Light Our Fire by Patricia Kennealy Morrison

Author:Patricia Kennealy Morrison [Morrison, Patricia Kennealy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shebooks
Published: 2014-06-29T04:00:00+00:00

***

We are standing in my small living room; it is about 10:00 at night on Midsummer Day. Candles all over the room flicker gold against the deep purple walls and silver tin ceiling; on the marble mantelpiece stands a cut-crystal vase filled with peonies. Huge, puffy blooms—some are pink, some white, a few of the white ones are tipped with blood-colored streaks.

Jim and I are hand in hand before a waist-high table of carved oak, pressed into service, as it usually is, as the altar. He and I have had our ritual baths—quick purificatory dips in salted water, a few passes with a lighted candle, anointings with consecrated oil, a prayer—and now we are dressed in long black robes, the ritual garb of my Celtic coven. The robes are floor-length, loose and unbelted; underneath them we are naked. I wear some silver Celtic jewelry, and upon my forehead is the moon crown of the High Priestess—a silver browband with a Pictish crescent moon at the front, mark of my office. Jim wears a vaguely classical-looking wreath of woven willow and laurel, very Dionysian against his long hair.

I am holding Jim’s hand because he is nervous; but so am I, a little. Catching sight of ourselves in the tall pier mirror, I laugh: we look like the woodcutter’s children in a fairy tale, hand in hand for comfort in the halls of the elf-king.

“I have to help set the table,” I tell him, gently disengaging my hand from his clutches. “The High Priestess shouldn’t have to do it herself.”

“I thought you were the High Priestess,” he mutters.

“I am, but not tonight. Lady Maura and Lord Bran”—I give them their full coven names and titles—“are officiating because I can’t perform my own wedding ceremony, and you’re not an initiated witch anyway. It’s OK. You’ll be fine. Just say that prayer I taught you.”

He rolls his eyes but seems to calm down as he mumbles the brief prayer to himself, over and over, as if there is reassurance in repetition, and watches the final preparations for the rite: setting up a small cast-iron cauldron to burn incense, lighting more candles, putting out the many ritual implements on the altar. The familiar drill soothes and calms me as I go along: Goddess candle, Goddess statue, athamé (the ritual black-handled dagger, tonight used for another purpose than invoking), sword, water, salt, censer, God statue. And then the special things for this particular rite: the quaich to hold the consecrated wine—a wide, flat, double-handled silver bowl that, as Jim remarks, looks like the Holy Grail (“So you’ve had it all this time!”); an ornate 18th-century silver chalice; a braided red silk cord; my wand of willow wood, bound with silver and sealed with a bloodstone; the claddaghs we bought last month, one silver, two gold.

Jim and Bran are talking earnestly, obviously guy stuff. I can’t hear what they are saying, but Jim is nodding comprehension, and, although grave-faced, he does not look scared or unhappy. He

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