Juniper stands, shouldering past her. “I’m going.”
“Then they’ll have both of you!” Bella’s voice is a wobbling wail. “What do you think will happen if you go charging into a hospital room?”
Juniper meets her sister’s eyes and wavers. She doesn’t want to go back down in the Deeps. She doesn’t want to feel the unnatural cold of a witch-collar or the oily slide of shadows.
But she can’t leave Agnes and her baby tied up and hurting. She can’t even frame the choice properly in her head.
Neither can Bella, not really. Juniper sees it in the resigned droop of her head. “Let me gather a few spells, at least.”
Juniper doesn’t wait. She tugs the tower door open and presses her palm to the three woven-together circles. She says the words and thinks of the golden tree, as she has a dozen times before.
Nothing happens.
Nothing continues to happen.
“Bella,” Juniper says, quite calmly. “How come I can’t get out of this damn tower?”
Bella scurries nearer. “It can only mean the sign is gone. The circle back in New Salem must be broken.”
They look at one another for a long moment, before Juniper says, “So you’re saying we’re—”
“Trapped. Yes.” The Lost Way of Avalon is a ship cut loose from its anchor, drifting through nowhere, while Agnes is stuck back in somewhere.
There’s a heavy silence, during which it becomes clear that Bella isn’t about to leap to her feet and shout aha! and save them all.
Juniper limps back to the pool of water and crouches down beside it, looking down into the dark well of her sister’s eyes. Juniper recognizes the thing she sees there: the despair of a woman trapped good and proper, who knows no one is coming to save her.
Dance, little baby, dance up high,
Never mind, baby, Mother is by.
Crow and caper, caper and crow,
Stay, little star, and don’t let go.
A spell to steady a life, requiring hyacinth & a seven-pointed star
Agnes Amaranth knows what childbirth is supposed to be like. She’s heard the talk from young mothers working beside her in the mill, the girls back in Crow County who hadn’t gone to Mama Mags for help. There’s pain, they said, pain like cleaving open, like breaking in half, but there are other women there to help you bear it. Aunts and midwives, grannies and sisters, mothers to press cool palms against your forehead and hum half-forgotten lullabies in your ears.
You aren’t supposed to be alone. You aren’t supposed to be locked in a green-tiled room, chained and drugged, with nothing but the dull grate of men’s voices for company. A doctor with his sleeves rolled to the wrist, his hands bare and pink and somehow repellent, grime crusted beneath his nails; an assistant or two with towels slung over their shoulders and nameless stains spattering their aprons; a pair of men in uniforms, who look down at her like she is a prize they intend to stuff and mount on their mantels. A nurse flits among them sometimes, young and sorry-looking as she sweeps and straightens.
The pain is still there, cutting like a clarion call through the fog, but Agnes can’t answer it. She can only lie there with spittle trailing from the corner of her mouth, clawing like an animal inside the cage of her body. She counts ceiling tiles to distract herself. She prays. She tells herself witch-tales, but the missing mothers seem to taunt her, wailing from the margins while their daughters sleep in the cinders and flee into tangled woods and marry beastly husbands.
The pain comes again, urgent and vast, and Agnes feels her body straining and failing at some important task. Then the foreign scrape of fingers inside her, probing, pulling, conducting some secret evaluation and finding her wanting.
A sigh from the doctor, precisely like Mr. Malton sighing over a jammed loom. Agnes imagines her blood replaced with oil, her joints with gears; a misbehaving machine instead of a woman.
The doctor addresses the officers, rather than Agnes. “There’s been no progression at all. We’ll want to think about extraction, if you boys want her to survive to stand trial.” One of the assistants rattles in a metal cart behind him and produces a long silver object. From the corner of her eye Agnes catches the ugly curve of a hook.
She thrashes against her shackles, her wild scream reduced to a choked moan. None of them look at her, except the nurse, whose eyes are huge and sad, her hands tight on the handle of her broom.
Agnes wants to bite her. She wants to claw and curse them all, to bring all the centuries of Avalon crashing down on their heads—but she walked away from all that, convinced the cost of power was too high, failing to calculate the cost of being without it.
She wonders if her sisters feel the echo of her toothless rage. She wonders if they would come to her, if they could.
Agnes feels her eyes widen, very slightly.
She finds that, if she focuses every ounce of fury into her left hand, she can curl her nails into her own flesh. She can drive them deep into her own palm until blood wells ruby-bright. She can unclench her hand and let the blood trickle to the point of her dangling finger and draw a blotched shape on the sheet beneath her: a red circle. She can even whisper the words, though her tongue is limp and wet in her mouth.
She can pray that her sisters are watching.
Juniper watches her sister’s skin turn from ivory to alabaster to wax. Her features remain slack, but her fingers are curled into her own palm just above the ugly iron of her shackle. Agnes’s fist clenches so tightly Juniper sees the dark gleam of blood gathering.
She flinches away. “We’ve got to get there somehow, Bell. Call the tower back into the square, if you have to. Undo the binding.” But that would leave the library exposed and send every police officer and zealot into the streets to hunt witches. Would they even make it to Agnes before they were caught?
She expects Bella to object, to cling to her books like a mother protecting several thousand of her favorite children, but when she looks up she sees that Bella is, inexplicably, smiling. Her eyes are on the pool of water.
“I don’t think that will be necessary. Look.”
Juniper looks.
The red gleam beneath Agnes’s fingernails has become a fistful of blood. One finger is extended, stretching at a painful angle, smearing the bed-sheet with shocking crimson. The finger moves slowly, as if it requires all Agnes’s strength to keep it in motion, and it takes Juniper a startled moment to see what she has drawn.
A circle. A way where there was none.
“Hold on, Ag.” Juniper whispers it to the water. Bella is already filling her arms with glass jars and paper bags, books and notes. Her owl swoops silently to her shoulder and she reaches a hand to stroke its onyx feathers. Juniper thinks she looks like a proper witch from one of Mags’s stories, about to curse her enemies or ride a thundercloud into battle.
They return to the tower door and this time when they press their palms to the carved sign they think of Agnes and her circle of blood, the red path she drew them through the dark.
The tower vanishes.
Agnes is alone.
Until she isn’t.
The air of the hospital skews sideways, a dizzy rushing, and afterward there are two hands pressed to the bloody circle on her bed-sheet. One of them is long and narrow, the fingertips stained with ink; the other is wide, sun-brown, marked with pale scars from thorns and thickets.