She stands on a stoop at the edge of St. Mary-of-Egypt Avenue, watching the crowd become a mob become a riot, thinking: It’s her own damn fault.
She has one hand on her belly, a half-moon heavy with the promise of a person still-becoming, already precious to her.
Too precious to risk for the sake of a grown-ass woman who should’ve known better.
Agnes grips the iron railing of the stoop and stares into the heaving crowd, looking for a glimpse of white, some sign of her wild, foolish sister. She knew as soon as she saw the note it would mean nine kinds of trouble.
And yet: this afternoon she rattled north on the trolley. She waited outside the Fair gates, unwilling to waste a hoarded nickel on a ticket. She heard the distant roar of the crowd, saw the VOTES FOR WOMEN banner snapping bright against the sky. Watched her sister limping at the head of a line of women, like a pied piper dressed in white, and felt a swell of something suspiciously like pride in her chest.
Agnes trailed behind them, her feet flat and aching from the weight of the baby. Maybe she was half hoping Juniper would look over her shoulder and see her. Maybe she was just spooked by the souring mutters around her, the resentful curl of lips and the coil of fingers into fists. New Salem is a well-behaved city, as cities go, but Agnes knows trouble when she sees it.
And now here she is, standing on a high stoop beside a cluster of women with low-cut dresses and rouged cheeks. None of them look especially concerned by the heave and froth of the riot below.
Juniper falls. Agnes stays put.
Until she feels her sister’s wrath scorching through the line between them.
She knows what Juniper is going to do because she did it once before. She’d been a girl then, full of little girl’s venom. She hadn’t quite killed him—maybe she didn’t quite want to, maybe she lacked the will—and the truth was forgotten in the fire that followed. Lots of things could be forgotten back home, looked away from until they were lost altogether.
Now Juniper is a grown woman with a grown woman’s will, and Agnes knows some fool man is going to die.
But it isn’t for his sake that Agnes stumbles down the steps and into the riot. Cities forget less easily.
She elbows and claws her way through the crowd, one arm braced around her belly. Someone tears at her hair. A shoulder thuds against her jaw. She doesn’t stop.
There’s Juniper, looking up from the street with her eyes black and burning. A boy stands above her, iron bar raised high.
Between them, there is a snake. Red as blood, red as lips, red as the rich heart of a cedar tree. It coils around itself, neck arching in a way that makes the boy take a step back, his weapon tumbling from nerveless fingers. Around them a circle of silence grows as the crowd watches, half-hypnotized by the subtle pattern of the snake’s scales, the hot smell of witching.
The snake’s eyes glow like sun through sap, fixed upon the boy, and Agnes knows it’s going to strike. It’s going to bury its borrowed fangs into his flesh and he’s going to die screaming. And, in a few minutes or days, so will her sister. This city could never suffer such a witch to live for long.
So Agnes does something very, very stupid. She doesn’t think as she does it, doesn’t ask herself why she would risk her life and more than her life, her everything-that-matters, for the sister who hates her. The sister she abandoned once before.
Agnes steps between the boy and the snake. She meets her sister’s eyes.
There’s a tilted second when she thinks Juniper won’t stop. That she’s too full-up with fury to care if her serpent strikes her sister or a stranger, so long as someone pays, someone hurts like she does.
Juniper’s eyes flicker, leaf-shadows shifting. She lunges and grabs the red snake by the throat. It twists in her hand, writhing like a live thing instead of a stray scrap of witching, before it goes rigid. And then there’s nothing but a red-cedar staff in her sister’s hand.
Agnes becomes aware that she hasn’t taken a breath in some time. She closes her eyes and sways, tasting the sweet soot of the city’s air in her throat, feeling the spark still safe inside her, still alive.
Then a voice behind her—the boy whose life she just saved, the ungrateful little shit—shouts, “Witches!”
Juniper is—she doesn’t know what she is. Ashes, raked coals. Whatever is left when a fire burns itself out. She’s looking up at her sister—and what is Agnes doing here? How is she standing above Juniper with her eyes steady and cool as creek-stones?—when someone shouts Witches! and hell, which had already broken loose, breaks looser.
The word swoops through the crowd, batlike. Glass shatters against stone. Screams echo down alleys. Feet rush both toward them and away. Juniper lies there, wrung out with witching and will, until she sees hard hands shove against Agnes’s back. Agnes falls, braid arcing, and Juniper hears the hollow smack of her body against the cobblestones.
Then Juniper is scrambling to her feet, swinging her staff in wild circles, shouting, “Get away, get the hell away from her!”
She loops a hand beneath her sister’s arm and hauls her upright. “C’mon, Ag, we got to move.” She claws the white cloak away from her throat, feels it catch and tangle in the bodies behind her. She limps sideways through the roil of the crowd, tugging Agnes beside her. There’s a thin moaning coming from somewhere, like an animal in pain; it’s only when Agnes pauses to swear that Juniper realizes it’s coming from her sister.
The riot is swirling and thickening around them, rising like floodwater, and Juniper can’t find Jennie or Inez or Electa, all the other girls who followed her into this mess. She can’t see any way out, any place to run.
Agnes points to a high stoop where three ladies are watching the street through long lashes. One of them is smoking a thin-rolled cigarette. “There!”
Juniper slants toward them, flinging elbows, crushing toes beneath her staff. She climbs the short steps, panting.
A woman in red silk watches her with no particular expression on her face. She removes the cigarette from between her lips. “You ladies in trouble?”
Juniper checks to see that the red-silk woman has a shadow beneath her, and that it seems to possess the correct number of arms and hands. She hitches a sideways, desperate smile at her. “Might be.”
The woman gives her a motherly nod. “Then you’re in the right place, love.” She reaches casually behind her to unlatch the door, knocking it open with one hip. The stale sweetness of perfume and liquor drifts out, and a few jangling notes of ragtime.
Juniper dives into the dimness with her sister’s hand in hers.
Jane and Jill went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water.
Spill it thrice, say it twice,
Or soon it will get hotter.
A spell against burns, requiring clear water & a strong will
The smell reminds James Juniper of a chestnut in bloom, sharp and sour in the back of her mouth. It hangs heavy in the shadowed hallway and grows stronger as they follow the red-silk lady up two flights of stairs and into a small bedroom. The wallpaper is rich and flowery and the bed is a frosted cupcake of pillows and feather-down.
“This place is awful nice, isn’t it, Ag?” Juniper offers. She’s thinking of her sister’s mildewed room in the boarding house. “Bet it costs a pretty penny, though.”