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.