—oh hell—Three bless and keep us—weave a circle round the throne—
Distantly, she feels cool fingers across her brow, palms cupping her face. A thumb traces her cheeks and she turns blindly toward it. If she is going to die, let it be with the sweet frost of those fingers against her lips, the taste of ink and cloves on her tongue.
There comes a point when Bella knows she should turn back. It’s like wading into the creek after a storm, the water rushing around your ankles, knowing if you take another step it will pull you under.
Bella takes another step. She goes under.
She is fire. She is pain. She is a crack in the world through which something else—magic or God or the heat of every unanswered wish and impossible dream, burning eternal on the other side of everything—pours through.
She thinks she’s probably dying.
The something-else pauses. It considers her, this dying woman kneeling in a circle of spent candles, her lips still shaping the words that are killing her.
Somewhere very far away, an owl calls.
Bella opens her eyes. Through the haze of heat and tears she sees a shape gliding through the trees, silent as smoke, blacker than the blackest night. Its eyes are a pair of embers burning nearer.
Quinn gasps, but Bella’s lips crack into a smile, because—though she is burning, though she is failing—at least she has come this far. At least she has knelt in the bones of Old Salem and watched her familiar winging toward her.
Bella draws a breath. She begins again.
The wayward sisters, hand in hand—
Juniper hears the words echoing down the line, tastes them gathering in her mouth. She keeps her teeth clamped tight.
The spell needs her. She feels it boiling too hot, gathering like lightning with nowhere to strike. But if she speaks, the collar around her throat will kill her.
If she doesn’t speak, the spell will kill her sisters.
Let it go, for the love of Eve, save yourselves.
They don’t let it go. Because they are fools, because they are desperate, because they will not abandon her a second time.
Juniper closes her eyes and whispers several very filthy words.
She thinks a little bitterly of all the lofty reasons she wanted to restore the Lost Way—to reclaim the power of witches for all womankind, to break the shackles of their servitude, to set this whole damn city on fire. And in the end she’s going to do it because she wants to save her dumb-shit sisters, who are only doing it to save her in turn.
She wonders if all great acts are secretly done for such small reasons; she wonders if the cleaning lady will be the first to find her in the morning, facedown in the Deeps with a red ring around her neck.
She gathers her will around her—a wild, clawing thing, hungry and desperate and half-starved—and speaks the words.
The collar glows dull orange in the darkness, but the borrowed words still tumble from her mouth in a steady stream. The orange deepens to ruby, painting the cell in blood and shadow, and Juniper feels herself falling backward. The collar hisses as it hits the water. Her mouth fills with the sour taste of sewer. Her will doesn’t waver.
Something vast slides invisibly into place, a great key turning in a lock, and the world splits open.
Magic comes roaring through the crack, through the three women who stand in Salem’s past and present. Juniper feels the heat of it crack the cobbles beneath Agnes’s feet and blacken the earth beneath Bella; around her, the Deeps boil.
And the collar around her throat—built to punish street-witches and fortune-tellers, women with nothing but the half-remembered rhymes of their mothers—burns from red to white to black, and then crumbles into gray ash.
The heat fades.
Juniper feels the tower standing tall, rooted like a tree in the middle of New Salem. And she feels her sisters: Agnes, her forehead pressed to heat-cracked stone and her arms doubled around her belly, laughing and sobbing; Bella, held tight in someone else’s arms, too stunned even to feel relief. Alive, both of them.
Juniper lies back in the cooling waters of the Deeps and closes her eyes, listening to the distant beating of their hearts. It’s a peaceful, easy sound, as familiar as rain on the roof.
She thinks she might stay like this, suspended, drifting away from the burned-meat smell of her own flesh and the pain too huge to feel, but a voice is calling her. It’s a familiar voice, querulous and cracked with age. It tells her to wake up, to get on her feet.
Juniper doesn’t much want to, but she knows better than to disobey that voice. She wakes up; she gets on her feet. She tries not to feel the brush of air against the raw mess of her throat.
A ghostly hand touches hers. Juniper knows the hand is a fever-dream or a mirage, a product of the pain pulsing like wine through her skull—but it feels familiar. Warm and knob-knuckled, paper-fleshed.
The hand pulls her forward, folds her fingers around a broken shard of stone. Then it places the edge of the stone against the wall and drags it in a slow, grinding circle. Weave a circle round, Juniper thinks, drunkenly, and mumbles the words again. Her voice sounds wrong in her ears, clotted and strangled.
The stone falls from her fingers as she closes the circle. The scratched shape begins, very faintly, to glow.
She squints at it, stupidly, until the voice clucks its invisible tongue at her and says, Go on, girl.
Juniper places her palm inside the soft shine of the circle. The cell vanishes around her, whipping into the starlit night.
One for sorrow,
Two for mirth,
Three for a funeral,
And four for birth,
Five for life,
Six for death,
Seven to find a merry wife.
A spell for healing,
