The Once and Future Witches - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,72
up until you lose the dangerous habit of courage.
Beatrice takes a half-step toward her, but Juniper turns back to face the women still circled around the tree. “Ladies,” she says, and smiles. It’s such a Juniper-ish smile—fey and foolish and dangerous, like an animal spinning to face its hunter, bare-toothed—that Beatrice knows abruptly what she’s about to do. She hears Agnes shout no!
“Hemlock.”
Juniper flings herself backward into Gideon Hill. They topple—him swearing, her howling and thrashing, swinging her staff—and the Sisters of Avalon scatter like a broken string of pearls.
Beatrice watches them running in a dozen directions, screaming, stumbling, leaving scraps of black hung on the broken spokes of the fence. They dodge through the headstones, some of them caught by reaching hands, borne to the earth, some of them vanishing like smoke into the night. Beatrice knows she ought to be running with them, but she’s still made of stone, unmoving.
There’s a tangle of bodies where Juniper once stood. Beatrice catches the shine of boots, the sick thud of fists on flesh. Hill struggles free. He stands panting, wiping blood from his split lip with an absent expression, as if he doesn’t feel any particular way about being violently tackled by a witch.
A pair of officers lumber toward the tree where Beatrice stands still as limestone. She thinks distantly that it might be nice to burn, because at least she’ll never have to see Miss Quinn’s cat’s grin and wonder why she betrayed them.
Someone shoves her between the shoulder blades, hard.
“Run, damn you!” Agnes hisses.
Beatrice runs.
Agnes should have started running as soon as she heard the first scuff of cloak on stone, as soon as she understood they’d walked into a trap.
She stayed. While Juniper flung herself at Gideon Hill, while Bella stood there like a damn statue, while her little sister’s blood turned thick and gelid in her palm.
The last time Juniper got herself in trouble, Agnes had rushed to save her without a second thought. But this time the men are wearing badges on their chests. This time Agnes will wind up in a jail cell, and she knows what happens to women who go to jail with babies in their bellies: they lose them. Either before birth, from rough treatment and poor food, or after it, when some flint-faced doctor rips the baby from their bodies and takes her away, still squalling. Agnes’s daughter would end up in the New Salem Home for Lost Angels. If she isn’t over-lain or shipped out west, Agnes might see her sometimes playing in the alleys, pox-scarred and undersized, with bitter black stones for eyes.
No. Not for anything. Not for the vote or the Sisters or even her own true-blood sisters.
She gives Bella a good shove and runs without looking back, one arm wrapped tight around her belly. Hands reach for her and she twists away from them. They tangle in her long cloak and she scrabbles for the clasp, sending it winging free behind her.
Each footfall is a slap against her stomach, jarring her hips. Her hair clings sweaty and tangled against her neck. She dodges behind a white pillar of stone and doubles over, heaving, choking back coughs.
There are boot-steps and raised voices behind her, growing nearer.
She fumbles a candle-stub from her pocket and draws a shaky, desperate X of wax on the stone. It’s men’s magic—“good for a quick getaway,” Mr. Lee had said, smiling his crooked smile. She gave him an arch look. “And are you often in need of getaways, Mr. Lee?”
“Oh, weekly, Miss Eastwood.”
Across the room, Juniper made a blech sound.
Now Agnes pants the string of Latin he taught them. Lightness fills her, as if her bones are hollowing out. A black twist of hair unpeels from her neck and floats lazily upward, as if gravity has briefly forgotten its business.
She runs again. This time she’s a thrown stone skipped across a pond, a gull skimming above the waves, there and gone again. The sounds of pursuit fade behind her.
Agnes braids a rope of hair for herself and climbs back over the cemetery gate. She runs alone through the quiet streets, her feet weightless and silent. She thinks of the Hanged Woman lying flat on Madame Zina’s tabletop, of Juniper disappearing beneath a wave of knuckles and boots.
She slows, staring down at the palm where her sister’s blood is cracking and flaking. Don’t leave me, Juniper begged her. Take care of them, her mother told her.