Ona’s eyes cross hers once, flint-black, and then she trails after him like a lamb behind the butcher.
Agnes looks away. It isn’t hard; she’s had years of practice. She simply turns her head aside and walks on, with Mama Mags’s voice in her ears: Every woman draws a circle around her heart.
She can’t seem to make herself step out into the alley. She’s caught on the threshold, too stupid to leave, not quite stupid enough to turn back. Instead of Mags’s voice she hears her sister’s: Don’t leave me. She thinks of Mr. Lee, in love with a woman who won’t look away.
Agnes turns around. Maybe because there are witch-ways burning in her pockets, or because her own daughter might grow up to look a little like Ona. Or because she is a damn fool.
Mr. Malton’s office door is locked. Agnes whispers to it and the latch rusts to nothing in her hand.
The room smells of shoe polish and alcohol. Ona is perched on the meanest edge of her seat, shoulders set, her eyes obsidian. Malton looms over her, one hand on his desk, the other on the back of her chair.
He looks up at the squeal of hinges, the faint patter of rust on the floor. His lip curls at the sight of Agnes with her pox scars and her swollen belly.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“Leave,” Agnes tells the girl in the chair. She can see from the resentful flick of Ona’s eyes that she’s resigned to doing what she has to, and that she doesn’t care to have it witnessed. “Now, girl,” Agnes growls, and Ona slips around her and vanishes into the mill, a rawboned shadow.
Malton is staring, slack-jawed. He turns to Agnes with an ugly gleam growing in his eyes, a lust that has nothing to do with want. “Care to explain yourself?”
Agnes takes a twist of her hair between her fingers and hisses the words. The false color melts away, her pox scars fade, and she stands before him wearing her true face once more. “Good afternoon, Mr. Malton.”
He jerks so violently he falls backward into the chair. Agnes thinks how quickly she might grow used to men flinching rather than flirting.
Malton gapes at her, fishlike, before gasping, “Begone, witch!” and fumbling for the silver cross beneath his shirt.
Agnes tuts at him. “Pretty sure that only works on vampires.” She leans closer, enjoying the way he presses himself against the office wall, as if she has a deadly nimbus around her body. “If you scream, I swear they’ll find a pig wearing your suit when they come running.”
She doesn’t technically have the ways to work the spell, but it hardly matters. She can tell from the panicked bulge of his eyes and the dry bob of his throat that he believes her. She is a witch, and a witch’s words have weight.
“Very good. Stay put.” She steps around him, rustling through drawers until she produces a sheet of paper and a pen. She writes a short list, tapping her chin briefly with the pen, then rummaging in her pockets for a dry curl of bindweed.
She circles back to face Mr. Malton. “If you want to leave this office on two feet rather than four, you will do three things for me.” She raises one finger. “First, you will speak of this to no one.”
Malton whimpers.
“Second, you will issue every person in your employ a raise of a dime a day, effective immediately.”
The whimper goes higher.
“And third—and listen to this part very closely—you will never touch an unwilling woman again, in this mill or outside of it, for as long as your miserable life shall last.”
His whimper is now so thin and high it could be mistaken for a boiling kettle.
“Now, swear to it.” She coaches him, stuttering and stumbling, through her three conditions. Then she stabs the pen into the sweating meat of his thumb and presses bindweed to the blood. “Mark it on the page and repeat after me.”
His voice is a thin warble as he says the words. Cross my heart and hope to die, strike me down if I lie.
The sweet heat of witching slicks through Agnes’s veins like whiskey. Oh, how she missed it, the drunken drumbeat of power in her chest, the thrill of working her will onto the world.
The muscles of her belly tighten, a ripple of not-quite pain. Agnes hardly feels it.
“If you break any of these vows, your heart will stop in your chest and you will fall down dead, and neither Heaven nor Hell will let your cursed spirit enter.” This is a bald-faced lie, but Mr. Malton goes white as cotton. “So behave yourself.”
The air outside the mill is gentle and golden with five o’clock sun. The light doesn’t seem to come from anywhere in particular, as if the city itself emits a faint sepia glow. The wind that trickles down the alley is cool for summer, smelling of fallen leaves and char, and Agnes wants suddenly to follow it all the way back to the dark tower where her sisters are waiting.
Her belly ripples again, a little stronger, and she rests a palm against it. She’s wondering if she ought to worry, if perhaps witching isn’t healthy for a womb this far along—when warm wetness trickles down her thigh.
Oh hell.
She stumbles backward, bracing a hand against the brick as a bright peal of pain tolls through her. The wetness trickles faster.
Madame Zina’s is nine blocks north and west. Agnes closes her eyes very briefly.
She pulls the hood of her half-cloak over her face, tucking the dark shine of her hair beneath it. She hobbles north, not thinking of the wet-pearl sheen of her mother’s skin or the wrong-thing in her daddy’s face as he watched her, or of all the dead mothers in Mama Mags’s stories.
She thinks instead of her sisters, of June’s face as she felt the kick of her niece against her hand.
She’s coming, June.
Bella is alone in the tower when she feels it: a tremor of pain echoing down the line from somewhere into nowhere. Agnes.
She is sitting cross-legged on one of the tower landings, reading in the last light of the autumn dusk, her black notebook held open by a tin cup of coffee. The pain echoes in her empty womb, spreads up her spine.
It might be nothing. Bella knows women often have false pains toward the end, and that Agnes isn’t due until the Barley Moon. But the pain has a certain weight to it, a portentous taste like thunderclouds gathering. Bella finds her fingers straying to a shelf several feet away, where a brass label reads Birthing—early, breeched, stillborn.
The pain comes again, a little louder.
Bella gathers an armful of books from the birthing shelf and spirals back down the stairs to the first floor. Without precisely thinking about what she’s doing or why, she begins to flick through the texts, gathering ways and making notes. Clean linens and jasmine flowers. A silver bell and powder-white shells. A gnarled tooth smaller than a pearl.
She waits. The pain finds a rhythm, cresting and falling. Bella circles the tower, straightening shelves that don’t need straightening, trying to feel through the line whether Agnes is alone or with friends, scared or safe.
Somewhere above her she feels the heat of red eyes watching her.
“It’s fine, Strix. I’m sure she’s fine.” Her voice has a thinness to it, like the first fragile stretch of ice across the Big Sandy. She wishes Quinn were here.
The air twists in a way that means someone has arrived at the tower door. It opens, and a wild-haired silhouette limps inside, cane tapping the flagstones.