The Once and Future Witches - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,121
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 she’s running out of words. Juniper figures that leaves her, the wild one, with her wild will.
She casts around for anything that might help her sister cling to life, that might bind a woman to the world. The word bind rattles like a thrown pebble in her skull, rippling outward, and Juniper thinks: Why the hell not?