Page 4 of A Resistance of Witches

Lydia looked out the window at the violence wreaked on the streets of London by the Blitz. Piles of brick and stone lay scattered where buildings had stood just days before, and massive craters gaped like wounds where bombs had fallen in the night. Sandbags sat in heaps in front of shops and banks, and everywhere men and women glanced anxiously at the sky, searching the clouds for German bombers.

For the rest of her life, Lydia would remember the Blitz. She wouldvividly recall the bone-rattling explosions and the screams of air raid sirens, dozens of witches chanting long into the night to protect the academy from destruction. How it had felt, lying awake and terrified all through the night, whispering the secret words to herself, adding her small scrap of power to the current of magic coming from the elder witches in the hall below. And each morning, she would wake and find the academy still standing. She should have been relieved, but deep down, she was racked with a terrible guilt, knowing that thousands were dead while she lived. Innocent people, without any magic to protect themselves, lying beneath the rubble.

“Yes,” she said. “We should help.”

Isadora nodded.

“Do you know why you were chosen to be my apprentice?”

Lydia had often wondered. There were other, more obvious choices. Girls with more natural talent, more charm, better families.

“Mistress Jacqueline says it’s because we must be very much alike.”

Isadora snorted. “Oh, my dear girl, we are nothing alike.” Lydia’s face burned, but if Isadora noticed Lydia’s dismay, she showed no sign of it. “I was always very skilled at charms. Manipulations, influencing the minds of men. I mastered glamours two years ahead of the rest of my class.”

Lydia felt a fresh wave of humiliation wash over her.

“Politics and influence, that was my talent, right from the beginning. Bringing others along to my side of things. That was why I was selected. Because that was what would be required.”

Lydia’s mortification slowly gave way to curiosity. “Required for what?”

Isadora smiled but did not answer. She took another black cigarette from her case and lit it, filling the car with an aroma that reminded Lydia more of incense than tobacco smoke. “You have no talent for diplomacy. Your teachers tell me you are hardheaded, and honest to afault. You bow to no one when you know you’re right, not even when doing so would save you pain and trouble. And when you have decided upon a thing, you will see it through to the end, even if it costs you dearly.”

Lydia could scarcely feel insulted. She’d been summed up too accurately to deny a word of it.

“Why, then?” she asked. “Why choose a graceless, obstinate, irritatingly principled girl to be your apprentice?”

Isadora looked at her a little sadly.

Lydia would remember that look. Years later, she would recall every detail, every line and curve, and she would wonder if perhaps Isadora had known every terrible thing that would come to pass, right from the beginning.

“Because that is what will berequired.”

Two

London, October 1943

Lydia sat at her mother’s kitchen table and reminded herself, not for the first time, that she was a grown woman now.

She told herself that she was the right hand of the grand mistress, and had been for nearly three years. That she was a graduate of the academy, nineteen years old and in the full bloom of her power. That she had the respect of her peers and of her students and of the grand mistress herself.

And yet somehow, sitting in her mother’s kitchen, Lydia may as well have been eleven years old.

“What do they have you teaching now at the academy?” her mother asked.

“Projection. Mistress Sybil has decided to dedicate herself fully to council matters, and they’ve asked me to take on her classes.”

“Oh. That’s nice.” Both women sipped their tea.

Lydia glanced around the cluttered flat, taking in the hodgepodge of amber bottles and canning jars, each one holding something moredisagreeable than the last. Fat bundles of herbs hung from the ceiling—calendula, feverfew, primrose—all giving off the same musty, herbal smell that had always given Lydia a headache, even when she was a child. On the cookstove, some murky concoction simmered away, stinking like hot, wet laundry.

Lydia’s mother, Evelyn, had never attended the academy, nor was she interested in the political or magical goings-on inside its walls. She was an herbalist, with a talent for soothsaying she had inherited from her own mother, who had inherited it from her mother before her. She made a modest living selling tea and telling fortunes and had always assumed her daughter would do the same, until the day Lydia, then eleven, announced that she’d applied for entrance to the academy, unbeknownst to anyone at all, and had been accepted.

“Do they teach herbs at the academy?” Evelyn asked.

Lydia sipped her tea. “They teach Advanced Botanical Philosophy as an elective.”

Evelyn frowned. “Would you say the class is more botany or…philosophy?”

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