Wade in the water with me,
My daughter all dressed in red.
Wade in the water, and dress in white instead.
A song to stop bleeding after a hard birth, requiring twice-blessed water & the Serpent-Bearer
James Juniper looks at the man kneeling beside her sister—at the gray smear on his cheekbone and the sorry angle of his shoulders—and tells him, very gently, “Bullshit.”
“It isn’t—”
“It is. Avalon would have to be somewhere in order for anybody to burn it, and I happen to know it’s nowhere.”
“It isn’t. It’s standing in the middle of St. George’s Square and it’s burning. Look out the window! You can see the light from here!”
Juniper doesn’t want to look out the window, doesn’t want to know the light glowing red on the underbellies of the clouds isn’t coming from the rising sun.
“Listen, we bound that tower and buried the binding, and warded the place we buried it. So excuse me if I don’t—”
“June.” It’s Agnes, her voice tired and cracked, pitched low so as not to wake the baby.
Juniper shoots August a now look what you did glare. “It’s alright, Ag. I’m sure Mr. Lee is mistaken.”
“June.” And there’s a sorriness in her voice that makes Juniper want to shout or stuff her fingers in her ears, anything so she doesn’t hear what she says next. “There were men at the graveyard. The tree was uprooted. I think they must have found the binding.”
Juniper doesn’t say anything. She stares at her sister, and then at August, who is climbing wearily to his feet. “It’s madness out there. I ran past people carrying torches, shouting about burning the witches out of their nest at last. They said the black tower had come back, and they said Gideon Hill was going to burn it.”
“Bullshit,” Juniper says again, but the word wobbles in her mouth. Agnes is looking up at her with a slick shine of tears in her eyes, and Bella has both hands pressed to her mouth.
Juniper looks away from them, anywhere else. Her eye catches on the bloody circle now dried and crusted on the bed-sheet beside her sister.
The trick to doing something stupid is to do it very quickly, before anyone can shout wait!
Juniper presses her palm to the circle and speaks the words, and then she is pulled sideways into the burning black.
Juniper hasn’t yet been to Hell—although, according to her daddy, the preacher, Miss Hurston, and the New Salem Police Department, it’s only a matter of time—but she figures when she gets there it’ll look a lot like St. George’s Square does now: fire and ash and ruination.
The door beneath her hand is burning, blue flames licking across charred wood, eating the inscription and sign both. She reels back, curling her hand to her chest, and stares up at the tower that was her hope and her home. Fire leaps from every window, fattened by the pages of ten thousand books and scrolls, by all the words and ways of witches preserved for so many centuries. Ivy and rose-vines wither and blacken, peeling away from the stone in long twists of ash. The trees wear hungry red crowns, like doomed queens, and birds caw and flap in frenzied circles.
Beneath the hungry roar of the flames Juniper thinks she hears a keening sound, low and distant, like women’s voices joined together in some sad lamentation. Or maybe the sound comes from her own heart as she watches the last hope of witches rising into the sky on wings of ash and cinder.
Through the white haze of smoke and the hiss of rain Juniper sees people ringing the square. Men and women stand with lit torches in raised fists, Hill’s symbol brought to hideous life. She can’t tell through the waver of heat and light if their shadows are their own. She isn’t sure she cares.
Behind the men and their torches—his eyes dancing with merry flames, his pale skin flushed—stands Gideon Hill. A willowy blond woman clutches his arm, looking up at him with such empty devotion that Juniper shivers.
Hill’s mouth is moving, issuing proclamations or commands or spells. The crowd is too mesmerized by their violent delights to wonder why the flames burn so unnaturally hot, heedless of the rain, or to notice the woman who now stands at the base of the tower, her hair fire-whipped, her tears hissing to steam before they leave her eyes.
Only Hill sees her. His nostrils flare like a hound catching a long-sought scent, and his eyes lift above the heads of his vicious, frothing flock. Juniper feels them like hooks in her skin.
“You were cleverer than I thought, little witch.” Hill is separated from her by fifty men and a roaring blaze, but his voice is a whisper in her ear. “But not clever enough.”
The sound of his voice drags her back down into the Deeps, sends shadow-fingers prying between her teeth. She spits. It sizzles where it strikes.
She sees the white glimmer of Hill’s smile through the haze. At his side Grace Wiggin frowns very faintly, as if she senses his attention wandering.
His laugh shivers in the air beside her. It’s a relieved sound, almost giddy, and Juniper remembers the terrible fear that worked in his eyes. “I knew when you escaped that you must have found it, somehow. Dragged it back from wherever those hags took it. You hid it well, but anything lost can be found, can it not?”
Juniper thinks of the wards they’d set so carefully around the witch-yard, salt and thistle; she pictures shadow-hands plucking and pulling at them until they unraveled.
“You have given me the thing I have wanted above all others, James Juniper.” The voice is passionless but sincere, and Juniper is struck by the certainty that he is telling the truth. “I am very grateful.”
His laugh echoes across the square and she wants to charge through the crowd and wrap her hands around his throat, curse him eyeless and earless and tongueless—except there’s a dark shimmer at her feet: shadows, many-armed, languorous as well-fed snakes, oozing across the scorched earth toward her. She whirls, presses her burned hand back to the hot ashes of the door, speaks the words a second time—
And she is on her knees in the stinking silence of the hospital ward, with hot tears tracking through the char on her cheeks.
Agnes knows from the broken slope of Juniper’s shoulders, from the reek of ashes and roses she brings with her, that August was telling the truth.
A wail rises: Bella, keening as if her own flesh and blood is burning along with the library. Her hands scrabble for the drawn circle on the sheet.
Juniper catches her tight around the waist. “It’s too late. It’s gone, Bell. He’s won.” Her voice is even rougher than before, twice-burned by fire. Bella sags against her youngest sister, weeping, and Juniper shushes her. August looks at the floor, a stranger intruding on their mourning.
They stay like that, suspended in grief like gnats in amber. Agnes knows with cold clarity that soon someone will wake from their spell and raise the alarm. Rioters and officers will turn up looking for more witches to burn, and they’ll find three sisters and a little witch-girl with hair the color of heart’s blood. They’ll rip her from Agnes’s arms.
She looks down at her daughter—her hair drying in bright swirls of red, her cheeks round and slack in sleep—and thinks: Let the bastards try.
“We have to go,” she says, very calmly. None of them move, mired in the selfishness of grief. Agnes raises her voice. “We have to go right now. Before they come for us, and for Eve.”