Bella had met her sister’s eyes and seen nothing but a terrible, leaden cold. Hate, she thought then.
Now she thinks of the witch-queen who sent shards of ice into warm hearts and soft eyes, turning them against the ones they loved best. Now she thinks she isn’t the only one familiar with betrayal.
“I never told, Agnes. I swear.”
Agnes shuts her eyes. “I thought—I didn’t—Saints, Bell.” A ragged whisper. “What did I do to us?”
“You were just a child.” Bella tries to sound measured and calm, as if it is a distant hurt long forgotten, rather than an ice-shard still buried in her breast.
“So were you.” Agnes clutches at the hard ball of her belly, breath catching. “I shouldn’t have said it. Even if you had told, I shouldn’t have turned on you.” There are tears mingling with the sweat on Agnes’s face now, more dripping from the end of Bella’s nose. She recalls dizzily that it was true love’s tears that melted the ice in the story.
“I’m sorry,” Agnes whispers.
“It’s all right,” Bella whispers back.
Another contraction wracks Agnes before she can answer. Bella can see the pain of it biting deep, even with the witching to ease it, and a tremor of fear moves through her. Perhaps even witching won’t be enough.
She smooths sweaty tendrils of hair back from Agnes’s brow.
Agnes looks up at her, pale and tired and scared. “Will you stay with me?”
“Yes,” Bella answers. In her chest she feels that cold sliver of ice melt into blood-warm water. “Always.”
Juniper doesn’t know much about birthing, but she knows it shouldn’t take this damn long.
She and Bella hover on either side of Agnes like a pair of black-cloaked gargoyles, standing vigil. It seems to go alright at first. Agnes pants and swears and strains against some invisible enemy, the veins blue and taut in her throat. But the baby doesn’t come, and each contraction wrings her like a rag, twists something vital out of her. Bella flicks back through her books, hissing and muttering, tossing herbs in ever-wilder circles.
The baby doesn’t come.
Agnes is supposed to be the strong one, but Juniper can see they’re coming to the end of her strength. Bella is supposed to be the wise one, but she’s running out of words. Juniper figures that leaves her, the wild one, with her wild will.
She casts around for anything that might help her sister cling to life, that might bind a woman to the world. The word bind rattles like a thrown pebble in her skull, rippling outward, and Juniper thinks: Why the hell not?
She plucks a single hair from her head. She tugs another one from Bella. (“Ow! What in the world—” “Hush.”) The last hair she takes is from Agnes, who doesn’t seem to notice.
Juniper twirls the strands in her fingers, three shades of shining black, and twists them into a slender wisp of braid. As she braids she sings the words to herself: Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Little words, old words, to bind a split seam or a stray thread. Why not a life?
Beside her Bella gives a little gasp. “A binding? That’s—what happens if s-she dies, and takes us with her—”
Juniper ignores her, and eventually Bella shuts the hell up and helps.
They speak the words together, circling round, rising and falling. The thing between them sings like a plucked string. and it’s suddenly clear as daylight to Juniper that it’s a binding, too, worn thin with time. She might wonder who worked it and why, except that she’s busy pouring her whole heart into her witching.
Juniper sees the spell plucking at Agnes, reeling her back toward life, but Agnes doesn’t want to come. Her head lolls against the sheets, sweat-sheened, and her eyes glitter from somewhere deep in her skull.
Juniper climbs carefully onto the bed beside her, fitting herself around the heat and hurt of her sister’s body. She tucks her cheek in the hollow between Agnes’s chin and collar, the way she did as a girl, and keeps speaking the words. Yours to mine and mine to yours.
“June. Baby.” Agnes’s voice is a hum against her cheek, a whisper in her ear. “Take care of her. Promise me you’ll take care of her.”
The words falter on Juniper’s lips; the spell sags. “I promise,” she says, and feels the promise weave a circle around her heart, a binding far older and stronger than any witchcraft.
Agnes softens after that, a final surrender.
Juniper thinks of the mornings when Mama Mags would come back from a hard birth with blood beneath her nails and heartache in her eyes. She would stare out at the white curls of mist rising like ghosts from the valley, rubbing her thumb across the brass shine of her locket. It’s just the way of things.
Juniper is old enough by now to know that the way of things is, generally speaking, horseshit. It’s cruelty and loss; locked doors and losing choices; sundered sisters and missing mothers.
What the hell good is witching, if it can’t change the way of things?
Juniper puts her lips against the shining dark of her sister’s hair and whispers, “Listen to me, Agnes. This isn’t how it goes. This isn’t how the story ends. All this—me and you and Bell—is just the beginning.” A shudder moves through Agnes, a laugh or a sob, but her eyes are closed.
Juniper’s arm tightens around Agnes’s shoulders and her voice rasps low. “Don’t leave me.”
Agnes opens her eyes and Juniper sees a spark burning somewhere deep down in the dark of them. Her fingers find Juniper’s on one side and Bella’s on the other, so they form a circle between them.
Agnes’s lips begin to move. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust—
Agnes speaks the words until they aren’t words anymore. Until they become clasped hands and bound threads, a circle woven from sister to sister to sister. Until the rules of the world bend beneath the weight of their will.
Agnes feels that will thrumming beneath her breastbone, a rush of desire. She wants to live. She wants to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with her sisters and shout a new story into the dark. She wants to look into her daughter’s eyes and see Juniper’s wildness and Bella’s wisdom, the wheel of stars and the snap of flames, all the everything she is and will be shining back at her.
Agnes is aware that she is crying, and that the tears are hissing against her skin. She is aware that the pain is an animal that has slipped its leash, biting and thrashing deep inside her, and that it carries her daughter closer.
That what they are doing—binding three lives together, holding a woman to life even while her pulse stutters and jolts—is an impossible reckless thing that only her dumbshit sister would think of, and that they are doing it anyway. Because she doesn’t want to die and they refuse to let her.
That power fills her, scorching her veins and blackening her bones, and it is outside her, too, watching her. Weighing her, this not-yetmother who will not die, who will break the laws of the universe rather than leave her daughter alone.
Somewhere in the blackness beyond her closed eyes, a hawk cries.
Then the silent rush of wings and the weightless bite of talons. Agnes opens her eyes to see the savage hook of a beak, the onyx shine of feathers. An eye like a comet, caught and polished.
In the brief lull before the pain and power surge again, it occurs to Agnes that Juniper will be insufferably, inconsolably jealous.