The pain crests. The hawk calls again, a wild shriek.
A final push, and Juniper is whooping and Bella is sobbing—“She’s beautiful, Ag, she’s perfect”—and someone, some new person who hadn’t existed a moment before, is wailing.
Oh, baby girl.
Time skips forward again and Agnes is lying back against a soft mound of pillows with a precious, burning thing clutched against her chest. She stares down into a small, furrowed face, faintly imperious, like a tiny deity who hasn’t seen much of the world yet but is already unimpressed. Her fists are two pink curls, and her eyes—open, staring solemnly back at Agnes, as if the two of them were instructed to memorize one another’s faces—are a nameless color somewhere between midnight and ash.
“She—is she steaming?” Juniper sounds only mildly concerned, as if perhaps all babies steam for the first few days.
Bella is fussing with boiled water and clean linen, scrubbing away the streaks of red and gummy white. “She’s just fine, I’m sure. It must be an effect of all that witching.”
The baby’s head is still glossy and wet, but already Agnes can see her hair is an unlikely shade of ruby red, like the deepest heart of a bonfire or the burning eye of a familiar.
Agnes glances sideways at the bird now perched on the bed rail. A river hawk, she thinks, all sharp angles and vicious curves, black as char. It looks down at the baby in her arms with the same fierce tenderness that Agnes feels, a love that has teeth and talons.
Agnes presses her lips to her daughter’s fiery hair and feels her life cleaving, splitting cleanly into two pieces: the time before, and the time after.
The mattress shifts beside her. “What’ll you name her?” Juniper’s voice is reverent. Her hand hovers above the baby’s head, not touching her, as if she isn’t sure she ought to be near anything that fragile and precious.
Agnes has thought of many names—Calliope for her mother or Magdalena for her mother’s mother, Ivy for power or Rose for beauty—but now a different name unfurls from her lips, snapping like a banner on the battlefield. “Eve.”
A sinful name, a shocking name. A name that broke the first world and walked into the new one, unbound and unbowed.
Juniper laughs, a low rasp. “And her mother’s-name?”
Agnes wants something deep-rooted and determined, something that grows in overturned earth and tumbled rocks. She thinks of the tough, silvery weed that was always threatening to overtake Mama Mags’s herb-garden: cudweed, she called it, or—“Everlasting. Eve Everlasting.”
Juniper dares to cup her palm around her niece’s ruby head, to whisper, “Eve Everlasting. Give ’em hell, baby girl.”
“She will,” Agnes promises. She finds her fingers clutching the swaddled sheets. “And so will I, I swear. I’m sorry to you both for running away, for hiding. I thought . . .” She thought it was safer to creep and cower, to be no one rather than someone. Like her mother taught her. “I will not be a mother like ours was.”
Bella settles on her other side. “Neither was she, once. You were five when she died, but I was seven.” Agnes has always envied Bella those two extra years. “I remember her the way she used to be. I think she thought if she made herself small enough and quiet enough, she would be safe.”
She was wrong. Bella doesn’t need to say it.
Agnes swallows the salt in her throat and leans very carefully against her sister. A silence blooms between them, the gentle calm following a storm. Agnes is several steps past exhaustion but can’t seem to close her eyes. She’s mesmerized by the ammonite curl of her daughter’s left ear, the delicate fall of her red lashes against the soft shape of her face.
She is studying the soft line of her cheek, wondering if she sees a hint of her sister’s square jaw, when the hawk mantles beside her. Its wings snap wide, as if to defend itself against some invisible attack. The owl on Bella’s shoulder does the same, eyes wide and round.
“Goodness!” Bella flinches from the slap of feathers, trying to stroke a calming finger down its breast, but it launches itself upward. The hawk joins it, circling near the ceiling on midnight wings. The pattern they draw is a warning, like vultures spiraling above some dying thing. A growing light gleams dull amber on their feathers, the rising sun, or the distant, electric glow of the Fair.
Agnes is looking up at them, clutching her daughter, when there’s a loud bang against the ward door.
“Agnes! Are you in there?” More banging, a desperate fist. “Hyssop, for Chrissake!”
Bella looks at Agnes and Agnes nods. She unlocks the door and Mr. August Lee falls through it.
His hair is tangled and dark with rain, his eyes wild. There’s a gray smear across one cheek and a smell rising from his clothes, trailing like a shadow behind him: acrid and sour, ugly in some way Agnes doesn’t understand.
“Is she alive? Is the baby—” August’s eyes rove between the three of them, fastening onto Agnes and the tight-wrapped bundle held to her breast. The relief in his face washes over her like daybreak.
Juniper says, sullenly, “They’re just fine, thank you very much,” but August doesn’t seem to hear her. He moves to Agnes’s bedside and kneels, still looking at her with that stripped-bare delight. Agnes turns her hand palm up on the sheet and he presses his forehead against it. “I’m sorry,” he says into the mattress. “I got your message, but you weren’t there. I looked and looked. Finally someone told me you’d been taken, but I didn’t know where—”
“It’s all right.” She strokes her thumb across his brow, because she can, because she likes the weight of his head in her hand and the bent line of his neck. “I had my sisters.” The binding thrums between them, a cat’s purr, and it occurs to Agnes that she was dead wrong.
She thought survival was a selfish thing, a circle drawn tight around your heart. She thought the more people you let inside that circle the more ways the world had to hurt you, the more ways you could fail them and be failed in turn. But what if it’s the opposite, and there are more people to catch you when you fall? What if there’s an invisible tipping point somewhere along the way when one becomes three becomes infinite, when there are so many of you inside that circle that you become hydra-headed, invincible?
August is silent, head still pressed to her hand as if all he wants in the world is to feel the heat of her pulse.
“Well.” Juniper clears her throat. “Not to interrupt, but it’s time we get gone. Before somebody notices this whole hospital is asleep or follows this fool here.” But she sounds less sullen, even faintly approving, as if she rather likes the sight of a man on his knees.
August looks up with a shadow looming in his face. “Where are you going? Is it that tower?”
Juniper shrugs at him, already turning to draw a circle on the white-tile wall. The birds still circle above her like some grave portent.
“You can’t go back there.”
“Excuse me?” Juniper wheels, chin thrust forward. “And why the hell not?”
But Agnes already knows why, because Agnes has finally recognized the smell rising from August’s clothes: wild roses and fire.
“Because,” August answers, “the tower is burning.”