The last time Agnes visited the Workingman it was early summer. She was giddy and coy, half-drunk with hope. Eve still slept safe beneath her ribs; Agnes wore a cloak to match her eyes.
This time it’s early autumn, and Agnes wears a pair of men’s pants and a tattered cloak the color of mud, with her hair tucked beneath a cap and her features dulled by magic. This time she feels like a lightning-struck tree or a pitted peach, hollowed out, empty; this time Eve is gone.
The first time she met him, Mr. August Lee was feckless and fearless, with a gambler’s grin and nothing to lose. This time his face is creased with fresh-made lines and his eyes are sober, almost frightened, as if he’s found something he doesn’t want to lose.
He sits across from Agnes with his haystack hair and his gray wool vest, a scrap of paper held tight in his hands. A covered basket sits on the table between them, smelling of clay and river-water.
Agnes nods to the list in his hand. “Well?” Her voice is cold and flat.
He scrubs his hand over his beard, brow knit. “Saints, Agnes. I haven’t seen you in over a week. No messages, no mockingbirds”—Agnes flinches, hearing the echo of small bones breaking—“and now you turn up with the Devil’s own groceries and a list of demands, looking like—” But he declines to say what she looks like. Agnes has avoided her own eyes in mirrors and windows, unwilling to look at the open wound of her face.
“Where’s Eve?” August asks. Agnes knows his voice is gentle, but her ears ache as if he screamed the name. “Here. Look.” From his breast pocket he withdraws a small, smooth-polished thing and sets it upright on the table between them: dark wood, carved into the wary shape of a perched hawk. Agnes can tell from the curve of beak and the sleek taper of wings that it’s an osprey, and from the watchful angle of its body that it’s her hawk, meant to watch over her daughter.
She pictures August worrying over it in the lengthening evenings, looking out into the lamp-lit dark of the city and hoping that she and Eve are safe. She pictures him turning the wood in his palm and choosing to carve the shape of her soul, dangerous and dark; rendering each talon without flinching from it.
“My dad would’ve been a wood-carver, if he could. He taught me some.” His voice is still gentle. Her skull still pounds as if he shouted.
Agnes reaches toward the little hawk without meaning to, fingers trembling, before closing her eyes and pressing her palm flat to the table. “I—I can’t—” She takes a long, steadying breath. “I need to know if you are able to work the spells we have supplied, Mr. Lee.”
She hears the long sigh of his breath, the sag of his shoulders. “I’m no witch.”
“I have it on good authority that everyone is a witch, given the proper words and ways.” Agnes tilts her head at the covered basket. “I’ve supplied you with both.”
August’s eyes flick to the basket and back to her face. Agnes wishes, stupidly, that she could abandon her glamor and let his eyes rest on her true features, feel the warmth of his care on her skin. Perhaps she will find him again after it’s over, if she’s lucky enough to have an after. The future has narrowed in her mind, vanishing toward the moment she holds her daughter again.
August’s brows knit tighter as he watches her. “Agnes, won’t you tell me what’s going on? Why you need me to do all this?” He eyes the list, lips shaping the words fire and changeling. “Why can’t you just work the spells yourselves?”
“We will be otherwise occupied.”
“Doing what?”
“Burning, I expect.”
“Excuse me?”
On previous occasions Agnes has enjoyed rendering Mr. Lee speechless, but now her lips barely twitch. Now the sun is swinging low and they are running out of time. “Because there’s no other way. Because the witches always burn in the end. Because I want my daughter back.” The last sentence is a strangled growl. The barman casts an admonitory take-it-outside-boys look at their booth.
Everything leaches away from August’s face, the hurt and irritation and puzzlement. He stares at her for a long, searing second. “When? Who?”
But it doesn’t matter when and he already knows who. “I’ll kill him.” His voice is casual but perfectly sincere. The scar shines white along his jaw.
“No,” Agnes answers, just as evenly. “You won’t.” She looks at the carved statue of the hawk between them, the killing curve of its beak, and knows she does not need to tell him who will.
She takes another breath, less steady. “I’m not asking for your outrage or your concern or your advice. I’m asking for your help. Do I have it?” She is distantly surprised by how easily the word help slips between her lips. Is this what it is to draw your circle wide, to need and be needed in turn?
August studies her, from the black-snake coils of hair slipping out from under her cap to the hard line of her mouth to the steel of her eyes, not looking away. Who does he see? A helpless girl, a hysterical woman? A mother gone mad with grief?
But it isn’t pity she sees in his eyes. It’s something several degrees warmer, far more dangerous. “You have it.” His voice is too low, rough with unsaid things. “I am yours to command, Agnes Amaranth.”
Agnes feels a heady heat through her, like summer wine. Men really ought to try offers of fealty rather than flowers.
She lets her fingers rest on the back of his hand. The hand turns palm up and their calluses slide against one another, fit smoothly into place. His fingers close around hers very carefully, as if her hand is a bird likely to startle.
Agnes thinks she should leave. She thinks about circles and costs, weakness and wants. Then she thinks these hours might be her last as a free woman and figures she can linger in this beery basement just a little longer, with the heat of his hand around hers.
She feels their bodies tilting toward one another, pulled by some secret gravity.
“It’s going to be dangerous.” The words come out crowded, slightly breathless. “If it goes wrong, if we fail—you could lose everything.”
August makes a considering hmmm in his throat. “And what do I get if I win?”
Still a man who can’t back down from a bet, still a man who likes his odds long. Agnes feels a helpless smile curling the corners of her lips, despite everything. “A kiss.”
She finds the distance between them closing, the careless blue of his eyes fragmenting into a hundred shades of slate and lapis, his lips parting in wild hope—
She stops a bare inch from his face. “Be at the Home for Lost Angels by dusk today. When you see Pan, it’s time.”
August exhales a soft but heartfelt string of curses as she pulls away, running his fingers through the bright gold of his hair.
Agnes stands, straightening her cap, and tucks the wooden hawk into her skirt pocket. It knocks softly against her hip.
“Oh, and we’ll need three branches. Good stout rowan-wood, if you please.”
The last time Juniper visited Inez Gillmore’s house it was glowing and gilded. Her Sisters were with her, laughing at their own daring, at the pop of champagne on their tongues.
Now the house is dark, quiet except for the tapping of Juniper’s black-yew staff across the tiles. She wades through drifts of shattered crystal, torn pages from books, tangles of drapes; the house has been searched at least twice since Inez’s arrest. It isn’t safe to linger, but Juniper won’t be waiting long.