“Oh.” Bella’s face lights with a fervent, librarianish glow. “So the words survived. They’re still out there somewhere. They could be collected again, preserved.”
“Or written anew. Every spell that exists was once spoken for the first time, by a witch who needed it.”
Bella actually claps her hands together. “Then the library could be . . . oh, but it would take so much work.”
The Crone huffs. “It always does.”
“Always?”
“Avalon wasn’t the first library. Alexandria, Antioch, Avicenna . . . They keep burning us. We keep rising again.”
Bella opens her mouth again, but Agnes stands, dusting the ashes of the library from her skirts. “Thank you all.” She bows her head to the Maiden, the Crone, especially the Mother. “But I have to go now.”
Agnes looks down at her sisters. It occurs to her that they might stay in this place, if they liked, hidden safe on the other side of somewhere. Eve isn’t their daughter, after all.
But Bella and Juniper are already standing, their shoulders warm on either side of hers. Juniper looks a little wistfully at the tower, at the deepening night of nowhere around them, free of the stink and noise of New Salem. Agnes wonders if she’s thinking of her nights back in Crow County, moon-bright and alive, of the time when she had a place to call home.
Juniper scuffs her shoe in the ash. “Maybe we’ll talk again someday. Once Hill gets what’s coming to him.”
The Maiden looks up at Juniper in a manner that causes Agnes to recall that she has lived and listened to the world for centuries. She is still the wild Maiden of the woods, but there’s a certain wisdom in her eyes, too. “He wasn’t always . . . what he is now,” she says softly.
“A monster,” Juniper supplies. “And a real bastard.”
The Maiden flinches but doesn’t disagree. “He didn’t use to be. I am not so foolish as to think he could be redeemed, but I wish . . .” She chews at her lip with those sharp teeth. “I wish he might die with his true name in his ears. Tell him, before the end?”
Her antlers brush the tangled black of Juniper’s hair as she whispers into her ear. Juniper frowns, then nods, solemn as a Saint.
They are nearly to the door, their palms reaching for the charred remains of the Sign of the Three, when Juniper turns back. “Could you really fly? On broomsticks, like the stories said?”
The Three smile at her in perfect unison, and in their eyes Agnes sees the silver shine of starlight, the damp silk of clouds, the memory of a thousand windswept nights spent soaring above the slow turning of the world.
The stars twist away above them, and then Bella and her sisters are crouched together on the floor of an unfamiliar room. Their palms are pressed to a ragged circle carved into the floorboards, and the ceilings vault high above them. There are rows of wooden benches alongside them, slicked smooth from years of use. It’s been a long time since Bella set foot in a church, but she remembers the quiet of the air, the warm smell of candles and wine.
A voice mutters a soft rhyme and a hot, golden light fills the room. Bella blinks against the sting of tears and follows the light back to its source: Miss Cleopatra Quinn, sitting cross-legged against the pulpit with her wand glowing like the orange eye of a cat.
“Took your time, didn’t you, ladies,” she says tartly. But Bella hears the warm relief behind the words.
Bella doesn’t bother to look anywhere else, or even to stand. She crawls down the aisle and wraps both arms around Cleo’s legs. She lays her cheek against her knees.
“Get a hold of yourself, woman.” Cleo’s voice is rough but her fingers on Bella’s face are soft. “Did you find what you needed?”
“Oh, Cleo, we saw them. We spoke to them! The Three themselves! I need a pen.” Bella’s fingertips fizz with the need to write it all down, to decant the marvels and curiosities of the last hour into the safety of ink and paper. She looks a little wildly into the shadows, as if an ink-pen might materialize. “Where are we?”
“The Mother Bethel Church in New Cairo. We warded it as best we could, but we shouldn’t linger.”
“We?”
Quinn lifts her wand-light and other faces swim out of the darkness, lining the pews: the Hull sisters with their hoods pulled high; Jennie Lind looking grim, one eye blacked; Yulia and her daughters sitting next to Annie Flynn; a scrawny, raw-boned girl who stares at Agnes with some combination of resentment and gratitude; a half-dozen others, their shoulders squared and their eyes steady.
The Sisters of Avalon. Their sisters, still.
Juniper is grinning, hard and fierce. Agnes is staring around at them, white-faced. “What are you all doing here?”
Yulia ticks her chin at Cleo. “She called. Said you three were doing something very stupid.” Yulia’s voice goes gruff. “Said they took your baby girl.”
Agnes swallows several times.
“You will get her back now?”
Agnes nods once, her eyes like hot steel.
Yulia grunts. Bella waits for the Sisters to ask questions, like how? or with what army? But they merely sit and wait. Bella fights an embarrassing impulse to cry.
She is rescued by Cleo tapping her gently on the shoulder. “You spoke to them?”
“Yes. That is, their spirits. They invented a binding that breached the usual corporeal bounds of the soul. They tied themselves to the library—or to witchcraft itself, I suppose. And I was right about rhymes as vehicles for the preservation of spells during the purge. They told us—”
“They told us Gideon Hill is an immortal and a witch,” Juniper interrupts, perhaps wisely. “In addition to being a pain in our asses. And they told us how to kill
