The Once and Future Witches - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,192
other week and he returns long missives stained with tea and wine, dotted with helpful questions and possibilities. He also includes regular updates on the state of New Salem and the Sisters of Avalon. Bella is amused by the frequency with which Miss Electa Gage’s name recurs; she will not be surprised to hear news of their engagement soon.
Most days Bella is hopeful, proud of the work they’ve accomplished in a mere six months—but sometimes a certain melancholy takes her. Some days when she steps back into the tower she is overwhelmed by the scent of ash and grief, haunted by its hollow heart. On those days what they have gained seems to pall before the immensity of what they have lost.
But the tower is no longer lost, nor is it a ruin. The trees surrounding it are flecked with green-furred buds and the rose-vines have crept up to the first window. There aren’t any blooms yet, but Bella has seen tight curls of red hidden among the thorns, waiting.
Bella and Agnes swept out the ashes and hauled burned scraps from the tower. They scrubbed the scorch marks with lye and hung twists of lavender and cat-mint in the windows. Mr. August Lee turned up with a number of useful tools—many of which were stamped with company names and certainly did not belong to him—and helped the sisters fell and cure the timber they needed. It sits now in neat stacks, drying. By summer perhaps they will have a staircase again, and the beginnings of bookshelves. All they have now is a rope ladder leading up to the little round room at the top of the tower, where three beds still stand in a neat circle.
Bella and Cleo have spent many nights in the tower—when Cleo provokes some particular outrage, or when Eve goes through one of her long phases of refusing to sleep except when held in someone’s arms, and that someone is walking beneath the trees, humming Greensleeves. Bella likes it there. Although sometimes after a visit to Avalon she finds corrections and additions to her notes, written in a querulous hand and signed with three circles intertwined.
This evening Bella is not working on spells or stories; she’s typing out the final pages of her first and most precious book. All winter she’s been transcribing and editing her little black notebook, making additions and subtractions, badgering Agnes and Cleo where her own memory fails her, sometimes despairing of ever weaving the thing into anything believably book-shaped.
It will never find a publisher—what publisher would risk moral and legal condemnation from the Church, most major political parties, the government, and every law enforcement organization?—and even if it did, most readers wouldn’t believe half of it. But it will be the first book she gives to the Library of Avalon: part story and part grimoire, part history and part myth. A new witch-tale, for a new world.
It’s the title that’s taken her longest. Cleo suggested gently that Our Own Stories was a little vague, and Bella spent the next month moaning and dithering. “A Vindication of the Rights of Witches? The Everywoman’s Guide to Modern Witchcraft? A Memoir of the First Three—”
“You are certainly not the First Three Witches of the West, no matter what they’re calling you.”
“No, of course, I just—”
“Nor were the Last Three truly the last anything, as it turns out,” Cleo added, musingly. “History is a circle, and you people are always looking for the beginnings and ends of it.”
She swept out and left Bella to think about endings and beginnings and circles. She thought of the Sign of the Three burned into the door of Avalon and the phrase inscribed above it, and found that—if she took certain liberties with the Latin—it made a perfectly serviceable title.
The light is fading as Bella tears the final page from the typewriter and lays it neatly on the stack. There’s still one last chapter to be added, but her part is done.
The moon rises like a silver dollar in the window and the church bells ring in the equinox-eve service. Cleo will be out late, attending a gathering of the Orleans chapter of her organization, the Daughters of Laveau. Bella will be spending the equinox elsewhere.
She tidies her papers and clears a small space on her desk. She lays a single rose on the bare wood, and beside it a smooth golden ring.
The ring isn’t much to look at—without diamonds or engravings—but the metal is warm to the touch