A small, sorry silence follows, while they listen to the susurrations of ash, the hollow howl of wind through the windows.
Agnes breaks it. “Gideon Hill.” She says his name carefully, the way a woman might stroke the edge of a fresh-sharpened blade. “And Saint George of Hyll. They’re the same man?”
“The same soul, at least,” the Crone allows.
“How?”
The Three exchange a look that Juniper recognizes: it’s the way three sisters look at one another when they’ve caused a great deal of trouble.
“We should have known,” says the Crone. “He watched us work our final spell. When the tower followed us into the dark he understood what we’d done. He was a formidable witch himself, by then, enough to try a binding of his own.”
The Maiden’s lip slides out from beneath her teeth. “But we weren’t thinking about immortality! We were just trying to survive, we never meant—”
“It doesn’t matter what we meant.” The Mother’s eyes are on the clenched-fist shape of Agnes’s face. “The first time we were called back into the world they told us George of Hyll had died a decade before and been sainted shortly after. But then we saw him. He wore a different face and a different name—Glennwald Hale, an Inquisitor and a churchman—but still we knew him.”
“We’d shown him the secret of bound souls. And he’d realized he could tether his soul to anything he liked, not just stones or roses or books.” The Crone’s snake slithers from her wrist to her throat, sliding its obsidian cheek against hers in a gesture that looks almost like comfort. “He bound himself to living bodies, one after the other. All he needed was the ashes of the body he was leaving and something from the body he was stealing. And enough will to stamp out the soul still living in it, I suppose.” She touches her familiar’s head. “I imagine he preys most often on the young and defenseless, to ease the binding.”
Juniper feels abruptly sick, like she’s turned over a log and found something foul and dead beneath it. She remembers the stories she heard about the dreamy, bookish boy whose favorite uncle died when he was young. How he changed after that, grew less dreamy and more calculating. How he asked his teachers to call him by his middle name: Gideon.
Juniper wonders how it felt, to have an ancient spirit steal your will, colonize your body and march it around like a wooden puppet. She pictures the long line of bodies stretching behind him, plucked like ripe fruit and hollowed out from the inside, discarded as easily as apple peels. And what happened to the souls he stamped out? Did they fade when their bodies died, or were they dragged along from corpse to corpse, trapped in a hell of his making?
“Bastard.” Her voice is a rasp, twice-burned. “So he’s just been hopping from kid to kid, getting a little smarter and a little meaner every time—”
“Gaining power, gaining witchcraft, and . . .” Bella gives a little gasp. “Covering his own tracks. Stealing records and burning books, fading whatever words and ways still remain.” Her tone makes it clear that she includes this among his most insidious crimes.
Agnes hasn’t blinked or flinched. She remains stone-faced, implacable. “Yet he’s still scared. What is he afraid of?”
“Same thing every powerful man is afraid of.” The Crone shrugs. “The day the truth comes out.”
“The day he gets what’s coming,” says the Maiden.
The Mother meets Agnes’s eyes and Juniper sees something pass between them, the gleam of a tossed blade. “Us.”
Agnes feels her lips curving for the first time since her daughter was stolen. It isn’t her usual smile—her mouth feels over-supplied with teeth and her jaw aches—but there’s a furious glee filling the hollow place her heart left behind it.
“And why’s that?” It’s nearly a purr.
“Because he burned us but our souls rose from the ashes, and he knows it. Because we know exactly what he is, and how to end him.” The Crone’s smile is subtle poison, the kind that has no taste or smell. “Because any binding may be broken.”
“Tell me how.”
“Same way you’d break any other binding: break the ways. Kill whatever body he’s wearing these days—”
Juniper makes a rasping sound in her throat. “If you’re telling us the secret to killing him is to kill him, I swear by Saint Hilda I’ll hex you.”
Bella and the Crone swat her simultaneously.
“—then banish his soul,” the Crone continues frostily. “I imagine it will want to linger even without the binding, out of habit and spite.”
“And how do we banish a soul?”
“We wrote the words especially for him,” says the Maiden. “After we saw what he’d become. But he was strong by then, wrapped in stolen shadows, and no witch ever got near enough to work the spell.”
“I will,” Agnes says. “Teach them to me.”
The Maiden does. Agnes is surprised to find that these words, too, are familiar, a children’s rhyme made eerie by the burned tower and slanting moonlight. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Georgie together again.
Agnes repeats the words to herself, rolling them over her tongue. They taste like grave-dirt and vengeance, like death long overdue. Pan’s claws flex around her shoulder, pricking her flesh.
You are not invincible, Gideon Hill.
Bella pushes her spectacles up her nose. “What about the three of you? If you bound yourselves to Avalon, and Avalon was burned, why haven’t your souls been sundered?”
The Crone’s eyes don’t twinkle—twinkling eyes are for soft, grandmotherly women who bake gingerbread and crochet scarves—but they glint. “Did you think I bound my everlasting soul to books? To paper and ink?” The glint sharpens.
