The Once and Future Witches - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,143

every trolley stop and train station. Now women are arrested and dragged past jeering crowds, their dresses torn and their throats collared, and the Deeps echo with the wails of caged women. Now Hill’s purge has begun, and it’s too late to run.

Agnes’s sisters are both off doing what they can, which isn’t enough. Juniper left at dusk to hassle the patrols of Inquisitors, leading them on a merry chase and granting their targets time to run. She kissed Eve’s cheek and strode into the hall with her black-yew staff gripped tight and her jaw set.

Bella left even before that, escorted by an impassive, oak-skinned woman into the tunnels to confer with Cleo and the other Daughters. The papers reported that Mayor Hill was recruiting “concerned citizens” to help settle the unsettled south side, massing a small army of men and torches at the edge of New Cairo. Cleo and her mother were trying to ward what could be warded and funnel the young and old out of harm’s way.

“I’ll ask Araminta if she has any feverfew left. Or anything else that might . . .” Bella didn’t seem to know how to finish the sentence, but merely cast a worried look at Eve.

Agnes and her sisters had cast every spell and charm they could find to drive back the fever, to soothe her racking cough. Agnes fell asleep each night chanting spells like prayers, stroking the bloody red of her daughter’s curls, but none of it seemed to last.

Now their witch-ways have run out. Now her daughter’s every breath rattles like dead leaves across pavement, as if autumn itself slunk down her throat and burrowed in her small chest. Now Agnes curls around her body on the narrow bed, willing her skin to cool.

She thinks a little sunlight might help, a little clean September air in her lungs, but she keeps the doors and windows shut tight and draws a salt-circle around their bed. A new wanted poster appeared on the streets the previous day, offering a generous reward for “an infant with red curls, cruelly stolen from her rightful mother; Eastwoods suspected.” Juniper brought it home crumpled in her fist.

So Agnes stays hidden, waiting.

Sometime after dawn Eve falls into a deeper sleep. At first Agnes is grateful, after a long night of coughing and fussing. But the longer she sleeps the less grateful Agnes becomes. Eve’s arms lie limp on the quilt, chest flushed pink, tiny fists unclenched. Even the frown-lines on her brow have unfolded.

Agnes strokes her bare skin with one knuckle. Eve doesn’t move.

Terror jolts through her, spine to skull. Pan appears at her shoulder, voicing a piercing hawk’s cry. Eve’s eyelids give the barest flutter.

Agnes says, firmly and calmly, “No.”

This isn’t how the story goes; she doesn’t cower in the dark while her daughter dies. She doesn’t lie back and let the tide of the world have its way with her, like her mother did.

She stands and paces, rustling through empty jars and turning out every pocket. A handful of thorns, black-pearl seeds, a few twists of herbs, curled and brittle. Not enough. There has to be someone in this city with the witch-ways or words she needs, or someone who will find them for her. She thinks of circles and bindings and joined hands. Of Mr. August Lee, who came when she called him.

She fumbles in her skirt pocket for her last mockingbird feather, raggedy and crimped. She pricks her palm with the hollow point and whispers the words. Hush little baby, don’t say a word.

Heat snakes through her veins. Agnes unlatches the window and sends the feather into the sky along with a whispered name. “Tell him to meet me”—she hesitates, unwilling to say the words South Sybil out loud in case some unfriendly shadow is listening in the alley—“at the corner of Lamentation and Sixteenth,” she finishes.

Agnes rubs pale dye into her hair and ties a maid’s apron around her waist. She wraps her daughter in gray wool—her head lolls, a thin line of white gleaming beneath the red of her lashes—and steps across their wards and into the hall. For a long moment she stands there, warring with herself, before lifting her hand to knock at the door to No. 12.

A pair of blondish, round-cheeked girls answer the door, so similar they can only be twins. All their hearty Kansas aunts and cousins must be at work. They blink up at Agnes, neither one recognizing the grayhaired maid standing in the