An Introduction 15 страница

“I always cared, Bell. Always. ” Agnes swallows the salt-promise of tears in her throat, hardens her voice. “But it never fucking mattered that I cared. I couldn’t stop him, couldn’t protect you—couldn’t even protect myself—” The tears threaten again, and Agnes breaks off.

There’s a pause, and after it Bella’s voice has softened very slightly. “Maybe this time we can make it matter. Miss Quinn and I will find the words. Juniper has always had will to spare. We need you to gather the ways. Will you do it? ”

Agnes doesn’t want Bella to speak softly to her. She wants to keep that bitter coal burning hot between them, because once it cools she’ll have nothing left but terrible guilt. She hadn’t wanted to betray her, to spill Bella’s secrets to their daddy, but surviving always comes at a cost.

Agnes looks again at the girl in the mirror, eyes tracing the dark blush of bruises, the shine of old scars. Juniper’s lips move in her sleep. Don’t leave me.

Agnes feels the taut scab of her sister’s blood dried on her palm. She closes her eyes. “Yes. ”

Bella gives her a cool nod and sets the mirror on the table. “Wait for my sign. ”

“But then I’m through. If we—after we save her, I’m done with witching and women’s rights and all the rest. ” She rests her palm on the full moon of her belly. “The cost is too high. ”

“Fine. ” Bella’s lip curls very slightly before she turns away. “It’s funny. Mama always said you were the strong one. ”

She unbolts the door and steps back into the deeper dark of the hall. Cleo moves to follow her and Agnes reaches for her sleeve. “Where are you going? To look for the words? ”

“Why, the last place we know for certain the words were spoken. ” Cleo removes her sleeve from Agnes’s hand, lips curling. “Old Salem. ”

Hark, hark,

The dogs do bark,

When witches come to town.

A spell to raise the alarm, requiring a gnawed bone & a strong whistle

Beatrice Belladonna always wanted to see Old Salem. It makes regular appearances in her favorite penny-papers—a burned city full of charred bones and the wailing ghosts of witches—and even in more academic texts it retains a certain Gothic drama. It’s always drawn with dense thickets of cross-hatched ruins and brooding trees, the stubborn black shapes of crows lurking in the corners, as if the artist had tried unsuccessfully to shoo them off the page.

As soon as Mr. Blackwell spoke its name, Beatrice felt a bone-deep certainty that he was right. Surely they could not fail to find their missing words in such a place—steeped in the oldest and wildest of witchcraft, oozing with mystery and memory.

But by the time she and Miss Cleopatra Quinn arrive in Old Salem, her certainty is sagging.

Perhaps it’s the journey itself. It’s difficult to feel particularly magical after fifty miles spent with one’s forehead pressed to the window of a crowded train car, watching the landscape blur past like a spun globe, followed by another twenty miles suffocating in the back of a stagecoach. Miss Quinn is obliged by the cruel absurdity of Jim Crow to ride out front with the driver, and without her Beatrice feels herself growing drab and doubtful.

The final four miles are spent swaying in the back of a coal-colored wagon with LADY LILITH’S AUTHENTIC OLD SALEM EXCURSIONS painted on the side in faux-medieval script. Lady Lilith is a bored, fifty-ish woman with artificially dark hair and a disconcerting habit of hawking and spitting at regular intervals. The other passengers are similarly unmagical: a vacationing family from Boston who cast disapproving looks at Miss Quinn, a honeymooning couple uninterested in everything except one another, a trio of boarding school girls of the kind who wear black chokers and worship the Brontë sisters.

The sky is such an unblemished blue it looks strangely unfinished, as if a careless painter has forgotten to add clouds and birds and slight variations in hue. Beatrice feels obscurely that the day should be gray and wintry, the wind howling as they approach the gravesite of the last witches of the modern world.

Lilith’s mules turn from the pocked highway down an even more forgotten-looking road made of moss-eaten cobbles and mud. The woods rise like water around them, cool and silent; even the newlyweds cease their giggling. The air smells green and secret, surprising Beatrice with a rare pang of homesickness for Crow County; she supposes a person doesn’t have to love their home in order to miss it.

They trundle on in near-silence, Beatrice wondering fretfully how much farther it is and whether their quest has any hope of success, until Miss Quinn points into the shadowed wood at a low, lichen-covered wall made of blackened stone. Another wall runs beside it, sketching a square in the undergrowth. Beyond that Beatrice sees the rotten remnants of a doorway, the ghost of a lane, and understands abruptly that they have already reached Old Salem. They are driving now through its remains.

“Excuse me, ma’am. ” Miss Quinn interrupts Lady Lilith mid-hawk. “Do you think we might explore a bit on our own? ”

Lady Lilith hauls her mules to a halt and eyes Quinn, scratching speculatively at the three white hairs coiled on her chin. “S’haunted, ” she observes. “Dangerous, to let tourists go wandering off. I might get in trouble. ”

Beatrice begins to explain that she is a former librarian and Miss Quinn is a journalist, and that they intend to take the utmost care in their explorations—which are in fact a matter of life and death for someone they love dearly—but Quinn produces a neatly folded dollar bill and presses it into Lady Lilith’s damp palm. “If you could come back before dusk, we’d very much appreciate it, ” Quinn says, then climbs out of the wagon and extends a hand to help Beatrice down after her.

Lilith flicks the reins and Quinn and Beatrice are alone in the soft green ruins of the city.

They wander wordlessly through the woods, pausing to scrub moss from walls or scuff leaves away from stone roads. The trees around them strike Beatrice as implausibly ancient, surely older than a century. Crows and starlings watch them with mocking eyes, as if they know what the women are looking for and where it’s hidden, but are disinclined to help.

Beatrice is no longer sure precisely what they are looking for—a signpost with an arrow pointing to the Lost Way of Avalon, perhaps, or a book titled On Restoring the Power of Witches and Rescuing One’s Sister from Certain Death; some instruction or spell that has survived a century of rain and sun and morbid tourists. The sudden absurdity of the idea curdles Beatrice’s stomach. She glances sideways at Quinn, wondering if she regrets signing her name in that notebook.

They walk on in silence. Sometimes Beatrice finds a patch of moss that grows in unlikely spirals, or a stone that bears an uncomfortable resemblance to a man with his arms raised to ward off some unseen blow. Somewhere in the middle of the city they find a bare circle of black-scorched stone, untouched by moss or grass or even fallen leaves, and the wind whips cold and tricksome against Beatrice’s cheek—but there are no helpful letters carved into the earth, no books hidden beneath loose cobbles.

By the time Lady Lilith’s wagon rattles back down the narrow road, the forest is gold and blue with early twilight, and tears are gathering behind Beatrice’s eyes. When she blinks she sees her sister’s body swimming in the darkness of her eyelids.

“Will you be staying at Salem Inn, misses? ” Lilith asks them perfunctorily. “We offer two meals in the historic dining hall without additional payment and a free ticket apiece to the Museum of Sin, recently reopened to the public following some difficulties with mold this spring. ”

Beatrice feels the faintest, dimmest spark of hope. Quinn is making some polite excuse about urgent business back home when Beatrice steps forward and asks, “How much just for the museum? ”

In the Deeps, Juniper waits.

She doesn’t know what she’s waiting for anymore, but she keeps doing it anyway.

She has visitors, sometimes, but never the ones she wants. An officer arrives twice a day to hang a pail of something whitish and congealed inside her cell. Grits, Juniper thinks, or the aggrieved ghost a grit might leave behind if it was murdered in cold blood. When she asks for water the man points downward, to the putrid gray of the water at their feet. He laughs.

In the mornings a woman in rubber boots comes to carry out the piss pot. The first morning Juniper badgers her with questions—Where are the others? How many did the bastards get? Has she no pity, no shame, aiding the enemy of all womankind? —until the woman calmly tips the contents of the pot into Juniper’s grits. The second morning Juniper keeps her damn mouth shut; the third morning the woman brings her a hard biscuit and a tin cup of water.

Her tormentors don’t return. Juniper is relieved at first, before she remembers that time is a tormentor, too. Down in the cellar the hours used to come alive around her, stalking and prowling in the dark.

By the evening of the third day, Juniper is cold and hungry and so thirsty her throat feels barbed, as if she swallowed briars. She sits on the bed and watches the stairwell, still waiting. A habit, maybe, from the seven years she spent hoping her sisters would come home.

She’s given up on hope, but she can’t seem to leave the habit of waiting behind.

Beatrice suspects that Lady Lilith’s Museum of Sin—boasting More Than One Hundred Genuine Relics of Witchcraft—has not eradicated its mold problem as thoroughly as Lilith claimed. There’s a damp, living smell to the place; Beatrice imagines saplings pressing up beneath the floorboards, vines digging green fingers into the plaster.

The museum is a series of low-ceilinged rooms draped in patchy velvet and black-dyed gauze, crowded with shelves and glass cases of Genuine Relics. At least three-quarters of the items are transparent frauds—Beatrice is confident that the witches of Old Salem never wielded wands with fake rubies glued to their handles, and the dust-furred skeleton labeled American Dragon (Juvenile) is most likely a small crocodile with vulture wings wired to its back—and everything conceivably authentic is too trivial to matter. There is a set of silver thimbles, charred and iridescent from some great heat; an iron skillet containing the “burnt remains of its owner’s last meal”; a little girl’s smoke-stained sewing sampler.

“Well. ” Beatrice sighs. “It was worth a try. I don’t suppose Lady Lilith will refund us our dimes. ”

Quinn is peering into cases and reading brass labels with every appearance of fascination. “Whyever should we want a refund? ”

“You’re being very sporting about this, but it’s clear—”

“My family has been free for three generations, ” Quinn interrupts. She tilts the derby hat back on her head in order to more closely examine a box containing, allegedly, the femur of an unidentified witch. “But my grandmother was born on a farm called Sweet Bay. ” Quinn squints as if she’s reading a label, but her eyes don’t move. “A rice plantation. ”

“I’m—so sorry. ”

“I’m sure you are. But what is sorry worth, in the face of Sweet Bay? ” Quinn is still staring at that brass label, but the perfect calm of her voice is splintered, bleeding through the cracks. “My grandmother didn’t need your sorry. ”

“I—”

Quinn straightens abruptly and moves to the next case, mending the split seams in her voice. “She didn’t need anyone, in the end. She and her sisters made it north, with the help of Aunt Nancy’s recipes. She taught my mother how they used to speak in codes and symbols, to keep their secrets safe. The Daughters still use some of them, because we aren’t strong enough to risk working in the open. Yet. ” Beatrice wonders precisely what Quinn and the Daughters might do with the Lost Way of Avalon, and then whether she really wants to know.

“Anyway. What my mother taught me is this: you hide the most important things in the places that matter least. Women’s clothes, children’s toys, songs… Places a man would never look. ” As she speaks she is levering open one of the glass cases, running long fingers over the hinges of a woman’s sewing box. “If the witches of Old Salem had the spell to restore the Way, do you really believe they would have advertised it? Left it listed in the index of a grimoire? ” She shakes her head, abandoning the sewing box for the child’s sampler hanging on the wall, yellowed and stained. “You’re thinking like a librarian, rather than a witch. Ah! Come see. ”

It appears to Beatrice to be a perfectly ordinary piece of embroidery: a crooked house framed by a pair of dark trees, with three lumpy women standing in the foreground beside a scattering of animals. Clumsy letters run across the top: “Workd by Polly Pekkala in The Twelfth Year of her Age, 1782. ” A border of dark vines curls around the edges.

“I don’t see—oh. ” There is a twist in the vines along the top, a hiccup in the pattern. The vines loop back on themselves to make three circles, interwoven.

Beatrice squints through her spectacles at the little scene. Upon closer inspection each of the animals in the yard is purest black, with red knots for eyes, and the figures are all women. One of them has a stitch of red dripping from her finger; the second holds a swaddled bundle to her breast, either a baby or a large potato; the last has a line of pale French knots running down her cheeks. Blood, milk, and tears.

Beatrice feels warm, weightless, as if she is hovering several inches off the warped floorboards. It’s the way she feels in the archives when she catches a glimmer of gold and brings it into the light, shining softly. She knows by the look on Quinn’s face that she feels it, too: the specific, almost spiteful joy of finding the truth buried beneath centuries of dust and deceit and neglect.

Their eyes meet and Beatrice forgets to count the seconds. Something warm and nameless wings between them.

(It is not nameless. )

Quinn is running her fingers over the empty linen of the sky above the little house. She breathes a small ha! of satisfaction and reaches for Beatrice’s hand. She guides it to the sampler’s surface. Beatrice is so worried she might sense that unnamed thing in the sweaty heat of her palm, the staccato flutter of her pulse, that she almost misses the subtle, irregular bumps of stitches beneath her fingertips.

She peers closer. There are tiny, nearly invisible words written in white thread.

The wayward sisters, hand in hand,

Burned and bound, our stolen crown,

But what is lost, that can’t be found?

The rhyme their Mama Mags once sung to them, the verse hidden in the Sisters Grimm. Except this time the words keep going:

Cauldron bubble, toil and trouble,

Weave a circle round the throne,

Maiden, mother, and crone.

Beatrice shivers as she reads the last line, wondering if she and her sisters are meant to walk this winding path, destined by blood or fate. She waits to be overcome with some grand sense of destiny before recalling that she is merely an ex-librarian standing in a fraudulent museum that smells of mold, trying to save her wicked, wild sister.

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-quite-full 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 because 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.

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