Agnes feels the dull thud of boots and paws down the scaffold steps, the sawblade buzz of the crowd. Stars appear overhead, dim and distant through the blaze of torchlight.
Hill takes his place in the balcony across from them. He tucks Miss Wiggin’s hand beneath his arm and she gazes up at him with such vacuous rapture that Agnes’s stomach turns. At least their daddy never forced them to love him; at least he never took their selves or souls away. She wonders if Grace hates him, somewhere deep down in her china-doll body.
Hill surveys the gathered citizens, face severe and mournful. Agnes thinks he might make another speech about morality and Satan and modernity, but he doesn’t. Instead he lets his gaze rest on the torchbearer below him. He nods once and a hideous hush falls over the square.
The torch hisses and snaps. A baby wails somewhere in the crowd. Agnes’s thoughts run in dizzy circles—a wise woman keeps her burning on the inside—sorry, Mags—hurry, August—
Bella’s voice comes soft and calm from the other side of the stake, as if she is sitting behind a collections desk rather than staked in the city square. “I translated that inscription, by the way. The one on the door: Maleficae quondam, maleficaeque futurae.” She ignores Juniper’s softly muttered, Jesus, Bell. “In English it’s ‘witches once and witches in the future.’”
“And what does that mean?” Agnes asks.
“I think it means witches will return, one day, no matter how many of us they burn.” Agnes can hear the smile in Bella’s voice, sharp and secret. “I think it means—us. All of us.”
Then the torch touches the pyre and flames lick like tiger claws into the sky, and the Eastwood sisters are burning.
Agnes Amaranth has burned once before. She’s familiar with the glass-shard sting of smoke in her eyes, the way the heat rolls up her body in waves, lifting her hair from her shoulders and singeing the ends. The way her own tears whisper into steam on her cheeks.
The first time, Agnes saved herself. She poured a circle of creek-water around her sisters and said the words and the heat vanished. She and her sisters stood perfectly still as the fire licked and twined around them, as if it was a newly tamed wolf that might still bite.
This time it’s August Lee who saves them. She sees his face through the honeyed glaze of the flames: eyes fixed, lips moving, arm still tight around Eve. The silver flask lies dripping on the cobbles, its contents scattered in a wide circle around the scaffold.
Agnes can see the shine of sweat slicking August’s forehead and the tense set of his shoulders, as if he’s braced beneath some immense weight. All witching takes is will, really, and he will not let her burn.
The scaffold hisses and pops beneath her feet and the flames snap high into the night, but they don’t seem to touch her, as if her skin is coated in armor made of running water. Only her collar feels hot, warming at the presence of magic. It throbs against her throat.
The crowd howls and moans and cheers around August, their cheeks flushed and their eyes glowing red. Their shadows have merged into a single creature behind them, hydra-headed and many-limbed, exultant. Hill looks down on them with no expression at all, as if they are nothing to him but hollow puppets.
When he looks back up at the Eastwoods there are flames dancing red in his eyes, perhaps a trace of grief—but also vast relief, that this threat to his endless, weary life is finally laid to rest.
But soon his relief will flicker. Soon his brow will furrow. He has burned many, many women over the centuries, and surely all of them have screamed.
The Eastwoods are not screaming. The flames are wrapped like hands around them, tearing at their white wool dresses. Their chains are glowing red-hot—but their skin is whole and smooth, unblistered. Soon Gideon Hill will notice that his witches are not burning.
But they aren’t ready. They need just a little more time.
Agnes takes a deep breath that should sear her lungs, but doesn’t. She tastes cinders and ash and August’s witching on her tongue. She thinks of Eve bundled tight in his arms, bathed in the light of her mother’s burning, and thinks: Listen close, baby girl.
She shouts into the night, clear and taunting and fearless. “Is it a confession you want?”
Bella hears her sister’s voice but hardly recognizes it. It booms and cracks, unrestrained, raw with rage. The sound of it thrums somewhere in Bella’s bones, a plucked string too low to hear.
“I confess it freely, Mr. Hill: I am a witch.”
The jeering crowd falls still at the sound of her voice. They stare up at the flames with wary faces, like hunters who hear their prey thrashing in the bracken, wounded but still dangerous. Gideon Hill stands very still on the balcony.
Bella feels the scaffold shudder beneath her feet as if someone is climbing it, as if they’re attempting something very daring and heroic without which their entire plan would collapse. Three bless and keep her.
“I am a witch.” Agnes shouts it a second time, louder, flinging her voice into the night. “And so are my sisters, and so will be my daughter and my daughter’s daughter.” Her voice roughens at the mention of Eve, as if the collar around her throat has constricted.
Behind them comes the sound of footsteps, then the whisper of words and the sizzle of saltwater spat on hot iron. Their chains crackle with unnatural rust. Their collars boil at the touch of witchcraft.
Bella bites her cheek until she tastes blood, but Agnes doesn’t seem to feel her collar at all. Her head is tilted back against the stake, her eyes closed, her voice strong. “And so is every woman who says what she shouldn’t or wants what she can’t have, who fights for her fair share.”
Every eye is on Agnes, transfixed. No one notices the fourth witch standing on the scaffold, singing her song to avert unwanted eyes. No one notices their chains and collars thinning and flaking, turning brittle as old bone.
Agnes gives a contemptuous twist of her shoulders, like a woman shrugging off an unwelcome touch, and the chain snaps. She steps forward, feet bare and unburnt on the blackened wood, hair dancing in the flames, and Bella hears the rushing sound of several hundred people drawing breath together.
She’s surprised to feel a pang of pity for them: they thought they were in the kind of story where the wicked witches were caught and burned at the end, where all the little children were tucked safely into bed with the smell of smoke in their hair. It must be upsetting to discover themselves in the kind of story where the witches make friends with the flames instead, where they snap their chains and laugh up at the stars with sharp teeth.
Agnes lifts her arm and the fire wraps around her naked flesh like golden armor. She points at Gideon Hill where he watches from the balcony, his face twisted, his mouth half-open to snarl orders to his Inquisitors over the wild barking of his dog. Grace Wiggin still clings to his arm, looking at Agnes with horror. But there’s a sliver of brightness in her eyes, as if a small, treacherous part of her is glad to see a witch walk out of the flames.
Bella’s throat is blistering beneath the thinning collar, each rust-flake searing her skin where it falls. She can’t see Cleo standing beside her, but she hears her voice whispering in her ear. “Hold on, love, it’s almost done—London Bridge is falling down, falling down—”