Agnes is struck by the sudden suspicion that Grace Wiggin doesn’t hate witching at all. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
“It’s vile. Wicked.” But the words have a hollow, learned-by-rote ring. Agnes waits, watching the tense roll of muscles in Wiggin’s face, wondering how long the woman will keep talking rather than screaming for help, and if it will be long enough for Bella to make the tower disappear.
That longing look is back in Wiggin’s eyes, stronger now. “My mother used to make my dolls dance, when I was a girl. I begged her to teach the words to me and she did, and more besides. I liked to learn them. It made me feel—” She doesn’t say how it made her feel, but Agnes knows: like her voice had power, like her will had weight.
“What happened to her?”
Bitterness seeps into Wiggin’s face, aging it. “She was caught killing the unborn.” Agnes thinks of Mags and the narrow path back to her house, Madame Zina with her gauzy veils and fake card-readings. “They made me go to the hanging. I was a Lost Angel, after that.”
An ungainly tenderness takes root in Agnes’s chest. She rebels against it—surely her circle needn’t be large enough to include women like Grace Wiggin, for the love of God—but it’s as if Wiggin’s face has become a window, or maybe a mirror. Agnes can see the frightened, hurting girl she once was, with a heart full of hate and nowhere to send it.
“Listen. You don’t have to keep doing . . . what you do. You don’t have to keep helping a man like Gideon Hill just because he—”
The sound of his name shatters the fragile thing between them. Wiggin’s eyes are shards of flint; her fingers clutch the shawl tighter around her shoulders. “Howdareyou—Mr. Hill is the noblest—the bravest—” A fervent, unnatural rage chokes her words.
Agnes is wondering if Wiggin is going to attack her, clawing and hissing like a cat, when the tower vanishes.
The stars and the tangled woods and the dark earth—all of it falls out of the world like coins dropping into an invisible pocket. Nothing remains of the Lost Way of Avalon except a mischievous wind, and the feral scent of magic and roses in the air. Wiggin staggers sideways, mouth open in horror. She spins back to Agnes with her skin waxen and yellow in the first streaks of true dawn. “You’ll burn for this,” she hisses. “He’ll make sure of it.”
And then she screams. “Help! Someone help! There are witches in New Salem!”
Agnes runs, pausing only to draw an X on the cobbles and whisper August’s spell into the dawn. Her hair rises from her shoulders and the baby’s weight lifts from her hips, and she runs with the vial knocking against her thigh and Wiggin’s voice ringing in her ears like a curse, or a prophecy.
She runs west, keeping to the side-streets and narrow alleys, dodging the lamp-lighters and night-soil men, hiding in doorways when she hears the ring of hooves on stone. At the cemetery she pauses, chewing her lip, before climbing the fence and winding her way back to the witch-yard, where their golden tree still stands, grand and gleaming, far too heavy to move.
Agnes buries the glass vial of earth among its roots. She scores a symbol into the soft metal of the tree’s trunk—three circles, intertwined—and whispers the words. The sign begins to glow, very faintly, and her fingers hover above it, wanting to touch it and be drawn back to the tower and the woods and the wild story her sisters are writing together.
But Agnes is through with all that. She saved her sister, and now she must survive for her daughter.
She walks home, weary and sore-footed. At first she hides when she sees officers riding past on their tall grays, but soon she realizes they hardly notice her. She is nothing, once again.
London Bridge is falling down, falling down,
iron bars will bend and break, bend and break,
My fair maiden.
A spell for rust, requiring saltwater & joined hands
Juniper wakes to a series of mysteries. The first mystery is her own skin, which she remembers as a battered, mistreated thing, like a worn-out suit of clothes. But it feels whole and smooth beneath her hands. Even—her fingers tremble as they reach her throat—the place where the iron collar burned itself to ash. It ought to be a scabbed, gluey ruin, weeping yellow and red, but there’s nothing but knots of taut flesh.
The second mystery is the room, which is round and sunny, and which she has never seen before in her life. There are three beds set beneath three arched windows, and three woven rugs overlapping on a wooden floor. Juniper thinks a little giddily of witch-tales about three bears and lost maidens. There’s a just-rightness to the room that Juniper can’t quite name, until she realizes it reminds her of the attic where they slept as girls. It was the only part of the house she was sorry to burn.
The third mystery is the most subtle and the most troubling: the light is all wrong. It feels like the middle of the day, but the sun falls slantwise through the windows, heavy and gold as a ripe apple. It’s autumn sunlight, Juniper is sure of it, and she wonders dizzily if she slept through summer.
She finds no answers in the quiet dancing of the dust motes, or in the green tendrils of ivy and rose that curl over the window ledges. She rustles in a chest at the foot of her bed and finds a wide-sleeved robe in undyed wool, with a single silver clasp in the shape of an S, or maybe a snake. She pulls it over her head, ignoring the pop and groan of muscles that would prefer to lie back down in the featherbed, and climbs down the ladder.
It ends at the top of a staircase that corkscrews downward. Along its dizzy route there are doors and alcoves, chairs piled with cushions and windows with wide benches beneath them. And books. An amount and variety of books that Juniper finds frankly excessive.
Juniper limps in slow spirals through the tower, badly missing her red-cedar staff, trailing one hand along the spines: soft calfskin, brittle leather, ragged cotton, burlap, eelskin, iron, titles stamped in gold and char, something that whispers sweetly as she touches it and something else that stings. She’s a little surprised she doesn’t find her oldest sister lying on the steps, expired from sheer glee.
Then, as she passes a delicately carved door, Juniper hears Bella’s voice. “—was thinking we ought to start with the medicinal texts. The fever is horrendous this year, and think what a coup it would be if we cured it!”
Juniper is standing halfway up a tower, right against the stone of the outer wall. By every natural law, there should be nothing but empty air behind the little carved door. But when she opens it she finds a smallish room paneled in dark oak, with a wide table presently buried beneath scrolls and books and scattered ink-pens. Bella leans over one side, spectacles perched on her nose, and Quinn sits at the other, lips quirked at some private joke.
“June!” Bella straightens. “When did you get up? What possessed you to walk down all those stairs on your own?” She shuffles Juniper over to a chair with much muttering and flapping of hands.
“I’m fine,” Juniper says, but her voice sounds like the drag of a match-tip against stone, harsh and grating. She fends off an offered shawl and cushion. “Jesus. Morning, Cleo.”
