“And even if we could find Eve I don’t think we can save her. Hill is powerful, and not just in the usual way. He has followers, and these shadows that creep around the city—”
A stillness falls over the Three as she says the word shadows. Even their serpents stop coiling and twining, their hot-coal eyes fixed on Agnes. The Mother swears in a language Juniper thinks might be a dialect of Hell.
“Almost sounds like you’ve met him,” Juniper drawls.
The Maiden bares her teeth in an expression that bears no relation at all to a smile. “Oh, I’ve met him,” she hisses.
“He’s the man who bested us at Avalon,” the Mother growls.
“And he’s the man who burned us, after. Heard he got a sainthood out of it,” the Crone finishes. “Bastard,” she adds, reflectively.
Juniper thinks she’s never heard a silence quite like the one that follows: there’s a depth and coldness to it, a thoroughness that could only exist after sundown on the other side of nowhere, when six witches and their familiars have just learned they have an enemy in common.
“Shit,” she says. And then, more emphatically, “Shit.”
Bella rallies first, clinging to the last fraying threads of reason. “But how? There’s no such thing at the Fountain of Youth or the Philosopher’s Stone. How is he still alive? How are you alive?”
“We’re not, strictly speaking.” The Maiden strokes her adder with one white finger. “Alive, I mean.”
“I never liked being called the Crone. I’ve forgotten the name my mother gave me, but I’m sure it wasn’t that. And she’s no maiden.” The Crone points her chin at the Maiden, who smiles in a distinctly unmaidenly fashion.
“I am a Mother,” muses the armored woman. “But more, too.”
Bella resettles her spectacles. “But the spell to call back the Lost Way of Avalon. It required a maiden, a mother, and a crone, did it not?”
The Crone shrugs. “Every woman is usually at least one of those. Sometimes all three and a few others besides.”
Bella blinks several times. “So we weren’t called, then. Or—chosen.” Juniper figures she’s remembering the thing that drew them together that day, the tugging of the line between them.
The Crone makes a sound that can only be described as a cackle. She catches her breath, tries to answer, then breaks into another fit of cackles. “Chosen? If you three were chosen, it was by circumstance. By your own need. That’s all magic is, really: the space between what you have and what you need.”
Bella looks like a woman shuffling through the several dozen questions that occurred to her, but Agnes beats her to it. “What do you know about Gideon Hill?”
The Three look at one another, stillness settling back over them.
The Maiden lifts her chin, hair sliding back over pale shoulders. “More than anyone alive.”
The Mother’s eyes flick again to the milk-trails on Agnes’s blouse. “Enough to help you, I hope.”
The Crone heaves a long, humorless sigh. “Let us start from the beginning.”
nce upon a time there were three witches.
The first witch was a scholar of Samarkand who dedicated her life to the study of words and witchcraft, who mastered a hundred languages and a thousand potions, who consulted with princes and khans on two continents.
The second witch was a slave from the Zanj sold in Constantinople who used the witching of her ancestors and her captors to free herself and her daughters, who made her bloody way through the world as the commander of a band of mercenaries.
The third witch was a peasant girl from the Blackdown Hills, abandoned with her brother in the deep dark of the trees. The boy returned to his village some years later; his sister was never seen or heard from again, except as a green-eyed shadow, a rumor with white teeth.
They were, in short, three ordinary witches of their times. Perhaps a shade more desperate and a half-step more learned, but certainly not legends.
None of them would have been remembered at all if it wasn’t for the plague. A ghastly, uncanny illness that crept into every village and down every city street and left bloated bodies behind it.
Most witches helped where they could, but the sickness came quickly and killed quicker, and even the cleverest witch couldn’t save them all. This failure—all the people they couldn’t save and the husbands and aunts and neighbors they left behind, grief-crazed—became their undoing.
Rumors began to spread: that the plague was unnatural; that it was the work of women-witches, somehow; that such evil must be purged from the world. And when a hero arose, promising to be a light against the darkness, dressed in white but trailed by black shadows, they followed him.
George of Hyll was not a Saint then. He was merely a witch, no different than the witches he hunted—except that he was a man, and man’s power was God-given.
“But—how could a man work witchcraft?” Bella interrupts. The Maiden laughs at her. “You think magic cares what’s between your legs? Or how you do your hair?” Bella does not interrupt again.
His followers burned the books first, swallowing centuries of learning in seconds. Then George asked: What of the women who carry the words and ways in their skulls? Who will surely teach them to their daughters and sisters?
They came for the witches then. The hedge-witches in their caves and hollow trees, the midwives and soothsayers, the sybils and scholars. The witches fought them with every curse and jinx they knew. But the harder they fought the more frightened the people became, and the larger George’s armies grew. The witches burned beside their books.
What words and ways were preserved were slipped into songs and rhymes, folded into fables. Women sang them to their children and taught them to their sisters, and even the watchful neighbors and listening shadows thought nothing of it.
The purge continued. The world changed. The weeds and herbs grew wild on the hillsides, with no one to tend them; the trees and animals fell silent, with no one to speak with them; there were no more dragons seen on the winds of morning.
It wasn’t long until witches retreated to a few last strongholds: the Black Forest in Saxony, the drifting isle of Lemuria, a certain haunted fen in the south of England, sometimes called Avalon.
One night the Mother and the Crone staggered into that misty moor, battle-worn and hopeless, and met the Maiden. They knew by their familiars that they shared some kinship, by soul if not by blood, and they shared a meal around a fire that night.
And there in the wild woods, at the bitter end of the age of witching, the three of them began to plan.
The Maiden had a place: the deep woods, where the remains of a tower stood, well hidden.
The Mother had the strength to defend it, at least for a while.
The Crone had something worth defending: all her decades of study, all her words and ways. She wrote down every spell she remembered or even half remembered, and then slipped out into the world to gather every unburned book or surviving scroll she could find.
Word spread among the remaining witches, and women arrived every day with scraps of spells and charred recipes. In return the Three taught them as much witchcraft as they could: for hiding and hurting, for birthing and breaking, for surviving. Some of them stayed—to defend the tor, to ward the tower, to patrol the fragile borders of their half-secret kingdom—but more often they fled back into the countryside.