The Once and Future Witches - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,116

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, a nest of toppled jars and strewn herbs. Maybe Zina ran before they came for her, or maybe she’s shackled in the Deeps, but she sure as hell isn’t here. There are other midwives on the west side, but so many of them have moved or closed up shop—

The pain swells, crests, fades. It’s hard to think anything in its wake except animal thoughts: run, hide, go home. But Agnes doesn’t have a home, just a narrow bunk at Three Blessings Boarding House with a few spells stuffed beneath the mattress.

She thinks for no reason of Avalon: that black tower, star-crowned, and the endless spiral of books. You know where to find us, Bella told her before she left.

Agnes finds her feet moving before she knows where they’re carrying her.

She doesn’t count the blocks as she walks back east. She merely sets her jaw and keeps going, feeling the bubble and burst of blisters on her feet, the bloody chafe of her thighs. The pain comes more often now and lingers longer, and she is obliged to stop and press her back against the warm brick while passersby cast her looks of concern and alarm. She keeps her hood pulled high.

The New Salem cemetery is locked after sundown, but the gate is open, swinging loose on its hinges. Agnes looks at it, swaying where she stands, feeling the same way she felt when she saw Zina’s crooked door. No.

There are men thronging the graveyard, their expressions both urgent and vacant, shovels and lit torches in their hands. They seem to be gathered at the witch-yard, shuffling and laboring around a vast, gleaming tangle. It takes a long second for Agnes to recognize it as the