Circe could feel her mothers’ anger. It sent a chill throughout her body, making her shiver. The odd sisters were screaming so loudly she thought they would bring the mansion down around them.

“How dare you share your blood—our blood—with Snow White!” screamed Lucinda, her eyes blazing with anger. “You can’t protect Snow White from us forever!” Then she turned to Snow White. “And you can’t have her! Circe is ours! As she was meant to be! As she was designed to be! Together we will bring darkness into this world and we will sing and dance to the sounds of screams from the land of the living!”

“Daughter, stop this at once!” It was Jacob. He stood there, serene and composed. Stoic and fatherly. Lucinda stopped cold. Her face crumbled into that of a little girl being scolded.

“Father?” Lucinda whispered, her voice so small that it seemed unnatural.

Circe had never seen her mother so passive. A calmness came over Lucinda, as if seeing her father somehow brought her out of her madness, if only for a moment. Martha and Ruby looked transfixed, their heads tilted to one side, their eyes too wide, and their mouths agape. Something about the man calmed her mothers, bringing them back to the edge of sanity and making Circe remember why she loved them.

“Calm yourself, my precious girl. All this rage and anger. You’re too much like your mother and grandmother. You must learn to quiet your souls,” Jacob cooed, trying to soothe his daughters.

“Don’t speak to me of my mother and grandmother! They cast us away, sending us off to live with the fairies and into the hands of the One of Legends! You realize that is how she got her name, don’t you? It wasn’t coined because of her greatness!” said Lucinda, her madness returning.

“We didn’t want to send you away! We had no choice, my girl! I promise you it was the last thing your mother and I wanted to do!”

Circe could see her mothers slipping into and out of sanity. She saw the madness washing over their faces, overtaking them like a foul demon, and releasing them again when they heard Jacob’s voice. It was the strangest thing she had ever beheld, her mothers’ transforming like this before her eyes, returning to their former selves. She wanted Snow out of the room, away from her mothers. Hazel, take Snow down to my mothers’ house. Hazel nodded, hearing Circe’s thoughts. While the odd sisters were still being lulled by Jacob, she took Snow by the hand and led her out of the room.

“Mothers, listen to Jacob, please!” cried Circe. “He loves you. I know he does. Just listen to him,” she said as Jacob slowly made his way to his broken daughters, approaching them tentatively, like they were wild beasts that could attack at any moment.

“Lucinda, my girl. Can I please hold your hand? I felt so ashamed after I shunned you and your sisters all those years ago, when you came to the dead woods. But I was afraid.”

“I didn’t know who you were that day,” said Lucinda. Her eyes welled with tears. “We didn’t learn who you were until we read Manea’s journals many years later.”

“My daughters, please sit down with me. There’s so much I have to tell you. Come, let us sit and talk somewhere we will be comfortable.”

Lucinda, Ruby, and Martha let Jacob lead them into the large dining room. Circe watched, stunned at how calm they were in his presence. How willing they were to do as he asked.

“Come along, my little girls,” he said as he helped them to their seats, pulling a chair out for each of them, treating them as cherished daughters with tender touches and a loving look in his eyes. Circe stood in the doorway with Primrose, amazed by the scene, waiting for something to go wrong, worried the odd sisters would fall back into delirium, worried Hazel wouldn’t get Snow White to the safety of the odd sisters’ house before the odd sisters lost their minds again. “My girls, sit down. I need you to listen to me. All of you,” he said, looking at them.

Circe and Primrose took seats across from the odd sisters, eyeing the doorway as they waited for Hazel to return. Jacob was sitting at the head of the table, and the stone harpies that dominated the room loomed over them. He was smiling at Lucinda, lost in the beauty of her face, lost in the memories of their mother. “You’re so much like them, my daughter, so much like your mother and her mother,” he said, looking at all the witches. “And when I was brought back to life as a servant to the queens of the dead woods, and you were made three, I loved you even more. But the ancestors were angry with your grandmother for her plots to extend her reach outside of the dead woods and became convinced you would do the same. They foresaw that you would destroy the dead woods if allowed to stay within its thicket. I see now how mistaken they were.” Jacob seemed to drift off into a place only he could see, a place they couldn’t follow him to. Perhaps he was remembering those days, or perhaps he was just happy to be in the company of his brood of witches.

“Your grandmother Nestis once tried to extend her reach beyond the dead woods, just as you are trying to do. She wanted to make the world black, to unleash her creatures on the many kingdoms, but the ancestors stopped her and forced your mother to give you to the fairies. They convinced her it was the only choice.”

“But why didn’t you fight to keep us here? Why didn’t Mother?” Lucinda asked. She seemed like a lost, lonely child, not the terrible witch she had become.

“We did, my girl, we did! But your mother wasn’t strong enough. Not yet. She hadn’t come into her full powers, and by the time she was strong, she believed the ancestors. She found herself fearing you as much as the ancestors had. But I see now we should have kept you here, kept you close. We should never have unleashed you on the many kingdoms only to cause havoc and destruction! If it were up to your mother and I, you would have ruled here after your mother passed, not Gothel, not that poor wretched child, or her sisters here, as much as I love them.”

“Then why didn’t you tell us all of this when we visited here?” asked Ruby, not looking as convinced as her sister Lucinda that her father was telling the truth.

“Because, my girl, I believed the ancestors. And your mother believed them. I thought you would be the ruin of this place. I was bound to protect Gothel, as I am bound to protect all queens and future queens of the dead, and to keep my mistresses’ secrets.” Jacob gathered the odd sisters’ hands and took them into his own. “Oh, my poor girls, you have been wandering the many kingdoms lost, forever searching for your true home, acting out your nature, the nature you inherited from your mother and her mother before her.”

Circe sat quietly, listening to Jacob. He was right. It made sense that her mothers would want to create a daughter in the same fashion their own mother had. But they had gone about it the wrong way. They had given too much of themselves away. They had lost too much.

“If you had been raised here, you would live within the confines of the dead woods. Here you would have had a purpose, a place to rule. The ancestors never should have tossed you into the unsuspecting world, where you are just chaos and destruction. Here you would have ruled after your mother.”

“You say our grandmother made us into three. What do you mean?” Martha asked, staring at Jacob with wide eyes. She seemed to be examining his every detail, as if the answer could be found in his face.

“What does he mean, Lucinda?” Ruby chimed in. They became manic, and Lucinda saw them spiraling into the same insanity that seemed to seize them more frequently than ever. “What does he mean?” they screamed, standing up and ripping at their black dresses and pulling at the feathers in their hair, tossing them onto the floor, and scratching at their own faces.

“Sisters, stop this at once! You will ruin the dresses I only just conjured for us before we left the place between. You don’t want to do that, do you? You don’t want to ruin your pretty new dresses.” Lucinda tried to calm her sisters in the best way she knew how.

Ruby and Martha stopped their fussing, but they still wanted to know what Jacob meant. “Lucinda, please tell us what he means. We don’t understand.”

“My dear sisters. My Ruby and Martha. I was born of our mother, Manea, and Jacob’s love, and Nestis, our grandmother, split me into three, creating you. She created you the same way we created Circe and helped Maleficent to create Aurora, don’t you see?”

“But it wasn’t quite the same spell, though, was it, Lucinda?” It was Hazel. She had been listening at the doorway, about to come in. Lucinda snapped her head around to look at Hazel.

“Another human with a witch’s blood! Blasphe-mous!” spat Lucinda. “At least Gothel was created by magic! We were her true sisters! Sisters in magic! You and your sister Primrose were taken from the village as babies by Jacob, did you know that? Taken away from your real parents, nasty human parents, and given Manea’s blood! To replace us! I should kill you where you stand!”

“You know that is impossible, Lucinda. We share the same blood. The blood of our mother!” Primrose stood up, clenching her fists around hexes, ready to defend her sister.

“Stop this, girls! Stop it at once!” Jacob’s voice boomed, but the witches wouldn’t hear him. Everything had fallen into delirium again. All the witches were wailing and screaming at each other.

“Did you know who you were when you came to us so many years ago? Is that why you took our sister Gothel from us and helped in destroying the dead woods?” asked Hazel, not hiding her contempt for Lucinda and her sisters.

“We took her because she was our true sister. Not like you. She was created with magic in the old way, as it was done for generations by the queens of the dead woods! We wanted her for ourselves. We wanted our family back!” hissed Lucinda, clenching her fists, digging them into her own flesh with anger.

“And then you abandoned her! You left her to go mad and wither to a husk while trying to bring us back, stringing her along for years, making her believe you would help her!”

“We wanted to help her! We tried. But we had to find a way to bring Circe back! We had to save Maleficent.”

“But if you had just used our mother’s spells, the spells used for generations by our ancestors, and not tampered with them, none of this would have happened. Instead you took our mother’s spell and made it your own! You twisted it and turned it into something destructive, like everything you touch, Lucinda. We loved you when you came to the dead woods, you know we did! You could have told us who you were and stayed to live here with us. We could have been happy together. We loved you so well, Lucinda. We were happy to have other witches in the dead woods. Someone to teach us magic. But you used Gothel, took our spells and twisted them, making them rebound on you and your dragon fairy-witch, and destroyed everything in the process!”

“It wasn’t our fault! It was a miscalculation! We are three, Maleficent was just one, that’s why it rebounded on her!”

“But don’t you see the same thing has been happening to you, just much more slowly? You gave Circe everything that was good within you, and because you are three, the degenerative effects simply took longer to destroy you! Don’t you see, Lucinda, you’re all going insane. My sister Gothel saw it. So did Maleficent and Ursula, they all said so in their missives. They saw it happening slowly over the years. And surely Circe sees it now. The only ones who don’t see it are you.”

“Don’t speak to us of Ursula! She is a traitorous witch and deserved her foul death!”

“That may be so, but she loved you well before she lost her mind, did she not? Don’t you see you have been sailing perilously close to the same depths of madness for many years? Please, Lucinda. Don’t do this. Don’t destroy everyone your daughter loves just to keep her close. With every person you hurt and life you destroy, you punish your daughter. You punish Circe.”

The odd sisters crumbled into madness once again. “No! Not punishment! She’s our light. Like Aurora was Maleficent’s. To have her near is to have our light back. The farther away she is, the less we can see clearly. We need our light. Otherwise we are in darkness and we are alone.”

“Mothers, I am here. No one is going to take me away from you,” said Circe, feeling she needed to say something to calm her mothers. But she couldn’t face a life by their side, not as they were now. And she was more certain than ever about what she had to do.

“These witches would have you to themselves! And so would Nanny, and the fairies! Everyone wants to take you from us! Nanny thinks she can make up for her past deeds by protecting you! Protecting you from us! But we won’t have it! We made a promise, a promise in hate that we are bound to fulfill! We are trapped in the promise we made in the land of dreams. We will have you for ourselves, Circe! We will rip from you everyone you hold dear so that you have only us!” Lucinda was raving, her hair wild and her face distorted by her mania.

The odd sisters stood together, raising their arms. Small balls of silver light appeared in their hands, crackling and emitting sparks throughout the room as they grew. The odd sisters squeezed the shining spheres, causing lightning to burst from their fists. It struck the walls and sent tremors throughout the entire mansion. The lightning struck the oldest parts of the mansion, bringing life to the stone carvings of night creatures that slumbered within. The creatures broke free, causing the mansion to crumble. The harpies that dominated the dining room came to life and crashed through the large picture windows, shattering the glass and falling to the courtyard below. Circe, Primrose, and Hazel screamed as Lucinda commanded the creatures of the dead woods.

“Night creatures, do my bidding! This is your queen! Seek out my enemies in the Fairylands and the many kingdoms, and destroy them all in my name!”

The mansion started to rumble and shake again; everyone in the room could hear the sounds of stone cracking and crashing to the ground. Jacob, Primrose, Hazel, and Circe all ran to the windows and saw giant stone dragons circling the dead woods. They saw the Gorgon statue come to life and walk through the courtyard toward a giant crimson spiral of light right at the boundary of the dead woods. Stone ravens and crows were circling above the Gorgon as more stone harpies crashed through windows, joining the other winged creatures that were making their way out of the dead woods.

Circe closed her eyes and sighed. She knew what she had to do. She’d known it since she started her journey, and only now would she have the courage to do it.