“When I look for a thing I find it.” Hill flicks his chin and the shadows in the room roil, sprouting wriggling fingers and reaching hands. “But I didn’t find you. I caught glimpses—Miss James running about, a few houses warded better than they ought to be—but nothing certain. If the child hadn’t fallen ill, if your messenger hadn’t flown into my hands . . . who knows?” The mockingbird pants on the desk, open-beaked. “I wondered if perhaps you’d called their tower back again and hidden your binding better this time.”
Agnes almost laughs at him. It isn’t some ancient witchcraft that’s kept them hidden—it’s merely the ordinary women of New Salem, the laundresses and maids and housewives who opened their doors despite the risk.
“Well, we haven’t.” And why would he care if they had? What is it to him if they crouch in the burnt ruins of a tower that was once a library?
“I wonder if you are telling me the truth.” His marionette-smile has worn thin; rotted wood is showing through the paint. “The three of you have become very adept at witching, very quickly.” His eyes flick to Pan and away. “Did you, perhaps, receive instruction?”
“No.” Their teachers were desperate need and decades of rage; the hoarded words of their mothers and grandmothers; one another.
“Don’t lie to me.” Agnes hears the lick of fear in his voice and sweat pricks her palms. Her daddy was never more dangerous than when he was afraid, and he was always afraid: that they might wriggle out of his grasp, that he was weak, that someone somewhere was laughing at him.
“If you love your daughter, you will tell me now: have you spoken to them?” There’s something broken about him, Juniper told them. Something sick. It’s only now that Agnes can see it, the terror and madness seeping through the cracks. “Are they still there? Still hiding from me?”
His shadow lengthens behind him, creeping up the wood-paneled wall. It boils with heads and limbs, arms extending at warped, unnatural angles. On the desk the mockingbird writhes and flutters more desperately, wingtips drawing mad patterns through spilled ink, fragile ribs flattening as a shadow-hand presses downward. The dog whines, high and mournful.
“Stop! I don’t know what you mean, I swear I don’t.”
There’s a terrible crunch, like china crushed beneath a boot, then silence. The mockingbird is very still.
Hill watches her face for another pressing second before his shoulders unwind. His shadow shrinks back to more plausible dimensions; he stitches the split seams of his mask.
“Very good. Of course I didn’t really think—but one never knows. Now, Miss Eastwood.” He prods the mockingbird into a wastebasket with a jagged shard of glass and lays the glass neatly back on the desk, like a man arranging his pens. “I called you here to make an offer. I am willing to pardon your crimes and grant you custody of Miss”—he refers to a typewritten page—“Eve Everlasting Eastwood—my, what a mouthful—if you are willing to assist me in locating and apprehending your sisters. This witch-hunt has gone on long enough, I think. People will grow discontented soon, perhaps doubtful, if I don’t produce the witches.”
Of course this is the choice. It’s always this choice, in the end—sacrifice someone else, trade one heart for another, buy your survival at the price of someone else’s. Save yourself but leave your sister behind. Don’t leave me.
Agnes feels cold water pooling around her ankles, rising fast. “And what . . . what will happen to my sisters?”
“That’s for the courts to decide.”
The water is belly-deep now. “And what happens if I say no?”
“Then your daughter remains deathly ill, in the dubious care of the Lost Angels. You will wait in the Deeps until I catch your sisters—which I will, sooner or later—and they will burn just the same. Except you will burn beside them.”
The water laps at her neck, icy and black. Hadn’t they drowned witches sometimes, in the way-back days? “What if—what if I convinced them to leave the city, instead? We’ll disappear. You’ll never hear our names again. We won’t work another spell as long as we live.”
His smile reminds her of Mr. Malton’s when he told them their shifts were cut or their pay was docked, soothing and false. “I’m afraid that wouldn’t satisfy my constituents. I’m sure you understand.” His tone turns musing. “It’s just the way people work. You tell them a story, and they require an ending. Would anyone know Snow White’s name if her Mother never wore hot iron shoes? Or Gretel’s, if her Crone never climbed in the oven?”
Hill’s smile now is sincere. “The witches always burn, in the end. You see?”
Agnes does. The cold water closes high above her head.
“Please.” She hates the taste of the word in her mouth, but she says it anyway. Sometimes begging was enough to turn her daddy’s fist into an open palm, a slap into a shout. “Please just give her back. She’s sick.” Tears gather and fall.
“I know, dear.” His smile is venom and honey. “Wouldn’t you like me to make her well again?”
Could he? Clearly he knows witching she and her sisters don’t; who’s to say what powers he possesses?
Her answer feels inevitable, a choice made in the moment she first looked down into Eve’s midnight eyes. There is nothing she wouldn’t do for her daughter.
“What will it be, Miss Eastwood?”
Agnes tries to picture her life after the choosing: gray and listless, alone except for the bitter taste of her own betrayal, the frayed ends of a broken binding. The summer of ninety-three would blur and fade, a little girl’s dream of a time when the three of them were one thing, whole and inviolate.
But she would have Eve. She would whisper the words and ways
