Juniper is whooping and thumping Agnes too hard on the back, already badgering Bella about the Lost Way, and Bella is shushing her to no discernible effect, when footsteps sound behind them.
Agnes turns to see the secretary girl from the Women’s Association, with her cornsilk hair and blue-bruised jaw. As she approaches, Agnes sees she’s not as mousy as she’d thought: her eyes are hard, shining with newborn conviction.
“Jennie?” Juniper asks. “What—”
“I want to join.” Jennie says it very fast, like a person diving into cold water before they can change their mind.
“That’s nice,” Juniper says. “Join who?”
Jennie frowns as if she thinks Juniper is making fun of her. “You.” Her eyes skitter to Agnes and Bella. “Your new society.”
Bella starts to say something calm and reasonable, like,There’s been some sort of misunderstanding! We’re not forming a society at all. Sorry for your trouble, but Juniper is already reaching out a welcoming hand, smiling with all the glee of a missionary contemplating a convert.
“Why, Jennie. You can be our first member.”
Bella makes a wheezy, punctured-tire noise. “I’m not sure—I don’t know—” But Juniper has an arm slung over Jennie’s shoulder and Jennie is smiling a shy smile.
“Well.” Bella sighs. “There were really four musketeers, anyway.”
Tell your tale and tell it true,
Cross my heart and hope to die.
Strike me down if I lie.
A spell for secrets kept and told, requiring bindweed & blood
The Calamitous Coven.”
“No.”
“Eve’s Army.”
“No! It ought to be about, I don’t know,sisterhoodorunion—”
“The Ladies Union of Giving the Bastards What’s Coming to Them.”
“James Juniper, if you can’t be serious, at least be quiet.”
Juniper subsides, slouching lower against the wall. As a clandestine society of would-be witches, Juniper had anticipated that their first order of business would be exciting and magical, like burning the Sign of the Three across City Hall or turning the Hawthorn River to blood.
Her sisters and Miss Jennie Lind apparently thought otherwise. The four of them have been stuck in Agnes’s cabbagey room at South Sybil for hours now, discussing safe houses and membership oaths and other disappointingly unwitchy subjects.
Jennie is even taking honest-to-Evenotes, sitting on Agnes’s bed with Bella’s little black book propped on her knees. She’s the one who suggested their society have a name, although she has so far ignored each of Juniper’s excellent suggestions.
“The Sisters of Sin.”
Jennie’s pen doesn’t move.
“What about—” Bella begins, then bites her lip. “What about the Sisters of Avalon?” It takes less than a second’s silence for Bella to begin backtracking and hand-wringing. “Perhaps not. It sounds a bit like the Daughters of Tituba, doesn’t it, and we hardly want to be mistaken for make-believe. And it’s so provocative to associate ourselves so openly with the Last Three—”
But Agnes is smiling and Jennie’s pen is moving across the top of the page, and Juniper can feel the name settling over them, shining in their faces. Juniper has a goosefleshed premonition that it will be printed in papers and on wanted posters, whispered through the alleys and mill-floors, passed like a lantern from hand to hand.The Sisters of Avalon, they call themselves. Did you hear?The looks exchanged, the flash of longing in their eyes.
“Excellent.” Jennie finishes the last flourish of the name. “And what about titles and duties? Should they be elected positions, do you think?”
Juniper finds that this somewhat dampens the shine of their new name. “Positions?”
“Well, I mean—secretary, treasurer, president, vice president, press liaison, head of recruitment . . .” Jennie ticks them off on her fingers.
