The Once and Future Witches - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,146
of ash and smoke, leaving the two of them surrounded by mutters and staring eyes. Bella wipes a smudge of char from her spectacles. “I didn’t know they could do that.”
Voices and running steps rise around them. Juniper grabs her sleeve and hauls her into an alley. “What do we do?”
Bella snorts, half-hysterical. “Didn’t you listen to any of my witch-tales?” Juniper marches her onward, whispering words and spitting over her shoulder. It hisses on the cobblestones and rises like steam behind them, obscuring their escape.
“In the stories, it’s generally best to do whatever the hell the talking animal tells you.”
May the Devil take you down
And break your golden crown.
A mortal curse, requiring hemlock & hate
The mayor’s office is all oiled leather and oak paneling. The walls are lined with paintings in gilt frames, displaying the usual association of horses and Saints and men in powdered wigs. An especially noble-looking Saint George of Hyll does battle with a dragon the color of hellfire, hounds baying at his side.
A dark-stained desk hulks in the middle of the room. On its surface, between neat stacks of papers and the dark shine of an inkwell, lies a mockingbird. A clawed shadow is cast across it, pinning its wings at precise and hideous angles. Its ribcage throbs in panic.
Agnes Amaranth looks away, swallowing hard. Pan croons on her shoulder.
Mr. Gideon Hill stands at the tall window, watching the scurry and bustle of the street below with his hand resting on the iron collar of the dog at his side. The five o’clock slant of the light draws deep shadows behind them.
The dog faces Agnes first, its tail giving the faintest, cowardly wave. Mr. Hill turns to Agnes with a mannered smile, as if she is a necessary but tiresome guest. “Ah, Miss Agnes Eastwood, I presume.” Agnes’s disguise is a careless one: the windswept braid over her shoulder is already threaded with sleek black and her eyes are boiling back to silver. “But surely Miss Tattershall ought to have shown you in?”
“The receptionist?”
“Yes.”
Agnes shrugs without looking away from him. “She’s sleeping.” Her head had knocked against her desk with a hollow, split-melon sound, but her eyes remained peacefully closed. Agnes supposes it was possible that she overdid it—Bella mentioned princesses who slept for centuries and dozing gentlemen who missed entire wars—but she finds she doesn’t much care.
“How generous of you.” Hill does not appear in the least relieved about Miss Tattershall’s fate. His gaze on her is—strange. Almost wary, as if he is waiting for her to produce a pistol or a spell from her skirt pockets.
Her pockets are empty except for the weak remnants of her witching: the crumbled dust of herbs, a few sweat-damp matches, the waxen stub of a candle.
“My daughter, Mr. Hill. Where is she?” She wonders if he hears the shake in her voice, and whether he mistakes it for fear.
Hill strolls to the dark island of his desk and sits, dog padding meekly behind him. It folds itself beneath his chair, looking at her with sorry black eyes, while its master steeples his hands above the mockingbird. It writhes, desperate, trapped.
“If you read the new city ordinances closely, you will find they specifically revoke the parental rights of known witches or witchsympathizers,” he observes.
“She’s mine. She belongs to me.” Every ruby-red curl of her hair, every soft fingernail. Agnes feels the absence of her weight like a spreading bruise on her arms.
Hill’s eyes are still watchful, calculating, as if he is prodding a caged creature to see what it might do. “She belongs to the city of New Salem, Miss Eastwood. She will be—”
Agnes snaps the match in her pocket and hisses the words August taught her months before, when the city still hummed with springtime and she still thought spells and sisterhood could alter the cruel workings of the world.
She doesn’t need to borrow her sisters’ will this time, does not even need the familiar perched like a red-eyed gargoyle on her shoulder; her own will might level cities.
The room shatters. Bright shards zing through the air as every pane of glass in Hill’s office fractures and bursts.
In the silence that follows, the September breeze sings through the jagged holes of the windows, tossing glittering specks of glass-dust into the air. Ink spreads from the cracked inkwell and pools like black blood over his desk.
Agnes feels a damp trickle down her jaw, a stinging line across her cheekbone. Hill appears entirely untouched.