Agnes doesn’t know if the message will find him, or if he will answer, or if she is a fool to trust the fickle heart of a man—but the pain comes to chase the worries away.
Time behaves strangely after that. It skitters forward then leaps out of sight, leaving her stranded in her own private eternity. She knows she ought to stand up, run, find shelter, but all she can do is curl over her belly and hiss curses between her teeth.
Footsteps. A concerned voice. “Are you all right, miss?”
Agnes tries to say she’s fine, thank you, just resting, but the words are lost in a moan.
A hand guides her elbow. Her hood slips aside as she stands, and she hears a sharp gasp. “Oh, Saints preserve us—you’re—”
Someone shouts her true name down the street.
The pain swallows her again. When she emerges the street is full of people and horses and men in black uniforms. “Agnes Amaranth East-wood! You are hereby under arrest for the crime of witchcraft!”
Rough hands roll her onto a canvas stretcher, and shackles snap around her wrists. Agnes fights, writhing and kicking, pulling so hard against her cuffs that something pops wetly in her wrist, but it does her no good.
She falls back, panting, and hears voices conferring. They use words likehystericalandagitated, and then one of the men is pressing a foul-smelling rag across her mouth.
The street goes gray and distant, as if she is peering up at it from the bottom of an empty well. Her limbs are slack against the canvas even as the pain spreads its sulfurous wings above her. Voices are still speaking around her, but none of the syllables seem to add up to words anymore.
Agnes lolls as they load her stretcher into the back of a cart. She doesn’t understand, doesn’t know where they’re taking her—until a woman in a starched apron leans over her and Agnes reads the words stitched across the breast in bold capitals: ST. CHARITY HOSPITAL.
Something is wrong and Juniper knows it. She can taste her sister’s terror through the line between them, feel the tarry black of despair.
Juniper lets go of Bella’s hand. She grabs a lead pitcher full of water and empties it onto the flagstone floor, ignoring Bella’s squawk. She kneels, the water soaking through the loose weave of her skirt while she waits for it to go still.
She’s supposed to have a possession of Agnes’s to work the spell properly, but she doesn’t care. Surely there’s enough of Agnes in her all the time—in her blood and bones, in the stubborn streak they share, in all the hours of their sisterhood.
Mirror, mirror, on the wall.
Juniper feels Bella peering over her shoulder, sharing her will. A picture shimmers to the surface of the water: Agnes, lying slack against too-white sheets in a too-white room, her hair a black pool behind her head. Her skirts are rucked carelessly to the waist, her legs gelid and still, somehow indecent. Her face is perfectly serene, half drowsing; the only sign of distress is the occasional ripple of her belly, a tightness that shudders through limp limbs, and the clawing, terrible black of her half-lidded eyes.
There are other people in the room with her, their faces blurred, their motions shadowed. Juniper sees the shake of a head, a dismissive wave of a hand. One of them steps to the side and Juniper sees the shackles around her sister’s wrists.
The water ripples as Bella takes a horrified step backward. She whispersoh no, oh noin a useless chant.
Juniper stands, shouldering past her. “I’m going.”
“Then they’ll have both of you!” Bella’s voice is a wobbling wail. “What do you think will happen if you go charging into a hospital room?”
Juniper meets her sister’s eyes and wavers. She doesn’t want to go back down in the Deeps. She doesn’t want to feel the unnatural cold of a witch-collar or the oily slide of shadows.
But she can’t leave Agnes and her baby tied up and hurting. She can’t even frame the choice properly in her head.
Neither can Bella, not really. Juniper sees it in the resigned droop of her head. “Let me gather a few spells, at least.”
Juniper doesn’t wait. She tugs the tower door open and presses her palm to the three woven-together circles. She says the words and thinks of the golden tree, as she has a dozen times before.
Nothing happens.
Nothing continues to happen.
“Bella,” Juniper says, quite calmly. “How come I can’t get out of this damn tower?”
Bella scurries nearer. “It can only mean the sign is gone. The circle back in New Salem must be broken.”
They look at one another for a long moment, before Juniper says, “So you’re saying we’re—”
“Trapped. Yes.” The Lost Way of Avalon is a ship cut loose from its anchor, drifting through nowhere, while Agnes is stuck back in somewhere.
