The first time Bella worked this spell she was in her office in the Salem College Library, foolish and alone. The second time she was with Cleo in the wild ruins of Old Salem, full of desperate hope. Now she is here in the empty fairgrounds with her sisters and her lover and her familiar, and they have whatever is left behind when hope fades—a scorched, enduring thing, like the earth after a wildfire.
It will have to be enough.
Bella holds out her hands to her sisters.
Juniper frowns. “Is this part of the spell?”
“No,” Bella admits. Juniper’s hand closes tight around hers and the lines between them seem to sing, like a string finally in tune. Bella’s tear slides cinder-hot down her cheek and splashes silently into the circle.
They speak the words together, a children’s song about wayward sisters and lost crowns. A rhyme too dangerous to be written down, which was whispered and sung and stitched in secret, passed in pieces through the centuries. Bella thinks of the faint verse she found written in the back ofChildren and Household Witch-Tales, placed there by a different pair of sisters. She wishes she could thank them.
The heat strikes and catches behind their ribs as the Eastwoods speak the words. They draw three circles with their edges overlapping, and the heat becomes a flame that becomes a blaze.
Agnes’s will is an anvil, an avalanche, cold and inevitable. Her fisher-hawk screeches a war-cry and Strix echoes him, their eyes scorching the sky. Just at the moment Bella thinks her skin will split and crack with the heat, it is done.
The tower stands in the unnatural dark of the New Salem fairgrounds. Gray curls of ash drift and shush around their skirts and burnt branches crisscross above them. On the ground between them three circles glow white.
Bella bends, scooping ash and earth into a glass jar. She works the binding and Cleo works the banishing, and then—with the faint snick of silver shears cutting the air—the tower vanishes again, tucked neatly into nowhere like a handkerchief folded back into a pocket.
Cleo slides the scissors back into her pocket. “There. Now hurry. I’m sure someone saw something, even with the clouds, and I don’t intend to be here when they come looking.”
Agnes and Juniper are already crouched again above their drawn circles, their faces white and ghoulish in the eerie light, like a penny-paper illustration of wicked witches leering above a bubbling cauldron.
Bella hesitates, looking at Cleo with her cloak rippling in the autumn wind and her hand tight around the glass jar. “Thank you,” Bella says softly, inadequately.
“I’ll wait for you back at South Sybil.” Cleo attempts one of her brash smiles, but it warps beneath the weight of worry. Her lips are warm against Bella’s wind-chilled cheek, and then she is gone.
A few moments later, after a whispered rhyme and a twist in the air, the fairgrounds are entirely empty. A passerby, had there been one, might peer through the iron gate and notice nothing but an unusual number of crows gathered on the electric lines and rooftops, and the faint, wild smell of ash and rose on the wind.
Agnes didn’t see Avalon after the fire, but she saw the bloody color of the sky as it burned and breathed the smoke of a thousand burning books. She isn’t surprised to find herself standing in a ruin, a charred door beneath her hand, a desolate tower looming above her.
Yet, beneath the dead smell of ash and fire, there’s a wetter, greener scent. She steps back from the door and sees tendrils of green snaking up the smoke-blackened stones: rose-vines, sprouting tiny buds and pale thorns. Grass reaches tender fingers up through the ash, and moss creeps like green velvet over the scorched roots of trees.
The only sounds are the rustle of wings and the pant of their breath and—is Agnes imagining it? Is her heart conjuring hope out of nothing?—the soft, secret murmur of women’s voices.
Juniper stomps her foot on the ground as if she is knocking on a door. “Hey, ghosts! Wake up!”
Bella makes a strangled sound. “They aren’t ghosts, June, I already said. And even if they were I hardly think shouting at them would be an effective—”
“Well, what’s your plan, then?”
Agnes answers, “Little Girl Blue.”
There’s a short silence, until Bella says tentatively, “I’m not sure—that’s a spell for rousing the sick or sleeping. I’m not sure it has the strength to wake lost souls from the dead, even if such soulsdoexist. Perhaps if we modified it somehow, added certain words or stronger ways—”
But Agnes is already bending to the earth, laying her palm among the soft green shoots of grass. “I don’t know that the words and ways matter all that much, Bell.” She hears Bella make a small, librarianish sound of objection. “Or maybe they matter, but not as much as will.” Agnes swallows once, hard. “And I promise you I don’t lack the will.”
Her sisters speak the spell with her.Little Girl Blue, come blow your horn.
There’s a little of Mama Mags lingering in the words, her sparrow-bright eyes and her tobacco-stained teeth. Agnes wishes she could call her spirit up from wherever it sleeps or drifts, just to cry once more against her breast.
Her sisters stumble at the final line, uncertain who they are waking, but Agnes fills in the gap. “Maiden, Mother, and Crone, awake, arise!” and whistles, sharp and high.
It’s a small spell, like Bella said, a hedge-witch’s cure for a drowsy babe or a touch of Devil’s-fever. But Agnes feeds her will into it until her skin burns and her blood boils, until the magic sinks down into the black earth of nowhere and finds—a silent pulse. A secret, a whisper.
The sisters fall silent. The heat wicks away from Agnes’s flesh.
“Did it work?” Juniper’s voice rings too loud in the hush of nowhere.
