Agnes meets her eyes, gray to gray. “The day in the barn. When Daddy found out—what he found out.” Her eyes flick to Bella, bitter cold, then back to Juniper. “We were trapped against the wall. He was coming closer. And then there you were, standing between us, scrawny and fierce. You told him to leave us alone, or else, and he laughed at you. So . . .” Agnes trails away, but Juniper remembers.
Juniper remembers: the arc of her spine as she looked up at her father.
Juniper remembers: the snake teeth waiting always in her pocket, ever since Mama Mags folded her fingers around them and told her to keep them secret and safe, just in case.
Juniper remembers: something snapping inside her. Her patience, her tolerance, her last straw.
May sticks and stones break your bones and serpents stop your heart. She didn’t have her cedar staff back then. But she had a tobacco-stake from the barn floor, crusted with dirt and chickenshit, and she had the words.
And she had the will. Almost.
At the very last second, as she watched her daddy writhing on the barn floor, a snake the color of dust wrapped around his ankle, her will had wavered. Maybe she didn’t hate him quite enough; maybe she just didn’t want to hate herself.
Afterward, when she was alone except for the wet crackle of her daddy’s breathing, she sent the memory of that snake down into the deepest oceans of herself, where she couldn’t see it, because her sisters were gone and she couldn’t stand to know it was her own fault.
Juniper feels tears trickling down her temples, burrowing in her hair. Her daddy had been different after the fire: slower, more cautious, less likely to raise a hand in anger. She thought it was gratitude, maybe, for all the putrid hours she spent changing his bandages and spoon-feeding him. But he was kind to her for the same reason a man is kind to a mad dog: for fear of her teeth.
Turns out he wasn’t quite scared enough.
“That’s why you never came back, then.” Because they saw what she was. A monster, a murderess. A dragon red in tooth and claw, and only princesses were rescued from towers. “That’s why you never wrote.”
But Bella’s voice cuts across hers. “I did write, June. Once a week at first. When you never wrote back, I thought you must want nothing to do with me. I thought maybe you’d heard . . . rumors.” Juniper tries hard to focus on her face, a hovering smear with sad eyes.
Agnes echoes her. “The first thing I bought when I got to the city was a postcard. You never answered, and after a while I stopped trying.”
“But—oh.” Juniper wonders if her daddy paid the postman to lose those letters, or if he burned them himself. She wonders if she ever shoveled their ashes from the woodstove, unknowing, and if her daddy watched her when she did.
Their closeness had always bothered him. When they were little he was forever playing them one against the other, favoring the youngest, blaming one for the sins of her sisters, finding the cracks between them and wedging them wider. But it never seemed to stick. The three of them remained a single thing, inviolate. So he split them apart and spent seven years tearing at the last threads that bound them together.
But—Juniper looks up at her gray-eyed sisters, here with her now—he failed.
“Agnes. Bell. I—”
“I do hate to interrupt, but it’s nearly dawn. Our time is short.” Quinn is standing in the doorway, pointing out to the thin line of gray visible on the horizon.
Juniper’s sisters get to their feet. Juniper wishes they would come back. She wants to ask what happened to the other Sisters and how they called back the Lost Way and if they think it’s possible that Mama Mags’s ghost visited her in the Deeps—but the stones are so cool on her skin and the air is so heavy on her eyes.
She wakes once, briefly, when a hand touches her cheek, and Agnes says, “Goodbye, Juniper.” Then, more stiffly, “Goodbye, Bella.”
“You know where to find us if you change your mind.”
Juniper doesn’t know if Agnes replies, because she drifts away.
There are still voices around her, murmuring and whispering, but they don’t belong to her sisters. They belong to three someone-elses, and they sound like the soft sighs of turning pages, the rustles of rose petals one against another, the silent touch of strange stars.
Agnes looks behind her once before she leaves the tower.
Bella stands with a pair of silver shears in one hand and an open book in the other, that eerie owl perched like a gargoyle on her shoulder, looking like the Crone herself come back from the dead. Juniper lies pale and still on the flagstones, a maiden laid out for sacrifice.
The sight of them tugs at Agnes. She wants to turn back and take her place between them, play the part of the middle sister and the Mother—but she doesn’t.
She pushes through the door and kneels briefly beneath the shadowed trees. She scoops a palmful of earth and leaf-litter into a glass and whispers the words over it: Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. She prays it is enough.
The night is quiet except for the whisper-touch of leaves and the distant toll of church bells ringing the solstice-morning service. The branches of trees drag against her skirts like friendly fingers, half-familiar; she remembers all the times she chased Juniper through thickets of mountain laurel and holly back home.
Agnes slips from the woods and takes three steps before she realizes she is not alone: there are birds roosting on every lamp-post and iron bench, crowding the sills and rooftops of the College and City Hall, silent as falling feathers—
And there is a woman standing several feet in front of her, right where the cobbles turn to dark, leaf-strewn earth.
Her face is tilted up to
