The Once and Future Witches - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,77
a queen, and royalty requires no armor.
Quinn steps sideways through another door. It’s only as Beatrice follows her and sees the sign—ARAMINTA’S SPICES & SUNDRIES—that she realizes it’s the same shop she visited only hours before.
Araminta’s Spices & Sundries is a very different sort of establishment by moonlight. There are black wax candles dripping onto bronze saucers and green bottles lining the shelves with labels like Hellebore, collected after rain and Hen’s teeth. The other-smell has grown stronger, wilder and darker, unmistakable for anything except what it is: witching.
“Does this happen every night?” Beatrice doesn’t know why she whispers it.
“Lord, no. Only on full moons.” Quinn leans an elbow on the counter and dings the brass bell three times. “It’s famous, in certain circles. People come up from miles away, hoard their goods and recipes all month . . .”
A small, regal woman shuffles up to the counter wearing a wide-brimmed hat hung with lace. Her face behind the veil is all cheekbone and chin, bones and angles, but the cheeks lift in a smile when she sees Quinn.
“Evening,” Quinn greets her. She nudges Beatrice, who lowers the dark drape of her hood.
The woman stares at Beatrice for a long, still second before sighing, “Oh, Cleo,” very much like a mother whose daughter has brought home a particularly unlovely pet and begged to keep it.
Quinn answers with crisp formality. “The third spectacle was an ambush. I saw at least four of the Sisters taken into custody, including their leader. Her blood-sister.” She tilts her head at Beatrice. “When I understood what was happening I . . . intervened.”
The woman behind the counter—Araminta?—murmurs something like obviously.
“With your permission, we’ll stay here till dawn.” The woman’s eyes slide between them again, a little too knowing; Beatrice squirms. “And then in the morning I’ll take her . . . wherever she likes.”
“The Hall of Justice, I suppose,” Beatrice sighs, and finds herself the object of two identical yellow stares. “T-to sort all this out.”
Araminta begins to laugh then, a rolling cackle, and does not stop for a long time. “Oh, sweet Saints preserve us. You’re going to march straight into the lion’s den and do what? Ask them real nice to give your sister back? This”—she waves a knobbed knuckle at Beatrice but addresses Quinn—“is exactly the kind of foolishness I was talking about. This is why we’re better off keeping to ourselves.”
“Excuse me,” Beatrice says stiffly. “My sister has been arrested on false charges”—well, probably false—“and they can’t hold a woman indefinitely without hard evidence.”
This only provokes an even longer, more extravagant laugh from Araminta. She’s thumbing actual tears from her eyes by the time it subsides.
Araminta turns away to face a gilded cage that sits behind the counter. She extends two fingers through the bars to stroke the creature inside it: a rabbit, whose fur is such a deep and starless black that it seems to swallow the candlelight like an open mouth.
Araminta addresses Beatrice over one shoulder. “They can do exactly whatever they want, child. I’d bet my eye-teeth your sister is already in the Deeps.” She catches sight of Beatrice’s face and the carved lines around her mouth soften very slightly. “I’m sorry for it. Truly, I am. But it’s too late for her now.”
It’s not the harshness of the words that undoes Beatrice; it’s the pity lurking beneath them. Terror closes like cold water above her.
If Quinn or Araminta says anything further, Beatrice doesn’t hear it. She is distantly aware of an arm around her shoulders, shepherding her behind the counter and up a narrow flight of stairs; a warm room that smells of spice and skin; a bed spread with saffron quilts.
She lies awake listening to the murmur of voices in the street and the tocking of a clock somewhere in the house—too-late, too-late—until Quinn’s voice tells her to sleep, and she does.
Beatrice dreams of cellars and locked doors and wakes with her own fingers clawing at her throat.
Dust motes dance above her, suspended in sunlight. Pigeons burble at the window. She is alone, though there’s a hollowed-out warmth in the bed beside her, as if someone has lain next to her in the night. Her spectacles are folded neatly on the bedside table.
Beatrice looks at them, picturing the hands that placed them there and feeling a dangerous tenderness creep over her, before she realizes the thing she doesn’t feel: her youngest sister. The line between them has gone slack and dead as a cut tendon.