Quinn pulls hard on the iron ring of the tower door. It opens easily, as if some tidy caretaker has kept its hinges oiled all these centuries.
Bella and Agnes lay their sister on the cool flagstone floor with her hair haloed around her and her throat gaping like a second mouth.
Bella looks a little wildly into the shadows, hoping for a glowing chalice or an ivory wand or perhaps a magical potion labeled Drink me!
There is nothing. Only soft darkness cut with silver shafts of moonlight, and a faint, dry smell that makes Bella’s heart lift inexplicably in her chest.
Agnes’s voice is hesitant, swallowed by the vast dark above them. “Someone will see, soon, and then they’ll come for us. What do we do?”
But Bella isn’t listening. She is breathing in that smell—dust and parchment, leather and cotton, ink made from oil and oak-gall and soot—with a wild suspicion swelling in her chest.
She fumbles a matchbook from her skirt and drags the tip across the flagstones. The light flares, reflected in the deep amber of Quinn’s eyes, illuminating a too-small circle of flagstones. At the very edge of the circle Bella can make out the faint outlines of shelves lining the tower walls. The glass shine of jars. Long benches and scarred tables scattered with leaves and bones and nameless things, as if some untidy woman had been brewing witch-ways just hours before.
Bella stands, lifting the match higher in trembling fingers, wishing for a lamp or torch or even a candle.
From her shoulder, the owl ruffles its feathers. It stretches forward—Bella doesn’t know if a true owl could extend its neck to such an uncanny length, or if the rules are different for familiars—and plucks the guttering match from her fingers. It makes a neat toss-and-catch motion with its head and swallows the match whole, flame and all.
“Oh! Don’t—” Bella makes a helpless gesture, far too late. Golden light is blooming in the shadowed center of the owl, like a candle seen through smoked glass. It glows brighter, spreading until the owl shines the deep gold of a well-tended fire, only the very tips of its claws and wings still edged in black. It spreads its wings and takes luminous flight.
Three faces turn upward to watch as it spirals upward through the tower. In its shining wake they see an endless staircase that circles and twines along the walls, so aimless and haphazard it looks grown rather than built. Landings and ladders sprout from the stairs like branches, lustrous and worn smooth with use, and doors nestle in the shadows, although Bella can’t imagine they open onto anything but empty air. And nestled between them—in leaning stacks and on tidy shelves, in calfskin and cracked leather, their pages gold-limned by the owl’s light—there are books. More books than Bella has ever seen, in a lifetime devoted to books.
Her owl fades back to pooled ink as the match burns out. It roosts somewhere high above them, invisible but for the red gleam of its gaze.
Bella closes her eyes. There’s an odd bubbling in her chest. It takes her a moment to identify it as giddy laughter. The Lost Way of Avalon isn’t a miracle or a magical relic or a fanciful artifact. It’s merely the truth, written and bound, preserved against time and malice. It’s—
“A library,” Quinn breathes.
“A library?” Agnes is the only one of them still crouched beside Juniper, her fingers bunched in the damp white of her shift. “What the hell are we supposed to do with a library?”
Bella is drifting toward the nearest shelf, squinting at the moonlit label written in antique calligraphy. Jinxes—Mortal, perilous, purely amusing. The next label reads: Weatherworking—Storms, floods, locust-plagues, directly above Changelings—Made from clay, stone, dealings with fae folk. The one beneath that is Medicinal—Burns, bites, bruising.
Quinn reads them over her shoulder. Even in the dimness Bella can see the keen shine of her eyes, the hunger of her half-smile as she looks at the books. She is a woman who understands the value of words, especially the ones they don’t want you to say.
Bella reaches for a volume bound in cherry-wood with brass hinges along the spine. The title is burned into the cover in square capitals: THE BOOK OF MARGERY MEM, Being a Translation of her Curative Receipts.
Bella steps into a sliver of moonlight as she opens it, sees the lost words and forgotten ways preserved in a thousand tidy lines of ink. Witchcraft, pure as dragon’s blood and bright as stardust, unspoken for centuries.
“With this, Agnes, we could do more or less anything we pleased. Speak with wolves or bring stones to life or turn Mayor Worthington into a weevil.” She turns back to Agnes, still crouched over Juniper’s still body, white with worry. “But we’ll begin with saving our sister.”
Juniper doesn’t much miss her body; it’s a broken, burnt thing, so full of pain there’s hardly any room left for her. She drifts above it instead, watching with detached affection while her sisters fret over the red mess of her neck, peel the cotton shift from her bruised flesh. That Quinn woman stands above them with dried herbs in one hand and a book in the other, reading aloud.
Her words tug at Juniper. She tries to ignore them, but they reel her downward, closer and closer to the shipwreck of her body. Then her sisters take up the words in tear-streaked voices. One for sorrow, two for mirth, three for a funeral, four for birth—
Bella lays a sprig of green across Juniper’s throat, still speaking the spell, knocking her knuckles on the stones.
The words are a trap. They pin her inside her own body alongside every bruise and
