The boy and his mother and father lived happily ever after. For a time.
Remember, remember till the fifth of December!
I know no reason why a single season
Should ever be forgot.
A spell to recall what is forgotten, requiring saltpeter & a single tear
James Juniper thought Gideon Hill was just like her daddy: a cowardly shit of a man who only felt whole when he was breaking something.
Now she thinks he’s more like her. Or what she might have been if she never found Agnes and Bella again, never stood arm in arm with her Sisters or held Eve tight in her arms: a vicious, broken creature who knew how to survive and nothing more.
Gideon Hill is staring at the ceiling, his hands clasped loosely in his lap. His dog is staring straight at Juniper with those mournful black eyes. Juniper doesn’t figure that’s their natural color.
“No one’s ever guessed what she is.” Juniper says it softly into the cell, the air still rich and thick with storytelling.
“I hide her well.” Hill’s fingers stroke the iron collar at his dog’s throat and the dog flinches.
“I thought witches were friendly with their familiars.”
Hill shakes his head at the ceiling. “That’s what the stories say, isn’t it? But if you want real power you must abandon sentiment. You must learn to think of your familiar not as a pet or a companion, but as a tool. And if a tool fails to do what is necessary, if it resists its master’s hand—” He shrugs in a manner that’s supposed to look careless but doesn’t.
Juniper tries to imagine what kind of devilry you’d have to wreak before witching itself resisted you, before your own familiar bared its teeth at you. Was it when he first bound his soul to someone else, and stole their body for himself? Or was it even earlier, when he drove a grove full of starlings to their deaths?
Her eyes fall to the rubbed-raw skin beneath the dog’s collar, and she wonders if it’s more than it seems. The first witch-collar, perhaps, crafted by some way-back incarnation of Gideon Hill to control his wayward hound. Then she wonders what would happen if it were free.
Gideon is still looking upward, waiting patiently for her next question. Juniper asks it. “What happened? After the happily-ever-after?”
Gideon sighs. He lifts one hand and its shadow stretches and roils across the cell floor, digits and joints bending in unnatural shapes. “The words and ways this requires are . . . potent. They come at a price—power always does. This isn’t a matter of wrong or right, you understand, but merely the working of the world. If you want strength, if you want to survive, there must be sacrifice.”
That’s not what Mags taught them. You can tell the wickedness of a witch by the wickedness of her ways. “So who paid your price?”
He bends his neck to look directly at her, weighing something. “A fever spread through my parents’ village that first winter.”
The word fever rings in Juniper’s ears, a distant bell tolling.
“It was nothing too remarkable, except the midwives and wise women couldn’t cure it. One of them came sniffing around, made certain deductions . . . I took her shadow, too. And the sickness spread further. The villagers grew unruly. Hysterical. I did what I had to do in order to protect myself.” That line has a smoothed-over feel, like a polished pebble, as if he’s said it many times to himself. “But then of course the fever spread even further . . . I didn’t know how to control it, yet. Which kinds of people were expendable and which weren’t. I’m more careful these days.”
The ringing in Juniper’s ears is louder now, deafening.
An uncanny illness, the Three had called it. Juniper remembers the illustrations in Miss Hurston’s moldy schoolbooks, showing abandoned villages and overfull graveyards, carts piled high with bloated bodies. Was that Gideon’s price? Had the entire world paid for the sins of one broken, bitter boy?
And—were they paying again? I’m more careful these days. Juniper thinks of Eve’s labored breathing, the endless rows of cots at Charity Hospital, the fever that raged through the city’s tenements and row houses and dim alleys, preying on the poor and brown and foreign—the expendable. Oh, you bastard.
But Hill doesn’t seem to hear the hitch in her breathing. “People grew frightened, angry. They marched on my village with torches, looking for a villain. So I gave them one.” Hill lifts both hands, palm up: What would you have of me? “I told them a story about an old witch woman who lived in a hut in the roots of an old oak. I told them she spoke with devils and brewed pestilence and death in her cauldron. They believed me.” His voice is perfectly dispassionate, neither guilty nor grieving. “They burned her books and then her. When they left my village I left with them, riding at their head.”
So: the young George of Hyll had broken the world, then pointed his finger at his fellow witches like a little boy caught making a mess. He had survived, at any cost, at every cost. Oh, you absolute damn bastard.
“And your sister? Did they catch her, too?” But Juniper doesn’t think they did. Juniper thinks his sister escaped, retreated to the lonely tor of Avalon, and wrote herself into a dozen new stories. Until the day her brother came with an army at his back and burned her for the crime of not loving him enough.
“No.”
“Did
