Burnt Snow

by Van Badham

  We were on the cement path now, walking north towards the big beachside park I used to play in with Nanna as a child. Water was lapping at the sand. I saw a lone jogger heading towards us, indistinct in the distance, and there was no one else around but some seagulls.

  ‘The video … of Lauren? Of—’ she said.

  What I was about to say was too ridiculous. It was the stupidest sentence ever.

  I breathed out. Stopped walking. Seagulls flew noiselessly above my head and the smell of seaweed and beach floated on the breeze. My eyes stared at the cement path but I thought, No, face her. Face your mother.

  ‘Mum,’ I said, ‘am I a witch?’

  Mum recrossed her arms and smiled at me. ‘No, Soph,’ she said, suddenly light, ‘you are certainly not.’

  ‘Are you?’

  My mother didn’t move. Something like a relieved frown crossed her face.

  ‘Mum,’ I said, ‘are you a witch?’

  ‘Oh, Soph … Why couldn’t you have asked that a week ago?’

  Her voice was regretful, but something shone in her eyes and her frown teased slowly into a smile. As if stretching awake, my mother lifted her arms in the air and gave her body a vigorous shake. She shook her head, and curls of her burgundy hair fell over her shoulders and past them. When Mum dropped her arms and looked back at me, I was frozen with blank shock.

  The wrinkles had vanished from her face, her hair was long and the line of her body was completely reshaped. My mother looked twenty years old.

  ‘I’ve been waiting for seventeen years for that question,’ said my mother in a girlish voice. Her eyes shone the same colour as the sapphire at her neck. She sank her fingers into her luxurious new hair, and gave her hips a restless wriggle. ‘Don’t stand there like an idiot – keep walking away from the house.’

  34

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I said weakly, trailing my reconstituted mother by a few paces. She was almost skipping ahead of me.

  ‘Sure you do,’ she said over her young shoulder. ‘You’re not stupid, Sophie.’

  ‘How’d you do that to yourself?’

  ‘It’s just a glamour,’ she said. ‘A basic realignment of the cells. Your mother gives you a run for your money, doesn’t she?’ She tossed her hair with a dramatic flick and nodded ahead. ‘I wonder if that jogger will stop and look.’

  She must have seen the horrified look on my face because she added, ‘I’ve crawled out of a cave I was forced into before you were born. Let me enjoy the sunshine for five minutes. Even if it is overcast.’ Mum – the thin, pretty version of my mum – sighed. I noticed that her eyes seemed to emit a strange scarlet glow in the jogger’s direction.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, walking on, ‘English-language culture calls me a witch. Our Finnish word is tietäjä – it means “those who know” – and I could have known a lot more if you’d been brave enough to broach this subject before Nanna went into hospital.’

  I tore my eyes away from her. Seagulls hovered, the white sand was still, but in this instant the transformation of my world was complete; my eyes darted everywhere, trying to see the invisible cracks that ran through everything I thought I knew. It was as if I was looking at the beach, the sand, the sky, my mother – certainly my mother – for the very first time. ‘You should have told me yourself,’ I said to her, my eyes stinging, ‘you’re my mum. I mean – aren’t you?’

  ‘Of course I am,’ said Mum, giving my hand a strangely cold squeeze. ‘It’s your father who’s kept these things from you. I would have told you everything – trained you like your nanna trained me, but …’ Her voice was bitter. ‘David Morgan is no professional magician, but with one spell, in particular, he distinguished himself as a very talented amateur.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Your nanna taught me her Craft from when I was a very small child, but it was not training your father wanted for any child of his … or for me, as it turned out. When I started seeing your father I was very careful to keep certain secrets – there are reasons, Sophie Morgan, very good reasons why witches don’t advertise in the papers. As far as I knew, your father believed that I was a landscape gardener who dabbled in herbs … but I underestimated his powers of deduction, rather shockingly.’ She leaned over; her long curls bounced. ‘Don’t be fooled by his mild-mannered persona – behind the TV shows and sports pages there is real cunning in David.’

  I didn’t know what to say. I stared at my mother’s slim brown hands and tried not to compare mine as pudgy.

  ‘How he worked out what I was, or where on earth someone like him found a binding spell, I don’t know. We’d only been seeing one another a few months – he suggested we climb up on the roof of his building to look at a view.’ A smile crossed her delicate face. ‘I looked like this then,’ she said. ‘I just thought your father was up for a laugh that night; it didn’t even occur to me it could be anything else. We got up to the roof and I failed to notice he had salt leaking out of his pockets. We’d gone through a bottle of wine together before I realised what he’d done.’

  We walked past the beachfront houses in the grey light, and my mind replayed the vision Izek had shown me of Ashley, trapped in a circle of crunchy crystals.

  ‘A salt circle on a rooftop is a very mediaeval way of catching witches, but it still works,’ Mum said. ‘A salt circle is like a net around magic – it lets the person who’s thrown it control what goes on inside. Once I was trapped, your father had the power to set spells on me and I had no way of fighting back. And he did set spells. Binds and silences – which you’ve just broken.’

  My brain was so overloaded with these revelations that I walked stiffly, almost without the mental energy to put one foot in front of the other. Dad, I saw. Dad with a newspaper. Dad watching TV. Not Dad on a roof casting spells – not even on a planet where my mum had just turned twenty next to me.

  ‘I can’t imagine Dad …’ I began. ‘He wouldn’t do something cruel to anyone,’ I said firmly.

  Mum shrugged. ‘All men can behave strangely when they’re in love, Soph. And your dad really loved me, didn’t want me to leave him. Who wants to be married to a woman who can shake the wrinkles out of her face, summon a storm and disappear into thin air, when you’re just a suburban accountant who does the books for sporting clubs? He learned things about magic – somewhere, somehow – and he used his knowledge on me.’ Her almond-shaped, Finnish eyes glimmered coldly, but her voice was more worldly than sad. I realised I was listening to her with a solemnity and respect I never had before. I didn’t know if it was because she was being honest or because she was pretty.

  ‘Do you hate him?’ I asked.

  Mum snorted. ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘I found it impressive. No man had ever outplayed me before. Attraction is just attraction – it’s respect that’s the true basis of love. Whatever the cost to me, I did suddenly respect I was dealing with much more than a mere accountant.’

  ‘But would you have stayed with Dad if he hadn’t done the salt thing?’

  ‘I wasn’t really given the choice,’ she said with a small shrug, her eyes on the jogger. ‘What he did … We call it a bind, or a binding spell. They’re hard to do – take a lot of energy – and they stitch you into certain patterns, behaviours, that you can’t get yourself out of. From the moment that salt circle was closed, until now – until right now when you said those words – your father had complete control.’

  There was something in my mother’s expression that I could not trust. ‘You said Dad cast the spell when you were first going out. How does it work that I got you out of it? You’d been married eight years before I was born.’

  ‘Magic is malleable,’ said my mother, as plainly as if she was discussing how a fridge worked, or a tap. ‘If you own the spell you can remake it, rework it, restitch it to fit your changing life, like altering clothes. Your father has always let me practise magic – some magic – and when you were born I negotiated that if there came a time when you needed
full access to this world, or needed to know about our family, I would be in a position to help you, unhindered. I suspected that this conversation wasn’t far off from the day we got to Yarrindi – the proximity of the mountains to the ocean has made an awful lot of strange energy in that town … And since we arrived – that wretched hill, and the birds, and that boy in the ice-creamery who you couldn’t stop looking at—’

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’

  ‘He’s covered in magic – dark magic, very dangerous magic.’

  That much was obvious, but it didn’t stop my heart racing with curiosity. ‘Is he … a magician?’

  Mum shook her head dismissively. ‘Someone else has coated him; I don’t know who and I don’t care to look closer – and neither should you. If I’ve been on your back recently it’s because I wanted to warn you about some of the things going on there, but your father believed he could do a better job keeping you safe the “normal” way … To not only be bound but silenced has been very hard. It’s caused years of problems between me and your Mummi.’

  ‘But Dad and Nanna get along—’

  The jogger was within a hundred metres of us now. ‘Louhi didn’t know about the bind – she thought I’d had some kind of belief change, and turned my back on my Instruction. It happens sometimes – not everyone wants to go into the family business.’ Mum’s voice was getting emotional. ‘I did, though … I would’ve … All the things she was going to teach me, and now she’s … We have to hope that your nanna wakes up, Sophie. We have to do everything we can because the things she could teach me now – her whole lifetime of knowledge!’ She turned to me. ‘Your grandmother is a lointija – a wise woman – a fearsome tietäjä—’ But then my mother drew to a halt.

  The jogger slowed as he approached us. He was good-looking and much younger than my mother. He stopped running and started stretching his sweaty legs.

  My mother ran her fingers through her luscious hair. The scarlet glow coming from her eyes grew into a bright red light. I stood frozen as my mother’s eyeballs rolled back in her head and the red light flicked out of them; the light grew into what looked like two long, scarlet ribbons that rolled out of my mother’s eye sockets towards the jogger. They extended metres in front of her face, bounced as if they were subject to the wind, and licked at the jogger’s own eyes.

  It was sickening. I wanted to gag, but somehow I realised my mother didn’t know I could see what she was doing. I swallowed down my disgust and it felt like a hard stone in my stomach.

  The ribbons pulled at the jogger’s gaze and he looked up. ‘It’s ordinary weather, girls,’ he said, flashing my mother a white smile as he bent over, ‘but just as tiring.’

  ‘So I can see,’ Mum purred. The ribbons trembled.

  ‘You live round here?’ he said, wiping his face with the edge of his T-shirt.

  ‘I like the neighbourhood,’ she said.

  ‘Then I’ll probably see you around sometime,’ he said, extending his smile into a stretch of his arms before jogging away. He looked over his shoulder, back at Mum, as he went.

  The ribbons retracted into my mother’s head like tape into a retractable tape measure and the scarlet light went out.

  ‘What were we talking about?’ said my mother, turning back to me with a self-satisfied smile.

  ‘About a fearsome tietäjä,’ I replied, my hands in sudden fists.

  35

  ‘Why did you think you were a witch? Because you realised that I was?’ Mum asked as we started walking again. ‘It’s not inherited, Sophie. You don’t become a doctor just because your parents are. You have to study and work hard, just like everything else.’

  ‘But Nanna is, you are—’ I began.

  ‘And some of your Finnish cousins too,’ she said. ‘Witchcraft has been the family business of the Otsos, your grandmother’s people, for a very long time. Before you ask, there is no “witch school”,’ Mum said, smiling. ‘For the first year you do little more than stare into a kitchen candle, trying to control the movement of the flame. It gets more interesting after that, but it’s hardly romantic.’

  ‘How do you learn … how to do—?’

  ‘Instruction is like an apprenticeship within your own family. Sometimes you will be sent to train with someone else for a while, another relative. It all begins much younger than you are now. There’s a lot to learn.’

  ‘It seems weird that you’re not born with, you know … magic powers,’ I said.

  ‘There are proclivities to a strong Will that run in families – like physical strength does, or speed,’ said Mum, adding archly, ‘Your grandmother has seen the potential for strong Will in you. Witchcraft itself is two things. Firstly, it is a hard, book-learnt and passed-on knowledge of the properties of the things around you – the energy that buzzes in every rock, or object, the electricity in human bodies and plants and animals, the forces at work in water and the wind. In Finnish, we call these properties haltija. It means “spirit”. Witches will the spirits of objects to do their bidding. Secondly, it is the trained talent to focus your Will to move that energy, and control it. The Will is the part of the brain that most people don’t exercise, but awakened it’s like a power supply that wires us into everything around us – some people believe it’s the piece of God inside the mind, or the light of the sun … or other … authorities.’

  Authorities struck me as a very odd choice of word, but I kept silent.

  ‘Magic,’ Mum said, ‘is when the Will finds a way of reaching into the spaces between things and using haltija to change their nature – like the glamour that makes me look young again. Your Will, if you channel it, can unleash enormous power, but like anything that comes from the body, there’s a cost. I could, for example, focus my Will so strongly that I could set this beach on fire, all the way from here to the park—’

  ‘Only that far?’ I said.

  ‘Theoretically, as far as the end of the universe, but I’d probably be dead of exhaustion before I got as far as the park,’ she said. ‘So that’s what spells and tools and all that knowledge is for – they’re vehicles for carrying the Will. Like my necklace.’ She dangled the dark blue stone on its chain. ‘A sapphire is an amplifier that works with weather magic. If I hold it, and sing a particular song to it, the stone will broadcast my Will into the air around me and summon the energy for rain or wind or a storm. Your stone is a turquoise – it’s a protection amulet. I have seeded it with magic that works with the stone so that while you wear it a forcefield is created that can protect you from most things. In our Finnish tradition, we have a lot of paths based on sound, or songs, or chanting – you would have heard me or your Mummi with our Finnish songs?’

  I heard myself in the bathroom of the hospital, singing a song I didn’t even know to charge a battery in a camcorder. To Mum, I nodded.

  ‘If you tried to explain it to a scientist,’ my mother said, ‘you could say it’s a way of using sound frequencies to … knit together the atoms of things, or reset their electrical currents.’

  My mother indicated a flight of cement stairs that led from the boulevard down to the beach. Removing her shoes, she stepped down the stairs. I took off my own shoes and followed slowly.

  ‘So,’ she said, when I joined her on the cool sand, ‘when I want to make fire, I know that—,’ here she scooped up a handful of fine white sand, ‘I need to convince the haltija of the sand to rearrange all the molecules of oxygen and carbon in the air around it until they combust. If I really concentrate, I can do that with my mind. But here’s some sand, and if I sing to it a certain frequency is emitted that works my Will into the material of the sand itself, and this happens.’

  My mother hummed a couple of notes, and then flung her handful of sand in the air. It burst into flames, and a blackened spray of ash fluttered to her feet. I immediately looked around to see if we had been seen by anyone – but, this early on a cloudy morning, the beach was empty.

  ‘Neat trick, isn’t it?’ she said, walki
ng back to the steps. ‘The vehicle analogy is a good one – yes, I could walk from Sydney to Perth, but it would take weeks and exhaust me. A good spell would be like driving that distance instead – it’d take a lot less time but you’d still arrive tired. A really good spell is like a super-fast aeroplane that takes hardly any time and no energy at all. That’s why an aeroplane is a lot more valuable than a car.’ She let out a long sigh. ‘Your grandmother knows a lot of those spells. And her strength of Will is astounding. She could incinerate this entire beach and then go home for a sauna. These are the things I want to know – spells so precious that they’re not written down. I hope your Mummi still has the chance to pass them on to me.’

  I kept following her, but my mind was in a clearing in a strange forest. It’s my library, Mummi said. No one knows. Not even your mother.

  Mum stroked her hair with the back of her hand.

  ‘I think Nanna might have taught me some things,’ I told her, carefully vague.

  ‘Your Mummi can’t help herself. What?’

  ‘Last night—’ I began.

  ‘Is that what provoked this conversation?’ Mum said.

  ‘Something took over, in me,’ I continued, ‘some kind of … animal self.’

  ‘You turned into a bear?’ said Mum.

  She was so casual I just stared.

  ‘Yes, that’s definitely your Mummi’s work,’ she said, frowning. ‘Very Finnish.’

  ‘Can you do it?’

  My mother nodded.

  ‘Can Nanna?’

  She nodded again. ‘Anyone could, if they were taught,’ she said. ‘Any idiot can make a spell work if they know how it’s put together. The difference between “idiot” and “witch” is that we learn a whole knowledge system – not just the odd trick. When did you change?’

  ‘When I couldn’t find Lauren. I knew she was in trouble and then I saw what those creeps were doing to her—’