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.
The Three had the help of their own familiars, too, as if magic itself did not want to be forgotten. When the tower was complete their snakes twined their bodies together into three circles and burned the mark into the tower door. The Three found afterward that they had a way back to the tower no matter how far they traveled.
They traveled very far indeed. The Crone spent weeks in the baked-earth halls of the mosque at Djenné. The Mother completed the three tasks set by the librarians at Constantinople. The Maiden visited Cambridge and contrived to steal an entire room of their library, which she affixed to the tower.
But fewer witches found them over the years. The Three tasted ash on the wind and knew George of Hyll was coming.
Later, the storytellers would say the Three lost the battle at Avalon. That Hyll and his Inquisitors dragged them screaming to the stake and broke the power of witching forever after.
But if the Three—the cleverest witches of their age, battle-tested and canny—had wanted to escape, they would have. Instead, they waited.
They waited with their familiars at their feet and words on their lips. They fought George of Hyll for three days and three nights, while their daughters and sisters and friends vanished into the hills. And when they came to the end of their strength they carved their promise on the tower door—Maleficae quondam, maleficaeque futurae—and knelt before Hyll with bent necks.
He burned them the next day, back-to-back, the flames dancing yellow and white in his eyes. They did not scream as they burned: they sang. About roses and ashes and falling together, hand in hand.
Because those words had never been spoken before and were no spell he knew, and because men are fools when they think they’ve won, George of Hyll ignored them. He didn’t understand that the Three had spent years wading deeper and deeper into witchcraft, studying spells from every nook and cranny of the world. That they had begun to wonder where the words and ways came from in the first place, and write their own.
The spell they sang that night was a binding, far stranger and bolder than any worked before. They bound their souls one to the other and then to their beloved library. As their bodies burned, their souls fled to the other side of elsewhere—and took Avalon with them. They took the tower and the books, the trees and stars, even the tricksome autumn wind.
George raged at their escape. For years and years he scoured the earth for any sign of the Last Three Witches of the West or the Lost Way of Avalon. He found rumors and songs, bits of rhyme, but he never saw that black tower again.
The Three waited. They studied and argued and wept, despaired and dreamed, undying, and eventually they lay themselves down to sleep. They let the shape of themselves coil down among the black roots and dark earth, slipping between stones and the brittle pages of books. Souls were never meant to linger for centuries.
But they did not let themselves fade entirely. They waited, still clinging to the slimmest thread of themselves, for the day when they would be called back to the world. When what was lost would be found again, and witching would return.
It never came.
Lady bird, lady bird, fly away home.
A spell for flight, requiring rowan & starlight
If James Juniper closes her eyes she can pretend she is a little girl again, curled with her sisters on the rag rug beside the stove while Mama Mags tells them tales. She can pretend it’s all make-believe and myth.
Until Bella says, tentatively, “But that isn’t so. Avalon was called back, wasn’t it? Before us?”
The Crone almost smiles at her. “Well, it wasn’t much use to hide the library if no one could ever find it again. We left the words with our daughters before they fled, so they could call us back when the world was safe again. It never was, but still they called us from time to time.”
“Old Salem,” Bella whispered.
“And Wiesensteig in the fifteen-sixties, before that, and the Auld Kirk Green at the end of the century. Navarre in the early sixteen-hundreds. Anyplace there were at least three witches with the will. But over the centuries there were fewer and fewer women who remembered the words and ways. The age of witches was nothing but stories now, and we listened to those stories twist and darken over the years, until every witch was a wicked one.”
The Crone’s smile is still in place, but the corners are twisted and mournful. “He nearly got us in Salem. Tituba and her coven banished us back to nowhere just before the flames took us.”
Bella presses her hand to her skirt pocket, where Juniper can see the square shape of her little black notebook. “I found the words written in the Sisters Grimm, half-faded . . .”
“The Grimms were clever girls,” says the Mother, fondly. “Jacobine and Willa called the tower and roused us from our sleep long after Old Salem, but they weren’t interested in powerful words or ways—perhaps they knew the trouble it would bring, by then. They just wanted our stories. Made a nice profit for themselves, I heard.”
“No one has
