Except she can’t build her own. It would take years and decades—a lifetime of research and collecting, of following every hummed lullaby and half-forgotten rhyme—and she doesn’t have decades. She has a few final hours to scrape together the words they need most.
Her sisters have gone out to assemble the ways and wills, spinning through the city like spiders weaving mad webs, but the sun is already slanting toward afternoon. The shadows rise like cold water up the walls, smelling of first frosts and last chances.
Bella wonders if the cells of the Deep are smaller than her room at St. Hale’s. She wonders if despair is waiting for her down in the darkness, ready to swallow her whole. She flexes her hands, remembering the deep bite of bound thread around them.
The trapdoor creaks upward and the smell of cloves and ink wafts into the room.
“Cleo!” Bella sits straighter in her paper-nest and pats ineffectually at her hair.
Cleo tosses a bulging brown paper sack onto the bed beside her. Bones clack as it lands. “It’s thin pickings now. The shop is practically empty. I bought what I could and bartered or begged for the rest. Tell Juniper she owes me—I bought those snake teeth from a little witch up from Orleans who gave me the honest-to-God chills.” Cleo is fidgeting distractedly in her skirt pockets as she speaks, as if her mind is elsewhere. “I spoke with the Daughters, too. My mother says to tell you this entire plan is, quote, ‘dumber than a bucket of bricks,’ and ‘doomed to fail’—”
“If only she felt she could be honest with me,” Bella murmurs.
“—and that she’ll be there. Along with any Daughters who volunteer.” Cleo smiles a little crookedly. “Although none of them like it much.”
“What don’t they like about it?”
“The part where three white ladies who know all their secrets wind up in the claws of Gideon Hill. You could betray us all.”
“Oh.” Bella finds her own fingers fidgeting now. She tries very hard not to think of witch-trials and tortured confessions. “Well. We won’t. I won’t.”
“So I told them.” Cleo says it lightly, but there’s so much trust in her voice that Bella finds her eyes stinging.
After a slight pause Cleo asks, “How are things here?”
Bella flaps her hands at the crumpled pages. “A mess. I’ve done the best I could without the library, but I don’t know if it will be enough. I don’t know if we’re enough. This is by far the worst idea Juniper has ever had, and let me tell you that’s saying something. When I was nine she tried to sneak a fox kit into the house as a pet. One time she jumped off the roof with our kitchen broom in one hand because she wanted to fly. Mags had to stitch her up.” Bella is aware that she is babbling, saying everything but the thing she ought to say.
She stops herself with considerable effort. “You and I need to talk, Cleo.”
“We do, yes.” Cleo is smiling, hands now back in her pockets.
“I—I’d like you to leave New Salem.” Bella’s tongue feels wrong-sized, reluctant to form the words.
Cleo’s eyebrows form a matched pair of arches. “It’s a little late for that, don’t you think?”
“Quit smiling, I’m serious. You’ve already risked more than any sane woman would for us—for me—and this plan of June’s—”
“The plan in which I play an extremely daring and heroic part? Without which the entire thing collapses?”
“We could find someone else!”
“You really couldn’t.”
“Cleo, please. Eve isn’t your niece, Agnes and June aren’t your sisters, I’m not your—anything.”
“Bella.” Cleo’s voice softens, the smile replaced by a dangerous sincerity.
Bella looks away, knotting her fingers together to keep from reaching out. “I can’t stand to think of you captured or hurt, for my sake.”
The soft shush of skirts, the creak of a floorboard. “Beatrice Belladonna Eastwood. Look at me.”
Bella looks. Cleo is crouched on one knee inside the ring of salt, her eyes blazing and her lip caught between her teeth. She has something held carefully in her palm, fingers bent around it in a cage that quivers very slightly.
Bella feels dizzy, delirious, as if she’s back on the Ferris wheel, swinging through sky. “What are you—”
Cleo opens her hand. A ring lies in the precise center of her palm, tarnished and battered. The cut-glass gem is fractured and badly chipped, very much as if it was dropped from a great height and spent a summer abandoned on the weedy cement, until a clever-fingered witch found it again.
“I believe this is yours, if you’ll have it.” Cleo’s voice is less sure now, higher than usual. “As am I.”
Bella finds her fingers extending of their own accord, trembling over Cleo’s open palm. “I thought one marriage was enough for you. I thought you didn’t make the same mistake twice.”
Cleo gives a one-shouldered shrug. “It’s possible I was mistaken.”
“A novelty for you, I’m sure.” Bella is breathless, swaying high above the city.
“It won’t happen again.”
Bella’s hand hovers above Cleo’s, hesitant. She closes her eyes against the sudden pulse of memories: Thud. Her daddy looking at her with death in his eyes. Thud. The suffocating silence of St. Hale’s, her hands bound together in forced prayer. Thud. Cleo’s voice advising her to trust less easily. Thud. The ashes of Avalon around her ankles, the taste of failure in her mouth.
Thud. Her mother. Who chose only what was good and proper, who tucked away every piece of herself that was wayward or unruly until she was a pale imitation of herself.
Bella opens her eyes. She looks down at Cleopatra Quinn: bare-souled and brave, entirely herself.
Bella cradles her head with ink-smeared hands and draws her upward. Their lips meet in a rush of heat and salt.
Cleo pulls away, panting slightly. Her thumb brushes the trail of tears on Bella’s cheek. “Is that a yes, Miss Eastwood?”
Bella nods once and Cleo slides the battered, broken, perfect ring onto her finger.
Bella laughs a little hysterically. “Don’t you need one, too?” She pats her pockets and finds nothing but a few snapped matchsticks, a candlewick—and a single rose petal, plucked from the ashes of the library. It smells faintly of witchcraft and smoke.
Bella draws it out and wraps it gently around Cleo’s finger, tucking it between her knuckles. “There. I’ve made an honest woman of you.”
The rest of the conversation is silent, conducted in the wordless language of skin and heartbeat.
Later—either several days or merely an hour; Bella has lost track of the winged passage of time—the trapdoor squeals again and Juniper’s voice rasps into the room.
“You about ready, Bell? Agnes should be back any—Saints save us.” Her sister’s footsteps pause on the ladder. “Is now really the time, ladies?” When neither Cleo nor Bella answer her, being otherwise occupied, Juniper gives an irritated huff.
They hear the clatter of feet on the ladder and a carrying shout: “I’ll be back in half an hour, and I want everybody’s clothes back where they belong. We’ve got hell to raise.”