and singing with power.
Her lip splits beneath her teeth. Blood runs hot down her chin, too hot, and drips to the cold water below. Juniper hears the delicate splish as it lands and remembers her blood falling to the limestone cobbles of St. George’s Square—then the whipping wind, the dark tower, the wild smell of roses—Bella’s fingers on her mouth: maiden’s blood.
She knows, then, what her sisters are doing.
“Oh, you fools. You beautiful Saints-damned sinners—” She curses them and cries as she curses, because she knows they are doing it for her. Even though they abandoned her once before, even though they know now what she is—a murderess and a villain, worse than nothing—
It hurts even to think it. They came back for me. She feels something snap in her chest, as if her heart is a broken bone poorly set, which has to break again before it can heal right.
For a moment she pictures herself standing arm in arm with her sisters, triumphant before the Lost Way of Avalon. She knows it will never be. Because—though she can sense the rightness of the words and ways, though she feels her sisters’ will scorching down the line between them—Juniper knows they will fail.
Bella calls. The magic answers.
Cauldron bubble, toil and trouble,
Weave a circle round the throne,
Maiden, mother, and crone.
The heat gathers first in her palms, spreading like fresh-caught flames up her arms, burrowing into the hollow of her throat. The invisible lines between Bella and her sisters—the bindings left behind by that half-worked spell months before—hum like fiddle strings beneath the bow.
The wind rises, and with it comes the calling of night-birds and the feral smell of magic.
The wayward sisters, hand in hand—
She feels Agnes a hundred miles away, lit like a torch in the center of New Salem, the cobbles growing hot beneath her heels. She feels her hands steady on the glass vials, and the bright hiss of tears and milk and blood as they fall.
Burned and bound, our stolen crown—
But where is Juniper? The line between them is thin and weak, far too cold.
Bella kneels on the bare earth of Old Salem, still speaking the spell, magic burning through her. Steam rises from the soil as it boils beneath her.
But what is lost, that can’t be found?
The words feel true in her mouth, like keys sliding into invisible locks. But the heat is consuming her. She pictures her veins glowing hotter and hotter until she ignites, until she is a bonfire with a woman’s voice.
She feels Agnes burning with her, arms wrapped tight around her belly, hair rising around her in the same wind that whips dirt and dead leaves around Bella.
But she doesn’t feel Juniper. There are only two of them, and two is not enough.
The last time she worked this spell—when she was just a librarian named Beatrice who found a few words that shouldn’t exist—she had grown frightened and fallen silent. Without the words the spell suffocated like an airless fire, and the only price was a little Devil’s-fever, quickly cured.
But now she is Belladonna Eastwood, the oldest sister and the wisest, and Juniper needs her.
She circles back to the beginning of the spell in an unbroken chant. The woods dim around her, vanishing in the rising haze of heat. Her lips keep moving, desperate prayers mixing with the words.
—oh hell—Three bless and keep us—weave a circle round the throne—
Distantly, she feels cool fingers across her brow, palms cupping her face. A thumb traces her cheeks and she turns blindly toward it. If she is going to die, let it be with the sweet frost of those fingers against her lips, the taste of ink and cloves on her tongue.
There comes a point when Bella knows she should turn back. It’s like wading into the creek after a storm, the water rushing around your ankles, knowing if you take another step it will pull you under.
Bella takes another step. She goes under.
She is fire. She is pain. She is a crack in the world through which something else—magic or God or the heat of every unanswered wish and impossible dream, burning eternal on the other side of everything—pours through.
She thinks she’s probably dying.
The something-else pauses. It considers her, this dying woman kneeling in a circle of spent candles, her lips still shaping the words that are killing her.
Somewhere very far away, an owl calls.
Bella opens her eyes. Through the haze of heat and tears she sees a shape gliding through the trees, silent as