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“You don’t know anything about her!”
“I know she has no business here! She’s no coven witch—”
“She’s as coven as any of you!”
There was a sudden, stunned silence. Maybe because of the decibel level; if I hadn’t known better, I’d have thought Saffy had used a spell to enhance her voice. But she hadn’t so much as made a move toward the wands sticking out of the tops of her boots.
I guess growing up in the covens, you learned to project.
I looked around, the absence of yelling making my ears ring, and met maybe three dozen pairs of eyes. Because more people had been pouring in all the time, and now they were all looking at me. “Uh,” I said brilliantly.
“Well?” A grandmotherly type poked the impressive looking woman. “Is she? Is it true?”
“Beatrice said it, too,” somebody offered.
“Well, where is she, then? She ought to be here, along with Zara and that damned Evelyn—”
“Oh, please, not Evelyn!” someone said. “Hasn’t my day been bad enough?”
“It’s true,” the impressive woman suddenly said. She’d been staring at me intently, ever since Saffy’s declaration. But since I hadn’t felt anything, I wasn’t sure if she was attempting to mind read or just had a headache.
If it was the latter, I could relate.
“What?” That was the grandmotherly type. “What’s true?”
“She passed the Gauntlet. She won her coven—”
Conversation suddenly exploded again.
“It doesn’t mean anything!” the impressive woman yelled. “It doesn’t mean anything!”
“Like hell,” Saffy said, from next to me. “Don’t let them get to you,” she added.
But then, before I could say anything, or ask what the heck was going on, she was swept away on the tide of conversation. I didn’t follow, because I didn’t know how to navigate these waters. I didn’t know anything.
Except that my towel was clammy and no longer helping.
It had been nice when I first got here, but it had absorbed all the water it was going to, and it was getting uncomfortable. I pulled it off my shoulders and dropped it onto a nearby “sofa,” if that was the right name for something that grew up out of the floor and was made solely out of wood. But it had little butt-like indentations in the seat, so I guessed you were supposed to fill them, only I wasn’t sure.
I wasn’t sure of much, because I was standing in a tree.
It was another thing besides the people that kept throwing me off balance. Because it wasn’t a tree so much as a tree. Huge and leafy and taking up pride of place at the end of the concourse with the portals. It was hollowed out near the top, creating a cozy room with none of the saw or chis
el marks you might have expected. Instead, it looked as if it had simply grown this way, with a satiny, slightly uneven floor, where occasional knots in the wood poked up as if defying whatever spell had been used to make it, like the way a few tiny branches popped out here and there from the otherwise smooth walls.
And from the sofa, I noticed. All around where I’d just dropped my towel. I picked it up, and sure enough, one little butt depression now looked like a Chia Pet, with the indentations full of tiny oak trees.
I swallowed and glanced around, but everybody was too busy yelling at each other to notice. I put the towel back down and edged away, only to realize that that hadn’t really helped any. Because the same thing was happening wherever I stood.
My jeans had soaked up a lot of water, and gravity had carried it down my legs into my equally soaked shoes. And now it was growing a tiny garden wherever I stepped. I danced back a couple of paces, but that only made it worse; small green footsteps followed me everywhere I went, and oh God, now I was trashing their living room, too!
I bumped into somebody, and thankfully, it was Saffy. I guess she’d gone off to fetch another towel, which she handed to me. “You okay?” she asked, seeing my worried face and bitten lip.
“I think I did something,” I whispered, and nodded at the sofa, which was now more like a forested lump in the middle of the room as the greenery spread across the seat. I could just imagine some of the ladies deciding to sit down and getting saplings up the bum.
“What?” She looked confused. And then she seemed to get it. “Oh, don’t worry. Happens a lot,” she told me. “It’s how they tell the tree what to make.”
“What?”
