But Bella isn’t listening. She is breathing in that smell—dust and parchment, leather and cotton, ink made from oil and oak-gall and soot—with a wild suspicion swelling in her chest.
She fumbles a matchbook from her skirt and drags the tip across the flagstones. The light flares, reflected in the deep amber of Quinn’s eyes, illuminating a too-small circle of flagstones. At the very edge of the circle Bella can make out the faint outlines of shelves lining the tower walls. The glass shine of jars. Long benches and scarred tables scattered with leaves and bones and nameless things, as if some untidy woman had been brewing witch-ways just hours before.
Bella stands, lifting the match higher in trembling fingers, wishing for a lamp or torch or even a candle.
From her shoulder, the owl ruffles its feathers. It stretches forward—Bella doesn’t know if a true owl could extend its neck to such an uncanny length, or if the rules are different for familiars—and plucks the guttering match from her fingers. It makes a neat toss-and-catch motion with its head and swallows the match whole, flame and all.
“Oh! Don’t—” Bella makes a helpless gesture, far too late. Golden light is blooming in the shadowed center of the owl, like a candle seen through smoked glass. It glows brighter, spreading until the owl shines the deep gold of a well-tended fire, only the very tips of its claws and wings still edged in black. It spreads its wings and takes luminous flight.
Three faces turn upward to watch as it spirals upward through the tower. In its shining wake they see an endless staircase that circles and twines along the walls, so aimless and haphazard it looks grown rather than built. Landings and ladders sprout from the stairs like branches, lustrous and worn smooth with use, and doors nestle in the shadows, although Bella can’t imagine they open onto anything but empty air. And nestled between them—in leaning stacks and on tidy shelves, in calfskin and cracked leather, their pages gold-limned by the owl’s light—there are books. More books than Bella has ever seen, in a lifetime devoted to books.
Her owl fades back to pooled ink as the match burns out. It roosts somewhere high above them, invisible but for the red gleam of its gaze.
Bella closes her eyes. There’s an odd bubbling in her chest. It takes her a moment to identify it as giddy laughter. The Lost Way of Avalon isn’t a miracle or a magical relic or a fanciful artifact. It’s merely the truth, written and bound, preserved against time and malice. It’s—
“A library,” Quinn breathes.
“A library?” Agnes is the only one of them still crouched beside Juniper, her fingers bunched in the damp white of her shift. “What the hell are we supposed to do with a library?”
Bella is drifting toward the nearest shelf, squinting at the moonlit label written in antique calligraphy. Jinxes—Mortal, perilous, purely amusing. The next label reads: Weatherworking—Storms, floods, locust-plagues, directly above Changelings—Made from clay, stone, dealings with fae folk. The one beneath that is Medicinal—Burns, bites, bruising.
Quinn reads them over her shoulder. Even in the dimness Bella can see the keen shine of her eyes, the hunger of her half-smile as she looks at the books. She is a woman who understands the value of words, especially the ones they don’t want you to say.
Bella reaches for a volume bound in cherry-wood with brass hinges along the spine. The title is burned into the cover in square capitals: THE BOOK OF MARGERY MEM, Being a Translation of her Curative Receipts.
Bella steps into a sliver of moonlight as she opens it, sees the lost words and forgotten ways preserved in a thousand tidy lines of ink. Witchcraft, pure as dragon’s blood and bright as stardust, unspoken for centuries.
“With this, Agnes, we could do more or less anything we pleased. Speak with wolves or bring stones to life or turn Mayor Worthington into a weevil.” She turns back to Agnes, still crouched over Juniper’s still body, white with worry. “But we’ll begin with saving our sister.”
Juniper doesn’t much miss her body; it’s a broken, burnt thing, so full of pain there’s hardly any room left for her. She drifts above it instead, watching with detached affection while her sisters fret over the red mess of her neck, peel the cotton shift from her bruised flesh. That Quinn woman stands above them with dried herbs in one hand and a book in the other, reading aloud.
Her words tug at Juniper. She tries to ignore them, but they reel her downward, closer and closer to the shipwreck of her body. Then her sisters take up the words in tear-streaked voices. One for sorrow, two for mirth, three for a funeral, four for birth—
Bella lays a sprig of green across Juniper’s throat, still speaking the spell, knocking her knuckles on the stones.
The words are a trap. They pin her inside her own body alongside every bruise and burn. Her screams are hoarse, thin things.
The pain eases with each knock of her sisters’ knuckles, each round of one for sorrow, two for mirth. A blissful coolness follows behind it, like creek-water on a hot day.
Juniper lies still, listening to the even beat of her blood and the tiny, invisible motions of skin reknitting and blisters shrinking. Her sisters are talking above her, their voices falling from some great height down to her ears.
“They’ll be here soon.” That’s Agnes, tense with fear.
“Who?” Bella sounds profoundly un-Bella-like, giddy and pleased and thoroughly unworried. Juniper wonders if she’s drunk.
“Everyone! Police, mobs with pitchforks, Hill and his friends! We have to go!” There’s something very important Juniper needs to tell them about Hill, about witchcraft and stolen shadows with watching eyes, but the thought sinks into the blessed coolness and vanishes.
Bella sobers. “I am not leaving this library for those depraved people to discover.” Library?
Agnes makes a wordless growl, but Quinn says calmly, “Hide it, then. If you can bind hats to cloaks and hide them away, why not a tower?”
There is a small silence, while the words ashes to ashes, dust to dust rattle loosely through Juniper’s skull. Then Bella says, “That is—quite brilliant, Cleo,” with such admiration in her voice that it’s almost indelicate. “But one of us will need to leave, to work the binding and find a safe place to hide it. And draw the Sign to give us a way back out.”
“I’ll do it,” Agnes offers quietly.
Bella’s voice cools for some reason. “Of course. I had forgotten you were already leaving.”
Juniper finds the voices above her blurring together after this, devolving into a jumble of plans and mutters and hurry nows. She would be content to lie there, basking in the absence of pain, except—
“Wait!” Her voice is still all kinds of wrong, thin and hoarse. “Thank you. For saving me.”
There’s a shush of skirts and Agnes’s face appears above her. “Hush, baby.” Her voice is warm and low and bossy as hell, just like when they were girls.
“I didn’t think you’d come. Now that you know about Daddy.”
“It’s true, then.” Agnes sounds neither surprised nor especially upset. Just tired.
Juniper swallows and gasps a little with the pain of it. “It’s true.”
“Oh, June.” Bella kneels on her other side, her face long and sharp beside Agnes’s. “Why? After all those years.”