“Well, relatively few of them are in English, and none in what you might recognize as modern English. There are a few texts in Latin and Greek, but significantly more in Arabic, classical forms of Persian, a Turkic language or two, even something I think must be a written form of Malinke, from Old Mali. And then once we translate them there are the witch-ways to contend with. Herbs that are native to the Old World, for example, but which do not thrive in the new one, or ingredients which no longer exist—dragon’s tooth, siren’s scale, that sort of thing. It will take considerable time and effort, but already we’ve found a stronger spell for warding and another for rust—” Bella pauses in this rhapsody to squint worriedly at Juniper. “What’s wrong?”
Juniper gives a shrug that tugs at the fresh scar around her neck. “Guess I just didn’t figure the Lost Way of Avalon would be a bunch of schoolwork.”
Bella clucks her tongue at her. “The Last Three Witches of the West spent their final days assembling the world’s greatest library of witchcraft, which Agnes and Quinn and I went through considerable difficulty to retrieve. I’m so sorry it disappoints you.”
“But even after you translate all these spells from Greek or hieroglyphs or what have you, are you sure we can work them? A woman would need a good helping of witch-blood, wouldn’t she?”
“Well, as to that . . . Cleo and I are no longer convinced that magical prowess is a matter of inheritance.” Bella actually gives a little clap as she says this, as if she simply cannot contain herself.
Juniper looks to Quinn, who translates, “We don’t know that blood counts for a damn thing, when it comes to witching.”
Juniper makes a skepticalhunhthat provokes her sister to rustle through a stack of scrolls. She unrolls one of them and points rather theatrically at an illustration painted in rusty red and brown. It shows a woman surrounded by spikes of flames, her mouth open in a silent scream, her skirts already alight. Beneath her feet, where Juniper might expect to find dry brush or logs, is a heaped, charred pile of books.
Bella gives the illustration an aggressive tap. “Why were witches sentenced to burning, anyway? Why not hanging or beheading or stoning?” Back in Miss Hurston’s one-room schoolhouse Juniper was taught that witches were burned to remind folks of the hellfire that awaited them in the next life, but Juniper supposes Miss Hurston also believed that bad behavior could be cured by prayer and regular thwacks with her yardstick, so perhaps her information was flawed.
Her sister leans closer, eyes bird-bright behind her spectacles. “What if they didn’t start as witch-burnings? What if they were book-burnings, in the beginning?”
Juniper shrugs. “I guess.”
Bella makes a noise like an irritable cat. “Think, June! What did Mags tell us every spell requires?”
“The words, the will, the way.”
“Where in that list does it mention a woman’s heritage? Her blood?” Bella gestures a little wildly to the carved door, to the tower behind it full of endless shelves of books. “I don’t think they were burning bloodlines out, at all—I think they were burningknowledge. Books, and the women who wrote them. I think . . . I think they stole the words and ways from us, and left us nothing but our wills.”
Bella’s face is full of fierce intent, but Juniper feels as if something inside her has been punctured and is slowly deflating. Some part of her had been childishly hoping they were the long-lost great-granddaughters of the Mother, descendants of Morgan le Fay or Lilith or Eve herself. But perhaps they weren’t born for greatness, after all; perhaps no one was.
Bella is still theorizing, speaking mostly to herself now. “I think the Maiden and Mother and Crone weren’t especially powerful for any reason other than the knowledge they kept. I wish . . .” Her voice goes a little sheepish, young-sounding. “I wish I could ask them. It would be infinitely more convenient than translating and transcribing all this.”
Juniper thinks privately it would be infinitely more convenient if the lost power of witches had turned out to be an enchanted broomstick or a potion you drank at the half-moon, rather than a bunch of books in dead languages.
She plucks moodily at Bella’s notes, admiring a diagram of a woman spitting flames from her mouth. “Is this a fire-starting spell?”
“It seems so, yes.”
“Can I try it?”
“Can you start a magical fire in a tower full of paper and leather?”
Juniper considers. “What if it were a verysmallfire?”
Bella shoos her from the room with instructions to eat and return to bed.
Juniper limps the rest of the way down the endless stairs, glaring a little resentfully at the spines of books she can’t read, watching the strange slant of the light through the windows. She finds the bread and cheese but takes it outdoors to eat, resting her spine against the sun-warmed stone of the tower.
She thinks of Agnes, back at some loom, head bowed. Of Frankie and Victoria and Tennessee and all the others stuck in the workhouse, caged like crows. It doesn’t sit right, that Juniper should be here beneath the twisted boughs of Avalon, hurt but now healed, while the women of New Salem are left to cower and creep, undefended, with nothing but their wills to protect them . . .
So give them the words and ways. It’s like someone whispers it in Juniper’s ear, in a voice like rose-leaves rustling. Juniper wonders if the Deeps shook something loose in her skull, or if the tower is haunted, and then decides she doesn’t care because the ghost has a damn good point.
She wanted the Lost Way to be a miracle-cure, a waved wand that turned every woman into a witch. But if there isn’t any such thing as witch-blood—if none of them are born for greatness and all they have are moldering stacks of books and an overgrown tower just south of somewhere—perhaps they have to make the miracle themselves.
When Juniper comes clattering back up the stairs and announces her intention to slip back into New Salem and spread the good word of witchcraft among its women, like Johnny Appleseed if he had a bag of spells instead of seeds, Bella is not especially surprised. Juniper has always been the wild one.
Bella feels the spark of her spirit burning in the line between them, white-hot—the line which shouldn’t exist, which is the subject of several pages of Bella’s notes and queries and theoretical musings—and knows she will have to lock her sister in the top of the tower if she wants to stop her, and even that would merely delay her; Juniper isn’t the sort of maiden to wait around for rescue.
“This is a very bad idea.” Bella says it mostly out of the dim sense that she would like to have the opportunity to sayI told you soafter the dust settles. “The witches of Old Salem called back the Lost Way and started slinging spells and cursing enemies left and right, and look how that turned out.”
Juniper shrugs. “So I’ll be more careful than they were.”
