The Once and Future Witches - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,184

single step. It’s harder than it ought to be, like there’s a weight pulling hard against her, like her muscles aren’t quite her own. A warm weight leans against her leg and she looks down to meet a pair of mournful red eyes: Gideon Hill’s familiar, still wearing her iron collar. Still bound to her master, following him loyally to his next body.

For the last time.

Juniper digs her fingers into her dark ruff and the two of them walk back to the scaffold, to her sisters and the stake, to the flames that curl like fingers into the sky, beckoning.

Bella watches her sister walk back to the scaffold as if she’s wading through knee-deep water. As if each step costs her dearly but she is bound to take it anyway.

There are people running and shoving around her—well-dressed gentlemen fleeing in terror, shouting Inquisitors with blood smeared on their white tunics, mad-eyed men clutching stones and broken bottles, looking for wicked witches to kill—but none of them seem willing to touch the young woman and the black wolf.

Bella reaches for her hands as she climbs the steps, but Juniper flinches away from her touch. Her hands curl back on themselves as if they’re smeared with something foul. She buries one of them in the black fur of the wolf at her side.

“June! What happened? Did he bind himself to you somehow?”

Juniper shrugs one shoulder and doesn’t meet her eyes. “No.”

“Then how—what—”

“I bound him to me.”

Bella considers bursting into tears. “Oh June, why?”

Juniper still isn’t looking at her. Bella follows the line of her gaze and sees Agnes shushing a wailing Eve. Juniper shrugs again. “Had to.”

“Well, we can fix it somehow. We can find a way to banish him, or contain him. A warding spell, maybe, or a healing—”

“There’s no time, Bell.” Juniper says it very gently, like a doctor telling a patient some unfortunate news. She tilts her chin at Agnes and Eve. “Take care of her, won’t you? She’s got to have it better than we did. A mama that sticks around, maybe even a daddy worth a damn.” Juniper squints speculatively at August, who is standing guard at the scaffold steps with an iron bar in his hand and the frenzied expression of someone fully prepared to lay down his life.

“She’ll need you and Cleo, too, to teach her the words and ways. Mags would like that, I figure.” Juniper smiles at her oldest sister. It’s the kind of smile that has farewells and regrets tucked in the corners. Bella doesn’t like it in the least.

“June, what exactly—”

Juniper limps closer and kisses Bella once on the cheek, her lips cracked and hot. Bella falls silent.

Juniper steps around her and pauses in front of Agnes. Agnes frowns at the wolf padding beside her, points up at the stars with the rowan branch in her hand. But Juniper shakes her head. Her hand hovers above the feather-down curl of Eve’s head, not quite touching her, trembling very slightly.

Agnes asks her a question and Juniper answers, still wearing that smile shaped like a goodbye. She kisses Agnes’s cheek, too.

It’s only as she turns away and stands staring into the flames—her hair fluttering in the heat, her eyes steady—that Bella understands what she’s going to do.

Juniper doesn’t have much time, but she has time enough to say goodbye to her sisters.

Agnes is clutching Eve in one arm and her rowan bough in the other, scowling at Juniper. “Where’s Gideon? Why is that thing following you?” Her eyes flick to the wolf still walking patiently at her side. “It’s time to go, June.” Agnes points up at the sky.

Juniper remembers lying in bed between her sisters when she was young, listening to the slur and stomp of their daddy downstairs. Agnes would stroke the hair back from Juniper’s forehead and whisper, It’ll be alright.

Even as a child Juniper knew it was a lie. But it was the kind of lie that became true in the telling, because at least there was someone in the world who loved her enough to lie.

Agnes is frowning so fiercely at her that Juniper thinks she must know what’s coming, must see it in the tremble of Juniper’s hand over her daughter.

“What’s going on?”

Juniper leans down to kiss her cheek. “It’ll be alright.”

She turns to face the flames.

She hesitates. Partly because Gideon Hill is railing and screaming inside her, straining against her will like a mad dog against the leash, but mostly because she likes being alive and