The Once and Future Witches - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,129

as stones. She feels the even beat of her heart. They taught her to be afraid, but somewhere along the way she lost the trick of it.

She lifts her hand to Quinn’s cheek, cups her palm around the curve of her jaw. Quinn holds very still, barely breathing.

“May I kiss you, Cleo?” She does not stutter.

Quinn exhales profanities.

“Is that a ye—” The end of Bella’s question is lost, stolen along with her breath.

It isn’t so much a kiss as a conflagration: of need and want long deferred, of lost hope and the wild abandon of two bodies colliding while the world burns around them.

Somewhere in the urgent fumble of buttons and clasps and the rushing rhythm of their breath, the touch of starlight on skin and the secret taste of salt, a treacherous thought occurs to Bella: that she would burn Avalon seven times over as long as it led her here, to this room and this saffron-yellow bed.

Afterward, when they lie together like a pair of clasped hands, one fitted perfectly beside the other, Bella lies awake. She resists the soft tug of sleep for as long as she can, because the sooner she sleeps the sooner dawn will arrive with all its hard truths. Already she feels the weight of the world hovering above them, waiting to settle.

“Cleo?” Her name tastes like cloves on Bella’s tongue. “Tell me a story?”

And Cleo does.

his is the story of how Aunt Nancy stole all the words for her daughters and granddaughters and great-granddaughters. Aunt Nancy was an old, old woman—or perhaps she was a young woman, or a spider, or a hare, or all four at once—with clouds of cobweb for hair and shining black buttons for eyes, when her littlest great-granddaughter cried that she wanted to learn her letters.

Now Aunt Nancy would do anything for her grandchildren, so she went to the man in the big house and asked if he would please teach her to write. The man laughed at her, this little old woman with her cobwebbed hair. There was even a little black spider dangling beside her ear, watching him with tiny red eyes. In the end the man swore he would teach her to read and write if she brought him the smile of a coyote and the teeth of a hen, the tears of a snake and the cry of a spider.

Aunt Nancy smiled and thanked him very prettily and he laughed again, because she was so old and foolish that she didn’t even know an impossible task when she heard one.

She hobbled back to her cabin in the woods. She sat on the porch and looked at the stars and sang a little song:

Cottontail and sly-fox

Terrapin and titmouse,

Come one, come all,

To your Aunt Nancy’s house.

And all the animals of the farm and forest began to creep forward as she sang, because Aunt Nancy knew plenty of words and ways already.

The next day Aunt Nancy returned to the big house with the smile of a coyote, the teeth of a hen, the tears of a snake, and the cry of a spider. But the man spurned her payment, claiming it was a trick or a ploy, that she was a witch and he would see her burned at the stake before he taught her a single letter. He ordered her to leave, and Aunt Nancy left.

But every evening after that, when the man read books to his children before bed, there was a spider watching him from the window, black as night and cinder-eyed. And, in time, Aunt Nancy taught her great-granddaughter her letters.

Hide away, hide away, hide away with me,

Hide away, hide away home.

A song to avert an unwanted eye, requiring sympathy & the Southern Crown

Beatrice Belladonna wakes just before dawn with her head pillowed on the soft meat of Cleo’s shoulder. Cleo is still sleeping, her heart thudding slow and even in Bella’s ear.

Bella pulls herself to one elbow and studies her, not counting the seconds: the clever arch of her brow, the polished shine of her skin, the hollow place where her collarbones meet. Bella thinks of all their long afternoons together at Avalon, annotating and translating, adrift in a private sea of words and ways.

Ashes, now, all of it. Men are probably wading through the wreckage at this very moment, smearing the remains beneath their boots. Laughing at the lost hope of witches.

The thought is a knife in her stomach.

She finds herself standing, slipping back into her stinking dress from the