One of them wise and wary, with her red-eyed owl perched on her shoulder like a demon escaped from Hell. Her hair straggles loose from its bun and her cloak pools like ink around her feet. A broken-glass ring glints on one finger. She doesn’t look like a librarian anymore.
One of them strong and seething, with her osprey on her arm and death in her eyes. Her braid flows like velvet over one shoulder; her dress is stitched together in a dozen shades of funeral-black. She doesn’t look like a mill-girl anymore.
And Juniper herself, wild and wicked. Her hair swings ragged just above her shoulders and her arms are bare and white. A silver scar climbs her left leg and another wraps around her throat, newly healed, from the two fires she’s survived so far. She wonders distantly what the third one will cost her.
She wishes she had a familiar. She wishes she were back home, wading through the cudweed and nettles around Mama Mags’s hut. She wishes Mr. Gideon Hill would choke on a chicken bone and save them all a world of trouble.
She smiles instead, looking between her sisters. “Ready?”
But she doesn’t need to ask. She can feel their wills burning through the binding between them, their hearts racing in perfect synchrony, their throats full of the same words.
“Thank you,” Agnes says, softly.
They work two spells that evening. The first smells of lavender and midnight-dreaming. They pour their wills into it, their skins feverish, their lips chanting—Now I lay thee down to sleep—and Juniper feels the spell pool and rise like deep water around them. The square grows eerily silent as every rat and roach and scuttling creature falls into an unnatural sleep.
But the spell is not for them. The owl and the osprey rise into the air. Their talons clench as if they are grasping an invisible ribbon in the air, and they vanish into the cooling blue of the sky, carrying their mistresses’ spell with them.
The owl, Juniper knows, will appear on the ledge of a window at the Hall of Justice. The shadows that writhe thick around the Deeps will not wait on that particular window ledge, because someone—one of the maids who scrubs the cells, perhaps—has left the sill strewn with salt, the window half-open.
The owl will wing through it, their words pouring from his open beak, soaring past the startled evening-shift of officers and guards and secretaries. Before they can shout the alarm, before they can do more than blink in confusion at the coal-colored owl flying through their offices—they will fall into a deep and boneless sleep, from which they will not wake for several hours, or possibly days. The prisoners locked in the Deeps beneath them—the city’s malcontents and drunks, its radicals and rabble-rousers and especially its witches—will hear nothing but the silent rush of wings and the hollow thuds of skulls against desks.
The osprey will not follow the owl to the Hall of Justice. His mistress has other business in the city. Juniper glances sideways at Agnes’s face and wonders if she can see through her familiar’s eyes: the grimy cinder blocks of the Home for Lost Angels, the cold swirl of Hill’s shadows around it. Mr. August Lee climbing through a window with a scrap of witchspeak in his pocket and a lump of clay that looks—if you squint in poor light, with bewitched eyes—like a baby girl.
Juniper begins the second spell when her sisters’ familiars return.
London Bridge is falling down, falling down.
She drinks saltwater from a flask in her pocket, whiskey-tainted and bitter, and spits it onto the cobbles. Her sisters reach for her hands and they chant the words with her until they see red rust climbing the lampposts along the edges of the square, until the air tastes of old blood and passing years.
The owl and the osprey carry that spell, too. Back to the Hall of Justice, past the slumped bodies of guards, down the steps to the crowded cells of the Deeps.
Juniper imagines how it might feel to wake in that fetid dark and see ember eyes watching you. To see the black iron bars of your cage—so real, so absolute a moment before—rusting away, leaving nothing but orange flakes floating on the scummed surface of the water.
The owl will open its beak, afterward, and speak with a woman’s voice. “Run, sisters,” it will say, “You have nothing to lose but your chains.” Some of the women in the cells will recognize that voice, smoke-eaten and rasping. One of them—a ruddy-cheeked woman whose fashionable furs have been replaced with a dingy white shift—will cackle aloud and crash through the weakened bars of her cell.
Before she can reach the steps, the owl will speak again. It will ask a favor of them.
Some of them will ignore it, Juniper knows: the women with hungry children or pining lovers, the women who want only to run and keep running. But some of them want something else, something that tastes of pitch and blood and rage unswallowed. Those women will linger and listen and—perhaps—do what Juniper asks of them.
In the square Juniper hears the sharp singing of iron-shod hooves, sees the angry glow of torchlight rising up the white walls of City Hall, and knows their time is up. She holds her sisters’ hands tight in hers and stands tall, waiting for the end of their story to come riding to meet them.
Agnes sees two men when she looks at Gideon Hill. Maybe three.
The first one is the one the rest of the city saw: the watery, weak-chinned mayor who now sits astride his white horse, loyal hound trotting at his side, red cross painted on the bright silver of his shield. He should look absurd, like a bank teller playing dress-up, but somehow his features are made grander in the reflected glow of his shield. He looks like a painting come to life, like a Saint come to save their souls.
The second man she sees is the one her sisters see: an ancient, unnatural creature who speaks with shadows and feasts on souls. A monster who murders women and steals children, who cut a red curl of hair from her daughter’s head to taunt her.
The third man she sees is her daddy: a monster. A coward. A man whose comeuppance is coming.
A dozen ranks of Inquisitors march behind him into the square, their eyes zealous and their uniforms starched white beneath silver armor. Hill pulls his horse to a showy halt before the plinth, his dog standing stiff-legged beside him, too-tight collar biting into its neck.
Hill looks just slightly down his nose at the three sisters still standing back-to-back. Three red lines run across his face, pulling and twisting the soft flesh of his lips.
Agnes isn’t aware that she’s thrown herself toward his throat, lips peeled in an animal snarl, fingers bent into claws, until she feels her sisters holding her back. She screams and Pan screams with her somewhere high above them, a hawk’s shriek echoing over the square. Some of the Inquisitors flinch.
Hill lifts his chin. “Inquisitors—arrest these women. For murder! For malice! For witchcraft most wicked.”
The scrape and clank of armored men shifting behind him, the heavy drag of chains. Gloved hands reach for their ankles, a little hesitant, as if even plate armor and fifty friends might not be enough to keep them safe from the most wanted witches of New Salem.
One of them catches the trailing edge of Juniper’s cloak and she kicks her leg without looking down. Agnes hears a muted crunch that might be a human nose.
“Where is she, Hill?” Agnes’s voice is flat and low.
The corner of Hill’s mouth twitches, as if it wants very much to smile but knows it would be off-script. “Silence, witch!” he screeches instead.