She stands up from the table, pushing her chair back. “I’d have done the same thing your mother did.” She aims it like a slap, and he rocks back with the force of it. “Did you never think what would have happened if she’d fought? How easy it is for lawyers to take a child away from a woman alone? Did you never think what it must have cost to choose her living son over her dead husband?”
She sees from the sudden white of his face that he never has.
“Sometimes you can’t fight. Sometimes you can only survive.”
He swallows once. “And yet you’re still fighting.”
Agnes draws her half-cloak back over her shoulders. “If you and your boys want to help the Sisters, talk to Annie or Yulia. Not me.”
“Wait—why? What are you doing?”
She looks back once before she leaves, a last greedy glance at the tangle of his hair and the angle of his scar. “Surviving.”
Juniper is a ghost, these days.
She is a silhouette on the windowsill, an apparition in the alley, a woman there and gone again. She is a pocketful of witch-ways and a voice whispering the right words to the right woman, the clack of a cane against cobbles.
She is rarely out in daylight, and she finds she likes the city better by night. It’s stranger and wilder, full of soft voices and scurrying feet. It reminds her of running the mountainside after dark, surefooted and free, certain that if she ran fast enough she would become a doe or a vixen, anything but a girl.
Now she runs along alleys rather than deer trails and ducks beneath laundry-lines rather than pine boughs. Now she runstowardrather than away, and she no longer runs alone.
There are fewer Sisters of Avalon than there once were—some of them were caught, some of them left town a half-skip ahead of the law, some of them were just scared—and they no longer have anything like headquarters. Instead they meet wherever they may: an attic above a hat shop that smells of glue and felt; Inez’s gilded parlor, where they drink wine from golden goblets and laugh themselves sick; a church basement that makes Juniper’s heart race in her throat.
Juniper and Bella bring the Sisters spells written out in plain English and the words disappear up sleeves and down boots. Later they are whispered by those who can read to those who can’t; stitched into handkerchiefs and hems; tucked into the pages of romance novels so frivolous that no man is likely to touch them. In return the Sisters give them bread and soft-baked potatoes, hot pies wrapped in dish towels, baskets of apples. They don’t ask where the Eastwoods live or how they disappear so thoroughly that neither the police nor the angry mobs—nor those eerie, unnatural shadows—can find them. They look at Juniper and Bella with shining eyes, waiting for the next trick, the next miracle, the next proof that witching has returned.
For tonight’s miracle, Juniper requires help.
She strides down a dark street, leaning on the slender cane that is the piss-poor replacement for her cedar staff, and two women walk beside her: a young nurse named Lacey Rawlins who works at St. Charity Hospital, and Miss Jennie Lind.
Jennie had turned up at the Sisters’ last meeting, looking—different. Her skirts were fancier and frothier than Juniper remembered, and she wore a chestnut wig instead of her own cornsilk-colored hair, but mostly it was her eyes that struck Juniper. They were colder and harder, like twice-beaten iron.
“Where the hell have you been?” Juniper asked, thumping her so hard on the back that Jennie coughed a little.
“They sent me to a . . . different workhouse, then released me into the custody of my family. Took me a while to get away.” She looked over Juniper’s shoulder and smiled at Inez. “Inez gave me a place to stay, and all this.” Jennie gestured at her fine skirts.
Juniper hadn’t said anything then, but she’d had herself a little think about it later. Why would Jennie be sent someplace different than all the other girls? And why would she be released without trial?
Before the Sisters left that evening she pulled Jennie aside. “Are you, by chance, the daughter of some fabulously wealthy member of New Salem society? Who pulled strings to spring you the second you got caught? And who you have now broken ties with?”
Jennie blinked at her once, then murmured, “Oh, we broke ties a long time ago.” She fingered her crooked nose.
“Huh. Well, next time you’re home steal a couple of candlesticks for us. We could use the cash.”
A genuine smile. “Yes, ma’am.”
Now Jennie follows behind Lacey as they creep through the doubled iron doors of St. Charity Hospital.
It looks nice enough inside—halls of green tile and white plaster, rows of doors with neat-painted numbers—except there don’t seem to be any windows. The smell turns Juniper’s stomach: lye and lesions, stained sheets and stale air.
Lacey pauses before a door at the end of the hall. Juniper tries not to look very closely at the smears of rust and yellow on its surface. She can almost feel the heat of fevered bodies behind it. “Ready?” Lacey asks, and they are.
They work three spells that night.
The first is for sleep, requiring crushed lavender and an old prayer.Now I lay thee down to sleep. Only when the rustling of bodies falls still do they creep through the door and into the sick ward.
The second spell is for driving down a fever, requiring a red thread tied around fingers slack with sleep. Juniper and the others move from bed to bed to bed, endless doubled lines of them, occupied by women and children and ruddy-cheeked men. This strikes Juniper as strange—surely any natural illness ought to fall hardest on the youngest and oldest.
The third spell is for healing, requiring willowbark and silkweed and knocked knuckles. This one proves more difficult than the others. Juniper hisses the words, veins hot with witching, and feels them vanish into the air, as if swallowed down some cold, invisible throat.
