She can pray that her sisters are watching.
Juniper watches her sister’s skin turn from ivory to alabaster to wax. Her features remain slack, but her fingers are curled into her own palm just above the ugly iron of her shackle. Agnes’s fist clenches so tightly Juniper sees the dark gleam of blood gathering.
She flinches away. “We’ve got to get there somehow, Bell. Call the tower back into the square, if you have to. Undo the binding.” But that would leave the library exposed and send every police officer and zealot into the streets to hunt witches. Would they even make it to Agnes before they were caught?
She expects Bella to object, to cling to her books like a mother protecting several thousand of her favorite children, but when she looks up she sees that Bella is, inexplicably, smiling. Her eyes are on the pool of water.
“I don’t think that will be necessary. Look.”
Juniper looks.
The red gleam beneath Agnes’s fingernails has become a fistful of blood. One finger is extended, stretching at a painful angle, smearing the bed-sheet with shocking crimson. The finger moves slowly, as if it requires all Agnes’s strength to keep it in motion, and it takes Juniper a startled moment to see what she has drawn.
A circle. A way where there was none.
“Hold on, Ag.” Juniper whispers it to the water. Bella is already filling her arms with glass jars and paper bags, books and notes. Her owl swoops silently to her shoulder and she reaches a hand to stroke its onyx feathers. Juniper thinks she looks like a proper witch from one of Mags’s stories, about to curse her enemies or ride a thundercloud into battle.
They return to the tower door and this time when they press their palms to the carved sign they think of Agnes and her circle of blood, the red path she drew them through the dark.
The tower vanishes.
Agnes is alone.
Until she isn’t.
The air of the hospital skews sideways, a dizzy rushing, and afterward there are two hands pressed to the bloody circle on her bed-sheet. One of them is long and narrow, the fingertips stained with ink; the other is wide, sun-brown, marked with pale scars from thorns and thickets.
Her sisters.
Who were watching, who came when she called.
They stand above her like a matched pair of Old Testament angels, the kind with flaming swords and vengeful hearts. Stories spin through Agnes’s head again, except this time she isn’t thinking of the dead mothers or their lost daughters. She’s thinking about the witches—the women who dispensed the glass slippers and curses and poison apples, who wreaked their wills on the world and damned the consequences.
There is a moment of crystalline silence while the gathered men stare at the three women and the black owl. Then comes Bella’s voice, perfectly calm, and the sharp smell of herbs crushed between fingers. A wicked crack splits the air, very much like a small bone snapping.
The police officers fall sideways, clutching at their ribs and howling. The doctor lunges for Juniper, but she’s already holding the hospital push broom in her hands. The handle cracks across his face with an unpleasant crunch. Bella whispers again and a heavy drowsiness descends on the room. The pair of assistants crumple to the floor and the howling officers fall silent.
The ward is quiet except for the heavy drag of bodies being hauled across the floor. The doctor rouses once, voice rising in a high whine. There are a few more thuds of broom-handle on flesh and he falls quiet.
Bella tsks. “Honestly, Juniper. The sleeping spell would have done just as well.”
“Sure.” Agnes can hear Juniper’s shrug in her voice, followed by a final, satisfied thwack of the broomstick.
Bella chants over Agnes’s head—Soundly she sleeps beneath bright skies, Agnes Amaranth awake, arise!—and gives a sharp whistle.
The drug lifts from Agnes like a rising fog. She pants relief, limbs seizing against the chains. She cranes her neck upward and sees the sorry-eyed nurse holding open the narrow door of what looks like a supply closet while Juniper stuffs the limp bodies inside it. “Now go tell them the doctor doesn’t want any interruptions—or better yet, take this.” Juniper hands the nurse a small canvas sack. “You remember the words? Once you work it, hightail it home. With my thanks, Lacey.”
Agnes wants to ask how they know one another and if every damn woman in this city is a witch, but another roll of pain sends her elsewhere, inward-facing, blind.
When it passes, her sisters are hovering above her. Their hands are gentle on hers, unbending her blood-gummed fingers, and their eyes are so full of love and worry that Agnes feels the pain receding a little. An owl calls from somewhere, a soft crooning that makes Agnes think of full-moon nights back home.
“We’re here now.” Juniper’s voice is low and smoke-streaked, as soft as she can make it. “Bella’s spelled the door and Lacey’s sent half the hospital straight to sleep. It’ll be all right.”
“I shouldn’t have—I should have—” Agnes’s tongue is still slow, her speech slurred. “The doctor said the baby wasn’t coming, that she would have to be extracted.”
Bella tuts, setting glass jars in a neat line on the bedside table and clutching her black leather notebook. “I’m sure he did. But I remind you that he was merely a man. Whereas we”—she looks over her spectacles at Agnes and gives her a very small smile—“are witches.”
Bella opens a heavy tome titled Obstetrix Magna and smooths the pages with a slightly shaking hand, wishing she felt as certain as she sounded. “Juniper, can you take care of these?”
