She wonders if all great acts are secretly done for such small reasons; she wonders if the cleaning lady will be the first to find her in the morning, facedown in the Deeps with a red ring around her neck.
She gathers her will around her—a wild, clawing thing, hungry and desperate and half-starved—and speaks the words.
The collar glows dull orange in the darkness, but the borrowed words still tumble from her mouth in a steady stream. The orange deepens to ruby, painting the cell in blood and shadow, and Juniper feels herself falling backward. The collar hisses as it hits the water. Her mouth fills with the sour taste of sewer. Her will doesn’t waver.
Something vast slides invisibly into place, a great key turning in a lock, and the world splits open.
Magic comes roaring through the crack, through the three women who stand in Salem’s past and present. Juniper feels the heat of it crack the cobbles beneath Agnes’s feet and blacken the earth beneath Bella; around her, the Deeps boil.
And the collar around her throat—built to punish street-witches and fortune-tellers, women with nothing but the half-remembered rhymes of their mothers—burns from red to white to black, and then crumbles into gray ash.
The heat fades.
Juniper feels the tower standing tall, rooted like a tree in the middle of New Salem. And she feels her sisters: Agnes, her forehead pressed to heat-cracked stone and her arms doubled around her belly, laughing and sobbing; Bella, held tight in someone else’s arms, too stunned even to feel relief. Alive, both of them.
Juniper lies back in the cooling waters of the Deeps and closes her eyes, listening to the distant beating of their hearts. It’s a peaceful, easy sound, as familiar as rain on the roof.
She thinks she might stay like this, suspended, drifting away from the burned-meat smell of her own flesh and the pain too huge to feel, but a voice is calling her. It’s a familiar voice, querulous and cracked with age. It tells her to wake up, to get on her feet.
Juniper doesn’t much want to, but she knows better than to disobey that voice. She wakes up; she gets on her feet. She tries not to feel the brush of air against the raw mess of her throat.
A ghostly hand touches hers. Juniper knows the hand is a fever-dream or a mirage, a product of the pain pulsing like wine through her skull—but it feels familiar. Warm and knob-knuckled, paper-fleshed.
The hand pulls her forward, folds her fingers around a broken shard of stone. Then it places the edge of the stone against the wall and drags it in a slow, grinding circle.Weave a circle round, Juniper thinks, drunkenly, and mumbles the words again. Her voice sounds wrong in her ears, clotted and strangled.
The stone falls from her fingers as she closes the circle. The scratched shape begins, very faintly, to glow.
She squints at it, stupidly, until the voice clucks its invisible tongue at her and says,Go on, girl.
Juniper places her palm inside the soft shine of the circle. The cell vanishes around her, whipping into the starlit night.
One for sorrow,
Two for mirth,
Three for a funeral,
And four for birth,
Five for life,
Six for death,
Seven to find a merry wife.
A spell for healing, requiring willow bark & silkweed
Beatrice Belladonna is mildly surprised to discover that she is not dead.
She is slumped sideways in a ring of white wax with someone’s arms held fast around her and someone’s voice in her ear. “Oh, thank the Saints,” it breathes, and Bella realizes who the arms and the voice belong to. She considers fainting again, simply to luxuriate in the feeling of Quinn’s body against hers.
“Bella, I think—I think it wants your attention.” With a small, private sigh, Bella opens her eyes.
There is an owl standing on the bare earth before her, except that no natural owl has ever had feathers so black they seem to swallow light, refusing even to reflect the dappled silver of the moonlight. No owl has ever possessed eyes the color of coals: a deep, solemn red. Behind those eyes Bella senses an echo of that vast thing that paused to consider her, as if the owl is a cinder spit from a much greater fire.
Witchcraft itself wearing an animal-skin, Mags used to say.
“Hello,” Bella says shyly. How should one greet a familiar? What does one say to magic fashioned into a shape that suits you?
