Agnes feels the broken edges of her heart grate against one another. Here she thought she had escaped Hill’s trap, refused his too-high price, but in the end she’d merely delayed it. In the end it’s still your life or your freedom, your sister or your daughter, and someone still has to pay.
August is beating uselessly at the flames with his shirt now, his chest smeared with char and ash. He calls to his men down in the square, begging for water, but they’re busy holding back the maddened crowd. There will be no circle of cold water and no whispered words to save Juniper this time.
Pan and Strix are circling the fire, crisscrossing above Juniper. Other birds have joined them—the ordinary pigeons and common crows of the city, come to witness this last great act of witching, eerily silent.
Agnes hears the wolf give a low, mournful howl, like a bell tolling in the distance, and knows it’s too late. Juniper’s hair has caught fire, a bloody crown, and her dress is flaking away from her body in gray sheets of ash. Smoke boils thick and greasy from her skin.
Agnes is the strong sister, the steady sister who stands unflinching, but now she looks away. She cannot bear to watch her sister burn.
Juniper is unraveling. Her soul is unspooling from her body, slipping like smoke through the cracks of a burning building. She wants to follow it, to drift into the sweet dark while her flesh spits and sizzles, but she stays. She speaks the words.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Georgie together again.
The words are like fingers picking at a knot, patient and persistent. They burrow between her ribs and find the black tangle of Hill’s soul and prise it away from the world, pulling it toward the vast silence of the hereafter. He resists, naturally—Juniper feels him clawing and screaming and generally kicking up three kinds of fuss, reduced to nothing but the wordless will to keep existing—but Juniper’s lips keep moving, the spell steady as a heartbeat and hot as hellfire. Maybe it’s her sisters’ wills added to her own.
Maybe it’s Mama Mags whispering in her ear.Keep going, honey-child.
Or maybe dying for someone else is just worth more than living for yourself.
Her dress burns first. Then her hair. She’d hoped maybe she wouldn’t feel it—her daddy always said the healing hurt worse than the burning, that he’d prayed for life during the fire and prayed for death afterward—but pain licks like a barbed tongue over every inch of her skin. It nibbles and bites, sinking its teeth bone-deep.
It occurs to her that she won’t be able to speak the words, soon. Already her tongue is cracked and swollen and the smoke is ground glass in her throat, but Hill still clings to her like clay on a boot-heel. She feels him stirring with the malicious hope that she might die before his soul is entirely sundered.
She might have. Except sometimes, if you reach deep enough into the red heart of magic, some little scrap of magic reaches back out to you. Sometimes if you bend the rules long enough, they break.
Juniper’s eyes are closed, but she feels it arrive: a winged darkness. A shape that smells like witching and wild places. It perches on her shoulder and brushes hot feathers against her cheek.
It occurs to her that it’s exactly her kind of bullshit luck that she’d finally get her familiar but die before she laid eyes on him.
She tries to touch his claws with her hand, but there’s something wrong with her arms, her hands, the skin and sinews between them. All she can do is send him the words and hope, somehow, that it will be enough.
“All the king’s horses and all the king’s men—” It’s her own voice singing strong and clear through the flames, but it doesn’t come from her cracked and boiling lips. It’s her familiar carrying the words for her, singing them loud and clear even as her throat closes and her lips burn.
There’s a loosening in her chest, a knot unbinding. Hill’s scream sounds very far away, as if he’s on a train heading into a long tunnel. The only thing holding him to the world now is Juniper’s own life, and that won’t last long.
The heat of the flames fades. So does the crackle of burning wood, the hiss of her own skin. Even the pain fades, and she knows then that she is dying.
Juniper is the wild sister, the sly sister, never caught, always running, but she can’t run from this.
She hears singing as she dies, distant and familiar. A children’s rhyme she used to chant with her sisters on summer evenings when they were young and whole, when the world was soft and green and small, when they thought they could hold hands forever, unbroken.
Bella feels her sister dying but doesn’t believe it. How can Juniper die? Juniper who is so young and so bold, who seems twice as alive as everyone around her? And if she can die—if that’s truly her body burning on the pyre, her pain ringing loud in the line between them—then the world is a far crueler place than even Bella imagined, and she wants nothing more to do with it.
She knows precisely how the Last Three must have felt at the end of the age of witches, knowing that something fierce and beautiful was leaving the world, so desperate to preserve even some small piece of it that they let their bodies burn around them.
But not—Bella draws a sharp breath—their souls.
The Three stole Saint George’s victory from him at the last second. They bound their souls to a tower of words and disappeared into nowhere to wait, undying, for the next age of witches to begin. What is magic, anyway, if not a way when there is none?
Cleo has her arm tight around Bella’s shoulders, holding her steady. Bella breaks free and spins to face her. “The rose petal I gave you, the one I put around your finger—do you still have it?”
Cleo’s face says this is a very odd thing to ask while your sister burns and the city riots, but she reaches into her skirt pocket and produces the petal, even more crumpled and dry, but still whole. “Having second thoughts, love?”
“Never.” Bella cups the petal in her palm. Such a small, fragile thing on which to rest her sister’s soul. “Agnes!”
Agnes is swaying and pale, too tear-blinded to see the rose in Bella’s hand, too grief-struck to understand the eager intent in her eyes. Then Bella says the words, and hope rises like the sun in Agnes’s face.
They’re the words the three of them had sung as little girls, dancing beneath the fireflies. They’re the words the Three wrote to bind their souls to witchcraft itself, which have filtered down through the ages as a children’s rhyme, not quite forgotten.
