to decide.”
The water is belly-deep now. “And what happens if I say no?”
“Then your daughter remains deathly ill, in the dubious care of the Lost Angels. You will wait in the Deeps until I catch your sisters—which I will, sooner or later—and they will burn just the same. Except you will burn beside them.”
The water laps at her neck, icy and black. Hadn’t they drowned witches sometimes, in the way-back days? “What if—what if I convinced them to leave the city, instead? We’ll disappear. You’ll never hear our names again. We won’t work another spell as long as we live.”
His smile reminds her of Mr. Malton’s when he told them their shifts were cut or their pay was docked, soothing and false. “I’m afraid that wouldn’t satisfy my constituents. I’m sure you understand.” His tone turns musing. “It’s just the way people work. You tell them a story, and they require an ending. Would anyone know Snow White’s name if her Mother never wore hot iron shoes? Or Gretel’s, if her Crone never climbed in the oven?”
Hill’s smile now is sincere. “The witches always burn, in the end. You see?”
Agnes does. The cold water closes high above her head.
“Please.” She hates the taste of the word in her mouth, but she says it anyway. Sometimes begging was enough to turn her daddy’s fist into an open palm, a slap into a shout. “Please just give her back. She’s sick.” Tears gather and fall.
“I know, dear.” His smile is venom and honey. “Wouldn’t you like me to make her well again?”
Could he? Clearly he knows witching she and her sisters don’t; who’s to say what powers he possesses?
Her answer feels inevitable, a choice made in the moment she first looked down into Eve’s midnight eyes. There is nothing she wouldn’t do for her daughter.
“What will it be, Miss Eastwood?”
Agnes tries to picture her life after the choosing: gray and listless, alone except for the bitter taste of her own betrayal, the frayed ends of a broken binding. The summer of ninety-three would blur and fade, a little girl’s dream of a time when the three of them were one thing, whole and inviolate.
But she would have Eve. She would whisper the words and ways to her daughter, disguised as songs and stories, in the secret hope that the next generation could take up their fallen swords and carry on the battle. It was what Mama Mags had done, and her mother before her: sacrifice in order to survive, and hand their sacrifice down to their daughters.
Now Agnes will choose the same. Gideon Hill’s smile gleams at her in the shard of windowpane still lying on his desk. The point shines crystal-white, sharp as shattered bone.
A very foolish idea occurs to Agnes. A bolder trade, a third choice.
They would catch her, of course, and there would be no fire hot enough for the witch who murdered the mayor of New Salem, their Light Against the Darkness. But without Hill and his shadows surely her sisters could save Eve, could flee the city and raise her in secret, surrounded by wild roses and stone.
She will need to be very fast. She falls to her knees as if overcome with grief, and Pan startles from her shoulder. Hill says something insincere about understanding the difficulty of her position, but she can’t hear it over the thud of blood in her ears. She fumbles a stub of candle wax from her pocket and draws an X on the polished parquet.
She covers her face with her hands and whispers the words to her palms, a hard line of Latin. Heat billows in her chest, burning back the cold water. Her hair drifts gently upward, as if gravity is an absentminded god who has forgotten her for this single, desperate second. Beneath his chair, Hill’s dog whines.
She thinks of her sisters: Juniper who would not hesitate, Bella who would not miss. She thinks of her daughter.
She leaps. The glass is in her hand and driving toward Hill’s left eye before he can flinch, almost before he can blink. The point parts the fine gold of his lashes. She braces for the wet puncture of his eye, the scrape of bone against glass—
But it doesn’t come. The shard skrees off Hill’s face and bites into the desktop instead, slicing Agnes’s palm. There is an airless moment while both of them look down at the red-slicked glass, before a dozen shadow-hands claw toward her. They wrap around her wrists