March 1692 - Old Witch Gaol, Salem
Lils heard it before she saw it; a squabble at the high window, claws on stone, and then the battering of wings.
She’d been awake for about an hour now, watching the darkness above the window slowly shift from black to the light of early morning. It was downright unnerving to try and sleep here, and she'd dozed off in short bursts all throughout the night. Tituba was being held elsewhere — Bridget had told her as much before the guard had come in from his rounds and shouted them into silence last night.
She looked up at the commotion in the window.
It was narrow enough that the crow nearly couldn’t fit through, even with its wings folded tight. It regarded her with one oil-black eye, its head cocked at an angle peeking through.
And hanging from the sill by his fingertips, peeking his head up along with the crow, was Levi.
Her heart lurched and she nearly cried out from seeing him. No no no, get away from here, Levi.
Levi had lifted himself up and she could see his face was red with sweat, and he was urgently scanning the cell, trying to find her in the dark.
She scrambled upright. “Levi,” she breathed. It came out as a rasp, barely a sound at all.
His whole face changed once his eyes landed on her. “Lils, I'm here!”
“Boy!” The guard’s voice rang out from somewhere below and to the left, sharp with authority. “You get down from there!”
Levi’s head whipped toward the sound. He looked back at Lils and then dropped, and she heard the thud of his feet hitting the ground, with the scatter of his footsteps as he ran.
The crow flew away from the sill, flapping its wings and hovering nearby as if it were annoyed.
In the second before it went, Lils caught a glimpse of something small tied to its foot with a thread. It was pale against the dark feathers, but it seemed to be a small roll of paper.
“Wait—” she called out, lunging forward uselessly.
But the crow was already gone, swallowed by the morning sky. The window was empty, and the cell was just cold stone and damp, smelly straw again.
She stood staring at the window, fists clenched at her sides.
Behind her, from the corner of the cell, came a voice.
“So... Hekate? Who is Hekate? The guard is still off on a chase with that boy, we can talk again.”
Lils turned.
Bridget Bishop was watching her from across the cell. In the growing light, Lils could finally see her properly: a woman in her sixties, broad-shouldered, with a face that had clearly once been striking and still was. Her clothes were plain, but she wore even the jail’s rough blanket in a defiant way.
“Thou called out to Hekate,” Bridget said. “When ye thought no one was listening.” She tilted her head. “Who is she?”
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Lils blinked. “So you heard that.”
“Yes, I hear most things.” Bridget’s tone suggested this had occasionally been inconvenient for her.
Lils looked at her for a moment, thinking. In 1692, Hekate wasn’t widely known in Puritan New England. She was ancient Greek, the goddess of crossroads and magic. Not the kind of name that would mean anything to a Puritan woman.
Except Bridget Bishop was not exactly a standard Puritan woman, not by any means.
“She’s a goddess,” Lils said carefully. “Very old. She presides over crossroads and thresholds.”
Bridget was quiet for a moment, considering. “A pagan goddess then.”
“Yes, pagan.”
“And yet thou prayest to her?”
“I was… well, I was trying to. Yes. I didn’t mean for anyone to hear.”
Bridget made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “I have been accused of calling upon the devil and sending my shape to torment half of Salem.” She said it with an exhausted irony. “And yet, not one word of it is true. But thou — thou art in this cell calling upon a pagan goddess and expecting her to listen.”
“I didn’t say she listened,” Lils said.
Bridget lost it at that, laughing. “No, no thou didn’t!” she agreed. “And yet, it seems like someone has sent thee a crow. Making me wonder if witches are real, child."
Lils noticed the woman’s tight posture and defiant air, and felt something shift. This was a woman who had been hauled before a court and watched people she barely knew accuse her of witchcraft. How must that feel? To have the town you lived in betray you like this?
“Why art thou here?” Lils asked. She knew why Bridget was here, but needed to feign ignorance.
Bridget’s voice was level. “They examined me. The girls fell down shrieking in the courtroom when they looked upon me. When I turned ’round, more fell.” She looked down briefly. “I was told not to cast my eyes upon them.” She said it with barely concealed contempt. “I have never seen most of those girls before in my life.”
“I believe you,” Lils said.
Bridget looked at her and laughed dryly.
“Yea, some good that does me, with us both here in this cell.”
Yet something moved through her expression, a flicker of recognition. “Thou art the Proctor girl, yea? They say you are Samuel’s sister.”
“I’m... related to the Proctors, yes.”
“And Samuel Proctor accused thee?”
“Yea, and I am his cousin, not his sister. Yet he is convinced that is not so.”
“I can tell that thou art not from Salem, just by thy manner of speech.” Bridget tilted her head. “I don’t think thou art a witch any more than I am, even with calling out for Hekate and strange crow visits.”
“None of us are witches, Bridget. Or at least, not in the way they are accusing us of being.”
“Aye, I agree. What was your name, girl?”
"I'm Lily. You can call me Lils."
She was not about to call herself Lilith around Bridget... explaining Hekate to her was enough for now.
Outside, the village was just waking up, and the low murmur of carts could be heard through the slit of a window. Lils realized with a start that the crow had returned to the windowsill.
It dropped through the narrow slit, wings beating once to slow itself, and landed on the floor of the cell not three feet from where Lils stood. It looked up at her with that same tilt of its head as it had earlier.
Then it lifted its foot.
"I'll be darned!" Bridget exclaimed from the corner, clearly in shock.
The paper was tied tight with a red thread, Lils could see that clearly now. The paper was small, no bigger than a strip out of a fortune cookie. The crow stood still, as if waiting for her to approach.
Lils crouched down slowly, taking the crow's foot in her hand. She carefully worked the red thread loose, and the paper came free into her palm, rolled up. And then the crow was gone again, up and out through the window.
She closed her fingers around the tiny scroll and felt the crinkle of it, dry and fragile.
“Well,” Bridget said, from her corner. “Art thou going to open it?”
Lils unrolled it.
And there, scrawled in handwriting she didn’t recognize, in ink that had dried to a blood red color, was a single word visible in the light beam of the window.
Ostara.