Bella knows from the pale green of Juniper’s eyes that she feels it, too, that she’s worried. “Should we go to her?” Bella whispers it.
Juniper rolls her head back and forth. “She knows where to find us, if she wants us.”
“Yes.”
Bella perches at a workbench. Juniper circles the tower in her rolling gait. Strix watches from above.
Eventually Juniper trails to a halt and sits beside Bella on the bench. Her hand brushes not quite accidentally against Bella’s and Bella holds it. They wait together for the next peal of pain.
Agnes knows before she knocks that Madame Zina will not answer. The door hangs crooked in its frame and the curtain-rod is slanted across the window. Someone has drawn an ashen X across the glass.
Agnes knocks anyway, because she doesn’t know what else to do. Because she walked nine blocks with her thighs chafing and her stomach clenching and unclenching like a fist, and a shiver is starting in her spine.
The door swings inward at her touch. Beyond it the room is dark and tumbled, a nest of toppled jars and strewn herbs. Maybe Zina ran before they came for her, or maybe she’s shackled in the Deeps, but she sure as hell isn’t here. There are other midwives on the west side, but so many of them have moved or closed up shop—
The pain swells, crests, fades. It’s hard to think anything in its wake except animal thoughts: run, hide, go home. But Agnes doesn’t have a home, just a narrow bunk at Three Blessings Boarding House with a few spells stuffed beneath the mattress.
She thinks for no reason of Avalon: that black tower, star-crowned, and the endless spiral of books. You know where to find us, Bella told her before she left.
Agnes finds her feet moving before she knows where they’re carrying her.
She doesn’t count the blocks as she walks back east. She merely sets her jaw and keeps going, feeling the bubble and burst of blisters on her feet, the bloody chafe of her thighs. The pain comes more often now and lingers longer, and she is obliged to stop and press her back against the warm brick while passersby cast her looks of concern and alarm. She keeps her hood pulled high.
The New Salem cemetery is locked after sundown, but the gate is open, swinging loose on its hinges. Agnes looks at it, swaying where she stands, feeling the same way she felt when she saw Zina’s crooked door. No.
There are men thronging the graveyard, their expressions both urgent and vacant, shovels and lit torches in their hands. They seem to be gathered at the witch-yard, shuffling and laboring around a vast, gleaming tangle. It takes a long second for Agnes to recognize it as the roots of a golden tree, ripped up.
No, no, no. The earth around the tree is churned and torn and wrong in some way that Agnes doesn’t understand. She stares, swaying a little, until she realizes that none of the gathered men seem to cast a shadow across it.
Agnes wheels away, hands flying to her hood. She walks blindly, taking turns at random, trying to think of someplace to run or someone to run to, but the pain returns and she finds herself on her knees in the middle of a nameless street, thinking, There’s no time.
She knows it as if there’s a wound clock somewhere in the center of her, ticking away seconds. The baby is coming too fast and she is crouched here like an animal with nowhere to go, no one to help her. She drew her circle too tight.
She fumbles in her pocket and finds a pair of silver-brown feathers, their edges ruffled and split. She stares at them for far too long, trying to remember what they might mean, what she might do with them—before the pain sends her thoughts running for cover again.
When it subsides she’s still holding the feathers. She remembers the words to an old lullaby written in her sister’s tidy hand: Hush little baby, don’t say a word, Mother will call you by mockingbird.
Agnes whispers the words to the feathers in her hand, along with a name, and feels the fever-flick of witchcraft under her skin. The feathers flutter upward, caught by an uncanny wind, and vanish into the falling night.
Agnes doesn’t know if the message will find him, or if he will answer, or if she is a fool to trust the fickle heart of a man—but the pain comes to chase the worries away.
Time behaves strangely after that. It skitters forward then leaps out of sight, leaving her stranded in her own private eternity. She knows she ought to stand up, run, find shelter, but all she can do is curl over her belly and hiss curses between her teeth.
Footsteps. A concerned voice. “Are you all right, miss?”
Agnes tries to say she’s fine, thank you, just resting, but the words are lost in a moan.
A hand guides her elbow. Her hood slips aside as she stands, and she hears a sharp gasp. “Oh, Saints preserve us—you’re—”
Someone shouts her true name down the street.
The pain swallows her again. When she emerges the street is full of people and horses and men in black uniforms. “Agnes Amaranth East-wood! You are hereby under arrest for the crime of witchcraft!”
Rough hands roll her onto a canvas stretcher, and shackles snap around her wrists. Agnes fights, writhing and kicking, pulling so hard against her cuffs that something pops wetly in her wrist, but it does her no good.
She falls back, panting, and hears voices conferring. They use words like hysterical and agitated, and then one of the men is pressing a foul-smelling rag across her mouth.
The street goes gray and distant, as if she is peering up at it from the bottom of an empty well. Her limbs are slack against the canvas even as the pain spreads its sulfurous wings above her. Voices are still speaking around her, but none of the syllables seem to add up to words anymore.
Agnes lolls as they load her stretcher into the back of a cart. She doesn’t understand, doesn’t know where they’re taking her—until a woman in a starched apron leans over her and Agnes reads the words stitched across the breast in bold capitals: ST. CHARITY HOSPITAL.
Something is wrong and Juniper knows it. She can taste her sister’s terror through the line between them, feel the tarry black of despair.
Juniper lets go of Bella’s hand. She grabs a lead pitcher full of water and empties it onto the flagstone floor, ignoring Bella’s squawk. She kneels, the water soaking through the loose weave of her skirt while she waits for it to go still.
She’s supposed to have a possession of Agnes’s to work the spell properly, but she doesn’t care. Surely there’s enough of Agnes in her all the time—in her blood and bones, in the stubborn streak they share, in all the hours of their sisterhood.
Mirror, mirror, on the wall.
Juniper feels Bella peering over her shoulder, sharing her will. A picture shimmers to the surface of the water: Agnes, lying slack against too-white sheets in a too-white room, her hair a black pool behind her head. Her skirts are rucked carelessly to the waist, her legs gelid and still, somehow indecent. Her face is perfectly serene, half drowsing; the only sign of distress is the occasional ripple of her belly, a tightness that shudders through limp limbs, and the clawing, terrible black of her half-lidded eyes.
There are other people in the room with her, their faces blurred, their motions shadowed. Juniper sees the shake of a head, a dismissive wave of a hand. One of them steps to the side and Juniper sees the shackles around her sister’s wrists.
The water ripples as Bella takes a horrified step backward. She whispers oh no, oh no in a useless chant.