Among Others

I didn’t have an oak leaf, and we weren’t near the door to death, but I was fire and she was fire and I had the pattern and I loved her. She was not me, but she was in my heart, she always would be. “Hold tight, Mor,” I said, and, though she was flame she smiled her real smile, the smile she used to smile on Christmas morning when Gramma was alive and we would wake up to see the balloons hanging in the hall that meant Father Christmas had been and there were stockings waiting to be to opened. I opened a space between the flame and where death fell in the pattern, and I hurled her through it, knife and all, and then I closed it up again and sank down, dampened the flame until I was in my own shape again.

I was still burning, still flame, but I knew how to stop, how to return to the flesh which is what I am. It would be easy to forget, to be consumed in the transformation. I reached for flesh, and with flesh came pain. I was not even singed, but my leg was protesting having my weight on it.

The fairies had backed off, but they were still all around me. Glorfindel looked rueful and the old man looked angry. “Goodbye,” I said, and took several slow steps backwards, up hill. The sun had set while I was talking and everything was dusky shadows. The fairies were melting away. I turned around slowly.

And there she was, of course, on the road in the twilight. Auntie Gwennie must have told her I was around, and she’d probably followed the commotion among the fairies to find exactly where.

She hadn’t changed at all. She looks like a witch. She has long greasy black hair, darkish skin, a hooked nose and a mole on her cheek. You couldn’t typecast someone more like a witch—though of course the Sisters are witches too, and they’re impeccably blond and County. She was wearing typical clothes for her—that is, whatever things had come up when she’d counted through her wardrobe by threes. It found things that were the most magically charged, or that was the idea. It also found things that were incredibly mismatched and unsuitable for the season, in this case a huge knitted patchwork jumper and a long thin black skirt.

“Mama,” I said, hardly above a whisper. I was terrified, far more so than I had been of the fairies and the knife. I have always been afraid of her.

“You’ve always been the one like me,” she said, conversationally.

“No,” I said, but my voice cracked and it came out as a whisper.

“Together we could do so much. I could teach you so much.”

I remembered how we had tormented her once, when she was at her maddest. We must have been ten or eleven. She had pushed me down the front steps because she had sent me to the shop for cigarettes and I had come back empty-handed because they wouldn’t sell them to me. I was bleeding, and Mor was picking me up and we saw a big black bird flap slowly across from the cemetery gates—it was probably a crow, but at that age we called them all ravens. It’s the same word in Welsh, anyway. “Once, upon a midnight dreary,” Mor began, and I joined in, and she, Liz, my mother, had retreated into the house, and then into her room, as we’d gone on reciting Poe’s Raven louder and louder.

I had seen the pattern of the world. I had sent Mor through to where people are supposed to go when they die. I had been flame. My mother was a pathetic patchwork witch who had used magic so much to meddle in her own life that she had no integrity left and was nothing but a coil of hatreds consuming themselves in futility. We had already hedged her power, with the help of the fairies.

“I have nothing to say to you,” I said, loudly, and took a step forward.

I took another step, which was making my leg hurt quite a bit, but I ignored that, ignored her. I could tell that she was doing something magical, something aimed at me, but my protections, the ones I had made at school, held, and it drained harmlessly away into the ground, the way the pain does in acupuncture.

I took another step and passed her. She reached out and physically grabbed me. Her hands were like claws.

I turned and looked at her. Her eyes were terrifying, just like always. I took a deep breath. “Leave me alone,” I said, and shrugged her off.

She reached up to hit me, and I realised she really was reaching upwards. I was taller than she was. I pushed her, using the momentum of her own movement and the turning of the world. She fell. I took another step on beyond her, up the hill. I couldn’t run, I could barely limp, but I kept on limping upwards.

“How dare you,” she said, from where she had fallen. She sounded really surprised. Then she was drawing on magic again and like the time when Mor died, she sent illusory monstrous shapes swirling around me as I walked. Then, we’d ignored them as best we could. Now I took hold of them and drew them around me. They were sad hollow things without fear to feed them.