“She did. I was watering the horses because Mags said it was fixing to freeze overnight.” Crow County slinks back into her voice, sly and drawling. “Then Daddy turns up and I could see in his face that he knew, about me and Clay, about the pennyroyal and the thing beneath the hornbeam. And then I saw Bella creeping along behind him, all pasty white, and I knew what she’d done.”
Juniper wants to argue. She remembers the feel of her sisters’ hands in hers on summer evenings, the circle they made between them; the promise that was never said aloud but was woven in their hair, written in their blood: that one would never turn against the other. Surely Bella would have died before she broke that trust.
But then Juniper recalls the cold gray of her sister’s eyes, the secrets she keeps safe in her notebook, and stays quiet.
“I told him it wasn’t true, that Bella was a liar and a—” Agnes swallows hard, skips over something. “But he just kept walking toward me. He wasn’t even in his cups—sober as a judge, I’d swear. But he was looking at me like—like . . .”
Juniper knows exactly how he was looking at her: like she was a colt that needed breaking or a nail that needed hammering, some misbehaving thing that could be knocked back into place. Juniper had seen that look. She came running into the barn, tangle-haired, sap-sticky, arms scored by the reaching fingers of the woods, and saw her sisters huddled against the far wall. Her father prowling toward them like a wolf, like a man, like the end of days—
And then—
That unseen thing swims too close to the surface and Juniper looks away. She goes someplace else instead, cool and green.
Agnes calls her back. “Juniper. June, baby.” Juniper returns to the pretty wallpapered room, to the sister who watches her with wide eyes.
Juniper bridles at the pity in that look. “What?”
Agnes takes up her story like a woman knitting past a dropped stitch, leaving a gaping hole behind her. “You remember the fire, don’t you?”
For a sick second Juniper thinks Agnes means the second fire, the one she set the night she ran north, before she recalls the shatter of her daddy’s lantern as he fell, the spit of oil across dry straw and old timbers, the weeks and weeks of changing bandages and coughing up globs of char and blood.
“Of course I do.” She falters a little. “But I don’t remember . . .” How she survived. How could she remember the inside of the barn as it burned—the rafters bright gold above her, the hideous screaming of the horses, the wet snap of flesh—without remembering how it ended?
“When I was younger I was always burning my fingers when I took the pot off the stove.” Agnes sounds like she’s treading carefully. “Mags gave me some words and ways to keep me safe. I didn’t know if they’d do any good, but Daddy was blocking the door and I still had the water for the horses . . . I threw it in a circle around the three of us and said the words, and it worked. Nearly.” Her eyes flick to Juniper’s left foot, then away, gray with guilt. “Daddy reached in after you, but we didn’t let him take you.”
Juniper always thought her scars look like split branches or spreading roots. Now she can see they look more like the fingers of a burning hand.
“Somebody must have heard the horses or seen the smoke. They dragged us all out, piled wet earth over Daddy to put out the flames. Mags took you away—you were all hot and shaking, I thought you might be dying—” Agnes pauses to swallow again, still not looking at Juniper. “We were sent upstairs while people came in and out. The preacher, the sheriff, half the county it felt like. Then Daddy called us down to his bedside and said it was all arranged. In the morning Bella would go to some school up north, and I would go live with our aunt Mildred.” Their aunt Mildred was a sour crabapple of a woman who lived two counties north and spent her time collecting tiny paintings of Saints and complaining about the many sins of her next-door neighbors. “I ran as soon as I could. Wound up here.”
Juniper wants to ask: How come you never came back for me? She wants to ask: How come you never even wrote? But she’s frightened of the skipped stitches in the story, the things she doesn’t want to see.
“Juniper, I—” Agnes is reaching toward Juniper almost as if she means to wrap her arms around her, and Juniper doesn’t know if she’s going to let her, when someone knocks softly on the door.
The two of them sit straighter, tucking their unruly feelings back inside their chests.
Frankie Black turns out to be a freckled colored girl with velveteen eyes and an accent that makes Juniper homesick. She has Agnes sit up straight and runs her fingertips over the small of her back, pressing and whispering. She lights a honey-colored candle and drips the wax in a pattern of lines and specks. She sings a spell that has a drumbeat rhythm running underneath it, shuffles her feet, tap-tap-tap, and straightens up.
It’s nothing like Mags’s spells, and Juniper watches with narrowed eyes. But Agnes’s face loosens as the pain lifts away, so Juniper figures it must be working. It occurs to her for the first time that there might be more than one kind of witching in the world. The thought is an uncomfortable one, far too large; it reminds her of riding the train across the Crow County line and feeling the country unfold like a map beneath her, flat and endless.
“Miss Pearl says you two should stay till morning. There’s police out looking for two black-haired women. One of them with child”—her eyes cut to the cedar staff on the bed—“one of them with a demon-snake for a familiar.”
Juniper says, “It’s not a familiar,” at the same time Agnes says, “We can pay. For the room, and the lost business.”
Frankie makes a sound somewhere between offense and amusement. “You couldn’t afford us, sweetheart. Miss Pearl says we’re closed up for the night, anyhow. The men are all riled up, looking to prove something. They can look elsewhere. There’s corned beef and rolls if you’re hungry.” She sets a basket on the dresser top and leaves them alone again.
The honey-candle is sitting in a waxy puddle and the food is nothing but crumbs caught in the valleys of the down comforter before either of them says a word to the other.
Agnes is slouched against the headboard, her body slack in the absence of pain, the baby swimming soft inside her.
Juniper has her arms wrapped around her knees. Her eyes slide over Agnes’s belly. “How come you came today?”
Agnes shrugs, because shrugging is easier than talking about guilt and love and the things that still stretch between them after seven years of silence. “How come you invited me?”
Juniper shrugs back, sullen, and counters, “How come you saved that idiot boy?”
Agnes almost laughs at her. For a quick girl, Juniper can be awfully slow sometimes. “I wasn’t saving that idiot boy, Juniper.”
Juniper narrows her eyes. Her mouth is half-open to retort when she realizes who Agnes was saving. Her face softens.
Juniper glances again at the fragile swell of Agnes’s belly. “But—even with—”
“I guess.” Agnes attempts a smile. “Mama told me to take care of you.” Maybe Agnes owed her, for all the times she’d failed. Or maybe it wasn’t about debts or duties at all; maybe it was just that she didn’t want to see her youngest sister strung up in the city square.