The Once and Future Witches - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,91

of witchcraft, oozing with mystery and memory.

But by the time she and Miss Cleopatra Quinn arrive in Old Salem, her certainty is sagging.

Perhaps it’s the journey itself. It’s difficult to feel particularly magical after fifty miles spent with one’s forehead pressed to the window of a crowded train car, watching the landscape blur past like a spun globe, followed by another twenty miles suffocating in the back of a stagecoach. Miss Quinn is obliged by the cruel absurdity of Jim Crow to ride out front with the driver, and without her Beatrice feels herself growing drab and doubtful.

The final four miles are spent swaying in the back of a coal-colored wagon with LADY LILITH’S AUTHENTIC OLD SALEM EXCURSIONS painted on the side in faux-medieval script. Lady Lilith is a bored, fifty-ish woman with artificially dark hair and a disconcerting habit of hawking and spitting at regular intervals. The other passengers are similarly unmagical: a vacationing family from Boston who cast disapproving looks at Miss Quinn, a honeymooning couple uninterested in everything except one another, a trio of boarding school girls of the kind who wear black chokers and worship the Brontë sisters.

The sky is such an unblemished blue it looks strangely unfinished, as if a careless painter has forgotten to add clouds and birds and slight variations in hue. Beatrice feels obscurely that the day should be gray and wintry, the wind howling as they approach the gravesite of the last witches of the modern world.

Lilith’s mules turn from the pocked highway down an even more forgotten-looking road made of moss-eaten cobbles and mud. The woods rise like water around them, cool and silent; even the newlyweds cease their giggling. The air smells green and secret, surprising Beatrice with a rare pang of homesickness for Crow County; she supposes a person doesn’t have to love their home in order to miss it.

They trundle on in near-silence, Beatrice wondering fretfully how much farther it is and whether their quest has any hope of success, until Miss Quinn points into the shadowed wood at a low, lichen-covered wall made of blackened stone. Another wall runs beside it, sketching a square in the undergrowth. Beyond that Beatrice sees the rotten remnants of a doorway, the ghost of a lane, and understands abruptly that they have already reached Old Salem. They are driving now through its remains.

“Excuse me, ma’am.” Miss Quinn interrupts Lady Lilith mid-hawk. “Do you think we might explore a bit on our own?”

Lady Lilith hauls her mules to a halt and eyes Quinn, scratching speculatively at the three white hairs coiled on her chin. “S’haunted,” she observes. “Dangerous, to let tourists go wandering off. I might get in trouble.”

Beatrice begins to explain that she is a former librarian and Miss Quinn is a journalist, and that they intend to take the utmost care in their explorations—which are in fact a matter of life and death for someone they love dearly—but Quinn produces a neatly folded dollar bill and presses it into Lady Lilith’s damp palm. “If you could come back before dusk, we’d very much appreciate it,” Quinn says, then climbs out of the wagon and extends a hand to help Beatrice down after her.

Lilith flicks the reins and Quinn and Beatrice are alone in the soft green ruins of the city.

They wander wordlessly through the woods, pausing to scrub moss from walls or scuff leaves away from stone roads. The trees around them strike Beatrice as implausibly ancient, surely older than a century. Crows and starlings watch them with mocking eyes, as if they know what the women are looking for and where it’s hidden, but are disinclined to help.

Beatrice is no longer sure precisely what they are looking for—a signpost with an arrow pointing to the Lost Way of Avalon, perhaps, or a book titled On Restoring the Power of Witches and Rescuing One’s Sister from Certain Death; some instruction or spell that has survived a century of rain and sun and morbid tourists. The sudden absurdity of the idea curdles Beatrice’s stomach. She glances sideways at Quinn, wondering if she regrets signing her name in that notebook.

They walk on in silence. Sometimes Beatrice finds a patch of moss that grows in unlikely spirals, or a stone that bears an uncomfortable resemblance to a man with his arms raised to ward off some unseen blow. Somewhere in the middle of the city they find a bare circle of black-scorched stone, untouched by moss or grass or even fallen leaves,