Bindings are deep, old witching, governed by obscure rules and strange affinities. Even Mama Mags didn’t fool with them much; she taught Juniper a rhyme to bind a split seam and promised to teach her more later, except it turned out she didn’t have much of a later.
Juniper did her best. She stole loose threads from each of the cloaks and stitched them into the brims of the white hats, whispering the words as she worked—Ashes to ashes, dust to dust—jabbing her thumb every fourth stitch and swearing up a storm.
She tested the first one on Jennie, jamming the hat on her head and ordering her to say the words. Jennie paled. “I don’t know. I don’t think I can.” Juniper swatted her with a spare hat. Jennie spoke the words. When the cloak settled over her shoulders—white as snow, white as wings—Jennie looked so stunned, so nakedly joyful that Juniper swatted her again just to keep her from floating away.
Now Juniper sees Jennie’s face shining through the crowd, full of that same glee despite the rising panic around her.
The crowd is surging away from the women in white, shouting and screeching. There’s a strange note in their voices, fear but also wonder. Witching is a small, shameful thing, worked in kitchens and bedrooms and boarding houses, half-secret. But here they are in broad daylight, calling white cloaks from nowhere. Juniper can feel the terms shifting around them, the boundaries bending. She can see faces—mostly women, mostly young—watching them with fascinated hunger in their eyes. Juniper figures they’re the ones who want, who pine, who long; the ones who chafe against the stories they were given and dream of better ones.
She unties the bundled parasol and lifts it high, except it’s not a parasol at all. It unfurls into a long banner with the words VOTES FOR WOMEN painted across it in bright red.
The crowd erupts. Salem’s Freedom devolves into a disjointed series of blats and hoots as the conductor stares, slack-jawed. Mayor Worthington bangs ineffectively on the podium. “What’s this now? Quite uncalled for—”
His voice is drowned by the thump of blood in Juniper’s ears, the burning heat in her chest. She wants to shout or chant or laugh, to shake her banner in their faces and bare her teeth—but Jennie thought they ought to remain quiet, dignified. Silent sentinels rather than wicked witches.
As one, the seven white-cloaked women turn their backs on the mayor and the City Council. Juniper raises her red banner in one hand and grips her staff tight with the other, and marches away from the stage, straight-spined. She feels the others falling in behind her, forming a single many-sailed ship.
The crowd splits like a sea. Mothers tug their children closer and canny salesmen start packing up shop, eyes darting sideways, sensing trouble. Juniper blows them kisses, feeling daring, a little drunk, listening with one ear for the ring of iron-shod hooves. They plan to disappear their cloaks and slink into the crowd before the authorities can arrive, but there are no men’s voices, no white horses prancing toward them. Yet.
They pass beneath the high arch of the Fair entrance and into the darkening streets of New Salem proper. Juniper expects the crowd to disperse, but it presses closer against them as the street narrows. The well-dressed families of the Fair are replaced by working folk and young men, the genteel scandal souring into something meaner. A cluster of drunks unslouches from an alley to leer at them, calling lewd suggestions. Someone laughs.
Juniper rests the iron pole of the banner on her shoulder and touches the locket beneath her blouse, the one Mama Mags gave her on her deathbed. At the graveside Juniper dug her dirt-crusted nails along the seam and popped it open like a brass clam, hoping for a message or a note or a voice saying, It’s alright, baby girl, I’m here. All she found was a thistledown curl of her grandmother’s hair.
This morning, Juniper added a pair of snake’s teeth.
She doesn’t plan to use them, not really. Mags told her they were only for last chances and final straws, when every choice was a losing one—but Juniper’s borrowed dress is too fancy and stupid to have pockets and she doesn’t like to be without them.
For a dizzy second she hears the scuff of red scales across the floor, the hiss of triumph, of pent-up hate finally set free—but then someone shouts look! and she does.
Another group of women is marching down the avenue, headed straight toward them. Juniper blinks twice—are they coming to join them? Is it the rest of the Women’s Association?—but then she sees the pale sashes crossing their chests.
“Oh hell.” It’s those Christian Union women who are always writing nasty letters to the editor and waving signs with slogans like WOMEN FOR A PURE SALEM and MICAH 5:12. How did they turn up so fast? Before the police, even? Juniper didn’t exactly advertise her march in the Sunday classifieds.
One of the Union women—a willowy, white-gloved woman Juniper recognizes from the papers as Miss Grace Wiggin—plants herself directly in Juniper’s path, chin high and skirt starched. There’s a shine to her, a porcelain perfection that makes Juniper want to rub her powdered nose in the mud.
“We, the good and righteous women of New Salem”—Wiggin gestures behind her to the other unionists, as if clarifying which women are good and righteous—“object to the promotion of sin on our streets!” Her voice is high, piercing.
“Oh for Chrissake,” Juniper drawls. “Don’t y’all have anything better to do?”
“They claim they are harmless! They claim they want justice! But what justice was there in the dark days of our pasts, when thousands of innocents suffered in the Black Plague?”
“Knitting, maybe. Charity work.”
Wiggin’s jaw flexes. “If we permit these women—these witches!—to march freely down our streets, what comes next? Will our daughters want broomsticks and cauldrons instead of pearls and dolls? Will our sons be seduced by their black arts? Will a second plague strike us down? The Christian Union urges you to vote for Mr. Gideon Hill this November!”
She keeps speechifying, her voice getting higher, more strident. The crowd presses closer, nodding and muttering and sometimes hear-hearing.
Behind her, Juniper hears Jennie curse softly, but she doesn’t turn to look because she’s looking at something else: Miss Grace Wiggin’s shadow.
It’s long and dark in the almost-sunset, flung black over cobblestones. At first it mimics Wiggin’s own gestures, like a good shadow should, but after a minute its hands fall to its sides. Its shoulders roll, as if stretching out stiffness, and then—like a puppet shedding its strings or a train waltzing off its tracks—it steps away from its owner.
Juniper goes very still. She watches Grace Wiggin’s shadow distort, stretching into a creature with too many hands and too many fingers. It finds other shadows—docile, well-behaved shadows lying in their proper place—and pulls them into itself. It swells and blackens; Juniper thinks of things left rotting in the sun.
She remembers asking Mags when she was little if witching was wicked. Mags had cackled. Wickedness is in the eye of the beholder, baby. But then she sobered. She said witching was power and any power could be perverted, if you were willing to pay the price. You can tell the wickedness of a witch by the wickedness of her ways.
Juniper touches the locket on her chest, full of poison. Mags never told her what went into the making of those teeth, but Juniper found the burned bodies of three snakes in the hearth and saw the bandages wrapped thick around Mags’s wrist, and knew the cost was cruel and high.