The Once and Future Witches - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,103

pages, the rustles of rose petals one against another, the silent touch of strange stars.

Agnes looks behind her once before she leaves the tower.

Bella stands with a pair of silver shears in one hand and an open book in the other, that eerie owl perched like a gargoyle on her shoulder, looking like the Crone herself come back from the dead. Juniper lies pale and still on the flagstones, a maiden laid out for sacrifice.

The sight of them tugs at Agnes. She wants to turn back and take her place between them, play the part of the middle sister and the Mother—but she doesn’t.

She pushes through the door and kneels briefly beneath the shadowed trees. She scoops a palmful of earth and leaf-litter into a glass and whispers the words over it: Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. She prays it is enough.

The night is quiet except for the whisper-touch of leaves and the distant toll of church bells ringing the solstice-morning service. The branches of trees drag against her skirts like friendly fingers, half-familiar; she remembers all the times she chased Juniper through thickets of mountain laurel and holly back home.

Agnes slips from the woods and takes three steps before she realizes she is not alone: there are birds roosting on every lamp-post and iron bench, crowding the sills and rooftops of the College and City Hall, silent as falling feathers—

And there is a woman standing several feet in front of her, right where the cobbles turn to dark, leaf-strewn earth.

Her face is tilted up to look at the tower, her skin ivory in the unsettling shine of constellations that have doubled in number and abandoned their usual patterns, unnaturally bright despite the electric orange glow of the city.

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