I wasted time brooding, in the early days after my death. I dreamed about stepping into the flames, smoke filling my mouth, my throat, my lungs. About all the sights I’d never see and the hell I’d never raise. But then Bella and Agnes called the tower back out of nowhere, and I held my baby niece in my arms, and all those regrets faded like cheap newsprint in the rain.
The farm still isn’t mine, legally speaking; it’s still my dumbshit cousin’s name on the deed. But he isn’t around much these days.
At first he thought to rebuild Daddy’s house and rent it out, or at least lease the fields, but nothing ever came of his plans. Carpenters found their survey stakes missing and their tools rusted overnight; planted seed went bad and crops wilted without reason. Briars grew twice as tall and three times as thick as they did elsewhere in the county, obscuring the clay drive and rising like thorned walls along the borders, and in the end my cousin threw up his hands and left my land alone.
So there was no one around to notice three women and three black birds slinking through the woods. No one to see the tower appear on the back acres, lit by stars from another time and place, covered in the burnt bones of rose-vines. (Bella fretted sometimes about leaving Avalon in Crow County, and suggested they find a place even more remote and defensible, but I wanted to stay home, and my sisters don’t deny me much of anything these days.)
I rarely wander far from the tower. I can, but I feel thin and anxious when I’m away too long, like a poorly knit shawl that might unravel at any moment. And I never lack for company. Bella and Cleo visit to help Agnes or bring supplies, sitting side by side to write by the fire, their silence interspersed with heartfelt swearing and the scratching out of unsatisfactory lines.
Agnes and August stay with me when they aren’t out teaching witchcraft to women and workingmen. Sometimes they leave Eve behind them, who generally leaves me feeling outnumbered and surrounded, although there’s only one of her.
Then there are the others my sisters bring with them. Stragglers and lost girls, outcasts and outlaws. Girls running from their suitors or fathers or uncles or neighbors; from weddings and boarding schools and convents; from desperation and despair and the siren call of wading into rivers with stones in their pockets.
I give them a place to hide and to rest, to gather the frayed ends of themselves. And sometimes, if they ask, I give them more. I teach them which herbs to pick and which words to say, which spells work best on the Milk Moon and which require the heat of summer. I teach them every bit of witching Mags taught me and every spell Bella and Cleo drag back, and send them out into the world like thistleseeds tossed into the wind. I hope they might take root and grow tall, thorned and beautiful.
I suspect they will. Already I can feel the world shifting around me, changing like a riverbank beneath rising water. The papers Bella brings home talk about burning factories and brutal men found dead, about a sewing circle caught spreading seditious spells and a Colorado mining town where no man dared to tread. Out west the Indian Wars are going poorly—or well, according to my line of thinking—and there are rumors of rebellion in Old Cairo.
I guess something rose from my ashes, after all. Makes me wonder if maybe those phoenix stories were never really about birds in the first place.
The backlash will come one day, the way it always does. I know the world won’t change easy, that more women will burn before it does, but at least I got to see the beginning. Bella says I could linger as long as I liked, being dead and all.
I don’t figure I’ll stay longer than is natural. One day when Eve is long grown and my sisters grown old, when perhaps the lost girls come less often to visit me because the world is less cruel, I’ll just lay myself down to rest beside the Maiden and Mother and Crone. The Three will become Four and the Eastwoods will fade into myth and rumor and fire-lit witch-tale.
It’s dusk now. Very soon the air will twist and two women will appear on either side of me. Their cheeks will be flushed with the heat of witching and their cloaks will twist in the autumn wind that still blows in Avalon, even in springtime. One of them will be tall and narrow and clever-looking, eyes bright behind her spectacles; one of them will be sweet-faced and sturdy, a baby clinging tight to her chest.
I will smile up at them and see for a moment not my sisters but as the first notes of a half-familiar song, the first lines of a story that has been told before and will be told again:
Once upon a time there were three witches.
Acknowledgments
If I were to tell you the tale of writing this book, it would go like this: Once there was a girl with a story she wanted to tell. She’d told stories before, so she set sail boldly. Very soon she found herself lost at sea, besieged by plot twists and broken arcs, murky metaphors and shifting themes. She had the words, but she lost her way and her will.
Fortunately, she wasn’t alone. She had her agent, Kate McKean, to answer even the most dramatic late-night emails with common sense and comfort. Nivia Evans, her editor, to see the story she was trying to tell and help her chart a course toward it. Lisa Marie Pompilio to make it beautiful; Roland Ottewell and Andy Ball
