Juniper still isn’t looking at her. Bella follows the line of her gaze and sees Agnes shushing a wailing Eve. Juniper shrugs again. “Had to.”
“Well, we can fix it somehow. We can find a way to banish him, or contain him. A warding spell, maybe, or a healing—”
“There’s no time, Bell.” Juniper says it very gently, like a doctor telling a patient some unfortunate news. She tilts her chin at Agnes and Eve. “Take care of her, won’t you? She’s got to have it better than we did. A mama that sticks around, maybe even a daddy worth a damn.” Juniper squints speculatively at August, who is standing guard at the scaffold steps with an iron bar in his hand and the frenzied expression of someone fully prepared to lay down his life.
“She’ll need you and Cleo, too, to teach her the words and ways. Mags would like that, I figure.” Juniper smiles at her oldest sister. It’s the kind of smile that has farewells and regrets tucked in the corners. Bella doesn’t like it in the least.
“June, what exactly—”
Juniper limps closer and kisses Bella once on the cheek, her lips cracked and hot. Bella falls silent.
Juniper steps around her and pauses in front of Agnes. Agnes frowns at the wolf padding beside her, points up at the stars with the rowan branch in her hand. But Juniper shakes her head. Her hand hovers above the feather-down curl of Eve’s head, not quite touching her, trembling very slightly.
Agnes asks her a question and Juniper answers, still wearing that smile shaped like a goodbye. She kisses Agnes’s cheek, too.
It’s only as she turns away and stands staring into the flames—her hair fluttering in the heat, her eyes steady—that Bella understands what she’s going to do.
Juniper doesn’t have much time, but she has time enough to say goodbye to her sisters.
Agnes is clutching Eve in one arm and her rowan bough in the other, scowling at Juniper. “Where’s Gideon? Why is that thing following you?” Her eyes flick to the wolf still walking patiently at her side. “It’s time to go, June.” Agnes points up at the sky.
Juniper remembers lying in bed between her sisters when she was young, listening to the slur and stomp of their daddy downstairs. Agnes would stroke the hair back from Juniper’s forehead and whisper, It’ll be alright.
Even as a child Juniper knew it was a lie. But it was the kind of lie that became true in the telling, because at least there was someone in the world who loved her enough to lie.
Agnes is frowning so fiercely at her that Juniper thinks she must know what’s coming, must see it in the tremble of Juniper’s hand over her daughter.
“What’s going on?”
Juniper leans down to kiss her cheek. “It’ll be alright.”
She turns to face the flames.
She hesitates. Partly because Gideon Hill is railing and screaming inside her, straining against her will like a mad dog against the leash, but mostly because she likes being alive and wants to keep doing it.
She wishes she could stay right where she is, with the frost-bitten edge of the wind in her hair and the wild wheel of stars above her and the beat of her sisters’ hearts beside her.
She wishes she could run away. Mount her rowan branch and disappear with her sisters, never to be seen or heard from again. They might go back home, to the mist-hung mountains and the cold creeks, and build their tower deep in the green woods. They might let the blackberry vines grow high as a rose-thorn hedge around them and raise Eve together in the leaf-dappled dark, safe and secret.
She wishes she were one of those firebirds from Mags’s stories, that something might rise from her ashes.
She can’t hold out much longer. Gideon Hill’s soul seeps like venom through her veins, settling into her bones. It seems like a fitting end, at least: her mother died for her and now Juniper will die for Eve. Maybe Eve will be the one to finally redeem all those generations of debt, all the sacrifices of the women who came before her.
Juniper draws a last breath. Pats the black wolf once on the head, like a loyal hound.
Hill twists like a knife inside her but she still feels some reserve in him, a calculating calm. Maybe he can’t quite believe she’ll do it, even now, because he can’t quite imagine loving anything more than he loves himself.
Or maybe he thinks he’ll survive it. Maybe he plans to slither away from her burning body the way he left his last one, clinging to the world until he finds some weak-willed creature to bind himself to.
He doesn’t know the Eastwoods have spoken to the Last Three, that they have the secret to his unmaking. That all his sins have finally come home to roost.
Juniper licks cracked lips. “You’ve had a lot of names, Gideon Hill.” She feels him cease his struggling, listening. “Gabriel Hill. Glennwald Hale. George of Hyll. Always Gs and Hs, so I guess you must have missed her.” He coils tighter inside her, cold and terrible and just beginning to be afraid. “Your sister sends her love, Hansel.”
Juniper feels a tremor move through his soul, a wave of confusion and longing and finally terror, as he understands that this death will be his true and final one, that all his scheming and stealing will end here, tonight, in the fire he lit himself.
Juniper steps into the flames and they close their waiting arms around her, hot and close. She hears Agnes screaming, Bella wailing, “June, no! Stop her!”
Then there’s nothing but the sound of burning and the words in her own mouth.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men—
Ring around the roses,
A pocket full of posies,
Ashes, ashes,
We all rise up.
A spell to bind a soul, requiring an untimely death & a destination
Agnes Amaranth screams. The wolf howls. The crowd roars.
