Araminta interrupts her. “You still have more words and ways than nine women out of ten. And”—her eyes slide to the hawk perched on her chair—“I know a familiar when I see one.”
Bella opens her mouth and then closes it. “And how’s that?”
Araminta smiles a sly, sidelong smile, and for the first time Agnes sees some of Cleo in her face. “Because I’m the tenth woman.”
And as she says it an animal appears at her feet, coiling out of nothing: a black hare with ember eyes. Juniper whispers something profane and admiring. Agnes gasps. Bella merely looks intent.
“There’s more witching left in the world than you think, girls,” Araminta says, and her eyes are on Bella’s. “The kind they can’t burn because it was never written down.”
Cleo speaks for the first time since her mother arrived. “And if they stay, will we help them? Will the Daughters stand beside their Sisters, Ohemaa?” Agnes frowns over the last word, but Araminta gives a little grunt, as if the title is an arrow aimed well.
She bows her head to her daughter and Cleo grins back. She turns to Bella. “What do you say?” Cleo’s voice is low and too warm again, her eyes bright, burning gold. “All for one?”
Agnes almost feels sorry for her sister, subjected to the heat of that gaze. Bella’s eyes search Cleo’s face, and whatever she finds sends a flush tip-toeing up her neck. Her fingers creep those few final inches to curl tight around Cleo’s.
“And one for all,” she whispers.
What is now and ever and unto ages and ages,
may not always be
A spell for undoing, requiring a needle & a cracked egg
For three days, Beatrice Belladonna and her sisters remain in the dim back rooms of Araminta’s Spices & Sundries. They’re long, tiresome days: Agnes rests and wakes and rests again, her fever rising and falling like a stubborn tide; Eve alternates between cherubic contentment and fits of aggrieved screaming, as if she was promised some treat and then bitterly denied; Bella sits for hours with her black notebook on her knees, listening to Araminta Wells’s lectures on constellations and sung-spells and the rhythm of witching. Juniper is mostly absent, arriving and departing at odd hours, filling her pockets with herbs and bones from the shop’s stock.
The nights are long, too, but Bella does not find them tiresome. They are smothered laughter and lips, hands and hips hidden beneath the saffron quilt. They are hours stolen out of time, unburdened by the future and unsullied by the past.
(Though sometimes the past slithers in. Sometimes Bella wakes from dreams of cellars and burning barns. Sometimes she flinches from Cleo’s touch as if it’s hot wax, and Cleo lies very still until Bella’s pulse steadies. Afterward she holds her carefully, like Bella has spun sugar for skin.)
By the afternoon of the fourth day Bella is beginning to hope they might be safe. That her sisters were not fools to stay in this vicious, hungry city. That she might wake up every morning with her cheek on Cleo’s shoulder.
But then Juniper staggers into the shop with her mouth thin and her eyes hard. “Outside. The shadows are . . . gathering. Thickening. I don’t know if they can smell us or track us or what, but I figure it’s time to get gone.”
They leave as the sun sets, drawing Nut Street in mauve and gray. They follow Cleo down into the tunnels: Bella, then Agnes with Eve wrapped tight to her chest in the manner Araminta taught her, then Juniper, swearing and shivering. Even before her time in the Deeps she didn’t care much for being belowground. Now she detests it.
They emerge long after dusk, filing out of a tiny building that looks from the outside like a garden shed or a pigeon coop, then slipping through a hedge and onto a sedate east-side avenue.
“Is this close enough?” Cleo whispers.
“Yes,” Bella answers.
“Send word once you’re settled.”
“I will.”
Cleo runs out of things to say. She simply stares at Bella, tracing her face—and Bella has never liked her own features so much as she does in that moment, in the soft gold of Cleo’s gaze—before touching the brim of her derby hat. “Three bless and keep you.”
Bella and her sisters are left alone on the darkening street.
The east side is apparently untroubled by the riots and arrests plaguing the rest of New Salem. The houses have dignified gables and clipped lawns and the slightly burnished shine of old money. Their windows send soft lamp-light and the clink of crystal over the empty streets. A man’s laugh floats from one of them, unworried, perfectly content.
Bella’s sisters crowd close behind her in their borrowed clothes and black cloaks, like refugees from some darker, wilder world. An owl and a hawk wheel high above them.
She leads them to a red-brick house on St. Jerome Street, slightly shabbier and older than its neighbors. She knocks twice, and the silence that follows is sufficient for her to doubt every decision that brought her here.
Then the door swings inward and an elderly, sweatered gentleman is blinking up at her. “Miss Eastwood! Pardon me—Misses Eastwood.” Mr. Henry Blackwell beams at the three of them as if they are unexpected guests to a dinner party rather than the most wanted criminals in the city. “And are those . . . my word.”
Their familiars have swept to their shoulders in a rush of black feathers and hot eyes, talons curving like carved jet. Mr. Blackwell’s genial smile shifts toward awe as he looks at them. He gathers himself. “I don’t believe we have been introduced.”
“This is Strix varia—Strix, I call him—and Pan.” Bella gestures to the fisher-hawk on Agnes’s shoulder. “For Pandion haliaetus, the western osprey, you know.”
Behind her she hears Juniper mutter about the injustice of her sisters finding their familiars first if they were just going to give them such stupid long names.
Mr. Blackwell appears not to hear her. He gives each of them a small bow. “Do come in, all of you.”
The hall is dark oak and dense carpet. As soon as the door clicks behind them Bella begins. “I’m so sorry to surprise you like this. It’s an imposition, I know, and terribly dangerous, but my sisters and I need a place to—”
But Mr. Blackwell is waving a hand over his shoulder at her. “Oh, it’s no trouble at all. I’ve been worried sick about you, to tell the truth.”
Bella isn’t at all convinced that amiable, bespectacled Mr. Blackwell understands the gravity of the risk. “If they find us here, you might well be arrested. Your property could be seized, your position terminated.”
Mr. Blackwell reaches the end of the hall and bends to peruse a bookshelf, thumbing through clothbound spines until he reaches a little bronze statue of a dog, its head shined smooth with use. Blackwell gives a small hah! and tips the dog forward. Some unseen mechanism clicks and whirrs, and the entire bookcase glides smoothly away. Behind it lies a dim, windowless room with a slanting ceiling and several fat down mattresses.
Mr. Blackwell makes a polite throat-clearing noise. “I tidied up a bit last week, got the worst of the cobwebs out at least. I had a suspicion it might be needed.” At Bella’s wordless, openmouthed expression, he adds, “My grandfather built this house. He told me there would always be someone who needed to hide, and that there ought always be a Blackwell there to hide them.”