Apparently she’s said something wrong, because Juniper is bristling and sharpening again. “I don’t need you to take care of me. I was about to teach that boy a lesson. Teach them all a lesson.”
Her eyes are seething, shadowed. They make Agnes think of maiden-stories—the kind about young witches who sing ships to their deaths, who hunt the woods at night with their seven silver hounds, who turn sailors into pigs and feast every night.
Agnes wants to be angry at her—for being so careless and cruel and so terribly young—but she can’t quite manage it. She’s been all of those things herself; she knows the black alchemy that transmutes hurt into hate. She remembers climbing barefoot from the attic window, meeting some poor boy in the woods and tearing at his clothes with more than lust, digging her nails too hard into his skin. It felt so good to be the one hurting, instead of being hurt.
So she doesn’t tell her sister to shut her damn mouth and think for a second. Instead she asks, “And then what? After you teach them all a lesson. After you burn them or bite them or curse them. What happens after that?”
Juniper’s mouth bows, petulant as a child.
“I know why you’d want to—Saints, so does every woman alive—but think what it costs.”
“I don’t care,” Juniper spits.
She never has. When she found them in the barn that day she hadn’t cared what might happen to three nothing-girls found beside their father’s corpse; when she led those suffrage ladies into a riot she hadn’t cared what kind of hell it started.
Agnes rubs the ball of her belly with a thumb, thinking of the little spark inside it. “I know you don’t. But I do.” The baby kicks in answer, a butterfly touch, and Agnes tilts her head at her sister. “You want to feel her move? The baby?”
Juniper stares at her like she’s never heard the word baby in her entire life. She reaches out a cautious hand. Agnes holds it to her belly and they wait together, hushed and still, feeling their hearts beat in their palms. The baby is motionless for so long Agnes is about to give up, until—
Juniper’s face splits in half with the size of her smile, eyes gone summer green. “I’ll be damned. That was her?”
Agnes nods, thinking how young and bright her sister looks right now, wishing she could stay that way. Wishing there was room for her inside Agnes’s circle. “The midwife says she’ll come by the Barley Moon, in August. Maybe sooner.”
Juniper seems taken aback by this information, as if she thought babies ought to abide by timetables and punch-clocks. She presses her palm to Agnes’s belly a second time, and her expression is so hopeful and wide open that Agnes says, “She could use an aunt.”
Juniper looks up at her, a quick darting glance, like she doesn’t want Agnes to see the hope shining in her face.
“But you’ve got to be more careful. The march today—it was your idea?”
Juniper takes her hand away. “Yes.”
“You saw what happened. The crowd went mad.”
Agnes expects Juniper to turn sullen again, but instead her face creases with thought. “I don’t think they were in their right minds.”
“Oh, don’t be so naive—”
“No, I mean I saw something . . . not right. Shadows moving in ways they shouldn’t, twisting together. It was witching, but darker and stranger than anything Mags ever did.”
Agnes thinks of the shadowless men in the alley and feels the hairs rising on her arms. “But what kind of witch would incite a riot against witches?”
Juniper purses her lips. “That Wiggin woman would. If ever there was a person who would work hard against themselves, it’d be her.”
“I heard those Christian Union types all swear oaths against every kind of witching, even the kind to keep dust off the mantel or mealbugs out of the flour.”
“Well somebody was messing with shadows.”
“All the more reason to be careful.”
“All the more reason to be prepared. To arm ourselves properly.” A fey light comes into Juniper’s eyes and Agnes knows she’s thinking of that black tower and those strange stars, of long-ago magics and long-gone powers. “Listen, the tower we saw that day. I was thinking—you remember the story Mags used to tell us? Saint George and the Last Three? What if it’s the tower? Their tower? I think that’s what Bella thinks, anyway.”
But Agnes doesn’t want to hear about witch-tales and wishes, and she especially doesn’t want to hear about Bella. “Oh, please. It’s a children’s story. And anyway, you seem well enough armed to me. That snake . . .” Agnes swallows. “Was it a familiar?”
Juniper snorts at her. “Did you forget everything Mags taught you? A familiar isn’t a spell or a pet. It’s witchcraft itself wearing an animal-skin. If a woman talks long and deep enough to magic, sometimes the magic talks back. But only the most powerful witches ever had familiars, and I don’t figure there are any of those bloodlines left.” Juniper looks away, and Agnes politely does not mention all the hours Juniper spent in the woods as a little girl, waiting for her familiar to find her.
Juniper gives herself a little shake and shoots Agnes a sickle-moon smile. “But maybe that wouldn’t matter, if we had the Lost Way. Just imagine what we could do.”
Before she can remind herself that the Lost Way of Avalon is a children’s story, Agnes does: she thinks of double-shifts and boarding-house fleas and all the nothing-girls whose highest hope is for a husband like Floyd Matthews, soft-palmed and stupid, and how it would feel to want more. She thinks of her daddy’s knuckles and Mr. Malton’s leers and how it would feel to be the dangerous one, for a change.
But then she thinks of angry mobs and scaffolds and all the things that would happen next, and the baby girl in her belly.
Agnes meets her sister’s gaze as steady as she can. “And what comes after?”
Juniper doesn’t look away. “Come with me in the morning,” she answers. “Come join the suffragists. And find out for yourself.”
Agnes looks into her face, blazing with hope and hunger, young and wild and jagged-edged—and finds she can’t answer. Instead she clears her throat and says, “It’s late. Time for bed, I think.”
Agnes manages not to look at her sister while they ready themselves for bed, unbuttoning and unclasping, taking turns at the chamber pot. It’s only in the last second of light, right before Agnes pinches the candlewick between her fingers, that she sees the silent shine of tears in Juniper’s eyes.
Juniper curls her spine away from her sister but she can still feel the heat of her, hear the steady rush of her breath.
Long past midnight, when even the ceaseless bustle and clank of the city has finally gone still and Juniper thinks she might be able to hear the distant seesaw song of spring peepers, Agnes rolls over beside her.
“I should have come back for you, no matter what. I was scared.”
Of me. Juniper doesn’t know where the thought comes from, why it sounds so certain and so sad.
“I’m sorry, Juniper.” Agnes whispers it to the ceiling, a prayer or a plea.
If Juniper says anything, Agnes will hear the tightness of her throat, the salt-bite of tears in her voice. So she says nothing.