Now Agnes will choose the same. Gideon Hill’s smile gleams at her in the shard of windowpane still lying on his desk. The point shines crystal-white, sharp as shattered bone.
A very foolish idea occurs to Agnes. A bolder trade, a third choice.
They would catch her, of course, and there would be no fire hot enough for the witch who murdered the mayor of New Salem, their Light Against the Darkness. But without Hill and his shadows surely her sisters could save Eve, could flee the city and raise her in secret, surrounded by wild roses and stone.
She will need to be very fast. She falls to her knees as if overcome with grief, and Pan startles from her shoulder. Hill says something insincere about understanding the difficulty of her position, but she can’t hear it over the thud of blood in her ears. She fumbles a stub of candle wax from her pocket and draws an X on the polished parquet.
She covers her face with her hands and whispers the words to her palms, a hard line of Latin. Heat billows in her chest, burning back the cold water. Her hair drifts gently upward, as if gravity is an absentminded god who has forgotten her for this single, desperate second. Beneath his chair, Hill’s dog whines.
She thinks of her sisters: Juniper who would not hesitate, Bella who would not miss. She thinks of her daughter.
She leaps. The glass is in her hand and driving toward Hill’s left eye before he can flinch, almost before he can blink. The point parts the fine gold of his lashes. She braces for the wet puncture of his eye, the scrape of bone against glass—
But it doesn’t come. The shard skrees off Hill’s face and bites into the desktop instead, slicing Agnes’s palm. There is an airless moment while both of them look down at the red-slicked glass, before a dozen shadow-hands claw toward her. They wrap around her wrists and ankles, slick and cold, and force her backward across his desk, limbs wrenched and splayed. She thinks of the mockingbird, twisting and twisting.
Gideon Hill looks down at her with a pair of watery, pink-rimmed eyes, entirely unhurt.
He gives her a pitying shake of his head. “I admire your spirit, Miss Eastwood. Truly I do. But please understand that I am not going to be harmed by nursery rhymes or bits of glass. I am going to ask you a final time—”
A black shape dives between them, talons outstretched. The claws rake. Blood blooms. Then the dog is barking hysterically and Hill is screaming and another shadow-hand is rising into the air, reaching for her hawk.
Pan is already gone, vanished back into elsewhere. Hill is left panting and powerless, blinking blood from his eyes and touching the ragged edges of three deep furrows Pan scored across his face.
He reels, his painted mask split. Beneath it Agnes sees raw, wild terror. “No! No! How dare you touch me! How dare you—shut up, Cane!” The black dog ceases her yelping.
Red drips from Hill’s chin. His face is someplace beyond fear, beyond fury, gray and still. Agnes realizes distantly that she knows that face, has seen it reflected back at her from her sisters: the terrible resignation of someone who is accustomed to pain. Who suffered too many blows, too young, and is always waiting for the next to fall.
Hill meets her eyes and she wonders if he will kill her now. If he will crush her like a bird in his fist for the crime of seeing him bleed.
The shadows tighten around her ankles, press against her ribs. She feels the scrape and pop of cartilage, the grind of bone against bone—before he flicks a finger in dismissal and sends her skidding backward off the desk.
He reaches into his breast pocket and Agnes flinches, thinking of pistols or knives or magic wands, but the thing he withdraws is small and soft, perfectly innocent: a tiny curl of hair. Agnes thinks it’s brown or maybe chestnut until the light catches it. The curl shines a deep, bonfire red.
She would prefer a knife.
“If you ever want to see your daughter again—if you want her to recover from the fever—you and your sisters will be in St. George’s Square tomorrow before sundown.”
Agnes looks at the blood still weeping from his wounds. It’s ordinary blood, red and wet. “Yes,” she whispers. “Alright.”
“Good. Now get out.”
Agnes does as she is told.
She does not run, this time. She walks, steady and upright, following the lines that lead back to her sisters, hardly noticing when passersby scurry out of her way. She should be despairing, regretting every choice that had led her here to this last and worst one, but she isn’t.
Instead she is merely thinking. Turning pieces over and over in her mind like stones: the fear in his face, ancient and terrible; a children’s story about witches who did not die when they should have; the bite of glass in her palm and the shine of Hill’s blood.
A thought is forming, surfacing like a leviathan from the black:
You are not invincible, Gideon Hill.
And if he is not invincible—if he can bleed and break and die like any other man—then he should never have touched a single hair on her daughter’s head.
Juniper feels her sister drawing closer like a gathering storm. Bella and Cleo wait with her, huddled together in the half-dark of the South Sybil boarding house, their eyes meeting sometimes then falling away. The room is silent except for the occasional rustle of skirts, the brush of feathers in the shadows.
Footsteps ring like mallets on the stairs. The door scrapes.
Agnes steps into the room looking fifty
