A dark twist of movement catches her eye. The shadow of the doorway is writhing as she watches it, sprouting hands and fingers, a malformed head. Bella doesn’t move, doesn’t breathe, as the shadow passes over her. It doesn’t seem to see her, but the head rolls back and forth like a hound with a scent, searching.
Bella runs.
“Tonight, I think. As soon as it’s good and dark. Are there tunnels that lead out of the city?”
Agnes wakes to the soft murmur of voices and the yellow slant of daylight. Through a doorway she sees Bella and Cleo sitting together at a scuffed kitchen table, their legs intermingled.
Cleo doesn’t answer immediately, but lays her hand on the table, not quite touching Bella’s. “Yes. But I’d rather you stayed.” Her voice is soft but somehow urgent, intimate. It occurs to Agnes to wonder where her oldest sister slept last night.
“But we’re putting you in danger just by being here.” Agnes watches Bella’s hand creep toward Cleo’s, as if it possesses a mind of its own. “Someone is bound to notice three white women and a newborn living in your mother’s spice shop, no matter how well we disguise ourselves or how thoroughly we hide. And we know now our wards won’t hold against Hill forever.”
“So we’ll find other safe houses and move between them. Renew the wards twice a day. The Sisters will help, and maybe the Daughters—and what about Agnes’s man, who delivered you to my doorstep so efficiently?” Agnes’s man. What a novel, rather appealing arrangement, to own a man rather than being owned by him.
Bella huffs. “And who will feed and clothe us? Our savings burned along with everything else, and none of us have jobs anymore, you’ll notice—”
“I do. And if they stop printing my stories we can steal or scavenge or beg. We’ll find a way.” Cleo pauses, eyes flicking across Bella’s face, and her voice falls. “You’re no coward.”
Bella swallows, eyes falling to Cleo’s hand still lying between them, then away. “It’s not a question of cowardice or courage. It’s just logic: We lost. He won. We thought we were the beginning of some grand new story, but we were wrong. It’s the same old story, and if we keep telling it every one of us will burn. Witches always do.”
There’s an enormous, scathing huh from the opposite doorway. Agnes startles and the air above her twists. Dark wings, the gleam of talons: her hawk, returned from the other side of elsewhere to hover over Agnes and Eve.
He flutters to the back of a chair, glaring at the smallish, sharp-faced woman who stands in the doorway. Agnes’s memory of the previous night is fragmented and feverish, but she thinks she recalls that face hovering above her, singing her well again.
Now her hands are on her hips, her face seamed and bitter. “I should have known. You spend all summer stirring up a hornet’s nest worth of trouble, but as soon as trouble arrives you’re heading for the hills.”
Bella has her mouth open, but another voice shouts across her, “The hell we are.” Juniper’s objection is so loud and abrupt that Eve wakes with a startled snort. Agnes struggles upright—the entire middle of her is wrong-feeling, squashy and swollen and aching—and tries to wrap the swaddling back around her daughter before her wails wake the neighbors, or possibly the entire city. But Eve seems to have sprouted several extra arms and legs in the night, all flailing in separate directions.
Juniper scrambles upright, hair standing at wild angles. “It’s all right, baby girl, Aunty June is here.”
Aunty June proceeds to scoop Eve from Agnes’s arms, swaying and patting. Eve’s cries shrink to muttered complaints and Juniper beams down at her. It’s a soft, half-sleeping smile that Agnes hasn’t seen on her sister’s face since they were girls.
“Sorry,” Juniper whispers. “I only meant: I’m not going anywhere. I want to fight.”
“We are aware, June.” Bella scrubs a hand over her face. “But there’s a time to fight, and there’s a time to survive. If we leave now—”
“And let the bastards win? No, ma’am.” Juniper’s face isn’t soft anymore.
But a faint frown crosses her sister’s face as she looks down at the baby curled in her arms. Juniper looks burdened and a little bewildered by the burden, as if she’s found herself hauling a heavy load entirely by accident. “And—it’s going to get bad, isn’t it? They’re going to come for all of us, for every woman who knows more than she should, who doesn’t smile when she’s told to.” Juniper sounds uncertain, feeling her way across unknown terrain. “It seems to me like Miss Araminta’s right. We got them into this mess, and we can’t walk out on them now.”
A brief, slightly astonished silence follows. Agnes wonders when her wild baby sister started thinking about duty and debt, cause and consequence. Somewhere in the dark of the Deeps, maybe. Or right now, standing with the weight of her niece in her arms.
Bella is the first to collect herself. “That’s very . . . laudable. But I went to St. George’s this morning—”
“You what now?”
“—and saw Gideon Hill. There’s something wrong about him, something sick—you were right. He was furious when I sent the tower away again, almost deranged. He’ll keep coming after us. And what happens in November, if he’s elected? What happens when he has more than just angry mobs and shadows?”
Agnes sees Bella glance down at Cleo’s hand again, her eyes clouded with worry, and understands that it isn’t herself she’s afraid for.
Agnes thinks of August running through the rising riot, searching for her, and the relief on his face when he found her; of Eve staring up into her eyes, solemn as a Saint; of Juniper’s voice breaking as she promised to take care of her. Of the terrible risk of loving someone more than yourself and the secret strength it grants you.
“Well,” she says mildly, “I’m staying.” Above her, the hawk croons.
Several sets of eyes swivel toward them. Bella adjusts her spectacles. “I thought you were done with all of this.”
Agnes shrugs. That was before Eve, before her familiar flew out of the darkness to her, before her life cleaved into before and after.
“Aren’t you worried for her?” Juniper tilts her chin at Eve, who is making a faint irritable-bee sound that might be a snore.
“Yes,” Agnes answers, because she is. She lay awake half the night consumed by stray terrors and uncertainties, convinced the miraculous rise and fall of her daughter’s ribs would cease the second she closed her eyes. But beneath the terror was something else, something clawed and fanged and ruthless that she doesn’t know how to explain.
I am terrified and I am terrible. I am fearful and I am something to be feared. She meets Miss Araminta’s eyes, dark and knowing, sharp and soft, and thinks maybe every mother is both things at once.
She gives her sisters another shrug. “Yes. But I’m still staying.”
Juniper’s face lights. Her eyes slide back to Bella. “Well?”
Bella lifts both hands in the air. “Well what? You two can make all the brave pronouncements you like, but what good are they? What good are we? Without Avalon—”