Her feet are numb on the steps. The stake nestles between the winged bones of her back. A pair of men wrap cold chains around their waists, pinching tight, while another unlocks their bridles and shackles, leaving only their collars. Witches always went to God with their tongues free to repent and their hands free to pray. Agnes doesn’t intend to do either.
It seems to her as she stands beside her sisters that it was always going to end like this: the three of them back-to-back, besieged on all sides. The wayward sisters, burned and bound. It seems to her it has happened this way before and will happen again, until there are no witches left to burn or no men left to burn them.
The crowd blurs and sways before her. She catches ripples of motion—the scarlet flash of August’s scarf as he shoulders through the tight-pressed watchers, circling the scaffold, the dark flutter of Cleo’s skirts as she edges closer—but then everything is obscured by a man in a suit the color of old honeysuckle.
Gideon Hill’s shadow oozes two steps behind him, lazy and full-bellied. It stretches its arms high and spills over the platform’s edge, down into the crowd, twisting around ankles and slinking up skirts. His dog trembles beside him, eyes huge in its thin skull.
“Last chance for a confession, ladies.” He addresses all three of them but his eyes linger on Juniper.
None of them answer. Agnes can’t sense her sisters through the cold iron around her throat, but she feels the wound-tight tension in the press of their shoulders against hers.
Hill steps closer to Juniper and says quietly, “Repent. Forgiveness is still possible.” His voice is urgent, almost desperate.
Juniper smiles at him. “No,” she says. “It isn’t.”
His jaw tightens. He turns away in a swirl of cream cloak. His dog lingers a step behind him, looking mournfully at the Eastwoods, until Juniper rasps, “S’alright, girl. Just a little longer.” It creeps after its master.
Agnes feels the dull thud of boots and paws down the scaffold steps, the sawblade buzz of the crowd. Stars appear overhead, dim and distant through the blaze of torchlight.
Hill takes his place in the balcony across from them. He tucks Miss Wiggin’s hand beneath his arm and she gazes up at him with such vacuous rapture that Agnes’s stomach turns. At least their daddy never forced them to love him; at least he never took their selves or souls away. She wonders if Grace hates him, somewhere deep down in her china-doll body.
Hill surveys the gathered citizens, face severe and mournful. Agnes thinks he might make another speech about morality and Satan and modernity, but he doesn’t. Instead he lets his gaze rest on the torchbearer below him. He nods once and a hideous hush falls over the square.
The torch hisses and snaps. A baby wails somewhere in the crowd. Agnes’s thoughts run in dizzy circles—a wise woman keeps her burning on the inside—sorry, Mags—hurry, August—
Bella’s voice comes soft and calm from the other side of the stake, as if she is sitting behind a collections desk rather than staked in the city square. “I translated that inscription, by the way. The one on the door: Maleficae quondam, maleficaeque futurae.” She ignores Juniper’s softly muttered, Jesus, Bell. “In English it’s ‘witches once and witches in the future.’”
“And what does that mean?” Agnes asks.
“I think it means witches will return, one day, no matter how many of us they burn.” Agnes can hear the smile in Bella’s voice, sharp and secret. “I think it means—us. All of us.”
Then the torch touches the pyre and flames lick like tiger claws into the sky, and the Eastwood sisters are burning.
Agnes Amaranth has burned once before. She’s familiar with the glass-shard sting of smoke in her eyes, the way the heat rolls up her body in waves, lifting her hair from her shoulders and singeing the ends. The way her own tears whisper into steam on her cheeks.
The first time, Agnes saved herself. She poured a circle of creek-water around her sisters and said the words and the heat vanished. She and her sisters stood perfectly still as the fire licked and twined around them, as if it was a newly tamed wolf that might still bite.
This time it’s August Lee who saves them. She sees his face through the honeyed glaze of the flames: eyes fixed, lips moving, arm still tight around Eve. The silver flask lies dripping on the cobbles, its contents scattered in a wide circle around the scaffold.
Agnes can see the shine of sweat slicking August’s forehead and the tense set of his shoulders, as if he’s braced beneath some immense weight. All witching takes is will, really, and he will not let her burn.
The scaffold hisses and pops beneath her feet and the flames snap high into the night, but they don’t seem to touch her, as if her skin is coated in armor made of running water. Only her collar feels hot, warming at the presence of magic. It throbs against her throat.
The crowd howls and moans and cheers around August, their cheeks flushed and their eyes glowing red. Their shadows have merged into a single creature behind them, hydra-headed and many-limbed, exultant. Hill looks down on them with no expression at all, as if they are nothing to him but hollow puppets.
When he looks back up at the Eastwoods there are flames dancing red in his eyes, perhaps a trace of grief—but also vast relief, that this threat to his endless, weary life is finally laid to rest.
But soon his relief will flicker. Soon his brow will furrow. He has burned many, many women over the centuries, and surely all of them have screamed.
The Eastwoods are not screaming. The flames are wrapped like hands around them, tearing at their white wool dresses. Their chains are glowing red-hot—but their skin is whole and smooth, unblistered. Soon Gideon Hill will notice that his witches are not burning.
But they aren’t ready. They need just a little more time.
Agnes takes a deep breath that should sear her lungs, but doesn’t. She tastes cinders and ash and August’s witching on her tongue. She thinks of Eve bundled tight in his arms, bathed in the light of her mother’s burning, and thinks: Listen close, baby girl.
She shouts into the night, clear and taunting and fearless. “Is it a confession you want?”
Bella hears her sister’s voice but hardly recognizes it. It booms and cracks, unrestrained, raw with rage. The sound of it thrums somewhere in Bella’s bones, a plucked string too low to hear.
“I confess it freely, Mr. Hill: I am a witch.”
The jeering crowd falls still at the sound of her voice. They stare up at the flames with wary faces, like hunters who hear their prey thrashing in the bracken, wounded but still dangerous. Gideon Hill stands very still on the balcony.
Bella feels the scaffold shudder beneath her feet as if someone is climbing it, as if they’re attempting something very daring and heroic without which their entire plan would collapse. Three bless and keep her.
“I am a witch.” Agnes shouts it a second time, louder, flinging her voice into the night. “And so are my sisters, and so will be my daughter and my daughter’s daughter.” Her voice roughens at the mention of Eve, as if the collar around her throat has constricted.
Behind them comes the sound of footsteps, then the whisper of words and the sizzle of saltwater spat on hot iron. Their chains crackle with unnatural rust. Their collars boil at the touch of witchcraft.
Bella bites her cheek until she tastes blood, but Agnes doesn’t seem to feel her collar at all. Her head is tilted back against the stake, her eyes closed, her voice strong. “And so is every woman who says what she shouldn’t or wants what she can’t have, who fights for her fair share.”
Every eye is on Agnes, transfixed. No one notices the fourth witch standing on the scaffold, singing her song to avert unwanted eyes. No one notices their chains and collars thinning and flaking, turning brittle as old bone.
Agnes gives a contemptuous twist of her shoulders, like a woman shrugging off an unwelcome touch, and the chain snaps. She steps forward, feet bare and unburnt on the blackened wood, hair dancing in the flames, and Bella hears the rushing sou
nd of several hundred people drawing breath together.
She’s surprised to feel a pang of pity for them: they thought they were in the kind of story where the wicked witches were caught and burned at the end, where all the little children were tucked safely into bed with the smell of smoke in their hair. It must be upsetting to discover themselves in the kind of story where the witches make friends with the flames instead, where they snap their chains and laugh up at the stars with sharp teeth.
Agnes lifts her arm and the fire wraps around her naked flesh like golden armor. She points at Gideon Hill where he watches from the balcony, his face twisted, his mouth half-open to snarl orders to his Inquisitors over the wild barking of his dog. Grace Wiggin still clings to his arm, looking at Agnes with horror. But there’s a sliver of brightness in her eyes, as if a small, treacherous part of her is glad to see a witch walk out of the flames.
Bella’s throat is blistering beneath the thinning collar, each rust-flake searing her skin where it falls. She can’t see Cleo standing beside her, but she hears her voice whispering in her ear. “Hold on, love, it’s almost done—London Bridge is falling down, falling down—”
Agnes is still pointing at Hill. Bella can only see the back of her head, but she can sense the vicious, delirious grin on her face. “I am a witch, Gideon Hill.” Her voice is low, dangerous, the twitch of a cat’s tail before it pounces, the final circle of an osprey before the plunge. “And so are you!”
As she says it, several things happen one after the other, like playing cards in a collapsing house.
Their witch-collars fall away from their necks, reduced to nothing but rust and malice. Bella can sense her sisters’ souls singing loud through the binding between them and magic seething again on the other side of everything.
An owl and an osprey appear in the smoke-hung sky, black as spades or hearts, and the first true screams ring through the square.
Gideon Hill shouts orders. White-and-red Inquisitors surge toward the scaffold just as most of the crowd scrabbles away. They clash into one another without noticing the knots of people who aren’t moving at all. Who are standing like stones or sentinels, watching the fire. Waiting.
Bella stumbles away from the stake and sags into Miss Cleo Quinn’s arms.
“What happened to your ring, woman?” Cleo murmurs into Bella’s hair. “I let you out of my sight for ten minutes.”
“It’s your fault, really, for letting me out of your sight.”
“I don’t make the same mistake twice.” Cleo’s hand finds hers and holds it so tightly her knuckle-bones creak.
Juniper limps free of the fire, raises her arms high, and laughs. It’s a raucous, devilish laugh, the laugh of the crow as it raids the cornfield, the trickster as she weaves her web. Bella catches the wild edge of her smile as she looks out at the crowd
“I believe my cue is coming, love,” Bella whispers. “Did you bring the wandwood?”
Cleo presses a thin strip of holly into her palm just as Juniper shouts a single word.
“Hemlock!”
Bella steps forward between her sisters as the crowd answers Juniper’s command.
She watches a hundred women reach into a hundred pockets and satchels and baskets to withdraw a hundred hats in black muslin and gray velvet, dark silk and ragged lace. Their arms arc upward as every witch in the city of New Salem dons a tall, pointed hat, and whispers the words.
Skirts and cloaks cascade over their bodies from nowhere. Fine gowns of draping chiffon and cotton day-dresses with their sleeves ripped away, black cloaks with long trains of feathers and evening gowns trimmed in dark mink. Some of them were sewn by the Sisters of Avalon and some of them were dug out of cedar chests and wardrobes for the occasion. Some of them aren’t true black but navy blue or lake-bottom green, but in the fickle light of stars and flames it hardly matters. The crowd sees women in tall hats and dark dresses and knows exactly what they are.
One witch you can laugh at. Three you can burn. But what do you do with a hundred?
Most people run, it turns out.
Hill isn’t running. He’s standing on the balcony shouting orders to his Inquisitors. He gathers fistfuls of shadow and tugs them like puppet-strings or fishing lines. Half the crowd lurches to a halt, swaying and blinking, too weak to wrest free of his will.
Perhaps his puppets might have stood their ground and overcome the witches of New Salem, but Bella touches her holly wand to the torch and lifts it high above her. The crowd below does the same, withdrawing thin strips of oak and applewood, birch and blackthorn. The women who have no matches borrow heat from the ones who do, touching their wand-tips one to another.
Bella speaks the spell without a trace of a stutter. A hundred voices echo her: Queen Anne, Queen Anne, you sit in the sun—
Simple, small words a woman might sing as she peered into her sewing box on a winter’s night. Words about driving back the darkness, about sunlight piercing shadows.
As fair as a lily as white as a wand.
Each wand below her casts its own particular light, from palest dawn to bloody sunset, silver moon-shine to golden candleflame. The lights meet and merge, joining to form a wave of noon-bright sun.
The shadows flee before the witch-light, unwinding from ankles and tearing free from skirt-hems to run like unclean water over the cobblestones. They pool around Hill, a writhing darkness that hisses and spits like oil in the pan.
The spell grows brighter. The shadows shrink until they’re the size of a single person standing tall, then a wizened old man, then a child, then nothing at all.
Gideon Hill stands shadowless and exposed, bathed in sunlight, his dog baring its teeth at the sky in a snarl or a smile.
A ripple moves through the crowd. Bella sees faces upturned, squinting at the witch-light with watering eyes and half-open mouths. Their shadows curl meekly beneath them once more, tame and ordinary. If the spell ends now she thinks most of them would be happy to stumble home, haunted by the memory of hate that wasn’t their own. But the spell doesn’t end.
Queen Anne, Queen Anne—
The witches didn’t stop chanting when Hill’s shadow vanished. The sunlight now is blinding, hot, boiling down on black wool and autumn cloaks, and the spell itself is becoming something more that itself, something that swallows lies and sheds truth.
Gideon Hill begins to change. The flat blond of his hair darkens to matted black. The chin sharpens, the flesh recedes to reveal a thin, hungry frame. This must be his true soul showing through his stolen body; Bella is surprised by how young and desperate it seems.
The dog beside him changes, too, her master’s illusion burning away. Her legs and jaw lengthen, her fur roughens, her ears stand up: a lean wolf with black fur and boiling red eyes.
The crowd is frozen, staring up at the savior. Their light against the darkness, their would-be Saint. The word witch rustles through them.
Bella lowers her wand with a dizzy, savage glee pulsing in her temples. At least if they fail now the truth will still be told. The man who spent centuries twisting history and telling false tales will still be laid bare for everyone to see.
Their daddy died a good man, in the eyes of the world; Gideon Hill will die a villain.
Bella turns to Juniper, who is watching Gideon Hill with a strange expression on her face, nearly mournful. “Your turn, June.”
Juniper is watching the boy on the balcony—the vicious, frightened boy who should have died a very long time ago—when her sister tells her it’s her turn.
Cleopatra Quinn presses two things into her hands: a black-yew staff and a long, curved pair of teeth.
Juniper leaps from the scaffold with her scorched and tattered dress flapping like burnt wings behind her. She lands barefoot on the cobbles, bad foot curling beneath her, knee cracking against stone. The teeth bite deep into her palm and blood pools in her hand.
She remains crouched, buffeted by the panicked crowd. She slicks her blood along the black-yew staff and whis
pers the words for the third time in her life.
May sticks and stones break your bones, and serpents stop your heart.
Vicious, venomous words that burn her throat and scorch her tongue. Words that require a furious will behind them. Juniper has always had a brimming cup of hate inside her, a well of rage that never runs dry, but it seems to her now that she has to reach deeper to find what she needs, that perhaps her well is not so bottomless after all.
Still: she thinks of Eve, of the Three, of all those poor people dying in the cots of Charity Hospital, and she finds the will she requires.
The staff twists in her hand, the wood grain replaced with smooth scales, the carved snake suddenly warm against her palm. It looks back at her once with its glass eyes, and she nods to it. Go.
Juniper struggles to her feet as the snake slides unseen through the trampling feet. Gideon Hill is leaning over the platform railing, glaring into the crowd below, searching. His eyes find her and a stillness falls over him.
His face is familiar to her. It’s the face she saw in every mirror and windowpane she passed for years. It’s the face of a broken, betrayed child, holding on to hate because they have nothing else.
What would it be like to remain that broken child for centuries, all alone?
The black-yew snake is coiling up the platform timbers now, sliding nearer. Gideon is too busy staring at Juniper to see his own death creeping closer.
But Juniper’s will is wavering. The snake is near enough to strike but it coils around itself, poised. Waiting.
Saints know he deserves it. So did her daddy, twice over, but she spared his life that day in the barn. She let him live seven years more, until he wore away every ounce of grace and goodness she had left. She didn’t hesitate the second time.
She’s spent the summer running, hunted and haunted, looking for someplace to put all the leftover hate in her heart. Maybe she’s come to the end of it, finally. Maybe she’s weary of vengeance earned and struck, of sacrifice and sin and too-high prices.
The Once and Future Witches Page 44
