Agnes is still pointing at Hill. Bella can only see the back of her head, but she can sense the vicious, delirious grin on her face. “I am a witch, Gideon Hill.” Her voice is low, dangerous, the twitch of a cat’s tail before it pounces, the final circle of an osprey before the plunge. “And so are you!”
As she says it, several things happen one after the other, like playing cards in a collapsing house.
Their witch-collars fall away from their necks, reduced to nothing but rust and malice. Bella can sense her sisters’ souls singing loud through the binding between them and magic seething again on the other side of everything.
An owl and an osprey appear in the smoke-hung sky, black as spades or hearts, and the first true screams ring through the square.
Gideon Hill shouts orders. White-and-red Inquisitors surge toward the scaffold just as most of the crowd scrabbles away. They clash into one another without noticing the knots of people who aren’t moving at all. Who are standing like stones or sentinels, watching the fire. Waiting.
Bella stumbles away from the stake and sags into Miss Cleo Quinn’s arms.
“What happened to your ring, woman?” Cleo murmurs into Bella’s hair. “I let you out of my sight for ten minutes.”
“It’s your fault, really, for letting me out of your sight.”
“I don’t make the same mistake twice.” Cleo’s hand finds hers and holds it so tightly her knuckle-bones creak.
Juniper limps free of the fire, raises her arms high, and laughs. It’s a raucous, devilish laugh, the laugh of the crow as it raids the cornfield, the trickster as she weaves her web. Bella catches the wild edge of her smile as she looks out at the crowd
“I believe my cue is coming, love,” Bella whispers. “Did you bring the wandwood?”
Cleo presses a thin strip of holly into her palm just as Juniper shouts a single word.
“Hemlock!”
Bella steps forward between her sisters as the crowd answers Juniper’s command.
She watches a hundred women reach into a hundred pockets and satchels and baskets to withdraw a hundred hats in black muslin and gray velvet, dark silk and ragged lace. Their arms arc upward as every witch in the city of New Salem dons a tall, pointed hat, and whispers the words.
Skirts and cloaks cascade over their bodies from nowhere. Fine gowns of draping chiffon and cotton day-dresses with their sleeves ripped away, black cloaks with long trains of feathers and evening gowns trimmed in dark mink. Some of them were sewn by the Sisters of Avalon and some of them were dug out of cedar chests and wardrobes for the occasion. Some of them aren’t true black but navy blue or lake-bottom green, but in the fickle light of stars and flames it hardly matters. The crowd sees women in tall hats and dark dresses and knows exactly what they are.
One witch you can laugh at. Three you can burn. But what do you do with a hundred?
Most people run, it turns out.
Hill isn’t running. He’s standing on the balcony shouting orders to his Inquisitors. He gathers fistfuls of shadow and tugs them like puppet-strings or fishing lines. Half the crowd lurches to a halt, swaying and blinking, too weak to wrest free of his will.
Perhaps his puppets might have stood their ground and overcome the witches of New Salem, but Bella touches her holly wand to the torch and lifts it high above her. The crowd below does the same, withdrawing thin strips of oak and applewood, birch and blackthorn. The women who have no matches borrow heat from the ones who do, touching their wand-tips one to another.
Bella speaks the spell without a trace of a stutter. A hundred voices echo her: Queen Anne, Queen Anne, you sit in the sun—
Simple, small words a woman might sing as she peered into her sewing box on a winter’s night. Words about driving back the darkness, about sunlight piercing shadows.
As fair as a lily as white as a wand.
Each wand below her casts its own particular light, from palest dawn to bloody sunset, silver moon-shine to golden candleflame. The lights meet and merge, joining to form a wave of noon-bright sun.
The shadows flee before the witch-light, unwinding from ankles and tearing free from skirt-hems to run like unclean water over the cobblestones. They pool around Hill, a writhing darkness that hisses and spits like oil in the pan.
The spell grows brighter. The shadows shrink until they’re the size of a single person standing tall, then a wizened old man, then a child, then nothing at all.
Gideon Hill stands shadowless and exposed, bathed in sunlight, his dog baring its teeth at the sky in a snarl or a smile.
A ripple moves through the crowd. Bella sees faces upturned, squinting at the witch-light with watering eyes and half-open mouths. Their shadows curl meekly beneath them once more, tame and ordinary. If the spell ends now she thinks most of them would be happy to stumble home, haunted by the memory of hate that wasn’t their own. But the spell doesn’t end.
Queen Anne, Queen Anne—
The witches didn’t stop chanting when Hill’s shadow vanished. The sunlight now is blinding, hot, boiling down on black wool and autumn cloaks, and the spell itself is becoming something more that itself, something that swallows lies and sheds truth.
Gideon Hill begins to change. The flat blond of his hair darkens to matted black. The chin sharpens, the flesh recedes to reveal a thin, hungry frame. This must be his true soul showing through his stolen body; Bella is surprised by how young and desperate it seems.
The dog beside him changes, too, her master’s illusion burning away. Her legs and jaw lengthen, her fur roughens, her ears stand up: a lean wolf with black fur and boiling red eyes.
The crowd is frozen, staring up at the savior. Their light against the darkness, their would-be Saint. The word witch rustles through them.
Bella lowers her wand with a dizzy, savage glee pulsing in her temples. At least if they fail now the truth will still be told. The man who spent centuries twisting history and telling false tales will still be laid bare for everyone to see.
Their daddy died a good man, in the eyes of the world; Gideon Hill will die a villain.
Bella turns to Juniper, who is watching Gideon Hill with a strange expression on her face, nearly mournful. “Your turn, June.”
Juniper is watching the boy on the balcony—the vicious, frightened boy who should have died a very long time ago—when her sister tells her it’s her turn.
Cleopatra Quinn presses two things into her hands: a black-yew staff and a long, curved pair of teeth.
Juniper leaps from the scaffold with her scorched and tattered dress flapping like burnt wings behind her. She lands barefoot on the cobbles, bad foot curling beneath her, knee cracking against stone. The teeth bite deep into her palm and blood pools in her hand.
She remains crouched, buffeted by the panicked crowd. She slicks her blood along the black-yew staff and whispers the words for the third time in her life.
May sticks and stones break your bones, and serpents stop your heart.
Vicious, venomous words that burn her throat and scorch her tongue. Words that require a furious will behind them. Juniper has always had a brimming cup of hate inside her, a well of rage that never runs dry, but it seems to her now that she has to reach deeper to find what she needs, that perhaps her well is not so bottomless after all.
Still: she thinks of Eve, of the Three, of all those poor people dying in the cots of Charity Hospital, and she finds the will she requires.