THE CITY OF MY BIRTH appeared as a faint speck growing larger as the boat churned up the water between our location and destination. I fought against the urge to dive overboard and swim to shore. That I could not reach my mother nor determine the location of the men we had followed so far south to begin with had made my sleep as restless as my companion’s. It was not what lay behind me that troubled me so much as it was the unknown before us.
Hawking’s spirits improved the further north we carried, as if we were on opposite ends of a scale. By the time the captain gave the order to let down the gangway, I was all but delirious with need, pushing my way through the crowd of passengers.
“Christ on a cross, would you slow your ass down?” Hawking said as I hurried to the main road, leaving him to drag what few effects we still had in our possession after the sale of the horses to pay for the boat ticket.
I did not slow down. I thrust my arms in the air to catch the attention of a waiting stagecoach driver and told him where we needed to go and how quickly we needed to do so.
The driver gave my wild hair a curious look, but did not question me further. He took the luggage from Hawking, who helped me into the back of the coach, and I cannot recall what we discussed, if anything at all. All I can tell you is the city of my childhood passed by as a blur I had no interest in sharpening.
By the time the coach pulled up to the roadhouse’s front drive, I had all but made myself sick with anticipation. The sickness that afflicts many women in the early days of their pregnancy had never bothered me, and it was not come to haunt me in the later ones. All I had left in this world, my family and my history and the things I had left behind in legacy, the roadhouse had kept safe.
Its front door was wide open, though the curtains for the saloon were drawn and the sign flipped to say CLOSED.
Without waiting for Hawking, I scrambled down from the coach and ran up the dirt path leading from the paved street to our porch. In my wake I left a trail of little wildflowers, which I know caused my companion to heave a hard sigh. I paid his consternation no mind. What mind I had left was on the other side of the threshold.
As I passed through it, I noticed the door’s glass inlay was cracked from one corner to its opposite. The CLOSED sign hung askew.
I called for my mother before my feet met the welcome mat, and I heard a commotion that would have provoked me to draw my weapon had I thought to bring one with me. All I had were my bare hands, and I felt the tingling in my fingers that forewarned an invocation of my Will. Then the voices became familiar to me, and I recognized the cadence of the footsteps.
Eva, her belly grown bigger than mine with her third pregnancy, stepped out of the kitchen as quickly as she could and still maintain her balance. Her hands took hold of my elbows as if in preparation to embrace me, but her eyes were wild and brimming with salt water.
“Oh, thank Cailleach you’re alive,” said my cousin. She embraced me, as close as two women carrying children can.
“What’s happened?” I asked. “Where’s my mother?”
“She’s not here, Lily.”
Only through my imagination could I see the roadhouse as it should have been. As it was, the bar glittered with shattered glassware. I saw the man in black gripping your gran by the scalp and hauling her across it, glass chewing up her face. I saw blood on the ground and imagined him savaging her with his ungloved fists. I saw chairs and rope and looked away.
When I returned to the present, Eva was standing firm to keep me from passing down the corridor.
“What’s in the kitchen, Eva?”
Eva shook her head no.
“Eva, what’s in the kitchen?”
I looked to the threshold, where Hawking had dragged our luggage and now stood like a creature of the night, unable to enter without invitation. I left Hawking in the entryway, moving my distraught cousin aside and following the familiar corridor past the stairwell and the saloon’s double doors until I came to the sunken kitchen, which smelled of rendered fat and singed hair. My cousins Agnes and Charlotte stood around the great table in the center of the kitchen with horror having drained the color from their cheeks.
Laid out in the center of the table were limbs. Two arms and two legs, slender and discolored, with a long silver braid serving to close the pentagram. I could not help but gasp at the sight and cover my mouth with my hand, and I could not help but cry out when the realization hit me. The limbs were older and thinner than I remembered, but I recognized them. They were those of my aunt Griselda.
“Lily,” said Charlotte, her voice wavering but her tears yet unshed.
“Where’s the rest of her?” I asked.
“What?”
“Her HEAD, Charlie. What did he do with her head?”
Charlotte shook her head to indicate she did not know, and I let the matter lie. Your cousins knew little more than I did.
It would not occur to me until later, when I confided as much in Hawking, that my travels and years on the frontier had toughened me. Agnes, with her interest in men, and Charlotte, with her interest in maps and far-flung places, were lacking my experience, and Eva had always wanted to grow up and become a mother herself above all else.
I love my cousins dearly. Their lives are their own, and though we do not want the same things, they are tough and smart and kind, in their own ways. Knowing they will be influences in your life, that you and Eva’s sons will grow up together, gives me comfort I know I do not deserve.
All the same—our childless, tale-weaving, sharp-tongued auntie Griselda was dead. Your gran was captured, strung up, enduring treatment I could only imagine. We had to do something.
As the eldest daughter, when her mother died, your gran moved out of her bedroom at the back of the house and into the carriage house on the other side of the garden. If I had stayed, I would have inherited the room. I do not know whose room it was, in my absence. It was made up as if in expectation of a guest, but it neither appeared nor felt as though anyone truly lived in it.
I felt the eyes of my cousins on my back as I passed through the garden where I had spent so many sunny afternoons as a child, several of the shrubs and fronds trampled under the intruders’ heavy steps. Agnes called after me, and I ignored her. I let myself into the carriage house, tidy and full of my mother’s energy, candles and cobwebs and bundles of herbs in their proper places.
She had left a nightgown at the end of the tightly made bed, doubtless with the intent to hang it in her wardrobe before the interruption tore her away from her routine. I picked up the nightgown, burying my face in its fabric and breathing deep in the hopes of catching a particle through which I could focus my search.
Your Nana Catriona is the strongest woman I know. She is built tall and fine, though her life’s pursuits have added toughness to her skin and her bones. Her hair retains some of its red even in her advancing age. She would be able to send a message even with great interference, while I had to find a conduit through which to reach her. That she had not reached out to me in all this time left my stomach awash in ice water. For the first time since stepping off the boat, I felt fear of a sort I will do everything left in my power to ensure you never, ever, encounter.
One day you will see the Library. It is intact, even after everything that has come to pass, and every bit as grand as it was when I was a child. Grander perhaps for its having survived this assault. But at that moment, when I passed through the doors and came to stand in the same spot in which we all stood when beginning to question where we would begin in our pursuit of knowledge, I felt two warring presences.
My mother’s presence was the strongest here, she being the eldest of our mothers and spending the most time here, but I felt it at war with that of the man in black. My revulsion intensified as I looked upon the chaos he had made of our unspoken order.
When I was young, perhaps the age you are now reading this, I could reach only the lower three shelves, and I believed the Library to be far grander than it appears to me in adulthood. Thick curtains kept the sun and its rays from damaging the pages, some of which had survived since our line first began hundreds of years ago, and though the interior was dim and packed full of furniture and instruments, not to mention books, it felt vast rather than cramped.
There in one corner was Aunt Lucinda’s abandoned altar to the nature spirits, whom industry threatened to drive out forever. There in another was Aunt Griselda’s, her tarot cards stacked neat, her minerals stacked even neater still. A spider had spun a web over her table, connecting a lamp to a bookshelf. I know it was not new—Griselda had treated spiders as messengers. My mother did not keep her instruments in the Library. Hers were behind the bar, in the attic of the carriage house. This place was where group Work happened.
As a girl, my awareness of the Library ended at eye level, until I realized I could use the power of my mind to remove books from the higher shelves if I did not want to take the time to position and climb the ladder. When I sat at the table centered between the only set of windows in the space, I treated it as a desk and not as the altar that it truly is. The space smelled of ashes and salt and time, of sage and lavender and the binding glue that holds books together for so many centuries.
By smell alone, I could almost believe I had come home. My other senses dispelled that notion. The man in black had let himself in, and he had stood in this most sacred of spaces, and I could tell without even beginning to look around that he had taken something we could not replace.
I began to make my way around the exterior of the Library, working shelf by shelf. My fingers drifted over titles I had once memorized, tomes about the power of True Names when dealing with adversaries, about the uses of herbs and minerals and elements and blood. Spells for fertility, spells for good fortune. Spells to affect the family, spells to affect the community, spells to bargain with the spirits and spells to bind them.
I found the dark spellbook my mother had warned me away from as a younger girl, the book written in Latin that had damned my ancestor Eimhir. Dark not because it dealt with hexes but because the spells violated so many natural laws. They could prolong life, return life, destroy life. But all that alteration came with a price. It was the darkest book in the Library. The rest of them, whether written in Latin or Gaelic or Arabic, as some of the very oldest books were written in, were books of theory and practical application. Which components worked for the caster who had taken pen to paper. For a moment I was a girl again, all of her future awaiting her still, rather than a widow.
This is where my mother sat me down when she had learned of my indiscretion in the schoolyard, encircling me in salt that no wandering spirits would take interest in my practice, and refusing to let me break the circle until I had demonstrated restraint. I would have made a room like this in our house on the prairie, would have let your father glimpse it on the occasions when his curiosity overtook him, but would never let him inside. He would never hear giggling or singing within its walls, for I would teach you early and young to be reverent in a space full of books and scrolls. Instead you will see the books and scrolls on your own, and you will know what it is to learn the history of witches and pagans from papyrus reams that survived the burning of the Library of Alexandria, and you will know why it is that men and the mundane are not allowed in such places in our family.
I was on the opposite side of the Library when the door groaned open, and I turned in preparation to fight before realizing it was Hawking.
“Good God,” he said.
“You don’t belong here,” I told him. Then I realized it was not the Library itself that had drawn his words and followed his eyes to a high shelf.
There sat the head of your aunt Griselda.
In spite of Hawking’s protests, I drew and climbed the ladder. The monster had wrenched open her jaws and crammed an old page into her mouth. After a moment to ensure I would not lose either the contents of my stomach or my composure, I descended the stairs of the ladder with one hand full, Hawking helping me down the last few rungs. I collapsed to the floor and held your great-aunt’s head in my lap, refusing to cry.
I cannot now be certain of the exact wording of the page I extracted from Aunt Griselda’s mouth, what with letters missing and it being written in Old English, but I will try:
Beware he who hunts with fire. He is minister to those with weak spirits, shepherd to those with empty hearts. Darkness commands him, and he wields it to command. His name echoes in the valley of shadows and he treads through centuries. His path is marked in blood. Those who follow do not return.
The urgency with which Hawking said my name and shook my shoulder was due to my having been lost in a fog.
“Woman, the law is going to be here before long. You gotta get up.”
Until that moment, I had given only cursory thought to the fact that Ness might have alerted the authorities in St. Louis. I had not cared before, and I was not sure how much I cared anymore, but Hawking was right. I had to get up.
In the time I was gone, my cousins had gathered up the pieces desecrating the table in the center of the room and scrubbed away the blood. The scent of lye and burnt sage hung in the air. All the cleansing in our power would not undo what had happened here, and I saw determination in Eva’s eyes as she worked at the table in spite of the memory staining its surface. They gasped at the sight of the head but I made no mention of the paper or warning.
I went into the pantry and found a bundle of dried thyme and a sprig of dried yarrow, both of which I brought to the table and ground together with a mortar and pestle. Though Eva looked at me from time to time, she continued her own Work without speaking. When I had finished, I poured the powder into my palm and carried it to the front door.
After dipping a finger into the powder and anointing my forehead with it, I tossed the palmful into the air and let it fall where it would. That the man in black had sought to conceal his path did not surprise me. I did not, however, expect that his path would appear just as the passage had warned.
His path was marked in blood.
I held a hand over you and followed the bloody footprints out of the foyer and onto the front porch, where they strode down the steps and along the dirt path. What flowers had sprung up in my wake were dying now that the man in black’s presence was revealed. I crouched down next to one of the prints, wary of it even before I placed my palm in its center.
It was then my mind left my body.
When I blinked, my consciousness was no longer in an autumnal river town in Missouri but traveling across an open expanse of salt and shale. The ridges and cliffs faded in color from the blue black of a bruise to the vivid red of blood fresh from an artery. A breeze cut across the land and met no resistance, neither tree nor shrub nor flower to buffer its force. I thought I knew what howling wind was, hearing it whip across the plains in wintertime with nothing to stop it.
But the plains were alive. They sustained life. This was a soulless land that sustained nothing.
I knew of few places that featured such desolate landscapes. The scoria and sandstone and silence told me where the blood would lead.
When I took my hand away from the print, I did so with a gasp, my consciousness returning to my body all at once and bringing with it memory of the path my prey had taken. I heard Charlotte’s voice behind me, felt her hands on my arm and shoulder, and once I was certain I was back in St. Louis, I let her help me to my feet.
With the autumn afternoon burning down, we had little time to discuss what we would do and how we would go about doing it. I knew I was tempting fate every moment I stayed, but the truth was the presence of your cousins was a comfort I needed so. That time was better spent putting Aunt Griselda’s pieces together as best we could, laying her in the ground as best we could, joining hands in a circle in a gathering for the departed as best we could.
By the time we had set fire to her remains and broken our circle, dusk had fallen. My cousins agreed to stay at the road-house and keep the hearth warm in anticipation of my return.
I wish I could tell you they convinced me to stay, that Eva had told me what the ringing in her ears and the ache in her teeth told her. That she had even whispered it to Agnes, that she might act as the eldest, as the most mature of us. Agnes, who had never settled down with a man, who like as not never would, who drank and played cards and swore just the same as I did but who knew she was beautiful, who used her beauty as a focus for her Work.
Though my cousins Worked in their own way—Eva handing me a packet of tea leaves and a bag of corn biscuits she had blessed to keep the baby safe, Charlotte pricking the pad of my thumb and pressing the well of blood to her third eye that she would be able to See me and assist me in spite of the distance, and Agnes taking the box of ammunition Hawking had had no cause to use in all this time and enchanting the bullets that they would find their mark in his time of need—I would not let them convince me to stay.
Hawking and I bid our farewells, and we took Aunt Griselda’s cart and Aunt Griselda’s motherless horses to the trail that would lead us to the end of the world.