The Once and Future Witches - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,163
merely an hour; Bella has lost track of the winged passage of time—the trapdoor squeals again and Juniper’s voice rasps into the room.
“You about ready, Bell? Agnes should be back any—Saints save us.” Her sister’s footsteps pause on the ladder. “Is now really the time, ladies?” When neither Cleo nor Bella answer her, being otherwise occupied, Juniper gives an irritated huff.
They hear the clatter of feet on the ladder and a carrying shout: “I’ll be back in half an hour, and I want everybody’s clothes back where they belong. We’ve got hell to raise.”
The last time Agnes visited the Workingman it was early summer. She was giddy and coy, half-drunk with hope. Eve still slept safe beneath her ribs; Agnes wore a cloak to match her eyes.
This time it’s early autumn, and Agnes wears a pair of men’s pants and a tattered cloak the color of mud, with her hair tucked beneath a cap and her features dulled by magic. This time she feels like a lightning-struck tree or a pitted peach, hollowed out, empty; this time Eve is gone.
The first time she met him, Mr. August Lee was feckless and fearless, with a gambler’s grin and nothing to lose. This time his face is creased with fresh-made lines and his eyes are sober, almost frightened, as if he’s found something he doesn’t want to lose.
He sits across from Agnes with his haystack hair and his gray wool vest, a scrap of paper held tight in his hands. A covered basket sits on the table between them, smelling of clay and river-water.
Agnes nods to the list in his hand. “Well?” Her voice is cold and flat.
He scrubs his hand over his beard, brow knit. “Saints, Agnes. I haven’t seen you in over a week. No messages, no mockingbirds”—Agnes flinches, hearing the echo of small bones breaking—“and now you turn up with the Devil’s own groceries and a list of demands, looking like—” But he declines to say what she looks like. Agnes has avoided her own eyes in mirrors and windows, unwilling to look at the open wound of her face.
“Where’s Eve?” August asks. Agnes knows his voice is gentle, but her ears ache as if he screamed the name. “Here. Look.” From his breast pocket he withdraws a small, smooth-polished thing and sets it upright on the table between them: dark wood, carved into the wary shape of a perched hawk. Agnes can tell from the curve of beak and the sleek taper of wings that it’s an osprey, and from the watchful angle of its body that it’s her hawk, meant to watch over her daughter.
She pictures August worrying over it in the lengthening evenings, looking out into the lamp-lit dark of the city and hoping that she and Eve are safe. She pictures him turning the wood in his palm and choosing to carve the shape of her soul, dangerous and dark; rendering each talon without flinching from it.
“My dad would’ve been a wood-carver, if he could. He taught me some.” His voice is still gentle. Her skull still pounds as if he shouted.
Agnes reaches toward the little hawk without meaning to, fingers trembling, before closing her eyes and pressing her palm flat to the table. “I—I can’t—” She takes a long, steadying breath. “I need to know if you are able to work the spells we have supplied, Mr. Lee.”
She hears the long sigh of his breath, the sag of his shoulders. “I’m no witch.”
“I have it on good authority that everyone is a witch, given the proper words and ways.” Agnes tilts her head at the covered basket. “I’ve supplied you with both.”
August’s eyes flick to the basket and back to her face. Agnes wishes, stupidly, that she could abandon her glamor and let his eyes rest on her true features, feel the warmth of his care on her skin. Perhaps she will find him again after it’s over, if she’s lucky enough to have an after. The future has narrowed in her mind, vanishing toward the moment she holds her daughter again.
August’s brows knit tighter as he watches her. “Agnes, won’t you tell me what’s going on? Why you need me to do all this?” He eyes the list, lips shaping the words fire and changeling. “Why can’t you just work the spells yourselves?”
“We will be otherwise occupied.”
“Doing what?”
“Burning, I expect.”
“Excuse me?”
On previous occasions Agnes has enjoyed rendering Mr. Lee speechless, but now her lips barely twitch. Now the sun is swinging low and