Juniper doesn’t seem to have heard her. There’s a glassy vacancy in her face that makes Agnes think of a little girl watching her father yell with her hands pressed over her ears, refusing to hear.
Agnes unpeels her fingernails from her palms and carefully doesn’t look at the cedar staff propped by the door. “My shift starts soon. I’ll talk to Mr. Malton, see if they need another girl on the floor. You can”—she swallows, feeling the bounds of her circle stretch like seams that might split, and makes herself finish—“you can stay here. Till you’re on your feet.”
But Juniper lifts her chin, looks down her crooked nose at Agnes. “I’m not working at some factory. I already told you: I’m signing up with the suffrage ladies. I’m going to find that tower. Fight for something.”
It’s such a youngest-sister thing to say that Agnes wants to slap her. In the witch-tales it’s always the youngest who is the best-beloved, the most-worthy, the one bound for some grander destiny than her sisters. The other two are too ugly or selfish or boring to get fairy godmothers or even beastly husbands. The stories never mentioned boardinghouse rent or laundry or aching knuckles from a double-shift at the mill. They never mentioned babies that needed feeding or choices that needed making.
Agnes swallows all those horseshit stories. “That’s all well and good, but causes don’t pay much, I heard. They don’t feed you or give you a place to sleep. You need to—”
Juniper’s lips peel back in a sudden animal snarl. “I don’t need a thrice-damned thing from you.” She takes a step closer, finger aimed like an arrow at Agnes’s chest. “You left, remember? I made it seven years without you and I sure as shit don’t need you now.”
Guilt worms in Agnes’s belly, but she keeps her face set. “I did what I had to.”
Juniper turns away, pulling on her cloak, running fingers through her black-bracken hair. “Bella knows something, seems like. Is Bethlehem Heights a county or a city?”
Agnes blinks. “It’s a neighborhood. On the east side, just past the College.”
“Don’t see why a city should need more than one name. So where’s Second and Sanctity?”
“The streets are numbered, June. You just follow the grid.”
Juniper shoots her a harassed look. “How’s that supposed to help if I don’t know where—” Her face goes blank. Her eyes trace some invisible line through the air. “Never mind. Don’t need a damn grid, after all.” She takes the cedar staff and limps into the hall as if she knows precisely where she’s going.
Which, Agnes realizes, she does. She feels it, too: a tugging between her ribs. An invisible kite-string stretched tight between her and her sisters, thrumming with unsaid things and unfinished business. It feels like a beckoning finger, a hand shoving between her shoulder blades, a voice whispering a witch-tale about three sisters lost and found.
But witch-tales are for children, and Agnes doesn’t like being told what to do. She shuts her door so hard the cross-stitched verse swings on its nail. She listens alone to the uneven thump of her sister’s footsteps.
Three circles woven together, or maybe three snakes swallowing their own tails: Beatrice has seen this shape before. Beatrice knows to whom it belongs.
The Last Three Witches of the West.
It’s the sign the Maiden left carved into the trunks of beech trees, the sign the Mother burned into her dragon-scale armor, the sign the Crone pressed into the leather covers of books. Beatrice has seen it printed in blurred ink in the appendices of medieval histories and described in the journals of witch-hunters and occasionally mis-identified in Church pamphlets as the Sign of Satan.
It doesn’t belong in the modern world. It certainly doesn’t belong in the City Without Sin, carved into a door on a tower that shouldn’t exist.
Beatrice escapes the labyrinth of the West Babel slums with her skin humming and her fingers shaking. She flags down a trolley and lets the electric whir drown out the rising hustle of the city, the calls of west-side street vendors and the misery of the mills and even the memory of her sisters’ faces, fresh and sharp as mint-leaves in her mouth.
(They’re alive and whole and their daddy is dead. The thought is deafening, a flood of hope and dread and hurt.)
Mr. Blackwell isn’t yet at his desk when Beatrice arrives at the library. Beatrice is relieved; there will be no one to see her pale-faced and rumpled in the same dress she wore yesterday.
She left the window open overnight and her office smells cool and damp, as if she is stepping into a starlit wood instead of a cramped room. The Sisters Grimm lies open on her desk, its pages rippling softly in the breeze.
Beatrice flips to the final page of the final story, traces the verse in faded ink. The wayward sisters, hand in hand. She thinks the spell looks somehow even fainter, as if it’s aged several decades since Beatrice last saw it; she thinks she might be losing her mind.
She turns back to the title page: The Tale of Saint George and the Witches. Mama Mags’s version was nothing like the Grimms’, all neat and cheery. The way she told it the Last Three had not flown to Avalon in terror, but in a desperate attempt to save the last remnants of their power from the purge. They’d built something—some great construct of stone and time and magic—that preserved the wicked heart of women’s magic like seeds saved after the winnowing.
Sometimes Mags said Saint George had simply torched their working along with the Three themselves. Other times she said it had vanished along with the isle of Avalon itself, drifting out of time and mind, lost to the world. But, she would whisper with a wink, what is lost, that can’t be found, Belladonna?
(Mags had always called them by their mother’s-names—the old-fashioned second-names given by mothers to daughters—but St. Hale’s had found the practice blasphemous. Eventually Beatrice had learned to forget the heathen indulgence of her mother’s-name and become merely Beatrice.)
Beatrice has heard similar portents and promises over the years, has even heard it given a name: the Lost Way of Avalon. It’s an absurdity, she knows—the Last Three themselves are three-quarters myth and witch-tale, generally only taken seriously by oracles or zealots or the occasional seditious schoolgirl—and Beatrice doesn’t see how witchcraft could be bound to a single place or object.
And yet.
Yesterday Beatrice stood beneath the light of strange stars in the shadow of a black tower, where her sister saw the sign of the Last Three.
What is lost, that can’t be found? The words Mags taught them alongside a hundred other songs and rhymes. Senseless, silly, utterly insignificant to the grand warp and weft of time.
Unless they aren’t. Unless there are words and ways waiting among the children’s verses; power passed in secret from mother to daughter, like swords disguised as sewing needles.
Beatrice removes her little black notebook from its drawer and writes out the entirety of The Tale of the Sleeping Maiden. She stares out the window, thinking of maidens and drops of blood and tall towers surrounded by roses and truths wrapped in lies.
There’s a strange wriggle in the corner of Beatrice’s eye. Her gaze flicks back to the desk: there is an odd, many-fingered shadow cast over the Grimms’ book.