Juniper snaps the chains with vicious glee, the scar around her throat gleaming white.
Agnes pulls her arms inward, cradling her own belly. She doesn’t scream or moan, but a low, animal growl leaves her lips. Juniper looks a little wildly at Bella. “Can’t you do anything?”
Bella can. She claws through the Obstetrix Magna, past alarming illustrations of wombs and veins and infants with small ivory horns or flames for hair. Her fingers find the pages she marked back in the tower, where there are spells to draw fevers from the womb and persuade blood to remain in the body, to ease the pains of labor and steady the heart of the unborn.
“Juniper.” Bella fumbles in her brown sack and finds a little tin of black-stained grease. “Draw a seven-pointed star around the bed, if you please.”
Juniper daubs the unsteady shape of a star while Bella circles, whispering and chanting. She tucks jasmine flower beneath her tongue and hyacinth in her hair. She rings a silver bell seven times and watches Agnes’s body unfurl a little further with each soft peal.
It’s a strong working. Bella can tell by the scorch of power in her veins and the hot smell of witching in the air. Juniper’s cheeks are flushed red from the effort of helping her, and Strix mantles on her shoulder.
Agnes sighs back down against the sheets, the trapped-animal terror receding from her face. Her gaze is unclouded, lucid for the first time since they arrived. “Thank you,” she breathes. “I didn’t know if you’d come.”
“Jesus, Ag.” Juniper shakes her head. “Have a little faith.”
“I used to. Until . . .” Agnes slants a bitter look at Bella.
Juniper says, “That was a long time ago,” just as Bella asks, “Until what?”
A contraction doubles Agnes around her belly, lips white, but her gaze stays clear and sharp as a bared blade. “Until—you—betrayed me,” she pants.
“I betrayed you?”
“You were the only one I told about the baby. Because you were the only one I trusted.” The words are spat poison, meant to wound, but Bella doesn’t flinch.
Because they aren’t true. Because she and her sister have wasted seven years hating one another for crimes neither one committed.
“Oh, Agnes.” Bella’s own voice sounds weary in her ears, worn thin by the weight of that single summer afternoon seven years ago. “I never told our daddy a damn thing.”
Agnes’s face makes Bella think of a ship in a dying wind, sails slack, as if the force that drove her has suddenly disappeared.
“Then how? How did he know?”
“The Adkins boy.”
“I never told him shit—”
Bella shakes her head. “He saw you in the woods, afterward.” Bella heard his tap-tap on their door, and her daddy’s hollered answer. Then low voices rising quickly, and that butter-brained boy saying, I’m sure, sir, I saw her bury it under a hornbeam. “I think he was hoping if he told Daddy you’d be cornered into a quick wedding.” Bella’s lip curls. “He didn’t know our daddy. After he left, Daddy went looking for you. I followed.”
She thought maybe she could help somehow, but she’d stood paralyzed as her daddy drew closer and closer to Agnes. As Agnes screamed that Bella was a liar, a sinner, an unnatural creature. Her story came out in jumbled sobs—going into the church cellar for fresh candles and finding Bella with the preacher’s daughter, half-naked and ruby-lipped, reveling in sin—but even a poorly told story has power. Their father understood. He turned on her, too, and Bella begged—Please, no, please—
Bella had met her sister’s eyes and seen nothing but a terrible, leaden cold. Hate, she thought then.
Now she thinks of the witch-queen who sent shards of ice into warm hearts and soft eyes, turning them against the ones they loved best. Now she thinks she isn’t the only one familiar with betrayal.
“I never told, Agnes. I swear.”
Agnes shuts her eyes. “I thought—I didn’t—Saints, Bell.” A ragged whisper. “What did I do to us?”
“You were just a child.” Bella tries to sound measured and calm, as if it is a distant hurt long forgotten, rather than an ice-shard still buried in her breast.
“So were you.” Agnes clutches at the hard ball of her belly, breath catching. “I shouldn’t have said it. Even if you had told, I shouldn’t have turned on you.” There are tears mingling with the sweat on Agnes’s face now, more dripping from the end of Bella’s nose. She recalls dizzily that it was true love’s tears that melted the ice in the story.
“I’m sorry,” Agnes whispers.
“It’s all right,” Bella whispers back.
Another contraction wracks Agnes before she can answer. Bella can see the pain of it biting deep, even with the witching to ease it, and a tremor of fear moves through her. Perhaps even witching won’t be enough.
She smooths sweaty tendrils of hair back from Agnes’s brow.
Agnes looks up at her, pale and tired and scared. “Will you stay with me?”
“Yes,” Bella answers. In her chest she feels that cold sliver of ice melt into blood-warm water. “Always.”
Juniper doesn’t know much about birthing, but she knows it shouldn’t take this damn long.
She and Bella hover on either side of Agnes like a pair of black-cloaked gargoyles, standing vigil. It seems to go alright at first. Agnes pants and swears and strains against some invisible enemy, the veins blue and taut in her throat. But the baby doesn’t come, and each contraction wrings her like a rag, twists something vital out of her. Bella flicks back through her books, hissing and muttering, tossing herbs in ever-wilder circles.
The baby doesn’t come.
Agnes is supposed to be the strong one, but Juniper can see they’re coming to the end of her strength. Bella is supposed to be the wise one, but
