Juniper rests her head in her palms and feels the tears sliding down her wrists. Shh, shh, whispers the wind. It’s alright, baby girl.
Juniper cries until the breeze dies and the smell of tobacco fades from the room, until her collar cools around her neck and the bitter coal in her heart finally burns itself to cold ash and blows away.
When she got to the top of the hill,
She blew her trumpet both loud and shrill.
A spell to shout, requiring daring & day-old meadowsweet
The sky is the milky blue of old china and the wind whips from everywhere at once, as if the ceiling has been lifted off the world to let in a draft. The city feels brand-new, scoured clean.
If Agnes Amaranth must burn, at least this is a good day for it.
Her feet are bare and cold on the cobbled streets and her hair flies long and loose around her face. Her sisters walk one behind and one ahead of her. She can almost pretend they’re girls again clambering up the mountainside, following the crow-feather tangle of Juniper’s hair.
Except instead of calico and cotton they wear rough-woven wool with ashen Xs painted across their chests. Instead of laughing and shrieking they are silent, their jaws locked tight in their iron cages. Instead of the soft shush of leaves and the sing-songing of creek-water, they’re surrounded by the clank and grate of their own chains, and the fevered hissing of a crowd.
Agnes has never seen such a large crowd; it’s as if every building in New Salem has been upended and shaken until its occupants fell out and swarmed into the streets. There are workingmen with their sleeves rolled high and clerks with their derby hats tilted back. High-society ladies in fur-lined cloaks beside leering drunks with split-veined noses, entire families sprawled on checkered picnic blankets. All of them come to watch the witches burn.
Their eyes are bright and empty, shining like wet stones in their skulls; their shadows pool like oil behind them, viscous and misshapen.
But not every eye is empty, and not every shadow is twisted. Scattered through the crowd Agnes finds other faces: the Domontovich girls standing with their mother, vast and blond; Annie, standing in a cluster of girls from the mill; Ona, the raw-boned girl, glaring among them; Frankie Black and Florence Pearl and six other women from Salem’s Sin; Rose Winslow beside the Hull sisters; Gertrude the Dakota girl and Lacey the nurse from Charity Hospital; Inez, disguised by a heavy cloak and a white wig, holding so tight to Jennie Lind that the two of them look like a single creature; a dozen other women freed from the Deeps, their eyes dark and their lips curled, waiting.
The Sisters of Avalon, who were not their sisters in truth but who still came when they were called.
And so had others. Agnes sees ranks of disreputable-looking young men she remembers from the Workingman, looking entirely too eager for mayhem. There are knots of brown-skinned women standing together, wearing long cloaks and grim expressions—Cleopatra Quinn is beside her mother, her eyes like a pair of lit torches as she looks at Bella—and even a few ladies from the Women’s Association. Miss Cady Stone stands behind Jennie Lind, her jaw lifted.
More—far more—than Agnes dared to hope, all here for Eve. And here for more than Eve: here because they are tired of stolen children and missing women, of creeping and hiding, of raids and arrests. Because none of them is strong enough to face Gideon Hill alone, so they did not come alone.
Annie Flynn catches Agnes’s eye and bows her head once, a soldier to her general, one witch to another. She slants her eyes sideways at someone else and Agnes sees him: Mr. August Lee.
He wears a cap pulled low over the blond bird’s-nest of his hair and a red scarf wrapped under his chin. His eyes blaze at her, as if he can’t see the witch-mark daubed on her chest or the iron muzzle over her face, as if she is a queen ascending her throne rather than a convict marching to her death. He holds a silver flask in one hand and something bundled tight in the crook of his arm. The bundle squirms very slightly.
Agnes stops walking, ignoring the yank of the collar around her throat, the curse as Juniper stumbles on her bad leg. The crowd shifts, someone steps aside, and she sees a ruby glint of hair, a tiny pink fist raised high. Her heart, held safe.
Eve. The nurses and nuns at the Home for Lost Angels must not have noticed yet that they’re tending a lump of clay. The spell will crack and fade in another few hours, but by then it will be too late. She and Eve will be free among the stars.
Someone hauls their chain forward. The collar feels light as lace around her neck now.
St. George’s Square has been transformed into a scene from a cheap play. A scaffold stands over George’s plinth, built from wood so green it weeps around every nail-head. A stake points up from it like an accusing finger, piled deep with pine and white oak, glistening with lamp-oil.
A second scaffold stands upwind of the first, filled with ranks of grave-faced men in judges’ robes and Inquisitors’ armor. Grace Wiggin is the only woman among them, her white sash crossed neatly between her breasts, her expression fixed and vacant. Agnes stares up at Wiggin as they pass, willing her to look down and see her own dark reflection there: a woman bound and bridled, stripped of her words and ways. Wiggin doesn’t look down, but a thin line appears between her brows.
A man in a stained gray suit stands at the base of the steps with a lit torch held high. The sight of it—the greasy coil of smoke, the aged iron—makes Agnes feel unmoored in time. As if she’s drifted out of the world of trolleys and elections and into some murkier era of castles and knights and midnight bonfires.
Her feet are numb on the steps. The stake nestles between the winged bones of her back. A pair of men wrap cold chains around their waists, pinching tight, while another unlocks their bridles and shackles, leaving only their collars. Witches always went to God with their tongues free to repent and their hands free to pray. Agnes doesn’t intend to do either.
It seems to her as she stands beside her sisters that it was always going to end like this: the three of them back-to-back, besieged on all sides. The wayward sisters, burned and bound. It seems to her it has happened this way before and will happen again, until there are no witches left to burn or no men left to burn them.
The crowd blurs and sways before her. She catches ripples of motion—the scarlet flash of August’s scarf as he shoulders through the tight-pressed watchers, circling the scaffold, the dark flutter of Cleo’s skirts as she edges closer—but then everything is obscured by a man in a suit the color of old honeysuckle.
Gideon Hill’s shadow oozes two steps behind him, lazy and full-bellied. It stretches its arms high and spills over the platform’s edge, down into the crowd, twisting around ankles and slinking up skirts. His dog trembles beside him, eyes huge in its thin skull.
“Last chance for a confession, ladies.” He addresses all three of them but his eyes linger on Juniper.
None of them answer. Agnes can’t sense her sisters through the cold iron around her throat, but she feels the wound-tight tension in the press of their shoulders against hers.
Hill steps closer to Juniper and says quietly, “Repent. Forgiveness is still possible.” His voice is urgent, almost desperate.
Juniper smiles at him. “No,” she says. “It isn’t.”
His jaw tightens. He turns away in a swirl of cream cloak. His dog lingers a step behind him, looking mournfully at the Eastwoods, until Juniper rasps, “S’alright, girl. Just a little longer.” It creeps after its master.