An Introduction. Epilogue. Acknowledgments

Epilogue

I figure since I’m the one who started the story, I should be the one to finish it.

It’s the spring equinox of 1894 and I’m sitting with my back against the sun-warmed wood of the tower door, rose-vines pricking the soft meat of my arms and meadow-grass shushing against the bare soles of my feet. A crow perches on my knee, watching me write with a cocked head and a candleflame eye.

The farm hasn’t changed much in the year I was away: the mountains still stand like green gods on all sides and the Big Sandy River still coils like a king snake through the heart of it. Owls still call three times at moonrise and dogwoods still bloom in the deep blue shadows. Mama Mags’s house has sunk a little farther into the earth, like an old woman settling deeper into a rocking chair, and her herb-garden has run wild and weedy, but otherwise I can almost believe no time has passed at all. That I’m still seventeen and all alone, living for the day my daddy would finally die.

Except I’m not alone, now. Neither am I living: I died on the fall equinox in St. George’s Square, and death doesn’t brook any back-talk or take-backs.

But witching is nothing if not a way to bend the rules, to make a way when there is none. My soul lingers, bound alongside the Last Three to the Lost Way of Avalon, to the rose-covered stones and the burned books and to witching itself. It isn’t the same as being alive—I don’t eat or drink except to remind myself that I can, and I don’t sleep now so much as come undone. As soon as my attention wavers I unravel like a dropped bobbin, losing myself among the roots and stone. But it’s a damn sight better than being dead, I figure.

On bad days I have Corvus. My familiar is a creature of the margins and in-betweens, being half-magic and half-bird and three-quarters mischief, and he laughs his crow-laugh at me when I fret about whether I’m dead or alive, sundered or saved. Just looking at him reminds me that I can still feel the sunlight on my skin and breathe the rich wet smell of spring and if that isn’t enough, well, it’s all I’ve got.

I wasted time brooding, in the early days after my death. I dreamed about stepping into the flames, smoke filling my mouth, my throat, my lungs. About all the sights I’d never see and the hell I’d never raise. But then Bella and Agnes called the tower back out of nowhere, and I held my baby niece in my arms, and all those regrets faded like cheap newsprint in the rain.

The farm still isn’t mine, legally speaking; it’s still my dumbshit cousin’s name on the deed. But he isn’t around much these days.

At first he thought to rebuild Daddy’s house and rent it out, or at least lease the fields, but nothing ever came of his plans. Carpenters found their survey stakes missing and their tools rusted overnight; planted seed went bad and crops wilted without reason. Briars grew twice as tall and three times as thick as they did elsewhere in the county, obscuring the clay drive and rising like thorned walls along the borders, and in the end my cousin threw up his hands and left my land alone.

So there was no one around to notice three women and three black birds slinking through the woods. No one to see the tower appear on the back acres, lit by stars from another time and place, covered in the burnt bones of rose-vines. (Bella fretted sometimes about leaving Avalon in Crow County, and suggested they find a place even more remote and defensible, but I wanted to stay home, and my sisters don’t deny me much of anything these days. )

I rarely wander far from the tower. I can, but I feel thin and anxious when I’m away too long, like a poorly knit shawl that might unravel at any moment. And I never lack for company. Bella and Cleo visit to help Agnes or bring supplies, sitting side by side to write by the fire, their silence interspersed with heartfelt swearing and the scratching out of unsatisfactory lines.

Agnes and August stay with me when they aren’t out teaching witchcraft to women and workingmen. Sometimes they leave Eve behind them, who generally leaves me feeling outnumbered and surrounded, although there’s only one of her.

Then there are the others my sisters bring with them. Stragglers and lost girls, outcasts and outlaws. Girls running from their suitors or fathers or uncles or neighbors; from weddings and boarding schools and convents; from desperation and despair and the siren call of wading into rivers with stones in their pockets.

I give them a place to hide and to rest, to gather the frayed ends of themselves. And sometimes, if they ask, I give them more. I teach them which herbs to pick and which words to say, which spells work best on the Milk Moon and which require the heat of summer. I teach them every bit of witching Mags taught me and every spell Bella and Cleo drag back, and send them out into the world like thistleseeds tossed into the wind. I hope they might take root and grow tall, thorned and beautiful.

I suspect they will. Already I can feel the world shifting around me, changing like a riverbank beneath rising water. The papers Bella brings home talk about burning factories and brutal men found dead, about a sewing circle caught spreading seditious spells and a Colorado mining town where no man dared to tread. Out west the Indian Wars are going poorly—or well, according to my line of thinking—and there are rumors of rebellion in Old Cairo.

I guess something rose from my ashes, after all. Makes me wonder if maybe those phoenix stories were never really about birds in the first place.

The backlash will come one day, the way it always does. I know the world won’t change easy, that more women will burn before it does, but at least I got to see the beginning. Bella says I could linger as long as I liked, being dead and all.

I don’t figure I’ll stay longer than is natural. One day when Eve is long grown and my sisters grown old, when perhaps the lost girls come less often to visit me because the world is less cruel, I’ll just lay myself down to rest beside the Maiden and Mother and Crone. The Three will become Four and the Eastwoods will fade into myth and rumor and fire-lit witch-tale.

It’s dusk now. Very soon the air will twist and two women will appear on either side of me. Their cheeks will be flushed with the heat of witching and their cloaks will twist in the autumn wind that still blows in Avalon, even in springtime. One of them will be tall and narrow and clever-looking, eyes bright behind her spectacles; one of them will be sweet-faced and sturdy, a baby clinging tight to her chest.

I will smile up at them and see for a moment not my sisters but as the first notes of a half-familiar song, the first lines of a story that has been told before and will be told again:

Once upon a time there were three witches.

Acknowledgments

If I were to tell you the tale of writing this book, it would go like this: Once there was a girl with a story she wanted to tell. She’d told stories before, so she set sail boldly. Very soon she found herself lost at sea, besieged by plot twists and broken arcs, murky metaphors and shifting themes. She had the words, but she lost her way and her will.

Fortunately, she wasn’t alone. She had her agent, Kate McKean, to answer even the most dramatic late-night emails with common sense and comfort. Nivia Evans, her editor, to see the story she was trying to tell and help her chart a course toward it. Lisa Marie Pompilio to make it beautiful; Roland Ottewell and Andy Ball to make it right; Ellen Wright and the rest of the Orbit/Redhook team to share it with the world.

She had Andy Ball, Edward James, and Niels Grotum to provide last-second Latin consultations; the courtyard of the Madison County Public Library to provide sunshine and silence; the Moonscribers to provide wit and wine.

She had the most generous and insightful early readers anyone could ask for: Laura Blackwell, E. Catherine Tobler, Lee Mandelo, and Ziv Wities. Without them she would have surely sunk, all souls feared lost.

She had babysitting and brunch from Taye and Camille; a constant supply of love and puns from her brothers; bottomless faith from her parents even when she lost all faith in herself.

She had Finn and Felix, who were far too busy writing their own stories to worry much about their mother’s.

And she had Nick. Her north star, her compass, her lighthouse, her once-upon-a-time and her happily-ever-after. Who sailed beside her through every storm and never once doubted she would bring them safely into harbor.

After a year at sea—after a hundred dark nights beneath nameless constellations, after missed deadlines and scrapped chapters—she did. The girl stood on the shore, under-slept and over-caffeinated, her story told.

She thought she might tell another.

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