The sound outweighs the grief in Agnes’s chest, like a brass scale tipping. They had lost too much—a library called back and then burned; a sister found and then lost forever—but not everything. Not the sound of her daughter flying with moon-shine on her skin, laughing.
Beneath them the city square looks small and dim. Agnes sees upturned faces, feels the tug of hundreds of watching eyes. She can almost see the new stories cast like dandelion-seeds behind them, taking root in the city below. Stories about shadows stolen and then set free, about villains and wolves and young women who walk willingly into the fire. About two witches flying where there should have been three.
An owl and an osprey fly beside them. Agnes wonders if any of them notice a third creature winging with them, black as sin, nearly invisible against the night. Or perhaps they see it and think nothing of it. Every crow is black, after all.
Perhaps, from so far below, they can’t see the way the crow’s eyes burn like the last stubborn coals of a dying fire, or the way they stare at some distant point in the sky, as if he’s flying to meet someone just on the other side of nowhere.
How many miles to Babylon?
Threescore miles and ten.
Can I get there by candlelight?
There and back again.
A spell for safe travel, requiring a lit candle & seventy steps
On the spring equinox of 1894 there is still snow lingering on the streets of Chicago. It gathers along curbs, sooty and sullen, waiting to crumble over boot-tops and soak the trailing hems of cloaks, while the wind sneaks down collars and beneath the brims of hats.
Agnes Amaranth doesn’t mind it; she will be leaving soon.
She steps into the early evening alley with her cloak pulled tight around her neck and her ears full of the hum and song of women’s voices. Agnes came to Chicago following a story she read on the second and third pages of the papers, well below all the hysterical headlines about witches and burnings (CHAOS REIGNS IN NEW SALEM; VOODOO REVOLT SHAKES RICHMOND; COVEN DISCOVERED IN ST. LOUIS—WILL YOUR CITY BE NEXT?). It’s a story about a lowly button-sewer at Hart & Shaffner Garment Factory who took issue with her employer’s decision to cut women’s wages and instigated a strike. The strike was met with brutal beatings and the illegal-but-unpunished burning of at least one accused witch. Agnes suspected such brutality wouldn’t break the garment-workers’ rebelliousness at all, but merely harden it, like beaten steel.
She wasn’t mistaken. In the dim basement of a settlement house, Agnes met a collection of women with clenched jaws and iron spines, their eyes bruised with too many long shifts, their knuckles swollen with too many hours bent around a needle. Their English was sparse and shifting, interspersed with lilting strings of foreign words and unfamiliar vowels, but they brought their daughters to translate for them, and both women and children looked at Agnes with a mix of skepticism and hope.
One of the older women asked, in a voice like pipe smoke and lead, “And who are you, exactly?”
Agnes’s arms were bare beneath her cloak, and she spread them wide. “A sister. A friend. A woman in want of a better world.” She smiled her witchiest smile. “I have in my possession certain ways and words you might find useful—from what I’ve read, you already have the will.”
There were whispers and glances. Some women shuffled out, unwilling to add witchcraft to the list of their crimes, but some edged nearer. Some remembered the words their mothers sang to them on winter nights and the spells their aunts chanted on the solstice; some of them had tasted power, and wanted more.
Agnes gave them the words on thin slips of paper, rolled tight. There were words for binding tongues and breaking machines, for healing hurts and causing them, for setting fires and walking through them unscathed. The papers disappeared up sleeves and beneath aprons and waited, like hidden knives, for their moment.
One of the girls—young and fierce-looking, with the wary black eyes of a winter fox—stared at the paper in her hands with such intensity Agnes thought it might burst into spontaneous flame. Her fingertips were pressed white where she held the paper.
Agnes is not, therefore, entirely surprised to hear soft footsteps padding after her down the snow-spotted alley. She does not look behind her. She turns down an even narrower lane, crisscrossed with drooping laundry and lined with dim doorways, before turning around.
“Bessie, wasn’t it?”
The girl flinches, eyes huge and feral, but tosses her head in denial. “They call me Bessie when I get here. Bas Sheva is my name.” Her accent makes Agnes think of hip-deep snow and rich furs, and a little of Yulia. The Domontoviches stayed in New Salem, living in the west wing of Inez and Jennie’s well-warded house. Agnes visited once over the winter, and found the manor transformed into a sunny, sprawling safe house. A place to run, for any woman who wants it.
“How may I help you, Bas Sheva?”
She doesn’t answer, but her eyes skitter hungrily over every inch of Agnes, from the sleek silk of her hair to the ragged black of her cloak. They linger on her face, as if mentally comparing it to the etchings on wanted posters and cartoons in the papers. “You’re one of them, aren’t you?”
Agnes has found it unwise to advertise her identity. Witch-hunters have sprouted like thistles across the country, along with wanted posters listing rather gratifying sums of money in reward for information leading to her arrest. She travels in disguise, under false names and befuddling magics, and never lingers long in one place. Although she’s found herself in Chicago several times over the winter.
So when Bas Sheva asks her name Agnes widens her eyes and says, “One of who?”
The girl glares before she says, low and quick, “The First Three.”
Agnes should deny it. But there’s something about this girl—the desperation or the fury or the fingerprint bruises circling her wrist—that makes Agnes nod her head once.
Bas Sheva’s face ignites. She licks her lips. “Then I wonder if—I want—” Agnes suspects she struggles less with her English and more with the immensity of her desire, the hollow shape of her hunger. The light in her eyes reminds Agnes strongly of her youngest sister.
“Here, girl. Speak these words and draw a circle, and you’ll find the place you need to go.” Agnes steps closer and sings her a rhyme about wayward sisters and stolen crowns. She doesn’t write them down—these words are too precious, too dangerous to risk anything more than a whisper—but she doesn’t have to. The girl’s lips move over the syllables like hands running over a key. “Not tonight, though. It’s the equinox. We’ll be busy.”
The girl bows her head, hesitates, and withdraws a small pewter charm from her skirt: a delicate case bearing a series of branched and rooted symbols that might be letters. She presses it into Agnes’s hand. “My great-grandmother knew certain words she should not. Hang these at your daughter’s door. For protection.”
Agnes slips it into her pocket and presses her palm over it. “Thank you.”
Agnes watches Bas Sheva leave—shoulders braced, hair dark and wind-tangled—and allows herself to pretend for a moment that she is a different young woman in a different city. The wind whips her tears dry before they fall.
She is several strides farther down the alley when a low, teasing voice speaks behind her. “Evening, miss.”