Bella hesitates, looking at Cleo with her cloak rippling in the autumn wind and her hand tight around the glass jar. “Thank you,” Bella says softly, inadequately.
“I’ll wait for you back at South Sybil.” Cleo attempts one of her brash smiles, but it warps beneath the weight of worry. Her lips are warm against Bella’s wind-chilled cheek, and then she is gone.
A few moments later, after a whispered rhyme and a twist in the air, the fairgrounds are entirely empty. A passerby, had there been one, might peer through the iron gate and notice nothing but an unusual number of crows gathered on the electric lines and rooftops, and the faint, wild smell of ash and rose on the wind.
Agnes didn’t see Avalon after the fire, but she saw the bloody color of the sky as it burned and breathed the smoke of a thousand burning books. She isn’t surprised to find herself standing in a ruin, a charred door beneath her hand, a desolate tower looming above her.
Yet, beneath the dead smell of ash and fire, there’s a wetter, greener scent. She steps back from the door and sees tendrils of green snaking up the smoke-blackened stones: rose-vines, sprouting tiny buds and pale thorns. Grass reaches tender fingers up through the ash, and moss creeps like green velvet over the scorched roots of trees.
The only sounds are the rustle of wings and the pant of their breath and—is Agnes imagining it? Is her heart conjuring hope out of nothing?—the soft, secret murmur of women’s voices.
Juniper stomps her foot on the ground as if she is knocking on a door. “Hey, ghosts! Wake up!”
Bella makes a strangled sound. “They aren’t ghosts, June, I already said. And even if they were I hardly think shouting at them would be an effective—”
“Well, what’s your plan, then?”
Agnes answers, “Little Girl Blue.”
There’s a short silence, until Bella says tentatively, “I’m not sure—that’s a spell for rousing the sick or sleeping. I’m not sure it has the strength to wake lost souls from the dead, even if such souls do exist. Perhaps if we modified it somehow, added certain words or stronger ways—”
But Agnes is already bending to the earth, laying her palm among the soft green shoots of grass. “I don’t know that the words and ways matter all that much, Bell.” She hears Bella make a small, librarianish sound of objection. “Or maybe they matter, but not as much as will.” Agnes swallows once, hard. “And I promise you I don’t lack the will.”
Her sisters speak the spell with her. Little Girl Blue, come blow your horn.
There’s a little of Mama Mags lingering in the words, her sparrow-bright eyes and her tobacco-stained teeth. Agnes wishes she could call her spirit up from wherever it sleeps or drifts, just to cry once more against her breast.
Her sisters stumble at the final line, uncertain who they are waking, but Agnes fills in the gap. “Maiden, Mother, and Crone, awake, arise!” and whistles, sharp and high.
It’s a small spell, like Bella said, a hedge-witch’s cure for a drowsy babe or a touch of Devil’s-fever. But Agnes feeds her will into it until her skin burns and her blood boils, until the magic sinks down into the black earth of nowhere and finds—a silent pulse. A secret, a whisper.
The sisters fall silent. The heat wicks away from Agnes’s flesh.
“Did it work?” Juniper’s voice rings too loud in the hush of nowhere.
Agnes ignores her, still reaching after that secret whisper in the dark, but it’s gone. Vanished. Tears slick her eyes, blurring the gray-green earth before her.
But then: “Gone, all of it gone, after all that work—”
“—disgraceful, what they’ve done to the place—”
Voices, querulous and strange, their accents lilting and lisping. Just on the other side of the tower door.
One of them shushes the others, and then—“In our day eavesdropping could get your ears turned into parsnips and your lips sewn shut. Come in, if you’re coming.”
James Juniper is the wild sister, fearless as a fox and curious as a crow; she goes first into the tower.
Inside she finds a ruin: snowdrifts of ash and char, the skeleton of the staircase still clinging to the walls, greasy soot blackening every stone.
And three women.
There is a strangeness to them, a blurred shine like moonlight on moving water, but it seems to fade even as Juniper watches, until they are as real and solid as the stone beneath their feet.
The first thing Juniper thinks is that none of them look like their storybook illustrations. They’re either uglier or more beautiful, she can’t tell which, riddled with scars and specks and the small imperfections that divide the real from the make-believe. And in the drawings the Three are always a matched set, like a single woman caught and preserved at three different ages. Sometimes they’re sisters; sometimes they’re grandmother and mother and daughter.
Juniper thinks the women standing in the tower are unlikely to share any ancestor besides the first witch herself.
One of them is gnarled and golden, with white-streaked hair and delicate lines of script tattooed across the veined backs of her hands. Her robes are wide-sleeved and monkish, black as ink.
One of them is beautiful and brown, with scars stippling her cheeks and a sword strapped crosswise over one shoulder. Her armor is overlapping scales, shining black as old blood.
One of them is pale and fey, with ivory antlers sprouting from matted dark hair and yellowed teeth strung in a necklace around her throat. Her dress is ragged and torn, black as a moonless night.
She meets Juniper’s eyes and Juniper feels a thrill of recognition.
Juniper always loved maiden-stories best. Maidens are supposed to be sweet, soft creatures who braid daisy-crowns and turn themselves into laurel trees rather than suffer the loss of their innocence, but the Maiden is none of those things.
