“That’s why you never came back, then.” Because they saw what she was. A monster, a murderess. A dragon red in tooth and claw, and only princesses were rescued from towers. “That’s why you never wrote.”
But Bella’s voice cuts across hers. “I did write, June. Once a week at first. When you never wrote back, I thought you must want nothing to do with me. I thought maybe you’d heard . . . rumors.” Juniper tries hard to focus on her face, a hovering smear with sad eyes.
Agnes echoes her. “The first thing I bought when I got to the city was a postcard. You never answered, and after a while I stopped trying.”
“But—oh.” Juniper wonders if her daddy paid the postman to lose those letters, or if he burned them himself. She wonders if she ever shoveled their ashes from the woodstove, unknowing, and if her daddy watched her when she did.
Their closeness had always bothered him. When they were little he was forever playing them one against the other, favoring the youngest, blaming one for the sins of her sisters, finding the cracks between them and wedging them wider. But it never seemed to stick. The three of them remained a single thing, inviolate. So he split them apart and spent seven years tearing at the last threads that bound them together.
But—Juniper looks up at her gray-eyed sisters, here with her now—he failed.
“Agnes. Bell. I—”
“I do hate to interrupt, but it’s nearly dawn. Our time is short.” Quinn is standing in the doorway, pointing out to the thin line of gray visible on the horizon.
Juniper’s sisters get to their feet. Juniper wishes they would come back. She wants to ask what happened to the other Sisters and how they called back the Lost Way and if they think it’s possible that Mama Mags’s ghost visited her in the Deeps—but the stones are so cool on her skin and the air is so heavy on her eyes.
She wakes once, briefly, when a hand touches her cheek, and Agnes says, “Goodbye, Juniper.” Then, more stiffly, “Goodbye, Bella.”
“You know where to find us if you change your mind.”
Juniper doesn’t know if Agnes replies, because she drifts away.
There are still voices around her, murmuring and whispering, but they don’t belong to her sisters. They belong to three someone-elses, and they sound like the soft sighs of turning pages, the rustles of rose petals one against another, the silent touch of strange stars.
Agnes looks behind her once before she leaves the tower.
Bella stands with a pair of silver shears in one hand and an open book in the other, that eerie owl perched like a gargoyle on her shoulder, looking like the Crone herself come back from the dead. Juniper lies pale and still on the flagstones, a maiden laid out for sacrifice.
The sight of them tugs at Agnes. She wants to turn back and take her place between them, play the part of the middle sister and the Mother—but she doesn’t.
She pushes through the door and kneels briefly beneath the shadowed trees. She scoops a palmful of earth and leaf-litter into a glass and whispers the words over it:Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. She prays it is enough.
The night is quiet except for the whisper-touch of leaves and the distant toll of church bells ringing the solstice-morning service. The branches of trees drag against her skirts like friendly fingers, half-familiar; she remembers all the times she chased Juniper through thickets of mountain laurel and holly back home.
Agnes slips from the woods and takes three steps before she realizes she is not alone: there are birds roosting on every lamp-post and iron bench, crowding the sills and rooftops of the College and City Hall, silent as falling feathers—
And there is a woman standing several feet in front of her, right where the cobbles turn to dark, leaf-strewn earth.
Her face is tilted up to look at the tower, her skin ivory in the unsettling shine of constellations that have doubled in number and abandoned their usual patterns, unnaturally bright despite the electric orange glow of the city.
She isn’t wearing her usual white sash or her starched skirt, and her Gibson Girl hair has deflated somewhat, but Agnes knows that face: Miss Grace Wiggin, head of the Women’s Christian Union and famed crusader against suffrage, witchcraft, alcohol, gambling, prostitution, immigration, miscegenation, and unionizing.
Agnes goes very still, feeling like some wild creature caught in the lamp-light. Wiggin’s face turns toward her slowly, as if she has difficulty tearing her eyes from the tower. Tears glitter in them, and a quarter-teaspoon of longing.
“Did you do this?” Her voice is thin, lost-sounding, nothing like the shrill clarion call Agnes remembers.
Agnes inclines her head, feeling an unsteady surge of pride.I did this, with my sisters. They called it from bottomless time, sang it straight into the middle of sober, sinless New Salem. Grace Wiggin and her ladies-in-waiting seem suddenly less worrisome, almost humorous.
Wiggin’s eyes focus on her for the first time, her lip curling. “And did you not fear for the soul of your child? Have you no mother’s natural instincts?”
Agnes considers slapping her. “What about you, Miss Wiggin? Do you not fear for your reputation, out alone at night? Have you no shame?”
An odd, childish flash of guilt crosses the woman’s face. “I was out for a walk. I happened to be looking up and saw the stars shifting, changing, and the birds gathering . . . Then I smelled the roses.”
Mags always said the solstices and equinoxes were the times magic burned closest to the surface of things, when any self-respecting hedge-witch or wild-hearted woman ought to be outdoors, with moonlight on her skin and night around her shoulders.
What is a proper young woman doing out on the summer solstice, watching the sky? Why do her eyes keep reeling back to the tower, like moths to flames?
