He’s holding the iron pole of her banner. He lifts it almost idly, as if he doesn’t know what he’s about to do.
But Juniper knows. She’s had too many hands raised against her, too many bruises, too many long nights in the lonely black of the cellar. He’s going to hurt her, maybe kill her, because there’s no one to stop him. Because he can.
Juniper keeps a little flame flickering in her chest, a bitter, hungry thing just waiting for something to burn. Now it blazes high, a towering, terrible thing. A killing thing.
She claws at the locket on her chest, pops it open. A pair of curved fangs rattle into her palm and she crushes them, feeling the bone splinter into flesh. She reaches for her cedar staff, slicks her blood along it.
Her staff is tight-grained and oiled smooth from all those hours beneath her hand. By all natural laws the blood ought to bead up along its surface, but Juniper has never cared much for natural laws. The cedar drinks her blood up, every drop.
The boy is watching her, head a little tilted. He’s not afraid—why would he be? She’s just a young crippled girl reaching for her cane, he’s a man with knuckles white around a weapon. Both of them know how this story goes.
But oh, not this time. This time the girl has the words and ways to change the story.
He’ll be afraid, before the end. Her daddy was.
The words wait in her throat like matches waiting to be struck. Juniper thinks she ought to care about the cost of speaking them—a boy’s life, the lives of the fools shouting and shoving nearby, the six other girls who’d followed her into this mess, who didn’t deserve to wind up on the scaffold beside her—
But all the caring was beaten and burned out of her, and now she’s just hate with a heartbeat.
May sticks and stones break your bones.
Agnes sees her sister fall. She sees her black-feather hair disappear, her white-wing cloak vanish beneath the mass of bodies, and she doesn’t move.
She stands on a stoop at the edge of St. Mary-of-Egypt Avenue, watching the crowd become a mob become a riot, thinking: It’s her own damn fault.
She has one hand on her belly, a half-moon heavy with the promise of a person still-becoming, already precious to her.
Too precious to risk for the sake of a grown-ass woman who should’ve known better.
Agnes grips the iron railing of the stoop and stares into the heaving crowd, looking for a glimpse of white, some sign of her wild, foolish sister. She knew as soon as she saw the note it would mean nine kinds of trouble.
And yet: this afternoon she rattled north on the trolley. She waited outside the Fair gates, unwilling to waste a hoarded nickel on a ticket. She heard the distant roar of the crowd, saw the VOTES FOR WOMEN banner snapping bright against the sky. Watched her sister limping at the head of a line of women, like a pied piper dressed in white, and felt a swell of something suspiciously like pride in her chest.
Agnes trailed behind them, her feet flat and aching from the weight of the baby. Maybe she was half hoping Juniper would look over her shoulder and see her. Maybe she was just spooked by the souring mutters around her, the resentful curl of lips and the coil of fingers into fists. New Salem is a well-behaved city, as cities go, but Agnes knows trouble when she sees it.
And now here she is, standing on a high stoop beside a cluster of women with low-cut dresses and rouged cheeks. None of them look especially concerned by the heave and froth of the riot below.
Juniper falls. Agnes stays put.
Until she feels her sister’s wrath scorching through the line between them.
She knows what Juniper is going to do because she did it once before. She’d been a girl then, full of little girl’s venom. She hadn’t quite killed him—maybe she didn’t quite want to, maybe she lacked the will—and the truth was forgotten in the fire that followed. Lots of things could be forgotten back home, looked away from until they were lost altogether.
Now Juniper is a grown woman with a grown woman’s will, and Agnes knows some fool man is going to die.
But it isn’t for his sake that Agnes stumbles down the steps and into the riot. Cities forget less easily.
She elbows and claws her way through the crowd, one arm braced around her belly. Someone tears at her hair. A shoulder thuds against her jaw. She doesn’t stop.
There’s Juniper, looking up from the street with her eyes black and burning. A boy stands above her, iron bar raised high.
Between them, there is a snake. Red as blood, red as lips, red as the rich heart of a cedar tree. It coils around itself, neck arching in a way that makes the boy take a step back, his weapon tumbling from nerveless fingers. Around them a circle of silence grows as the crowd watches, half-hypnotized by the subtle pattern of the snake’s scales, the hot smell of witching.
The snake’s eyes glow like sun through sap, fixed upon the boy, and Agnes knows it’s going to strike. It’s going to bury its borrowed fangs into his flesh and he’s going to die screaming. And, in a few minutes or days, so will her sister. This city could never suffer such a witch to live for long.
So Agnes does something very, very stupid. She doesn’t think as she does it, doesn’t ask herself why she would risk her life and more than her life, her everything-that-matters, for the sister who hates her. The sister she abandoned once before.
Agnes steps between the boy and the snake. She meets her sister’s eyes.
There’s a tilted second when she thinks Juniper won’t stop. That she’s too full-up with fury to care if her serpent strikes her sister or a stranger, so long as someone pays, someone hurts like she does.
Juniper’s eyes flicker, leaf-shadows shifting. She lunges and grabs the red snake by the throat. It twists in her hand, writhing like a live thing instead of a stray scrap of witching, before it goes rigid. And then there’s nothing but a red-cedar staff in her sister’s hand.
Agnes becomes aware that she hasn’t taken a breath in some time. She closes her eyes and sways, tasting the sweet soot of the city’s air in her throat, feeling the spark still safe inside her, still alive.
Then a voice behind her—the boy whose life she just saved, the ungrateful little shit—shouts, “Witches!”
Juniper is—she doesn’t know what she is. Ashes, raked coals. Whatever is left when a fire burns itself out. She’s looking up at her sister—and what is Agnes doing here? How is she standing above Juniper with her eyes steady and cool as creek-stones?—when someone shouts Witches! and hell, which had already broken loose, breaks looser.
The word swoops through the crowd, batlike. Glass shatters against stone. Screams echo down alleys. Feet rush both toward them and away. Juniper lies there, wrung out with witching and will, until she sees hard hands shove against Agnes’s back. Agnes falls, braid arcing, and Juniper hears the hollow smack of her body against the cobblestones.
Then Juniper is scrambling to her feet, swinging her staff in wild circles, shouting, “Get away, get the hell away from her!”
She loops a hand beneath her sister’s arm and hauls her upright. “C’mon, Ag, we got to move.” She claws the white cloak away from her throat, feels it catch and tangle in the bodies behind her. She limps sideways through the roil of the crowd, tugging Agnes beside her. There’s a thin moaning coming from somewhere, like an animal in pain; it’s only when Agnes pauses to swear that Juniper realizes it’s coming from her sister.
The riot is swirling and thickening around them, rising like floodwater, and Juniper can’t find Jennie or Inez or Electa, all the other girls who followed her into this mess. She can’t see any way out, any place to run.
Agnes points to a high stoop where three ladies are watching the street through long lashes. One of them is smoking a thin-rolled cigarette. “There!”
Juniper slants toward them, flinging elbows, crushing toes beneath her staff. She climbs the short steps, panting.
A woman in red silk watches her with no particular expression on her face. She removes the cigarette from between her lips. “Y
ou ladies in trouble?”
Juniper checks to see that the red-silk woman has a shadow beneath her, and that it seems to possess the correct number of arms and hands. She hitches a sideways, desperate smile at her. “Might be.”
The woman gives her a motherly nod. “Then you’re in the right place, love.” She reaches casually behind her to unlatch the door, knocking it open with one hip. The stale sweetness of perfume and liquor drifts out, and a few jangling notes of ragtime.
Juniper dives into the dimness with her sister’s hand in hers.
Jane and Jill went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water.
Spill it thrice, say it twice,
Or soon it will get hotter.
A spell against burns, requiring clear water & a strong will
The smell reminds James Juniper of a chestnut in bloom, sharp and sour in the back of her mouth. It hangs heavy in the shadowed hallway and grows stronger as they follow the red-silk lady up two flights of stairs and into a small bedroom. The wallpaper is rich and flowery and the bed is a frosted cupcake of pillows and feather-down.
“This place is awful nice, isn’t it, Ag?” Juniper offers. She’s thinking of her sister’s mildewed room in the boarding house. “Bet it costs a pretty penny, though.”
The red-silk lady—who introduced herself with a casual flick of her fingers as Miss Florence Pearl, proprietress of Salem’s Sin, No. 116 St. Mary-of-Egypt Avenue—cracks a cackle. Cigarette smoke coils from her nose. “Sure does.”
Juniper sees her shoot a knowing wink at Agnes, who snorts, then flinches.
Miss Pearl’s eyes narrow. “I’ll send Frankie up. Her auntie taught her rootspeak back in Mississippi, she’s ten times better than those butchers over at St. Charity’s. And dinner—you picky about food? I was almost the whole nine months.” She ticks her chin at Agnes’s belly, and Juniper notices for the first time the way it’s pushed tight against her dress, the way her sister cradles it in her arms.
Oh.
Juniper sees her sister standing above her again, strong and steady, risking herself to save some stupid, vicious boy—and risking a second someone, too.
Agnes shakes her head, lowering herself onto the bed with white lips. Miss Pearl sweeps out.
Then they’re alone together with the cupcake bed and the smell of blooming chestnuts and the careful sound of Agnes’s breathing. A gluey silence falls between them.
“So,” Juniper says, “who’s the daddy?” It comes out meaner than she meant it to. She can almost feel Mama Mags’s knuckles on the back of her skull. Mind that tongue, child.
Agnes shakes her head at the floor, still breathing thin through her nose. “Doesn’t matter.” She looks up, meets Juniper’s eyes. “She’s mine.”
“Oh.” Juniper feels a hot flare in the line between them, fierce and defiant. Is that what mother’s love is like? A thing with teeth?
Juniper’s mother was never anything to her but a secondhand story from her sisters, a curl of hair in a locket. Juniper never missed her much; she always figured if her mother was worth a damn she would’ve left their daddy or slipped hemlock into his whiskey, and she didn’t do either. Juniper had her sisters, and it was enough. Until it wasn’t.
A second silence falls, thicker than the first. Agnes starts to speak just as Juniper asks, “Why did you leave?”
Agnes frowns at the floor. “You’re the one who left, as I recall.”
“I mean before.”
Juniper already knows why she left. Their daddy was a mean drunk with hard knuckles who never loved anything or anyone as much as he loved corn liquor, and there was nothing for miles but coal seams and sycamores and men just like him. Any girl with a single, solitary lick of sense would want to get as far from Crow County as her feet could carry her, unless they loved the wild green mountains more than they loved themselves.
She’s just too chickenshit to ask her real question: Why didn’t you take me with you?
Agnes looks up at her, then away. “Had to, didn’t I?”
“I guess.” Maybe it’s even true; maybe everybody has to survive the best they can. Maybe her sisters couldn’t afford to haul a wild ten-year-old girl along with them when they ran. “But later. You could’ve come back later.” Or written a letter, at least. Even a single smudged address would’ve been a map or a key to Juniper, a way out.
Agnes shrugs one shoulder. “Only if I wanted to spend the rest of my life locked in the cellar. Daddy told me he’d skin me himself if he ever saw me again, and I guess I believed him.”
“He—what?”
Agnes looks up again, but now there’s a faint crease between her brows. “When he sent me away. He told me he was through with me, that he did his best but God cursed him with wayward daughters, and he washed his hands of us.”
Juniper doesn’t hear anything but the beginning: He sent me away. Her daddy sent Agnes away.
What if her sisters hadn’t cut and run? What if they loved her after all? It’s too huge a thing to think, too dangerous to want. Juniper feels her own pulse rabbiting in her ears, her fingers trembling on the red-cedar staff.
“Why—” She stops, swallows hard. “Why did he send you away?”
The frown between Agnes’s brows goes a little deeper. “You don’t remember?”
Juniper limps to the bed and settles beside her sister. “I remember I was running the mountain that day.” The slant of sun through leaves, the bite of briars, the whip of sassafras and beech leaves against her cheeks. Some days it would take her like that, an animal need to run and keep running, and she would dive through the woods at a pace that would have killed a person who didn’t know every stone and gully of that mountain.
“I was running and then I felt . . .” A tugging in her chest, an invisible need that made her turn around and run even faster. “Well. I remember walking into the old tobacco barn, all dark and hot. You and Bella were there, and so was Daddy . . .” Juniper feels something vast slide beneath the surface of her memory like a whale beneath a ship. She looks away from it. “I was sick for a while after the barn-fire. Mags did what she could, but my foot must’ve got infected. I was hot and dizzy for days, and my head ached.” It’s aching now, a dull warning.
Agnes is watching her face. “Weren’t there ever any rumors about me? After?”
Of course there were rumors: people hissed that Agnes was a whore and a hedge-witch, that she cursed the ewes to lamb out of season and lay down with devils before running off to the city to fornicate.
“No.”
Agnes grunts, very nearly amused, then sighs long and slow. “Well. It’s no secret now: I got myself in a family way. You remember Clay, the Adkins boy?”
There was a whole pack of boys that used to trail after Agnes; Juniper and Bella used to come up with names for them. She thinks the Adkins boy was Cow Pie, or maybe Butter Brains.
“Sure I remember him.”
“Well, he and I . . . I was lonely and he was nice enough, and one thing led to another.” Her voice goes young and soft. “Mags figured it out before I did.”
Juniper thinks of all the girls she used to see slinking across the back acres to Mags’s house, looking for the words and ways to unmake the babies in the bellies. Not all of them young or unwed—some were too old for childbearing or too sick, or had too many hungry mouths already. Mags had helped them all, every one, and buried their secrets deep in the woods. The preacher called it the Devil’s darkest work, but Mags said it was just women’s work, like everything else.
Agnes is rubbing her thumb over the ball of her belly now. “She . . . helped me. It hurt, but it was a good kind of hurting. Like shedding a skin, coming out brighter and bigger. Afterward I buried it beneath a hornbeam on the east side of the mountain, and I thought that was the end of it. I told the Adkins boy to get gone and stay that way. I thought nobody would ever know.”
Juniper remembers all her daddy’s lectures on Eve’s curse and original sin, descending into slurred ra
mbles about weak-fleshed women and their whoring ways. She remembers his eyes gleaming red in the gloom in the barn, his bones showing white through stretched-taut skin, and begins to understand. “How did he find out?”
“I didn’t tell anybody. Not a soul except Mama Mags.” Agnes’s mouth twists, venom in her voice. “And Bella, of course. I told her everything back then.”
“She never—”
“She did. I was watering the horses because Mags said it was fixing to freeze overnight.” Crow County slinks back into her voice, sly and drawling. “Then Daddy turns up and I could see in his face that he knew, about me and Clay, about the pennyroyal and the thing beneath the hornbeam. And then I saw Bella creeping along behind him, all pasty white, and I knew what she’d done.”
Juniper wants to argue. She remembers the feel of her sisters’ hands in hers on summer evenings, the circle they made between them; the promise that was never said aloud but was woven in their hair, written in their blood: that one would never turn against the other. Surely Bella would have died before she broke that trust.
But then Juniper recalls the cold gray of her sister’s eyes, the secrets she keeps safe in her notebook, and stays quiet.
“I told him it wasn’t true, that Bella was a liar and a—” Agnes swallows hard, skips over something. “But he just kept walking toward me. He wasn’t even in his cups—sober as a judge, I’d swear. But he was looking at me like—like . . .”
Juniper knows exactly how he was looking at her: like she was a colt that needed breaking or a nail that needed hammering, some misbehaving thing that could be knocked back into place. Juniper had seen that look. She came running into the barn, tangle-haired, sap-sticky, arms scored by the reaching fingers of the woods, and saw her sisters huddled against the far wall. Her father prowling toward them like a wolf, like a man, like the end of days—
And then—
That unseen thing swims too close to the surface and Juniper looks away. She goes someplace else instead, cool and green.
The Once and Future Witches Page 10