The Witch in the Lake Read Free Page A

and guide you as you grow.’
    â€˜I’ll be a better wizard than
you?
’ asked little Leo in wonder. He looked at his father with the big face he couldn’t even hold in his hands, and felt a shiver of delight.
    Then his father had taken him by the shoulders and looked deep into his eyes. ‘My magic is weak,’ he said, ‘it’s untutored and without power—I have never saved anyone. But you, Leo, you will be different. You have the two signs of wizardry, my boy—silver hair and golden eyes. You have the sun and moon within you.’
    Leo often remembered that day. The day his father had told him about the two signs, the way he’d looked into his face. ‘You can do anything,’ he’d said, making Leo’s stomach rumble with pride and terror.
    Since then Leo had often comforted himself with those words of his father’s. Because it was hard to keep faith. The exercises they practised every Thursday were hard and often boring. For a whole hour, sometimes, Leo would have to sit on the wooden stool, staring at an object so that he ‘understood its true nature’.
    On Leo’s seventh birthday, Marco told him that the Pericolo family specialised in a particular brand of magic—the magic of Metamorphosis.
    â€˜That’s where one thing is changed into something else altogether,’ Marco explained. ‘It’s perhaps the most powerful kind of magic. It can create all that is good, but it can call into being the most unimaginable evil.’ Marco’s face closed in then, darkening around some secret storm.
    Leo had stared into his face. ‘Tell me.’
    They were hunched close together at the table, sharing the circle of lamplight and their long shadows had danced across the walls. Leo kept silent, holding his breath, desperate with wanting to know. He could see there was some private landscape behind his father’s eyes—a time before he, Leo, was born, and Marco had had this whole other life, where maybe, just once, he’d touched evil. ‘Tell me,’ he whispered again.
    But Marco shook himself, making the shadows shudder. ‘There’s nothing to tell,’ he’d said abruptly. ‘But I’ll warn you, Leo. Although you may go way beyond me with your magic, you must always stop when I tell you. You must listen to me. I don’t have the power you do, but I have the years and the wisdom to know—’
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜To know the places you mustn’t go, the forests of wizardry that are too dark to explore.’
    Leo didn’t answer. He felt hushed, in awe, as if someone had touched his naked back with a drop of ice.
    â€˜You must always obey me,’ Marco said. ‘Otherwise you will get lost. Is that understood?’
    Leo had nodded. He had never seen his father so serious. His voice was deeper, so certain—it didn’t jangle with outrage or passion the way it often did. And strangely, from then on, Leo found the lessons more interesting, absorbing even, and hours floated by while he sat, mesmerised on his stool, his mind travelling to other places entirely.
    To practise the art of Metamorphosis, Marco told Leo early on, you have to be able to see.
    â€˜Well of
course!
’ Leo laughed. ‘What do you think I am, an idiot?’
    â€˜No, I don’t,’ smiled Marco. ‘But there are ways of seeing, son. In order to transform something, you have to
see
it first. You have to look straight to the heart of that thing, before you can change it.’
    â€˜You mean if you only see its outside, then only that will be changed when you do the spell? I mean, it will
look
changed, but the heart of the thing will be the same.’
    Marco gave a little jump of excitement. ‘Yes, Leo, that’s it,
bravo!
The object’s real nature has to be understood, all its history, its deepest soul, even the making of it, has to be seen and held in your grasp. Once