An Introduction 29 страница

She turns away from her cold triumph to see August Lee climbing the scaffold steps with her name on his lips and her daughter cradled against his chest.

Agnes isn’t aware of reaching for her until she feels the rightness of Eve’s weight against her arms and hears the endless nonsense-stream of her own voice (Baby girl, little love, it’s alright, Mama’s here, I’ve got you). Her ribs ache as if something feathered is trying to escape them, like vast wings.

She smells sawdust and feels the careful weight of arms around her. She leans her cheek against August’s chest and the arms settle. His skin is still warm with witching.

In the hollow between them she looks down into her daughter’s solemn eyes, shining with stars and flames and the beginnings of ten thousand stories. Once there was a girl who was stolen and won back. Once there was a girl who was raised by three witches. Once there was a girl who rose like a phoenix from her mother’s ashes and winged into the light of a new world.

August releases her and presses a smooth branch into her palm. “Rowan-wood, just like you asked. ” It smells raw and green, cool against the burning air.

“Me and my boys will keep the crowd back. ”

Agnes looks up at him, this man who loves all of her, this knight who has gotten his tales crossed and fallen in love with the witch instead of the princess. Here he stands with her at the end, ash-streaked and sweating, and it seems perfectly clear to her what comes next in the story.

She kisses him. Despite the screaming crowd and the too-close lick of flames, despite the bruised sting of her lips and the startled blue of his eyes. His palm rises uncertainly, hovering above the line of her jaw. His lips are hesitant against hers. Agnes presses harder, teeth against skin, reminding him what she is. He burns back at her, all want and heat, fingers tangling in her hair.

It ends too soon, not a kiss so much as a promise, hope translated into flesh.

She releases his collar and August touches his bitten lips with the expression of a person who has suffered a religious revelation or a recent head injury.

“Agnes—” His voice is pleasingly hoarse.

She meets his eyes and lifts her chin in challenge. “Come find me, Mr. Lee. When it’s over. ”

He touches his hand to his heart and she knows he will. Trusts it, body and blood.

Agnes grips her rowan-wood broomstick in one hand and reaches for her sister with the other. Bella’s fingers catch tight around hers. “Where’s June? There’s still the banishing to work. ”

Agnes sees her. Juniper is still standing in the crowd below, looking up at Grace Wiggin as she’s finally dragged away by bitten and bleeding Inquisitors. At her feet, Gideon Hill lies dead. His wolf has curled beside him, her slender nose on his chest, her eyes closed.

Juniper should be triumphant or gleeful or at least grimly satisfied—but instead she is perfectly still, staring. There’s a bloodless terror in her face that makes the hair on Agnes’s arms prickle. She has seen her sister raging and weeping, laughing and lying and a hundred other things; she has never seen her afraid.

Juniper knows what a man looks like when he dies. He looks sick and scared and finally sorry, like a skinflint villager when the Piper comes to collect. He looks impotent, weak, unlikely ever to hurt you again.

Gideon Hill doesn’t look like that.

His face is bruised-black and his eyes are wet rubies, blood-streaked, but his expression at the very end is placid, almost bored. Just before the end he meets Juniper’s eyes—as the crowd wails and panics around them, as Wiggin’s fingers go white around the sash, her face lit with that wild, killing hate—and smiles.

His fist dangles over the raw-wood edge of the balcony. His fingers slacken as he dies and a bright ribbon flutters free: a single curl of hair, soft as feather-down.

Red as blood.

All the king’s horses and all the king’s men

couldn’t put Georgie together again.

A spell to sunder a soul, requiring a death long overdue

Of all the souls James Juniper has seen this summer—four, by her accounting—Gideon Hill’s is the foulest.

It leaks like hot tar from his open mouth and pools on the balcony beneath him, wet and black. Juniper figures that’s what happens to a soul when it lingers too long, feeding on stolen shadows: it goes to rot, like a diseased organ.

His soul leaks away from his body, away from the wolf who lies with him—shouldn’t a familiar vanish, when its master dies? —and drips between the boards.

It splashes to the cobbles and runs like black water along the cracks. It’s hard to be sure through the trampling feet of the crowd, but Juniper thinks it’s heading dead north. Toward her.

She looks back to the scaffold behind her, where her sisters are silhouetted by flames. Bella and Cleo are shoulder-to-shoulder, rowan branches in their hands. August is shouting to his men, guarding the platform against the rioting crowd.

Agnes is looking down into the face of her daughter, smiling with such love that Juniper’s throat seizes. She thinks all of it—the Deeps and Avalon, the scar around her neck and the coals in her heart—might be worth it, if only Agnes and Eve make it out of this twice-damned city together.

Then Juniper thinks of the ruby curl of hair falling from the balcony. The smile on Hill’s lips as he died. The Crone’s voice saying something from the body he was stealing.

She understands that Gideon’s soul isn’t headed for her, after all. It’s headed for the scaffold, for the only truly pure thing Juniper has ever seen in the world, the only thing neither she nor her sisters could ever bring themselves to harm.

Eve.

And she understands that she only has one choice, and that it’s a losing one.

First she curses—Gideon Hill and his damn shadows, herself and her terrible choices, the world that demands such a steep price just for living—then she says the words.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, mine to yours and yours to mine.

The words Mama Mags used to bind split seams, then sisters, then her own soul. Surely they would work now, for Juniper.

Bindings usually involve ways and means, objects and complicated affinities, but Juniper has nothing but the taste of Gideon Hill’s bridle between her teeth, the scars of his collar around her throat, and her own will, which does not waver.

She reaches for his soul as it runs past her, curls her fingers into it. It twists in her hands, fighting to escape, but her will is a hammer and anvil, a stone and a sledge. She doesn’t let go. She says the words again and the shadow goes limp and cold in her hands.

Juniper fights the urge to toss it to the ground and stamp it like a roach. But she couldn’t even if she wanted to: it’s streaking up her arms, twining upward. She feels it climb her collarbone and writhe up her neck, pressing like a cold finger between her lips and pouring itself down her throat. It’s like drinking pond-slime or January mud, thick and foul and unnatural. She retches at the oily touch of his soul inside her.

A laugh rings from somewhere inside her skull, sickly familiar, and a voice whispers: I wanted you to stay with me, James Juniper, and now you always will.

He swallows her whole. The world goes black as the belly of a whale.

Bella sees the shadow reaching toward the scaffold.

She sees her sister step—stupidly, bravely, perfectly predictably—into its path. The darkness flows up her arms and slips into her mouth, stretching black tendrils up her cheeks and filling her eyes with shadows. Bella feels it through the thing between them, a suffocating, poisonous cold.

Juniper stiffens, her mouth open in a silent howl, her fingers clawing at her own chest as if a weed has taken root inside her. Bella’s scream is lost in the howling chaos of the crowd.

Only Cleo hears her. “What is it? Oh, Saints. ” She sees Juniper, her spine bent in an unnatural arc, her nails digging into her own skin. Her eyes are black as graves.

Bella is aware that her own lips are moving, a breathless chant of oh no, oh no, oh no. “He’s taking her, just like he took the others. ”

“She’s got a strong will, your sister. Maybe she can stop him. ”

“No, she can’t. ” Bella knows it, feels it through the binding between them. Her breath catches. The binding. “Not alone. ”

She shoves her will toward Juniper, every scrap of fear and fury and desperate love she possesses, and prays it’s enough.

Juniper flinches. Her neck snaps toward the scaffold and her lips peel back from her teeth in a snarl that doesn’t belong to her—then it passes. Her spine unbends. Her shoulders square, familiar and stubborn. The blackness recedes from her eyes and leaves them clear silver, entirely her own.

She meets Bella’s worried gaze and gives her a tired half-smile. Bella feels a giddy rush of relief.

Until she sees movement at Juniper’s side. The black wolf—the one that lay beside its master’s body on the balcony—is standing now beside her sister, looking up at her with red, red eyes.

Juniper figures a few hundred years of always getting his own way has spoiled Mr. Gideon Hill. He’s grown used to weak wills and whispered words, to women bound and burning.

But Juniper learned spite in the cradle. She knows all about long odds and losing choices, about grit and spine. She plants her feet and holds fast.

He might still have won, in the end—Gideon Hill who was once George of Hyll, who has been stealing souls for centuries before Juniper or her mother or her mother’s mother were even born—except that Juniper is not alone.

Bella’s will floods her heart like the first warm wind of spring. It drives the chill back, presses Hill down inside her until he’s nothing but a shard of ice between her ribs.

A mocking voice hisses in her head. How long do you think you can keep this up? How long can you resist me?

Not forever, she knows—he’s a tumor in her breast, waiting for the moment her attention slips or her will flags—but she doesn’t need forever.

Long enough, you bastard, she thinks, and takes a single step. It’s harder than it ought to be, like there’s a weight pulling hard against her, like her muscles aren’t quite her own. A warm weight leans against her leg and she looks down to meet a pair of mournful red eyes: Gideon Hill’s familiar, still wearing her iron collar. Still bound to her master, following him loyally to his next body.

For the last time.

Juniper digs her fingers into her dark ruff and the two of them walk back to the scaffold, to her sisters and the stake, to the flames that curl like fingers into the sky, beckoning.

Bella watches her sister walk back to the scaffold as if she’s wading through knee-deep water. As if each step costs her dearly but she is bound to take it anyway.

There are people running and shoving around her—well-dressed gentlemen fleeing in terror, shouting Inquisitors with blood smeared on their white tunics, mad-eyed men clutching stones and broken bottles, looking for wicked witches to kill—but none of them seem willing to touch the young woman and the black wolf.

Bella reaches for her hands as she climbs the steps, but Juniper flinches away from her touch. Her hands curl back on themselves as if they’re smeared with something foul. She buries one of them in the black fur of the wolf at her side.

“June! What happened? Did he bind himself to you somehow? ”

Juniper shrugs one shoulder and doesn’t meet her eyes. “No. ”

“Then how—what—”

“I bound him to me. ”

Bella considers bursting into tears. “Oh June, why? ”

Juniper still isn’t looking at her. Bella follows the line of her gaze and sees Agnes shushing a wailing Eve. Juniper shrugs again. “Had to. ”

“Well, we can fix it somehow. We can find a way to banish him, or contain him. A warding spell, maybe, or a healing—”

“There’s no time, Bell. ” Juniper says it very gently, like a doctor telling a patient some unfortunate news. She tilts her chin at Agnes and Eve. “Take care of her, won’t you? She’s got to have it better than we did. A mama that sticks around, maybe even a daddy worth a damn. ” Juniper squints speculatively at August, who is standing guard at the scaffold steps with an iron bar in his hand and the frenzied expression of someone fully prepared to lay down his life.

“She’ll need you and Cleo, too, to teach her the words and ways. Mags would like that, I figure. ” Juniper smiles at her oldest sister. It’s the kind of smile that has farewells and regrets tucked in the corners. Bella doesn’t like it in the least.

“June, what exactly—”

Juniper limps closer and kisses Bella once on the cheek, her lips cracked and hot. Bella falls silent.

Juniper steps around her and pauses in front of Agnes. Agnes frowns at the wolf padding beside her, points up at the stars with the rowan branch in her hand. But Juniper shakes her head. Her hand hovers above the feather-down curl of Eve’s head, not quite touching her, trembling very slightly.

Agnes asks her a question and Juniper answers, still wearing that smile shaped like a goodbye. She kisses Agnes’s cheek, too.

It’s only as she turns away and stands staring into the flames—her hair fluttering in the heat, her eyes steady—that Bella understands what she’s going to do.

Juniper doesn’t have much time, but she has time enough to say goodbye to her sisters.

Agnes is clutching Eve in one arm and her rowan bough in the other, scowling at Juniper. “Where’s Gideon? Why is that thing following you? ” Her eyes flick to the wolf still walking patiently at her side. “It’s time to go, June. ” Agnes points up at the sky.

Juniper remembers lying in bed between her sisters when she was young, listening to the slur and stomp of their daddy downstairs. Agnes would stroke the hair back from Juniper’s forehead and whisper, It’ll be alright.

Even as a child Juniper knew it was a lie. But it was the kind of lie that became true in the telling, because at least there was someone in the world who loved her enough to lie.

Agnes is frowning so fiercely at her that Juniper thinks she must know what’s coming, must see it in the tremble of Juniper’s hand over her daughter.

“What’s going on? ”

Juniper leans down to kiss her cheek. “It’ll be alright. ”

She turns to face the flames.

She hesitates. Partly because Gideon Hill is railing and screaming inside her, straining against her will like a mad dog against the leash, but mostly because she likes being alive and wants to keep doing it.

She wishes she could stay right where she is, with the frost-bitten edge of the wind in her hair and the wild wheel of stars above her and the beat of her sisters’ hearts beside her.

She wishes she could run away. Mount her rowan branch and disappear with her sisters, never to be seen or heard from again. They might go back home, to the mist-hung mountains and the cold creeks, and build their tower deep in the green woods. They might let the blackberry vines grow high as a rose-thorn hedge around them and raise Eve together in the leaf-dappled dark, safe and secret.

She wishes she were one of those firebirds from Mags’s stories, that something might rise from her ashes.

She can’t hold out much longer. Gideon Hill’s soul seeps like venom through her veins, settling into her bones. It seems like a fitting end, at least: her mother died for her and now Juniper will die for Eve. Maybe Eve will be the one to finally redeem all those generations of debt, all the sacrifices of the women who came before her.

Juniper draws a last breath. Pats the black wolf once on the head, like a loyal hound.

Hill twists like a knife inside her but she still feels some reserve in him, a calculating calm. Maybe he can’t quite believe she’ll do it, even now, because he can’t quite imagine loving anything more than he loves himself.

Or maybe he thinks he’ll survive it. Maybe he plans to slither away from her burning body the way he left his last one, clinging to the world until he finds some weak-willed creature to bind himself to.

He doesn’t know the Eastwoods have spoken to the Last Three, that they have the secret to his unmaking. That all his sins have finally come home to roost.

Juniper licks cracked lips. “You’ve had a lot of names, Gideon Hill. ” She feels him cease his struggling, listening. “Gabriel Hill. Glennwald Hale. George of Hyll. Always Gs and Hs, so I guess you must have missed her. ” He coils tighter inside her, cold and terrible and just beginning to be afraid. “Your sister sends her love, Hansel. ”

Juniper feels a tremor move through his soul, a wave of confusion and longing and finally terror, as he understands that this death will be his true and final one, that all his scheming and stealing will end here, tonight, in the fire he lit himself.

Juniper steps into the flames and they close their waiting arms around her, hot and close. She hears Agnes screaming, Bella wailing, “June, no! Stop her! ”

Then there’s nothing but the sound of burning and the words in her own mouth.

All the king’s horses and all the king’s men—

Ring around the roses,

A pocket full of posies,

Ashes, ashes,

We all rise up.

A spell to bind a soul, requiring an untimely death & a destination

Agnes Amaranth screams. The wolf howls. The crowd roars. And beneath all that desperate noise Agnes hears the soft, inevitable sound of her own heart breaking.

She should have known better than to draw that circle wide. Should have known what it would cost her.

Agnes rushes toward the flames but reels back at the snap of black teeth. Gideon’s wolf is standing between her and the fire. There is no wrath in the deep red of her eyes, but merely a weary duty.

Agnes curls her spine around Eve to protect her from the hiss of cinders. “August! ”

He’s already beside her, drawn by her scream. She knows by the sound of his swearing that he’s seen Juniper standing in the white heart of the fire, her hair floating in a dark halo around her head, her woolen shift burned black.

“Help me—the damn wolf—” Agnes can’t seem to string her words into sentences—Juniper’s pain is echoing through the binding between them, vast and hot—but August understands her. Agnes feints left and the wolf follows her while August leaps behind it.

He dives into the flames without hesitation or second-guessing, as if it’s his own sister burning, and Agnes has the fleeting, mad desire for her daddy to appear beside her so she could show him what love ought to look like.

The wolf snarls and follows him into the flames, jaws reaching for a boot or a leg. A too-long second follows, while the wolf pulls August backward and August refuses to be pulled. Both of them tumble out of the fire, smoking faintly, coughing and retching—

Without Juniper.

“She won’t let go of the post! ” August’s voice is raw and smoke-laden, his face smeared with soot.

Agnes looks back into the fire, squinting against the rising heat. Her sister’s arms are wrapped tight around the stake. Agnes can feel the grit of her will through the binding, running like steel beneath the pain. Her mouth is open, lips forming words that Agnes recognizes even through the bright lick of flames and the haze of smoke. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men—

The words to sunder a soul. The words the Last Three had written for Gideon Hill, centuries ago.

Agnes understands what Juniper must have done, and what she is doing now, and why she will not permit herself to be saved.

Agnes feels the broken edges of her heart grate against one another. Here she thought she had escaped Hill’s trap, refused his too-high price, but in the end she’d merely delayed it. In the end it’s still your life or your freedom, your sister or your daughter, and someone still has to pay.

August is beating uselessly at the flames with his shirt now, his chest smeared with char and ash. He calls to his men down in the square, begging for water, but they’re busy holding back the maddened crowd. There will be no circle of cold water and no whispered words to save Juniper this time.

Pan and Strix are circling the fire, crisscrossing above Juniper. Other birds have joined them—the ordinary pigeons and common crows of the city, come to witness this last great act of witching, eerily silent.

Agnes hears the wolf give a low, mournful howl, like a bell tolling in the distance, and knows it’s too late. Juniper’s hair has caught fire, a bloody crown, and her dress is flaking away from her body in gray sheets of ash. Smoke boils thick and greasy from her skin.

Agnes is the strong sister, the steady sister who stands unflinching, but now she looks away. She cannot bear to watch her sister burn.

Juniper is unraveling. Her soul is unspooling from her body, slipping like smoke through the cracks of a burning building. She wants to follow it, to drift into the sweet dark while her flesh spits and sizzles, but she stays. She speaks the words.

All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Georgie together again.

The words are like fingers picking at a knot, patient and persistent. They burrow between her ribs and find the black tangle of Hill’s soul and prise it away from the world, pulling it toward the vast silence of the hereafter. He resists, naturally—Juniper feels him clawing and screaming and generally kicking up three kinds of fuss, reduced to nothing but the wordless will to keep existing—but Juniper’s lips keep moving, the spell steady as a heartbeat and hot as hellfire. Maybe it’s her sisters’ wills added to her own.

Maybe it’s Mama Mags whispering in her ear. Keep going, honey-child.

Or maybe dying for someone else is just worth more than living for yourself.

Her dress burns first. Then her hair. She’d hoped maybe she wouldn’t feel it—her daddy always said the healing hurt worse than the burning, that he’d prayed for life during the fire and prayed for death afterward—but pain licks like a barbed tongue over every inch of her skin. It nibbles and bites, sinking its teeth bone-deep.

It occurs to her that she won’t be able to speak the words, soon. Already her tongue is cracked and swollen and the smoke is ground glass in her throat, but Hill still clings to her like clay on a boot-heel. She feels him stirring with the malicious hope that she might die before his soul is entirely sundered.

She might have. Except sometimes, if you reach deep enough into the red heart of magic, some little scrap of magic reaches back out to you. Sometimes if you bend the rules long enough, they break.

Juniper’s eyes are closed, but she feels it arrive: a winged darkness. A shape that smells like witching and wild places. It perches on her shoulder and brushes hot feathers against her cheek.

It occurs to her that it’s exactly her kind of bullshit luck that she’d finally get her familiar but die before she laid eyes on him.

She tries to touch his claws with her hand, but there’s something wrong with her arms, her hands, the skin and sinews between them. All she can do is send him the words and hope, somehow, that it will be enough.

“All the king’s horses and all the king’s men—” It’s her own voice singing strong and clear through the flames, but it doesn’t come from her cracked and boiling lips. It’s her familiar carrying the words for her, singing them loud and clear even as her throat closes and her lips burn.

There’s a loosening in her chest, a knot unbinding. Hill’s scream sounds very far away, as if he’s on a train heading into a long tunnel. The only thing holding him to the world now is Juniper’s own life, and that won’t last long.

The heat of the flames fades. So does the crackle of burning wood, the hiss of her own skin. Even the pain fades, and she knows then that she is dying.

Juniper is the wild sister, the sly sister, never caught, always running, but she can’t run from this.

She hears singing as she dies, distant and familiar. A children’s rhyme she used to chant with her sisters on summer evenings when they were young and whole, when the world was soft and green and small, when they thought they could hold hands forever, unbroken.

Bella feels her sister dying but doesn’t believe it. How can Juniper die? Juniper who is so young and so bold, who seems twice as alive as everyone around her? And if she can die—if that’s truly her body burning on the pyre, her pain ringing loud in the line between them—then the world is a far crueler place than even Bella imagined, and she wants nothing more to do with it.

She knows precisely how the Last Three must have felt at the end of the age of witches, knowing that something fierce and beautiful was leaving the world, so desperate to preserve even some small piece of it that they let their bodies burn around them.

But not—Bella draws a sharp breath—their souls.

The Three stole Saint George’s victory from him at the last second. They bound their souls to a tower of words and disappeared into nowhere to wait, undying, for the next age of witches to begin. What is magic, anyway, if not a way when there is none?

Cleo has her arm tight around Bella’s shoulders, holding her steady. Bella breaks free and spins to face her. “The rose petal I gave you, the one I put around your finger—do you still have it? ”

Cleo’s face says this is a very odd thing to ask while your sister burns and the city riots, but she reaches into her skirt pocket and produces the petal, even more crumpled and dry, but still whole. “Having second thoughts, love? ”

“Never. ” Bella cups the petal in her palm. Such a small, fragile thing on which to rest her sister’s soul. “Agnes! ”

Agnes is swaying and pale, too tear-blinded to see the rose in Bella’s hand, too grief-struck to understand the eager intent in her eyes. Then Bella says the words, and hope rises like the sun in Agnes’s face.

They’re the words the three of them had sung as little girls, dancing beneath the fireflies. They’re the words the Three wrote to bind their souls to witchcraft itself, which have filtered down through the ages as a children’s rhyme, not quite forgotten.

Ring around the roses, pocket full of posies, ashes, ashes, we all rise up.

Cleo joins Bella’s chant, then Agnes. August comes next, his voice low and unsteady, and Strix and Pan high above them. More voices follow, too many to count, singing up from the crowd below—the Sisters of Avalon and the Daughters of Tituba, the Women’s Association and the workers’ unions, the maids and mill-girls, all the witches of New Salem who came when the Eastwoods called.

Together they call the magic and the magic answers, boiling through their veins. Bella waits until it crests like a wave in her chest before she curls her fist around the petal, crushing it. She tosses the remains into the night.

The sky does not split open. No black tower appears. But a sudden wind rises, sharp and green and rose-sweet. The wind tangles Bella’s skirts and whips the flames high. It hovers above the pyre, waiting.

Bella knows the precise moment Juniper dies.

The line that leads to her youngest sister goes slack; Agnes screams; the wolf’s howl goes abruptly quiet. Bella sees a pale shadow rise from the fire, like mist, before the witch-wind carries it away.

For a moment she thinks she hears voices calling, almost like three women welcoming a fourth, or maybe she merely hopes she does. The spell ends and the wind dies and a strange silence falls over the square, as if even the most foolish of them know something grave and grand has happened.

Bella feels her knees crack against the scaffold, then the sting of tears and the warmth of Cleo’s arms around her.

Bella is the wise sister, the bookish one, the knowing one, but she doesn’t know whether it was enough.

Agnes wants to climb into the fire and burn alongside her sister. She wants to scream until her throat is flayed raw from screaming, until the whole city has to stop and look and see what they have wrought. She wants to step into nowhere and call Juniper’s name.

But there are people swarming up the steps now. Some of the most devout Inquisitors and their followers have rallied and fought past August’s men. August rushes to meet them, iron bar whipping back and forth, but Agnes knows he can’t hold them for long. She looks down at Eve—awake now and frowning fiercely—then reaches for the rowan-wood branches and climbs to her feet.

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