The third witch was a peasant girl from the Blackdown Hills, abandoned with her brother in the deep dark of the trees. The boy returned to his village some years later; his sister was never seen or heard from again, except as a green-eyed shadow, a rumor with white teeth.
They were, in short, three ordinary witches of their times. Perhaps a shade more desperate and a half-step more learned, but certainly not legends.
None of them would have been remembered at all if it wasn’t for the plague. A ghastly, uncanny illness that crept into every village and down every city street and left bloated bodies behind it.
Most witches helped where they could, but the sickness came quickly and killed quicker, and even the cleverest witch couldn’t save them all. This failure—all the people they couldn’t save and the husbands and aunts and neighbors they left behind, grief-crazed—became their undoing.
Rumors began to spread: that the plague was unnatural; that it was the work of women-witches, somehow; that such evil must be purged from the world. And when a hero arose, promising to be a light against the darkness, dressed in white but trailed by black shadows, they followed him.
George of Hyll was not a Saint then. He was merely a witch, no different than the witches he hunted—except that he was a man, and man’s power was God-given.
“But—how could a man work witchcraft?” Bella interrupts. The Maiden laughs at her. “You think magic cares what’s between your legs? Or how you do your hair?” Bella does not interrupt again.
His followers burned the books first, swallowing centuries of learning in seconds. Then George asked: What of the women who carry the words and ways in their skulls? Who will surely teach them to their daughters and sisters?
They came for the witches then. The hedge-witches in their caves and hollow trees, the midwives and soothsayers, the sybils and scholars. The witches fought them with every curse and jinx they knew. But the harder they fought the more frightened the people became, and the larger George’s armies grew. The witches burned beside their books.
What words and ways were preserved were slipped into songs and rhymes, folded into fables. Women sang them to their children and taught them to their sisters, and even the watchful neighbors and listening shadows thought nothing of it.
The purge continued. The world changed. The weeds and herbs grew wild on the hillsides, with no one to tend them; the trees and animals fell silent, with no one to speak with them; there were no more dragons seen on the winds of morning.
It wasn’t long until witches retreated to a few last strongholds: the Black Forest in Saxony, the drifting isle of Lemuria, a certain haunted fen in the south of England, sometimes called Avalon.
One night the Mother and the Crone staggered into that misty moor, battle-worn and hopeless, and met the Maiden. They knew by their familiars that they shared some kinship, by soul if not by blood, and they shared a meal around a fire that night.
And there in the wild woods, at the bitter end of the age of witching, the three of them began to plan.
The Maiden had a place: the deep woods, where the remains of a tower stood, well hidden.
The Mother had the strength to defend it, at least for a while.
The Crone had something worth defending: all her decades of study, all her words and ways. She wrote down every spell she remembered or even half remembered, and then slipped out into the world to gather every unburned book or surviving scroll she could find.
Word spread among the remaining witches, and women arrived every day with scraps of spells and charred recipes. In return the Three taught them as much witchcraft as they could: for hiding and hurting, for birthing and breaking, for surviving. Some of them stayed—to defend the tor, to ward the tower, to patrol the fragile borders of their half-secret kingdom—but more often they fled back into the countryside.
The Three had the help of their own familiars, too, as if magic itself did not want to be forgotten. When the tower was complete their snakes twined their bodies together into three circles and burned the mark into the tower door. The Three found afterward that they had a way back to the tower no matter how far they traveled.
They traveled very far indeed. The Crone spent weeks in the baked-earth halls of the mosque at Djenné. The Mother completed the three tasks set by the librarians at Constantinople. The Maiden visited Cambridge and contrived to steal an entire room of their library, which she affixed to the tower.
But fewer witches found them over the years. The Three tasted ash on the wind and knew George of Hyll was coming.
Later, the storytellers would say the Three lost the battle at Avalon. That Hyll and his Inquisitors dragged them screaming to the stake and broke the power of witching forever after.
But if the Three—the cleverest witches of their age, battle-tested and canny—had wanted to escape, they would have. Instead, they waited.
They waited with their familiars at their feet and words on their lips. They fought George of Hyll for three days and three nights, while their daughters and sisters and friends vanished into the hills. And when they came to the end of their strength they carved their promise on the tower door—Maleficae quondam, maleficaeque futurae—and knelt before Hyll with bent necks.
He burned them the next day, back-to-back, the flames dancing yellow and white in his eyes. They did not scream as they burned: they sang. About roses and ashes and falling together, hand in hand.
Because those words had never been spoken before and were no spell he knew, and because men are fools when they think they’ve won, George of Hyll ignored them. He didn’t understand that the Three had spent years wading deeper and deeper into witchcraft, studying spells from every nook and cranny of the world. That they had begun to wonder where the words and ways came from in the first place, and write their own.
The spell they sang that night was a binding, far stranger and bolder than any worked before. They bound their souls one to the other and then to their beloved library. As their bodies burned, their souls fled to the other side of elsewhere—and took Avalon with them. They took the tower and the books, the trees and stars, even the tricksome autumn wind.
George raged at their escape. For years and years he scoured the earth for any sign of the Last Three Witches of the West or the Lost Way of Avalon. He found rumors and songs, bits of rhyme, but he never saw that black tower again.
The Three waited. They studied and argued and wept, despaired and dreamed, undying, and eventually they lay themselves down to sleep. They let the shape of themselves coil down among the black roots and dark earth, slipping between stones and the brittle pages of books. Souls were never meant to linger for centuries.
But they did not let themselves fade entirely. They waited, still clinging to the slimmest thread of themselves, for the day when they would be called back to the world. When what was lost would be found again, and witching would return.
It never came.
Lady bird, lady bird, fly away home.
A spell for flight, requiring rowan & starlight
If James Juniper closes her eyes she can pretend she is a little girl again, curled with her sisters on the rag rug beside the stove while Mama Mags tells them tales. She can pretend it’s all make-believe and myth.
Until Bella says, tentatively, “But that isn’t so. Avalon was called back, wasn’t it? Before us?”
The Crone almost smiles at her. “Well, it wasn’t much use to hide the library if no one could ever find it again. We left the words with our daughters before they fled, so they could call us back when the world was safe again. It never was, but still they called us from time to time.”
“Old Salem,” Bella whispered.
“And Wiesensteig in the fifteen-sixties, before that, and the Auld Kirk Green at the end of the century. Navarre in the early sixteen-hundreds. Anyplace there were at least three witches with the will. But over the centuries there were fewer and fewer women who remembered the words and ways. The age of witches was nothing but stories now,
and we listened to those stories twist and darken over the years, until every witch was a wicked one.”
The Crone’s smile is still in place, but the corners are twisted and mournful. “He nearly got us in Salem. Tituba and her coven banished us back to nowhere just before the flames took us.”
Bella presses her hand to her skirt pocket, where Juniper can see the square shape of her little black notebook. “I found the words written in the Sisters Grimm, half-faded . . .”
“The Grimms were clever girls,” says the Mother, fondly. “Jacobine and Willa called the tower and roused us from our sleep long after Old Salem, but they weren’t interested in powerful words or ways—perhaps they knew the trouble it would bring, by then. They just wanted our stories. Made a nice profit for themselves, I heard.”
“No one has called us since then.” The Maiden sighs. “We thought perhaps no one ever would. We contented ourselves with the thought that at least he never found us.” The Maiden’s eyes flick up to the charred shelves and sagging stairs, then back to the Eastwoods. Her voice cools considerably. “Until recently, that is.”
A small, sorry silence follows, while they listen to the susurrations of ash, the hollow howl of wind through the windows.
Agnes breaks it. “Gideon Hill.” She says his name carefully, the way a woman might stroke the edge of a fresh-sharpened blade. “And Saint George of Hyll. They’re the same man?”
“The same soul, at least,” the Crone allows.
“How?”
The Three exchange a look that Juniper recognizes: it’s the way three sisters look at one another when they’ve caused a great deal of trouble.
“We should have known,” says the Crone. “He watched us work our final spell. When the tower followed us into the dark he understood what we’d done. He was a formidable witch himself, by then, enough to try a binding of his own.”
The Maiden’s lip slides out from beneath her teeth. “But we weren’t thinking about immortality! We were just trying to survive, we never meant—”
“It doesn’t matter what we meant.” The Mother’s eyes are on the clenched-fist shape of Agnes’s face. “The first time we were called back into the world they told us George of Hyll had died a decade before and been sainted shortly after. But then we saw him. He wore a different face and a different name—Glennwald Hale, an Inquisitor and a churchman—but still we knew him.”
“We’d shown him the secret of bound souls. And he’d realized he could tether his soul to anything he liked, not just stones or roses or books.” The Crone’s snake slithers from her wrist to her throat, sliding its obsidian cheek against hers in a gesture that looks almost like comfort. “He bound himself to living bodies, one after the other. All he needed was the ashes of the body he was leaving and something from the body he was stealing. And enough will to stamp out the soul still living in it, I suppose.” She touches her familiar’s head. “I imagine he preys most often on the young and defenseless, to ease the binding.”
Juniper feels abruptly sick, like she’s turned over a log and found something foul and dead beneath it. She remembers the stories she heard about the dreamy, bookish boy whose favorite uncle died when he was young. How he changed after that, grew less dreamy and more calculating. How he asked his teachers to call him by his middle name: Gideon.
Juniper wonders how it felt, to have an ancient spirit steal your will, colonize your body and march it around like a wooden puppet. She pictures the long line of bodies stretching behind him, plucked like ripe fruit and hollowed out from the inside, discarded as easily as apple peels. And what happened to the souls he stamped out? Did they fade when their bodies died, or were they dragged along from corpse to corpse, trapped in a hell of his making?
“Bastard.” Her voice is a rasp, twice-burned. “So he’s just been hopping from kid to kid, getting a little smarter and a little meaner every time—”
“Gaining power, gaining witchcraft, and . . .” Bella gives a little gasp. “Covering his own tracks. Stealing records and burning books, fading whatever words and ways still remain.” Her tone makes it clear that she includes this among his most insidious crimes.
Agnes hasn’t blinked or flinched. She remains stone-faced, implacable. “Yet he’s still scared. What is he afraid of?”
“Same thing every powerful man is afraid of.” The Crone shrugs. “The day the truth comes out.”
“The day he gets what’s coming,” says the Maiden.
The Mother meets Agnes’s eyes and Juniper sees something pass between them, the gleam of a tossed blade. “Us.”
Agnes feels her lips curving for the first time since her daughter was stolen. It isn’t her usual smile—her mouth feels over-supplied with teeth and her jaw aches—but there’s a furious glee filling the hollow place her heart left behind it.
“And why’s that?” It’s nearly a purr.
“Because he burned us but our souls rose from the ashes, and he knows it. Because we know exactly what he is, and how to end him.” The Crone’s smile is subtle poison, the kind that has no taste or smell. “Because any binding may be broken.”
“Tell me how.”
“Same way you’d break any other binding: break the ways. Kill whatever body he’s wearing these days—”
Juniper makes a rasping sound in her throat. “If you’re telling us the secret to killing him is to kill him, I swear by Saint Hilda I’ll hex you.”
Bella and the Crone swat her simultaneously.
“—then banish his soul,” the Crone continues frostily. “I imagine it will want to linger even without the binding, out of habit and spite.”
“And how do we banish a soul?”
“We wrote the words especially for him,” says the Maiden. “After we saw what he’d become. But he was strong by then, wrapped in stolen shadows, and no witch ever got near enough to work the spell.”
“I will,” Agnes says. “Teach them to me.”
The Maiden does. Agnes is surprised to find that these words, too, are familiar, a children’s rhyme made eerie by the burned tower and slanting moonlight. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Georgie together again.
Agnes repeats the words to herself, rolling them over her tongue. They taste like grave-dirt and vengeance, like death long overdue. Pan’s claws flex around her shoulder, pricking her flesh.
You are not invincible, Gideon Hill.
Bella pushes her spectacles up her nose. “What about the three of you? If you bound yourselves to Avalon, and Avalon was burned, why haven’t your souls been sundered?”
The Crone’s eyes don’t twinkle—twinkling eyes are for soft, grandmotherly women who bake gingerbread and crochet scarves—but they glint. “Did you think I bound my everlasting soul to books? To paper and ink?” The glint sharpens. “We bound ourselves to the words themselves, Belladonna. We won’t fade until children forget their rhymes and mothers lose their lullabies, until the last witch forgets the last word.”
“Oh.” Bella’s face lights with a fervent, librarianish glow. “So the words survived. They’re still out there somewhere. They could be collected again, preserved.”
“Or written anew. Every spell that exists was once spoken for the first time, by a witch who needed it.”
Bella actually claps her hands together. “Then the library could be . . . oh, but it would take so much work.”
The Crone huffs. “It always does.”
“Always?”
“Avalon wasn’t the first library. Alexandria, Antioch, Avicenna . . . They keep burning us. We keep rising again.”
Bella opens her mouth again, but Agnes stands, dusting the ashes of the library from her skirts. “Thank you all.” She bows her head to the Maiden, the Crone, especially the Mother. “But I have to go now.”
Agnes looks down at her sisters. It occurs to her that they might stay in this place, if they liked, hidden safe on the other side of somewhere. Eve isn’t their daughter, after all.
But Be
lla and Juniper are already standing, their shoulders warm on either side of hers. Juniper looks a little wistfully at the tower, at the deepening night of nowhere around them, free of the stink and noise of New Salem. Agnes wonders if she’s thinking of her nights back in Crow County, moon-bright and alive, of the time when she had a place to call home.
Juniper scuffs her shoe in the ash. “Maybe we’ll talk again someday. Once Hill gets what’s coming to him.”
The Maiden looks up at Juniper in a manner that causes Agnes to recall that she has lived and listened to the world for centuries. She is still the wild Maiden of the woods, but there’s a certain wisdom in her eyes, too. “He wasn’t always . . . what he is now,” she says softly.
“A monster,” Juniper supplies. “And a real bastard.”
The Maiden flinches but doesn’t disagree. “He didn’t use to be. I am not so foolish as to think he could be redeemed, but I wish . . .” She chews at her lip with those sharp teeth. “I wish he might die with his true name in his ears. Tell him, before the end?”
Her antlers brush the tangled black of Juniper’s hair as she whispers into her ear. Juniper frowns, then nods, solemn as a Saint.
They are nearly to the door, their palms reaching for the charred remains of the Sign of the Three, when Juniper turns back. “Could you really fly? On broomsticks, like the stories said?”
The Three smile at her in perfect unison, and in their eyes Agnes sees the silver shine of starlight, the damp silk of clouds, the memory of a thousand windswept nights spent soaring above the slow turning of the world.
The stars twist away above them, and then Bella and her sisters are crouched together on the floor of an unfamiliar room. Their palms are pressed to a ragged circle carved into the floorboards, and the ceilings vault high above them. There are rows of wooden benches alongside them, slicked smooth from years of use. It’s been a long time since Bella set foot in a church, but she remembers the quiet of the air, the warm smell of candles and wine.
The Once and Future Witches Page 39
