Page 27 of Rewitched

“Helping friends in need is a happy part of our position. We hope to see magic shared sensibly for the non-wicche who needs and deserves it,” Caspar said.

The jury seemed appeased.

“Some might call it meddling.” Rune thumbed his jawline, leaning languidly on the pew, dragging his gaze from the manifest performance back to Belle. She could have sworn a tiny smirk twitched across his lips. Belle’s face flushed like fire; she was furious with him. She shot back an indignant look.

“Well, I…”

Someone else interjected, “Ms. Blackthorn was in turn benefiting from the result of enchanting her friend’s future; it was she who couldn’t bear to face the reality. For all we know, the non-wicche girl would have handled it well. It could have been the making of her.”

“In fact, this spell changed the trajectory of her friend’s life entirely…” a blond witch pointed out.

“And we certainly never encourage cheating,” added the soup lady, Elspeth. “Using magic on others for one’s own advancement or unfair advantages.”

“Hang on a second,” Belle interjected, rising from her seat. “I wouldn’t go that far. You don’t know her. Ari is pretty much a genius. It wasn’t ‘cheating.’ She buckles when the pressure gets too much, and it’s not fair. I was just righting a blatant wrong.”

“Pardon me, Ms. Blackthorn.” Morena raised her voice sharply. “Interruptions are not welcome. You will have the opportunity to plead your case when all nine manifests have been presented.”

Belle promptly shut up, feeling like a scolded child.

Rune at least had the grace to offer her a sheepish look the second he caught her eye again, mouthing a brooding “Sorry” across the courtroom. She only squinted a scowl in return. For a charismatic “rising star” warlock, the man was particularly skilled at inadvertently putting his foot in it.

5

As it transpired, the spell for Ariadne twelve years ago seemed to have been an inadvertent catalyst for Belle’s magic losing its footing. With each graceful tidal crash of water and lightning dust, she was filled with a little more rising dread.

Next came the fifth manifest, a moment from a university night out which was entirely mortifying to witness. Reliving it in front of a jury of esteemed wicchefolk just seemed plain cruel. Belle had rolled home late—or early, to be more accurate—and failed miserably at reading texts for the morning’s seminar. She had already spent the whole term feeling like the least knowledgeable person in every room she entered, sliding from consistent top grades and praise to someone distinctly mediocre in all her work.

The manifest revealed how she had attempted a messy potion brew, a rather desperate Brevis Eruditio knowledge spell in the sink of her tiny room. A few weeds she’d plucked from campus which seemed the right colour, some substitute kitchen ingredients only slightly out of date. The lazy spell had unsurprisingly led to limited success: uncontrollable babbling about Shakespeare to her professor and, worse still, relentless chatter about John Donne at a party. She’d later discovered that people knew her until she graduated as the “intense Renaissance fan.”

This one attracted horrified looks.

“We never drink and conjure,” one witch said with vehement disapproval, as though her decision had just been made.

“And magic is never to be a substitute for effort. It is not to be contorted into crooked short cuts for sheer laziness,” another outraged older witch cried.

Several icy glances were exchanged.

Belle flushed, unable to defend herself even if she was permitted to.

6

Belle smarted as she watched the sixth manifest reveal a time, one of countless despondent times, that she’d tried to use magic to change herself.

Altering clothing and outfits multiple times a day back then, haircuts and hair colours, helping her skin to play ball when it refused. But more than that. With Ari at the opposite end of the country, she’d been painfully lonely, desperate for a true friend. Even just one. As the loneliness at university grew and felt overwhelming at times, when she should have been poring over textbooks or pouring drinks with new friends, there’d been nights that she’d shut herself away for shame, landing on her own body in lieu of anything else to blame. How the fabric hung and clung, how her silhouette went this way instead of that way. How everybody else around her seemed to be exactly as they should be at twenty-one, while she felt intrinsically wrong in every way possible. On bleak, desperate nights, after food and tears and loneliness, she’d grown obsessed with trying, without success, to create magic that would make her smaller. To take up less space, to shrink as much as she possibly could. Defying the very point of being a witch, losing all pride in her own unique self.

The convoluted words of the spells, spoken desperately through tears and hiccups, had resulted in nothing except ruining several pairs of jeans and making her bones and throat ache while plunging her self-esteem to what felt like unrecoverable lows. A decade of slowly improved kindness and gentleness had since taught her that even magic was not an answer to something so deeply burrowed under skin.

“Thousands of years of magic at your fingertips, and you decide to use it for the sole purpose of insignificant vanity?” An older warlock with thick eyebrows barked his opinion.

Belle answered quietly. “Obviously you’ve never been at war with your own body. At the time, nothing else mattered.”

7

The seventh manifest recreated the day that she’d concocted a particularly rotten stomach bug for Christopher, who had patronised her to an even worse extent than usual in front of everyone at Lunar, heckling during a sold-out author Q&A that Belle “had her knickers in a twist” over the popular banshee romance series. It had brought considerable satisfaction to see him sprinting from the office to the toilets while clutching at the seat of his trousers.

She stuck her nose in the air. “I’m not apologising for that one.”

“Madames Sage, I have seen everything I need to see here. So have many of us, I suspect. Selfishness, short cuts, superficiality. Strix, you can’t let this continue,” called a wicche with a floral headscarf wrapped underneath their coven hat.