Ring around the roses, pocket full of posies, ashes, ashes, we all rise up.
Cleo joins Bella’s chant, then Agnes. August comes next, his voice low and unsteady, and Strix and Pan high above them. More voices follow, too many to count, singing up from the crowd below—the Sisters of Avalon and the Daughters of Tituba, the Women’s Association and the workers’ unions, the maids and mill-girls, all the witches of New Salem who came when the Eastwoods called.
Together they call the magic and the magic answers, boiling through their veins. Bella waits until it crests like a wave in her chest before she curls her fist around the petal, crushing it. She tosses the remains into the night.
The sky does not split open. No black tower appears. But a sudden wind rises, sharp and green and rose-sweet. The wind tangles Bella’s skirts and whips the flames high. It hovers above the pyre, waiting.
Bella knows the precise moment Juniper dies.
The line that leads to her youngest sister goes slack; Agnes screams; the wolf’s howl goes abruptly quiet. Bella sees a pale shadow rise from the fire, like mist, before the witch-wind carries it away.
For a moment she thinks she hears voices calling, almost like three women welcoming a fourth, or maybe she merely hopes she does. The spell ends and the wind dies and a strange silence falls over the square, as if even the most foolish of them know something grave and grand has happened.
Bella feels her knees crack against the scaffold, then the sting of tears and the warmth of Cleo’s arms around her.
Bella is the wise sister, the bookish one, the knowing one, but she doesn’t know whether it was enough.
Agnes wants to climb into the fire and burn alongside her sister. She wants to scream until her throat is flayed raw from screaming, until the whole city has to stop and look and see what they have wrought. She wants to step into nowhere and call Juniper’s name.
But there are people swarming up the steps now. Some of the most devout Inquisitors and their followers have rallied and fought past August’s men. August rushes to meet them, iron bar whipping back and forth, but Agnes knows he can’t hold them for long. She looks down at Eve—awake now and frowning fiercely—then reaches for the rowan-wood branches and climbs to her feet.
She tries to think of nothing but the cool strength of the wood in her hand and the sharp scent of sap. Not the third bough she leaves lying on the scaffold, riderless. Not Juniper’s face when the Crone told them the spell for flight. Not the way she looked up at the sky as they were bound to the stake, sly and knowing, as if the moon was a long-lost lover she would soon meet again.
The scaffold blurs before her, fractured by tears. She stumbles to Bella, who leans half-collapsed in Cleo’s arms, and presses a branch into her hand.
“Come on, Bell. It’s time to go.”
Bella looks as if she, too, would like to lie down and let the flames wash over her, but she doesn’t. She stands slowly, as if she’s aged several decades, and offers her hand down to Cleo. She pulls her to her feet but does not release her hand. “You could still come with us.”
Cleo shakes her head once. “I’m needed here. The Daughters have work to do, and a chance to move in the open, without Hill.” But she touches Bella’s face, thumb brushing over her cheekbone. “I’ll come when I can.” Then she draws a stub of chalk from her pocket and marks a shape on the scaffold, singing a song. Cleo blurs around the edges, not quite invisible.
“Don’t keep me waiting, Miss Quinn,” Bella says, and the heat of it makes Agnes look away. Her eyes find August, forced to the top of the stairs now, iron bar still swinging. His mouth is red and swelling. A bright line of blood runs from a cut at his temple. He throws a wild look back to Agnes and she knows he intends to stand there until she is safely gone or until he can stand no longer. This last look is the closest they can come to goodbye.
Agnes reaches for Bella’s hand and whispers the words.Lady bird, lady bird, fly away home.
An airy, weightless feeling spreads from Agnes’s fingertips to her ribs, as if her blood has been replaced with rising mist.
She and her sister (she stumbles over the singular word, the absence of that softsat the end) mount their rowan branches and feel their bare feet lift from the scaffold. They rise into the air like smoke. Or like witches, in the way-back days when they flew with clouds as their cloaks and stars in their eyes.
They follow the spirals of cinder and ash with their familiars winging alongside them, leaving behind the city that hates them and the people who love them and their sister who died for them. It’s only in Agnes’s head that she hears a small, wild girl begging her:Don’t leave me.
The air grows clean and cold as they fly higher, smokeless, moonlit. The world feels vast and boundless around Agnes, like a house with all its walls and windows thrown down, and she clutches her daughter tighter to her chest. She thinks she hears a muffled gurgle from the wrapped bundle, almost like a laugh.
The sound outweighs the grief in Agnes’s chest, like a brass scale tipping. They had lost too much—a library called back and then burned; a sister found and then lost forever—but not everything. Not the sound of her daughter flying with moon-shine on her skin, laughing.
Beneath them the city square looks small and dim. Agnes sees upturned faces, feels the tug of hundreds of watching eyes. She can almost see the new stories cast like dandelion-seeds behind them, taking root in the city below. Stories about shadows stolen and then set free, about villains and wolves and young women who walk willingly into the fire. About two witches flying where there should have been three.
An owl and an osprey fly beside them. Agnes wonders if any of them notice a third creature winging with them, black as sin, nearly invisible against the night. Or perhaps they see it and think nothing of it. Every crow is black, after all.
Perhaps, from so far below, they can’t see the way the crow’s eyes burn like the last stubborn coals of a dying fire, or the way they stare at some distant point in the sky, as if he’s flying to meet someone just on the other side of nowhere.
How many miles to Babylon?
Threescore miles and ten.
Can I get there by candlelight?
There and back again.
