The Once and Future Witches - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,169

her hand tight around her battered brass ring, and still Hill does not look back.

If he had, he might have seen the promise seething in Agnes’s eyes: That is the last time you will ever hear me beg, you bastard.

The three sisters are not locked in the seeping dark of the Deeps, as Mr. Hill intended, because upon arriving at the Hall of Justice they found no single piece of iron or steel unrusted. The bars of the cells stood like rows of snapped teeth; doors hung at mad angles from rotten hinges; rings of keys were nothing but circles of red-orange rust on the floor.

Instead the Inquisitors locked the sisters on the highest floors, generally reserved for the drunk sons of City Council members or businessmen whose lawyers were sure to raise a fuss about unsanitary conditions. The cells are dry and clean-swept, with chamber pots and barred windows that divide the moonlight into clean silver stripes.

Agnes lets the moon touch the bruised flesh of her face with cool fingers. It trails over the ugly iron of her witch’s bridle and collar, down the bare white of her shift. She misses the weight of her cloak and skirts; she misses her sisters locked in their separate cells. But mostly she feels nothing at all.

Mags used to tell a story about a witch who cut out her own heart and buried it deep. Agnes knows precisely how she must have felt, walking around with nothing in her chest but an absence.

The moonlight vanishes, replaced by scorched black wings.

Agnes opens her eyes to see Pan perched on the narrow window ledge. He looks somehow translucent, barely there, as if she isn’t really seeing him but merely his reflection in a smudged and dim mirror. The collar burns dully against her throat, a rising warning.

Agnes crawls as close to him as she can before her chain draws short. Pan opens his beak and a voice issues from it, a faint echo: “I have her. She’s safe.” A man’s voice, low and steady, that tugs at the absent place in her chest.

Pan wisps into smoke and vapor. Her collar cools. The moonlight shines clear once more.

Agnes collapses on the dry stone, trembling with relief and exhaustion and wild laughter, because she knows the same thing the heartless witch knew: without your heart, they cannot hurt you.

Roses are red,

Violets are blue,

The Devil will pay,

And so will you.

A spell for vengeance, requiring thorns & blood

The Salem College archives include several hundred trunks full of records relating to the witch-trials of the purges, and Beatrice Belladonna has read most of them. She knows what’s coming better than her sisters. She knows that history digs a shallow grave, and that the past is always waiting to rise again.

First: the convening of the court.

They gather in a small, lightless chamber in the Hall of Justice: the judge, pale and lipless, like a large mushroom forced into a starched white collar; a panel of milky men in pressed suits; a reporter and a sketch-artist from The Post. Gideon Hill himself, standing with his hound beneath the bench, smiling faintly.

Three chairs wait in the center of the room, stained and old, with iron bands waiting like open hands. The Eastwoods are chained to their seats by a pair of Inquisitors who must have been selected for their sober expressions and clean-parted hair, the perfect human opposites to the bedraggled witches between them.

Already Bella can hear the excited scritching of the artist’s pen, see the cartoons that will run in The Post for weeks: three women bound and bowed, their limbs bare and indecent, their hair poking at wild angles through their bridles. Most people will unfold their papers and tsk their tongues at the sight of such wicked witches.

A few of them, though, will see the fury in their eyes, blazing even through the callous caricature, and suspect that behind every witch is a woman wronged.

Second: the evidence against them.

Gideon begins with a sanctimonious little speech about sin and sedition and the propensity of evil to flourish where good men do nothing. Then comes a parade of witnesses, ranging from the purely fanciful—a red-nosed barkeep who claims to have seen Agnes cavorting “in a most unseemly manner” with a fork-tailed gentleman; a housewife who was supposedly seduced by Bella’s “foul glamors” into visiting a house of prostitution on the south end—to the uncomfortably plausible.

There’s a series of disgruntled fairgoers who saw Juniper’s hat-trick; a handful of doctors from St. Charity