The Once and Future Witches
Page 11
Agnes calls her back. “Juniper. June, baby.” Juniper returns to the pretty wallpapered room, to the sister who watches her with wide eyes.
Juniper bridles at the pity in that look. “What?”
Agnes takes up her story like a woman knitting past a dropped stitch, leaving a gaping hole behind her. “You remember the fire, don’t you?”
For a sick second Juniper thinks Agnes means the second fire, the one she set the night she ran north, before she recalls the shatter of her daddy’s lantern as he fell, the spit of oil across dry straw and old timbers, the weeks and weeks of changing bandages and coughing up globs of char and blood.
“Of course I do.” She falters a little. “But I don’t remember . . .” How she survived. How could she remember the inside of the barn as it burned—the rafters bright gold above her, the hideous screaming of the horses, the wet snap of flesh—without remembering how it ended?
“When I was younger I was always burning my fingers when I took the pot off the stove.” Agnes sounds like she’s treading carefully. “Mags gave me some words and ways to keep me safe. I didn’t know if they’d do any good, but Daddy was blocking the door and I still had the water for the horses . . . I threw it in a circle around the three of us and said the words, and it worked. Nearly.” Her eyes flick to Juniper’s left foot, then away, gray with guilt. “Daddy reached in after you, but we didn’t let him take you.”
Juniper always thought her scars look like split branches or spreading roots. Now she can see they look more like the fingers of a burning hand.
“Somebody must have heard the horses or seen the smoke. They dragged us all out, piled wet earth over Daddy to put out the flames. Mags took you away—you were all hot and shaking, I thought you might be dying—” Agnes pauses to swallow again, still not looking at Juniper. “We were sent upstairs while people came in and out. The preacher, the sheriff, half the county it felt like. Then Daddy called us down to his bedside and said it was all arranged. In the morning Bella would go to some school up north, and I would go live with our aunt Mildred.” Their aunt Mildred was a sour crabapple of a woman who lived two counties north and spent her time collecting tiny paintings of Saints and complaining about the many sins of her next-door neighbors. “I ran as soon as I could. Wound up here.”
Juniper wants to ask: How come you never came back for me? She wants to ask: How come you never even wrote? But she’s frightened of the skipped stitches in the story, the things she doesn’t want to see.
“Juniper, I—” Agnes is reaching toward Juniper almost as if she means to wrap her arms around her, and Juniper doesn’t know if she’s going to let her, when someone knocks softly on the door.
The two of them sit straighter, tucking their unruly feelings back inside their chests.
Frankie Black turns out to be a freckled colored girl with velveteen eyes and an accent that makes Juniper homesick. She has Agnes sit up straight and runs her fingertips over the small of her back, pressing and whispering. She lights a honey-colored candle and drips the wax in a pattern of lines and specks. She sings a spell that has a drumbeat rhythm running underneath it, shuffles her feet, tap-tap-tap, and straightens up.
It’s nothing like Mags’s spells, and Juniper watches with narrowed eyes. But Agnes’s face loosens as the pain lifts away, so Juniper figures it must be working. It occurs to her for the first time that there might be more than one kind of witching in the world. The thought is an uncomfortable one, far too large; it reminds her of riding the train across the Crow County line and feeling the country unfold like a map beneath her, flat and endless.
“Miss Pearl says you two should stay till morning. There’s police out looking for two black-haired women. One of them with child”—her eyes cut to the cedar staff on the bed—“one of them with a demon-snake for a familiar.”
Juniper says, “It’s not a familiar,” at the same time Agnes says, “We can pay. For the room, and the lost business.”
Frankie makes a sound somewhere between offense and amusement. “You couldn’t afford us, sweetheart. Miss Pearl says we’re closed up for the night, anyhow. The men are all riled up, looking to prove something. They can look elsewhere. There’s corned beef and rolls if you’re hungry.” She sets a basket on the dresser top and leaves them alone again.
The honey-candle is sitting in a waxy puddle and the food is nothing but crumbs caught in the valleys of the down comforter before either of them says a word to the other.
Agnes is slouched against the headboard, her body slack in the absence of pain, the baby swimming soft inside her.
Juniper has her arms wrapped around her knees. Her eyes slide over Agnes’s belly. “How come you came today?”
Agnes shrugs, because shrugging is easier than talking about guilt and love and the things that still stretch between them after seven years of silence. “How come you invited me?”
Juniper shrugs back, sullen, and counters, “How come you saved that idiot boy?”
Agnes almost laughs at her. For a quick girl, Juniper can be awfully slow sometimes. “I wasn’t saving that idiot boy, Juniper.”
Juniper narrows her eyes. Her mouth is half-open to retort when she realizes who Agnes was saving. Her face softens.
Juniper glances again at the fragile swell of Agnes’s belly. “But—even with—”
“I guess.” Agnes attempts a smile. “Mama told me to take care of you.” Maybe Agnes owed her, for all the times she’d failed. Or maybe it wasn’t about debts or duties at all; maybe it was just that she didn’t want to see her youngest sister strung up in the city square.
Apparently she’s said something wrong, because Juniper is bristling and sharpening again. “I don’t need you to take care of me. I was about to teach that boy a lesson. Teach them all a lesson.”
Her eyes are seething, shadowed. They make Agnes think of maiden-stories—the kind about young witches who sing ships to their deaths, who hunt the woods at night with their seven silver hounds, who turn sailors into pigs and feast every night.
Agnes wants to be angry at her—for being so careless and cruel and so terribly young—but she can’t quite manage it. She’s been all of those things herself; she knows the black alchemy that transmutes hurt into hate. She remembers climbing barefoot from the attic window, meeting some poor boy in the woods and tearing at his clothes with more than lust, digging her nails too hard into his skin. It felt so good to be the one hurting, instead of being hurt.
So she doesn’t tell her sister to shut her damn mouth and think for a second. Instead she asks, “And then what? After you teach them all a lesson. After you burn them or bite them or curse them. What happens after that?”
Juniper’s mouth bows, petulant as a child.
“I know why you’d want to—Saints, so does every woman alive—but think what it costs.”
“I don’t care,” Juniper spits.
She never has. When she found them in the barn that day she hadn’t cared what might happen to three nothing-girls found beside their father’s corpse; when she led those suffrage ladies into a riot she hadn’t cared what kind of hell it started.
Agnes rubs the ball of her belly with a thumb, thinking of the little spark inside it. “I know you don’t. But I do.” The baby kicks in answer, a butterfly touch, and Agnes tilts her head at her sister. “You want to feel her move? The baby?”
Juniper stares at her like she’s never heard the word baby in her entire life. She reaches out a cautious hand. Agnes holds it to her belly and they wait together, hushed and still, feeling their hearts beat in their palms. The baby is motionless for so long Agnes is about to give up, until—
Juniper’s face splits in half with the size of her smile, eyes gone summer green. “I’ll be damned. That was her?”
Agnes nods, thinking how young and bright her sister looks right now, wishing she could stay that way. Wishing there was room for her inside Agnes’s circle. “The midwife says she’ll come by the Barley Moon, in August. Maybe
sooner.”
Juniper seems taken aback by this information, as if she thought babies ought to abide by timetables and punch-clocks. She presses her palm to Agnes’s belly a second time, and her expression is so hopeful and wide open that Agnes says, “She could use an aunt.”
Juniper looks up at her, a quick darting glance, like she doesn’t want Agnes to see the hope shining in her face.
“But you’ve got to be more careful. The march today—it was your idea?”
Juniper takes her hand away. “Yes.”
“You saw what happened. The crowd went mad.”
Agnes expects Juniper to turn sullen again, but instead her face creases with thought. “I don’t think they were in their right minds.”
“Oh, don’t be so naive—”
“No, I mean I saw something . . . not right. Shadows moving in ways they shouldn’t, twisting together. It was witching, but darker and stranger than anything Mags ever did.”
Agnes thinks of the shadowless men in the alley and feels the hairs rising on her arms. “But what kind of witch would incite a riot against witches?”
Juniper purses her lips. “That Wiggin woman would. If ever there was a person who would work hard against themselves, it’d be her.”
“I heard those Christian Union types all swear oaths against every kind of witching, even the kind to keep dust off the mantel or mealbugs out of the flour.”
“Well somebody was messing with shadows.”
“All the more reason to be careful.”
“All the more reason to be prepared. To arm ourselves properly.” A fey light comes into Juniper’s eyes and Agnes knows she’s thinking of that black tower and those strange stars, of long-ago magics and long-gone powers. “Listen, the tower we saw that day. I was thinking—you remember the story Mags used to tell us? Saint George and the Last Three? What if it’s the tower? Their tower? I think that’s what Bella thinks, anyway.”
But Agnes doesn’t want to hear about witch-tales and wishes, and she especially doesn’t want to hear about Bella. “Oh, please. It’s a children’s story. And anyway, you seem well enough armed to me. That snake . . .” Agnes swallows. “Was it a familiar?”
Juniper snorts at her. “Did you forget everything Mags taught you? A familiar isn’t a spell or a pet. It’s witchcraft itself wearing an animal-skin. If a woman talks long and deep enough to magic, sometimes the magic talks back. But only the most powerful witches ever had familiars, and I don’t figure there are any of those bloodlines left.” Juniper looks away, and Agnes politely does not mention all the hours Juniper spent in the woods as a little girl, waiting for her familiar to find her.
Juniper gives herself a little shake and shoots Agnes a sickle-moon smile. “But maybe that wouldn’t matter, if we had the Lost Way. Just imagine what we could do.”
Before she can remind herself that the Lost Way of Avalon is a children’s story, Agnes does: she thinks of double-shifts and boarding-house fleas and all the nothing-girls whose highest hope is for a husband like Floyd Matthews, soft-palmed and stupid, and how it would feel to want more. She thinks of her daddy’s knuckles and Mr. Malton’s leers and how it would feel to be the dangerous one, for a change.
But then she thinks of angry mobs and scaffolds and all the things that would happen next, and the baby girl in her belly.
Agnes meets her sister’s gaze as steady as she can. “And what comes after?”
Juniper doesn’t look away. “Come with me in the morning,” she answers. “Come join the suffragists. And find out for yourself.”
Agnes looks into her face, blazing with hope and hunger, young and wild and jagged-edged—and finds she can’t answer. Instead she clears her throat and says, “It’s late. Time for bed, I think.”
Agnes manages not to look at her sister while they ready themselves for bed, unbuttoning and unclasping, taking turns at the chamber pot. It’s only in the last second of light, right before Agnes pinches the candlewick between her fingers, that she sees the silent shine of tears in Juniper’s eyes.
Juniper curls her spine away from her sister but she can still feel the heat of her, hear the steady rush of her breath.
Long past midnight, when even the ceaseless bustle and clank of the city has finally gone still and Juniper thinks she might be able to hear the distant seesaw song of spring peepers, Agnes rolls over beside her.
“I should have come back for you, no matter what. I was scared.”
Of me. Juniper doesn’t know where the thought comes from, why it sounds so certain and so sad.
“I’m sorry, Juniper.” Agnes whispers it to the ceiling, a prayer or a plea.
If Juniper says anything, Agnes will hear the tightness of her throat, the salt-bite of tears in her voice. So she says nothing.
There’s a pause, then: “I’ll come with you in the morning, if you’ll have me.”
Another pause, while Juniper breathes carefully through her mouth. “I’ll have you.” It comes out too rough, a little strangled, but she hears Agnes sigh in relief.
After that Agnes’s breath goes deep and slow and Juniper lies wide awake, thinking about venom and vengeance, praying to every Saint that her sisters never find out how their daddy died.
Bella isn’t here—Bella the betrayer? Bella the Judas?—but Juniper wishes she were. She would ask her for a story and fall asleep on a bed of once-upon-a-times and happily-ever-afters and righted wrongs.
She whispers one to herself, instead.
nce upon a time there was a woodcutter whose wife was with child. But she grew very ill, her golden hair turned brittle gray, and in his desperation the woodcutter went to the local hedge-witch and begged for a cure. The hedge-witch told him of a black tower in the hills covered in green-growing vines even at midwinter. Just three leaves from this vine would cure his wife.
The woodcutter found the black tower and the green-growing vines. He stole his three leaves and brewed them as the witch instructed. Soon his wife was rosy-cheeked and smiling again, her hair the brightest gold. When their daughter was born they named her after the herb that saved her: Rapunzel.
But as they named the baby there came a terrible wind from the east, smelling of earth and ash. Knuckle-bones knocked at their door and they found a bent-backed Crone hunched on their stoop. She wore a tattered black cloak around her shoulders and an asp around her wrist, like a bracelet made of obsidian scales.
She came, she said, to take back what was stolen from her. When the woodcutter pleaded that his wife had already eaten the leaves, the Crone shuffled into the house and peered down at the baby girl. The baby girl peered back at her with eyes the color of green-growing vines.
When the Crone left the house that night, trudging through the silent snow, she carried a baby bundled beneath her cloak.
The Crone raised the girl in her high, lonely tower. Rapunzel grew to love the old woman, and, inasmuch as a witch loves anything, the Crone loved the girl. By the time Rapunzel was half-grown the only sign that she had ever belonged to anyone else was her hair: bright gold, long and shining.
One day when the Crone was away, a traveling bard saw the shine of Rapunzel’s hair through the tower window. He sang to her:
My maiden, my maiden,
Let down your long hair,
Braided tight and shining bright,
A way where once was none.
There followed the usual course of events when a handsome stranger sings to a beautiful maiden, and soon Rapunzel was climbing down a golden rope woven of her own hair, reaching her hand out for his.
The Crone returned just as the pair took their first step away from the tower, hands clasped.
“If you would leave me,” she told Rapunzel, “you must return what belongs to me.”
Rapunzel raised her chin and agreed to pay any price. The Crone bade her close her eyes and touched two cold fingers to their lids. When Rapunzel opened her eyes once more the green-growing color had been taken from them, along with her sight.
The Crone wept, and as her tears touched the stone floor, the tower trembled and fell. Or perhaps it vanished outside of time and memory and took the Crone with it. Perhaps she waits still for her stolen daughter to call out to her.
The only certainty is the tears themselves.
My maiden, my maiden,
Let down your long hair,
Braided tight and shining bright,
A way where once was none.
A spell to escape, requiring three hairs & nimble fingers
When Beatrice Belladonna runs from the riot on St. Mary-of-Egypt’s, she knows two things for certain: that her youngest sister is alive, and that her middle sister is with her.
It shouldn’t comfort her to know that Agnes is there—she learned long ago that she couldn’t trust her when it counted—but it does. If anyone could haul their little sister out of the mess she made and keep her alive through the night, it’s surely Agnes.
“If you’re finished staring at nothing, I would quite like to keep running for our lives now.” Beatrice makes a private note that Miss Quinn grows drier and more cutting under pressure, before bunching her skirts in her fists and following after her.
For a woman born and raised in New Cairo, Quinn possesses an uncanny knowledge of the north side. She leads Beatrice down narrow alleys and nameless back streets, following a winding path that leads them somewhat mystifyingly to the respectable row house where Beatrice rents a room.
“How did you know my address?”
Miss Quinn gives a very unsorry shrug. “Stay inside tonight. The police are awfully scarce this evening, which makes me wonder just who’s behind this mess.”
Beatrice wants to say, Thank you for saving me, or Be careful, or Who exactly are you and what uncanny secrets are you hiding? but Quinn is already turning away, taking long-legged strides down Second Street.