The Once and Future Witches - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,138
about the way Miss Lee and her son speak to one another, as if they’re treading lightly over a fresh-mended wound.
Bella and June nest on the floor in a pile of tattered quilts and Agnes claims the rocking chair. But Eve refuses to settle, her usual whines escalating to ragged wails that burrow into Juniper’s skull.
Agnes curses. “She won’t eat. I don’t understand—she’s always had such an appetite.”
Miss Lee leans over her, says, “May I?” and touches two fingers to Eve’s forehead. “She’s warm. A fever’ll take the edge off an appetite.”
The word fever drifts around the room like a stray cinder, too hot to touch. No one says anything for a long moment, while Agnes’s face goes blotchy white and August watches her with a helpless expression. He takes a step toward her but Juniper beats him to it, scooping her niece into her arms and shooting a get in line glare at August.
Eve falls asleep that night with her cheek smeared against Juniper’s breastbone, her cheeks blushing red. A product of the stuffy, too-small room, Juniper is certain.
In the morning Juniper wakes to see shadow-fingers sliding across the window, prying between the panes, trying to get in.
They run.
Agnes pretends to herself that her daughter isn’t sick. That the rising bloom of red in her cheeks is the product of bad air in the tenements or too-tight swaddling, that the thin edge of her wail is just hunger or indigestion or exhaustion. But she sees the way her sisters look at Eve, feels their worry like a gathering cloud in the binding between them—and knows better.
Bella consults her little black notebook and produces long lists of rhymes and chants, poultices and cures. Juniper visits Araminta’s spice shop and a few midwives in hiding and returns with feverfew and willowbark, silkweed and red thread. It seems to help, at first. Eve’s eyes lose the dangerous, glassy sheen, and her usual imperious expression returns. But then her breath thickens again, her temperature rising as some unseen thing eats away at their spells. A cough emerges, wet and persistent, so that her breath rattles sometimes in her sleep.
“The plague, for certain,” pronounces Yulia, a few days later. They’re staying with one of the several dozen Domontoviches scattered on the west side, stuffed in a warm loft above a barroom.
“You don’t know that,” Agnes snaps.
Yulia shrugs, unmoved. “Eh. This is how my cousin sounds, before they take her to St. Charity’s.”
“No one’s taking Eve anywhere.” There’s a silent rushing in the air between them and Pan appears on her shoulder, a tangle of darkness that becomes a hawk. Yulia looks at the osprey—his vicious beak, his scalding glare—and subsides.
They sit with their Sisters at a round table in the middle of the loft, pocked and scarred from years in the bar below. It’s a larger meeting than they’ve dared in weeks: Cleo sitting with her knee pressed against Bella’s, Gertrude and Frankie sharing a long bench with the Hull sisters, Inez and Electa lost in a mob of Valkyrie-like women who can only be Yulia’s relatives. Agnes can’t help noticing that most of the women sit a little apart from the Eastwoods, as if they are either too dangerous or too revered to touch.
Juniper called them all by mockingbird after the most recent round of arrests, because the women are no longer being held in the workhouses. They’ve thrown them in the Deeps, with witch-collars and bridles around their throats, where their witching can’t reach them. The shadows seem to fall more darkly around the Hall of Justice, sharp and black, like the jagged teeth of a trap.
The Sisters confer for hours, proposing spells and countermeasures and unlikely schemes. Some of them have daughters or sisters down in the Deeps, and their eyes burn like coals in their skulls. Agnes thinks of circles drawn wide, of bindings-between and one-for-all, and shivers a little at the strength of it.
Sometime past midnight Juniper stands. “Well, it’s a start. Now, what witch-ways have you brought?” The women turn out pockets and empty brown paper sacks on the table. Agnes can tell from the worried bow of Juniper’s shoulders that it isn’t enough.
She’s frowning and opening her mouth when Inez says, “Wait a moment.”
Inez lays a long, thin object along the table, smiling at Juniper. Inez looks older and a little thinner than she did in the spring, her cheeks no longer merry and full. She and Jennie have been running, too.