The Once and Future Witches - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,155
falls over the Three as she says the word shadows. Even their serpents stop coiling and twining, their hot-coal eyes fixed on Agnes. The Mother swears in a language Juniper thinks might be a dialect of Hell.
“Almost sounds like you’ve met him,” Juniper drawls.
The Maiden bares her teeth in an expression that bears no relation at all to a smile. “Oh, I’ve met him,” she hisses.
“He’s the man who bested us at Avalon,” the Mother growls.
“And he’s the man who burned us, after. Heard he got a sainthood out of it,” the Crone finishes. “Bastard,” she adds, reflectively.
Juniper thinks she’s never heard a silence quite like the one that follows: there’s a depth and coldness to it, a thoroughness that could only exist after sundown on the other side of nowhere, when six witches and their familiars have just learned they have an enemy in common.
“Shit,” she says. And then, more emphatically, “Shit.”
Bella rallies first, clinging to the last fraying threads of reason. “But how? There’s no such thing at the Fountain of Youth or the Philosopher’s Stone. How is he still alive? How are you alive?”
“We’re not, strictly speaking.” The Maiden strokes her adder with one white finger. “Alive, I mean.”
“I never liked being called the Crone. I’ve forgotten the name my mother gave me, but I’m sure it wasn’t that. And she’s no maiden.” The Crone points her chin at the Maiden, who smiles in a distinctly unmaidenly fashion.
“I am a Mother,” muses the armored woman. “But more, too.”
Bella resettles her spectacles. “But the spell to call back the Lost Way of Avalon. It required a maiden, a mother, and a crone, did it not?”
The Crone shrugs. “Every woman is usually at least one of those. Sometimes all three and a few others besides.”
Bella blinks several times. “So we weren’t called, then. Or—chosen.” Juniper figures she’s remembering the thing that drew them together that day, the tugging of the line between them.
The Crone makes a sound that can only be described as a cackle. She catches her breath, tries to answer, then breaks into another fit of cackles. “Chosen? If you three were chosen, it was by circumstance. By your own need. That’s all magic is, really: the space between what you have and what you need.”
Bella looks like a woman shuffling through the several dozen questions that occurred to her, but Agnes beats her to it. “What do you know about Gideon Hill?”
The Three look at one another, stillness settling back over them.
The Maiden lifts her chin, hair sliding back over pale shoulders. “More than anyone alive.”
The Mother’s eyes flick again to the milk-trails on Agnes’s blouse. “Enough to help you, I hope.”
The Crone heaves a long, humorless sigh. “Let us start from the beginning.”
nce upon a time there were three witches.
The first witch was a scholar of Samarkand who dedicated her life to the study of words and witchcraft, who mastered a hundred languages and a thousand potions, who consulted with princes and khans on two continents.
The second witch was a slave from the Zanj sold in Constantinople who used the witching of her ancestors and her captors to free herself and her daughters, who made her bloody way through the world as the commander of a band of mercenaries.
The third witch was a peasant girl from the Blackdown Hills, abandoned with her brother in the deep dark of the trees. The boy returned to his village some years later; his sister was never seen or heard from again, except as a green-eyed shadow, a rumor with white teeth.
They were, in short, three ordinary witches of their times. Perhaps a shade more desperate and a half-step more learned, but certainly not legends.
None of them would have been remembered at all if it wasn’t for the plague. A ghastly, uncanny illness that crept into every village and down every city street and left bloated bodies behind it.
Most witches helped where they could, but the sickness came quickly and killed quicker, and even the cleverest witch couldn’t save them all. This failure—all the people they couldn’t save and the husbands and aunts and neighbors they left behind, grief-crazed—became their undoing.
Rumors began to spread: that the plague was unnatural; that it was the work of women-witches, somehow; that such evil must be purged from the world. And when a hero arose, promising to be a light against the darkness, dressed in white but trailed by black shadows, they followed him.