The Once and Future Witches - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,167
that particular window ledge, because someone—one of the maids who scrubs the cells, perhaps—has left the sill strewn with salt, the window half-open.
The owl will wing through it, their words pouring from his open beak, soaring past the startled evening-shift of officers and guards and secretaries. Before they can shout the alarm, before they can do more than blink in confusion at the coal-colored owl flying through their offices—they will fall into a deep and boneless sleep, from which they will not wake for several hours, or possibly days. The prisoners locked in the Deeps beneath them—the city’s malcontents and drunks, its radicals and rabble-rousers and especially its witches—will hear nothing but the silent rush of wings and the hollow thuds of skulls against desks.
The osprey will not follow the owl to the Hall of Justice. His mistress has other business in the city. Juniper glances sideways at Agnes’s face and wonders if she can see through her familiar’s eyes: the grimy cinder blocks of the Home for Lost Angels, the cold swirl of Hill’s shadows around it. Mr. August Lee climbing through a window with a scrap of witchspeak in his pocket and a lump of clay that looks—if you squint in poor light, with bewitched eyes—like a baby girl.
Juniper begins the second spell when her sisters’ familiars return.
London Bridge is falling down, falling down.
She drinks saltwater from a flask in her pocket, whiskey-tainted and bitter, and spits it onto the cobbles. Her sisters reach for her hands and they chant the words with her until they see red rust climbing the lampposts along the edges of the square, until the air tastes of old blood and passing years.
The owl and the osprey carry that spell, too. Back to the Hall of Justice, past the slumped bodies of guards, down the steps to the crowded cells of the Deeps.
Juniper imagines how it might feel to wake in that fetid dark and see ember eyes watching you. To see the black iron bars of your cage—so real, so absolute a moment before—rusting away, leaving nothing but orange flakes floating on the scummed surface of the water.
The owl will open its beak, afterward, and speak with a woman’s voice. “Run, sisters,” it will say, “You have nothing to lose but your chains.” Some of the women in the cells will recognize that voice, smoke-eaten and rasping. One of them—a ruddy-cheeked woman whose fashionable furs have been replaced with a dingy white shift—will cackle aloud and crash through the weakened bars of her cell.
Before she can reach the steps, the owl will speak again. It will ask a favor of them.
Some of them will ignore it, Juniper knows: the women with hungry children or pining lovers, the women who want only to run and keep running. But some of them want something else, something that tastes of pitch and blood and rage unswallowed. Those women will linger and listen and—perhaps—do what Juniper asks of them.
In the square Juniper hears the sharp singing of iron-shod hooves, sees the angry glow of torchlight rising up the white walls of City Hall, and knows their time is up. She holds her sisters’ hands tight in hers and stands tall, waiting for the end of their story to come riding to meet them.
Agnes sees two men when she looks at Gideon Hill. Maybe three.
The first one is the one the rest of the city saw: the watery, weak-chinned mayor who now sits astride his white horse, loyal hound trotting at his side, red cross painted on the bright silver of his shield. He should look absurd, like a bank teller playing dress-up, but somehow his features are made grander in the reflected glow of his shield. He looks like a painting come to life, like a Saint come to save their souls.
The second man she sees is the one her sisters see: an ancient, unnatural creature who speaks with shadows and feasts on souls. A monster who murders women and steals children, who cut a red curl of hair from her daughter’s head to taunt her.
The third man she sees is her daddy: a monster. A coward. A man whose comeuppance is coming.
A dozen ranks of Inquisitors march behind him into the square, their eyes zealous and their uniforms starched white beneath silver armor. Hill pulls his horse to a showy halt before the plinth, his dog standing stiff-legged beside him, too-tight collar biting into its neck.
Hill looks just slightly down his nose at the three