The Once and Future Witches - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,193

even days after the casting. Bella found a goldsmith in the Garden Quarter who permitted her to inspect the gold before casting. Bella smiled and thanked him, and then bound spells to every gram of metal. The ring ought to offer some protection from unfriendly eyes and ill wishes, from cold iron and hot coals, bad dreams and mean dogs and broken bones.

She tucks a scrap of paper beneath the ring: Yours, if you will have it. As am I.

Bella dons a half-cloak and a historically inaccurate hat, black and pointed, and draws a charcoal circle on the floorboards. She whispers the words and steps into elsewhere.

Epilogue

I figure since I’m the one who started the story, I should be the one to finish it.

It’s the spring equinox of 1894 and I’m sitting with my back against the sun-warmed wood of the tower door, rose-vines pricking the soft meat of my arms and meadow-grass shushing against the bare soles of my feet. A crow perches on my knee, watching me write with a cocked head and a candleflame eye.

The farm hasn’t changed much in the year I was away: the mountains still stand like green gods on all sides and the Big Sandy River still coils like a king snake through the heart of it. Owls still call three times at moonrise and dogwoods still bloom in the deep blue shadows. Mama Mags’s house has sunk a little farther into the earth, like an old woman settling deeper into a rocking chair, and her herb-garden has run wild and weedy, but otherwise I can almost believe no time has passed at all. That I’m still seventeen and all alone, living for the day my daddy would finally die.

Except I’m not alone, now. Neither am I living: I died on the fall equinox in St. George’s Square, and death doesn’t brook any back-talk or take-backs.

But witching is nothing if not a way to bend the rules, to make a way when there is none. My soul lingers, bound alongside the Last Three to the Lost Way of Avalon, to the rose-covered stones and the burned books and to witching itself. It isn’t the same as being alive—I don’t eat or drink except to remind myself that I can, and I don’t sleep now so much as come undone. As soon as my attention wavers I unravel like a dropped bobbin, losing myself among the roots and stone. But it’s a damn sight better than being dead, I figure.

On bad days I have Corvus. My familiar is a creature of the margins and in-betweens, being half-magic and half-bird and three-quarters mischief, and he laughs his crow-laugh at me when I fret about whether I’m dead or alive, sundered or saved. Just looking at him reminds me that I can still feel the sunlight on my skin and breathe the rich wet smell of spring and if that isn’t enough, well, it’s all I’ve got.

I wasted time brooding, in the early days after my death. I dreamed about stepping into the flames, smoke filling my mouth, my throat, my lungs. About all the sights I’d never see and the hell I’d never raise. But then Bella and Agnes called the tower back out of nowhere, and I held my baby niece in my arms, and all those regrets faded like cheap newsprint in the rain.

The farm still isn’t mine, legally speaking; it’s still my dumbshit cousin’s name on the deed. But he isn’t around much these days.

At first he thought to rebuild Daddy’s house and rent it out, or at least lease the fields, but nothing ever came of his plans. Carpenters found their survey stakes missing and their tools rusted overnight; planted seed went bad and crops wilted without reason. Briars grew twice as tall and three times as thick as they did elsewhere in the county, obscuring the clay drive and rising like thorned walls along the borders, and in the end my cousin threw up his hands and left my land alone.

So there was no one around to notice three women and three black birds slinking through the woods. No one to see the tower appear on the back acres, lit by stars from another time and place, covered in the burnt bones of rose-vines. (Bella fretted sometimes about leaving Avalon in Crow County, and suggested they find a place even more remote and defensible, but I wanted to stay home, and my sisters don’t deny me much of anything these