The Once and Future Witches - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,135
. .”
Mr. Blackwell gives her another of his affable smiles, but the edges are turned downward. “Someone along the line misled you as to your worth, Miss Eastwood.” Distantly, through the froth of chardonnay, Bella hears the word nothing in her daddy’s voice. “I should quite like to give him a piece of my mind.”
“I—thank you.” She thinks of Juniper, the hiss of scales over straw, the sin she bore for all of them. “But it’s no longer possible.”
Mr. Blackwell nods, unsurprised. “Good.”
She thinks of Cleo’s eyes on her face before they parted, studying her as if she were precious, even vital. “Or necessary.”
“Even better.” Mr. Blackwell raises his glass. “Give Miss Quinn my warmest thanks.”
They sip their wine. Bella imagines a version of her life where she never met Cleopatra Quinn, where she married Mr. Blackwell and lived in this pleasant red-brick house until she was a crone in truth, reading witch-tales by the fireside in winter and dreaming of better worlds. She thinks of the old story of the witch who buried her heart in a silver box beneath the snow so that she might never be hurt. A chill shivers up her spine.
Blackwell sets his glass among the checkers. “Did you truly find it?”
Bella knows from the soft reverence of his voice what he means. “We did.” She can’t help the note of pride in her voice.
“And is it truly gone?”
Her voice this time is a graveside whisper. “It is. Although—” She withdraws her little black notebook from her skirt pocket and runs her thumb across the cover. “It has been recently brought to my attention that not all witching was lost, that night.”
“Oh?” It’s the same oh? he used to give her over lunch in the College library, which granted her permission to lecture to her heart’s content about the lives of Saints or the execrable handwriting of monks. Bella smiles a small, wistful smile for those quiet, safe days, and tells him more or less everything there is to tell.
She tells him about Old Salem and the sewing sampler and the owl winging toward her through the trees; living in the lost library of Avalon, outside of time and mind, and standing in its ashes; Araminta’s spells, which rely on stars and songs rather than rhymes and herbs, and her growing suspicion that witchcraft isn’t one thing but many things, all the ways and words women have found to wreak their wills on the world.
She tells him far more than she needs to, and he listens with considering nods and small smiles and a few my words.
“I was hoping to ask Araminta about the scarification process and their mother’s-names, but then Hill’s shadows turned up in New Cairo. Oh! The wards!”
Bella stands so abruptly that her blood thuds in her skull. She reels to the front door and pours a line of salt and thistle across the threshold. Maiden, Mother, and Crone. Guard the bed that I lay on.
She’s on her sixth window before she notices the yellowing grains of salt already lying on the sills. “Did you ward your house already?”
Mr. Blackwell looks a little sheepish. “Not nearly so well as you are, I’m sure. It’s just that fever—the Second Plague, some are calling it now—has been creeping north. It strikes me as uncanny, so I thought perhaps a little uncanniness might keep it at bay.” He nudges his spectacles back up his nose. “My great-aunt taught me a few little charms here and there.”
Bella would like to ask more about all this—a man working witchcraft, an uncanny sickness—but at that moment Juniper emerges from behind the bookshelf. She is wrapped in a dark cloak, limping badly without her red-cedar staff, her eyes the green-lit gray of the sea before a storm. She pauses to sweep the two of them a bow before slipping out the front door and vanishing into the deepening night.
“What is she doing, at this hour?”
“Whatever she can. Whatever might help.” Bella sighs. “I imagine we’ll read about it in tomorrow’s papers.”
Juniper has never cared much for reading (or any of the others of Miss Hurston’s three R’s), but over the next few weeks she acquires the habit of reading the paper over breakfast. Or at least the headlines: SISTERS EASTWOOD STILL AT LARGE; NEW SALEM CHIEF OF POLICE RESIGNS AMID RUMORS OF NERVOUS BREAKDOWN; HILL’S RALLY INTERRUPTED BY BAYING DOGS AND STRONG WINDS.
The other Sisters tell Juniper that Mayor Worthington is leaning on The Post not to print the