From the Ashes of Victory: The Complete Series, page 196
part #0 of From the Ashes of Victory Series
Millie had to think about herself, and what she needed.
Including how.
"The girls are so far away. I can't help but feel one of them needs me right now."
"We would have a telephone," Elise said.
"Aye, but I can't fly like Vickie can. I would have to leg it back. Maybe I should try, see how long it takes." Millie began to push herself to her feet, but Elise pulled her back down by the belt loop.
"Non. Stay here and feel, ma chérie. You deserve peace."
Millie plucked several blades of grass and flicked them into the wind one by one. Only a few reached the river. "I don't know if this is it. I feel like I'm getting ready to retire."
"In some way, you are. The parts of you that need to retire," Elise said, putting a hand on Millie's knee to help still the thoughts careening across the Bond.
"The Niamh parts, you mean."
"Yes," Elise replied.
An unsteady breath leaked between Millie's lips, and a strange calm came over her. Maybe it was Elise's steadiness or just having said it out loud, but Millie felt the truth of it.
Her heart ached every day missing Niamh, but she didn't miss being Niamh. The peace Elise spoke of was already partly present; Millie had shed her most violent tendencies without really thinking about it, but ten years of living almost every day with one eye open and an ear out for trouble didn't just stop.
Elise's hand tracked down Millie's leg to take her hand. Even without the Bond, she knew it as well as Millie did, but with the Bond she felt it as Millie did. "There is no danger here, my love. You could sleep soundly in this place."
"Could I?"
The words were out before Millie knew they were in her mouth, and her neck burned from her lack of discipline.
"You are right, I do not know that for sure," Elise said.
"I'm sorry. I didn't mean—"
"Yes, you did." Elise turned to Millie and tapped her gently on the temple. "I know. You are not wrong. I am sorry to have spoken with such confidence, it was unfair."
Millie pulled off her cap and rubbed her head. "I didn't expect it to be like this. I thought it would be obvious one way or the other."
"I share this feeling. But perhaps it is harder because there is so little here yet." Elise flipped through the packet until she came across an illustration of what the development would look like when it was finished. They had pored over it together on countless nights already, but seeing it again in the exact place where it would actually be built made it much more than an idle dream. "Right now we have only what is not here. It is not a home."
The house was a mound of bricks, the trees getting ready to sleep. Come spring it would be luscious and teeming with birds and insects. Frogs, maybe a fox or two. Fish in the river, vegetables in the garden…
"It's such a big decision to base on a painting, some numbers and a lot of hope," Millie said. Beside the school remodelling, the riverside lots were being snapped up quickly. The one they were sitting in was near the edge of the development and further from EVE than they would have liked already. But there was quite a lot of peace to be had for the price of a bicycle. "I wish we had more time."
"I do not," Elise said with a trace of a smile. "If we will live for centuries, we may never choose without outside pressure. But if we do not choose this, there will be another."
Millie looked out over the river, downstream. Could she rest here? Build? "But probably not the same."
"Yes. Change is part of life." Elise kissed the back of Millie's hand and gave her the kind of smile that made her glad to be alive. "Especially ours."
By mid-October, the realities—and magnitude—of Sveta's proposals were settling over EVE as thickly as the colder air. Though Victoria had been told in advance the date of the Red Zone ceremony, hearing it announced publicly for the Saturday before Remembrance Day gave it extra significance.
What drove her to redouble her magical training wasn't just the date, but the stakes now set given who would be in attendance: Germany's new chancellor.
It was almost impossible to credit the idea that the leader of the largest country in Europe, the aggressors who had started the war that broke the world, was a witch.
And a friend.
The horrors of August had resulted in one of the most unlikely turn of events Victoria could recall, and one of the very first things Helga had insisted upon after her installation as chancellor was attending the Red Zone ceremony. And ego, as well as international relations, demanded that if the leader of Germany was going to be there, then so must the leader of France. And Belgium. And Britain.
The dialogue that could come from such an event was almost beyond measure in its implications on Sveta and the APP's peace process, so it behooved EVE to do all it could to facilitate the most positive outcomes possible.
But on a more basic, personal level, it was simply exciting, and Victoria's surge of positivity that had needed to be turned into action failed to ebb. Thus, she had been granted special dispensation to spend more time in the Training Hall pushing magic (and objects) around instead of paper.
Katya had reassured her that any result Victoria produced would be seen as a miracle, and that onlookers would be gawping and crossing themselves, not criticising it against her intentions. It was likely that not even Katya would have much idea what Victoria was doing magically, and she knew her better than anyone.
All valid points, but the one person who knew Victoria better than Katya was Victoria, and she would know what she was doing. All the personal progress she had made counted for very little when it came to magic, which she still viewed as her profession. Self-acceptance and self-love could only be achieved by the integration of all of her aspects as woman and witch, which she doggedly pursued in the guise of the Red Zone recovery project. Every bit of progress on it was progress on herself as she honed and expanded her powers to unquestionably positive purpose.
And positive expression. Every day, Katya's good-bye kiss from the morning would sing on Victoria's lips well into the afternoon, the scent of her perfume wafting up at random moments, making it impossible for Victoria to act irresponsibly. To harm herself would be to harm Katya, and the very notion was unacceptable.
Acting with a lack of self-regard had cost her as much as she'd gained before. Now, acting from a place of love and positivity? Acting for instead of against? What would she be capable of? With a blade heated by the Firebird, could the Raven finally drive it through the hearts of her demons for good?
She had to try, to know.
So as the days grew shorter, her experiments grew longer, temporally and physically, eventually driving her out of the Hall altogether. Leaving it sealed shut, she would go out into the mist and the rain, reaching for the materials inside from greater and greater distances, until she left the airfield entirely. For the next train station. Then the next town.
Iron, brass, zinc, different chemical mixtures from gunpowder to ammonia, all she might expect to find in the poisoned soil of the Red Zone, but it was the uranium she'd extracted from the glass that always inexorably drew her magical senses. It had amounted to a pellet barely larger than a grain of sand, yet was completely novel compared to anything she had ever manipulated. Dangerous chemicals were complex and interesting in their own ways when isolated from any chance to harm her, but uranium allowed her to finally touch the truth of her thesis.
For eight gruelling years she had laboured over pen and paper to work out the theory, but numbers were numbers. Two-dimensional. In that unassuming grey speck she felt the energy potential and knew beyond doubt that she was right.
It was beautifully horrifying.
And the reason Victoria couldn't love herself. Why she still found true rest elusive. No matter how much she changed, how many beautiful things Katya whispered into her ear, the old Victoria was still out there, in the theories she had produced. The Victoria who hadn't had forethought, who had believed 'could' was synonymous with 'should' lurked within the nucleus of the most massive natural element in existence. Her name wouldn't matter if there was no-one left to pass judgment on it.
And in that also lurked the creeping, inky darkness of her past self. Given the ramifications of an atomic weapon's creation, why did the greatest heat beneath her heels come from something as ultimately irrelevant as her feelings about herself? What was her own self-worth to a holocaust that would make what happened in Verdun look like a pub brawl? Aircraft like Atlas were becoming so fast and so long-ranged an entire nation could be wiped out in hours.
It was impossible to envision. And perhaps in that she took some solace as to her own short-sightedness. The human mind wasn't meant to conceive of what the apocalypse would actually be like. No-one had a clearer idea than Victoria, and even she couldn't fully accept the scope, nor the possibility. Perhaps she needed more immediate motivation; as awesome a phrase as 'the end of the world' might be, the concept wasn't real in any meaningful sense.
Whether she took that as refuge or delusion, the strength of her motivation was unchanged. It was for the world, Katya, and Victoria's own soul she worked like she was possessed all through October, until on the Friday before Samhain came the starkest reminder of her true power as a witch.
The Crows were uncharacteristically late for their lesson, leaving Victoria sitting alone in the library anteroom with a Dewar flask of over-sweetened coffee to write discreet inquiries to her geologist colleagues from university about her newest research subjects. In preparation for her work in the Red Zone, she'd subscribed to several geology journals, including one edited by a professor from Belfast who'd been in London to propose using seismographs to map the interior of the Earth. Fascinating on its face, Victoria was very much interested in such lines of inquiry anyway, including what it could reveal about soil compositions and mineral distributions. Asking about uranium specifically would hopefully not seem out of place. Her 'enthusiasm for uranium glass' was not entirely feigned, which aided the ruse.
Still, she had only so many letters to write, and when she'd run out and the Crows still hadn't arrived, she grew vexed. Getting extra work done was all well and good, but her concern soon took up arms against her sense of affront. She was just about to go ask Carice about it when she was spared by the approach of a commotion entirely inconsistent with occurring in a library.
The door burst open to deposit Emma and Clara with Sophia locked in their arms between them, all red-faced and slightly out of breath.
"We're sorry, Mistress," Emma laboured, heaving her bag unceremoniously onto her usual chair. "Sophie was working on something and didn't want to come."
"I never said that!" Sophia protested, shooting a look between her friends that might have been injurious if it weren't for the enormous smiles that quite easily deflected it.
Clara was much more considerate with her belongings, but seemed certain Sophia was about to bolt for how snugly she held her. "Not with words."
"What is the meaning of this? Why does it appear you marched Sophia here against her will?" Victoria asked as neutrally as she could. Something was happening, but Emma and Clara looked entirely too pleased to set off any of Victoria's internal alarms.
"Because she doesn't believe in herself as much as we believe in her." The softness in Emma's tone matched the look in her eye, but behind it was an excitable tension that seemed desperate for permission to be loosed.
It was matched perfectly by Clara. "Show her, Sophie."
Sophia blanched, unwilling to look at anyone. "Not yet," she whispered out of the corner of her mouth.
"Miss Kensington, is something amiss?" Victoria asked, concerned enough to default to more formal address. Whatever the case, Sophia appeared fully awake and alert, though the adrenaline clearly surging through her could be entirely responsible for either. "Would your cohorts leaving make things easier?"
"No!" Emma blurted. "Er, that is… please, no. We want to be here for you, Sophie. Please show her."
"You can do it. I know you can," Clara said.
Sophia gave her friends a look that was part gratitude and part apprehension. The one she gave Victoria was entirely the latter.
"I… Mistress…" Sophia stammered. At the very least, the expression on her face removed the possibility that what they'd come to deliver was bad news, and Victoria allowed herself to lean towards being more intrigued than fearful as to why Emma and Clara looked like they were about to burst.
All over her usual black, Victoria did her best to summon the parts of her that were white and shining. "Take your time, Sophia. You can tell me anything."
Sophia didn't so much nod as vibrate. "I know, Mistress." She looked between her friends and let out a breath of decision. "It's too… I can't. Could you turn out the light, Emma?"
The request struck an immediate chord in Victoria, squelching her impulse to loose a witchlight when Emma complied and plunged the room into complete darkness.
Quickly the air grew thick with anticipation, the amount of breathing considerably less than there should have been for four people in such a small space, especially given that three of them had run to get there.
But Victoria didn't need light to feel what was happening.
Magic thrummed within Sophia, stronger than it ever had, solidifying her channels into a crystalline web that tied her together from head to toe as she cupped her hands.
Then came a spark.
From the centre of her hands awakened a soft red glow, brightening until there were no longer any shadows between her tightly-clasped fingers. The shine of her skin began to dull as a mist slowly formed, giving shape to the glow, rising from her palms to fill both hands with witchfog.
But Sophia had done that before.
Slowly, and with considerable concentration, the glowing red mist began swirling around its makeshift pool, constricting itself down into something roughly the size and shape of a cherry.
With a final push, it snapped into a perfect sphere.
The red glow grew steady, more than enough to illuminate all four faces hovering over the very first witchlight created by a student of the EVE Witchcraft Conservatory.
Though the moment had been all but inevitable given Sophia's work ethic and propensity for magic, it still hit Victoria in a way she hadn't prepared for. She thought back to Colette and how breathlessly proud she had been when it had been Victoria who had sparked her first witchlight; the sense of connection to her, over ten years after her death, brought tears to Victoria's eyes.
She understood now.
Sophia looked up from her little miracle. "Did I do it right?"
Victoria answered by embracing Sophia as she would her own child, obliterating the line between teacher and student. "It's perfect. Sophia Kensington, I name you witch."
Emma and Clara erupted into squeals of joy, dancing and jostling Sophia until she could barely keep her feet under her.
"I'm… a witch?" Sophia looked from Emma and Clara to her witchlight and back. "I'm a witch! Oh, Mistress! Thank you! Thank you, thank you, thank you!" She threw herself at Victoria with enough force to nearly take her off her feet.
"I knew you could do it!" Emma cried, and joined the scrum, followed by Clara.
"You did it, Sophie! You're a witch!"
All four of them shared an embrace, and Victoria didn't give a single thought to her position, responsibility or title, only that she was present for Sophia and her closest friends for one of the most important moments of her life. Victoria let it seep into her marrow, nourishing aspects of her she hadn't realised had been starving.
"Are you crying, Mistress?" Sophia asked through sniffles of her own.
There was no reason to mask the truth. "Yes. A witch is nothing without her feelings." Victoria looked between her charges, all of them with glassy eyes and reddened faces. "Witchkind has welcomed a new sister today. Remember this moment. Celebrate it. You have earned this, Sophia. I am very proud of you."
"Yes, Mistress. Thank you, Mistress," Sophia said. A fresh, bigger wave of tears gushed down Sophia's cheeks as she looked at her friends. "And thank you, too. You deserve to share this. So should we get to work?"
"Take a moment," Victoria began, "there's no—"
"Yes. We get to learn from two witches today," Emma said.
"Are you certain?" Victoria asked.
Clara nodded. "There's only a month left in the term, Mistress. We'll have the whole of December to celebrate."
The thought sent a pang reverberating through Victoria. In her obsession with uranium, her preparations for France and the global tour, she'd all but lost sight of the fact that the school would be closing at the end of November. After that it would be six long weeks before she saw any of her students again.
"Then we should get started."
Fueled by the ebullience of EVE's first new witch, Atlas roared out of Longstown a week later on a tidal wave of optimism—completely different from the last time Millie was aboard. Then, it had been herself and Kat alone on a long-shot mission to help a sister stand up to fanatics.
Today EVE was travelling in full force, ready and eager to grab the future by the scruff in front of the whole world.
As they winged their way over London, Vickie never pulled her face more than a few inches from the window, eyes wide as she took in the city from the air for the first time. No amount of magic could have made her look more youthful as she gawked and pointed like a dazzled schoolgirl, pawing at Kat's shoulder and cajoling her to look, too. With a gut full of Ivy's anti-nausea elixir, Kat put up a good showing, but still preferred the ceiling or the inside of her own eyelids for the view.
From being terrified of telephones and phonographs not too long ago, Ivy was having the time of her life. Selene had to constantly remind her to keep her seatbelt on when all she wanted to do was look out both sides at once so as to not miss anything. The trill of delight she let out the first time they flew into a cloud was a powerful reminder of how rare it was for someone her age to experience something truly new.
