“Very good. Stay put.” She steps around him, rustling through drawers until she produces a sheet of paper and a pen. She writes a short list, tapping her chin briefly with the pen, then rummaging in her pockets for a dry curl of bindweed.
She circles back to face Mr. Malton. “If you want to leave this office on two feet rather than four, you will do three things for me.” She raises one finger. “First, you will speak of this to no one.”
Malton whimpers.
“Second, you will issue every person in your employ a raise of a dime a day, effective immediately.”
The whimper goes higher.
“And third—and listen to this part very closely—you will never touch an unwilling woman again, in this mill or outside of it, for as long as your miserable life shall last.”
His whimper is now so thin and high it could be mistaken for a boiling kettle.
“Now, swear to it.” She coaches him, stuttering and stumbling, through her three conditions. Then she stabs the pen into the sweating meat of his thumb and presses bindweed to the blood. “Mark it on the page and repeat after me.”
His voice is a thin warble as he says the words. Cross my heart and hope to die, strike me down if I lie.
The sweet heat of witching slicks through Agnes’s veins like whiskey. Oh, how she missed it, the drunken drumbeat of power in her chest, the thrill of working her will onto the world.
The muscles of her belly tighten, a ripple of not-quite pain. Agnes hardly feels it.
“If you break any of these vows, your heart will stop in your chest and you will fall down dead, and neither Heaven nor Hell will let your cursed spirit enter.” This is a bald-faced lie, but Mr. Malton goes white as cotton. “So behave yourself.”
The air outside the mill is gentle and golden with five o’clock sun. The light doesn’t seem to come from anywhere in particular, as if the city itself emits a faint sepia glow. The wind that trickles down the alley is cool for summer, smelling of fallen leaves and char, and Agnes wants suddenly to follow it all the way back to the dark tower where her sisters are waiting.
Her belly ripples again, a little stronger, and she rests a palm against it. She’s wondering if she ought to worry, if perhaps witching isn’t healthy for a womb this far along—when warm wetness trickles down her thigh.
Oh hell.
She stumbles backward, bracing a hand against the brick as a bright peal of pain tolls through her. The wetness trickles faster.
Madame Zina’s is nine blocks north and west. Agnes closes her eyes very briefly.
She pulls the hood of her half-cloak over her face, tucking the dark shine of her hair beneath it. She hobbles north, not thinking of the wet-pearl sheen of her mother’s skin or the wrong-thing in her daddy’s face as he watched her, or of all the dead mothers in Mama Mags’s stories.
She thinks instead of her sisters, of June’s face as she felt the kick of her niece against her hand.
She’s coming, June.
Bella is alone in the tower when she feels it: a tremor of pain echoing down the line from somewhere into nowhere. Agnes.
She is sitting cross-legged on one of the tower landings, reading in the last light of the autumn dusk, her black notebook held open by a tin cup of coffee. The pain echoes in her empty womb, spreads up her spine.
It might be nothing. Bella knows women often have false pains toward the end, and that Agnes isn’t due until the Barley Moon. But the pain has a certain weight to it, a portentous taste like thunderclouds gathering. Bella finds her fingers straying to a shelf several feet away, where a brass label reads Birthing—early, breeched, stillborn.
The pain comes again, a little louder.
Bella gathers an armful of books from the birthing shelf and spirals back down the stairs to the first floor. Without precisely thinking about what she’s doing or why, she begins to flick through the texts, gathering ways and making notes. Clean linens and jasmine flowers. A silver bell and powder-white shells. A gnarled tooth smaller than a pearl.
She waits. The pain finds a rhythm, cresting and falling. Bella circles the tower, straightening shelves that don’t need straightening, trying to feel through the line whether Agnes is alone or with friends, scared or safe.
Somewhere above her she feels the heat of red eyes watching her.
“It’s fine, Strix. I’m sure she’s fine.” Her voice has a thinness to it, like the first fragile stretch of ice across the Big Sandy. She wishes Quinn were here.
The air twists in a way that means someone has arrived at the tower door. It opens, and a wild-haired silhouette limps inside, cane tapping the flagstones.
Bella knows from the pale green of Juniper’s eyes that she feels it, too, that she’s worried. “Should we go to her?” Bella whispers it.
Juniper rolls her head back and forth. “She knows where to find us, if she wants us.”
“Yes.”
Bella perches at a workbench. Juniper circles the tower in her rolling gait. Strix watches from above.
Eventually Juniper trails to a halt and sits beside Bella on the bench. Her hand brushes not quite accidentally against Bella’s and Bella holds it. They wait together for the next peal of pain.
Agnes knows before she knocks that Madame Zina will not answer. The door hangs crooked in its frame and the curtain-rod is slanted across the window. Someone has drawn an ashen X across the glass.
Agnes knocks anyway, because she doesn’t know what else to do. Because she walked nine blocks with her thighs chafing and her stomach clenching and unclenching like a fist, and a shiver is starting in her spine.
The door swings inward at her touch. Beyond it the room is dark and tumbled,
