She isn’t wearing her usual white sash or her starched skirt, and her Gibson Girl hair has deflated somewhat, but Agnes knows that face: Miss Grace Wiggin, head of the Women’s Christian Union and famed crusader against suffrage, witchcraft, alcohol, gambling, prostitution, immigration, miscegenation, and unionizing.
Agnes goes very still, feeling like some wild creature caught in the lamp-light. Wiggin’s face turns toward her slowly, as if she has difficulty tearing her eyes from the tower. Tears glitter in them, and a quarter-teaspoon of longing.
“Did you do this?” Her voice is thin, lost-sounding, nothing like the shrill clarion call Agnes remembers.
Agnes inclines her head, feeling an unsteady surge of pride. I did this, with my sisters. They called it from bottomless time, sang it straight into the middle of sober, sinless New Salem. Grace Wiggin and her ladies-in-waiting seem suddenly less worrisome, almost humorous.
Wiggin’s eyes focus on her for the first time, her lip curling. “And did you not fear for the soul of your child? Have you no mother’s natural instincts?”
Agnes considers slapping her. “What about you, Miss Wiggin? Do you not fear for your reputation, out alone at night? Have you no shame?”
An odd, childish flash of guilt crosses the woman’s face. “I was out for a walk. I happened to be looking up and saw the stars shifting, changing, and the birds gathering . . . Then I smelled the roses.”
Mags always said the solstices and equinoxes were the times magic burned closest to the surface of things, when any self-respecting hedge-witch or wild-hearted woman ought to be outdoors, with moonlight on her skin and night around her shoulders.
What is a proper young woman doing out on the summer solstice, watching the sky? Why do her eyes keep reeling back to the tower, like moths to flames?
Agnes is struck by the sudden suspicion that Grace Wiggin doesn’t hate witching at all. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
“It’s vile. Wicked.” But the words have a hollow, learned-by-rote ring. Agnes waits, watching the tense roll of muscles in Wiggin’s face, wondering how long the woman will keep talking rather than screaming for help, and if it will be long enough for Bella to make the tower disappear.
That longing look is back in Wiggin’s eyes, stronger now. “My mother used to make my dolls dance, when I was a girl. I begged her to teach the words to me and she did, and more besides. I liked to learn them. It made me feel—” She doesn’t say how it made her feel, but Agnes knows: like her voice had power, like her will had weight.
“What happened to her?”
Bitterness seeps into Wiggin’s face, aging it. “She was caught killing the unborn.” Agnes thinks of Mags and the narrow path back to her house, Madame Zina with her gauzy veils and fake card-readings. “They made me go to the hanging. I was a Lost Angel, after that.”
An ungainly tenderness takes root in Agnes’s chest. She rebels against it—surely her circle needn’t be large enough to include women like Grace Wiggin, for the love of God—but it’s as if Wiggin’s face has become a window, or maybe a mirror. Agnes can see the frightened, hurting girl she once was, with a heart full of hate and nowhere to send it.
“Listen. You don’t have to keep doing . . . what you do. You don’t have to keep helping a man like Gideon Hill just because he—”
The sound of his name shatters the fragile thing between them. Wiggin’s eyes are shards of flint; her fingers clutch the shawl tighter around her shoulders. “How dare you—Mr. Hill is the noblest—the bravest—” A fervent, unnatural rage chokes her words.
Agnes is wondering if Wiggin is going to attack her, clawing and hissing like a cat, when the tower vanishes.
The stars and the tangled woods and the dark earth—all of it falls out of the world like coins dropping into an invisible pocket. Nothing remains of the Lost Way of Avalon except a mischievous wind, and the feral scent of magic and roses in the air. Wiggin staggers sideways, mouth open in horror. She spins back to Agnes with her skin waxen and yellow in the first streaks of true dawn. “You’ll burn for this,” she hisses. “He’ll make sure of it.”
And then she screams. “Help! Someone help! There are witches in New Salem!”
Agnes runs, pausing only to draw an X on the cobbles and whisper August’s spell into the dawn. Her hair rises from her shoulders and the baby’s weight lifts from her hips, and she runs with the vial knocking against her thigh and Wiggin’s voice ringing in her ears like a curse, or a prophecy.
She runs west, keeping to the side-streets and narrow alleys, dodging the lamp-lighters and night-soil men, hiding in doorways when she hears the ring of hooves on stone. At the cemetery she pauses, chewing her lip, before climbing the fence and winding her way back to the witch-yard, where their golden tree still stands, grand and gleaming, far too heavy to move.
Agnes buries the glass vial of earth among its roots. She scores a symbol into the soft metal of the tree’s trunk—three circles, intertwined—and whispers the words. The sign begins to glow, very faintly, and her fingers hover above it, wanting to touch it and be drawn back to the tower and the woods and the wild story her sisters are writing together.
But Agnes is through with all that. She saved her sister, and now she must survive for her daughter.
She walks home, weary and sore-footed. At first she hides when she sees officers riding past on their tall grays, but soon she realizes they hardly notice her. She is nothing, once again.
London Bridge is falling down, falling down,
iron bars will bend and break, bend and
