“Same thing every powerful man is afraid of.” The Crone shrugs. “The day the truth comes out.”
“The day he gets what’s coming,” says the Maiden.
The Mother meets Agnes’s eyes and Juniper sees something pass between them, the gleam of a tossed blade. “Us.”
Agnes feels her lips curving for the first time since her daughter was stolen. It isn’t her usual smile—her mouth feels over-supplied with teeth and her jaw aches—but there’s a furious glee filling the hollow place her heart left behind it.
“And why’s that?” It’s nearly a purr.
“Because he burned us but our souls rose from the ashes, and he knows it. Because we know exactly what he is, and how to end him.” The Crone’s smile is subtle poison, the kind that has no taste or smell. “Because any binding may be broken.”
“Tell me how.”
“Same way you’d break any other binding: break the ways. Kill whatever body he’s wearing these days—”
Juniper makes a rasping sound in her throat. “If you’re telling us the secret to killing him is tokillhim, I swear by Saint Hilda I’ll hex you.”
Bella and the Crone swat her simultaneously.
“—then banish his soul,” the Crone continues frostily. “I imagine it will want to linger even without the binding, out of habit and spite.”
“And how do we banish a soul?”
“We wrote the words especially for him,” says the Maiden. “After we saw what he’d become. But he was strong by then, wrapped in stolen shadows, and no witch ever got near enough to work the spell.”
“I will,” Agnes says. “Teach them to me.”
The Maiden does. Agnes is surprised to find that these words, too, are familiar, a children’s rhyme made eerie by the burned tower and slanting moonlight.All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Georgie together again.
Agnes repeats the words to herself, rolling them over her tongue. They taste like grave-dirt and vengeance, like death long overdue. Pan’s claws flex around her shoulder, pricking her flesh.
You are not invincible, Gideon Hill.
Bella pushes her spectacles up her nose. “What about the three of you? If you bound yourselves to Avalon, and Avalon was burned, why haven’t your souls been sundered?”
The Crone’s eyes don’t twinkle—twinkling eyes are for soft, grandmotherly women who bake gingerbread and crochet scarves—but they glint. “Did you think I bound my everlasting soul tobooks? To paper and ink?” The glint sharpens. “We bound ourselves to the words themselves, Belladonna. We won’t fade until children forget their rhymes and mothers lose their lullabies, until the last witch forgets the last word.”
“Oh.” Bella’s face lights with a fervent, librarianish glow. “So the words survived. They’re still out there somewhere. They could be collected again, preserved.”
“Or written anew. Every spell that exists was once spoken for the first time, by a witch who needed it.”
Bella actually claps her hands together. “Then the library could be . . . oh, but it would take so much work.”
The Crone huffs. “It always does.”
“Always?”
“Avalon wasn’t the first library. Alexandria, Antioch, Avicenna . . . They keep burning us. We keep rising again.”
Bella opens her mouth again, but Agnes stands, dusting the ashes of the library from her skirts. “Thank you all.” She bows her head to the Maiden, the Crone, especially the Mother. “But I have to go now.”
Agnes looks down at her sisters. It occurs to her that they might stay in this place, if they liked, hidden safe on the other side of somewhere. Eve isn’t their daughter, after all.
But Bella and Juniper are already standing, their shoulders warm on either side of hers. Juniper looks a little wistfully at the tower, at the deepening night of nowhere around them, free of the stink and noise of New Salem. Agnes wonders if she’s thinking of her nights back in Crow County, moon-bright and alive, of the time when she had a place to call home.
Juniper scuffs her shoe in the ash. “Maybe we’ll talk again someday. Once Hill gets what’s coming to him.”
The Maiden looks up at Juniper in a manner that causes Agnes to recall that she has lived and listened to the world for centuries. She is still the wild Maiden of the woods, but there’s a certain wisdom in her eyes, too. “He wasn’t always . . . what he is now,” she says softly.
