When she returns, Gideon Hill is at the judge’s bench, whispering. The judge stands, flushed and blinking, his white collar wilting.
“This court, convened on September the twenty-first in the year eighteen-hundred and ninety-three, finds the Eastwood sisters guilty on all charges.” He clacks his hammer once. “They will burn at dusk tomorrow.”
Over the sudden noise—the murmurs andhear-hears, the curses of the officers now wrestling Juniper back into her iron mask—Bella hopes no one notices that Agnes is smiling.
The first time Gideon Hill visited Juniper in her prison cell she was reeling and wounded, stunned to meet a witch in the Deeps beneath New Salem.
This time, she’s the witch. This time, she’s waiting for him.
The moon has already risen and ripened by the time she hears the soft tap of boots, the click of claws. The steps pause outside her door.
She thinks of beasts who came for maidens in the night, of knights who plucked princesses from their towers like fruit from the branch.
A hissed exhalation, a twist of shadow, and Gideon Hill and his dog are standing in her cell. He’s not himself, she sees, or maybe more himself: his features are the same, but the muscles beneath them are arranged differently. His shoulders are no longer stooped, his spine no longer furled.
Juniper looks at him through the iron bars of her bridle, waiting.
He flicks his hands and a pair of five-fingered shadows peel lazily away from the window and inch toward Juniper. She doesn’t recoil when they slide over her bare ankles, crawl like hands up the thin cotton of her shift. Her collar flares hot beneath their touch and her breath hitches in her throat—but the shadows pass on, coiling like snakes around her bridle.
The bit slides from Juniper’s mouth. She rolls her jaw and listens to the wet pop of tendons and bones. “Still paying house calls before sunrise, I see. Guess you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, can you?”
Hill’s eyes sharpen at the wordold, searching her face for hidden messages or veiled threats.Keep him stupid, Agnes warned her.
“I’m still not in the mood for a confession, if that’s what you came for.” Juniper knows it isn’t.
The sharpness leaves his features. He gives her a strange, angled smile, almost wry. “No, I thought not. May I sit?”
Juniper makes a grand gesture to the bench opposite her, shackles clanking. She tries to keep her face scornful, but there’s a tenseness in her stomach, a whisper of uncertainty. She expected Gideon to gloat or sneer or possibly rave, to torment her like a cat with cornered prey. It’s what her daddy did as he dragged them to the cellar, drunk with his own power.
Gideon’s face doesn’t look much like her daddy’s. It’s watchful in the moonlight, hungry in some way that Juniper doesn’t understand. “You must hate me,” he observes.
Juniper feels her eyebrows rise. “You make it pretty damn easy.”
A soft laugh from the shadows. “Yes, well. One does what one must to survive, and not all of it is pleasant. I thought you might understand that better than anyone.”
Juniper doesn’t say anything. She thinks of the slide of snake scales, the addled terror in her daddy’s face at the very end.
“I was wondering, Miss Eastwood, if I might tell you a story. And then ask you a question, after.”
Juniper thinks about telling him precisely where he can shove his story. Thinks about showing him the swollen red places where the needles burrowed deep, the blackening bruises along her knees and knuckles, and telling him he already asked enough damn questions.
He seems to see her answer in her face, because he withdraws something from his breast-pocket: a battered brass locket. “Here. A trade in good faith.”
He places Mama Mags’s locket on the bench beside her. Juniper tries hard not to scrabble for it too eagerly, to press it too hard against her breastbone. “I only ask a little of your time, in exchange.”
The locket is warm against her skin, despite their hours apart. She leans back against the wall, and listens.
nce upon a time there were a brother and a sister who loved each other very much because they had no one else to love them.
The sister told the brother it wasn’t always so—she remembered the warmth of their mother’s arms, the boom of their father’s laughter—but the little boy never knew their parents as anything but hungry and hateful, with bitter coals for hearts.
In time they grew hungrier and more hateful, until one day their mother led them into the deepest dark of the woods. She gave them a single loaf of bread, more sawdust than wheat, and told them to wait for her return. They waited, as the owls swooped and the badgers burrowed, as the woods turned from blue to black and the tears froze on their cheeks, but their mother never came back. The little boy found that he, too, had a bitter coal burning in his heart.
The boy and his sister wandered farther into the woods. They ate their meager loaf of bread and shared the last crumbs with a black raven who watched them from the trees. The raven gave them a long, red stare, then led them along a twisting path until they found a little house tucked beneath the roots of an ancient oak.
Juniper thinks she knows this tale. In the version her sister told her, the house is made of gingerbread.
The house was crooked and wild-looking, and so was the woman who lived inside it. “A witch,” the boy whispered to his sister, but she didn’t seem to mind.
