She turns away from her cold triumph to see August Lee climbing the scaffold steps with her name on his lips and her daughter cradled against his chest.
Agnes isn’t aware of reaching for her until she feels the rightness of Eve’s weight against her arms and hears the endless nonsense-stream of her own voice (Baby girl, little love, it’s alright, Mama’s here, I’ve got you). Her ribs ache as if something feathered is trying to escape them, like vast wings.
She smells sawdust and feels the careful weight of arms around her. She leans her cheek against August’s chest and the arms settle. His skin is still warm with witching.
In the hollow between them she looks down into her daughter’s solemn eyes, shining with stars and flames and the beginnings of ten thousand stories. Once there was a girl who was stolen and won back. Once there was a girl who was raised by three witches. Once there was a girl who rose like a phoenix from her mother’s ashes and winged into the light of a new world.
August releases her and presses a smooth branch into her palm. “Rowan-wood, just like you asked.” It smells raw and green, cool against the burning air.
“Me and my boys will keep the crowd back.”
Agnes looks up at him, this man who loves all of her, this knight who has gotten his tales crossed and fallen in love with the witch instead of the princess. Here he stands with her at the end, ash-streaked and sweating, and it seems perfectly clear to her what comes next in the story.
She kisses him. Despite the screaming crowd and the too-close lick of flames, despite the bruised sting of her lips and the startled blue of his eyes. His palm rises uncertainly, hovering above the line of her jaw. His lips are hesitant against hers. Agnes presses harder, teeth against skin, reminding him what she is. He burns back at her, all want and heat, fingers tangling in her hair.
It ends too soon, not a kiss so much as a promise, hope translated into flesh.
She releases his collar and August touches his bitten lips with the expression of a person who has suffered a religious revelation or a recent head injury.
“Agnes—” His voice is pleasingly hoarse.
She meets his eyes and lifts her chin in challenge. “Come find me, Mr. Lee. When it’s over.”
He touches his hand to his heart and she knows he will. Trusts it, body and blood.
Agnes grips her rowan-wood broomstick in one hand and reaches for her sister with the other. Bella’s fingers catch tight around hers. “Where’s June? There’s still the banishing to work.”
Agnes sees her. Juniper is still standing in the crowd below, looking up at Grace Wiggin as she’s finally dragged away by bitten and bleeding Inquisitors. At her feet, Gideon Hill lies dead. His wolf has curled beside him, her slender nose on his chest, her eyes closed.
Juniper should be triumphant or gleeful or at least grimly satisfied—but instead she is perfectly still, staring. There’s a bloodless terror in her face that makes the hair on Agnes’s arms prickle. She has seen her sister raging and weeping, laughing and lying and a hundred other things; she has never seen her afraid.
Juniper knows what a man looks like when he dies. He looks sick and scared and finally sorry, like a skinflint villager when the Piper comes to collect. He looks impotent, weak, unlikely ever to hurt you again.
Gideon Hill doesn’t look like that.
His face is bruised-black and his eyes are wet rubies, blood-streaked, but his expression at the very end is placid, almost bored. Just before the end he meets Juniper’s eyes—as the crowd wails and panics around them, as Wiggin’s fingers go white around the sash, her face lit with that wild, killing hate—and smiles.
His fist dangles over the raw-wood edge of the balcony. His fingers slacken as he dies and a bright ribbon flutters free: a single curl of hair, soft as feather-down.
Red as blood.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
couldn’t put Georgie together again.
A spell to sunder a soul, requiring a death long overdue
Of all the souls James Juniper has seen this summer—four, by her accounting—Gideon Hill’s is the foulest.
It leaks like hot tar from his open mouth and pools on the balcony beneath him, wet and black. Juniper figures that’s what happens to a soul when it lingers too long, feeding on stolen shadows: it goes to rot, like a diseased organ.
His soul leaks away from his body, away from the wolf who lies with him—shouldn’t a familiar vanish, when its master dies?—and drips between the boards.
It splashes to the cobbles and runs like black water along the cracks. It’s hard to be sure through the trampling feet of the crowd, but Juniper thinks it’s heading dead north. Toward her.
She looks back to the scaffold behind her, where her sisters are silhouetted by flames. Bella and Cleo are shoulder-to-shoulder, rowan branches in their hands. August is shouting to his men, guarding the platform against the rioting crowd.
Agnes is looking down into the face of her daughter, smiling with such love that Juniper’s throat seizes. She thinks all of it—the Deeps and Avalon, the scar around her neck and the coals in her heart—might be worth it, if only Agnes and Eve make it out of this twice-damned city together.
Then Juniper thinks of the ruby curl of hair falling from the balcony. The smile on Hill’s lips as he died. The Crone’s voice saying something from the body he was stealing.
She understands that Gideon’s soul isn’t headed for her, after all. It’s headed for the scaffold, for the only truly pure thing Juniper has ever seen in the world, the only thing neither she nor her sisters could ever bring themselves to harm.
Eve.
And she understands that she only has one choice, and that it’s a
