The Once and Future Witches - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,95

this is madness. It cannot succeed. Even supposing we have the words and ways, I am not at all suited for this sort of thing. I lack the blood, the conviction, the courage—”

Quinn gives a tart cluck of her tongue. “Please do stop pretending you are a coward. It grows tiresome.”

“Pretending—”

“You fret and worry, but your hands are steady as stones.” Quinn’s arms are crossed, her chin high. “You have not stammered once since we arrived in Old Salem.”

Beatrice closes her mouth. “I suppose not.”

Quinn takes a step nearer, her face gilded gold. “Would a coward form a secret society of witches? Would she transfigure statues and hex cemeteries? Would she stand in the ruins of a lost city on the solstice?”

Beatrice feels as if the earth is tilting beneath her feet or the sky is tumbling around her ears, some fundamental truth is coming undone. “Perhaps she wouldn’t.” It comes out a near-whisper. “But she might still fail.”

“And yet you will try anyway.”

“Yes.”

“For your sister.”

Or perhaps for all of them: for the little girls thrown in cellars and the grown women sent to workhouses, the mothers who shouldn’t have died and the witches who shouldn’t have burned. For all the women punished merely for wanting what they shouldn’t have.

Beatrice settles for another “Yes.”

“I deceived you, it’s true, but Beatrice . . .” The challenge in Quinn’s face softens, replaced by a wistful tenderness that Beatrice finds far more dangerous. “I beg you not to deceive yourself.”

“I see.” A brief silence follows, while Beatrice recovers her straying voice. “Call me Bella.” Beatrice was the name of her father’s mother, a dried-out onion of a woman who visited once a year for Christmas and only ever gave them turgid novels about the lives of the Saints. A Beatrice couldn’t stand in this wild wood by the light of the not-quitefull moon, working the greatest witching of her century; a Beatrice couldn’t meet Quinn’s eyes in the candlelight, with the wind whipping her hair loose across her face. Perhaps a Belladonna could.

“Oh, are we on first-name terms now?” Quinn’s lips are a teasing curve, but that tender thing lingers in her voice.

“Of course we are.” Bella swallows once, too hard. “Cleo.”

She finds she can’t look into Quinn’s eyes as she says her name. She looks down at her notebook instead, rubbing her thumb across the words. “If anything untoward happens, you should run.”

“No, thank you,” Quinn says politely.

Bella tries again. “If it goes awry . . .” They both know it would be unwise for Quinn to be found in a scene of obvious witchcraft beside the burned husk of a white woman.

“Then I advise you not to let it go awry.” Quinn catches her eyes. “I am not here as a spy, Bella. Or even as a member of the Sisters of Avalon. I’m here as your . . . friend.” Her grin tilts. “And because I am the most curious creature ever cursed to walk the earth, to quote my mother, and I would very much like to be there when the Lost Way of Avalon comes back to the world.”

“Your mother seems a wise woman,” Bella says, and adds, a little daringly, “I’d like to meet her, someday.”

“But you already have!” Quinn sighs at Bella’s slack expression. “I did tell you my mother ran a spice shop.”

Bella considers objecting on the grounds that Quinn never said her mother ran a secret apothecary disguised as a spice shop while actually leading a clandestine society of colored witches, but instead says, “Oh.”

Quinn gives her a consoling pat. “She thought you were very sweet.”

Bella closes her eyes in brief and mortal mortification. “Well. It’s time, don’t you think?”

Quinn’s hand slips into hers, warm and dry. Bella wets her lips, feels the cool whip of wind on her tongue, and says the words a coward never would:

The wayward sisters, hand in hand,

Burned and bound, our stolen crown,

But what is lost, that can’t be found?

It’s seven minutes past midnight when Juniper’s collar begins to burn.

She splashes to her knees in the dark waters of the Deeps, fingers scrabbling at the hot iron, teeth gritted on howls and curses.

She heard the dogs, earlier—even buried beneath ten thousand pounds of stone and iron she could hear that mad chorus, sense the wicked heat of witchcraft in the air—but her collar had remained dull and cold against her blistered throat. Now it blazes, and beneath its heat she feels the lines that lead to her sisters, taut