Now she watches the shadow oozing through the crowd like spilled ink, coiling around ankles and sliding up skirts, and thinks the price for this must have been even higher.
As the shadow spreads, the crowd shifts. Meanness turns to malice; heckling turns to hate. Juniper feels it as a prickle of fear along her arms, the kind that means a thunderstorm is rolling in or your daddy’s coming home with a bellyful of liquor.
Juniper sees whitening knuckles, scowling faces, eyes gone empty and dim as closed-up houses. It’s as if their souls were stolen along with their shadows.
She looks back to Grace Wiggin. She’s smiling so wide and bright that Juniper understands two things in a hurry: number one, that there’s a good chance the wicked witch wandering around New Salem is standing right in front of her in a white sash.
And number two, that she’s glad, for once, that her sisters forsook her, because at least they won’t be here for whatever happens next.
Beatrice is wishing very much that she forsook her youngest sister. She’s wishing she didn’t invite Miss Cleopatra Quinn to accompany her to the Fair, didn’t watch from the fringes as Juniper raised her banner, didn’t trail after the white cloaks of the suffragists while the crowd soured like milk around them.
Because then she wouldn’t be standing here in the darkening street while a cluster of glassy-eyed men peel away from the crowd and lurch toward her, their shadows twisting and rippling behind them.
Their eyes are on Miss Quinn, a colored woman dressed a little too well, a little too far north. Beatrice sees the shape of slurs on their lips, the promise of punishment in their fists.
She hears Miss Quinn hiss a rude phrase beneath her breath. Then there’s a hand in hers—warm and dry, urgent—and Quinn is pulling her sideways, shoving her against the sooty brick wall of a pub.
Miss Quinn removes a stub of white chalk from her coat pocket and sketches something on the wall, a shape made of lines and stars. She whispers a half-song beneath her breath in a language Beatrice doesn’t know, then grabs Beatrice by the shoulders and presses her hard against the brick. Miss Quinn places her palms on either side of Beatrice and hisses, “Don’t move.”
Beatrice tastes witching in the air, feels the sudden heat of it radiating from Quinn’s skin. She doesn’t move.
The cluster of men is very close now. Their eyes, which had been fixed with eerie, hunting-hound intensity a minute before, now slide harmlessly across Miss Quinn’s back.
Beatrice watches them shuffle on, grunting to one another, pointing ahead. And then she looks at Quinn’s face (so near to hers that she can see the slide of sweat from her temple, the rust streaks in her yellow eyes) and gasps, “That was—that was witchcraft, Miss Quinn!”
“By all means, please say it louder. It’s not like there’s a riot nearby.” Miss Quinn is straightening, dusting chalk from her hands.
“But where—how—?”
“Honestly, did you think yours was the only grandmother who knew words she shouldn’t? Aunt Nancy’s recipes, my mother calls them.” Her voice is light, careless, but Beatrice hears a certain tension running beneath it. “I would be obliged if you would keep this to yourself, Miss Eastwood. We’re not supposed to . . . I don’t know what came over me.” She gives her head an irritated shake, as if Beatrice had personally forced her to work witchcraft in the middle of New Salem.
“O-of course. I wouldn’t want to cause you trouble.”
Miss Quinn gives her a taut, crooked smile. “Oh no?”
And if there’s more than just exasperation and irony in her voice, a sly heat, Beatrice doesn’t hear it.
She’s distracted by the echoes of her youngest sister’s pain. The pain is followed by fear, and the fear is followed by a terrible, killing rage.
May sticks and stones break your bones,
And serpents stop your heart.
A spell to poison, requiring fangs & fury
James Juniper has never in her life hoped to see an officer of the law—in her experience they show up just to hassle your grandmother over a stillborn baby in the next county and stay long enough to clink glasses with your daddy—but she hopes for one now. The crowd is pushing closer, their mutters turning into shouts, their shouts turning into shoves. Miss Grace Wiggin and her followers have melted away, leaving the seven suffragists surrounded by red-faced men and shouting women.
Juniper feels shoulders bracing against hers as the others turn back-to-back, facing the crowd. This isn’t right—they were supposed to be a slick spectacle, here and gone again, a scandalous headline for tomorrow’s papers. They were supposed to be scared of misdemeanor charges and Miss Stone, not a soul-eating shadow and a vicious crowd.
Someone yanks on Juniper’s banner and she stumbles. Her damn leg—the one with the puckered scar wrapped around the ankle, the silvered, sunken places where muscle and tendon never quite healed—twists beneath her and she sprawls sideways, palms skinning against the grit of the street, staff clattering on stone.
She hears Inez call her name, but there are people shoving between them, and the white cloaks disappear behind bare fists and broad backs.
Juniper looks up to see a man looming over her. A boy, really: scrawny and underfed-looking, like the leggy weeds that sprout down dark alleys, his face speckled with youth. His eyes are empty as promises.
He’s holding the iron pole of her banner. He lifts it almost idly, as if he doesn’t know what he’s about to do.
But Juniper knows. She’s had too many hands raised against her, too many bruises, too many long nights in the lonely black of the cellar. He’s going to hurt her, maybe kill her, because there’s no one to stop him. Because he can.
Juniper keeps a little flame flickering in her chest, a bitter, hungry thing just waiting for something to burn. Now it blazes high, a towering, terrible thing. A killing thing.
She claws at the locket on her chest, pops it open. A pair of curved fangs rattle into her palm and she crushes them, feeling the bone splinter into flesh. She reaches for her cedar staff, slicks her blood along it.
Her staff is tight-grained and oiled smooth from all those hours beneath her hand. By all natural laws the blood ought to bead up along its surface, but Juniper has never cared much for natural laws. The cedar drinks her blood up, every drop.
The boy is watching her, head a little tilted. He’s not afraid—why would he be? She’s just a young crippled girl reaching for her cane, he’s a man with knuckles white around a weapon. Both of them know how this story goes.
But oh, not this time. This time the girl has the words and ways to change the story.
He’ll be afraid, before the end. Her daddy was.
The words wait in her throat like matches waiting to be struck. Juniper thinks she ought to care about the cost of speaking them—a boy’s life, the lives of the fools shouting and shoving nearby, the six other girls who’d followed her into this mess, who didn’t deserve to wind up on the scaffold beside her—
But all the caring was beaten and burned out of her, and now she’s just hate with a heartbeat.
May sticks and stones break your bones.
Agnes sees her sister fall. She sees her black-feather hair disappear, her white-wing cloak vanish beneath the mass of bodies, and she doesn’t move.