The staff twists in her hand, the wood grain replaced with smooth scales, the carved snake suddenly warm against her palm. It looks back at her once with its glass eyes, and she nods to it. Go.
Juniper struggles to her feet as the snake slides unseen through the trampling feet. Gideon Hill is leaning over the platform railing, glaring into the crowd below, searching. His eyes find her and a stillness falls over him.
His face is familiar to her. It’s the face she saw in every mirror and windowpane she passed for years. It’s the face of a broken, betrayed child, holding on to hate because they have nothing else.
What would it be like to remain that broken child for centuries, all alone?
The black-yew snake is coiling up the platform timbers now, sliding nearer. Gideon is too busy staring at Juniper to see his own death creeping closer.
But Juniper’s will is wavering. The snake is near enough to strike but it coils around itself, poised. Waiting.
Saints know he deserves it. So did her daddy, twice over, but she spared his life that day in the barn. She let him live seven years more, until he wore away every ounce of grace and goodness she had left. She didn’t hesitate the second time.
She’s spent the summer running, hunted and haunted, looking for someplace to put all the leftover hate in her heart. Maybe she’s come to the end of it, finally. Maybe she’s weary of vengeance earned and struck, of sacrifice and sin and too-high prices.
She feels the serpent hardening back to black wood, its venom seeping away.
Above her Gideon sees the weakness in her face. His eyes glitter in triumph. Juniper knows with cold certainty that he won’t hesitate, that he will pay any price merely to live and keep living.
Gideon sees her, and smiles at what he sees.
What he doesn’t see is the woman standing beside him on the balcony, her shadow lying at her feet where it belongs, her will finally her own once more: Miss Grace Wiggin.
As I lay dying upon the earth,
I raised my hands to her,
But she would not even close my lips nor my eyes.
A spell for a final regret, requiring a betrayal most bitter
Agnes Amaranth sees her.
Agnes stands at the edge of the scaffold with her back turned to her own pyre. She sees Gideon’s shadows banished, his power broken. She sees Miss Grace Wiggin slip away from him like a kite with a cut string.
At first her face remains cool and empty, but then the truth comes boiling to the surface. Confusion first, then revulsion, as if she wants to peel her own flesh from her body. Then rage: pure and white-hot, toothed and fanged, entirely foreign on Miss Wiggin’s docile features.
She turns to face the man who took her in then took her will, the father who cursed his own daughter. She looks in that moment less like a woman and more like a harpy. Like an ending long overdue, like a reckoning in a white dress.
Agnes figures Gideon Hill has always chosen his victims with care: the small and strange, the lonely and weak. Old women who lived in the woods and young women with wayward hearts. His own dreamy, bookish nephew. He burned them and blamed them, ate them whole and spat out the seeds and never once worried that one of them would sprout behind him and bear poison fruit. That even the weak can make powerful enemies, if there are enough of them.
A red light is glowing now in Wiggin’s eyes. Her fingers clutch at her skirts, searching for some weapon or way and finding none. Then her hands land on the pale sash that runs from hip to shoulder. She strokes the neat-stitched lettering slowly, almost wonderingly, before pulling the sash over her head. She holds the white silk like a sword laid flat across her palms. Women are good at making their own ways when they have none.
Hill doesn’t see it coming. And even if he had—if he turned and saw the sash between Wiggin’s hands and the rage in her face—Agnes doubts he would have believed it until it was too late.
Wiggin throws the sash over Hill’s head and it settles gently across his throat. Before he can tear it away, before he can even cast an irritable glance downward, it twists tight around his neck.
“Saints save us.” It’s Bella, staring at Hill with her hands covering her mouth.
Cleo draws air through her teeth. “But not him.”
Below them Juniper is looking up at Hill and Wiggin with her mouth open. Her black-yew staff is gone but Agnes doesn’t see a serpent anywhere.
One of the Inquisitors on the balcony has noticed that the head of the Women’s Christian Union is strangling the mayor. He apparently objects, even if the mayor no longer looks quite as he should, and strides forward.
“No!” Agnes shouts it uselessly, hopelessly,
Gideon’s dog—now tall and red-eyed, no longer a dog at all but a wolf with an iron collar around her throat—turns on the Inquisitor. Her teeth snap inches from his flesh, hackles high. Her collar glows a punishing orange, but she does not back down.
More Inquisitors join the first. Before they can knock the wolf aside, a dark streak of feathers strikes, talons first. Pan joins the wolf, followed by Strix. The three familiars keep the shouting men at bay with teeth and claws and burning eyes. Behind them, Wiggin’s sash tightens across Gideon Hill’s throat. The wolf howls in agony or triumph.
Hill’s face goes from white to red to mauve, darkening to a bruised, bloated color like meat gone bad. His lips are foam-specked and bitten, still moving in some final, futile spell. His legs kick weaker and weaker, his honeysuckle suit stained with spittle and piss. His wolf staggers.
All his malice and might, all his centuries of learning, and death came for him just the same. Agnes intends to watch until the very end, until his legs quit kicking and his heart quits beating, but someone shouts her name.
“Agnes Amaranth!” She ignores it.
But a baby cries, and Agnes knows that cry. It’s written on her heart and carved into her bones. It echoes in her dreams, haunting her.
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.