An Introduction 20 страница

That power fills her, scorching her veins and blackening her bones, and it is outside her, too, watching her. Weighing her, this not-yet-mother who will not die, who will break the laws of the universe rather than leave her daughter alone.

Somewhere in the blackness beyond her closed eyes, a hawk cries.

Then the silent rush of wings and the weightless bite of talons. Agnes opens her eyes to see the savage hook of a beak, the onyx shine of feathers. An eye like a comet, caught and polished.

In the brief lull before the pain and power surge again, it occurs to Agnes that Juniper will be insufferably, inconsolably jealous.

The pain crests. The hawk calls again, a wild shriek.

A final push, and Juniper is whooping and Bella is sobbing—“She’s beautiful, Ag, she’s perfect”—and someone, some new person who hadn’t existed a moment before, is wailing.

Oh, baby girl.

Time skips forward again and Agnes is lying back against a soft mound of pillows with a precious, burning thing clutched against her chest. She stares down into a small, furrowed face, faintly imperious, like a tiny deity who hasn’t seen much of the world yet but is already unimpressed. Her fists are two pink curls, and her eyes—open, staring solemnly back at Agnes, as if the two of them were instructed to memorize one another’s faces—are a nameless color somewhere between midnight and ash.

“She—is she steaming? ” Juniper sounds only mildly concerned, as if perhaps all babies steam for the first few days.

Bella is fussing with boiled water and clean linen, scrubbing away the streaks of red and gummy white. “She’s just fine, I’m sure. It must be an effect of all that witching. ”

The baby’s head is still glossy and wet, but already Agnes can see her hair is an unlikely shade of ruby red, like the deepest heart of a bonfire or the burning eye of a familiar.

Agnes glances sideways at the bird now perched on the bed rail. A river hawk, she thinks, all sharp angles and vicious curves, black as char. It looks down at the baby in her arms with the same fierce tenderness that Agnes feels, a love that has teeth and talons.

Agnes presses her lips to her daughter’s fiery hair and feels her life cleaving, splitting cleanly into two pieces: the time before, and the time after.

The mattress shifts beside her. “What’ll you name her? ” Juniper’s voice is reverent. Her hand hovers above the baby’s head, not touching her, as if she isn’t sure she ought to be near anything that fragile and precious.

Agnes has thought of many names—Calliope for her mother or Magdalena for her mother’s mother, Ivy for power or Rose for beauty—but now a different name unfurls from her lips, snapping like a banner on the battlefield. “Eve. ”

A sinful name, a shocking name. A name that broke the first world and walked into the new one, unbound and unbowed.

Juniper laughs, a low rasp. “And her mother’s-name? ”

Agnes wants something deep-rooted and determined, something that grows in overturned earth and tumbled rocks. She thinks of the tough, silvery weed that was always threatening to overtake Mama Mags’s herb-garden: cudweed, she called it, or—“Everlasting. Eve Everlasting. ”

Juniper dares to cup her palm around her niece’s ruby head, to whisper, “Eve Everlasting. Give ’em hell, baby girl. ”

“She will, ” Agnes promises. She finds her fingers clutching the swaddled sheets. “And so will I, I swear. I’m sorry to you both for running away, for hiding. I thought…” She thought it was safer to creep and cower, to be no one rather than someone. Like her mother taught her. “I will not be a mother like ours was. ”

Bella settles on her other side. “Neither was she, once. You were five when she died, but I was seven. ” Agnes has always envied Bella those two extra years. “I remember her the way she used to be. I think she thought if she made herself small enough and quiet enough, she would be safe. ”

She was wrong. Bella doesn’t need to say it.

Agnes swallows the salt in her throat and leans very carefully against her sister. A silence blooms between them, the gentle calm following a storm. Agnes is several steps past exhaustion but can’t seem to close her eyes. She’s mesmerized by the ammonite curl of her daughter’s left ear, the delicate fall of her red lashes against the soft shape of her face.

She is studying the soft line of her cheek, wondering if she sees a hint of her sister’s square jaw, when the hawk mantles beside her. Its wings snap wide, as if to defend itself against some invisible attack. The owl on Bella’s shoulder does the same, eyes wide and round.

“Goodness! ” Bella flinches from the slap of feathers, trying to stroke a calming finger down its breast, but it launches itself upward. The hawk joins it, circling near the ceiling on midnight wings. The pattern they draw is a warning, like vultures spiraling above some dying thing. A growing light gleams dull amber on their feathers, the rising sun, or the distant, electric glow of the Fair.

Agnes is looking up at them, clutching her daughter, when there’s a loud bang against the ward door.

“Agnes! Are you in there? ” More banging, a desperate fist. “Hyssop, for Chrissake! ”

Bella looks at Agnes and Agnes nods. She unlocks the door and Mr. August Lee falls through it.

His hair is tangled and dark with rain, his eyes wild. There’s a gray smear across one cheek and a smell rising from his clothes, trailing like a shadow behind him: acrid and sour, ugly in some way Agnes doesn’t understand.

“Is she alive? Is the baby—” August’s eyes rove between the three of them, fastening onto Agnes and the tight-wrapped bundle held to her breast. The relief in his face washes over her like daybreak.

Juniper says, sullenly, “They’re just fine, thank you very much, ” but August doesn’t seem to hear her. He moves to Agnes’s bedside and kneels, still looking at her with that stripped-bare delight. Agnes turns her hand palm up on the sheet and he presses his forehead against it. “I’m sorry, ” he says into the mattress. “I got your message, but you weren’t there. I looked and looked. Finally someone told me you’d been taken, but I didn’t know where—”

“It’s all right. ” She strokes her thumb across his brow, because she can, because she likes the weight of his head in her hand and the bent line of his neck. “I had my sisters. ” The binding thrums between them, a cat’s purr, and it occurs to Agnes that she was dead wrong.

She thought survival was a selfish thing, a circle drawn tight around your heart. She thought the more people you let inside that circle the more ways the world had to hurt you, the more ways you could fail them and be failed in turn. But what if it’s the opposite, and there are more people to catch you when you fall? What if there’s an invisible tipping point somewhere along the way when one becomes three becomes infinite, when there are so many of you inside that circle that you become hydra-headed, invincible?

August is silent, head still pressed to her hand as if all he wants in the world is to feel the heat of her pulse.

“Well. ” Juniper clears her throat. “Not to interrupt, but it’s time we get gone. Before somebody notices this whole hospital is asleep or follows this fool here. ” But she sounds less sullen, even faintly approving, as if she rather likes the sight of a man on his knees.

August looks up with a shadow looming in his face. “Where are you going? Is it that tower? ”

Juniper shrugs at him, already turning to draw a circle on the white-tile wall. The birds still circle above her like some grave portent.

“You can’t go back there. ”

“Excuse me? ” Juniper wheels, chin thrust forward. “And why the hell not? ”

But Agnes already knows why, because Agnes has finally recognized the smell rising from August’s clothes: wild roses and fire.

“Because, ” August answers, “the tower is burning. ”

Wade in the water with me,

My daughter all dressed in red.

Wade in the water, and dress in white instead.

A song to stop bleeding after a hard birth, requiring twice-blessed water & the Serpent-Bearer

James Juniper looks at the man kneeling beside her sister—at the gray smear on his cheekbone and the sorry angle of his shoulders—and tells him, very gently, “Bullshit. ”

“It isn’t—”

“It is. Avalon would have to be somewhere in order for anybody to burn it, and I happen to know it’s nowhere. ”

“It isn’t. It’s standing in the middle of St. George’s Square and it’s burning. Look out the window! You can see the light from here! ”

Juniper doesn’t want to look out the window, doesn’t want to know the light glowing red on the underbellies of the clouds isn’t coming from the rising sun.

“Listen, we bound that tower and buried the binding, and warded the place we buried it. So excuse me if I don’t—”

“June. ” It’s Agnes, her voice tired and cracked, pitched low so as not to wake the baby.

Juniper shoots August a now look what you did glare. “It’s alright, Ag. I’m sure Mr. Lee is mistaken. ”

“June. ” And there’s a sorriness in her voice that makes Juniper want to shout or stuff her fingers in her ears, anything so she doesn’t hear what she says next. “There were men at the graveyard. The tree was uprooted. I think they must have found the binding. ”

Juniper doesn’t say anything. She stares at her sister, and then at August, who is climbing wearily to his feet. “It’s madness out there. I ran past people carrying torches, shouting about burning the witches out of their nest at last. They said the black tower had come back, and they said Gideon Hill was going to burn it. ”

“Bullshit, ” Juniper says again, but the word wobbles in her mouth. Agnes is looking up at her with a slick shine of tears in her eyes, and Bella has both hands pressed to her mouth.

Juniper looks away from them, anywhere else. Her eye catches on the bloody circle now dried and crusted on the bed-sheet beside her sister.

The trick to doing something stupid is to do it very quickly, before anyone can shout wait!

Juniper presses her palm to the circle and speaks the words, and then she is pulled sideways into the burning black.

Juniper hasn’t yet been to Hell—although, according to her daddy, the preacher, Miss Hurston, and the New Salem Police Department, it’s only a matter of time—but she figures when she gets there it’ll look a lot like St. George’s Square does now: fire and ash and ruination.

The door beneath her hand is burning, blue flames licking across charred wood, eating the inscription and sign both. She reels back, curling her hand to her chest, and stares up at the tower that was her hope and her home. Fire leaps from every window, fattened by the pages of ten thousand books and scrolls, by all the words and ways of witches preserved for so many centuries. Ivy and rose-vines wither and blacken, peeling away from the stone in long twists of ash. The trees wear hungry red crowns, like doomed queens, and birds caw and flap in frenzied circles.

Beneath the hungry roar of the flames Juniper thinks she hears a keening sound, low and distant, like women’s voices joined together in some sad lamentation. Or maybe the sound comes from her own heart as she watches the last hope of witches rising into the sky on wings of ash and cinder.

Through the white haze of smoke and the hiss of rain Juniper sees people ringing the square. Men and women stand with lit torches in raised fists, Hill’s symbol brought to hideous life. She can’t tell through the waver of heat and light if their shadows are their own. She isn’t sure she cares.

Behind the men and their torches—his eyes dancing with merry flames, his pale skin flushed—stands Gideon Hill. A willowy blond woman clutches his arm, looking up at him with such empty devotion that Juniper shivers.

Hill’s mouth is moving, issuing proclamations or commands or spells. The crowd is too mesmerized by their violent delights to wonder why the flames burn so unnaturally hot, heedless of the rain, or to notice the woman who now stands at the base of the tower, her hair fire-whipped, her tears hissing to steam before they leave her eyes.

Only Hill sees her. His nostrils flare like a hound catching a long-sought scent, and his eyes lift above the heads of his vicious, frothing flock. Juniper feels them like hooks in her skin.

“You were cleverer than I thought, little witch. ” Hill is separated from her by fifty men and a roaring blaze, but his voice is a whisper in her ear. “But not clever enough. ”

The sound of his voice drags her back down into the Deeps, sends shadow-fingers prying between her teeth. She spits. It sizzles where it strikes.

She sees the white glimmer of Hill’s smile through the haze. At his side Grace Wiggin frowns very faintly, as if she senses his attention wandering.

His laugh shivers in the air beside her. It’s a relieved sound, almost giddy, and Juniper remembers the terrible fear that worked in his eyes. “I knew when you escaped that you must have found it, somehow. Dragged it back from wherever those hags took it. You hid it well, but anything lost can be found, can it not? ”

Juniper thinks of the wards they’d set so carefully around the witch-yard, salt and thistle; she pictures shadow-hands plucking and pulling at them until they unraveled.

“You have given me the thing I have wanted above all others, James Juniper. ” The voice is passionless but sincere, and Juniper is struck by the certainty that he is telling the truth. “I am very grateful. ”

His laugh echoes across the square and she wants to charge through the crowd and wrap her hands around his throat, curse him eyeless and earless and tongueless—except there’s a dark shimmer at her feet: shadows, many-armed, languorous as well-fed snakes, oozing across the scorched earth toward her. She whirls, presses her burned hand back to the hot ashes of the door, speaks the words a second time—

And she is on her knees in the stinking silence of the hospital ward, with hot tears tracking through the char on her cheeks.

Agnes knows from the broken slope of Juniper’s shoulders, from the reek of ashes and roses she brings with her, that August was telling the truth.

A wail rises: Bella, keening as if her own flesh and blood is burning along with the library. Her hands scrabble for the drawn circle on the sheet.

Juniper catches her tight around the waist. “It’s too late. It’s gone, Bell. He’s won. ” Her voice is even rougher than before, twice-burned by fire. Bella sags against her youngest sister, weeping, and Juniper shushes her. August looks at the floor, a stranger intruding on their mourning.

They stay like that, suspended in grief like gnats in amber. Agnes knows with cold clarity that soon someone will wake from their spell and raise the alarm. Rioters and officers will turn up looking for more witches to burn, and they’ll find three sisters and a little witch-girl with hair the color of heart’s blood. They’ll rip her from Agnes’s arms.

She looks down at her daughter—her hair drying in bright swirls of red, her cheeks round and slack in sleep—and thinks: Let the bastards try.

“We have to go, ” she says, very calmly. None of them move, mired in the selfishness of grief. Agnes raises her voice. “We have to go right now. Before they come for us, and for Eve. ”

At Eve’s name Juniper looks up, blinking scorched eyes. “Where? They’ll be watching the train station and the trolley lines, and I bet the streets are crawling. We might make it to Salem’s Sin, maybe—”

Bella cuts her off, sounding surprisingly firm despite the snot and tears. “We can go to Cleo’s in New Cairo. People are scared of the south side these days, and they have the means to hide us. ” Agnes suspects it isn’t merely logic that drives Bella. Bella frowns at the clouds out the window and adds, inanely, “It’s the full moon, too. ”

Juniper shakes her head. “We’ll be moving slow, and they’ll be looking for three women and a baby. It’s too far. ”

Bella might have argued, but Agnes turns to August and says simply, “Help us. Please. ”

She knows from the warm twist of his smile that he hears it not as a command, but as an act of blind trust, the sort of thing one comrade might ask of another as they stand back-to-back, surrounded.

His eyes catch hers and hold steady. “It’s far. ” He glances at the push broom propped against the wall, slightly splintered from Juniper’s misuse. “Unless—can you—? ”

Juniper’s laugh is a bitter crack. “No. ”

“Well, I could get my boys to help. ” He trails off, worry creasing his face. “But it’ll be rough going. Are you sure you ought to move, so soon after…” His eyes flick nervously to the bloodied sheets in the corner.

Agnes’s voice goes very dry. “I’ll manage, Mr. Lee. ”

“Are you sure? I always heard a woman shouldn’t—”

A hawk’s scream silences him. Agnes strokes the wing of her familiar. “Do you doubt me? Truly? ”

Mr. Lee rocks back, like a man in a gust of fierce wind. He looks at her—at the black river hawk perched at her side and the redheaded baby clutched to her bare breast and the scorching heat of her eyes—and nods so deeply it’s nearly a bow. “Never again, ” he breathes.

He turns to leave and calls over his shoulder, “Meet me behind the hospital in half an hour. ”

Bella has seen the undertakers’ carriages before—black-painted wagons with ST. CHARITY HOSPITAL written in stark white capitals on the side—but she always imagined it would be several long decades before she rode in one herself.

She also imagined she would be alone, and dead, rather than pressed beside her sisters on the floorboards, very much alive and praying the baby won’t cry as they clatter and jounce across the city.

Mr. Lee met them behind the hospital with several of his friends—scruffy, disreputable fellows who seemed well versed in mayhem—a cheap black suit, and a matched pair of carthorses that were persuaded to pull the carriage despite the smell of rot and arsenic. Mr. Lee helped them one after the other into the coach. His hand lingered around Agnes’s, his mouth half-open, but the driver hyahed and August vanished into the gloom.

Now the city passes in ghoulish flashes through the high windows: the flare of a lit torch in a bare hand; shouted curses and prayers; the stamp of feet marching in unnatural synchrony. The sour smell of wet smoke clings to her skin like grease, burying even the corpse-stink of the carriage.

A drifting flake of ash filters through the window and settles soft as snow on Bella’s cheek. She wonders what mystery or magic it once held, now lost to the flames. Her tears slide silently to her temples and trickle through her hair.

The carriage rattles over trolley tracks and missing cobbles, the street roughening beneath them. The noise shifts from angry shouts to worried voices, pitched low. The clop of hooves falls quiet and the carriage sways to a stop.

Knuckles tap twice on the roof, and the three Eastwoods—four, Bella supposes, catching the delicate curve of her niece’s cheek in the moonlight—stumble out into the night.

They’re on a street she doesn’t know, standing in the shadowed dark between two gas-lamps. Bodies move in the darkness around them, hurrying steps and hushed voices. Bella hears the snick of locks turning in latches, even the muffled thump of a hammer nailing shutters closed over a window, as New Cairo battens itself like a ship before a coming storm.

The driver tips his cap to them, addressing Agnes more than either of the others. “Mr. Lee begs you to send word to the Workingman, Misses Eastwood, once you’re settled. He assures me you have your methods. ”

Agnes sweeps her stained cloak around herself and nods regally. “Thank you, sir. ” She falters, suddenly more woman than witch. “And thank him, for me? Tell him—” But she doesn’t seem to know what she wants to tell him.

The driver grants her another grave tip of his hat. “I will, miss. ” Then, far less formally, “Trust August to fall for the most wanted woman in New Salem. ”

He flicks the reins and Juniper’s affronted mutter (“I thought I was the most wanted woman in New Salem”) is lost in the muffled clop of hooves.

Bella is blinking up at the stars, squinting through smudged spectacles at the distant street sign. “Ah—this way. ” Bella walks south and her sisters follow a half-step behind her, scuttling like field mice beneath a full moon.

No one sits on stoops or plays cards on street-corners. The barrooms are dark and vacant. The only people they pass are clusters of men carrying cudgels and hammers, and long-cloaked women with hard, fearless expressions that make Bella think there are reasons the police don’t like to patrol Cairo after sundown.

She turns twice and doubles back once before she finds Nut Street. But the night market isn’t what she remembers: the stalls and rugs are being rolled away, wares packed hastily into canvas sacks and crates, dark cloaks pulled over colorful skirts. Eyes turn and catch on Bella and her sisters—three white women and two black birds and one red-haired baby—but Bella ignores them.

She finds Araminta’s shop and staggers through the door, weak-kneed and reeling. Araminta herself (Quinn’s mother, Bella thinks with a small, internal wail) sits behind the counter. “Now what’s going on—” she begins, but then she catches sight of Bella’s face. Her eyes flick to Agnes, too pale and shivering in the warm evening. “I’ll fetch her. ”

The three of them stand, swaying slightly, until Quinn appears wearing a half-buttoned gentleman’s shirt over her nightdress. “Bella! ” She reaches toward Bella as if she wants to hold her, but at that moment Agnes says unff and slumps sideways against a shelf of tiny wooden drawers.

Then the shop is full of low voices and reaching hands, the shuffle of feet as they hurry into the back room and make a pallet of pillows and spare quilts. They settle Agnes in the center while Araminta sings a spell against fever and another against blood loss, feet shuffling, a chalk map of stars drawn hastily on the floor. Juniper cradles Eve with her lower lip caught between her teeth, looking awkward and fierce and full of unwieldy, fresh-hatched love.

Araminta presses her palm to Agnes’s forehead as the song ends and nods once. Juniper nests beside Agnes, the baby swaddled between them, and Araminta hauls herself upright and picks her way over to Quinn and Bella. “They’ll keep for the night. ”

She looks at her daughter and the corner of her mouth twitches. “Get some sleep, you two. ”

Quinn ducks her head and heads up a narrow flight of stairs and Bella watches her go with a silent sinking in her heart.

Halfway up, Quinn turns. She meets Bella’s eyes and extends her hand, palm up. An invitation, a question, a challenge. Bella hears Juniper’s voice: Are you such a coward?

Bella isn’t.

Quinn’s hand is warm and dry. She leads Bella up the stairs to a room she recognizes. There’s the bed with its saffron quilt, gone gray in the gloom. There’s the pillow where Bella woke with the memory of warmth beside her.

Quinn sits on the foot of the bed and slides the gentleman’s shirt from her shoulders. Her arms beneath it are bare and long, velveteen in the dark, her nightdress ghostly white. She looks like a living Saint, the street-lamp painting a glowing halo behind her head.

Bella thinks she should probably leave.

(Bella does not want to leave. )

Quinn smooths the quilt beneath her, a gentle invitation. Bella doesn’t move or speak, as if her body is a fractious animal that will betray her given the slightest loosening of the reins.

“You can leave if you like. ” Quinn’s voice is carefully neutral. “There’s room beside your sisters. ”

“No, thank you, ” Bella breathes.

The white flash of Quinn’s teeth in the dark. Her chin tilts in a come here flick, and this invitation is less gentle, warmer and sweeter and far more dangerous.

Bella makes an inarticulate sound, swallows, and tries again. “Mr. Quinn—”

“Does not live at this address, nor has he ever. ” Bella blinks several times and Quinn explains gently, “The two of us grew up together, and understood very young that neither of us was interested in… the usual arrangement. He lives in Baltimore with a very nice gentleman friend and a spoiled dog named Lord Byron. ”

“I… oh. ” Bella has not previously imagined any arrangements other than the usual one; she feels simultaneously too young and too old, terribly naive.

She looks again at the space beside Quinn. She sits.

“It’s gone, you know. ” Bella’s voice is hoarse from swallowed smoke. “All of it. The hoarded magic of witches, lost in a single night. It would have been safe if we’d just left it hidden where the Last Three put it, but we didn’t. I didn’t. And now it’s gone and all our hope with it. ”

Bella thinks of all the women who followed them down this dangerous rabbit hole, all the Sisters hoping for the ways and words to change the bitter stories they were handed. “What have I done? ” It comes out tear-thick, warbling.

“What have we done, I think you mean, ” Quinn says dryly. “Who found the spell in Old Salem, again? ”

“You did, of course, I didn’t mean—”

“So is it my fault, as well? ”

“No! ”

“And who got herself locked in jail and needed saving in the first place? And who had the baby early and kept you all distracted at the worst possible moment? Is it your sisters’ fault, too? ” Quinn shakes her head. “If you want to blame someone for a fire, look for the men holding matches. ”

“I… suppose. ”

Quinn turns sideways on the bed, facing Bella. “But let’s look at what you’ve done, Belladonna Eastwood. You called back the Lost Way of Avalon and spread its secrets around half the city. You saved both your sisters’ lives. You stood for something. You lost something. But…” Quinn’s hands rise to either side of Bella’s face to slide her spectacles from her temples. Bella finds it necessary to remind her heart to keep beating and her lungs to keep pumping. “You gained something, too, I think. ”

Quinn is close enough now that Bella can feel the heat of her skin, see the black swell of her pupils.

Bella wants very badly to kiss her.

The thought arrives without parentheses, a wild rush of wanting that Bella knows better than to give in to. She’ll be punished, afterward, bruised or beaten or locked up until she learns to forget again. Except—and she doesn’t know why this simple arithmetic has never occurred to her—isn’t she already being punished, in her loneliness? And if it hurts either way, surely she should at least enjoy the sin for which she suffers.

Bella looks down at her own hands, steady as stones. She feels the even beat of her heart. They taught her to be afraid, but somewhere along the way she lost the trick of it.

She lifts her hand to Quinn’s cheek, cups her palm around the curve of her jaw. Quinn holds very still, barely breathing.

“May I kiss you, Cleo? ” She does not stutter.

Quinn exhales profanities.

“Is that a ye—” The end of Bella’s question is lost, stolen along with her breath.

It isn’t so much a kiss as a conflagration: of need and want long deferred, of lost hope and the wild abandon of two bodies colliding while the world burns around them.

Somewhere in the urgent fumble of buttons and clasps and the rushing rhythm of their breath, the touch of starlight on skin and the secret taste of salt, a treacherous thought occurs to Bella: that she would burn Avalon seven times over as long as it led her here, to this room and this saffron-yellow bed.

Afterward, when they lie together like a pair of clasped hands, one fitted perfectly beside the other, Bella lies awake. She resists the soft tug of sleep for as long as she can, because the sooner she sleeps the sooner dawn will arrive with all its hard truths. Already she feels the weight of the world hovering above them, waiting to settle.

“Cleo? ” Her name tastes like cloves on Bella’s tongue. “Tell me a story? ”

And Cleo does.

HOW AUNT NANCY STOLE THE WORDS

This is the story of how Aunt Nancy stole all the words for her daughters and granddaughters and great-granddaughters. Aunt Nancy was an old, old woman—or perhaps she was a young woman, or a spider, or a hare, or all four at once—with clouds of cobweb for hair and shining black buttons for eyes, when her littlest great-granddaughter cried that she wanted to learn her letters.

Now Aunt Nancy would do anything for her grandchildren, so she went to the man in the big house and asked if he would please teach her to write. The man laughed at her, this little old woman with her cobwebbed hair. There was even a little black spider dangling beside her ear, watching him with tiny red eyes. In the end the man swore he would teach her to read and write if she brought him the smile of a coyote and the teeth of a hen, the tears of a snake and the cry of a spider.

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