The Eastwoods are not screaming. The flames are wrapped like hands around them, tearing at their white wool dresses. Their chains are glowing red-hot—but their skin is whole and smooth, unblistered. Soon Gideon Hill will notice that his witches are not burning.
But they aren’t ready. They need just a little more time.
Agnes takes a deep breath that should sear her lungs, but doesn’t. She tastes cinders and ash and August’s witching on her tongue. She thinks of Eve bundled tight in his arms, bathed in the light of her mother’s burning, and thinks: Listen close, baby girl.
She shouts into the night, clear and taunting and fearless. “Is it a confession you want?”
Bella hears her sister’s voice but hardly recognizes it. It booms and cracks, unrestrained, raw with rage. The sound of it thrums somewhere in Bella’s bones, a plucked string too low to hear.
“I confess it freely, Mr. Hill: I am a witch.”
The jeering crowd falls still at the sound of her voice. They stare up at the flames with wary faces, like hunters who hear their prey thrashing in the bracken, wounded but still dangerous. Gideon Hill stands very still on the balcony.
Bella feels the scaffold shudder beneath her feet as if someone is climbing it, as if they’re attempting something very daring and heroic without which their entire plan would collapse. Three bless and keep her.
“I am a witch.” Agnes shouts it a second time, louder, flinging her voice into the night. “And so are my sisters, and so will be my daughter and my daughter’s daughter.” Her voice roughens at the mention of Eve, as if the collar around her throat has constricted.
Behind them comes the sound of footsteps, then the whisper of words and the sizzle of saltwater spat on hot iron. Their chains crackle with unnatural rust. Their collars boil at the touch of witchcraft.
Bella bites her cheek until she tastes blood, but Agnes doesn’t seem to feel her collar at all. Her head is tilted back against the stake, her eyes closed, her voice strong. “And so is every woman who says what she shouldn’t or wants what she can’t have, who fights for her fair share.”
Every eye is on Agnes, transfixed. No one notices the fourth witch standing on the scaffold, singing her song to avert unwanted eyes. No one notices their chains and collars thinning and flaking, turning brittle as old bone.
Agnes gives a contemptuous twist of her shoulders, like a woman shrugging off an unwelcome touch, and the chain snaps. She steps forward, feet bare and unburnt on the blackened wood, hair dancing in the flames, and Bella hears the rushing sound of several hundred people drawing breath together.
She’s surprised to feel a pang of pity for them: they thought they were in the kind of story where the wicked witches were caught and burned at the end, where all the little children were tucked safely into bed with the smell of smoke in their hair. It must be upsetting to discover themselves in the kind of story where the witches make friends with the flames instead, where they snap their chains and laugh up at the stars with sharp teeth.
Agnes lifts her arm and the fire wraps around her naked flesh like golden armor. She points at Gideon Hill where he watches from the balcony, his face twisted, his mouth half-open to snarl orders to his Inquisitors over the wild barking of his dog. Grace Wiggin still clings to his arm, looking at Agnes with horror. But there’s a sliver of brightness in her eyes, as if a small, treacherous part of her is glad to see a witch walk out of the flames.
Bella’s throat is blistering beneath the thinning collar, each rust-flake searing her skin where it falls. She can’t see Cleo standing beside her, but she hears her voice whispering in her ear. “Hold on, love, it’s almost done—London Bridge is falling down, falling down—”
Agnes is still pointing at Hill. Bella can only see the back of her head, but she can sense the vicious, delirious grin on her face. “I am a witch, Gideon Hill.” Her voice is low, dangerous, the twitch of a cat’s tail before it pounces, the final circle of an osprey before the plunge. “And so are you!”
As she says it, several things happen one after the other, like playing cards in a collapsing house.
Their witch-collars fall away from their necks, reduced to nothing but rust and malice. Bella can sense her sisters’ souls singing loud through the binding between them and magic seething again on the other side of everything.
An owl and an osprey appear in the smoke-hung sky, black as spades or hearts, and the first true screams ring through the square.
Gideon Hill shouts orders. White-and-red Inquisitors surge toward the scaffold just as most of the crowd scrabbles away. They clash into one another without noticing the knots of people who aren’t moving at all. Who are standing like stones or sentinels, watching the fire. Waiting.
Bella stumbles away from the stake and sags into Miss Cleo Quinn’s arms.
“What happened to your ring, woman?” Cleo murmurs into Bella’s hair. “I let you out of my sight for ten minutes.”
“It’s your fault, really, for letting me out of your sight.”
“I don’t make the same mistake twice.” Cleo’s hand finds hers and holds it so tightly her knuckle-bones creak.
Juniper limps free of the fire, raises her arms high, and laughs. It’s a raucous, devilish laugh, the laugh of the crow as it raids the cornfield, the trickster as she weaves her web. Bella catches the wild edge of her smile as she looks out at the crowd
“I believe my cue is coming, love,” Bella whispers. “Did you bring the wandwood?”
Cleo presses a thin strip of holly into her palm just as Juniper shouts a single word.
“Hemlock!”
Bella steps forward
