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—”
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
