And—were they paying again? I’m more careful these days. Juniper thinks of Eve’s labored breathing, the endless rows of cots at Charity Hospital, the fever that raged through the city’s tenements and row houses and dim alleys, preying on the poor and brown and foreign—the expendable. Oh, you bastard.
But Hill doesn’t seem to hear the hitch in her breathing. “People grew frightened, angry. They marched on my village with torches, looking for a villain. So I gave them one.” Hill lifts both hands, palm up: What would you have of me? “I told them a story about an old witch woman who lived in a hut in the roots of an old oak. I told them she spoke with devils and brewed pestilence and death in her cauldron. They believed me.” His voice is perfectly dispassionate, neither guilty nor grieving. “They burned her books and then her. When they left my village I left with them, riding at their head.”
So: the young George of Hyll had broken the world, then pointed his finger at his fellow witches like a little boy caught making a mess. He had survived, at any cost, at every cost. Oh, you absolute damn bastard.
“And your sister? Did they catch her, too?” But Juniper doesn’t think they did. Juniper thinks his sister escaped, retreated to the lonely tor of Avalon, and wrote herself into a dozen new stories. Until the day her brother came with an army at his back and burned her for the crime of not loving him enough.
“No.”
“Did you ever see her again?”
“Once. I asked her again if she would come with me, stand at my side—I could have protected her—but she refused me. Again.”
Juniper has always thought of the final days at Avalon as a grand battle, a clash between the forces of good and evil, Saint against sinners. Now she pictures instead a brother and a sister looking at one another through the flames, both haunted by the same hateful story. The Maiden, who found her way into a better one, who made a way for herself among the crows and foxes and wild things. The Saint, who never found any ways except cruel ones.
Juniper wonders what it cost the Maiden to refuse the brother she loved. She wonders what it cost the Saint to burn the only person who ever loved him.
Gideon Hill is watching her again, and she imagines she sees something of that cost in the hollow blue of his eyes. “You remind me of her,” he says, very softly. Juniper looks away.
He straightens on the bench, voice clipped and quick again. “Which brings me to my question, James Juniper: Will you stay with me? Or will you, too, burn?”
Her neck snaps back toward him. She feels her jaw dangling and closes it carefully. “Come again?”
“I’ve been alone for—a very long time. I grow weary of it. I have no wife, no family, no lovers.”
“What about Miss Wiggin? Isn’t she your daughter?”
Hill makes a soft, derisive noise in his throat. “She’s useful to me, in her way. A pliable will, a pretty face. Excellent for politics. I’ve met a dozen women like her in my time.” Juniper is willing to bet he’s met hundreds, maybe thousands. How dull the world must look after centuries of soul-eating, slinking from body to body like a disease. How many wives has he buried? How many children has he outlived? Grace Wiggin must seem to him nothing but a mayfly, another collared creature under his sway.
“But you are a rarer species. Free, feral, forceful. And such a will—didn’t you wonder why I never stole your shadow?” His smile is warm, almost admiring. “What a witch I could make of you.”
“And my sisters?”
The smile dims slightly. “The people need a villain again. Someone has to burn.” Beneath the watery red of the eyes he stole, Juniper thinks she sees a glimmer of his true self: a little boy lost in the woods who doesn’t want to be alone. “But not you.”
Juniper can tell by the curl of Gideon’s smile that he’s confident in her answer, certain she’ll forsake her sisters and survive. It’s what he did, after all.
It’s what Juniper herself might have done, back when she was a heartless, hurting thing. Now she wants so much more than merely to survive.
She pretends to consider it, catching her lip between her teeth and making worried eyes. Hill stands slowly and steps closer, hungry-eyed, hopeful, hands lifting as if he wants to take her in his arms. She waits until he’s close enough that she can see his pulse jack-rabbiting in his throat.
“I told you before, Hill.” Her whisper is soft, sincere. “Go fuck yourself.”
Shadow-hands slam her spine against the stone wall. The collar burns at the touch of his witching, but Juniper’s throat is knotted and scarred now, half-numbed to the pain. Distantly it occurs to her that men like Gideon ought to stop breaking people, because sometimes they mend twice as strong.
Hill’s face swims dizzily before her: chalk-white and mad as a spring starling, the lost little boy replaced by the ancient, addled soul.
“She refused me and she burned for it,” he hisses into her face. “And so will you, James Juniper.”
He vanishes in a swirl of shadow, and she is alone.
Juniper sits for a long while after, not sleeping. She touches the brass locket lying warm against her breast, thinking of all those long hours lying on Mama Mags’s grave waiting for a ghost that never came, thinking of the voice she heard the last time she was locked up. Wishing she could hear it again.
Then she thinks: Why not?
She draws the chain over her head and cracks open the locket. Half of it is occupied by a face that Juniper never lets her eyes linger on for long.
She lingers now. The photograph is blurred and silvered, the face blooming out of shadows. She’s beautiful, like Agnes. Freckled, like Bella. Juniper has never found much of herself in her mother, but she supposes they share a certain tilt in their chins, a wildness in their eyes. A heavy hand rests on her shoulder. The picture is too small to show its owner, but Juniper knows every scar and knob of her daddy’s knuckles.
The other half of the locket holds a single curl of thistledown hair, tufted and white. Juniper strokes it once.
She knows it’s madness. She knows it’s the foolish dream of a frightened girl. But she whispers the words anyway: Little Girl Blue, come blow your horn.
She hesitates when she comes to the place where a name should be. She figures a person should be respectful when summoning the dead, so she calls her grandmother by her true name: Magdalena Cole awake, arise!
Nothing happens except that the collar sears white-hot and Juniper swears.
And the wind rushes through the cell window, smelling of tobacco and earth and midnight. Of home.
Juniper swallows very hard. “Mama Mags?”
No one answers her. But a cool touch trails over her brow—the wind over her skin or the brush of ghostly lips.
“I’ll be twice-damned.” Juniper’s voice is hoarse, tear-thick. “You did it, didn’t you? Bound yourself to this locket?”
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The words are the creak of floorboards, the whisper of moonlight.
It’s nothing but a hedge-witch’s spell to mend split seams, but maybe it isn’t the words that matter, really. Maybe magic is just the space between what you have and what you need, and Mama Mags needed to leave some pale scrap of herself to watch over her granddaughters.
A suspicion occurs to Juniper then, about what else Mama Mags might have bound. About the invisible force that pulled Juniper and her sisters to St. George’s Square that day in March, the lines that still stretch between them. Not fate, not destiny or blood-right, but merely the faded remains of their grandmother’s gift.