Quinn pulls the black leather notebook from Beatrice’s pocket and flips to the page with a spell concerning barking dogs and gnawed bones. “The solstice begins at midnight. I believe it’s time to call your sister.”
The wayward sisters, hand in hand,
Burned and bound, our stolen crown,
But what is lost, that can’t be found?
Cauldron bubble, toil and trouble,
Weave a circle round the throne,
Maiden, mother, and crone.
A spell to find what has been lost, requiring maiden’s blood, mother’s milk, crone’s tears & a fierce will
Wait for my sign, Bella told her, but Agnes doesn’t know what sign she’s waiting for. In the stories, witches were always sending messages by raven or whispering secrets into the hollow curves of conch shells, so Agnes rattles around South Sybil, squinting out windows, looking for letters in the smoke-bitten stars or words written in the rising steam.
When the sign comes, Agnes cannot miss it.
It begins as a lone keening from the street below, the plaintive howl of a street-dog. Then the street-dog is joined by its brothers, by yips and barks and rumbling growls that rise from every quarter of the city in an uncanny wave. It’s as if every dog in New Salem has joined a single, mottled wolf-pack. The noise of the dogs is followed by the human shrieks and curses of alarmed pedestrians and angry owners.
“Saints, Bell. I hear you.” The line that leads to her oldest sister is stretched thin by the miles between them, but Agnes can still feel the echo of Bella’s will behind the working.
Agnes gathers the ways—three glass jars, the waxen stubs of seven candles, a book of matches, and a cast iron skillet that is the closest thing she has to a cauldron—and wraps them tight in a canvas sack.
Then she and the sack and the baby swimming silent inside her step out into the howling noise of the night. The streets are so full of people—baffled policemen and shouting men, irritable mothers holding screaming infants, escaped toddlers clapping their hands with delighted cries of “DOGGY!”—that no one pays much attention to Agnes.
“Nothing to be concerned about,” one officer is repeating, loudly and falsely. “Just a flock of geese passing by, or a cat.” But Agnes can tell from the white sheen of his face that he doesn’t believe it. That he can feel the rules of the real shifting beneath his feet, the orderly world of New Salem warping and cracking like a snow globe tossed in a bonfire.
She pulls her cloak hood high and winds through the alleys with the bag clanking gently at her side and Mama Mags’s stories echoing in her ears, the ones about sisters and spells worked on solstice-eve. In stories the sisters are always set one against the others—the beautiful one and her two ugly sisters, the clever one and the fools, the brave one and the cowards. Only one of them escapes the wicked witch or breaks the terrible curse.
Their daddy was a curse. He left them scarred and sundered, broken so badly they can never be put back together again.
But maybe tonight—just for a little while—they can pretend. Maybe they can stand hand in hand, once lost but now found. Maybe it will be enough to save their wild, wayward sister from a world that despises wayward women.
Agnes walks until the howling of the dogs quiets to whimpers and whines, until the moon hangs high and clear above her, until her steps echo in the empty dark of St. George’s Square. Mama Mags taught her that magic likes to burn the same way twice, like deer following a trail or water running to a river. Perhaps the tower will come easier to the place they last called it; perhaps this time it will stay.
She kneels beneath the empty plinth where Saint George once stood and places the candles around her like the pale flowers of a fairy ring. She sets the jars before her, three in a row, and waits.
It is midnight when Beatrice returns to the ruins of Old Salem.
Old Salem at midnight is not the same city they visited at noon. The skeletons of walls and streets are clearer by moonlight, their bones drawn in silver and shadow beneath the moss. The wind has risen, banishing the idle warmth of summer, whistling strangely through the alleys and corners of the lost city. It tugs at Beatrice’s hair, playful as a schoolgirl.
She and Miss Quinn stand in the bare circle of earth in the middle of the lost city. Seven candles flicker around them, drawing upward-slanting shadows over their faces, guttering in the untrustworthy wind.
Miss Quinn nods approval. “Thoroughly witchy, Miss Eastwood. You could hardly ask for better.”
“I thought perhaps the Way would have an affinity for the city, if it stood here once before. I suspect we’ll need all the help we can get.” There are supposed to be seven candles made of pure white wax, instead of five mismatched stubs stolen from Lilith’s inn (one of them is decorated with small, malformed bats; two of them are melted to their willow-patterned saucers). She and her sisters are supposed to be standing shoulder-to-shoulder, hand in hand; they’re supposed to be real witches, with familiars and broomsticks and pointed hats, instead of three desperate young women.
“Truly, this is madness. It cannot succeed. Even supposing we have the words and ways, I am not at all suited for this sort of thing. I lack the blood, the conviction, the courage—”
Quinn gives a tart cluck of her tongue. “Please do stop pretending you are a coward. It grows tiresome.”
“Pretending—”
“You fret and worry, but your hands are steady as stones.” Quinn’s arms are crossed, her chin high. “You have not stammered once since we arrived in Old Salem.”
Beatrice closes her mouth. “I suppose not.”
Quinn takes a step nearer, her face gilded gold. “Would a coward form a secret society of witches? Would she transfigure statues and hex cemeteries? Would she stand in the ruins of a lost city on the solstice?”
Beatrice feels as if the earth is tilting beneath her feet or the sky is tumbling around her ears, some fundamental truth is coming undone. “Perhaps she wouldn’t.” It comes out a near-whisper. “But she might still fail.”
“And yet you will try anyway.”
“Yes.”
“For your sister.”
Or perhaps for all of them: for the little girls thrown in cellars and the grown women sent to workhouses, the mothers who shouldn’t have died and the witches who shouldn’t have burned. For all the women punished merely for wanting what they shouldn’t have.
Beatrice settles for another “Yes.”
“I deceived you, it’s true, but Beatrice . . .” The challenge in Quinn’s face softens, replaced by a wistful tenderness that Beatrice finds far more dangerous. “I beg you not to deceive yourself.”
“I see.” A brief silence follows, while Beatrice recovers her straying voice. “Call me Bella.” Beatrice was the name of her father’s mother, a dried-out onion of a woman who visited once a year for Christmas and only ever gave them turgid novels about the lives of the Saints. A Beatrice couldn’t stand in this wild wood by the light of the not-quitefull moon, working the greatest witching of her century; a Beatrice couldn’t meet Quinn’s eyes in the candlelight, with the wind whipping her hair loose across her face. Perhaps a Belladonna could.
“Oh, are we on first-name terms now?” Quinn’s lips are a teasing curve, but that tender thing lingers in her voice.
“Of course we are.” Bella swallows once, too hard. “Cleo.”
She finds she can’t look into Quinn’s eyes as she says her name. She looks down at her notebook instead, rubbing her thumb across the words. “If anything untoward happens, you should run.”
“No, thank you,” Quinn says politely.
Bella tries again. “If it goes awry . . .” They both know it would be unwise for Quinn to be found in a scene of obvious witchcraft beside the burned husk of a white woman.
“Then I advise you not to let it go awry.” Quinn catches her eyes. “I am not here as a spy, Bella. Or even as a member of the Sisters of Avalon. I’m here as your . . . friend.” Her grin tilts. “And bec
ause I am the most curious creature ever cursed to walk the earth, to quote my mother, and I would very much like to be there when the Lost Way of Avalon comes back to the world.”
“Your mother seems a wise woman,” Bella says, and adds, a little daringly, “I’d like to meet her, someday.”
“But you already have!” Quinn sighs at Bella’s slack expression. “I did tell you my mother ran a spice shop.”
Bella considers objecting on the grounds that Quinn never said her mother ran a secret apothecary disguised as a spice shop while actually leading a clandestine society of colored witches, but instead says, “Oh.”
Quinn gives her a consoling pat. “She thought you were very sweet.”
Bella closes her eyes in brief and mortal mortification. “Well. It’s time, don’t you think?”
Quinn’s hand slips into hers, warm and dry. Bella wets her lips, feels the cool whip of wind on her tongue, and says the words a coward never would:
The wayward sisters, hand in hand,
Burned and bound, our stolen crown,
But what is lost, that can’t be found?
It’s seven minutes past midnight when Juniper’s collar begins to burn.
She splashes to her knees in the dark waters of the Deeps, fingers scrabbling at the hot iron, teeth gritted on howls and curses.
She heard the dogs, earlier—even buried beneath ten thousand pounds of stone and iron she could hear that mad chorus, sense the wicked heat of witchcraft in the air—but her collar had remained dull and cold against her blistered throat. Now it blazes, and beneath its heat she feels the lines that lead to her sisters, taut and singing with power.
Her lip splits beneath her teeth. Blood runs hot down her chin, too hot, and drips to the cold water below. Juniper hears the delicate splish as it lands and remembers her blood falling to the limestone cobbles of St. George’s Square—then the whipping wind, the dark tower, the wild smell of roses—Bella’s fingers on her mouth: maiden’s blood.
She knows, then, what her sisters are doing.
“Oh, you fools. You beautiful Saints-damned sinners—” She curses them and cries as she curses, because she knows they are doing it for her. Even though they abandoned her once before, even though they know now what she is—a murderess and a villain, worse than nothing—
It hurts even to think it. They came back for me. She feels something snap in her chest, as if her heart is a broken bone poorly set, which has to break again before it can heal right.
For a moment she pictures herself standing arm in arm with her sisters, triumphant before the Lost Way of Avalon. She knows it will never be. Because—though she can sense the rightness of the words and ways, though she feels her sisters’ will scorching down the line between them—Juniper knows they will fail.
Bella calls. The magic answers.
Cauldron bubble, toil and trouble,
Weave a circle round the throne,
Maiden, mother, and crone.
The heat gathers first in her palms, spreading like fresh-caught flames up her arms, burrowing into the hollow of her throat. The invisible lines between Bella and her sisters—the bindings left behind by that half-worked spell months before—hum like fiddle strings beneath the bow.
The wind rises, and with it comes the calling of night-birds and the feral smell of magic.
The wayward sisters, hand in hand—
She feels Agnes a hundred miles away, lit like a torch in the center of New Salem, the cobbles growing hot beneath her heels. She feels her hands steady on the glass vials, and the bright hiss of tears and milk and blood as they fall.
Burned and bound, our stolen crown—
But where is Juniper? The line between them is thin and weak, far too cold.
Bella kneels on the bare earth of Old Salem, still speaking the spell, magic burning through her. Steam rises from the soil as it boils beneath her.
But what is lost, that can’t be found?
The words feel true in her mouth, like keys sliding into invisible locks. But the heat is consuming her. She pictures her veins glowing hotter and hotter until she ignites, until she is a bonfire with a woman’s voice.
She feels Agnes burning with her, arms wrapped tight around her belly, hair rising around her in the same wind that whips dirt and dead leaves around Bella.
But she doesn’t feel Juniper. There are only two of them, and two is not enough.
The last time she worked this spell—when she was just a librarian named Beatrice who found a few words that shouldn’t exist—she had grown frightened and fallen silent. Without the words the spell suffocated like an airless fire, and the only price was a little Devil’s-fever, quickly cured.
But now she is Belladonna Eastwood, the oldest sister and the wisest, and Juniper needs her.
She circles back to the beginning of the spell in an unbroken chant. The woods dim around her, vanishing in the rising haze of heat. Her lips keep moving, desperate prayers mixing with the words.
—oh hell—Three bless and keep us—weave a circle round the throne—
Distantly, she feels cool fingers across her brow, palms cupping her face. A thumb traces her cheeks and she turns blindly toward it. If she is going to die, let it be with the sweet frost of those fingers against her lips, the taste of ink and cloves on her tongue.
There comes a point when Bella knows she should turn back. It’s like wading into the creek after a storm, the water rushing around your ankles, knowing if you take another step it will pull you under.
Bella takes another step. She goes under.
She is fire. She is pain. She is a crack in the world through which something else—magic or God or the heat of every unanswered wish and impossible dream, burning eternal on the other side of everything—pours through.
She thinks she’s probably dying.
The something-else pauses. It considers her, this dying woman kneeling in a circle of spent candles, her lips still shaping the words that are killing her.
Somewhere very far away, an owl calls.
Bella opens her eyes. Through the haze of heat and tears she sees a shape gliding through the trees, silent as smoke, blacker than the blackest night. Its eyes are a pair of embers burning nearer.
Quinn gasps, but Bella’s lips crack into a smile, because—though she is burning, though she is failing—at least she has come this far. At least she has knelt in the bones of Old Salem and watched her familiar winging toward her.
Bella draws a breath. She begins again.
The wayward sisters, hand in hand—
Juniper hears the words echoing down the line, tastes them gathering in her mouth. She keeps her teeth clamped tight.
The spell needs her. She feels it boiling too hot, gathering like lightning with nowhere to strike. But if she speaks, the collar around her throat will kill her.
If she doesn’t speak, the spell will kill her sisters.
Let it go, for the love of Eve, save yourselves.
They don’t let it go. Because they are fools, because they are desperate, because they will not abandon her a second time.
Juniper closes her eyes and whispers several very filthy words.
She thinks a little bitterly of all the lofty reasons she wanted to restore the Lost Way—to reclaim the power of witches for all womankind, to break the shackles of their servitude, to set this whole damn city on fire. And in the end she’s going to do it because she wants to save her dumb-shit sisters, who are only doing it to save her in turn.
She wonders if all great acts are secretly done for such small reasons; she wonders if the cleaning lady will be the first to find her in the morning, facedown in the Deeps with a red ring around her neck.
She gathers her will around her—a wild, clawing thing, hungry and desperate and half-starved—and speaks the words.
The collar glows dull orange in the darkness, but the borrowed words still tumble from her mouth in a steady stream. The orange deepens to ruby, painting the cell in blood and shado
w, and Juniper feels herself falling backward. The collar hisses as it hits the water. Her mouth fills with the sour taste of sewer. Her will doesn’t waver.
Something vast slides invisibly into place, a great key turning in a lock, and the world splits open.
Magic comes roaring through the crack, through the three women who stand in Salem’s past and present. Juniper feels the heat of it crack the cobbles beneath Agnes’s feet and blacken the earth beneath Bella; around her, the Deeps boil.
And the collar around her throat—built to punish street-witches and fortune-tellers, women with nothing but the half-remembered rhymes of their mothers—burns from red to white to black, and then crumbles into gray ash.
The heat fades.
Juniper feels the tower standing tall, rooted like a tree in the middle of New Salem. And she feels her sisters: Agnes, her forehead pressed to heat-cracked stone and her arms doubled around her belly, laughing and sobbing; Bella, held tight in someone else’s arms, too stunned even to feel relief. Alive, both of them.
Juniper lies back in the cooling waters of the Deeps and closes her eyes, listening to the distant beating of their hearts. It’s a peaceful, easy sound, as familiar as rain on the roof.
She thinks she might stay like this, suspended, drifting away from the burned-meat smell of her own flesh and the pain too huge to feel, but a voice is calling her. It’s a familiar voice, querulous and cracked with age. It tells her to wake up, to get on her feet.
Juniper doesn’t much want to, but she knows better than to disobey that voice. She wakes up; she gets on her feet. She tries not to feel the brush of air against the raw mess of her throat.
A ghostly hand touches hers. Juniper knows the hand is a fever-dream or a mirage, a product of the pain pulsing like wine through her skull—but it feels familiar. Warm and knob-knuckled, paper-fleshed.
The Once and Future Witches Page 24
