The spell they sang that night was a binding, far stranger and bolder than any worked before. They bound their souls one to the other and then to their beloved library. As their bodies burned, their souls fled to the other side of elsewhere—and took Avalon with them. They took the tower and the books, the trees and stars, even the tricksome autumn wind.
George raged at their escape. For years and years he scoured the earth for any sign of the Last Three Witches of the West or the Lost Way of Avalon. He found rumors and songs, bits of rhyme, but he never saw that black tower again.
The Three waited. They studied and argued and wept, despaired and dreamed, undying, and eventually they lay themselves down to sleep. They let the shape of themselves coil down among the black roots and dark earth, slipping between stones and the brittle pages of books. Souls were never meant to linger for centuries.
But they did not let themselves fade entirely. They waited, still clinging to the slimmest thread of themselves, for the day when they would be called back to the world. When what was lost would be found again, and witching would return.
It never came.
Lady bird, lady bird, fly away home.
A spell for flight, requiring rowan & starlight
If James Juniper closes her eyes she can pretend she is a little girl again, curled with her sisters on the rag rug beside the stove while Mama Mags tells them tales. She can pretend it’s all make-believe and myth.
Until Bella says, tentatively, “But that isn’t so. Avalon was called back, wasn’t it? Before us?”
The Crone almost smiles at her. “Well, it wasn’t much use to hide the library if no one could ever find it again. We left the words with our daughters before they fled, so they could call us back when the world was safe again. It never was, but still they called us from time to time.”
“Old Salem,” Bella whispered.
“And Wiesensteig in the fifteen-sixties, before that, and the Auld Kirk Green at the end of the century. Navarre in the early sixteen-hundreds. Anyplace there were at least three witches with the will. But over the centuries there were fewer and fewer women who remembered the words and ways. The age of witches was nothing but stories now, and we listened to those stories twist and darken over the years, until every witch was a wicked one.”
The Crone’s smile is still in place, but the corners are twisted and mournful. “He nearly got us in Salem. Tituba and her coven banished us back to nowhere just before the flames took us.”
Bella presses her hand to her skirt pocket, where Juniper can see the square shape of her little black notebook. “I found the words written in the Sisters Grimm, half-faded . . .”
“The Grimms were clever girls,” says the Mother, fondly. “Jacobine and Willa called the tower and roused us from our sleep long after Old Salem, but they weren’t interested in powerful words or ways—perhaps they knew the trouble it would bring, by then. They just wanted our stories. Made a nice profit for themselves, I heard.”
“No one has called us since then.” The Maiden sighs. “We thought perhaps no one ever would. We contented ourselves with the thought that at leasthenever found us.” The Maiden’s eyes flick up to the charred shelves and sagging stairs, then back to the Eastwoods. Her voice cools considerably. “Until recently, that is.”
A small, sorry silence follows, while they listen to the susurrations of ash, the hollow howl of wind through the windows.
Agnes breaks it. “Gideon Hill.” She says his name carefully, the way a woman might stroke the edge of a fresh-sharpened blade. “And Saint George of Hyll. They’re the same man?”
“The same soul, at least,” the Crone allows.
“How?”
The Three exchange a look that Juniper recognizes: it’s the way three sisters look at one another when they’ve caused a great deal of trouble.
“We should have known,” says the Crone. “He watched us work our final spell. When the tower followed us into the dark he understood what we’d done. He was a formidable witch himself, by then, enough to try a binding of his own.”
The Maiden’s lip slides out from beneath her teeth. “But we weren’t thinking about immortality! We were just trying to survive, we never meant—”
“It doesn’t matter what we meant.” The Mother’s eyes are on the clenched-fist shape of Agnes’s face. “The first time we were called back into the world they told us George of Hyll had died a decade before and been sainted shortly after. But then we saw him. He wore a different face and a different name—Glennwald Hale, an Inquisitor and a churchman—but still we knew him.”
“We’d shown him the secret of bound souls. And he’d realized he could tether his soul to anything he liked, not just stones or roses or books.” The Crone’s snake slithers from her wrist to her throat, sliding its obsidian cheek against hers in a gesture that looks almost like comfort. “He bound himself to living bodies, one after the other. All he needed was the ashes of the body he was leaving and something from the body he was stealing. And enough will to stamp out the soul still living in it, I suppose.” She touches her familiar’s head. “I imagine he preys most often on the young and defenseless, to ease the binding.”
Juniper feels abruptly sick, like she’s turned over a log and found something foul and dead beneath it. She remembers the stories she heard about the dreamy, bookish boy whose favorite uncle died when he was young. How he changed after that, grew less dreamy and more calculating. How he asked his teachers to call him by his middle name: Gideon.
Juniper wonders how it felt, to have an ancient spirit steal your will, colonize your body and march it around like a wooden puppet. She pictures the long line of bodies stretching behind him, plucked like ripe fruit and hollowed out from the inside, discarded as easily as apple peels. And what happened to the souls he stamped out? Did they fade when their bodies died, or were they dragged along from corpse to corpse, trapped in a hell of his making?
“Bastard.” Her voice is a rasp, twice-burned. “So he’s just been hopping from kid to kid, getting a little smarter and a little meaner every time—”
“Gaining power, gaining witchcraft, and . . .” Bella gives a little gasp. “Covering his own tracks. Stealing records and burning books, fading whatever words and ways still remain.” Her tone makes it clear that she includes this among his most insidious crimes.
Agnes hasn’t blinked or flinched. She remains stone-faced, implacable. “Yet he’s still scared. What is he afraid of?”
