Thirteen Minds

The thing outsiders never understood about a coven — the thing Priya had stopped trying to explain to outsiders years ago — was that it was not a club. It was not a group of witches who happened to work together. A true coven, a bound coven, an old one like Hartfield, was closer to a single mind that happened to be wearing thirteen bodies. You felt the others. All the time, every day, a low warm constant hum at the back of your skull — thirteen presences, thirteen weathers, thirteen lives running alongside your own. When Old Bess two streets over burned her hand on the kettle, the whole coven flinched. When little Tomas passed his exams, the whole coven was, for an afternoon, inexplicably and pleasantly proud of something. The magic was pooled. That was the heart of it. No witch of Hartfield held her own power alone; she held a thirteenth of the coven's, and the coven held all of hers, and the strength of that — the sheer warm depth of it — was the reason a Hartfield witch could do things a lone witch never dreamed of. It also meant the coven kept no secrets. Could not. A secret was a thing you held apart, and in a pooled mind there was no apart. Priya had been born into it. She had never known the inside of her own head to be a private room; the coven had always been there, the warm hum, the thirteen. She had never wanted it otherwise. She loved her coven the way you love a thing you have never had to imagine being without — completely, and without examining it. And then, on an ordinary Thursday, in the back room of a bookshop that smelled of dust and bergamot, she met Wren Calloway, and her whole understanding of her own life developed a crack down the middle. It happened in the most ordinary way imaginable. Priya was after a particular book on hedge-craft; the bookshop's new assistant went to find it for her; the new assistant came back with the wrong book and a self-deprecating joke about it, and Priya laughed, and looked up properly at the woman's face for the first time — — and felt nothing. She wanted to be precise about this, because it mattered, because it would matter more than she could yet know. She did not mean she felt no attraction. She felt a great deal of attraction; that was its own separate and immediate problem. What she meant was that she felt no coven. Every person Priya had ever met in her life had registered, faintly, against the warm hum of the thirteen — a human was a small silence in it, a witch a small chime, but everyone, everyone, made some mark on that constant inner weather. It was how a coven witch moved through the world. You felt people the way you felt temperature. Wren Calloway made no mark at all. Standing there with the wrong book in her hands, Priya reached, the way you'd reach to check a familiar thing was still in your pocket — reached for the sense of this woman against the coven-hum — and found, where every other person in her life had left an impression, a clean and total blank. Not a silence. A silence she would have recognized. This was an absence shaped exactly like a person, a woman the coven simply could not see. "You've gone very pale," Wren said. "Was it that bad a book recommendation?" "No," Priya said. "No, it's — I'm sorry. You just reminded me of someone." Which was a lie, and Priya, who had lived her whole life inside a mind that kept no secrets, was astonished by how easily it came, and more astonished by what came after it. Because the coven had not heard the lie. She checked. Of course she checked — she stood in the dust and bergamot with her heart going strangely fast and reached inward to the warm hum of the thirteen, braced for the gentle inquiring nudge that always followed a moment of feeling, the soft Priya? are you well? that was the price and the comfort of never being alone in your own head. It did not come. Wherever Priya stood in the orbit of Wren Calloway, she stood, for the first time in her entire life, in a room the coven could not enter. The blankness around Wren did not only hide Wren. It hid Priya too. It closed around the pair of them like a held breath, and inside it, for one extraordinary unbearable moment, Priya's mind was nobody's but her own. She had never known she was lonely for it. You cannot miss a room you have never stood in. But standing in it now, with a stranger's wrong book in her hands and her own thoughts private for the first time in twenty-six years, Priya understood two things with perfect and frightening clarity. The first was that she wanted to see Wren Calloway again very badly, and not about books. The second was that the moment she did — the moment she let herself want this, in here, in the one place the coven could not follow — she would be doing the one thing a witch of Hartfield was never, ever supposed to do. She would be keeping a secret from the circle. And a coven that kept no secrets had never, in three hundred years, had to learn what one would do to it.