The Once and Future Witches - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,94
letters in the smoke-bitten stars or words written in the rising steam.
When the sign comes, Agnes cannot miss it.
It begins as a lone keening from the street below, the plaintive howl of a street-dog. Then the street-dog is joined by its brothers, by yips and barks and rumbling growls that rise from every quarter of the city in an uncanny wave. It’s as if every dog in New Salem has joined a single, mottled wolf-pack. The noise of the dogs is followed by the human shrieks and curses of alarmed pedestrians and angry owners.
“Saints, Bell. I hear you.” The line that leads to her oldest sister is stretched thin by the miles between them, but Agnes can still feel the echo of Bella’s will behind the working.
Agnes gathers the ways—three glass jars, the waxen stubs of seven candles, a book of matches, and a cast iron skillet that is the closest thing she has to a cauldron—and wraps them tight in a canvas sack.
Then she and the sack and the baby swimming silent inside her step out into the howling noise of the night. The streets are so full of people—baffled policemen and shouting men, irritable mothers holding screaming infants, escaped toddlers clapping their hands with delighted cries of “DOGGY!”—that no one pays much attention to Agnes.
“Nothing to be concerned about,” one officer is repeating, loudly and falsely. “Just a flock of geese passing by, or a cat.” But Agnes can tell from the white sheen of his face that he doesn’t believe it. That he can feel the rules of the real shifting beneath his feet, the orderly world of New Salem warping and cracking like a snow globe tossed in a bonfire.
She pulls her cloak hood high and winds through the alleys with the bag clanking gently at her side and Mama Mags’s stories echoing in her ears, the ones about sisters and spells worked on solstice-eve. In stories the sisters are always set one against the others—the beautiful one and her two ugly sisters, the clever one and the fools, the brave one and the cowards. Only one of them escapes the wicked witch or breaks the terrible curse.
Their daddy was a curse. He left them scarred and sundered, broken so badly they can never be put back together again.
But maybe tonight—just for a little while—they can pretend. Maybe they can stand hand in hand, once lost but now found. Maybe it will be enough to save their wild, wayward sister from a world that despises wayward women.
Agnes walks until the howling of the dogs quiets to whimpers and whines, until the moon hangs high and clear above her, until her steps echo in the empty dark of St. George’s Square. Mama Mags taught her that magic likes to burn the same way twice, like deer following a trail or water running to a river. Perhaps the tower will come easier to the place they last called it; perhaps this time it will stay.
She kneels beneath the empty plinth where Saint George once stood and places the candles around her like the pale flowers of a fairy ring. She sets the jars before her, three in a row, and waits.
It is midnight when Beatrice returns to the ruins of Old Salem.
Old Salem at midnight is not the same city they visited at noon. The skeletons of walls and streets are clearer by moonlight, their bones drawn in silver and shadow beneath the moss. The wind has risen, banishing the idle warmth of summer, whistling strangely through the alleys and corners of the lost city. It tugs at Beatrice’s hair, playful as a schoolgirl.
She and Miss Quinn stand in the bare circle of earth in the middle of the lost city. Seven candles flicker around them, drawing upward-slanting shadows over their faces, guttering in the untrustworthy wind.
Miss Quinn nods approval. “Thoroughly witchy, Miss Eastwood. You could hardly ask for better.”
“I thought perhaps the Way would have an affinity for the city, if it stood here once before. I suspect we’ll need all the help we can get.” There are supposed to be seven candles made of pure white wax, instead of five mismatched stubs stolen from Lilith’s inn (one of them is decorated with small, malformed bats; two of them are melted to their willow-patterned saucers). She and her sisters are supposed to be standing shoulder-to-shoulder, hand in hand; they’re supposed to be real witches, with familiars and broomsticks and pointed hats, instead of three desperate young women.