An Introduction 19 страница

Eventually Juniper trails to a halt and sits beside Bella on the bench. Her hand brushes not quite accidentally against Bella’s and Bella holds it. They wait together for the next peal of pain.

Agnes knows before she knocks that Madame Zina will not answer. The door hangs crooked in its frame and the curtain-rod is slanted across the window. Someone has drawn an ashen X across the glass.

Agnes knocks anyway, because she doesn’t know what else to do. Because she walked nine blocks with her thighs chafing and her stomach clenching and unclenching like a fist, and a shiver is starting in her spine.

The door swings inward at her touch. Beyond it the room is dark and tumbled, a nest of toppled jars and strewn herbs. Maybe Zina ran before they came for her, or maybe she’s shackled in the Deeps, but she sure as hell isn’t here. There are other midwives on the west side, but so many of them have moved or closed up shop—

The pain swells, crests, fades. It’s hard to think anything in its wake except animal thoughts: run, hide, go home. But Agnes doesn’t have a home, just a narrow bunk at Three Blessings Boarding House with a few spells stuffed beneath the mattress.

She thinks for no reason of Avalon: that black tower, star-crowned, and the endless spiral of books. You know where to find us, Bella told her before she left.

Agnes finds her feet moving before she knows where they’re carrying her.

She doesn’t count the blocks as she walks back east. She merely sets her jaw and keeps going, feeling the bubble and burst of blisters on her feet, the bloody chafe of her thighs. The pain comes more often now and lingers longer, and she is obliged to stop and press her back against the warm brick while passersby cast her looks of concern and alarm. She keeps her hood pulled high.

The New Salem cemetery is locked after sundown, but the gate is open, swinging loose on its hinges. Agnes looks at it, swaying where she stands, feeling the same way she felt when she saw Zina’s crooked door. No.

There are men thronging the graveyard, their expressions both urgent and vacant, shovels and lit torches in their hands. They seem to be gathered at the witch-yard, shuffling and laboring around a vast, gleaming tangle. It takes a long second for Agnes to recognize it as the roots of a golden tree, ripped up.

No, no, no. The earth around the tree is churned and torn and wrong in some way that Agnes doesn’t understand. She stares, swaying a little, until she realizes that none of the gathered men seem to cast a shadow across it.

Agnes wheels away, hands flying to her hood. She walks blindly, taking turns at random, trying to think of someplace to run or someone to run to, but the pain returns and she finds herself on her knees in the middle of a nameless street, thinking, There’s no time.

She knows it as if there’s a wound clock somewhere in the center of her, ticking away seconds. The baby is coming too fast and she is crouched here like an animal with nowhere to go, no one to help her. She drew her circle too tight.

She fumbles in her pocket and finds a pair of silver-brown feathers, their edges ruffled and split. She stares at them for far too long, trying to remember what they might mean, what she might do with them—before the pain sends her thoughts running for cover again.

When it subsides she’s still holding the feathers. She remembers the words to an old lullaby written in her sister’s tidy hand: Hush little baby, don’t say a word, Mother will call you by mockingbird.

Agnes whispers the words to the feathers in her hand, along with a name, and feels the fever-flick of witchcraft under her skin. The feathers flutter upward, caught by an uncanny wind, and vanish into the falling night.

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 Eastwood! 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 like hysterical and agitated, 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 whispers oh no, oh no in 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.

There’s a heavy silence, during which it becomes clear that Bella isn’t about to leap to her feet and shout aha! and save them all.

Juniper limps back to the pool of water and crouches down beside it, looking down into the dark well of her sister’s eyes. Juniper recognizes the thing she sees there: the despair of a woman trapped good and proper, who knows no one is coming to save her.

Dance, little baby, dance up high,

Never mind, baby, Mother is by.

Crow and caper, caper and crow,

Stay, little star, and don’t let go.

A spell to steady a life, requiring hyacinth & a seven-pointed star

Agnes Amaranth knows what childbirth is supposed to be like. She’s heard the talk from young mothers working beside her in the mill, the girls back in Crow County who hadn’t gone to Mama Mags for help. There’s pain, they said, pain like cleaving open, like breaking in half, but there are other women there to help you bear it. Aunts and midwives, grannies and sisters, mothers to press cool palms against your forehead and hum half-forgotten lullabies in your ears.

You aren’t supposed to be alone. You aren’t supposed to be locked in a green-tiled room, chained and drugged, with nothing but the dull grate of men’s voices for company. A doctor with his sleeves rolled to the wrist, his hands bare and pink and somehow repellent, grime crusted beneath his nails; an assistant or two with towels slung over their shoulders and nameless stains spattering their aprons; a pair of men in uniforms, who look down at her like she is a prize they intend to stuff and mount on their mantels. A nurse flits among them sometimes, young and sorry-looking as she sweeps and straightens.

The pain is still there, cutting like a clarion call through the fog, but Agnes can’t answer it. She can only lie there with spittle trailing from the corner of her mouth, clawing like an animal inside the cage of her body. She counts ceiling tiles to distract herself. She prays. She tells herself witch-tales, but the missing mothers seem to taunt her, wailing from the margins while their daughters sleep in the cinders and flee into tangled woods and marry beastly husbands.

The pain comes again, urgent and vast, and Agnes feels her body straining and failing at some important task. Then the foreign scrape of fingers inside her, probing, pulling, conducting some secret evaluation and finding her wanting.

A sigh from the doctor, precisely like Mr. Malton sighing over a jammed loom. Agnes imagines her blood replaced with oil, her joints with gears; a misbehaving machine instead of a woman.

The doctor addresses the officers, rather than Agnes. “There’s been no progression at all. We’ll want to think about extraction, if you boys want her to survive to stand trial. ” One of the assistants rattles in a metal cart behind him and produces a long silver object. From the corner of her eye Agnes catches the ugly curve of a hook.

She thrashes against her shackles, her wild scream reduced to a choked moan. None of them look at her, except the nurse, whose eyes are huge and sad, her hands tight on the handle of her broom.

Agnes wants to bite her. She wants to claw and curse them all, to bring all the centuries of Avalon crashing down on their heads—but she walked away from all that, convinced the cost of power was too high, failing to calculate the cost of being without it.

She wonders if her sisters feel the echo of her toothless rage. She wonders if they would come to her, if they could.

Agnes feels her eyes widen, very slightly.

She finds that, if she focuses every ounce of fury into her left hand, she can curl her nails into her own flesh. She can drive them deep into her own palm until blood wells ruby-bright. She can unclench her hand and let the blood trickle to the point of her dangling finger and draw a blotched shape on the sheet beneath her: a red circle. She can even whisper the words, though her tongue is limp and wet in her mouth.

She can pray that her sisters are watching.

Juniper watches her sister’s skin turn from ivory to alabaster to wax. Her features remain slack, but her fingers are curled into her own palm just above the ugly iron of her shackle. Agnes’s fist clenches so tightly Juniper sees the dark gleam of blood gathering.

She flinches away. “We’ve got to get there somehow, Bell. Call the tower back into the square, if you have to. Undo the binding. ” But that would leave the library exposed and send every police officer and zealot into the streets to hunt witches. Would they even make it to Agnes before they were caught?

She expects Bella to object, to cling to her books like a mother protecting several thousand of her favorite children, but when she looks up she sees that Bella is, inexplicably, smiling. Her eyes are on the pool of water.

“I don’t think that will be necessary. Look. ”

Juniper looks.

The red gleam beneath Agnes’s fingernails has become a fistful of blood. One finger is extended, stretching at a painful angle, smearing the bed-sheet with shocking crimson. The finger moves slowly, as if it requires all Agnes’s strength to keep it in motion, and it takes Juniper a startled moment to see what she has drawn.

A circle. A way where there was none.

“Hold on, Ag. ” Juniper whispers it to the water. Bella is already filling her arms with glass jars and paper bags, books and notes. Her owl swoops silently to her shoulder and she reaches a hand to stroke its onyx feathers. Juniper thinks she looks like a proper witch from one of Mags’s stories, about to curse her enemies or ride a thundercloud into battle.

They return to the tower door and this time when they press their palms to the carved sign they think of Agnes and her circle of blood, the red path she drew them through the dark.

The tower vanishes.

Agnes is alone.

Until she isn’t.

The air of the hospital skews sideways, a dizzy rushing, and afterward there are two hands pressed to the bloody circle on her bed-sheet. One of them is long and narrow, the fingertips stained with ink; the other is wide, sun-brown, marked with pale scars from thorns and thickets.

Her sisters.

Who were watching, who came when she called.

They stand above her like a matched pair of Old Testament angels, the kind with flaming swords and vengeful hearts. Stories spin through Agnes’s head again, except this time she isn’t thinking of the dead mothers or their lost daughters. She’s thinking about the witches—the women who dispensed the glass slippers and curses and poison apples, who wreaked their wills on the world and damned the consequences.

There is a moment of crystalline silence while the gathered men stare at the three women and the black owl. Then comes Bella’s voice, perfectly calm, and the sharp smell of herbs crushed between fingers. A wicked crack splits the air, very much like a small bone snapping.

The police officers fall sideways, clutching at their ribs and howling. The doctor lunges for Juniper, but she’s already holding the hospital push broom in her hands. The handle cracks across his face with an unpleasant crunch. Bella whispers again and a heavy drowsiness descends on the room. The pair of assistants crumple to the floor and the howling officers fall silent.

The ward is quiet except for the heavy drag of bodies being hauled across the floor. The doctor rouses once, voice rising in a high whine. There are a few more thuds of broom-handle on flesh and he falls quiet.

Bella tsks. “Honestly, Juniper. The sleeping spell would have done just as well. ”

“Sure. ” Agnes can hear Juniper’s shrug in her voice, followed by a final, satisfied thwack of the broomstick.

Bella chants over Agnes’s head—Soundly she sleeps beneath bright skies, Agnes Amaranth awake, arise! —and gives a sharp whistle.

The drug lifts from Agnes like a rising fog. She pants relief, limbs seizing against the chains. She cranes her neck upward and sees the sorry-eyed nurse holding open the narrow door of what looks like a supply closet while Juniper stuffs the limp bodies inside it. “Now go tell them the doctor doesn’t want any interruptions—or better yet, take this. ” Juniper hands the nurse a small canvas sack. “You remember the words? Once you work it, hightail it home. With my thanks, Lacey. ”

Agnes wants to ask how they know one another and if every damn woman in this city is a witch, but another roll of pain sends her elsewhere, inward-facing, blind.

When it passes, her sisters are hovering above her. Their hands are gentle on hers, unbending her blood-gummed fingers, and their eyes are so full of love and worry that Agnes feels the pain receding a little. An owl calls from somewhere, a soft crooning that makes Agnes think of full-moon nights back home.

“We’re here now. ” Juniper’s voice is low and smoke-streaked, as soft as she can make it. “Bella’s spelled the door and Lacey’s sent half the hospital straight to sleep. It’ll be all right. ”

“I shouldn’t have—I should have—” Agnes’s tongue is still slow, her speech slurred. “The doctor said the baby wasn’t coming, that she would have to be extracted. ”

Bella tuts, setting glass jars in a neat line on the bedside table and clutching her black leather notebook. “I’m sure he did. But I remind you that he was merely a man. Whereas we”—she looks over her spectacles at Agnes and gives her a very small smile—“are witches. ”

Bella opens a heavy tome titled Obstetrix Magna and smooths the pages with a slightly shaking hand, wishing she felt as certain as she sounded. “Juniper, can you take care of these? ” She gestures to Agnes’s shackles, but Juniper is already chanting her rhyme, Bend and break, bend and break, and the chains are blushing red. The iron rusts and flakes, as if several decades of rain and weather have passed in a handful of seconds.

Juniper snaps the chains with vicious glee, the scar around her throat gleaming white.

Agnes pulls her arms inward, cradling her own belly. She doesn’t scream or moan, but a low, animal growl leaves her lips. Juniper looks a little wildly at Bella. “Can’t you do anything? ”

Bella can. She claws through the Obstetrix Magna, past alarming illustrations of wombs and veins and infants with small ivory horns or flames for hair. Her fingers find the pages she marked back in the tower, where there are spells to draw fevers from the womb and persuade blood to remain in the body, to ease the pains of labor and steady the heart of the unborn.

“Juniper. ” Bella fumbles in her brown sack and finds a little tin of black-stained grease. “Draw a seven-pointed star around the bed, if you please. ”

Juniper daubs the unsteady shape of a star while Bella circles, whispering and chanting. She tucks jasmine flower beneath her tongue and hyacinth in her hair. She rings a silver bell seven times and watches Agnes’s body unfurl a little further with each soft peal.

It’s a strong working. Bella can tell by the scorch of power in her veins and the hot smell of witching in the air. Juniper’s cheeks are flushed red from the effort of helping her, and Strix mantles on her shoulder.

Agnes sighs back down against the sheets, the trapped-animal terror receding from her face. Her gaze is unclouded, lucid for the first time since they arrived. “Thank you, ” she breathes. “I didn’t know if you’d come. ”

“Jesus, Ag. ” Juniper shakes her head. “Have a little faith. ”

“I used to. Until…” Agnes slants a bitter look at Bella.

Juniper says, “That was a long time ago, ” just as Bella asks, “Until what? ”

A contraction doubles Agnes around her belly, lips white, but her gaze stays clear and sharp as a bared blade. “Until—you—betrayed me, ” she pants.

“I betrayed you? ”

“You were the only one I told about the baby. Because you were the only one I trusted. ” The words are spat poison, meant to wound, but Bella doesn’t flinch.

Because they aren’t true. Because she and her sister have wasted seven years hating one another for crimes neither one committed.

“Oh, Agnes. ” Bella’s own voice sounds weary in her ears, worn thin by the weight of that single summer afternoon seven years ago. “I never told our daddy a damn thing. ”

Agnes’s face makes Bella think of a ship in a dying wind, sails slack, as if the force that drove her has suddenly disappeared.

“Then how? How did he know? ”

“The Adkins boy. ”

“I never told him shit—”

Bella shakes her head. “He saw you in the woods, afterward. ” Bella heard his tap-tap on their door, and her daddy’s hollered answer. Then low voices rising quickly, and that butter-brained boy saying, I’m sure, sir, I saw her bury it under a hornbeam. “I think he was hoping if he told Daddy you’d be cornered into a quick wedding. ” Bella’s lip curls. “He didn’t know our daddy. After he left, Daddy went looking for you. I followed. ”

She thought maybe she could help somehow, but she’d stood paralyzed as her daddy drew closer and closer to Agnes. As Agnes screamed that Bella was a liar, a sinner, an unnatural creature. Her story came out in jumbled sobs—going into the church cellar for fresh candles and finding Bella with the preacher’s daughter, half-naked and ruby-lipped, reveling in sin—but even a poorly told story has power. Their father understood. He turned on her, too, and Bella begged—Please, no, please—

Bella had met her sister’s eyes and seen nothing but a terrible, leaden cold. Hate, she thought then.

Now she thinks of the witch-queen who sent shards of ice into warm hearts and soft eyes, turning them against the ones they loved best. Now she thinks she isn’t the only one familiar with betrayal.

“I never told, Agnes. I swear. ”

Agnes shuts her eyes. “I thought—I didn’t—Saints, Bell. ” A ragged whisper. “What did I do to us? ”

“You were just a child. ” Bella tries to sound measured and calm, as if it is a distant hurt long forgotten, rather than an ice-shard still buried in her breast.

“So were you. ” Agnes clutches at the hard ball of her belly, breath catching. “I shouldn’t have said it. Even if you had told, I shouldn’t have turned on you. ” There are tears mingling with the sweat on Agnes’s face now, more dripping from the end of Bella’s nose. She recalls dizzily that it was true love’s tears that melted the ice in the story.

“I’m sorry, ” Agnes whispers.

“It’s all right, ” Bella whispers back.

Another contraction wracks Agnes before she can answer. Bella can see the pain of it biting deep, even with the witching to ease it, and a tremor of fear moves through her. Perhaps even witching won’t be enough.

She smooths sweaty tendrils of hair back from Agnes’s brow.

Agnes looks up at her, pale and tired and scared. “Will you stay with me? ”

“Yes, ” Bella answers. In her chest she feels that cold sliver of ice melt into blood-warm water. “Always. ”

Juniper doesn’t know much about birthing, but she knows it shouldn’t take this damn long.

She and Bella hover on either side of Agnes like a pair of black-cloaked gargoyles, standing vigil. It seems to go alright at first. Agnes pants and swears and strains against some invisible enemy, the veins blue and taut in her throat. But the baby doesn’t come, and each contraction wrings her like a rag, twists something vital out of her. Bella flicks back through her books, hissing and muttering, tossing herbs in ever-wilder circles.

The baby doesn’t come.

Agnes is supposed to be the strong one, but Juniper can see they’re coming to the end of her strength. Bella is supposed to be the wise one, but she’s running out of words. Juniper figures that leaves her, the wild one, with her wild will.

She casts around for anything that might help her sister cling to life, that might bind a woman to the world. The word bind rattles like a thrown pebble in her skull, rippling outward, and Juniper thinks: Why the hell not?

She plucks a single hair from her head. She tugs another one from Bella. (“Ow! What in the world—” “Hush. ”) The last hair she takes is from Agnes, who doesn’t seem to notice.

Juniper twirls the strands in her fingers, three shades of shining black, and twists them into a slender wisp of braid. As she braids she sings the words to herself: Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Little words, old words, to bind a split seam or a stray thread. Why not a life?

Beside her Bella gives a little gasp. “A binding? That’s—what happens if s-she dies, and takes us with her—”

Juniper ignores her, and eventually Bella shuts the hell up and helps.

They speak the words together, circling round, rising and falling. The thing between them sings like a plucked string. and it’s suddenly clear as daylight to Juniper that it’s a binding, too, worn thin with time. She might wonder who worked it and why, except that she’s busy pouring her whole heart into her witching.

Juniper sees the spell plucking at Agnes, reeling her back toward life, but Agnes doesn’t want to come. Her head lolls against the sheets, sweat-sheened, and her eyes glitter from somewhere deep in her skull.

Juniper climbs carefully onto the bed beside her, fitting herself around the heat and hurt of her sister’s body. She tucks her cheek in the hollow between Agnes’s chin and collar, the way she did as a girl, and keeps speaking the words. Yours to mine and mine to yours.

“June. Baby. ” Agnes’s voice is a hum against her cheek, a whisper in her ear. “Take care of her. Promise me you’ll take care of her. ”

The words falter on Juniper’s lips; the spell sags. “I promise, ” she says, and feels the promise weave a circle around her heart, a binding far older and stronger than any witchcraft.

Agnes softens after that, a final surrender.

Juniper thinks of the mornings when Mama Mags would come back from a hard birth with blood beneath her nails and heartache in her eyes. She would stare out at the white curls of mist rising like ghosts from the valley, rubbing her thumb across the brass shine of her locket. It’s just the way of things.

Juniper is old enough by now to know that the way of things is, generally speaking, horseshit. It’s cruelty and loss; locked doors and losing choices; sundered sisters and missing mothers.

What the hell good is witching, if it can’t change the way of things?

Juniper puts her lips against the shining dark of her sister’s hair and whispers, “Listen to me, Agnes. This isn’t how it goes. This isn’t how the story ends. All this—me and you and Bell—is just the beginning. ” A shudder moves through Agnes, a laugh or a sob, but her eyes are closed.

Juniper’s arm tightens around Agnes’s shoulders and her voice rasps low. “Don’t leave me. ”

Agnes opens her eyes and Juniper sees a spark burning somewhere deep down in the dark of them. Her fingers find Juniper’s on one side and Bella’s on the other, so they form a circle between them.

Agnes’s lips begin to move. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust—

Agnes speaks the words until they aren’t words anymore. Until they become clasped hands and bound threads, a circle woven from sister to sister to sister. Until the rules of the world bend beneath the weight of their will.

Agnes feels that will thrumming beneath her breastbone, a rush of desire. She wants to live. She wants to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with her sisters and shout a new story into the dark. She wants to look into her daughter’s eyes and see Juniper’s wildness and Bella’s wisdom, the wheel of stars and the snap of flames, all the everything she is and will be shining back at her.

Agnes is aware that she is crying, and that the tears are hissing against her skin. She is aware that the pain is an animal that has slipped its leash, biting and thrashing deep inside her, and that it carries her daughter closer.

That what they are doing—binding three lives together, holding a woman to life even while her pulse stutters and jolts—is an impossible reckless thing that only her dumbshit sister would think of, and that they are doing it anyway. Because she doesn’t want to die and they refuse to let her.

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