The Mother intercedes in a voice like iron. “Why have you woken us? What is it that you need?” She looks at Agnes as she asks, her eyes tracing the milk-stains down her blouse. There’s a darkness in her face that makes Bella think of sharpened blades.
“Help,” breathes Agnes, before she buries her face in both hands and begins to sob.
Maleficae quondam,
maleficaeque futurae
Purpose unknown
James Juniper catches her sister around the shoulders and eases her down to the black-scorched stones. Agnes is trying to explain between gulps and shudders, about Gideon Hill and the election, about Eve and votes for women and the burning of the library, but Juniper isn’t sure how much sense she’s making.
The Three watch her with concern in their mismatched eyes. The Three who shouldn’t have eyes at all, who should be dead but aren’t. Juniper watches the Maiden, all deerskin and white flesh, and resists the urge to touch her, to see if her hand passes through her skin.
Eventually the Mother says, “Hush, child,” and Agnes hiccups to a stop. The Mother stamps her foot once and a sudden wind whips through the tower, scouring away the heaped ashes and the stink of smoke. The Maiden flicks her hand and moss wriggles up between the seams of the flagstone floor, green and soft as spring. The Crone settles herself with a huff that makes Juniper think of Mama Mags.
“Start at the beginning,” she orders, and Juniper wonders which beginning she means. The day they called the tower into St. George’s Square and found one another again? Or seven years before, when she ran down the rutted road after her sisters, begging them not to leave her? Or maybe the beginning of their story is the same as the middle and the end:Once there were three sisters.
Agnes starts with Eve, which Juniper figures is the beginning of a different story. She tells the Three about the fever they couldn’t cure and the mockingbird message she shouldn’t have sent. She tells them about Hill holding the red curl of her daughter’s hair, and Juniper feels the pain of it in the binding between them, an open wound sown with salt.
“And even if we could find Eve I don’t think we can save her. Hill is powerful, and not just in the usual way. He has followers, and these shadows that creep around the city—”
A stillness falls over the Three as she says the wordshadows. Even their serpents stop coiling and twining, their hot-coal eyes fixed on Agnes. The Mother swears in a language Juniper thinks might be a dialect of Hell.
“Almost sounds like you’ve met him,” Juniper drawls.
The Maiden bares her teeth in an expression that bears no relation at all to a smile. “Oh, I’ve met him,” she hisses.
“He’s the man who bested us at Avalon,” the Mother growls.
“And he’s the man who burned us, after. Heard he got a sainthood out of it,” the Crone finishes. “Bastard,” she adds, reflectively.
Juniper thinks she’s never heard a silence quite like the one that follows: there’s a depth and coldness to it, a thoroughness that could only exist after sundown on the other side of nowhere, when six witches and their familiars have just learned they have an enemy in common.
“Shit,” she says. And then, more emphatically, “Shit.”
Bella rallies first, clinging to the last fraying threads of reason. “But how? There’s no such thing at the Fountain of Youth or the Philosopher’s Stone. How is he still alive? How areyoualive?”
“We’re not, strictly speaking.” The Maiden strokes her adder with one white finger. “Alive, I mean.”
“I never liked being called the Crone. I’ve forgotten the name my mother gave me, but I’m sure it wasn’t that. And she’s no maiden.” The Crone points her chin at the Maiden, who smiles in a distinctly unmaidenly fashion.
“I am a Mother,” muses the armored woman. “But more, too.”
Bella resettles her spectacles. “But the spell to call back the Lost Way of Avalon. It required a maiden, a mother, and a crone, did it not?”
The Crone shrugs. “Every woman is usually at least one of those. Sometimes all three and a few others besides.”
Bella blinks several times. “So we weren’t called, then. Or—chosen.” Juniper figures she’s remembering the thing that drew them together that day, the tugging of the line between them.
The Crone makes a sound that can only be described as a cackle. She catches her breath, tries to answer, then breaks into another fit of cackles. “Chosen?If you three were chosen, it was by circumstance. By your own need. That’s all magic is, really: the space between what you have and what you need.”
Bella looks like a woman shuffling through the several dozen questions that occurred to her, but Agnes beats her to it. “What do you know about Gideon Hill?”
The Three look at one another, stillness settling back over them.
The Maiden lifts her chin, hair sliding back over pale shoulders. “More than anyone alive.”
The Mother’s eyes flick again to the milk-trails on Agnes’s blouse. “Enough to help you, I hope.”
