From the bed beside them, Bella makes a soft, hurting sound. Her skin is a damp, fish-belly white.
Juniper snaps her teeth shut and crouches down beside her, peeling one of her eyelids back. “Devil’s-fever.” Juniper would like very much to know what the hell her sister was doing to get herself burnt up with witching. “You got a tin whistle? Or a horn?”
Agnes shakes her head and Junipertsks. She says the words anyhow and gives a sharp, two-fingered whistle. A spark of witching flares between them.
Bella’s eyes flutter. She blinks up at her sisters, face slack with shock. “Agnes? June?” Juniper gives her a stiff little bow. “Saints.” A sudden fear seems to strike Bella. She struggles up from the bed, eyes skittering around the room, lingering on the shadows. “Where’s Daddy?”
“Not here.”
“Does he know where you are? Is he coming?”
“Doubt it.” Juniper runs her tongue over her teeth and lays out the next words like a winning hand of cards, a heartless snap. “Dead men usually stay put.” She lets her eyelids hang heavy as she says it, hoping her sisters won’t see anything lurking in her eyes.
They stare at her, barely breathing, their faces empty.
Juniper knows how they feel. Even right afterward, when Juniper was scrubbing the guilt and smoke off her arms in the Big Sandy River, she remembers thinking,Is that it?Her daddy’s death was supposed to feel like vanquishing a foe or winning a war, like the end of the story when the giant crashes to earth and the whole kingdom celebrates.
But the giant had already stomped everything flat. There was no one left to celebrate except Juniper the Giantkiller, all alone.
Agnes lowers herself slowly onto the floor beside Juniper. After a while she says, “So how come you left? Who’s watching the farm?”
Juniper answers her second question. “Cousin Dan.”
“That dumbshit?”
“He owns it now. Daddy left the whole thing to him. Even Mags’s place.” A little hut dug into the mountainside with a dirt floor and a cedar-shake roof gone green with moss, worth less than the land it sat on. People in town gossiped and clucked their tongues about Mama Mags, wondering to one another how a person could live all alone like that, but it sounded alright to Juniper. She’d never had any interest in boys or betrothals or the things that came after; she figured she’d spend her days clearing henbit and cudweed from the herb-garden and chatting with the sycamores. In the fall-times maybe she and her red staff would go walking in the hills with a basket over her arm, collecting foxglove and ninebark, snake-skins and bone, sleeping beneath the clean light of stars.
Daddy took that away from her, like he took everything else.
“I—I’m sorry, Juniper. I know you always loved that place.” Bella says it soft, as if she’s trying to comfort Juniper, as if she cares.
Juniper shucks her shoulders, ducking away from her caring. “How’d you two end up in New Salem, anyhow?”
Neither of them meet her eyes. Bella removes her spectacles and polishes the glass with the bed-sheet. “I w-work for the College, at the library.”
Agnes gives a small, humorless laugh and mimics Bella’s chopped-short vowels, her schoolteacher voice. “Well, I work for the Baldwin Brothers. At the cotton mill.”
Juniper sees their eyes meet, cold and cutting, and wonders what the hell they have to hold against one another. They weren’t the ones left in the lion’s den. She leans between them. “And how’d you end up in that square today?”
Now they look at her, wide and hungry. Bella touches her own breastbone, as if there’s still something lodged there, towing her forward, and Juniper knows they felt it, too: the thing that tugged them together, the spell that burned between them and left a terrible wanting behind it. She can almost see the black tower reflected in their eyes, starlit and rose-eaten, like a promise nearly fulfilled.
Bella whispers, “What was it?”
Juniper whispers back, “You know damn well what it was.” Something long gone, something dangerous, something that was supposed to have burned up in the way-back days along with their mother’s mothers.
Bella hisses “witching,” just as Agnes says “trouble.”
Agnes pulls herself to her feet, the sunlit wand drawing deep shadows around her frown. There’s no starlight in her eyes, now. “All kinds of trouble. People will be scared, and the law’ll get involved. It’s not like it was back home, where people mostly looked the other way when it came to witching. You saw the witch-yard in the cemetery? They say in the old days it was ankle-deep with the ashes of the women they burned in this city.”
She shakes her head. “And now there are these Christian Union women running around, and the Morality Party has somebody on the City Council—he’s running for mayor now, I heard. He doesn’t have a chance in hell, but still. Him and his people will eat all this tower business up with a damn spoon.”
“But don’t you want to—” Juniper begins.
“What I want is to get some sleep. I have an early shift tomorrow.” Agnes’s voice is clipped and cold as she rummages in a battered trunk. “The police will be out looking, by now. You two should stay here.” She tosses a stack of moth-eaten wool at Juniper, not looking at her. “For the night.”
For the night. Not forever, not happily ever after.
Of course not.
