Chapter 9 Belle’s Manifests

9

Belle's Manifests

"HOW CONSIDERATE OF you all to rejoin us. I hear the sun is in its last moments of burning, the final reckoning should be upon humankind any second." Morena rifled through a stack of papers on the podium, peering over the top of a pair of reading glasses as she addressed their re-entry into the courtroom.

"Third time's a charm, Ms.Blackthorn," she continued with dripping sarcasm. "Unless you have a further tête-à-tête to bring along to the court today. I can grab my knitting, if you'd like? Help pass the time a little."

"Now, now, Morena. Play nice," Caspar warned.

With the short break, the jury seemed to have settled back to something more neutral, marginally less side-eyes and curt looks being thrown in Belle's direction. Bronwyn took her place beside her impatient sister, and Belle regretfully returned to her precarious stool. As Rune found his seat again, adjusting the thighs of his trousers as he lowered himself, Belle was surprised to notice him give her a small expressionless nod of what she assumed was supposed to be encouragement. Belle returned the gesture and did her best to entirely ignore the small swell of appreciation in her chest.

She fiddled with the clasp on her sooth stone, now pinned back onto her dress.

"No knitting needed, thank you. I'm ready."

Bronwyn gave Belle a wink and a keen thumbs-up, like an enthusiastic parent watching their child in a school play. The mouse in her pocket adjusted itself to get a better view of the courtroom scene, its tail peeking over the hem.

"We'll pick up where we left off, eh, folks? No need to rehash the boring stuff," Bronwyn asked the jury, who murmured in approval. Morena looked disappointed that her speech about withering death did not require a reprise.

Bronwyn clapped twice to bring the lights low and the pendulum to a languid halt once more. Belle could feel her own pulse raising the skin at her temples in an emphatic rhythm.

Recognising their cue, those able amongst the jury rose to their feet with a flurry of cloaks and a rustling adjustment of hats. Hands were raised in unison, poised in personal shapes, gestures and statures. Belle was grateful she had instantly selected the simple finger point fifteen years ago without much thought, drawn to its minimal margin for error. Other magic folk chose options with a little more flair when first receiving their powers. Raised open palms like both Gowdens were common, claps and clicks like Rune also popular choices, but any gesture was a possible option to accommodate all physicalities. Nose twitches had their day, intentional stares were considered a power move, wands were sometimes favoured by traditionalists but widely considered clunky in the modern magic era. She'd heard of a warlock who burped to cast his magic, which seemed like a choice that a fifteen-year-old boy would find funny and later grow up to deeply regret.

Speaking in one galvanising voice, the coven began to chant in unison, and the words washed over her in a wave of solid magic. She shut her eyes.

Our grandmothers wait for the truth to reveal,

Equidistant existence, thine secrets unsealed.

Ten nine fifty days to span decades three,

Transcend limitation, and thus shall it be.

Experience, action, perception and truth.

This coven now claims you for life, so in sooth.

For a moment, nothing happened.

Belle dared to peep through one eye while keeping the other firmly shut, half expecting everything around her to have vanished. To wake up with a start but safe in her bed.

Instead, everyone present in the courtroom had turned completely still, all held under the same blanketing trance. Their eyes closed, the slightest of movement only in hair caught on a slow breeze, and steady sleeping breaths seemed to come at a fraction of normal intervals. Everything in sight was motionless. Frozen in time.

"Oh…god." Belle swayed on the spot, gripping the edge of the stool. "Please don't have all died. Please, please don't have all died."

Bronwyn stood at peace, a pleasant smile on her face. Morena, deathly still, could have been a glamorous corpse. Belle chanced a glance at Rune, somehow expecting his attitude to be immune, but he, too, was entirely stationary, though still leaning unruffled against the wooden pew with one hand in his pocket. Belle's internal panic was reaching interesting new levels of chaotic. How best might one begin to escape an underground witches' lair full of the mysteriously deceased, with no exits known or available? All of the true crime documentaries in the world couldn't help her cover it up.

The ground beneath her jolted in a giant tremor. She grabbed the flopping brim of her hat, losing balance. An enormous deafening clap of what could only be thunder boomed so loudly that Belle felt it rattle through her legs and chest and all the way up to the domed ceiling. The walls shook so hard from the noise that books tumbled from the shelves. The fireplaces burning at each end of the room were instantly extinguished.

The courtroom ceiling began to disappear from view as looming layers of opaque grey clouds rolled in thickly from the shadows and knitted themselves densely together. Several hundred feet under London, a storm was coming to Hecate House.

There followed three blindingly bright bolts of lightning, which slashed through the air with startling white light and wrapped the pendulum in a live, sparking current. All the while, through cacophony and chaos, the entire jury and the Gowden sisters remained absolutely motionless, frozen and floating in time.

And then came the rain. Sheets and sheets of it, relentlessly pouring down from the clouds which had formed inside. The heavens—or wherever she'd found herself for her birthday—had opened, and Belle threw her pointing finger out instinctively to conjure an umbrella.

But it wasn't needed. Rather than drenching her from head to toe, the rain slid right over her. It felt like a ream of chilled soft silk, the water skimming over her clothes and skin, leaving no trace. Yet the rain pooled at her feet in translucent floods, reflecting rainbows like a petrol spill. The rainwater rippled like invisible pearlescent cloth across the floor, while the sparks and shocks from the lightning bounced and crackled haphazardly through the air, falling like a snow flurry. Rather than sticking as snowfall would, the sparks hovered in mid-air above the floods, from snowflakes to fireflies. It was breathtaking to see, the lightning dust reflecting off the torrents of rain. Belle couldn't look away. It was beautiful and terrifying.

As suddenly as the thunderstorm arrived, it passed. One final grand thunderclap shook the room and seemed to break the spell. The rain slowed in a moment. The clouds above parted and dissolved to nothing, as candyfloss vanishes in water. The iridescent flood remained pooled across the ground, and the fireflies of lightning stayed floating.

The jury were awoken from their trance in unison as though they'd been napping and jerked themselves awake. The Gowden sisters jolted back to consciousness, Bronwyn so startled by her return to the room that she dropped like a sack of spuds into her chair with a snuffling snore. Morena simply shook her head elegantly as if to brush away the cobwebs, returning to perfect composure in an instant.

"Bravo, everybody! Bravo, folks! All okay back there?" Bronwyn called cheerily, as she dusted herself down.

She was answered with a murmur from the jury that didn't sound entirely convinced that they were okay, actually. A few looked wobbly on their feet, like they'd had one too many. One lady covered her mouth in panic to stop herself from throwing up. Another person was attempting to wring imaginary water out of their ears. Caspar simply straightened the lapels of his blazer. Rune casually pushed hair back from his face and looked straight at Belle.

"Oh, isn't it pretty?" Bronwyn said, gesturing to the dance of stars and rain now in front of them. "Well, that's the easy bit out of the way."

"The easy bit? I thought you'd all died," Belle exclaimed, any fragment of composure long gone.

Bronwyn, double-checking that the mouse in her pocket had survived the events, didn't seem to hear. "And on with…What's next? Ah, yes, the nine manifests of Belle Blackthorn. That's you, dear," Bronwyn said.

The sisters turned away from their view of the witch in question and spun to face the pendulum, its huge brass form reflecting in the flooded floor.

"We begin the Manifests of Belladonna Blackthorn. Thunder, lightning and rain, come together with the magic of Selcouth." Morena spoke firmly and clearly.

She held out her hands so that they hovered over the iridescent floods of storm-water surrounding their podium with rainbow reflects. At her words, sparks of magic flew magnetically from Morena's palms and joined the thousands of tiny lightning bursts. Like a whirlwind, the magic and lightning began to fly in great tornado circles. Belle could only watch in awe as the sea of storm-water then rose to meet it all in a great tidal wave that towered over everybody. Sparks and splashes flew madly in a cyclone together as Morena's palms conducted the spellwork. Together, the powers were forming a shape. A pattern. A picture.

"Is that…me?" Belle was astonished.

With chaotic elegance, the elements formed what was undeniably an image, a live dot-to-dot made of magic and cascading water, of her younger self. Bronwyn turned back to her, nodding excitedly but placing her finger to her lips to shush her.

1

Belle recognised the moment almost instantly. It was her fifteenth birthday, and she stood around a family-sized cauldron with her mother and her grandmother. The three of them were dishevelled and filthy, having spent the day in Bonnie's greenhouse picking flora for Belle's first ever cauldron-based spell. They'd decided on something simple, a comforting brew of Solatium Quies to help Belle feel at home with her newly acquired powers. It was one of her most treasured memories, the three of them selecting the right flowers and herbs and mushrooms together. She remembered the potion, like sipping on the feeling of stepping out into a warm day, feeling the sun's rays on her skin as she drank. Her heart could have burst to hear their trio of female laughter in a chorus, the clinking of bottles and flasks a balanced harmony. She suddenly wished desperately for her mum and ached with the familiar raw grief for her grandmother who, even now, made herself known like a weary visitor seeking a home for the night.

"Touching. It comes so naturally to the Blackthorns. Undoubtedly truth," she heard Caspar say.

"The power of mother and daughter magic—threefold, too," offered a jury member with colourful hair knots, who clapped with sheer joy. They all sounded thoroughly pleased with the first manifest. After moments that Belle wished would last longer, the sparks and splashes tumbled back down, sending deep ripples across the floor before rising back again in a wave.

2

This time, they merged to become the image of a later teenage Belle, when her hair was longer and her jeans were, frankly, terrible. She sat cross-legged in front of her single bed and a floor-length mirror to practice, a tiny kitten Jinx nuzzling at her chin as Belle pored over a book in her lap. She was trying (failing but trying nonetheless) to master a basic levitation spell straight from the grimoire without Bonnie's supervision. She'd managed to raise the unsuspecting cat about a foot off the ground for a handful of seconds but hadn't got much further. She persisted for hours, much to her floating furry friend's confusion, before finally succeeding in continuous levitation.

A murmur of fond laughter from the jury at the floating, pawing kitten bolstered Belle a little. So far, shockingly, so good. A sentimental moment with her highly esteemed witch mother and grandmother followed by an example of dedication to learning her craft and an Animal Affinity to her familiar. Not only were these precious moments to relive, but they were earning points from hardened coven critics. She smiled as her own manifestation scooped Jinx onto her shoulder and gave her a scruff on the head, receiving a headbutt in return.

"Look, Mor. A natural and loyal familiar. The sign of a born witch." Bronwyn pointed to her sister with a told-you-so expression. Morena rolled her eyes for what must surely be the hundredth time that day.

"Oh, please. Anyone can have a bloody cat, Bron."

3

The picture cascaded back down into the water, and the elements remerged in a triumphant dance into a third manifest. Now they painted Belle and another figure.

"Ariadne!"

They must have been no more than seventeen, Belle thought, trying to recognise the scene that was crafting itself in dots. The sparks became a picture of the pair at university all those years ago, when they'd been the true meaning of the word "inseparable." Ari had been dumped by a particularly foul boy (Belle couldn't remember his name anymore) and was inconsolable.

On the grey day that the manifest had plucked from obscurity, they'd skipped university and parked up in front of the river in Ariadne's second-hand car to lament her broken heart. In an attempt to cheer up her best friend, Belle had performed magic that she hoped would spark a smile. She'd thrown together a nature summoning spell, entirely doubtful of its success, but after she'd chucked the contents of the bottle out of the car window, it had ended up attracting all of the wildlife within a ten-mile radius.

The girls sat in disbelief, watching as deer, rabbits, badgers, hares and foxes emerged from the shrubs and woodland—even seals and otters glided by on the river. Ariadne swore that she'd seen a unicorn. Belle had tried to convince her it had been a dog with a stick. Their hysterical laughter and delirious shrieks from the memory rang around the courtroom. With the joy of magic, she succeeded that day in putting a smile back on Ari's face, even for a few minutes, and watching the scene again made Belle remember the pleasure in magic for magic's sake. Each new animal, depicted like shadow puppets in the magic, brought gasps and compliments from the jury.

"Wonderful, wonderful!" Bronwyn said, clapping. "Beautiful magic. I remember my first fauna summons, there's nothing like it. Did end up bringing a dragon wandering into Donnington Service Station, though—bit of a ruckus…"

It felt to Belle like watching a film she didn't want to end. The moments brought a nostalgic ache to her chest, both hollow and full at once. Magic really had shone inside her once, with a genuine love and desire to make life more wonderful.

4

Ariadne stayed in the picture for the fourth manifest, the image twisting and contorting to new strings of stars.

They stood together, shoulder to shoulder, ponytails swinging, in the corner of the college. Pieces of paper were lined up regimentally across tables, and both girls reached out for the one with their name on a neat square sticker. The brown envelopes contained what had felt like the be-all and end-all, the outcome of their final exams and the verdicts from universities.

Ariadne had been frantic all morning, chewing on the ends of her hair and stopping to be sick in a drain on the walk. She'd known that she'd botched the higher maths paper earlier in the summer and had been plagued with self-loathing ever since, knowing that it would spoil her chances of following the path she'd been set on.

Belle, much less of a fixed plan in mind, had been more nervous for Ariadne's results than her own. Unable to handle the months of waiting, she had finally caved and reached for Bonnie's crystal ball in the middle of the night. Her stomach had plummeted as the clouds behind the glass revealed Ariadne's second choice university printed boldly across the paper. She'd cried for Ari and the thought of her broken dreams at eighteen.

Belle saw her manifest's hands working unnoticed. She vaguely remembered turning to the grimoire to find a transformative spell to change the typed letters on the page inside the envelope. It was only what Ariadne deserved.

"That's rather thoughtful," pointed out a jury member wearing a frog-patterned jumper.

"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.

"Revenge should never fuel magic." Caspar sighed and nodded slowly, reluctantly.

Belle couldn't bring herself to catch his eye.

"Is this really what the future of our coven rests upon? Absurdly disappointing," spluttered a furious older lady.

The jury called out and bickered amongst themselves.

"We cannot deny that truth of magic exists here. She is a Blackthorn."

"Family name can only carry her so far."

"But this jury cannot negate the other qualities. Experience? Her magic remains largely unexplored, usually ignored entirely."

"What of action? Hardly commendable. This witch has barely ventured to imagine what she's capable of."

"Even perception is questionable. It cannot be said with confidence that these manifests come from entirely unselfish magic."

8

As soon as the next scene began to play out, rain and lightning transported her back. As everyone had already witnessed in glorious technicolour, Belle had previously used magic to try and change herself in several different ways, but they had always been appearance- based. This particular time, she had decided that magic would change the aspects of herself that nobody else could see, which she wrestled with alone.

Violet's offer took her by surprise the first time, years ago at twenty-seven. The fear had been too great. Curiosity and excitement were displaced by dread of what might happen if she dared to make the leap. She almost resented her boss for putting her in that position. It wasn't the right time for change. It never was. She couldn't trust herself to do it. And she didn't deserve it.

The potion that she had created to make herself braver and bolder, make herself steadfast with confidence, had burned in her chest. As she attempted to swallow down the vile mix, trying incantation after incantation to manipulate who she was, it had become clear that magic could not be relied on to change that. Confidence potions and nerve tonics were complex but valid magic, but something to change her intrinsic gifts, her innermost make-up, was to dabble far beyond her skill set. She wasn't ready to be brave, even with the help of magic. So she had stayed scared, turned down the chance and watched her opportunity drift instead to somebody else's snatching hands.

"She started out with such promise…"

"Decisions from fear, every time. I certainly can't respect it."

"Superficial and selfish."

Belle's shoulders were so tense that they felt glued to her ears, the brim of her hat pulled down so low that she could barely see anymore. She felt exposed to an extreme, a light being shone into the darkest nooks of her magical history. It all felt so unfair, but perhaps there were no better options for the fates to choose for her manifests. This was, at its crux, an accurate painting of her potential. She had remained stuck, stayed living small. Fading from favour, magic wilting away while the years passed.

The dancing sparks and splashes had lost all of their earlier beauty. They turned her stomach as they painted their last picture.

9

She saw two figures side by side again, and at first, she couldn't work out what was happening. It soon dawned on her, however, that there couldn't have been a worse, more private moment for Selcouth to see. The memory came from a long time ago.

Unable to sit with her secret anymore, Belle had ventured timidly to open up the conversation and reveal her magic to a non-wicche soul. And, foolishly, she hadn't chosen Ariadne. She had been proud and excited to share it, tender with the blush of first love.

"Do you believe in magic?" she'd asked nervously, creasing the corner of a page between her fingers as she thumbed through a paperback.

In response, he'd sneered. "Don't tell me you're getting into that. Anyone who goes in for that stuff is embarrassing."

"You don't believe at all?"

"It doesn't exist, obviously."

"But not everything can be explained in black and white, so surely it must exist," she'd chanced, used to having to defend her joy to him by now.

"No, it doesn't. And it's kind of pathetic to think it does."

"But—"

"Why are you even asking me this? Stop being weird."

Although some buried part of her had known to expect it, his response had shoved her hard in the chest, sent her curling back into a closed shell. He had always been repulsed by her wonder and naivety once the initial novelty of them had worn off, so she had trained it to stay hidden afterwards. That was the one and only time she'd attempted to share her magic with a non-wicche.

The manifest showed, too, what followed after that conversation. Somewhat bewildered by her own stupidity and strangeness, she'd made an effort at the cauldron. She had aimed to bind her own powers. Unthinkable now, but the obvious, only possible answer to her then. Magic had shown itself to be more of a curse than a blessing, and his response had only confirmed everything she already suspected about herself.

But she'd cut corners and hurried to finish, desperate for her magic to never have happened at all, desperate to eliminate the element of strangeness that she could blame for it all. From the first unnatural sip, her slapdash incantation had sent her flying backwards with such force that she still had a scar on her shoulder.

Trying to run from who she truly was had left its own scar, too. A seed of shame had been planted then, and from it, a deep-rooted oak of self-doubt had grown unchecked ever since. Not enough, yet somehow too much. Easy to leave behind, so she had to work twice as hard to keep people loving her. To this day, it held her back, wrapped its shadowed arms around her waist and locked its hands.

Belle watched as the young manifest of herself, tearful and strung together by sparks, summoned her cloak and hat, books and bottles, even her sooth stone. They all flew to her grasp in unison and were stuffed into a crumpled ball, shoved into the corner of a cupboard.

Everything special, unique, rare was left behind. The wonder-seeking girl she had been was no more. And shame of her own magic would not be excused.