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Tell your tale and tell it true, cross my heart and hope to die, strike me down if I lie.
The oath for the Sisters of Avalon
She and Agnes are still wary with one another, careful as cats, but at this moment Beatrice is certain they are both wondering the same thing: whether there is anything in the world more sinister than their youngest sister in possession of an idea.
Ha
Whoever was standing in the hall must have left, because the light shines unbroken now. It’s only in the final blurred seconds before she closes her eyes that it occurs to Juniper that she never heard their footsteps.
Spooky
Moly and spite a woman make, May every man his true form take. A spell for swine, requiring wine & wicked intent
Miss Alexandra Pope.
Woman who wrote the spell just indicated
But his eyes are not playing tricks. On the plinth where Saint George once stood, proud and princely, there is now something lumpen and squat, vaguely shameful: a bronze pig, bearing a brand of three circles woven together.
A “modern-day coven,” he calls them, seeking to bewitch young maidens and seduce God-fearing husbands. (Just the reverse, Beatrice thinks, and then spends several minutes shocked at her own wickedness.)
Lol
What was lost has been found. Even the stars are not the stars I knew as a girl. Come soonest, my love. If we burn, let us burn together, S. Good
Where Tituba and Osborne and Good and the rest of them had worked their wonders and terrors, walking the streets with black beasts at their heels. Where men feared to tread and women feared nothing at all.
Mr. Thomas
Cleo's husband
“My sister did.”
Agnes sent Bella to St. Hale's?
And Beatrice watched her sister choose. I saw Beatrice with the preacher’s girl last Sunday.
But she must have only said that cause she thought Beatrice told their father about Agnes being pregnant. I don't think B did
“Surely trust is never truly broken, but merely lost.” Beatrice’s lips twist. “And what is lost, that can’t be found?”
Fee and fie, fum and foe, Green and gold, see them grow! A spell for growth, requiring buried seeds & fool’s gold
Mr. August S. Lee
Grace grew up in the Home for Lost Angels—the orphanage,” she clarifies, in response to Juniper’s blank stare, “before she was adopted at sixteen by an older gentleman who had no heirs and a generous inheritance from an uncle. A gentleman who is now a member of the City Council.”
Ooh I wonder if Agnes knew her?
Ferrum rubigine, pernay o chronoss. A spell to rust, requiring salt, spit, & considerable patience
It’s Gertrude Bonnin, the clay-colored woman from one of the Dakotas.
Miss Pankhurst
Oh she was the woman the Cady Stone mentioned
“Look, you should know before you get your heart broke: Miss Cleopatra has… other interests, and they will always come first.”
Intery, mintery, cutery-corn, Apple seed and apple thorn; Feather fine, five-fold Turn it all to gold. A spell for a golden apple, requiring five feathers & pricked thumb
A girl is such an easy thing to break: weak and fragile, all alone, all yours. But they aren’t girls anymore, and they don’t belong to anyone. And they aren’t alone.
Quote?
May she snatch me through the doors of Hell And take me down with her to dwell. A spell for opening certain doors, requiring stars & scars
“the Underground Railroad, of course.”
“The Daughters of Tituba.”
She decides she doesn’t care, that maybe trust is neither lost nor found, broken nor mended, but merely given.
It occurs to Beatrice for the first time that there’s a certain power in being nothing; she thinks of that old tale where the clever Crone tells a man her name is Nobody, and when asked who cursed him the man cries, “Nobody!” while the witch escapes.
“Men stop seeing you altogether, after a certain age.”
THE TALE OF THE WITCH WHO SPUN STRAW INTO SILVER
The mother—or, in some tellings, the Mother—followed the snake deeper into the woods.
The Mother from the Last Three?
Mirror, mirror, on the wall, Tell the truth, reveal all. A spell to see, requiring a mirror & a borrowed belonging
“Well.” Mr. Blackwell gives a slightly embarrassed cough. “With calling back the Lost Way of Avalon. I presume.”
What?! He knows lol
“I may not be a witch, Miss Eastwood, but I’m quite a tolerable librarian.”
Yay for librarians
Mr. Blackwell nods genially at his own knuckles. “As a man of God I disapprove, but as a mere man, well… I wonder sometimes where the first witch came from. If perhaps Adam deserved Eve’s curse.” His smile twists. “If behind every witch is a woman wronged.”
The chill quadruples. “They didn’t,” she says again. “Because if they did, their own tongue would’ve split in two as the words left their lips, and the whole city would know them for the snake they are.”
But she should have known no man ever loved a woman’s strength—they only love the place where it runs out. They love a strong will finally broken, a straight spine bent.
Then he merely waited while the iron grew hotter and hotter,
I wonder if he was using a type of magic on her
It’s the man standing with her in the prison cell, smiling his not-right smile, looking nothing at all like the stoop-shouldered bureaucrat Juniper met at the beginning of the summer.
So Gideon Hill is a witch?! Damn, very much like Salem
Hark, hark, The dogs do bark, When witches come to town. A spell to raise the alarm, requiring a gnawed bone & a strong whistle
Blood, milk, and tears.
The wayward sisters, hand in hand, Burned and bound, our stolen crown, But what is lost, that can’t be found?
Cauldron bubble, toil and trouble, Weave a circle round the throne, Maiden, mother, and crone.
A spell to find what has been lost, requiring maiden’s blood, mother’s milk, crone’s tears & a fierce will
Or perhaps for all of them: for the little girls thrown in cellars and the grown women sent to workhouses, the mothers who shouldn’t have died and the witches who shouldn’t have burned. For all the women punished merely for wanting what they shouldn’t have.
They came back for me. She feels something snap in her chest, as if her heart is a broken bone poorly set, which has to break again before it can heal right.
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.
Bella
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, requiring willow bark & silkweed
Witchcraft itself wearing an animal-skin, Mags used to say.
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.
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.
