The Once and Future Witches - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,27

stay that way—remember what you are—and now she’s just a skinny librarian with gray already streaking her hair, a premonition of spinsterhood.

Miss Quinn raises her eyebrows and nods at the ratty notebook still clutched to Beatrice’s chest. “And what of your work? Is that nothing?”

Beatrice should say yes. She should toss her notes aside and flick her fingers. Oh, that? Just moonbeams and daydreams.

Her fingers tighten on her notebook instead. “It’s not . . . much. Just conjecture so far. But I think . . .” She wets her lips. “But I think I found the words and ways to call back the Lost Way of Avalon. Or some of them.”

She flinches as she says it, half waiting for the crack of a nun’s knuckles or the cold draft of the cellar.

Miss Quinn doesn’t scorn or scold her. “Really,” she says, and waits. Listens.

Beatrice isn’t listened to very often. She finds it makes her heart flutter in a most distracting fashion. “It’s this rhyme our grandmother taught us. I thought she made it up, but then I found it in the back of a first-edition copy of the Grimms’ Witch-Tales—you’re familiar with the Grimms?”

She tells Miss Quinn about wayward sisters and maiden’s blood and her theory that secrets might have survived somehow in old wives’ tales and children’s rhymes. “It must sound ridiculous.”

Miss Quinn lifts one shoulder. “Not to me. Sometimes a thing is too dangerous to be written down or said straight out. Sometimes you have to slip it in slantwise, half-hidden.”

“Even if I pieced together the spell, I doubt any of us has enough witch-blood to work it. All the true witches were burned centuries ago.”

“All of them, Miss Eastwood?” There’s a hint of pity in Quinn’s voice. “How, then, did Cairo manage to repel the Ottomans and the redcoats both for decades, despite all their rifles and ships? Why did Andrew Jackson leave those Choctaw in Mississippi? Out of the goodness of his black little heart?” The pity sharpens, turns scathing. “Do you really think the slavers found every witch aboard their ships and tossed her overboard?”

Beatrice has encountered wild theories that there was witchcraft at work in Stono and Haiti, that Turner and Brown were aided by supernatural means. She’s heard the scintillated whispers about colored covens still prowling the streets. But at St. Hale’s she was taught that such stories were base rumors, the product of ignorance and superstition.

Quinn gentles her tone. “Maybe even good Saint George missed a witch or two during the purge. How do you think your grandmother came to know those words in the first place?”

Beatrice has not permitted herself to ask that question out loud. To wonder who Mags’s mother was, and her mother’s mother. Witch-blood runs thick in the sewers, after all.

“Surely it’s worth looking for these missing words and ways of yours, at least.”

“I—perhaps.” Beatrice swallows hard against the hope rising in her throat. “But they don’t seem to want to be found.” She gestures at her desk, strewn with scraps and open books and dead-ends. “I’ve read the Sisters Grimm a dozen times, every edition I could find. I’ve made a good start on the other folklorists—Charlotte Perrault, Andrea Lang—but if there are any secret instructions or notes tucked inside them they’re faded, stained . . . lost.”

She doesn’t mention the shadow-hand she saw splayed across the page, or the creeping sense that someone doesn’t want the words to be found, on the grounds that she wants Miss Quinn to continue thinking of her as a sane adult. “I’ve been looking. But I’ve been failing.”

Miss Quinn does not look particularly distressed. She gives Beatrice a smart nod and sets her derby hat on the desktop. She unbuttons her sleeves and rolls them up, revealing several inches of pox-scarred wrist. “Well, naturally.”

“Oh?”

Miss Quinn perches on the same stack of encyclopedias Juniper occupied a few weeks before and extends her hand, palm up, toward Beatrice and her black notebook. Her expression is teasing but her eyes are sober, her hand steady. “You didn’t have me.”

Beatrice rubs her thumb along the spine of her notebook, stuffed full of her most private thoughts and theories, her wildest suppositions and most dangerous inquiries. Her own heart, sewn and bound.

It should be difficult to hand it over to a near-stranger, even impossible.

It isn’t.

Juniper didn’t have any friends, growing up. The girls at school weren’t allowed to visit the Eastwood farm, either because of the whispers of witching that surrounded Mama Mags or the