Juniper shrugs, invisible in the dark. “The women who think we’re lying or stupid or selling them snake oil. The men who think they can beat us in the street. Everybody, I guess.”
There’s a long pause before Bella says, with unflattering shock, “That’s . . . not a terrible idea.”
“Why, thank you.”
“It would certainly help with recruitment, and the larger our organization becomes the more collective knowledge we possess. Of course we’ll need to be quite clever in our selection of spells—” Bella’s voice is warming with the kind of scholarly enthusiasm that means she could keep going for hours or possibly weeks, when a second pillow whumps into her and Agnes grates, “Go to sleep, you ingrates.”
The ingrates go to sleep.
Whoever was standing in the hall must have left, because the light shines unbroken now. It’s only in the final blurred seconds before she closes her eyes that it occurs to Juniper that she never heard their footsteps.
Moly and spite a woman make,
May every man his true form take.
A spell for swine, requiring wine & wicked intent
It’s Beatrice Belladonna who finds the words and ways for their first demonstration. Well, who else would it be? Who else spends their days wrapped in ink and paper-dust? Who else dreams in threes and sevens, in once-upon-a-times and witch-tales?
She finds it in an obscure translation of Homer, tucked between a verse about cruel arts and noxious herbs. Beatrice is no Classicist, but she’s certain she’s never seen these lines in any other version of the Odyssey. She assumes they are the addition of the translator, a Miss Alexandra Pope.
Juniper claps her hands and cackles when Beatrice shows her. “Hot damn, Bell. Who will it be? The mayor? That Gideon Hill bastard?”
Agnes says, “Jesus, June, you’re a menace,” and Beatrice says, a little shyly, “I was thinking perhaps Saint George?” Her sisters agree.
And so, on the last night of May, when the moon is a blacker blackness in the sky above them and the air smells hot and rich with summer, Beatrice leads the Sisters of Avalon to St. George’s Square.
They flit through the alleys and side-streets of New Salem in ones and twos, there and gone again. Instead of their usual skirts and aprons they wear gowns sewn from scraps and bits, pieced together by the girls who are cleverest with needle and thread.
Juniper had waved an illustrated copy of the Sisters Grimm at them as they worked. “We want them long and loose, witchy as all hell. And for Saints’ sake, make sure they have pockets.”
Beatrice thinks they did well; in their dark cloaks and long gowns the Sisters look like shadows or secrets, like fables come to life.
They gather in the white-paved square. Saint George stands over them, tall and bronze and cold, the hero who saved them from the plague and the wicked rule of witches.
Beatrice meets his metal eyes and has no difficulty at all summoning the will.
The words come next. Then the red splash of spilled wine. The bright scorch of magic as it burns its way into the world, shared between them and stronger for it. Beatrice staggers a little with the force of it.
When they smell the hot reek of molten bronze, they run.
It’s the lamp-lighters who find it first. They arrive with their ladders and dousers just before dawn, leaning for a moment against the linden trees that have never quite been the same since the equinox, ragged and twisting.
“Thought I’d gone mad,” one of them tells The New Salem Post, several hours later. “Thought my eyes was playing tricks.”
But his eyes are not playing tricks. On the plinth where Saint George once stood, proud and princely, there is now something lumpen and squat, vaguely shameful: a bronze pig, bearing a brand of three circles woven together.
The following afternoon Miss Cleopatra Quinn marches into Beatrice’s office at Salem College and lays three newspapers across the desk. BELOVED STATUE SUFFERS UNCANNY ATTACK, reads one headline. THE WITCHES ARE COMING! declares another. The Defender offers the more measured SAINT OR SWINE? AVALONIANS STRIKE A BLOW FOR WITCH-KIND.
“My, my, Miss Eastwood. I wasn’t aware I was fraternizing with such a troublemaker.” Beatrice assures herself that Miss Quinn means nothing in particular by the word fraternizing.
“It was nothing,” Beatrice murmurs, barely blushing.
“Hardly nothing. You have the whole city’s attention, now.”
They do: the Women’s Christian Union, the Ladies’ Temperance Society, and the New Salem Women’s Association issued a joint letter of condemnation the previous week, and Mr. Gideon Hill is holding rallies each Sunday afternoon. A “modern-day coven,” he calls them, seeking to bewitch young maidens and seduce God-fearing husbands. ( Just the reverse, Beatrice thinks, and then spends several minutes shocked at her own wickedness.)
And their numbers are growing. Agnes says they knock at all hours of the day and night: too-young girls run away from home, lost-looking mothers with babies in tow, grandmothers with sly smiles and witch-ways tucked in their pockets.
“Juniper wants another demonstration before the half-moon,” Beatrice says. “I haven’t found anything suitable—just the usual trifling spells to darn socks or shine silver—but Agnes thinks she might have what we need. It comes from that old witch-tale story about a boy who buys an enchanted bean from the Crone. Do you know it? One of the mill-girls told Agnes a rhyme that went with the story . . .”
But Beatrice trails away because Quinn isn’t listening. She’s looking out the window with her brow knit. “I hope you and your sisters know what you’re doing. I hope you understand that this kind of trouble”—she nods out to the square, where city workers are even now gathered around Saint George’s plinth, scratching their heads over the problem of relocating several possibly accursed tons of bronze pig—“demands a response.”
“From who?”
“The law. The Church. Every man whose wife looks at him sideways, not quite laughing, picturing him as a pig instead of a man. Every man who has ever wronged a woman, which is just about every man.” Her voice is tense, her arms folded. Beatrice doesn’t think she’s ever seen Quinn look worried.
“Well,” Beatrice says with forced cheer. “That’s why we’re looking for the Lost Way, isn’t it? Here are the materials we requested last week.” She gestures to the teetering stack of crates behind her desk.
Quinn turns away from the window, the worry banished by a childish eagerness. “The Old Salem papers?”
It was Quinn who connected Old Salem with the Lost Way. She was skimming through an antique book of nursery rhymes when a scrap of paper slid from the pages. It seemed to be the end of a much longer letter, just a few precious lines:
is true. What was lost has been found. Even the stars are not the stars I knew as a girl. Come soonest, my love. If we burn, let us burn together,
S. Good
October 10, 1783
Salem
Beneath the signature were three circles looped together, dotted with ink-drops that might have been eyes.
Quinn showed it to Beatrice and she felt a great wave move through her as she looked at it, an electric thrill that ran from her spine to her scalp. This was not a myth or a children’s story; this was ink-and-cotton proof that the Eastwoods were not the first wayward sisters to call the tower and its strange constellations.