“All the king’s horses and all the king’s men—” It’s her own voice singing strong and clear through the flames, but it doesn’t come from her cracked and boiling lips. It’s her familiar carrying the words for her, singing them loud and clear even as her throat closes and her lips burn.
There’s a loosening in her chest, a knot unbinding. Hill’s scream sounds very far away, as if he’s on a train heading into a long tunnel. The only thing holding him to the world now is Juniper’s own life, and that won’t last long.
The heat of the flames fades. So does the crackle of burning wood, the hiss of her own skin. Even the pain fades, and she knows then that she is dying.
Juniper is the wild sister, the sly sister, never caught, always running, but she can’t run from this.
She hears singing as she dies, distant and familiar. A children’s rhyme she used to chant with her sisters on summer evenings when they were young and whole, when the world was soft and green and small, when they thought they could hold hands forever, unbroken.
Bella feels her sister dying but doesn’t believe it. How can Juniper die? Juniper who is so young and so bold, who seems twice as alive as everyone around her? And if she can die—if that’s truly her body burning on the pyre, her pain ringing loud in the line between them—then the world is a far crueler place than even Bella imagined, and she wants nothing more to do with it.
She knows precisely how the Last Three must have felt at the end of the age of witches, knowing that something fierce and beautiful was leaving the world, so desperate to preserve even some small piece of it that they let their bodies burn around them.
But not—Bella draws a sharp breath—their souls.
The Three stole Saint George’s victory from him at the last second. They bound their souls to a tower of words and disappeared into nowhere to wait, undying, for the next age of witches to begin. What is magic, anyway, if not a way when there is none?
Cleo has her arm tight around Bella’s shoulders, holding her steady. Bella breaks free and spins to face her. “The rose petal I gave you, the one I put around your finger—do you still have it?”
Cleo’s face says this is a very odd thing to ask while your sister burns and the city riots, but she reaches into her skirt pocket and produces the petal, even more crumpled and dry, but still whole. “Having second thoughts, love?”
“Never.” Bella cups the petal in her palm. Such a small, fragile thing on which to rest her sister’s soul. “Agnes!”
Agnes is swaying and pale, too tear-blinded to see the rose in Bella’s hand, too grief-struck to understand the eager intent in her eyes. Then Bella says the words, and hope rises like the sun in Agnes’s face.
They’re the words the three of them had sung as little girls, dancing beneath the fireflies. They’re the words the Three wrote to bind their souls to witchcraft itself, which have filtered down through the ages as a children’s rhyme, not quite forgotten.
Ring around the roses, pocket full of posies, ashes, ashes, we all rise up.
Cleo joins Bella’s chant, then Agnes. August comes next, his voice low and unsteady, and Strix and Pan high above them. More voices follow, too many to count, singing up from the crowd below—the Sisters of Avalon and the Daughters of Tituba, the Women’s Association and the workers’ unions, the maids and mill-girls, all the witches of New Salem who came when the Eastwoods called.
Together they call the magic and the magic answers, boiling through their veins. Bella waits until it crests like a wave in her chest before she curls her fist around the petal, crushing it. She tosses the remains into the night.
The sky does not split open. No black tower appears. But a sudden wind rises, sharp and green and rose-sweet. The wind tangles Bella’s skirts and whips the flames high. It hovers above the pyre, waiting.
Bella knows the precise moment Juniper dies.
The line that leads to her youngest sister goes slack; Agnes screams; the wolf’s howl goes abruptly quiet. Bella sees a pale shadow rise from the fire, like mist, before the witch-wind carries it away.
For a moment she thinks she hears voices calling, almost like three women welcoming a fourth, or maybe she merely hopes she does. The spell ends and the wind dies and a strange silence falls over the square, as if even the most foolish of them know something grave and grand has happened.
Bella feels her knees crack against the scaffold, then the sting of tears and the warmth of Cleo’s arms around her.
Bella is the wise sister, the bookish one, the knowing one, but she doesn’t know whether it was enough.
Agnes wants to climb into the fire and burn alongside her sister. She wants to scream until her throat is flayed raw from screaming, until the whole city has to stop and look and see what they have wrought. She wants to step into nowhere and call Juniper’s name.
But there are people swarming up the steps now. Some of the most devout Inquisitors and their followers have rallied and fought past August’s men. August rushes to meet them, iron bar whipping back and forth, but Agnes knows he can’t hold them for long. She looks down at Eve—awake now and frowning fiercely—then reaches for the rowan-wood branches and climbs to her feet.
She tries to think of nothing but the cool strength of the wood in her hand and the sharp scent of sap. Not the third bough she leaves lying on the scaffold, riderless. Not Juniper’s face when the Crone told them the spell for flight. Not the way she looked up at the sky as they were bound to the stake, sly and knowing, as if
