Madame Zina nods amiably and hands her the brown paper sack sealed with wax. Concern crimps her black brows. “No need to look so glum, girl. I don’t know what your man or your god has told you, but there’s no sin to it. It’s just the way of the world, older than the Three themselves. Not every woman wants a child.”
Agnes almost laughs at her: Of course she wants a child. Of course she wants to lay its sleeping cheek against her breastbone and smell its milk-sweet breath, to become on its behalf something grander than herself: a castle or a sword, stone or steel, all the things her mother wasn’t.
But Agnes wanted to take care of her sisters, once. She won’t bring another life into the world just to fail it, too.
She doesn’t know how to put any of her foolish, doomed wanting into words, so she shrugs at Madame Zina, feeling the bones of her shoulders grate.
“Let me read the cards for you. Free of charge.” Zina gestures to an armchair that looks like it was once pink or cream but is now the greasy color of unwashed skin. Ragged red curtains droop over the arm.
“No, thank you.”
Zina runs her tongue over her teeth, eyes narrowed. “I could read hers, if you like.” Her eyes are on Agnes’s belly.
Agnes sits as if something heavy has hit the backs of her knees.
Zina settles herself across from her and produces a pack of over-sized cards with gold stars painted on their backs and edges gone soft with use.
“Her past.” She flips over the Three of Swords, showing a ruby-red heart with three swords run cleanly through it. Agnes thinks of her sundered sisters and the terrible wounds they’ve dealt one another, seven years old and still unhealed, and shifts uncomfortably in the chair.
“Her present.” Zina lays out three cards this time: the Witch of Swords, the Witch of Wands, and the Witch of Cups. Agnes almost smiles to see them. The Witch of Swords even looks a little like Juniper—her hair a wild splatter of ink, her expression fierce.
“Her future.” The Eight of Swords, showing a woman bound and blind, surrounded by enemies. The Hanged Woman, dangling upside down like a sacrificial animal on the altar. Agnes avoids her gaze.
Zina sets the deck on the table and taps it once. “You draw the last one.”
Agnes reaches out her hand but a sudden wind whips through the open window—night-cool and tricksome, scented faintly with roses—and scatters the deck across the floor. The wind riffles like fingers through the fallen cards before whispering into silence. It leaves a single card face up: the Tower, shadowed and tall.
Agnes’s blood burns at the sight of it. “Here—” She claws the cards off the floor and shoves them at Zina. “Let me choose properly.”
Zina purses her lips as if she thinks Agnes is being a little stupid, but shuffles the deck. She knocks the edges on the table and presents it again.
Agnes turns the card and the Tower leers up at her a second time. A black spire of ink surrounded by white pinpricks. Up close she sees the border is actually a tangle of thorned vines with smears of dull pink for blooms, like tiny mouths. Or roses.
Agnes stands very abruptly. “I’m sorry. I have to go.” She wants nothing to do with that tower or that wicked wind. She knows what trouble looks like when it comes slinking through the open window to tug at the loose threads of your fate.
“Oh, it’s not such a bad reading as all that. She’ll face trials, but who doesn’t in this life?”
Agnes can only shake her head and stumble backward toward the door. She hears Zina call after her—“Come see me when you change your mind. I’m the best midwife in West Babel, ask anyone”—before she is out in the alley, turning right on St. Fortitude.
She walks with one hand fisted in her pocket, palms sweating into the brown paper of the sack, cards hovering behind her eyes like portents or promises: the tower; the heart stabbed thrice over; the three witches.
She can feel the edges of a story plucking at her, making her the middle sister in some dark witch-tale.
Better the middle sister than the mother. Middle sisters are forgotten or failed or ill-fated, but at least they survive, mostly; mothers rarely make it past the first line. They die, as gently and easily as flowers wilting, and leave their three daughters exposed to all the wickedness of the world.
Their deaths aren’t gentle or easy in real life. Agnes was five when Juniper was born, but she remembers the mess of stained sheets and the wet-pearl color of her mother’s skin. The old-penny stink of birth and blood.
Her father watching with a jagged wrongness in his face, arms crossed, not running for help, not ringing the bell that would bring Mama Mags and her herbs and rhymes.
Agnes should have rung the bell herself, should have slipped out the back door and hauled on the half-rotten rope—but she didn’t. Because she was scared of the wrong-thing in her daddy’s eyes, because she chose her own hide over her mother.
She remembers her mother’s hand—white and bloodless as the blank pages at the end of a book—touching her cheek just before the end. Her voice saying, Take care of them, Agnes Amaranth. Bella was older, but she knew Agnes was the strong one.
That first night it was Agnes who washed the blood from her baby sister’s skin. Agnes who let her suck on the tip of her pinky finger when she cried. Later it was Agnes who brushed her hair before school and held her hand in the endless night behind the cellar door.
And it was Agnes who left Juniper to fend for herself, because she wasn’t strong enough to stay. Because survival is a selfish thing.
Now her sisters are here with her in the sinless city and their daddy is dead. Agnes ought to be relieved, but she’s seen enough of the world to know he was just one monster among many, one cruelty in an endless line. It’s safer to walk alone. The brown paper bag in her pocket is a promise that she’ll stay that way.
She passes a tannery, eyes watering with acid or maybe something else. A butcher shop, a cobbler, a stable half-full of police horses idly stamping iron hooves. St. Charity Hospital, a low limestone building that smells of lye and lesions, built by the Church to tend to the filthy, godless inhabitants of West Babel. Agnes has seen nuns and doctors walking the streets, proselytizing at unmarried women and waving purity pledges. But girls who give birth at Charity’s came out grayish and sagging, holding their babies loosely, as if they aren’t certain they belong to them. At the mill most women prefer mothers and midwives, when their time comes.
Now St. Charity’s echoes with the hacking sounds of the summer fever. Someone has drawn a witch-mark across the door, a crooked cross daubed in ash. Agnes wonders if the rumors are right and a second plague is coming.
She crosses the street and distracts herself by reading the tattered posters pasted along fences and walls. Advertisements and ordinances; wanted posters with rain-splotched photographs; bills for the Centennial Fair next month.
On the corner of Twenty-Second Street the brick has been entirely covered by a single repeated poster, like grim wallpaper. It’s crisp and new-looking, the image printed in bold black and red: a raised fist holding a burning torch against the night. Smoke coils from the flames, forming ghoulish faces and animal bodies and distorted words: SIN, SUFFRAGE, WITCHCRAFT. Smaller, saner lettering across the top urges citizens to Vote Gideon Hill! Our Light Against the Darkness!