The Crone heaves a long, humorless sigh. “Let us start from the beginning.”
nce upon a time there were three witches.
The first witch was a scholar of Samarkand who dedicated her life to the study of words and witchcraft, who mastered a hundred languages and a thousand potions, who consulted with princes and khans on two continents.
The second witch was a slave from the Zanj sold in Constantinople who used the witching of her ancestors and her captors to free herself and her daughters, who made her bloody way through the world as the commander of a band of mercenaries.
The third witch was a peasant girl from the Blackdown Hills, abandoned with her brother in the deep dark of the trees. The boy returned to his village some years later; his sister was never seen or heard from again, except as a green-eyed shadow, a rumor with white teeth.
They were, in short, three ordinary witches of their times. Perhaps a shade more desperate and a half-step more learned, but certainly not legends.
None of them would have been remembered at all if it wasn’t for the plague. A ghastly, uncanny illness that crept into every village and down every city street and left bloated bodies behind it.
Most witches helped where they could, but the sickness came quickly and killed quicker, and even the cleverest witch couldn’t save them all. This failure—all the people they couldn’t save and the husbands and aunts and neighbors they left behind, grief-crazed—became their undoing.
Rumors began to spread: that the plague was unnatural; that it was the work of women-witches, somehow; that such evil must be purged from the world. And when a hero arose, promising to be a light against the darkness, dressed in white but trailed by black shadows, they followed him.
George of Hyll was not a Saint then. He was merely a witch, no different than the witches he hunted—except that he was a man, and man’s power was God-given.
“But—how could a man work witchcraft?” Bella interrupts. The Maiden laughs at her. “You think magic cares what’s between your legs? Or how you do your hair?” Bella does not interrupt again.
His followers burned the books first, swallowing centuries of learning in seconds. Then George asked: What of the women who carry the words and ways in their skulls? Who will surely teach them to their daughters and sisters?
They came for the witches then. The hedge-witches in their caves and hollow trees, the midwives and soothsayers, the sybils and scholars. The witches fought them with every curse and jinx they knew. But the harder they fought the more frightened the people became, and the larger George’s armies grew. The witches burned beside their books.
What words and ways were preserved were slipped into songs and rhymes, folded into fables. Women sang them to their children and taught them to their sisters, and even the watchful neighbors and listening shadows thought nothing of it.
The purge continued. The world changed. The weeds and herbs grew wild on the hillsides, with no one to tend them; the trees and animals fell silent, with no one to speak with them; there were no more dragons seen on the winds of morning.
It wasn’t long until witches retreated to a few last strongholds: the Black Forest in Saxony, the drifting isle of Lemuria, a certain haunted fen in the south of England, sometimes called Avalon.
One night the Mother and the Crone staggered into that misty moor, battle-worn and hopeless, and met the Maiden. They knew by their familiars that they shared some kinship, by soul if not by blood, and they shared a meal around a fire that night.
And there in the wild woods, at the bitter end of the age of witching, the three of them began to plan.
The Maiden had a place: the deep woods, where the remains of a tower stood, well hidden.
The Mother had the strength to defend it, at least for a while.
The Crone had something worth defending: all her decades of study, all her words and ways. She wrote down every spell she remembered or even half remembered, and then slipped out into the world to gather every unburned book or surviving scroll she could find.
Word spread among the remaining witches, and women arrived every day with scraps of spells and charred recipes. In return the Three taught them as much witchcraft as they could: for hiding and hurting, for birthing and breaking, for surviving. Some of them stayed—to defend the tor, to ward the tower, to patrol the fragile borders of their half-secret kingdom—but more often they fled back into the countryside.
The Three had the help of their own familiars, too, as if magic itself did not want to be forgotten. When the tower was complete their snakes twined their bodies together into three circles and burned the mark into the tower door. The Three found afterward that they had a way back to the tower no matter how far they traveled.
They traveled very far indeed. The Crone spent weeks in the baked-earth halls of the mosque at Djenné. The Mother completed the three tasks set by the librarians at Constantinople. The Maiden visited Cambridge and contrived to steal an entire room of their library, which she affixed to the tower.
But fewer witches found them over the years. The Three tasted ash on the wind and knew George of Hyll was coming.
Later, the storytellers would say the Three lost the battle at Avalon. That Hyll and his Inquisitors dragged them screaming to the stake and broke the power of witching forever after.
But if the Three—the cleverest witches of their age, battle-tested and canny—had wanted to escape, they would have. Instead, they waited.
They waited with their familiars at their feet and words on their lips. They fought George of Hyll for three days and three nights, while their daughters and sisters and friends vanished into the hills. And when they came to the end of their strength they carved their promise on the tower door—Maleficae quondam, maleficaeque futurae—and knelt before Hyll with bent necks.
He burned them the next day, back-to-back, the flames dancing yellow and white in his eyes. They did not scream as they burned: they sang. About roses and ashes and falling together, hand in hand.
Because those words had never been spoken before and were no spell he knew, and because men are fools when they think they’ve won, George of Hyll ignored them. He didn’t understand that the Three had spent years wading deeper and deeper into witchcraft, studying spells from every nook and cranny of the world. That they had begun to wonder where the words and ways came from in the first place, and write their own.
