through drawers.
Juniper’s eyes meet Bella’s. Cleo asks, gently, “Agnes? Why do you need candles?”
Agnes finds a handful of candle-stubs in a crate beneath her bed and arranges them in a hurried circle, muttering to herself. She looks perfectly deranged.
“Agnes.” Bella’s voice is even gentler than Cleo’s. “What are you doing?”
But Juniper already knows. So does Bella, judging by the tremble of her fingers. “She’s calling back the Lost Way of Avalon. Again.”
Agnes doesn’t pause, doesn’t even look up.
“But why?” Bella sounds very close to tears.
“Because I’d like to talk with the Last Three.”
A small silence follows this announcement. Even Cleo’s mouth hangs open, her journalist’s composure overcome at last. Juniper says, as casually as she can, “Sure. The thing is, though—and I don’t want to upset you—the Last Three are dead.”
Agnes makes a faint noise of irritation at such nitpicking.
“Real dead. Exceptionally dead. There are legends and stories about how dead they are. You might’ve heard some of them.”
“I have, yes,” Agnes acknowledges. “Still.”
This is apparently too much for Bella, who wails, “What’s wrong with you, Agnes? There’s nothing left.”
Agnes still doesn’t look up. “What about Yulia’s story? What about the witch who bound her heart to a needle or an egg or whatever it was, and lived forever?”
“A fable. A myth.”
“And how many of our spells came from fables? What if it’s more than a myth?”
Bella looks as if she’s considered actually tearing her hair in frustration. “It isn’t possible.”
Agnes raises her head from her candle-circle and meets their eyes. She should look like a grief-struck madwoman, broken and hopeless, but instead she looks like an angel cast down from Heaven struggling back to her feet with blood on her teeth, ready to make war with God himself.
“I do not,” she says, very clearly, “give a shit.”
She withdraws a rust-smeared shard of glass from her pocket and hands it to Juniper. Her eyes say please and Juniper can’t refuse her. She slices the glass across her open palm, cutting deep, and opens her hand to let her blood drip onto the warped floorboards of South Sybil.
Red sky at night, witch’s delight.
Red sky at morning, witch’s warning.
A spell for storms, requiring red cloth & wet earth
Beatrice Belladonna catches her sister’s hand in hers before her blood falls. “Saints, think,” she hisses. “What happens if you materialize a tower on top of a boarding house?”
Neither Agnes nor Juniper seem overly concerned. Juniper even looks slightly eager, like a child anticipating fireworks.
Bella suppresses an urge to shake the pair of them until their teeth rattle. “People live here! Lots of them! You can’t just drop a library on top of them! The Mother only knows what it would do to our wards. And I still don’t understand why we’d want to call Avalon in the first place—”
“He took her.” Agnes’s voice is quiet but ragged-edged, like a distant scream.
“Who did?” But Bella knows who.
“Gideon Hill. And he’s scared, Bell. He has his shadows and his city and my daughter, but he’s still frightened of something.” Agnes looks up at her. “Of Avalon. Even though all the books are burned.” Bella presses her fingertips to the paper-dry petal of the rose in her pocket, the only thing she saved from the ashes. “He asked me if they were still there. And I thought—who is they?”
“Sometimes when it was real quiet at Avalon I heard voices. Or thought I did.” Juniper speaks slowly, feeling her way toward the edge of the impossible. “And down in the Deeps I heard . . . somebody.”
She doesn’t look at Bella, as if she expects scorn or pity, but Bella is quiet. She’s remembering the times when she was alone in the rose-scented silence of the tower, when her attention wandered and she heard whispers murmuring and scuttling in the shadows. Words spoken in voices of dust and ivy, there and gone again.
There’s a rustle of wool as Cleo shifts on the bed. “Do you mean . . . ghosts?” Bella feels a rush of relief that Cleo seems willing to entertain the possibility rather than edging quietly out of the room.
“I don’t think they could be. What ghost could last four hundred years?” Ghosts were lingering specters, especially tenacious souls that clung to life a few hours beyond death. They didn’t haunt towers or castles for centuries, except in wives’ tales and rumors.
Cleo shrugs. “Some kind of spirit or memory, then? Perhaps preserved by—”
“I don’t care what they are or aren’t. I’m going to find them.” Agnes