mother how they used to speak in codes and symbols, to keep their secrets safe. The Daughters still use some of them, because we aren’t strong enough to risk working in the open. Yet.” Beatrice wonders precisely what Quinn and the Daughters might do with the Lost Way of Avalon, and then whether she really wants to know.
“Anyway. What my mother taught me is this: you hide the most important things in the places that matter least. Women’s clothes, children’s toys, songs . . . Places a man would never look.” As she speaks she is levering open one of the glass cases, running long fingers over the hinges of a woman’s sewing box. “If the witches of Old Salem had the spell to restore the Way, do you really believe they would have advertised it? Left it listed in the index of a grimoire?” She shakes her head, abandoning the sewing box for the child’s sampler hanging on the wall, yellowed and stained. “You’re thinking like a librarian, rather than a witch. Ah! Come see.”
It appears to Beatrice to be a perfectly ordinary piece of embroidery: a crooked house framed by a pair of dark trees, with three lumpy women standing in the foreground beside a scattering of animals. Clumsy letters run across the top: “Workd by Polly Pekkala in The Twelfth Year of her Age, 1782.” A border of dark vines curls around the edges.
“I don’t see—oh.” There is a twist in the vines along the top, a hiccup in the pattern. The vines loop back on themselves to make three circles, interwoven.
Beatrice squints through her spectacles at the little scene. Upon closer inspection each of the animals in the yard is purest black, with red knots for eyes, and the figures are all women. One of them has a stitch of red dripping from her finger; the second holds a swaddled bundle to her breast, either a baby or a large potato; the last has a line of pale French knots running down her cheeks. Blood, milk, and tears.
Beatrice feels warm, weightless, as if she is hovering several inches off the warped floorboards. It’s the way she feels in the archives when she catches a glimmer of gold and brings it into the light, shining softly. She knows by the look on Quinn’s face that she feels it, too: the specific, almost spiteful joy of finding the truth buried beneath centuries of dust and deceit and neglect.
Their eyes meet and Beatrice forgets to count the seconds. Something warm and nameless wings between them.
(It is not nameless.)
Quinn is running her fingers over the empty linen of the sky above the little house. She breathes a small ha! of satisfaction and reaches for Beatrice’s hand. She guides it to the sampler’s surface. Beatrice is so worried she might sense that unnamed thing in the sweaty heat of her palm, the staccato flutter of her pulse, that she almost misses the subtle, irregular bumps of stitches beneath her fingertips.
She peers closer. There are tiny, nearly invisible words written in white thread.
The wayward sisters, hand in hand,
Burned and bound, our stolen crown,
But what is lost, that can’t be found?
The rhyme their Mama Mags once sung to them, the verse hidden in the Sisters Grimm. Except this time the words keep going:
Cauldron bubble, toil and trouble,
Weave a circle round the throne,
Maiden, mother, and crone.
Beatrice shivers as she reads the last line, wondering if she and her sisters are meant to walk this winding path, destined by blood or fate. She waits to be overcome with some grand sense of destiny before recalling that she is merely an ex-librarian standing in a fraudulent museum that smells of mold, trying to save her wicked, wild sister.
Quinn pulls the black leather notebook from Beatrice’s pocket and flips to the page with a spell concerning barking dogs and gnawed bones. “The solstice begins at midnight. I believe it’s time to call your sister.”
The wayward sisters, hand in hand,
Burned and bound, our stolen crown,
But what is lost, that can’t be found?
Cauldron bubble, toil and trouble,
Weave a circle round the throne,
Maiden, mother, and crone.
A spell to find what has been lost, requiring maiden’s blood, mother’s milk, crone’s tears & a fierce will
Wait for my sign, Bella told her, but Agnes doesn’t know what sign she’s waiting for. In the stories, witches were always sending messages by raven or whispering secrets into the hollow curves of conch shells, so Agnes rattles around South Sybil, squinting out windows, looking for