But Juniper doesn’t care. She wants the cool whip of the night on her cheeks, the black tangle of robes behind her, the heat of witching in her blood. Damn the danger.
She stands, her smile wide and wicked. “Then it’s time we get ready.”
Intery, mintery, cutery-corn,
Apple seed and apple thorn;
Feather fine, five-fold
Turn it all to gold.
A spell for a golden apple, requiring five feathers & pricked thumb
James Juniper is just a girl, most of the time. The rest of the Sisters of Avalon are just maids or mill workers, dancers or fortune-tellers, mothers or daughters. Everyday sorts of women with everyday sorts of lives, not worth mentioning in any story worth telling.
But tonight, beneath the Rose Moon of June, they are witches. They are crones and maidens, villains and temptresses, and all the stories belong to them.
Juniper likes the city at night better than its daytime self. At night the noise and clatter soften enough to hear the rush of wind through alleys, the padding of stray cats, the chitter and dart of bats. The earth feels closer beneath the cobblestones and the stars shine stubborn through the smog and gas-light. Juniper can almost pretend she’s running through the woods back home, tangle-haired and barefoot. Maybe it’s just the solstice getting closer; Mags always said the holy days are when witching burns brightest, when even mice and men can feel the hot pulse of it beneath the skin of the world.
The cemetery is locked after dark, the gates high and sharp, but tonight they are witches. Juniper tosses her cedar staff over the top, then braids three hairs together and whispers the words. The Sisters climb the black silk rope, long and supple, and thud into the soft earth of the cemetery one after the other. They slip like shadows among the graves.
The witch-yard is tucked on the eastern edge of the cemetery: a half-acre of weeds and scraggled grass, without so much as a cracked headstone or a wooden cross. A witch was never buried beneath her name; instead, her ashes were sown with salt to prevent her soul from lingering longer than it should, then scattered over unhallowed ground. Juniper looks at that barren, sour earth and feels a leaden weight in her limbs: grief, maybe, for all the women they burned before her.
The fence around the witch-yard is less a fence than a suggestion; their skirts snag on rusted iron and sagging posts as they step across it. They flock to the center, where a single stunted hawthorn claws the sky.
Stillness falls. The cemetery is silent except for the rustle of wind through black-dyed cloth.
Juniper looks from face to moon-silvered face: Agnes with her belly hard and full; worried-looking Bella; Frankie Black and Florence Pearl, their arms long and bare; Jennie Lind and Gertrude Bonnin; a dozen other girls with eyes like bared blades and bloody promises, standing on the ashes of their ancestors.
Juniper wishes, with a poisonous twist in her stomach, that her daddy could see them. A girl is such an easy thing to break: weak and fragile, all alone, all yours. But they aren’t girls anymore, and they don’t belong to anyone. And they aren’t alone.
Come and get us now, you bastard.
Her fist is tight around the feather in her pocket, and for a red second she wants to snap it. What good are golden apples? They should be raining brimstone or poisoning wells, making every man in New Salem shake in his damned boots. Last week they’d found a spell to call storms, a sailor’s rhyme about red skies at morning and red skies at night, but Agnes shook her head. “I thought you wanted to recruit more women to the cause.”
“It’d recruit the hell out of me,” Juniper said, truthfully.
“Yes, well, you’re a plague and a calamity and you should be locked up for the safety of the city.” Agnes held the apple up to the window, where it glowed a rich, impossible yellow. “All of us grew up on stories of wicked witches. The villages they cursed, the plagues they brewed. We need to show people what else we have to offer, give them better stories.”
Now Agnes clears her throat at Juniper’s side. She steps forward to bury five apple seeds at the base of the hawthorn. She kneels in the dirt, hair loose and shining around her shoulders, lips forming the words for growth and greening. Some of the others whisper them with her. Fee and fie, fum and foe.
The hawthorn creaks. It groans and whines in a manner not unlike Mama Mags on a cold morning, when frost creeps white up the mountainside. Then it grows. The knobbled branches swell; the roots twist through the earth; the dry curls of leaves turn glossy emerald. Buds sprout, unfurl, bloom, fade, fall—an entire springtime in a second. Fruit swells, hard and green and then waxy red, ready for the plucking.
When Agnes stops speaking, there is an apple tree in the witch-yard where the hawthorn once stood, its crown spread high and proud, its boughs heavy with unnatural fruit.
Juniper puts her thumb to her mouth and bites until she tastes warm copper. She reaches for an apple and smears her blood across its flesh, red on red. Beside her she sees the others mimic her, hands lifting up, blood running down their wrists, feathers clutched tight.
They speak the words together, and it’s just like Bella said it would be: stronger for the sharing. Grander, wilder, hotter—the witching burns into the world and the apples blush gold. Except it’s not just the apples: yellow creeps up stems and twines around branches, runs along the branched veins of the leaves. Juniper and her Sisters keep speaking the words and the magic keeps burning and the gold keeps spreading until the entire tree stands bright and metal, as if Queen Midas herself strolled out of legend to trail her fingers along its bark.
The chanting stops. Silence falls, broken only by the calls of night-birds and the clink-clink of wind through golden leaves. The tree seems to emit its own buttery light, like a torch burning in the night, and Juniper sees the shine of it reflected in the upturned faces of the Sisters of Avalon. Each of them has the awed, slack expression of a woman who has witnessed an impossibility: a miracle, a revelation. A better story, glowing gold in the darkness.
Juniper glances sideways at Agnes, who looks younger and softer in the golden light. Juniper reaches for her hand without thinking, the way she did when they were girls, except now her palm is tacky with her own blood. “So maybe you were right,” she whispers.
“Of course I was.” Agnes folds her fingers around hers and squeezes once.
Juniper limps forward. With the scuffed end of her staff she scrapes a sign into the dirt: three circles, bound one to the other.
She’s about to tell them all to head home when something rustles in the grave-strewn dark at Juniper’s back. A fox, she thinks, or a cat.
But the rustle spreads. It echoes from every direction, a sudden swell of sound. Juniper spins to see shadows standing, black-cloaked figures rising from behind gravestones with silver badges glinting on their chests. She sees hands reaching, dark cloths whipped aside, and then the witch-yard is flooded with the blinding light of a dozen lanterns.
The light hits them like the stroke of midnight breaking some invisible spell. The glow of the golden tree turns sickly yellow and the wheeling stars become pale pinpricks above them. The wind dies, the night-birds fall silent. The witches are made into mere women once more.
Juniper swears, eyes stinging. Around her she hears the gasps and screams of the others—her sisters and Sisters, the girls and women who followed her into this—