Juniper thinks of the wards they’d set so carefully around the witch-yard, salt and thistle; she pictures shadow-hands plucking and pulling at them until they unraveled.
“You have given me the thing I have wanted above all others, James Juniper.” The voice is passionless but sincere, and Juniper is struck by the certainty that he is telling the truth. “I am very grateful.”
His laugh echoes across the square and she wants to charge through the crowd and wrap her hands around his throat, curse him eyeless and earless and tongueless—except there’s a dark shimmer at her feet: shadows, many-armed, languorous as well-fed snakes, oozing across the scorched earth toward her. She whirls, presses her burned hand back to the hot ashes of the door, speaks the words a second time—
And she is on her knees in the stinking silence of the hospital ward, with hot tears tracking through the char on her cheeks.
Agnes knows from the broken slope of Juniper’s shoulders, from the reek of ashes and roses she brings with her, that August was telling the truth.
A wail rises: Bella, keening as if her own flesh and blood is burning along with the library. Her hands scrabble for the drawn circle on the sheet.
Juniper catches her tight around the waist. “It’s too late. It’s gone, Bell. He’s won.” Her voice is even rougher than before, twice-burned by fire. Bella sags against her youngest sister, weeping, and Juniper shushes her. August looks at the floor, a stranger intruding on their mourning.
They stay like that, suspended in grief like gnats in amber. Agnes knows with cold clarity that soon someone will wake from their spell and raise the alarm. Rioters and officers will turn up looking for more witches to burn, and they’ll find three sisters and a little witch-girl with hair the color of heart’s blood. They’ll rip her from Agnes’s arms.
She looks down at her daughter—her hair drying in bright swirls of red, her cheeks round and slack in sleep—and thinks: Let the bastards try.
“We have to go,” she says, very calmly. None of them move, mired in the selfishness of grief. Agnes raises her voice. “We have to go right now. Before they come for us, and for Eve.”
At Eve’s name Juniper looks up, blinking scorched eyes. “Where? They’ll be watching the train station and the trolley lines, and I bet the streets are crawling. We might make it to Salem’s Sin, maybe—”
Bella cuts her off, sounding surprisingly firm despite the snot and tears. “We can go to Cleo’s in New Cairo. People are scared of the south side these days, and they have the means to hide us.” Agnes suspects it isn’t merely logic that drives Bella. Bella frowns at the clouds out the window and adds, inanely, “It’s the full moon, too.”
Juniper shakes her head. “We’ll be moving slow, and they’ll be looking for three women and a baby. It’s too far.”
Bella might have argued, but Agnes turns to August and says simply, “Help us. Please.”
She knows from the warm twist of his smile that he hears it not as a command, but as an act of blind trust, the sort of thing one comrade might ask of another as they stand back-to-back, surrounded.
His eyes catch hers and hold steady. “It’s far.” He glances at the push broom propped against the wall, slightly splintered from Juniper’s misuse. “Unless—can you—?”
Juniper’s laugh is a bitter crack. “No.”
“Well, I could get my boys to help.” He trails off, worry creasing his face. “But it’ll be rough going. Are you sure you ought to move, so soon after . . .” His eyes flick nervously to the bloodied sheets in the corner.
Agnes’s voice goes very dry. “I’ll manage, Mr. Lee.”
“Are you sure? I always heard a woman shouldn’t—”
A hawk’s scream silences him. Agnes strokes the wing of her familiar. “Do you doubt me? Truly?”
Mr. Lee rocks back, like a man in a gust of fierce wind. He looks at her—at the black river hawk perched at her side and the redheaded baby clutched to her bare breast and the scorching heat of her eyes—and nods so deeply it’s nearly a bow. “Never again,” he breathes.
He turns to leave and calls over his shoulder, “Meet me behind the hospital in half an hour.”
Bella has seen the undertakers’ carriages before—black-painted wagons with ST. CHARITY HOSPITAL written in stark white capitals on the side—but she always imagined it would be several long decades before she rode in one herself.
She also imagined she would be alone, and dead, rather than pressed beside her sisters on the floorboards, very much alive and praying the baby won’t cry as they clatter and jounce across the city.
Mr. Lee met them behind the hospital with several of his friends—scruffy, disreputable fellows who seemed well versed in mayhem—a cheap black suit, and a matched pair of carthorses that were persuaded to pull the carriage despite the smell of rot and arsenic. Mr. Lee helped them one after the other into the coach. His hand lingered around Agnes’s, his mouth half-open, but the driver hyahed and August vanished into the gloom.
Now the city passes in ghoulish flashes through the high windows: the flare of a lit torch in a bare hand; shouted curses and prayers; the stamp of feet marching in unnatural synchrony. The sour smell of wet smoke clings to her skin like grease, burying even the corpse-stink of the carriage.
A drifting flake of ash filters through the window and settles soft as snow on Bella’s cheek. She wonders what mystery or magic it once held, now lost to the flames. Her tears slide silently to her temples and trickle through her hair.
The carriage rattles over trolley tracks and missing cobbles, the street roughening beneath them. The noise shifts from angry shouts to worried voices, pitched low.
