Trap. She thinks the word and feels the iron bite as it closes around her.
She’s still tear-blind and staggering when she hears a man’s voice echoing weirdly off the gravestones. It’s a familiar voice—oily, too high—but it’s only when Juniper hears the soft whimper of a dog that she realizes who it belongs to: Mr. Gideon Hill.
“For the safety of our fair city and the good of her people”—she can hear the smile in his voice, cloying and gray—“I hereby place James Juniper Eastwood and her accomplices under arrest, to be tried for the crime of murder by witchcraft.”
The first thing Beatrice feels is a rush of very foolish relief: there’s been some sort of mistake! Surely none of them, whatever their sins and faults, are murderers.
Then Beatrice sees her youngest sister’s face—bloodless and hard, her eyes flicking through every expression except surprise—and thinks perhaps she is mistaken in that assumption.
The second thing she feels is the familiar chill of flesh turning to stone, the numbness that follows betrayal. These men were huddled in the cemetery past midnight, waiting. Forewarned.
One of the figures scuttles forward, his lantern held high: a middle-aged, unremarkable man with a dog skulking at his heels like a reluctant shadow. It takes Beatrice far too long to recognize him, given that his face is plastered on campaign posters across three-quarters of the city. The Gideon Hill of the ads and newspapers is noble, even dashing, with ruddy cheeks and flaxen hair. In the lantern-glare he seems to have no color at all.
His eyes flick to the golden tree behind the Sisters and his lips twist in the patronizing cousin of a smile. “Most impressive, ladies.” The eyes move to the ground, where Juniper scratched the sign of the Last Three, and the smile vanishes. His voice rises. “You have besmirched our fair city with your sinful ways. But no longer!” Beatrice is busy turning to stone and drowning in panic, but she spares a second to think, Besmirched? and wonder exactly which pulpy novels Mr. Hill has been reading. “James Juniper, come with us if you please. The rest of you will be taken in for questioning.”
Beatrice knows enough about witch-trials to hear the violence waiting beneath the word questioning: the hiss of hot iron on flesh, the crack of a whip.
The line of men at Hill’s back seems to hesitate. They shuffle and murmur, perhaps reluctant to lay hands on black-gowned women meeting beneath the full moon, perhaps remembering all the stories they heard as boys.
Mr. Hill stamps his foot at them. “Sergeant, tell your men—”
But Juniper cuts him off. “Easy now, Hill.” Her voice is a slow, careless drawl, nearly friendly; it reminds Beatrice of the sheriff talking their daddy down from some drunken rant: Easy now, James. “No need to get hysterical.”
Juniper strolls away from the golden tree and limps over the fence, leaning heavy on her staff, just a young crippled girl with cropped hair. She lifts one hand in sarcastic surrender. “Do you think you brought enough boys, Sergeant? Or do you want to run back for a couple more?”
Her expression is scornful, a little bored, as if this is all a lot of fuss and mess, but Beatrice feels her terror shrieking through the line between them and knows it’s nothing but stubbornness and guts keeping her standing.
Juniper ought to remember that there are places where guts don’t matter. Dark cellars, little white rooms where they lock you up until you lose the dangerous habit of courage.
Beatrice takes a half-step toward her, but Juniper turns back to face the women still circled around the tree. “Ladies,” she says, and smiles. It’s such a Juniper-ish smile—fey and foolish and dangerous, like an animal spinning to face its hunter, bare-toothed—that Beatrice knows abruptly what she’s about to do. She hears Agnes shout no!
“Hemlock.”
Juniper flings herself backward into Gideon Hill. They topple—him swearing, her howling and thrashing, swinging her staff—and the Sisters of Avalon scatter like a broken string of pearls.
Beatrice watches them running in a dozen directions, screaming, stumbling, leaving scraps of black hung on the broken spokes of the fence. They dodge through the headstones, some of them caught by reaching hands, borne to the earth, some of them vanishing like smoke into the night. Beatrice knows she ought to be running with them, but she’s still made of stone, unmoving.
There’s a tangle of bodies where Juniper once stood. Beatrice catches the shine of boots, the sick thud of fists on flesh. Hill struggles free. He stands panting, wiping blood from his split lip with an absent expression, as if he doesn’t feel any particular way about being violently tackled by a witch.
A pair of officers lumber toward the tree where Beatrice stands still as limestone. She thinks distantly that it might be nice to burn, because at least she’ll never have to see Miss Quinn’s cat’s grin and wonder why she betrayed them.
Someone shoves her between the shoulder blades, hard.
“Run, damn you!” Agnes hisses.
Beatrice runs.
Agnes should have started running as soon as she heard the first scuff of cloak on stone, as soon as she understood they’d walked into a trap.
She stayed. While Juniper flung herself at Gideon Hill, while Bella stood there like a damn statue, while her little sister’s blood turned thick and gelid in her palm.
The last time Juniper got herself in trouble, Agnes had rushed to save her without a second thought. But this time the men are wearing badges on their chests. This time Agnes will wind up in a jail cell, and she knows what happens to women who go to jail with babies in their bellies: they lose them. Either before birth, from rough treatment and poor food, or after it, when some flint-faced doctor rips the baby from their bodies and takes her away, still squalling. Agnes’s daughter would end up in the New Salem Home for Lost Angels. If she isn’t over-lain or shipped out west, Agnes might see her sometimes playing in the alleys, pox-scarred and undersized, with bitter black stones for eyes.
No. Not for anything. Not for the vote or the Sisters or even her own true-blood sisters.
She gives Bella a good shove and runs without looking back, one arm wrapped tight around her belly. Hands reach for her and she twists away from them. They tangle in her long cloak and she scrabbles for the clasp, sending it winging free behind her.
Each footfall is a slap against her stomach, jarring her hips. Her hair clings sweaty and tangled against her neck. She dodges behind a white pillar of stone and doubles over, heaving, choking back coughs.
There are boot-steps and raised voices behind her, growing nearer.
She fumbles a candle-stub from her pocket and draws a shaky, desperate X of wax on the stone. It’s men’s magic—“good for a quick getaway,” Mr. Lee had said, smiling his crooked smile. She gave him an arch look. “And are you often in need of getaways, Mr. Lee?”
“Oh, weekly, Miss Eastwood.”
Across the room, Juniper made a blech sound.
Now Agnes pants the string of Latin he taught them. Lightness fills her, as if her bones are hollowing out. A black twist of hair unpeels from her neck and floats lazily upward, as if gravity has briefly forgotten its business.
She runs again. This time she’s a thrown stone skipped across a pond, a gull skimming above the waves, there and gone again. The sounds of pursuit fade behind her.