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She’s asking: Aren’t you tired yet? Of being cast down and cast aside? Of making do with crumbs when once we wore crowns? She’s asking: Aren’t you angry yet?
“Witching and women’s rights. Suffrage and spells. They’re both…” She gestures in midair again.
“They’re both a kind of power, aren’t they? The kind we aren’t allowed to have.” The kind I want, says the hungry shine of her eyes.
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 river hawk, she thinks, all sharp angles and vicious curves, black as char. It looks down at the baby in her arms with the same fierce tenderness that Agnes feels, a love that has teeth and talons.
“You are a witch!” “Yes,” Agnes answers distantly. “And they should have thought of that before they took what was mine.”
She thinks how very tiresome it is to love and be loved. She can’t even risk her life properly, because it no longer belongs solely to her.
Mothers are supposed to be weak, weepy creatures, women who give birth to their children and drift peacefully into death, but the Mother is none of those things. She’s the brave one, the ruthless one, the witch who traded the birthing-chamber for the battlefield, the kitchen for the knife. She is bloody Boadicea and heartless Hera, the mother who became a monster.
She never believed in crone-stories, even as a girl. She determined long ago that the Crone was an amalgamation of myths and fables, an expression of collective fear rather than an actual old woman. Old women are supposed to be doting and addled, absent-minded grandmothers who spoil their sons and keep soup bubbling on the stove-top, but the Crone is none of those things.
She’s the canny one, the knowing one, the too-wise witch who knows the words to every curse and the ingredients for every poison. She is Baba Yaga and Black Anna; she is the wicked fairy who hands out curses rather than christening-gifts.
Bella knows her by her fingertips: ink-stained, tattooed with words in a dozen dead languages. A delica...
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Was that Gideon’s price? Had the entire world paid for the sins of one broken, bitter boy?
“People grew frightened, angry. They marched on my village with torches, looking for a villain. So I gave them one.” Hill lifts both hands, palm up: What would you have of me? “I told them a story about an old witch woman who lived in a hut in the roots of an old oak. I told them she spoke with devils and brewed pestilence and death in her cauldron. They believed me.” His voice is perfectly dispassionate, neither guilty nor grieving. “They burned her books and then her. When they left my village I left with them, riding at their head.”
