The Once and Future Witches - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,124
flinches from the slap of feathers, trying to stroke a calming finger down its breast, but it launches itself upward. The hawk joins it, circling near the ceiling on midnight wings. The pattern they draw is a warning, like vultures spiraling above some dying thing. A growing light gleams dull amber on their feathers, the rising sun, or the distant, electric glow of the Fair.
Agnes is looking up at them, clutching her daughter, when there’s a loud bang against the ward door.
“Agnes! Are you in there?” More banging, a desperate fist. “Hyssop, for Chrissake!”
Bella looks at Agnes and Agnes nods. She unlocks the door and Mr. August Lee falls through it.
His hair is tangled and dark with rain, his eyes wild. There’s a gray smear across one cheek and a smell rising from his clothes, trailing like a shadow behind him: acrid and sour, ugly in some way Agnes doesn’t understand.
“Is she alive? Is the baby—” August’s eyes rove between the three of them, fastening onto Agnes and the tight-wrapped bundle held to her breast. The relief in his face washes over her like daybreak.
Juniper says, sullenly, “They’re just fine, thank you very much,” but August doesn’t seem to hear her. He moves to Agnes’s bedside and kneels, still looking at her with that stripped-bare delight. Agnes turns her hand palm up on the sheet and he presses his forehead against it. “I’m sorry,” he says into the mattress. “I got your message, but you weren’t there. I looked and looked. Finally someone told me you’d been taken, but I didn’t know where—”
“It’s all right.” She strokes her thumb across his brow, because she can, because she likes the weight of his head in her hand and the bent line of his neck. “I had my sisters.” The binding thrums between them, a cat’s purr, and it occurs to Agnes that she was dead wrong.
She thought survival was a selfish thing, a circle drawn tight around your heart. She thought the more people you let inside that circle the more ways the world had to hurt you, the more ways you could fail them and be failed in turn. But what if it’s the opposite, and there are more people to catch you when you fall? What if there’s an invisible tipping point somewhere along the way when one becomes three becomes infinite, when there are so many of you inside that circle that you become hydra-headed, invincible?
August is silent, head still pressed to her hand as if all he wants in the world is to feel the heat of her pulse.
“Well.” Juniper clears her throat. “Not to interrupt, but it’s time we get gone. Before somebody notices this whole hospital is asleep or follows this fool here.” But she sounds less sullen, even faintly approving, as if she rather likes the sight of a man on his knees.
August looks up with a shadow looming in his face. “Where are you going? Is it that tower?”
Juniper shrugs at him, already turning to draw a circle on the white-tile wall. The birds still circle above her like some grave portent.
But Agnes already knows why, because Agnes has finally recognized the smell rising from August’s clothes: wild roses and fire.
“Because,” August answers, “the tower is burning.”
Wade in the water with me,
My daughter all dressed in red.
Wade in the water, and dress in white instead.
A song to stop bleeding after a hard birth, requiring twice-blessed water & the Serpent-Bearer
James Juniper looks at the man kneeling beside her sister—at the gray smear on his cheekbone and the sorry angle of his shoulders—and tells him, very gently, “Bullshit.”
“It isn’t—”
“It is. Avalon would have to be somewhere in order for anybody to burn it, and I happen to know it’s nowhere.”
“It isn’t. It’s standing in the middle of St. George’s Square and it’s burning. Look out the window! You can see the light from here!”
Juniper doesn’t want to look out the window, doesn’t want to know the light glowing red on the underbellies of the clouds isn’t coming from the rising sun.
“Listen, we bound that tower and buried the binding, and warded the place we buried it. So excuse me if I don’t—”
“June.” It’s Agnes, her voice tired and cracked, pitched low so as not to wake the baby.
Juniper shoots August a now look what you did glare. “It’s alright, Ag. I’m sure Mr. Lee is mistaken.”