There are many hands on their skirts now, hauling them down. Juniper is swearing and kicking. Bella is whispering oh dear, oh dear in a desperate circle. Agnes pitches her voice far louder. “Where is she? You promised me my daughter back!”
This time the smile escapes, a cruel curl of lips puckered by Pan’s claw-marks. “Witches don’t have daughters, Miss Eastwood.”
Agnes isn’t surprised, not really. She knows powerful men only keep their promises when they have to, and they never have to. But she’s surprised how angry it makes her to be told she has no daughter—when her belly is still slack and empty from carrying her, when her breasts still ache with the certainty of her motherhood. She’s surprised, too, by the sound she makes, a keening howl.
Juniper flings herself down onto the Inquisitors, fists bruising against armor, and Agnes lunges for Hill a second time. Hands intercept her, tangle in her cloak and skirts, drag her to the cobbles. Pan’s claws skree against helmets and shields and men’s voices swear. Beside her Bella’s chant has escalated to oh hell, oh hell, interspersed with the hiss of spells. Several Inquisitors collapse, bee-stung or sleeping or clawing at their own sewn-shut mouths.
But there are so many of them, and so few Eastwoods.
Soon Agnes is kneeling beside her sisters with a mailed fist snarled in her braid and iron cuffs around her wrists. Collars creak and snap around their throats, frost-cold, and Agnes feels the great red heartbeat of magic go gray and distant. Pan and Strix vanish. The lines that lead to Juniper and Bella go slack, replaced by the heavy pull of chains leading from collar to collar. Agnes hears the ragged pant of Juniper’s breathing, feels the shiver in her chain, and wishes she could hold her hand.
Hill dismounts in a fluid sweep. His shield reflects the last yellow edge of the dying day; his face is stern, like Old Testament God descended from Heaven to visit some calamity on sinning mortals, but Agnes sees the strut in his stride. Behind him, his dog licks her teeth nervously, not looking at them.
Agnes closes her eyes. “P-please, sir,” she begs him, because he expects her to beg, because men are stupid when they think they’ve won. Because it might work. “Please.”
He doesn’t bother even to answer her, but merely turns his back to the three witches and speaks to his men. “Bind their tongues, that they may not work their devilry, and follow me.”
He doesn’t watch as his Inquisitors approach the sisters with jangling metal bridles, as thumbs bruise their jaws and force their mouths open, as Juniper curses and spits until she’s silenced by the bit between her teeth. The cage locks around Agnes’s skull, the bit pressing into her mouth like a metal tongue.
Hill doesn’t watch as they are half dragged, half marched down Third Street to the Hall of Justice, as the evening crowd swells around them and rumors swoop like cruel-beaked birds through the air—I heard they put half the city into an enchanted sleep; I heard Mr. Hill banished the Devil himself from the square; why not burn them now, before their master returns?—and the crowd’s murmurs turn to mockery and then malice. They throw spoiled fruit and insults at first, then bottles and stones. Juniper swears around her bridle and Bella clenches her hand tight around her battered brass ring, and still Hill does not look back.
If he had, he might have seen the promise seething in Agnes’s eyes: That is the last time you will ever hear me beg, you bastard.
The three sisters are not locked in the seeping dark of the Deeps, as Mr. Hill intended, because upon arriving at the Hall of Justice they found no single piece of iron or steel unrusted. The bars of the cells stood like rows of snapped teeth; doors hung at mad angles from rotten hinges; rings of keys were nothing but circles of red-orange rust on the floor.
Instead the Inquisitors locked the sisters on the highest floors, generally reserved for the drunk sons of City Council members or businessmen whose lawyers were sure to raise a fuss about unsanitary conditions. The cells are dry and clean-swept, with chamber pots and barred windows that divide the moonlight into clean silver stripes.
Agnes lets the moon touch the bruised flesh of her face with cool fingers. It trails over the ugly iron of her witch’s bridle and collar, down the bare white of her shift. She misses the weight of her cloak and skirts; she misses her sisters locked in their separate cells. But mostly she feels nothing at all.
Mags used to tell a story about a witch who cut out her own heart and buried it deep. Agnes knows precisely how she must have felt, walking around with nothing in her chest but an absence.
The moonlight vanishes, replaced by scorched black wings.
Agnes opens her eyes to see Pan perched on the narrow window ledge. He looks somehow translucent, barely there, as if she isn’t really seeing him but merely his reflection in a smudged and dim mirror. The collar burns dully against her throat, a rising warning.
Agnes crawls as close to him as she can before her chain draws short. Pan opens his beak and a voice issues from it, a faint echo: “I have her. She’s safe.” A man’s voice, low and steady, that tugs at the absent place in her chest.
Pan wisps into smoke and vapor. Her collar cools. The moonlight shines clear once more.
Agnes collapses on the dry stone, trembling with relief and exhaustion and wild laughter, because she knows the same thing the heartless witch knew: without your heart, they cannot hurt you.
Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
The Devil will pay,
And so will you.
A spell for vengeance, requiring thorns & blood
The Salem College archives include several hundred trunks full of records relating to the witch-trials of the purges, and Beatrice Belladonna has read most of them. She knows what’s coming better than her sisters. She knows that history digs a shallow grave, and that the past is always waiting to rise again.
First: the convening of the court.
They gather in a small, lightless chamber in the Hall of Justice: the judge, pale and lipless, like a large mushroom forced into a starched white collar; a panel of milky men in pressed suits; a reporter and a sketch-artist from The Post. Gideon Hill himself, standing with his hound beneath the bench, smiling faintly.
Three chairs wait in the center of the room, stained and old, with iron bands waiting like open hands. The Eastwoods are chained to their seats by a pair of Inquisitors who must have been selected for their sober expressions and clean-parted hair, the perfect human opposites to the bedraggled witches between them.
Already Bella can hear the excited scritching of the artist’s pen, see the cartoons that will run in The Post for weeks: three women bound and bowed, their limbs bare and indecent, their hair poking at wild angles through their bridles. Most people will unfold their papers and tsk their tongues at the sight of such wicked witches.
A few of them, though, will see the fury in their eyes, blazing even through the callous caricature, and suspect that behind every witch is a woman wronged.
Second: the evidence against them.
Gideon begins with a sanctimonious little speech about sin and sedition and the propensity of evil to flourish where good men do nothing. Then comes a parade of witnesses, ranging from the purely fanciful—a red-nosed barkeep who claims to have seen Agnes cavorting “in a most unseemly manner” with a fork-tailed gentleman; a housewife who was supposedly seduced by Bella’s “foul glamors” into visiting a house of prostitution on the south end—to the uncomfortably plausible.