But every evening after that, when the man read books to his children before bed, there was a spider watching him from the window, black as night and cinder-eyed. And, in time, Aunt Nancy taught her great-granddaughter her letters.
Hide away, hide away, hide away with me,
Hide away, hide away home.
A song to avert an unwanted eye, requiring sympathy & the Southern Crown
Beatrice Belladonna wakes just before dawn with her head pillowed on the soft meat of Cleo’s shoulder. Cleo is still sleeping, her heart thudding slow and even in Bella’s ear.
Bella pulls herself to one elbow and studies her, not counting the seconds: the clever arch of her brow, the polished shine of her skin, the hollow place where her collarbones meet. Bella thinks of all their long afternoons together at Avalon, annotating and translating, adrift in a private sea of words and ways.
Ashes, now, all of it. Men are probably wading through the wreckage at this very moment, smearing the remains beneath their boots. Laughing at the lost hope of witches.
The thought is a knife in her stomach.
She finds herself standing, slipping back into her stinking dress from the night before. She looks back once at the sleeping sprawl of Cleo’s body, an offering at an undeserving altar, before tip-toeing down the narrow stairs.
Her sisters are still sleeping, nested close together. The binding between them seems to hum as Bella passes, and for a dizzy second she feels two hearts beating beside hers, two chests rising and falling, as if they are no longer entirely separate from one another. It ought to worry her, but there’s a rightness to it, like three strands braiding together.
Bella catches the pale ghost of her own reflection in a hall mirror. Her face is subtly different, as if Cleo worked some arcane spell in the night: her hair is loose and long, her cheeks warm, her lips bitten pink. If this is the consequence of her sinfulness, perhaps she ought to sin more often.
Bella leaves her reflection behind and steps into the spice shop proper. She rattles briefly behind the counter, emerging with a pair of dull silver shears, and is inching toward the door when a voice stops her.
“Leaving already, Miss Belladonna?”
She wheels to find Quinn’s mother perched on a stool with a steaming mug curled in one hand and a black silk wrap around her head. She clucks her tongue. “Without so much as a thank-you.”
Bella tucks the shears behind her back, a guilty schoolgirl. “Thank you, Miss . . .”
“Miss Araminta Andromeda Wells. And just where were you going?”
“I—nowhere.”
Miss Wells considers her for a second or possibly a century. She sighs. “Come here, girl.” It does not occur to Bella to disobey. “I’d send you through the tunnels, but the doors only open for Daughters, and you don’t have the mark.” She taps Bella’s wrist, right where Cleo bears her scarred pattern of stars. “This’ll have to do.”
Bella stands very still as Miss Wells hums a tune beneath her breath. She removes an ink-pen from her dressing gown pocket and draws a shape on the soft white of Bella’s palm: a spiral of lines and diamonds, a starry crown. Bella thinks it’s the same shape Cleo drew on the brick wall on St. Mary-of-Egypt Avenue when they ran from the rioters. She closes her hand tight around the marks, warm with witching.
“Thank you, Miss Wells.”
“Cleo’s a good girl,” Araminta answers, somewhat obscurely. She amends, “Well, no, she isn’t. She’s always been curious as a cat and twice as sly. But she’s mine, and she deserves . . .” She trails away, pursing and unpursing her lips, before finishing, “Make sure you come back.”
Bella gives her a grave bow, hand over her heart.
The streets of New Cairo are still, the houses shut tight against the madness of men with lit torches. The stale, dead smell of smoke hangs thick in the air.
It grows stronger as Bella draws closer to the city’s heart, muffling sound, obscuring the first gray streaks of dawn. There are people in the streets now—paper-boys and maids, workingmen heading west, street-cleaners and lamp-lighters—but they move with hunched shoulders and red eyes, as if the whole city is recovering from a night of drunken rage. Their eyes slide over Bella as if she is made of glass; none of them see the black-winged bird that keeps pace with her, high above.
A block south of the square she starts noticing white dust gathering in the cracks between cobblestones, clotting the gutters. There is a dizzy second when she mistakes it for snow before she recognizes it for what it is: ash.
At the final corner Bella ducks into the doorway of a closed shop. A gray drift of ash is gathered on the threshold, with a single rose petal lying atop it. The petal survived the fire with its edges only lightly charred, the center still soft pink. Bella bends and slips it into her skirt pocket.
She keeps her hand pressed over it as she peers around the edge of the shop and into the square.
The tower stands tall and terrible, strangely naked without its cloak of roses and ivy. The windows are desolate holes, revealing the hollow heart of the place that was once a library, a haven, a home. The woods around it are a smoking graveyard, the burnt stumps of trees leaning like headstones.
It seems to Bella she hears women weeping, softly and steadily, but the only people present are the men who pluck at the still-smoking ruins with shovels and rakes, sifting tentatively through the ash as if they are expecting vengeful witches to come soaring out of the coals on flaming broomsticks.
Someone stands among them, staring up at the corpse of the tower with a small, contented smile, like a man at the end of some long and arduous journey. He strokes the spine of the black dog beside him, who stands with her tail tucked between her legs.
Gideon Hill.
The last time Bella saw him he was ordering her sister’s arrest.
The sight of him now is another knife-twist in her belly, a hot rush of hate.
She withdraws the silver shears from her skirt and studies them. She isn’t a librarian anymore and her library is nothing but ash, but surely she can still evict a misbehaving patron. Surely it’s easier to lose something than to find it.
Bella glances up at Strix, circling so high above the square he could be mistaken for a crow unless you catch the hot gleam of his eyes.
Bella whispers her grandmother’s words and snips the scissors once in the air. A simple charm for a hedge-witch hiding her potions or a child hiding her petty crimes, for secrets kept and truths untold.
The black tower and the gravestone-trees vanish in a fold of elsewhere. This time there is no binding to hold it close, no jar of earth and leaves, and the tower falls deeper and deeper, a coin dropped in a bottomless ocean.
Hill’s men are left holding their rakes and shovels and blinking stupidly at one another, but Bella isn’t watching them. She’s watching Gideon Hill himself. His neck stiffens, the satisfied smile becomes a snarl. His colorless hair wisps into his face as he turns around. “Where is it? Who—”
Bella enjoys a second of savage satisfaction, but his expression is wrong somehow, unhinged in a way that makes Bella duck back behind her doorway. It reminds her of their daddy when one of them thwarted him: red fury stretched thinly over gray terror.
But Hill hasn’t been thwarted. He’s already won everything there is to win; what is there to fear in a vanishing ruin?