There is no industrial hum under the skies of the Navajo Nation, and the stars float bright and naked in them, the urban gauze of pollution far away and veiling someone else’s view. And in that clarity all you hear is the song the earth decides to sing—well, that, and whatever noise you make yourself. The crackle and whoosh of wood as it burns under a bubbling stewpot is some of my favorite music, and visually it can be mesmerizing—and evocative.

“Fire burn and cauldron bubble,” Granuaile intoned, staring into the orange heart of the blaze of our campfire as she quoted the witches from Shakespeare. The words triggered a memory and I shivered involuntarily. My apprentice caught it as she looked up from the fire. “What? Are you spooked by those fictional hags?”

“Not the fictional ones, no,” I said, and Granuaile grew still, staring at me. Oberon, my Irish wolfhound, was curled up outside the stones surrounding the fire pit and sensed that some tension had crept too close to his warm repose. He raised his head and spoke to me through our mental bond.

<Atticus? What’s going on?>

Granuaile wasn’t bound to the earth yet and she couldn’t hear Oberon, but she had learned to pick up some of his cues. “If Oberon’s asking you what’s up, I’d like to know too. What made you shudder like that?”

I briefly wondered if I should tell her or dodge the question but then remembered she had already seen plenty of things through her association with me that she’d never unsee. The visage of Hel, for example, Norse goddess of the dead, was nightmare fuel enough for any lifetime, and she hadn’t cracked yet.

“It’s a bit of a story, but I suppose we have the time for it.”

“We absolutely do,” Granuaile agreed. “We have a fire, honest-to-goodness stew that’s been cooking all day, and some beers in the cooler. And no chance of being interrupted.” She waggled a finger at me. “That’s key.”

“Indeed. Well, it’s a story from England shortly after the death of Queen Elizabeth, when Shakespeare had a new patron in Scottish Jimmy—”

“Scottish Jimmy?”

“That was what the irreverent called King James back then. That was the politest term, actually.”

“We’re talking about the namesake of the King James Bible?”

“Precisely.”

“Hold on. I know you have all of Shakespeare’s works memorized, but did you actually meet him?”

“Not only did I meet him, I saved his life.”

Granuaile gaped. She knew that my long life had acquainted me with a few celebrated historical figures, but I could still surprise her. “How have you not told me this before?”

Shrugging, I said, “There was always a chance we’d be interrupted before, and as you said, that’s key. And I didn’t want to be a name-dropper.”

“So is saving Shakespeare a different story from the memory that made you shiver?”

“Nope. It’s the same one.”

Granuaile clapped her hands together and made a tiny squeaking noise, which made Oberon thump his tail on the ground.

What are you getting excited about? I asked him.

<I don’t know, Atticus, but she sounds really happy, so I’m happy for her. Did people in England have poodles back then?>

They might have, but I didn’t see any.

<Oh, I’m sorry, Atticus. That must have been rough on you. I know it’s been rough on me, out here all alone without any asses to sniff … >

I know, buddy, I know; we need to go into town soon so you can have a social life.

<I will dream of it! But after we eat. Which I hope is now.>

Looking across the fire at Granuaile, I said, “Oberon’s happy for you. He’d be even happier if we ate before I get into the story.”

“Sounds good to me. It should be ready, don’t you think?”

I nodded, fetched three bowls, and ladled out the lamb stew for each of us, cautioning Oberon to let it cool a little first so he wouldn’t burn his tongue.

“So were you in England the whole time Shakespeare was writing?”

“No, I missed the reign of Queen Elizabeth entirely and arrived from Japan shortly after her death.”

“What were you doing in Japan?”

“That’s a story for another night, but it was an exciting time. I saw the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate and witnessed early stages of the construction of Nijo Castle in Kyoto. But Aenghus Óg eventually found me there and I had to move, and I chose to move much closer to home because an English sailor had told me of this Shakespeare character. My interest was piqued.”

<Wasn’t England composed primarily of fleas at that time?>

“Yes, Oberon. It was mostly fleas and excrement in the streets, and people dying of consumption, and Catholics and Protestants hating each other. Quite different from Japan. But Shakespeare made it all bearable somehow.”

“Kind of makes his work even more amazing when you think about it,” Granuaile commented. “You don’t read Hamlet and think, This man could not avoid stepping in shit every day of his life.”

“It was also difficult at that time to move around London without passing within hexing distance of a witch.”

“They were truly that common back then?”

“Aye. And their existence wasn’t even a question; people in those days knew witchcraft to be a fact as surely as they knew their teeth ached. And King James fancied himself quite the witch-hunter, you know. Wrote a book about it.”

“I didn’t realize that.”

“Of course, the kind of witches you might run into—and warlocks too; we shouldn’t pretend that only women engaged in such practices—varied widely. For many it was a taste of power that the medieval patriarchy wouldn’t otherwise allow them.”

“Can’t say that I blame them. If you don’t give people a conventional path to power, they will seek out their own unconventional path.”

“Said the Druid’s apprentice,” I teased.

“That’s right. I’m sticking it to the Man!” Granauile said, extending a middle finger to the sky.

<Yeah!> Oberon said, and barked once for Granuaile’s benefit, adding in a tail wag.

“Well, the witches that almost ended Shakespeare certainly wanted to stick it to him.”

“Is this why there’s a curse on Macbeth? You’re not supposed to say its name or bad luck will befall you, right, so actors always call it ‘the Scottish play’ or something?”

“Almost, yes. The way the legend goes, the witches were upset that Shakespeare wrote down their real spells, and they wanted the play suppressed because of it—hence the curse.”

“Those weren’t real spells?” Granuaile asked, lifting a spoonful of stew to her mouth.

“No, but Shakespeare thought they were. What angered the witches was his portrayal of Hecate.”

My apprentice stopped mid-slurp and actually choked a little, losing a bit of stew. “You and Shakespeare met Hecate?”

“That’s a polite way of putting it, but yes. I met her and the three witches, and so did Shakespeare, and that inspired portions of what many now call the Scottish play.”

My apprentice grinned and let loose with another squee of excitement. “Okay, okay, I can’t wait, but I want to finish this stew first. Because I slurp and Oberon turbo-slurps.”

Oberon’s laps at the bowl really were loud enough to blot out all other nearby sound.

<She’s right. I take a backseat to no one at slurping,> Oberon said.

When we’d all finished, Oberon curled up at my feet, where I could pet him easily, Granuaile and I thumbed open some cold ones, and the crackle of the logs under the stewpot provided occasional exclamation points to my tale.

In 1604 I arrived in London, paid two pennies, and witnessed a performance of Othello in the Globe Theatre. It smelled foul—they had no toilets in the facility, you know, so people just dropped a deuce wherever they could find space—but the play was divine. That’s when I knew the rumored genius of Shakespeare was an absolute fact. Poetry and pathos and an astounding villain in the form of Iago—I was more than merely impressed. I knew that he was a bard worthy of the ancient Druidic bards of my youth, and I simply had to meet him.

The way to meet almost anyone you wanted in London was to wear expensive clothing and pretend to be French. Clothing equaled money, and money opened all doors, and pretending to be French kept them from checking up on me easily while allowing me to misunderstand questions I didn’t want to answer. I dyed my hair black, shaved my beard into something foppish and pointy, and inquired at the Merchant Taylors’ Hall on Threadneedle Street where I might find a tailor to dress me properly. They gave me a name and address, and I arrived there with a purse full of coin and a French accent, calling myself Jacques Lefebvre, the Marquis de Crèvecoeur in Picardy. That was all it took to establish one’s identity in those days. If you had the means to appear wealthy and noble, then everyone accepted that you were. And the bonuses to being one of the nobility were that I could openly wear Fragarach and get away with wearing gloves all the time. The triskele tattoo on the back of my right hand would raise far too many questions otherwise. To the Jacobeans, there was functionally no difference between a Druid and a witch: If it was magic, their solution was to kill it with fire.

It is now well known that Shakespeare rented rooms from a French couple in Cripplegate in 1604, but it took me some time back then to find that out. Though I heard from several sources that he was “around Cripplegate,” no one would tell me precisely where he lived. That was no matter: All I had to do was ask about him in several Cripplegate establishments, and eventually he found me. Helpful neighbors, no doubt, who could not for ready money remember where he lived, shot off to inform him straightaway after speaking with me that a Frenchman with a fat purse was asking about him. He found me nursing a cup of wine in a tavern. I was careful to order the quality stuff instead of sack or small beer. Appearances were quite important at the time, and Shakespeare was well aware. He had taken the trouble to groom himself and wash his clothing before bowing at my table and begging my pardon but might I be the Marquis de Crèvecoeur?

He wore a black tunic sewn with vertical lines of silver thread and punctuated with occasional pinpoints of embroidery. His collar was large but not one of those ridiculous poufy ruffs you saw in those later portraits of him. Those portraits—engravings, really—were done after his death, in preparation for the publishing of his plays. In the flesh he looked very similar to the Sanders portrait found in Canada, painted just the year before I met him. His beard and mustache were soft wispy things trimmed short, a sop to fashion but clearly not something he cared about. His hair, brown and fine, formed a slightly frazzled cloud around his skull, and he almost always had a smirk playing about his lips. He was neither handsome nor ugly, but the intelligence that shone behind those brown eyes was impossible to miss.

“Oui,” I said, affecting a French accent. It was more south-of-France than genuine Picardy, but I was hoping Englishmen would be unable to tell the difference, the same way that most modern Americans cannot distinguish the regional differences between English accents.

“I’m told you’ve been looking for me,” he said. “I’m Master William Shakespeare of the King’s Men.”

“Ah! Excellent, monsieur, I have indeed been asking about you! I wish to pay my respects; I just saw Othello recently and was astounded by your skill. How like you this establishment?” I said, for it was fair-to-middling shabby, and I had chosen it for its visibility more than its reputation. “May I buy you a bottle of wine here, or do you prefer a more, uh, how do you say, exquisite cellar?”

“I know of an excellent establishment if you would not mind a walk,” he replied, and so it was that I settled my bill, allowing my coin-heavy purse to be viewed, and navigated the standing shit of Jacobean London to the White Hart Inn, the courtyard of which had played host to Shakespeare’s company under Queen Elizabeth, when his troupe was called the Lord Chamberlain’s Men.

The November skies permitted little in the way of warmth, so there was never any suggestion that I remove my gloves. I played the fawning patron of the arts and enjoyed my evening at the White Hart Inn, where Master Shakespeare was well known. He ordered a bottle of good wine and put it on my tab, and it wasn’t long before he was talking about his current projects. Since King James himself was his patron, he could hardly set aside projects meant for him and do something specifically for me, but he could certainly discuss his work and perhaps, for a generous donation to the King’s Men, work in something that would please my eyes and ears.

“I’m quite near to finishing King Lear,” he said, “and I have in mind something that might appeal at court, a Scottish skulduggery from a century or so past. A thane called Macbeth aspires to murder his way to the throne. But this exposure of a thane’s base ambition is lacking something.”

“What? A knavery? A scandalous liaison?”

“Something of the supernatural,” he said, lowering his voice as one does when discussing the vaguely spooky. “The king possesses a keen interest for such things, and it behooves me to please the royal audience. But I confess myself unacquainted with sufficient occult knowledge to inform my writing. There’s my astrologer, of course, but he knows little of darker matters, and he’s a gossip besides.”

“Do you need firsthand knowledge to write about it? Can you not glean what inspiration you need from others?”

Shakespeare shook his head, finished his cup of wine, and poured a refill from the bottle on the table. “Ah, M’sieur Lefebvre, what I’ve read is too fantastical to be believed, and I do not wish to tread on ground so well packed by others. I need something compelling, a spectacle to grab you firmly in the nethers and refuse to let go. Even the fabulous must have been kissed by reality at some point to have the appearance of truth, and without that appearance it will not work in the theatre.”

“Have you any idea where to find such a spectacle?”

The bard leaned forward conspiratorially. “I do have an inkling. It is a new moon tonight, and I have heard tales that on such nights, north of town in Finsbury Fields, black arts are practiced.”

I snorted. “Black arts? Who would report such things? If one were truly involved, one would hardly spread word of it and invite a burning at the stake. And if one witnessed such rites up close, it follows that one would hardly survive it.”

“No, no, you misunderstand: These accounts speak of strange unholy fires spied in the darkness and the distant cackling of hags.”

“Bah. Improbable fiction,” I declared, waving it away as folly.

“Most like. But suppose, M’sieur Lefebvre, that it is not? What meat for my art might I find out there?” The innkeeper delivered a board of cheese, bread, and sausage to the table, and Shakespeare speared a gray link that had been boiled a bit too enthusiastically. He held it up between us and eyed it with dismay. “One would hope it would be better fare than this.”

“Will you go a-hunting, then?”

Shakespeare pounded the table once with the flat of his left palm and pointed at me, amused at a sudden thought. “We shall go together.”

I nearly choked and coughed to clear my throat before spluttering, “What? Are you addlepated?”

“You have a sword. I’ll bring a torch. If we find nothing it will still be a pleasant walk in the country.”

“But if we find something we could well lose our souls.”

“My most excellent Marquis, I have every confidence that you will protect me long enough to make good my escape.” His grin was so huge that I could not help but laugh.

“I trust you would give me a hero’s death in your next play.”

“Aye, you would be immortalized in verse!”

I kept him waiting while I decided: If we actually found a genuine coven cooking up something out there in the fields, it could prove to be a terrible evening—they tended to put everything from asshole cats to cat assholes in their stews, simply horrifying ingredients to construct their bindings and exert their will upon nature, since they weren’t already bound to it as I was. But the risk, while real, was rather small.

“Very well, I’ll go. But I think it might be wiser to go a-horseback, so that we both might have a chance of outrunning anything foul. Can you ride?”

“I can.”

And so it was settled. We ate over-boiled meat and drank more wine and I allowed myself to enjoy the buzz for a while, but when it was time for us to depart, I triggered my healing charm to break down the poison of alcohol in my blood. Some people might be comfortable witch-hunting under the influence, but I was not. I arranged with a stable to borrow some horses and, late at night, under the dark of the moon, went looking for the worst kind of trouble with William Shakespeare.

By the time we set out, his cheeks were flushed and he was a far cry from sober, but neither was he so impaired that he could not stay in the saddle—writers and their livers.

The smoke and fog and sewer stench of London followed us out of the city proper to Finsbury Fields, which are simply suburbs, a park, and St. Luke’s church now but were liberally fertilized with all manner of excrescence back then, and some had been gamely sown with attempted crops. Muddy wagon trails divided the fields, and it was Shakespeare’s idea that we would find the hags at some crossroads out there, if the rumors of witchcraft were true.

“On the continent, one can still find offerings left at crossroads on the new moon for Hecate, or Trivia,” he said, and I feigned ignorance of the custom.

“Is that so? I have never heard the like.”

“Oh, aye. It is always at three roads, however, not four; Hecate has a triple aspect.”

“So we are looking for worshippers of Hecate, then?”

“The proceedings being held on the new moon would be consistent with her cult. It is a slightly different devilry from dealing with powers of hell but no less damned.”

I suppressed a smile at that. The worship of Hecate had taken many forms throughout the centuries—her conception and manifestation was especially fluid compared with that of most other deities. Even today she is the patron goddess of some Wiccans, who look at her as embodying the maiden-mother-crone tradition, a gentler conception than the sometimes fierce and bloodthirsty manifestations she took on in earlier days.

Shakespeare, of course, looked upon all witches, regardless of type, through the Christian filter—evil by default and allied with hell to destroy Christendom. I looked at them through the Druidic filter: Plenty of witches were fine in my book until they tried to twist nature’s powers for their own purposes. If they wanted to curse someone with bad luck or sacrifice a goat with a knife to summon a demon, that was their business and frankly not my fight. I was also grateful for those who tried to heal others or craft wards against malevolent spirits. But moon magic could be dangerous, and attempts to bind weather or possess people or animals would draw my annoyed attention rather quickly. The elementals would let me know what was up and I would come running.

It was because of this that I tended not to notice the benevolent witches or even meet them very often; they did their thing in secret and harmed no one. All I ever saw were the bad apples, and it probably prejudiced me against witches in general over time.

The dirt tracks cutting swaths through Finsbury Fields were not precisely dry, but neither were they muddy bogs. They’d be dry in another day or so, and the horses left only soft depressions in the mud, chopping up the ruts somewhat and moving quietly at a slow walk. The rustle of our clothes and our conversation made more noise than the horses’ hooves.

That noise, however, was enough to attract four figures out of the darkness—that and Shakespeare’s torch, no doubt.

“Please, good sir, could you give me directions?” a voice said in the night. We reined in—a terrible decision—and four unshaven and aggressively unwashed men with atrocious dentition approached from either side of our horses, taking reins with one hand and pointing daggers at us with the other. A very smooth and practiced waylay, and they knew it. We could not move without being cut, and they smiled up at us with blackened, ravaged teeth, enjoying our expressions of surprise and dismay.

The leader was on my right and spoke again. “More specifically, can you direct me to your purse? Hand it over now and we’ll let you be on your way; there’s a good lad.”

If it had been only coins in my purse, I would have happily obliged. Coins are easy to come by. But the piece of cold iron resting in the bottom was rare, and I didn’t wish to part with it.

Shakespeare, who was not only deep in his cups but thrashing about deeply in them, began hurling insults at the leader, who found them rather amusing and smiled indulgently at the angry sot while never taking his eyes off me.

“You raw and chap-blistered rhinoceros tit!” Shakespeare roared. “You onion-fed pustule of a snarling badger quim! How dare you accost the Marquis de Crèvecoeur!”

The bandit laughed, polluting the air with his halitosis. Drawing on the stored energy in my bear charm to increase my strength and speed, I began to mutter bindings in Old Irish, which they would probably interpret as nervous French. “Visiting from the continent, are we? Well, me chapped tits and snarling quim would welcome some French coin as well as English.”

His companions chuckled at his lame riposte, confident that they had the better of us, and the one on my left, with a broken nose and a boil on his cheek, gestured with his dagger. “Let’s begin with you getting off that high horse, Marquis.”

Shakespeare wouldn’t let that pass without loud comment, still directing his remarks at the man on my right. “Cease and begone, villain! You have all the dignity of a flea-poxed cur’s crusty pizzle! You dry, pinched anus of a Puritan preacher!”

Their gap-toothed smiles instantly transformed into scowls, and all eyes swung to the bard. “What!” the leader barked. “Did he just call me a bloody Puritan?”

“Not exactly,” Cheek Boil said. “I think he called you a Puritan’s bunghole.”

While keeping his hand on my horse’s bridle, the leader swung his dagger away from my thigh to point at Will, behind me. “Listen, you shite, I may be a bunghole,” he cried, brown phlegmy spittle flying from his maw, “but I’m a proper God-fearing one, not some frothy Puritan baggage!”

While they were all looking at Will, I triggered my camouflage charm, taking on the pigments of my surroundings and effectively disappearing in the dim torchlight. Using the boosted strength and speed I’d drawn, I slipped my left foot out of the stirrup and kicked Cheek Boil in the chest before falling to the right and landing chops on either end of the leader’s collarbones. They broke, he dropped both his knife and my horse’s reins, and I gave him a head butt in the face to make sure he fell backward and stayed there.

My attack drew the attention of the men watching the bard, and he was not slow to seize advantage of the opportunity. With the gazes of the two men pulled forward, he dipped the torch in his left hand and shoved it into the face of the man on his left. The man screamed and dropped his weapon, stepping back with both hands clutched to his eyes. That startled Shakespeare’s horse and it shied and whinnied, ripping out of the grip of the rogue on Shakespeare’s right. He began shouting, “Oi! Hey!” and then, seeing that his companions were all wounded or down and he wasn’t either quite yet, he muttered, “To hell with this,” and scarpered off whence he came, into the dark wet sludge of Finsbury Fields. The leader was discovering how difficult it was to get up with a couple of broken collarbones and called for help. Cheek Boil, who’d not been seriously hurt, recovered and moved to help him, not seeing me.

Fire Face, meanwhile, had morphed from mean to murderous. Nothing would do for him now but to bury his knife in Shakespeare’s guts. Growling, he searched for the knife he’d dropped in the dark. I scrambled in front of Will’s horse, dropping my camouflage as I did so, and drew Fragarach, slipping between Will and Fire Face just as he found his knife and reared up in triumph.

“Think carefully, Englishman,” I said, doing my best to emphasize that I was very French and not an Irish lad.

Fire Face was not a spectacular thinker. He was a ginger like me, perhaps prone to impetuousness, and he bellowed to intimidate me and charged. Maybe his plan was to wait for me to swing or stab and then try to duck or dodge, get in close, and shove that dagger into my guts. Perhaps it would have worked against someone with normal reflexes. I slashed him across the chest, drawing a red line across his torso, and he dropped to the ground and screamed all out of proportion to the wound, “O! O! I am slain!”

“Oh, shut up,” I spat. “You are not. You’re just stupid, that’s all.” Turning to Will, I said, “Ride ahead a short distance, Master Shakespeare. I will be close behind.” I slapped the rump of his horse, and it surged forward despite the protests of its rider. I kept Fragarach out and stepped around my horse to check on Cheek Boil and the leader. Cheek Boil was trying to help the leader to his feet but was having trouble without an arm to pull on. The pigeon-livered one who ran away could be neither seen nor heard.

“I’m leaving you alive, monsieurs,” I said, as I sheathed my sword and mounted my horse. “A favor that you would not likely have extended to me. Think kinder of the French from now on, yes?”

A torrent of fairly creative profanity and the continued wailing of Fire Face trailed me as I goaded the horse to catch up to Will, but I was glad I didn’t have to kill any of them. William Shakespeare would probably exaggerate the encounter as it was, and I didn’t need a reputation as a duelist or fighter of any kind.

The bard was jubilant when I caught up to him. “Excellent fighting, Marquis! You moved so quickly I lost track of you for a moment!”

Ignoring that reference to my brief time in camouflage, I said, “You were quite skilled with the torch.”

Shakespeare grinned at it, jiggling it a little in his fist. “And it’s still aflame! Finest torch I’ve ever carried.”

“Shall we return to London, then?”

“What, already? Fie! That passing distraction is no matter. We have hags to find.”

“I doubt we will find them in these fields. They seem to be populated by villains and pale vegetables, and fortune may not favor us a second time.”

“Tush! Think no more on it! You are more than a match for any bandits, M’sieur Lefebvre.”

“I may not be a match for one with a bow.”

“Anyone skilled with a bow would be patrolling a richer stretch of road than a wagon trail in this mildewed fen, m’sieur.”

He had a point, damn him. Using one of my charms—newly completed at that time—I cast night vision as a precaution and didn’t look toward the torch anymore. If another set of bandits wished to ambush us, I would see them coming. I was so intent on scanning the area on the right side of the road that Shakespeare startled me after a half mile by saying, “There.” He pointed off to his left, and I had to lean forward and crane my neck to see what he was looking at. It was a faint white glow on the horizon, a nimbus of weak light in the darkness near the ground. It flickered as if something passed in front of it and kept moving. “What could that be?” he asked. “ ’Tis the wrong color of light for a campfire, wouldn’t you say?”

I grunted noncommittally but could think of no good reason to ignore it. I followed Shakespeare’s horse once we came to a track that appeared to lead directly to the light.

As we drew closer we could hear chanting floating over the fen, and I realized that we might have actually found the witches Shakespeare was hoping to find and I was hoping to not. There would be no telling him to turn back while I investigated on my own—and I did need to investigate, in case their ritual proved to be an attempt to usurp some measure of the earth’s magic. But I couldn’t risk revealing myself as a Druid to him if I was forced to act. I would be every bit as damned in his eyes as the witches if he discovered my pagan origins.

We dismounted to creep forward on foot. I doubted the horses would still be there when we returned, but we couldn’t take them with us; even though they were quieter than usual in the soft earth, they weren’t stealthy creatures. One impatient snort could give us away.

Keeping my voice low, I said, “Conceal the torch behind my body,” and watching him step uncertainly in the mud, still quite drunk, I added, “preferably without setting me aflame. It will allow us to see while hopefully preventing our detection.”

“I approve of this plan,” he said, enunciating carefully, and we stepped forward into the mud. The macabre sounds of muted chanting pounded nails of dread into our hearts. With every step nearer, I grew more certain that we had, in fact, discovered a small coven of witches. The light was indeed from some kind of fire, but the wood wasn’t burning orange and yellow as it should. It was silvery, like moonlight. Perhaps there was phosphorus at work. Or something arcane.

I began to worry about Shakespeare’s safety. I had my cold iron amulet tucked underneath my tunic to protect me against magic, but the bard had nothing. I wanted to tell him I had protection but couldn’t tell him I had bound the cold iron to my aura. I had to craft a lie that he would accept. “Master Shakespeare, should we be discovered, let me go ahead. I have a blessed talisman that may shield me against their, uh, infernal practices.” I wasn’t sure where he stood on the Holy Roman Church, so I settled for the generic blessed rather than Pope-licked or Cardinal-kissed or any number of other vaguely holy-sounding phrases. I drew Fragarach from its scabbard. “I also have this, should it be necessary.”

Shakespeare’s breathing was coming quicker and his eyes had widened. “Your plans continue to be well conceived, Marquis.”

We crept closer still, the voices growing louder, and a faint rumble and hiss could be heard, which I imagined to be something boiling in the cauldron. It was a large black iron affair, the sort one uses to feed armies and that’s usually transported in a wagon, and I could only imagine how they had lugged it out there and what might be boiling inside it. Perhaps the darkness concealed an ox and cart nearby. The unnatural white flames glowed underneath the cauldron and licked at its sides, consuming what appeared to be normal firewood.

As we grew close enough to distinguish words, I recognized that the chanting was in Greek, which Shakespeare did not understand but I understood very well. I chose to be a classically educated marquis and translated for the bard in whispers when he asked me if I could make sense of their babble.

“It’s an invocation to Hecate, pleading for her guidance—no, her personal guidance. As in guiding them, in person, right here! They are trying to summon her.”

“A summoning! For what purpose?”

“I know not.”

We were close enough now that I, with my aided vision, could distinguish shapes in the darkness; I doubted that Shakespeare could see anything, except something that kept moving in front of the firelight.

There were three witches circling the cauldron, naked but smeared with dark streaks—blood or animal fat would be my guess. Their ages were indeterminate; by appearance they were somewhere on the happy side of middle age, but I knew that in reality they could be much older than that. As they circled the fire they also spun around, raising their arms and voices to the sky. I wondered how they kept from getting dizzy.

Their right hands each held a short dagger—no special curved blades or gilded guards, nothing you might call an athame; they were merely sharp, efficient knives.

“Master Shakespeare,” I whispered, “they are armed, and I do not doubt they will attack if provoked. We should probably keep our distance.”

“How can you see anything, Marquis? I can only see shadows in the dark. My eyes need some assistance and I must see better; this could prove to be a fine provocative sauce for my play.”

I could hardly cast night vision on him without revealing my abilities, so I sighed and said, “If we’re going to get any closer, I suggest you put out that torch.”

I expected a protest but he complied instantly, jamming it into the mud behind me. He dearly wanted to get a closer look; to this point he hadn’t seen nearly so much as I had.

We inched forward, ignoring the filthy ground, fascinated by the lights and the ritual playing out before us. I was fairly certain by then that I would have no official role to play as a protector of the earth, but playing protector to Shakespeare could be even more dangerous if we were discovered.

The cauldron, I noticed, squatted in the middle of a crossroads, but the three-way sort to which Shakespeare had alluded earlier. What possible need the witches could have for Hecate’s personal appearance I could not imagine. Their hair was tied and queued behind them, and I perceived that they wore theatre masks straight out of ancient Greece, albeit with visages of bearded men strangely attached to what were plainly female bodies. Masked rites might make them Thracians, but if so their presence in England was especially bewildering.

The only possible motivation I could come up with to conduct such a ritual near London was the upset or even overthrow of King James’s reign, but I was surprised that Greek cultists would care about it. Perhaps they didn’t care but were doing this on a mercenary basis—I had heard there were plots boiling all over the country, mostly by Catholics opposed to King James’s very existence. We were only twelve months away from the Guy Fawkes Gunpowder Plot, after all. But if those witches were Catholic, then I was the son of a goat.

“What token of hell is this?” Shakespeare breathed next to me, his eyes wide and fixed on the spectacle. We were crouched low to the ground on our haunches. “Bearded women cavorting and, and …” He fell speechless. Sometimes there simply aren’t words, even for him.

“Draw no closer,” I warned him, listening to their chant. “Their words have changed. The invocation is set and now they are waiting.”

“What are they saying?”

“They are literally saying that they are waiting. Periménoume means ‘we wait’ in Greek, and they’re just repeating that, spinning around.”

“For what do they wait?”

“My guess would be a sacrifice. Maybe they know we’re here and they’re waiting for us to get closer, and then they will sacrifice us to their goddess.”

Shakespeare did not fall for my scare tactics. “Did they not sacrifice something already? There has to be something in that cauldron.”

“Aye, but a chicken or a newt will not summon a goddess to English shores. It will only secure a flicker of her attention. They need something bigger.”

“How know you this?”

“I am a witch-hunter of sorts myself,” I said, “though I confess I did not expect to find any tonight.”

“You doubted me, m’sieur?”

“No, I doubted the stories you heard.” But now that I heard the witches were “waiting,” I wondered how long they had been coming out here during the new moon to wait. Those stories of lights and croaking hags looked to be true now.

“Why not simply bring the necessary sacrifices with them?” Shakespeare asked.

“It is a matter of power,” I said. “If the sacrifices come to the crossroads willingly, it would be better for their purposes.”

We heard the neigh of a horse behind us—quite probably one of ours. The witches heard it too. They didn’t stop their chanting or their ritualistic circling of the cauldron, but their masked faces pointed in that direction—in our direction, in fact. I didn’t have to tell Shakespeare that he shouldn’t say another word. We emulated the movement and speech of stone gargoyles in the darkness and kept our eyes on the coven.

Soon the approach of hooves reached our ears, a soft rumbling thump in the mud, and an angry voice shouted, “That has to be them up ahead, or someone who saw where they went!”

It sounded like Fire Face to me. Apparently he had recovered from thinking I had slain him and now he wanted a piece of both of us. Chucking Will on the shoulder, I gestured that we should get off the road, and we rolled in the mud until we were naturally (rather than magically) camouflaged in a sodden field of disconsolate cabbages.

It was Fire Face, all right, riding my horse, and riding double on Will’s were Cheek Boil and Pigeon Liver, a surprise guest. The latter must have returned and offered to make up for his earlier cowardice. And Fire Face’s spleen must have been full of rage to pursue us so blindly and abandon their leader somewhere behind. Fire Face was the de facto leader now and clearly not expecting to find three naked, masked, and dancing witches at a crossroads in Finsbury Fields. The leader had been left behind with his broken collarbones, and were he there to witness what happened next, he would have counted himself fortunate.

The witches stopped chanting “We wait” and each said in turn, “The time is now,” and then, in concert, “Hecate comes!”

The bandits reined in short of the fire, and Cheek Boil exclaimed, “What the bloody hell?” shortly before it all became a bloody hell.

I sat up to yank off my right boot so that the binding tattoo on the sole of my foot could contact the earth and allow me to draw upon its energy. The witches broke their circle and streaked directly at the horses, knives held high and moving much faster than humans should. I would need to speed up just to match them.

“What are these naked wenches?” Fire Face said, and then one leapt straight over his horse’s head to tackle him backward out of the saddle. Cheek Boil and Pigeon Liver were similarly bowled over, and the horses bolted, not bred or trained for war. The strength of the witches became evident in the next few seconds as they stood each bandit up and employed those knives, drawing them across the men’s throats with an audible slice of flesh. As their life’s blood gouted into the mud, the men tried in vain to stanch the flow with their hands, but the witches dragged them to the crossroads in front of the cauldron, then pushed them into a triangle formed by their shoulder blades, each of them facing a different direction.

“Come to us, Hecate, Queen of the Moon!” they cried. “Your vessels await!”

“Oh, no,” I said, and rose to my feet, drawing Fragarach. They really were going to summon her.

Shakespeare would have joined me, no doubt, but was trying to vomit quietly on the cabbage instead. His earlier drinking had soured his stomach, and seeing a murder so starkly committed brought a good measure of it back up.

I couldn’t reach the witches in time to stop the summoning and I had Shakespeare to worry about, so I had to watch. We’d be leaving as soon as he finished emptying his guts. The bandits began to twitch, then shudder, then buck violently against the witches’ staying hands on their sternums; their eyes rolled up in their heads and their tongues lolled out of their mouths while blood continued to squirt from their carotids. And then it all stopped for a second, the air charged, and the hairs on the back of my neck started like the quills of the fretful porpentine, for Hecate slipped out of whatever netherworld plane she’d been occupying and into the bodies of those three bandits, simultaneously her sacrifices and her new vessels. Their lives were forfeit, their spirits expelled who knows where, and Triple Hecate had new flesh to command far from Thrace.

Except she didn’t much like the look or feel of that flesh—it was male, for one thing. So she set about changing it to suit her, and that was when Shakespeare looked up from his retching to see what else could horrify him.

The witches stepped back from the bodies, since Hecate was occupying them now and they stood on their own power. But the skin of the men’s faces split and melted as it changed shape, and muted popping noises indicated that their very bones were being broken and re-formed to suit the will of the goddess. The bard did me an enormous favor at that point and fainted into the cabbage patch after a single squeak of abject terror. It meant I wouldn’t have to pretend to be a French nobleman anymore or hide my abilities.

His squeak, however, did catch the attention of one of the witches, and she was just able to spy me and hiss a challenge into the night. “Who is there?” she said in accented English.

The other two swiveled their heads at that, and the one who had killed Cheek Boil said in Greek, “I will look. Hecate must not be disturbed in transition.”

She darted in my direction, bloody knife out, as I was thinking that perhaps Hecate should be disturbed in transition. Any aspect of the goddess summoned in this manner would fail spectacularly on measurements of benevolence and goodwill. Deities that manifest through animal and human sacrifice tend not to engage in acts of philanthropy.

The witch located me and rushed forward, no doubt assuming that I was as slow as the bandits had been. But I was not only as fast as she but better armed and better trained. Her unguarded lunge, meant to dispatch me quickly, got her an arm lopped off at the wrist and a face-first trip into the mud. Her mask crunched and she howled, cradling her shortened arm with her good one. She was far too close to Shakespeare for my comfort, though she hadn’t seen him yet. The wisest thing for my own safety would be to cast camouflage and disappear, but they might find and slay William while searching for me, so I kept myself visible and moved purposely away from him to the other side of the road, which looked like a turnip field. The witches all tracked me, and the one I’d wounded pointed with her good hand.

“He’s not human!” she shouted in Greek. “He moves like us!”

“I’m a Druid of Gaia,” I announced in the same language. If Shakespeare revived and heard any of this, my cover wouldn’t be blown. “I mean you no harm if you mean no harm to the earth.”

“No harm!” the wounded witch shrieked. “You cut off my hand!”

“You were trying to kill me with it,” I pointed out. “And I chose to maim when I could have killed. Considering what you’ve just done to those men, I think I have the moral high ground.” The hot waxen features of the former bandits were slowing, congealing, solidifying into female faces, and their hair was growing long and dark at an alarming rate; their frames shrank somewhat in their clothing as they transformed into feminine figures. “Isn’t talking more pleasant? Let’s chat. Why are you summoning Hecate here?”

“The Druids died out long ago,” one near the fire said, ignoring my question.

“It’s funny you say that, because I was going to say there were no Thracian witches in England.”

With a final crescendo of chunky bone noises and a slurp of sucking flesh, Hecate finished transforming the bodies of her vessels into her preferred manifestation, and three women who could have stepped off a Grecian urn—long noses, thin lips, flawless skin, and all kinds of kohl on the eyelids—took deep breaths and exhaled as one. They weren’t of differing ages in the mold of maiden-mother-crone: They could be teenaged triplets, which made sense since it was really a single goddess in there, and I regret now that I never asked her if she took pleasure in confounding storytellers with the problem of whether to use singular or plural pronouns. I’ll stick with plural for the moment, because after the synchronized sigh that the witches and I all simply watched in awe, their eyes fluttered open and they spoke in creepy unison: “Blood.”

That was a pretty dire omen, but it got worse. Triple Hecate’s heads swung to look directly at me and smiled. “His will do. Bring me his heart.”

Her hands shot in my direction and she spat, “Pétra ostá!” which means “stone bones.” She wanted me to stand petrified while her witches carved me up, but her hex ran into my cold iron aura and fizzled, resulting in nothing more than a thump of my amulet against my chest. I played along with it, though, freezing up, widening my eyes, and warbling in panic as the two healthy witches raced forward to do Hecate’s bidding. Had they been the least bit cautious—a lesson they should have learned after the experience their sister had in coming after me—I might not have been able to handle two at once. But they came in unguarded, unable to fathom the idea that their goddess’s powers might have a counter or a limit.

Still, I didn’t kill them. They were too undisciplined to be a true threat, but since I couldn’t have them ganging up on me either, they each got a slash across the belly to make them sit down and work on healing for a while. If they were half decent at witchcraft—their accomplishments suggested they were—they’d eventually be fine, but it would take them some time. And then the easy part was over.

Triple Hecate, unlike her witches, was very disciplined and knew how to coordinate the attacks of her vessels. And she was able to juice up those bodies even more than I was, though I didn’t know at first what fuel she was using for it; if it was blood, then she would need more soon, and Shakespeare was still available. Hissing, she launched herself at me and spread out, two of her vessels flanking me and dodging my first wide swing. She lunged forward in coordinated strikes and danced out of the way of my blade; I got a kick in the kidney, a hammer blow to the ribs that cracked one, and a breath-stealing punt to the diaphragm before I remembered to trigger my camouflage. She had a more difficult time targeting me after that and couldn’t track the sword but still got her licks in, because I fell down and she heard it, aiming her kicks low. I was able to get in a few of mine, though. Fragarach was able to cut her a few times—never deeply, but she slowed noticeably after each one. She really did need that blood to fuel her speed and strength; she wasn’t feeding on the life energy of the earth but rather on the energy of sacrifices.

The dismembered witch, whom I’d forgotten about, cried out in discovery. “Queen Hecate! There’s a man asleep over here! His blood will set you right!”

Triple Hecate backed off and turned away, and I looked as well to see the witch pointing with her good hand toward Shakespeare. There was no way I’d be able to get up and run over there faster than Hecate.

I swung quick and hard with everything I had at the legs of the nearest vessel, taking off a foot and chunking into the other leg, but the other two dashed off to feed on the bard. While my target fell over and I rose to my knees, gasping for breath, the other two called for a knife to cut Shakespeare’s throat.

“I lost mine in the mud,” the witch wailed, her voice making it plain that she feared Hecate’s displeasure.

“Check your belts,” one of the other witches moaned, reminding Hecate that her vessels had been wearing clothes and, yes, weapons. As one, the vessels—including mine—looked down, spied their daggers, and drew them. The mobile vessels were closing on Shakespeare and would end him in seconds. There was no time for subtlety, only a desperate chance at saving him. Scrambling on my hands and knees to the fallen vessel, I thrust upward into her skull from the bottom of her jaw just underneath the chin, shoving through into the brain and scrambling any chance of healing that particular mortal coil. She’d heard my approach, though, and at the same time stabbed into my vulnerable left side with her newfound dagger, sinking it below my armpit into a lung. I collapsed on top of her as she expired, and I heard a cry in stereo: The other two vessels stopped, shook as if gripped by a seizure, and then exploded in a shower of chunky meat and bone.

It had worked—though on a significantly more gory level than I expected: Triple Hecate could not occupy only two vessels. Kill one and you killed them all.

Or you hit the reset button anyway. I was under no illusion that Hecate had really been slain; she’d merely been banished to whatever Olympian ether she’d come from, and she could be summoned again, though I imagined it would be difficult.

A hush born of shock settled about the field for a few seconds, and then the weird sisters shrieked—and not over their various wounds. They’d toiled and waited a long time for their moment, for whatever reason, and most likely thought Hecate invincible. To see all of that crushed in the space of minutes caused them more than a little emotional distress.

Wincing, I yanked out the knife in my side and triggered my healing charm, drawing plenty of power through the earth to fuel it. It would take a while to heal, but I felt sure I’d survive; I still had doubts about Shakespeare. The first witch was standing over him and might kill him out of spite. Lurching to my feet was impossible to do quietly, and the witches all turned at the sound. They couldn’t make me out but knew I was there.

“We will curse you for this, Druid,” one of them promised. She was clutching her guts together in the mud.

“You can try, but it would be a waste of your time,” I said. “If Hecate’s curse didn’t work on me, why would yours?”

They didn’t have a ready answer for that, so they took turns suggesting various sex acts I could perform with animals, and I let them. The longer their attention was focused on me, the closer I staggered to Shakespeare. I goaded them a couple of times to keep them going, and then, when I was close enough, I poked the first witch with the tip of Fragarach, just a nick, which caused her to yelp and leap away from him. She cradled her stump, which I noticed she had managed to stop bleeding. I stepped forward, placing myself between her and the bard’s prone form, and dropped my camouflage.

“Hi. Back away, join your sisters, and you can live. You might even summon Hecate again someday. Or I can kill you now. What’ll it be?”

She said nothing but retreated, always keeping her eyes on me, and I watched her go, keeping my guard up.

With a little bit of help from the elemental communicating through the earth, I located the horses—they hadn’t run far—and convinced them that they’d be safe if they returned to give us a ride back to town; when we got to the stables they’d get oats and apples.

While I waited for them, I knelt and checked on Shakespeare. He was unharmed except for his drunken oblivion; he’d likely have a monstrous hangover. But while he was out of immediate physical danger, he still needed magical protection. The witches might not be able to curse me, but they could curse him, and it would occur to them to try before I left the field. But the piece of cold iron in my purse that I’d been anxious to hold on to earlier would do me yeoman service now. I fished it out and, having no string or chain on me, bound it to his skin at the hollow of his throat and made it a talisman against direct hexes. It wouldn’t save him from more carefully crafted curses using his blood or hair, but I’d address that next.

The witches huddled together and eyed me through their bearded masks as I hefted Shakespeare over his horse’s back, a task made more difficult by my wound. I did what I could to hide his face from their view and was particularly careful about leaving anything behind for them to use against us later. I located Shakespeare’s vomit and my blood and, with the elemental’s aid, made sure that everything got turned into the earth and buried deep.

I snuffed out the fire too, binding dirt to the wood to smother the unnatural flames, and that not only left the crossroads really dark but prevented the witches from doing much else that night. They complained loudly that they needed it to heal.

“Don’t try to summon Hecate in England again,” I called over their cursing, giving the horses a mental nudge to walk on. “England and Ireland are under my protection. I won’t be so merciful a second time.”

A tap on my cold iron amulet warned me that one or more of them had just tried to hex me. Since Shakespeare didn’t immediately burst into flames or otherwise die a gruesome death, I assumed his talisman protected him as well.

“Good night, now,” I called cheerfully, just to let them know they’d failed, and we left them there to contemplate the profound disadvantages of summoning rituals. The risks are almost always greater than the reward.

Once we were well out of their sight and hearing, I paused to recover my cold iron talisman and place it back in my purse. Shakespeare helpfully remained unconscious until we returned to the stables and his feet touched ground. He was bleary-eyed and vomited again, much to the disgust of the stable boy, but rose gradually to lucidity as his synapses fired and memories returned.

“Marquis! You live! I live!” he said as I led him away to the White Hart, where I would gladly fall into bed in my room. His eyes dropped, and he raised his hands and wiggled his fingers the way people do when they want to make sure that everything still works. “What happened?”

I remembered just in time that I was supposed to have a French accent. “What’s the last thing you remember?”

“The witches—”

“Shh—keep your voice down!”

More quietly, he said, “The witches—they killed those men.”

“Yes, they did. Is that all?”

His eyes drifted up for a moment, trying to access more details, but then dropped back down to me and he nodded. “That’s the last thing I remember.”

Fantastic! That was my cue to fabricate something. “Well, they threw the men in the cauldron, of course, while I threw you over my shoulder to sneak out of there.”

“What? But what happened? Did they eat the men?”

“No, no, it was all divination, the blackest divination possible, powered by blood. They were asking Hecate to reveal the future for them.”

“Zounds, God has surely preserved me from damnation. And you! Thank you, sir, for my life. But what did they say?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“What matters did the hags seek to learn? The future of England?”

“I heard nothing beyond a general request to let the veil of time be withdrawn, that sort of thing. They were out of earshot before they got to specifics.”

“But the chanting, before—you heard all of that; you translated some of it for me. What were their words, exactly—I need a quill and some ink!” He staggered into the White Hart Inn to find some, time of day be damned.

And that put me in the uncomfortable position of creating something that sounded like a spell but wasn’t. I couldn’t very well provide Shakespeare with the words one needed to summon Triple Hecate, knowing that he would immortalize them in ink.

So once he found his writing materials and demanded that I recount everything I could recall, providing a literal translation of the witches’ chanting, I spun him some doggerel and he wrote it down: Double, double toil and trouble …

“And now you know why I shivered, Granuaile, when you said, ‘Fire burn and cauldron bubble.’ ”

Granuaile cried, “You wrote the witches’ lines? No way!”

Shrugging and allowing myself a half grin, I said, “You’re right. Shakespeare didn’t write what I said into Macbeth verbatim. He played around with it a bit and made it fit his meter. Much better than what I said, to be sure. And the mystery of Hecate’s summoning remained a mystery.”

“The words alone wouldn’t have been sufficient to do the deed, would they?”

“Not initially; I was worried about the cumulative effect. With such frequent invocation, the goddess might have grown stronger and chosen to manifest at any time, with or without a sacrifice, and you don’t want that version of Hecate to appear in a packed theatre.”

Granuaile shook her head. “No, you don’t. Why did they curse the play, then?”

“Shakespeare never saw Hecate summoned but knew that the witches looked to her somehow, so she got written into Macbeth. The Hecate in his play is a single character and not particularly fearsome or strong. They thought his portrayal was demeaning, and that inspired the curse.”

“So they remained in England?”

“Long enough to see the play, yes. I don’t think they realized that they had met the playwright in the past; they simply took grave offense and foolishly cursed it in concert within the hearing of others. They were caught and burned soon afterward.”

<I’m kind of glad I didn’t live in that time, Atticus,> Oberon said. <Over-boiled sausages are so disappointing. Dry and flavorless like kibble.>

That was your takeaway? Bad sausage at the White Hart Inn?

<Wasn’t that the climax to your tragedy? Or was it the end where you and Shakespeare never even took a spoonful of what they were cooking in that cauldron?>

It wasn’t a tragedy, Oberon. Nobody died except for those three guys, and that was only because they were too stupid to leave us alone.

<Nobody ate anything delicious either, so it sounded like a tragedy to me. I mean, you had witches smeared with blood and fat, so there had to be some meat cooking in there.>

It truly was a rough time. Luckily, your circumstances are different. You got to eat what we cooked over the fire.

Oberon rolled over, presenting his belly, and stretched. <Yeah, I guess I have it pretty good. But shouldn’t you be getting to work, Atticus? This belly isn’t going to rub itself, you know.>

I obliged my hound and asked Granuaile if she felt like round two. She nodded and tossed me another beer from the cooler, grabbing one for herself. The pop and hiss of the cans sounded loud in the darkness, but after that it was only the occasional snap of the comfortably orange fire and the song that Gaia decided to sing to us under the unveiled stars.