and the admission did nothing to cool her anger.
She slipped inside her bedroom and locked the door from the inside.
As she settled at her dressing table, she felt as if there were two of her. One was imprisoned in Harriet’s manikin, tortured, smothered, bound. The other was preparing to do battle. To protect herself. To win.
She would be ruthless. She would have to be. The maleficia dictated it. Its power was greater than any she knew, and she would wield it however she had to. There would be pain, but it wouldn’t last. Every battle caused pain and suffering, but victory demanded it.
She set a match to her half-burned candle and took up the manikin of the marquess. It hung limply in her hand, all the fire that had energized it the night before expended. She set it back against the mirror.
Hastily she blended the last of the mistletoe and barrenwort and mandrake in her saucer. Her forefinger was still sore from the piercing of the night before, so she stabbed her thumb instead. She squeezed the drops of blood over the ground herbs, and finally, inspired, she plucked three of her eyelashes to add to the mixture.
She held the saucer over the candle flame, too close, because she was hurrying. It grew so hot she almost dropped it, but she gritted her teeth against the burning in her fingers and waited for it to bubble.
When it was ready, she picked up the manikin of Annis.
For the briefest of moments, she admired it anew. It was uncanny, really, how much it resembled her stepdaughter. Perhaps, she thought, her initial success had transformed it, made its little beetroot-dyed mouth more natural, its painted eyes look so real they might blink. Even the wooden-bead head seemed almost alive, its roundness softened by the fluff of Annis’s hair. It was perfect, and it radiated magic. Her magic.
She dipped her finger into the saucer and rubbed the syrupy mixture on the simulacrum’s chest, on its belly, between its legs, and then, turning it over, on its back. She chanted as she did so, her voice throbbing with fury:
Witch’s blood and lashes three
Bring obedience to me.
What is done in candlelight
You will suffer full this night.
She laid the manikin down and took up the cushion with its array of hat pins. She chose an amber-beaded one for its length and slenderness and for the sharpness of its tip, meant to penetrate the thickest straw, the most elaborate hairstyle. She chanted her cantrip again, and when she reached the final line—
You will suffer full this night
—she plunged the hat pin into the very center of Annis’s manikin.
33
Harriet
The last of the stars had retreated before the steady march of morning light, and Harriet was so tired she could barely stand. She wished she had forced herself to eat something the night before. They had repeated their cantrip half a dozen times before, at last, the manikin representing Frances went limp in Harriet’s hand.
“It’s done!” Annis said.
“It looks that way,” Harriet answered. She set the thing beside the candle, but she watched it warily. Something about it troubled her, some sense of work unfinished, though she couldn’t say why.
She was about to blow out her candle when Annis emitted an anguished cry. Harriet whirled and reached for the girl just as she doubled over. She had both arms wrapped around her middle, and she was groaning and gasping for breath. If Harriet had not been there to support her, she would have fallen.
“What is it?” Harriet asked, and at the same time, she knew. Her ametrine was on fire, and the knowing gripped her with sickening surety.
It was Frances. She had surrendered completely to the darkness. She was lost in the miasma of her own witchery.
And she was torturing Annis.
Annis moaned again, and Harriet led her to the bench, where she huddled in obvious misery. “I must be sick,” she grunted. “My stomach…”
“You’re being magicked,” Harriet said in a hard voice. “Breathe, Annis. Do your best to release the pain.”
As Annis drew a ragged breath, Harriet strode back to the manikin. She seized it up in her left hand, gripping it hard. There was no time to make a new slurry, nor to paint the thing. There was no time to create a cantrip. There was only her strength to counter Frances’s, and it was a deadly duel they were fighting.
She took her amulet with her right hand and awkwardly looped the chain over her head so the ametrine