves.

  Her little zen clock chimed soothingly and she looked at the digital readout. Noon. Her shoulders relaxed. The Engineering Department Office closed precisely from noon to one. She hadn't needed an alarm clock in the Theater Department. Looking back, the over-the-top emotions and dramatics of the students in Theater weren't as bad as she'd thought.

  Brandy rose and locked the door, then returned to her desk and got her uninspired sack lunch and a book from her drawer. After the failure of her dawn meditation, she'd just grabbed food on hand for her lunch. She'd known she'd have to eat at her desk to get the report done on time.

  She ate her lunch and studied the bagua chart in The Way of Feng Shui for You. She'd given up hiding her reading material after a month. Did the Chinese really have so many octagonal rooms? She hadn't thought so.

  "You don't really believe in that junk!" Associate Professor Richard Wilse came from the conference room behind her, stopped and snorted.

  Brandy looked up at the blond hunk. She admired his body and deplored his mind. It was inconceivable to her now that she'd had a brief affair with him. Mistake.

  She folded her hands. "I have an open mind."

  Wilse grunted.

  "One of the tenets of Feng Shui is simplicity," she said. "Ridding your life of clutter." She looked pointedly through the open door of his office to the edge of his desk. A waterfall of paper toppled from the stacks on the edge to the floor.

  "Bunch of crap," Wilse said, but a hint of color showed in his cheeks. His pale blue gaze lingered on Brandy's breasts, then went to the curve of her stomach.

  He nodded approvingly at her apple. "I see you're taking my advice about nutrition." He flexed his muscles. "Exercise some more and you'll get rid of those extra pounds. You want another guest pass to my club?"

  Mature women don't have flat stomachs, Brandy told herself, trying to believe it. The female body is constructed to carry weight in the abdomen, butt, and thighs. Mature women are curvy. She still ground her teeth.

  "Thanks, Richard, but no. I'm fine." Better than her anorexic five-times-married mother, at least.

  "Huh." He looked at her book again and shook his head. "You know, here in Boulder there are two sorts of people: real people and flakes."

  "That's right," Brandy agreed. "Two sorts of people: academic folks and the real people."

  "If you two are finished, I'd like to talk about work." The Dean's dry voice came from behind her. Brandy winced.

  A stack of papers containing columns of figures and equations in small block handwriting plopped onto her dark blue blotter decorated with gold suns, moons and stars. "Those are the final statistics for our latest departmental paper on the structural integrity of the older campus buildings. My part of the report is now done." He tapped his finger on the document. Just like the rest of him, his finger was long and lean and nondescript. "With a day to spare."

  He lifted his balding head and glanced at Richard. "Dr. Wilse, is your portion of the research ready to be inputted?"

  "Almost, sir. I'll have it for Brandy within the half-hour."

  The Dean's bushy gray eyebrows, the only luxuriant thing about him, drew together. "See that you do." He nodded coolly to Brandy, then left.

  Richard strode into his office. When he sat and pulled his chair up to his desk, more paper rustled to the floor. He ignored it and began tapping on his computer keyboard.

  A few minutes later he made a sound of disgust and his chair squeaked as it rolled back. He marched to Brandy's desk and flipped a diskette atop the Dean's stats that she was already working on.

  "That's the information. It's all there, but I can't get the table to format right." He glanced at his watch. "Time for my afternoon class, see you." Picking up an overfull briefcase, he hurried from the room, shoulders hunched—not waiting for her reply. Not that she could get one past her gritted teeth. She glared at the diskette. It was bound to be a mess.

  Overtime again today and with a stop at GoldenRaven's she wouldn't get home before dark. She glanced at the moon chart taped to the back of one of her shelves—the moon was waxing, four days until full, so she'd have some light on her way home.

  She eyed another apple and decided to run across the quad to the student union and get some buttered popcorn.

  MARIAN AND GOLDEN RAVEN

  Socreress of Faith

  All rights reserved; copyright © Robin D. Owens.The text contained within may not be reproduced in w
hole or in part or distributed in any form whatsoever OR SOLD without first obtaining permission from the author.

  Late Spring, Boulder, Colorado, the same evening

  Slowly rising from the pillow on the floor and flicking her skirt out to straighten it, Marian Hrasta watched GoldenRaven's other students thank the woman and file out the room to the house's entryway. Marian braced herself to talk to her teacher about the strange sounds—chimes, gongs, and chants—that had haunted her this last month.

  When GoldenRaven turned back to the living room and saw Marian waiting, her smile faded. Marian didn't like that. She'd always been a good student, and it dented her pride—perhaps even something more—if her profs didn't like her.

  GoldenRaven stepped into the room and folded her hands at her waist and tilted her blond head. Her blue eyes were stern. "This was the last session in our endeavor to find your totem animal. You were deep in meditation, Marian and I believe you found your totem, didn't you? Therefore the class was a success in your mind, yes?" GoldenRaven's smile was a little too sharp for what Marian thought of as a laid-back, new age practitioner. But a teacher had asked a question.

  "Yes, an owl." Shades of Harry Potter, must have been the movie she'd seen a week before. "A snowy owl."

  GoldenRaven nodded once. "Good."

  "Uh, GoldenRaven, I know that you spoke the guided meditation, but did you use music, too? Chants and chimes and a gong, for instance?"

  "No."

  Marian was afraid of that. She wet her lips, but before she could broach the reason she stayed, Goldenraven spoke. "You're like many of my university grad students, studying me and my beliefs rather than the subject—the lifestyle—I want to teach." She started straightening the living room, picking up pillows from the last guided meditation session.

  "I'm sorry if you don't think that I take you seriously."

  GoldenRaven sighed, took a seat on a broken-down sofa. She was several inches shorter than Marian and even plumper than Marian herself. Unlike Marian, GoldenRaven accepted her body-shape. She gestured to Marian to sit, too. "Marian, you have a great deal of intelligence, and more, just plain magic in you, right beneath the surface. But you dabble. You don't commit yourself to the learning.”

  Marian felt heat creep up her neck. She'd always been a good student.

  "Listen to me," GoldenRaven said, "You dabble, not taking what you learn seriously. Yet I feel a brilliant spark within you, just under the surface." She tapped Marian's chest above her breasts. "Strong magic."

  She wanted to believe. Wanted to think that some magic actually worked, but was unable to cast aside the last little nugget of logic and reason.

  GoldenRaven sighed. "My belief in magic is integral to my spiritual beliefs. Life itself is magic—the growing of a babe in the womb, the unfurling of the bud to a blossom, a rainbow. All to be celebrated, all life. And I know that you—" She made a helpless gesture as if searching for words. "I must show her," she whispered to herself. She turned to Marian. "Sit back down and relax. We'll try a little something."

  Marian took a seat on the old, soft sofa, sinking into the cushions, leaning back. GoldenRaven closed the room's door and re-lit some of the candles.

  "Close your eyes," GoldenRaven said and Marian did.

  She relaxed as she'd learned to do, allowing the flow of GoldenRaven's voice to carry her into that state where her body was very heavy, but her mind was clear. Marian had told herself that she wasn't really losing control, GoldenRaven couldn't make Marian do anything she didn't want to. She knew this. More, she trusted GoldenRaven, sensing an ethical woman. Marian had run across enough scams and cons in her exploration of New Age classes to know when a voice didn't sound true.

  Thinking of music brought the chimes and chants flooding through her mind. GoldenRaven must have turned on her system again, but that didn't explain why Marian kept hearing the music outside of class—when she was dropping into sleep, or awakening, or even when her mind got caught in a daydream. Must be some sort of conditioning, some lingering game her mind played to send her into the meditative state.

  "Why do you continue to take classes like Finding Your Totem Animal, Introduction to the Tarot, Feng Shui, Wiccan 101? Not just for your goal of being a professor of Comparative Religion, I'm sure. Why?" GoldenRaven asked softly.

  Marian had told the class of all her other studies during the introductory portion. "Because I'm interested in all those."

  "Because the magic you feel inside you pulls you to such studies Now sink into your core, visualize a root going from the base of your spine through the couch, through the floor and deep into the earth of our world. What do you feel, Marian?"

  "I hear an ancient, intricate song," Marian said, confessing for the first time that this melody had been with her for a long, long time, ever since she could remember. And still it throbbed with beautiful rhythm. As she focused on it the chimes and chant and occasional gong seemed to lift and diminish. Interesting trick.

  "A song? Hmmmm," GoldenRaven said, and Marian heard the nuances in her voice, too, the initial surprise, the amusement. She was acutely aware of the sounds in the room, the house—the small rush of a table fountain, the tiny hiss of flames as they ate candles. The mewing of a cat upstairs.

  "You love this song?" asked GoldenRaven?

  What wasn't to love? "Of course."

  The song surged and for one shining instance Marian felt completely whole, completely accepted and loved. Total joy nearing ecstasy.

  "That is your connection to Mother Earth, Marian, and just a part of your magic. Don't you sense the winds that swirl around our world, and fire of the molten core, and tides of her oceans?"

  "Yes," Marian breathed.

  A distant clomping of male footsteps down the stairs broke the moment.

  "Time to end this exercise. I will count from ten to one...." GoldenRaven continued with the patter that pulled Marian from her alternative mental state. The ceiling light flicked on, brightening the light beyond her eyelids.

  "If you want to fulfill your true potential, and what scholar does not, you must find another teacher. One who will help you with your control and need for perfection issues."

  Marian flushed. "Are you starting a new class, soon?" Marian was sure that the Native American spirituality that GoldenRaven taught wasn't what she was looking for, but the woman was the best New Age teacher Marian had ever had.

  "I'm afraid not. As a matter of fact, WoodElk and I have decided that we aren't really 'mountain' people. We miss deciduous forests. So we're heading to the West Coast, Oregon or Washington." She shrugged. "Wherever Spirit takes us."

  Marian bit her lip. "I need to talk with you."

  The older woman returned her gaze to Marian. "I'm sorry, but it's impossible. We can talk a little now, but otherwise, it will be a while before I'll be settled. There's email, of course."

  "I'm having trouble with my meditation. I hear things." She waved. "A gong, chimes, chants." She hadn't wanted to blurt out her problems, but didn't see any choice. And she'd had her hearing checked at the student health center. Nothing was wrong with her ears. She felt as normal mentally as usual, and sensed the problem wasn't one a psychologist could help.

  GoldenRaven's eyes widened. She tilted her head. "Then perhaps you should quit for the moment."

  "But this thing you said was inside me—" Magic. "Shouldn't I continue? My path—" Marian's tongue felt thick, unaccustomed confusion stopped her.

  "We didn't determine your Path, Marian," GoldenRaven's voice mellowed, lowered as if comforting. "We only agreed that your Path and mine are not the same. My training would not fill your needs." She grasped Marian's arm, then stiffened, her eyes going blank and unfocused.

  Marian realized then that this was really why she'd come to GoldenRaven, because the woman was a brilliant forecaster, because Marian wanted to be told what to do, what direction to go instead of trying to figure it out on her own.

  Understanding her own motives made her feel gu
ilty, but not guilty enough to break away.

  "The full moon. Three days." GoldenRaven sucked in a breath and stepped back from Marian, breaking the physical connection. She shook her head, then met Marian's eyes. "I don't know what it means." GoldenRaven lifted her hands in a helpless gesture. "I can't tell you. Except that this full moon ritual is very important for you. It will free your magic. Life changing. For you and your brother. Ask for your teacher then." She opened her mouth, then shut it and shook her head again. "No, I should not tell you even if I could. I'm sorry, Marian. Go now, and Blessings upon you." With a little duck of her head she glided from the room.

  Marian barely saw her go. She had never mentioned her brother, Andrew, to GoldenRaven or anyone in the class. Automatically, Marian picked up her bag, emotions churning inside her. Her feet didn't work well. She stumbled from the living room, over the threshold of the house.

  The cold night, wind slapping at her, whipping her long hair into tiny lashes across her face, only increased her inner chill. Though she walked fast, she couldn't prevent shivers.

  She might have shrugged off the continuing auditory illusions, might have ignored GoldenRaven's advice to find another teacher. Might have continued to "dabble" in New Age spirituality on her way to receiving her doctorate in Comparative Philosophies and Religion. But she would never ignore any threat to her brother.

  If a full moon ritual was that important to him, she'd do it. And take it seriously by God—or by All The Powers That Were.

  SORCERESS OF FAITH, CUT SCENE-JAQUAR

  All rights reserved; copyright © Robin D. Owens. The text contained within may not be reproduced in whole or in part or distributed in any form whatsoever OR SOLD without first obtaining permission from the author.