She isn’t alone. Miss Jennie Lind sits at the polished dining room table, staring at nothing, her face framed in long chestnut curls. The bruise around her eye has mottled to yellow and gray, like bad fruit.
“You don’t have to come, you know.” Juniper doesn’t mean it to come out so hard. She starts again. “I only mean . . .” But she doesn’t know how to say what she means. That Jennie doesn’t have to keep following her deeper and deeper into trouble, like that Italian witch who walked through nine circles of Hell; that she is the first friend Juniper made in her life, and the thought of her harmed on their behalf takes all the air from Juniper’s lungs.
Instead, she says, “I only mean this isn’t your fight. You’re not like us. You have a home to run to—a rich daddy, a place to weather the storm—”
“I really don’t.” Jennie’s smile is brief and bitter.
“Why’s that?”
“Because.” Jennie pauses here for so long that Juniper doesn’t think she intends to go on. Then she heaves a hard sigh and meets Juniper’s eyes. “Because my father and mother are adamant in their belief that they raised a son, instead of a daughter.” She lets the statement stand for a moment before adding, gently, “I never had a brother, Juniper.”
Juniper feels her head tilting. “But why—oh.” Oh. She feels simultaneously very stupid, mildly aggrieved, baffled, curious, and shocked. She recalls the delight on Jennie’s face the first time she worked women’s witching and the silent clench of her jaw when they accused her of men’s magic, the entire summer she spent shoulder-to-shoulder with Sisters she couldn’t quite trust with her secret. Juniper adds shame to her list.
Before she can express any of these things, Jennie lifts her chestnut wig from her head. Beneath it Juniper sees her cornsilk-colored hair has been cut brutally short. It stands in shocked tufts, as if refusing to take such abuse quietly. “When I was arrested they threw me in the men’s workhouse, burned my skirts, and did this.” She gestures to her hair. Juniper imagines shadowy figures holding her down, the silver gleam of shears, soft coils of cornsilk drifting to the prison floor. And then Juniper doesn’t feel anything except sorry, and mad as hell.
“Does anyone else know?”
“Inez.” Jennie says her name with such care that Juniper thinks there are one or two other things she didn’t know about Jennie Lind. “And Miss Cady Stone, of course.”
“That old—”
“Yes. She knew my father. She hired me as a secretary for the Women’s Association after he turned me out. She’s not . . . She’s better than you think she is.”
There’s a brief silence, while Juniper works to revise another half-dozen or so of her assumptions. “Jennie, I—”
“This fight.” Jennie rubs the broken bridge of her nose. “To just—live, to be—is one that I was signed up for before I was even born. I don’t get to walk away.”
Her eyes flick up to Juniper’s and away. “And they have Inez.” Another pause. “Who I love.”
Juniper stops her pacing after that. She sits at the other end of the polished dining table, staff across her knees, thinking about bindings and blood and the sideways logic of love: all for one and one for all, a dead-even trade that adds up to infinity. She thinks how upside-down it is that she started this fight out of rage—spite and fury and sour hate—and that she’ll finish it for something else entirely.
It’s full dusk by the time it appears, folding out of darkness: a black owl with burning eyes that speaks in her sister’s voice.
“It’s time.”
Now I lay thee down to sleep,
I pray the Lord your soul to keep.
A spell for sleep, requiring crushed lavender & a whisper
If it was one of Mama Mags’s stories, James Juniper thinks it would go like this:
Once upon a time there were three sisters.
They were born in a forgotten kingdom that smelled of honeysuckle and mud, where the Big Sandy ran wide and the sycamores shone white as knuckle-bones on the banks. The sisters had no mother and a no-good father, but they had each other; it might have been enough.
But the sisters were banished from their kingdom, broken and scattered.
(In stories, things come in threes: riddles and chances, wrongs and wishes. Juniper figures that day in the barn was the first great wrong in their story. She whispers it to herself as she runs through the streets of New Salem this evening, the September shadows long and cold, the leaf-rot smell of fall hidden beneath the coal-smoke and piss of the city: One.)
The sisters survived their breaking. They learned to swallow their rage and their loneliness, their heartbreak and their hate, until one day they found one another again in a faraway city. Together they dared to dream of a better world, where women weren’t broken and sisters weren’t sundered and rage wasn’t swallowed, over and over again. They began to build a new kingdom from rhymes and rumors, witch-tales and will. It might have been enough.
But their new kingdom was stolen from them, burned to rubble and ash. (Two, Juniper whispers.)
The three sisters survived the fire. They hid in attics and cellars, flitting like secrets through the streets, chased by shadows and torches. Perhaps they should have disappeared entirely—swallowed their rage and faded from the city like a bad dream, crept into some hillside town in need of a witch to cure their coughs and charm their crops, and been forgotten. It might have been enough.
But their baby girl was stolen from them. (Three, Juniper hisses into the half-light. Anybody who knows stories knows that after three comes the ending, the comeuppance. The reckoning.)
Now the three sisters run toward their reckoning with the setting sun at their backs and whispers and curses at their heels. They wear no disguises, have indeed dressed the part: their cloaks are ragged and dark, their skirts black velvet and obsidian silk. Witchy as hell. Juniper wonders if anyone sees them and wonders at the absence of pointed black hats.
They toss salt and poppy-flowers as they run, tangling the alleys and blurring the street signs behind them, so that their pursuers will find themselves circling the same block several times without knowing why, or discovering dead-ends that were through-ways the day before. The sisters know it won’t save them, but they don’t intend to be saved.
It seems to Juniper the city itself does its best to help them. The branches of linden trees duck low behind them, and roots leave the sidewalks humped and treacherous in their wake. Crows watch them with too-bright eyes, swooping in front of trolleys and passersby at just the right moment to distract them as three witches run past. Juniper thinks it might be her imagination or the spirits of the Last Three or the red heart of witching itself, helping them, whispering at their heels, yesyesyes.
The three of them converge on the bridge, cross the Thorn, and step into St. George’s Square together. It’s empty in the deepening dusk, except for the soft burbling of the pigeons and the whisper of September wind.
They walk to the precise center of the square, where Saint George of Hyll himself once stood. There’s nothing there now but a marble plinth, quite empty. Juniper scrambles atop it and reaches down for her sisters’ hands.
Her vision doubles as they look back at her, so that she sees her sisters, but also two strangers who have stepped out of a winter’s night witch-tale.