The scaffold blurs before her, fractured by tears. She stumbles to Bella, who leans half-collapsed in Cleo’s arms, and presses a branch into her hand.
“Come on, Bell. It’s time to go.”
Bella looks as if she, too, would like to lie down and let the flames wash over her, but she doesn’t. She stands slowly, as if she’s aged several decades, and offers her hand down to Cleo. She pulls her to her feet but does not release her hand. “You could still come with us.”
Cleo shakes her head once. “I’m needed here. The Daughters have work to do, and a chance to move in the open, without Hill.” But she touches Bella’s face, thumb brushing over her cheekbone. “I’ll come when I can.” Then she draws a stub of chalk from her pocket and marks a shape on the scaffold, singing a song. Cleo blurs around the edges, not quite invisible.
“Don’t keep me waiting, Miss Quinn,” Bella says, and the heat of it makes Agnes look away. Her eyes find August, forced to the top of the stairs now, iron bar still swinging. His mouth is red and swelling. A bright line of blood runs from a cut at his temple. He throws a wild look back to Agnes and she knows he intends to stand there until she is safely gone or until he can stand no longer. This last look is the closest they can come to goodbye.
Agnes reaches for Bella’s hand and whispers the words. Lady bird, lady bird, fly away home.
An airy, weightless feeling spreads from Agnes’s fingertips to her ribs, as if her blood has been replaced with rising mist.
She and her sister (she stumbles over the singular word, the absence of that soft s at the end) mount their rowan branches and feel their bare feet lift from the scaffold. They rise into the air like smoke. Or like witches, in the way-back days when they flew with clouds as their cloaks and stars in their eyes.
They follow the spirals of cinder and ash with their familiars winging alongside them, leaving behind the city that hates them and the people who love them and their sister who died for them. It’s only in Agnes’s head that she hears a small, wild girl begging her: Don’t leave me.
The air grows clean and cold as they fly higher, smokeless, moonlit. The world feels vast and boundless around Agnes, like a house with all its walls and windows thrown down, and she clutches her daughter tighter to her chest. She thinks she hears a muffled gurgle from the wrapped bundle, almost like a laugh.
The sound outweighs the grief in Agnes’s chest, like a brass scale tipping. They had lost too much—a library called back and then burned; a sister found and then lost forever—but not everything. Not the sound of her daughter flying with moon-shine on her skin, laughing.
Beneath them the city square looks small and dim. Agnes sees upturned faces, feels the tug of hundreds of watching eyes. She can almost see the new stories cast like dandelion-seeds behind them, taking root in the city below. Stories about shadows stolen and then set free, about villains and wolves and young women who walk willingly into the fire. About two witches flying where there should have been three.
An owl and an osprey fly beside them. Agnes wonders if any of them notice a third creature winging with them, black as sin, nearly invisible against the night. Or perhaps they see it and think nothing of it. Every crow is black, after all.
Perhaps, from so far below, they can’t see the way the crow’s eyes burn like the last stubborn coals of a dying fire, or the way they stare at some distant point in the sky, as if he’s flying to meet someone just on the other side of nowhere.
How many miles to Babylon?
Threescore miles and ten.
Can I get there by candlelight?
There and back again.
A spell for safe travel, requiring a lit candle & seventy steps
On the spring equinox of 1894 there is still snow lingering on the streets of Chicago. It gathers along curbs, sooty and sullen, waiting to crumble over boot-tops and soak the trailing hems of cloaks, while the wind sneaks down collars and beneath the brims of hats.
Agnes Amaranth doesn’t mind it; she will be leaving soon.
She steps into the early evening alley with her cloak pulled tight around her neck and her ears full of the hum and song of women’s voices. Agnes came to Chicago following a story she read on the second and third pages of the papers, well below all the hysterical headlines about witches and burnings (CHAOS REIGNS IN NEW SALEM; VOODOO REVOLT SHAKES RICHMOND; COVEN DISCOVERED IN ST. LOUIS—WILL YOUR CITY BE NEXT?). It’s a story about a lowly button-sewer at Hart & Shaffner Garment Factory who took issue with her employer’s decision to cut women’s wages and instigated a strike. The strike was met with brutal beatings and the illegal-but-unpunished burning of at least one accused witch. Agnes suspected such brutality wouldn’t break the garment-workers’ rebelliousness at all, but merely harden it, like beaten steel.
She wasn’t mistaken. In the dim basement of a settlement house, Agnes met a collection of women with clenched jaws and iron spines, their eyes bruised with too many long shifts, their knuckles swollen with too many hours bent around a needle. Their English was sparse and shifting, interspersed with lilting strings of foreign words and unfamiliar vowels, but they brought their daughters to translate for them, and both women and children looked at Agnes with a mix of skepticism and hope.
One of the older women asked, in a voice like pipe smoke and lead, “And who are you, exactly?”
Agnes’s arms were bare beneath her cloak, and she spread them wide. “A sister. A friend. A woman in want of a better world.”
