upon our heads tonight. In our bodies sleeps the Soul Mate of our ancestors. May the Virgin Mary bless them.

“May she bless us because we are women and live in a world in which men love and understand us more and more. Yet still we bear on our bodies the marks of past lives, and those marks still hurt.

“May the Virgin Mary free us from those marks and put an end forever to our sense of guilt. We feel guilty when we go out to work because we’re leaving our children in order to earn money to feed them. We feel guilty when we stay at home because it seems we’re not making the most of our freedom. We feel guilty about everything, because we have always been kept far from decision making and from power.

“May the Virgin Mary remind us always that it was the women who stayed with Jesus when all the men fled and denied their faith. That it was the women who wept while He carried the cross and who waited at His feet at the hour of His death. That it was the women who visited the empty tomb, and that we have no reason to feel guilty.

“May the Virgin Mary remind us always that we were burned and persecuted because we preached the Religion of Love. When others were trying to stop time with the power of sin, we gathered together to hold forbidden festivals in which we celebrated what was still beautiful in the world. Because of this we were condemned and burned in the public squares.

“May the Virgin Mary remind us always that while men were tried in the public square over land disputes, women were tried in the public square for adultery.

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“May the Virgin Mary remind us always of our ancestors, who—like St. Joan of Arc—had to disguise themselves as men in order to fulfill the Lord’s word, and yet still they died in the fire.”

Wicca held the wooden spoon in both hands and stretched out both arms.

“Here is the symbol of our ancestors’ martyrdom. May the flame that devoured their bodies remain always alight in our souls.

Because they are in us. Because we are them.”

And she threw the spoon into the fire.

Brida continued to perform the rituals that Wicca had taught her. She kept the candle always burning and danced to the sound of the world. She noted down her meetings with Wicca in the Book of Shadows and went to the sacred wood twice a week.

She noticed, to her surprise, that she was beginning to understand more about herbs and plants.

However, the voices that Wicca wanted to awaken did not appear. Nor did she manage to see the point of light above anyone’s left shoulder.

“Who knows, perhaps I haven’t yet met my Soul Mate,” she thought rather fearfully. This was the fate of those who knew the Tradition of the Moon: never to make a mistake when choosing the man in their life. This meant that, from the moment they became a true witch, they would never again nurse the same il-

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lusions about love that other people did. True, this would mean less suffering or even no suffering at all, because they could love everything more intensely; finding one’s Soul Mate was, after all, a divine mission in everyone’s life. Even if, one day, you were forced to part, love for your Soul Mate—according to both Traditions—

would always be crowned with glory, understanding, and a kind of purifying nostalgia.

It meant, too, that, from the moment you became able to see the point of light, there would be no Dark Night of Love. Brida thought of the many times she had suffered for love, the nights she had lain awake waiting for a phone call that never came, the romantic weekends that didn’t survive the following week, the parties spent glancing anxiously around to see who was there, the joy of making a conquest simply to prove that you could, the sadness and loneliness when you were sure that your best friend’s boyfriend was the only man who could possibly make you happy.

That was part of her world, and the world of everyone else she knew. That was love, and that was how people had searched for their Soul Mate since time began, by looking into another person’s eyes in search of that special light, desire. She had never given much value to such things; on the contrary, she had always thought it pointless to suffer because of someone else, or to feel scared stiff because you couldn’t find anyone with whom to share your life. Now, however, that she had the chance to free herself from such fears forever, she wasn’t sure she wanted to.

“Do I really want to be able to see that point of light?”

She thought of the Magus—she was beginning to think he

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was right and that the Tradition of the Sun was the only way to deal with Love. But she couldn’t change her mind now; she knew the path to follow, and she must follow it to the end. She knew that if she gave up now, she would find it harder and harder to make any choices in life.

One afternoon, after a long lesson devoted to rain-making rituals performed by the witches of old—rituals that Brida would have to note down in her Book of Shadows even though she would probably never use them—Wicca asked if she wore all the clothes she owned.

“No, of course I don’t,” came the reply.

“Well, from now on, wear everything in your wardrobe.”

Brida thought perhaps she had misunderstood.

“Everything that contains our energy should be in constant movement,” Wicca explained. “The clothes you bought are part of you, and they represent those special times when you left the house wanting to splash out a little because you were happy with the world, times when you’d been hurt and wanted to make yourself feel better or times when you thought you should change your life.

“Clothes always transform emotion into matter. It’s one of the bridges between the visible and the invisible. Some clothes can even be harmful because they were made for someone else but have ended up in your hands.”

Brida knew what she meant. There were some clothes she couldn’t bring herself to wear, because whenever she did, something bad happened.

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“Get rid of any clothes that were not intended for you,”Wicca went on. “And wear all the others. It’s important to keep the soil turned, the waves crashing, and all your emotions in movement.

The whole Universe is moving all the time, and we must do like-wise.”

When she got home, Brida spread out the contents of her wardrobe on the bed. She looked at each item of clothing; there were some she’d completely forgotten about; others brought back happy memories but were no longer fashionable. Brida kept them, though, because they held a special charm, and if she got rid of them, she might be undoing all the good things she had experienced while wearing them.

She looked at the clothes which she felt contained “bad vibrations.” She’d always hoped that those bad vibrations might one day become good vibrations and then she would be able to wear the clothes again. However, whenever she put them to the test, the results were invariably disastrous.

She realized that her relationship with clothes was more complicated than she had thought, and yet it was hard to accept Wicca meddling in something as private and personal as the way she dressed. Some clothes had to be kept for special occasions, and only she could say when she should wear them. Others weren’t suitable for work or even for going out on the weekend. Why was Wicca so interested in this? She never questioned what Wicca told her to do; she spent her life dancing and lighting candles, plunging knives into water, and learning about rituals she would never use. And she accepted all that because it was part of the Tradition,

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a Tradition she didn’t understand but that was perhaps in touch with her unknown self. But by meddling with her clothes, Wicca was also meddling with her way of being in the world.

Perhaps Wicca had overstepped the bounds of her power. Perhaps she was trying to interfere in things she shouldn’t.

“What is outside is harder to change than what is inside.”

Someone had said something. Brida instinctively looked around her, knowing that she would find no one.

It was the Voice.

The Voice that Wicca had wanted to awaken.