The Once and Future Witches - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,179

whispers. “Did you bring the wandwood?”

Cleo presses a thin strip of holly into her palm just as Juniper shouts a single word.

“Hemlock!”

Bella steps forward between her sisters as the crowd answers Juniper’s command.

She watches a hundred women reach into a hundred pockets and satchels and baskets to withdraw a hundred hats in black muslin and gray velvet, dark silk and ragged lace. Their arms arc upward as every witch in the city of New Salem dons a tall, pointed hat, and whispers the words.

Skirts and cloaks cascade over their bodies from nowhere. Fine gowns of draping chiffon and cotton day-dresses with their sleeves ripped away, black cloaks with long trains of feathers and evening gowns trimmed in dark mink. Some of them were sewn by the Sisters of Avalon and some of them were dug out of cedar chests and wardrobes for the occasion. Some of them aren’t true black but navy blue or lake-bottom green, but in the fickle light of stars and flames it hardly matters. The crowd sees women in tall hats and dark dresses and knows exactly what they are.

One witch you can laugh at. Three you can burn. But what do you do with a hundred?

Most people run, it turns out.

Hill isn’t running. He’s standing on the balcony shouting orders to his Inquisitors. He gathers fistfuls of shadow and tugs them like puppet-strings or fishing lines. Half the crowd lurches to a halt, swaying and blinking, too weak to wrest free of his will.

Perhaps his puppets might have stood their ground and overcome the witches of New Salem, but Bella touches her holly wand to the torch and lifts it high above her. The crowd below does the same, withdrawing thin strips of oak and applewood, birch and blackthorn. The women who have no matches borrow heat from the ones who do, touching their wand-tips one to another.

Bella speaks the spell without a trace of a stutter. A hundred voices echo her: Queen Anne, Queen Anne, you sit in the sun—

Simple, small words a woman might sing as she peered into her sewing box on a winter’s night. Words about driving back the darkness, about sunlight piercing shadows.

As fair as a lily as white as a wand.

Each wand below her casts its own particular light, from palest dawn to bloody sunset, silver moon-shine to golden candleflame. The lights meet and merge, joining to form a wave of noon-bright sun.

The shadows flee before the witch-light, unwinding from ankles and tearing free from skirt-hems to run like unclean water over the cobblestones. They pool around Hill, a writhing darkness that hisses and spits like oil in the pan.

The spell grows brighter. The shadows shrink until they’re the size of a single person standing tall, then a wizened old man, then a child, then nothing at all.

Gideon Hill stands shadowless and exposed, bathed in sunlight, his dog baring its teeth at the sky in a snarl or a smile.

A ripple moves through the crowd. Bella sees faces upturned, squinting at the witch-light with watering eyes and half-open mouths. Their shadows curl meekly beneath them once more, tame and ordinary. If the spell ends now she thinks most of them would be happy to stumble home, haunted by the memory of hate that wasn’t their own. But the spell doesn’t end.

Queen Anne, Queen Anne—

The witches didn’t stop chanting when Hill’s shadow vanished. The sunlight now is blinding, hot, boiling down on black wool and autumn cloaks, and the spell itself is becoming something more that itself, something that swallows lies and sheds truth.

Gideon Hill begins to change. The flat blond of his hair darkens to matted black. The chin sharpens, the flesh recedes to reveal a thin, hungry frame. This must be his true soul showing through his stolen body; Bella is surprised by how young and desperate it seems.

The dog beside him changes, too, her master’s illusion burning away. Her legs and jaw lengthen, her fur roughens, her ears stand up: a lean wolf with black fur and boiling red eyes.

The crowd is frozen, staring up at the savior. Their light against the darkness, their would-be Saint. The word witch rustles through them.

Bella lowers her wand with a dizzy, savage glee pulsing in her temples. At least if they fail now the truth will still be told. The man who spent centuries twisting history and telling false tales will still be laid bare for everyone to see.

Their daddy died a good man, in the eyes of the world;