“I—”
Quinn straightens abruptly and moves to the next case, mending the split seams in her voice. “She didn’t need anyone, in the end. She and her sisters made it north, with the help of Aunt Nancy’s recipes. She taught my mother how they used to speak in codes and symbols, to keep their secrets safe. The Daughters still use some of them, because we aren’t strong enough to risk working in the open. Yet.” Beatrice wonders precisely what Quinn and the Daughters might do with the Lost Way of Avalon, and then whether she really wants to know.
“Anyway. What my mother taught me is this: you hide the most important things in the places that matter least. Women’s clothes, children’s toys, songs . . . Places a man would never look.” As she speaks she is levering open one of the glass cases, running long fingers over the hinges of a woman’s sewing box. “If the witches of Old Salem had the spell to restore the Way, do you really believe they would have advertised it? Left it listed in the index of a grimoire?” She shakes her head, abandoning the sewing box for the child’s sampler hanging on the wall, yellowed and stained. “You’re thinking like a librarian, rather than a witch. Ah! Come see.”
It appears to Beatrice to be a perfectly ordinary piece of embroidery: a crooked house framed by a pair of dark trees, with three lumpy women standing in the foreground beside a scattering of animals. Clumsy letters run across the top: “Workd by Polly Pekkala in The Twelfth Year of her Age, 1782.” A border of dark vines curls around the edges.
“I don’t see—oh.” There is a twist in the vines along the top, a hiccup in the pattern. The vines loop back on themselves to make three circles, interwoven.
Beatrice squints through her spectacles at the little scene. Upon closer inspection each of the animals in the yard is purest black, with red knots for eyes, and the figures are all women. One of them has a stitch of red dripping from her finger; the second holds a swaddled bundle to her breast, either a baby or a large potato; the last has a line of pale French knots running down her cheeks. Blood, milk, and tears.
Beatrice feels warm, weightless, as if she is hovering several inches off the warped floorboards. It’s the way she feels in the archives when she catches a glimmer of gold and brings it into the light, shining softly. She knows by the look on Quinn’s face that she feels it, too: the specific, almost spiteful joy of finding the truth buried beneath centuries of dust and deceit and neglect.
Their eyes meet and Beatrice forgets to count the seconds. Something warm and nameless wings between them.
(It is not nameless.)
Quinn is running her fingers over the empty linen of the sky above the little house. She breathes a small ha! of satisfaction and reaches for Beatrice’s hand. She guides it to the sampler’s surface. Beatrice is so worried she might sense that unnamed thing in the sweaty heat of her palm, the staccato flutter of her pulse, that she almost misses the subtle, irregular bumps of stitches beneath her fingertips.
She peers closer. There are tiny, nearly invisible words written in white thread.
The wayward sisters, hand in hand,
Burned and bound, our stolen crown,
But what is lost, that can’t be found?
The rhyme their Mama Mags once sung to them, the verse hidden in the Sisters Grimm. Except this time the words keep going:
Cauldron bubble, toil and trouble,
Weave a circle round the throne,
Maiden, mother, and crone.
Beatrice shivers as she reads the last line, wondering if she and her sisters are meant to walk this winding path, destined by blood or fate. She waits to be overcome with some grand sense of destiny before recalling that she is merely an ex-librarian standing in a fraudulent museum that smells of mold, trying to save her wicked, wild sister.
Quinn pulls the black leather notebook from Beatrice’s pocket and flips to the page with a spell concerning barking dogs and gnawed bones. “The solstice begins at midnight. I believe it’s time to call your sister.”
The wayward sisters, hand in hand,
Burned and bound, our stolen crown,
But what is lost, that can’t be found?
Cauldron bubble, toil and trouble,
Weave a circle round the throne,
Maiden, mother, and crone.
A spell to find what has been lost, requiring maiden’s blood, mother’s milk, crone’s tears & a fierce will
Wait for my sign, Bella told her, but Agnes doesn’t know what sign she’s waiting for. In the stories, witches were always sending messages by raven or whispering secrets into the hollow curves of conch shells, so Agnes rattles around South Sybil, squinting out windows, looking for 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.