She thinks a little sunlight might help, a little clean September air in her lungs, but she keeps the doors and windows shut tight and draws a salt-circle around their bed. A new wanted poster appeared on the streets the previous day, offering a generous reward for “an infant with red curls, cruelly stolen from her rightful mother; Eastwoods suspected.” Juniper brought it home crumpled in her fist.
So Agnes stays hidden, waiting.
Sometime after dawn Eve falls into a deeper sleep. At first Agnes is grateful, after a long night of coughing and fussing. But the longer she sleeps the less grateful Agnes becomes. Eve’s arms lie limp on the quilt, chest flushed pink, tiny fists unclenched. Even the frown-lines on her brow have unfolded.
Agnes strokes her bare skin with one knuckle. Eve doesn’t move.
Terror jolts through her, spine to skull. Pan appears at her shoulder, voicing a piercing hawk’s cry. Eve’s eyelids give the barest flutter.
Agnes says, firmly and calmly, “No.”
This isn’t how the story goes; she doesn’t cower in the dark while her daughter dies. She doesn’t lie back and let the tide of the world have its way with her, like her mother did.
She stands and paces, rustling through empty jars and turning out every pocket. A handful of thorns, black-pearl seeds, a few twists of herbs, curled and brittle. Not enough. There has to be someone in this city with the witch-ways or words she needs, or someone who will find them for her. She thinks of circles and bindings and joined hands. Of Mr. August Lee, who came when she called him.
She fumbles in her skirt pocket for her last mockingbird feather, raggedy and crimped. She pricks her palm with the hollow point and whispers the words. Hush little baby, don’t say a word.
Heat snakes through her veins. Agnes unlatches the window and sends the feather into the sky along with a whispered name. “Tell him to meet me”—she hesitates, unwilling to say the words South Sybil out loud in case some unfriendly shadow is listening in the alley—“at the corner of Lamentation and Sixteenth,” she finishes.
Agnes rubs pale dye into her hair and ties a maid’s apron around her waist. She wraps her daughter in gray wool—her head lolls, a thin line of white gleaming beneath the red of her lashes—and steps across their wards and into the hall. For a long moment she stands there, warring with herself, before lifting her hand to knock at the door to No. 12.
A pair of blondish, round-cheeked girls answer the door, so similar they can only be twins. All their hearty Kansas aunts and cousins must be at work. They blink up at Agnes, neither one recognizing the grayhaired maid standing in the hall as their former neighbor.
“I need someone to watch my baby girl while I run to the grocer’s. Please, just for a minute. She’s sick.”
The girls look at one another, communicating in the same silent language Agnes once shared with her sisters. They nod, and Agnes sets Eve in their arms with shaking hands. Better to keep her hidden away than risk someone on the street spotting a red curl.
Agnes hurries up the street with her head bent and her shoulders hunched, trying to look harmless and timid and forgettable. Every now and then her gaze crosses another woman’s and she sees the same desperate innocence in their faces. It sends a shiver of fury through her.
She arrives at the corner of St. Lamentation and Sixteenth before August. She circles the block rather than lingering, ducking her head politely at a pair of patrolling Inquisitors.
He still isn’t there when she returns. Fearful questions clamor in her skull—was he detained or delayed? Was he already in the Deeps, outed as a witch-sympathizer?—but she keeps her feet shuffling and her face slack. A flash of shadow tells her Pan is hovering somewhere high above her.
She circles the block again. This time August’s absence is a bell tolling in her chest, a low warning. If he could have come to her, he would have: it was written in the tilt of his smile, the shine of his eyes when he looked at her.
Had her mockingbird failed somehow? Had it gotten lost or eaten or—her heart vanishes mid-beat, a breathless silence—intercepted?
Agnes feels something falling inside her from a very great height, a silent rushing.
She runs. She runs as if there are wolves or shadows at her heels. Her body jars with the running, her breasts tender, her belly weak, but she doesn’t stop.
Eve, Eve, EveEveEve.
She crashes through the boarding-house door, heaving up the steps. She doesn’t bother to knock at No. 12. The door bangs against the cracked plaster. “Where is she? Is she safe?”
The blond girls are holding one another on the floor, shoulders shivering with sobs. One of them looks up at Agnes with the shine of tears on her cheeks, one eye puffing with the promise of a bruise. “They c-came knocking right after you left. They said—”
But Agnes can’t hear her because she’s listening to the silence running beneath her, the terrible absence of the sound she’s heard every second for seven days: the dry, desperate rattle of her daughter’s breath.
The silence swells inside her. It presses against her ribs and pops in her ears, until Agnes is nothing but pale skin wrapped around a soundless scream.
Her own voice has a distant, underwater warble. “Who?”
The other girl answers this time, reaching an arm around her sister. “Inquisitors. A pair of them, wearing those red-cross uniforms. They knocked and Clara answered, and they said they were looking for a baby girl.” Her eyes shift a little, uncertain. “They said a w-witch had snatched her straight from her mother’s arms and run off with her.” Her arm tightens around her sister, as if she thinks Agnes might snatch one of them next.
“And where”—her voice is still perfectly calm; only the very tips of her fingers tremble—“did they take her?”
“Don’t know,” says the girl. “They—they said if you had any questions you could take them up with the mayor.”
The mayor. The girl sounds doubtful as she says it, because even a little girl knows mayors don’t meet with witches. But Agnes recognizes it for what it is: an invitation.
A trap, into which she would walk willingly and open-eyed, because he has stolen her daughter away from her and there is nothing she would not do to get her back.
The girls gasp and clutch at one another. It’s only when one of them pants, “What—what is that?” that Agnes becomes aware that Pan has materialized on her shoulder, talons biting through her blouse. “You are a witch!”
“Yes,” Agnes answers distantly. “And they should have thought of that before they took what was mine.”
And then she’s back in the street, stumbling over cobblestones and shoving past strangers. She’s crossing the Thorn, heading for St. George’s Square, before it occurs to her, with a faraway flick of annoyance, that her sisters will follow her into the trap. That they will feel her fear through the binding between them and come running, and then Gideon Hill will have all three—four, Agnes thinks, with a swallowed scream—Eastwoods in his palm.
She thinks how very tiresome it is to love and be loved. She can’t even risk her life properly, because it no longer belongs solely to her.
A feathered shadow sweeps across her. Pan. What is he, really? A piece of magic itself, flown through from the other side and tethered to her soul. An else-wise, otherworldly creature that doesn’t particularly care what is and isn’t possible.