Beatrice sleeps. She dreams—of locked cells and spun silver, of white snakes and black towers—and wakes sweating in the stale heat of midday. She wills herself back to sleep, staring at the pulsing dark of her own eyelids until she slips into a dazed, dreamless place.
The next time she wakes the attic is all slanting shadows and twilit windows, and Miss Cleopatra Quinn is sitting at the end of her bed.
(Beatrice is abruptly aware that her left cheek is sticky with spittle and that she is wearing her oldest and most mortifying nightdress, the one with little bonneted ducks embroidered at the collar.)
“I believe in the story it’s a kiss that wakes Snow White from her sleep, but I’ve always found that a little presumptuous.” Quinn’s voice is light, but her eyes on Beatrice are heavy with worry. “I tried to visit your office at the library today.”
Beatrice licks sleep-gummed lips. “It’s not my office anymore.”
“So I was made to understand.” She adds, after a pause, “I’m sorry.”
The next pause is much longer and emptier. The interior of Beatrice’s skull feels dim and cobwebbed, like a closet she prefers not to open.
Quinn strokes the brim of the derby hat in her lap. “The Post reports five arrests—Frankie, Gertrude, Jennie, the oldest Domontovich girl—all of whom are charged with general mayhem, the promotion of sin, and public witchcraft. Juniper has . . . additional charges, of course. As far as I can tell, most of the girls were shipped four miles south to the women’s workhouse. Except Jennie, who I can’t seem to find, and Juniper, who is in the Deeps.”
Beatrice wonders vaguely what Quinn expects her to do with this report. Cry, perhaps. But even crying seems messy and troublesome compared to the clean relief of sleep.
Quinn continues in a clipped, professional voice. “Your sister’s trial is set for the middle of next week, but the Deeps are not a healthful place to linger, and the solstice is the day after tomorrow. I don’t think we can afford to wait.”
Beatrice lets this rattle through the cobwebby closet of her brain for a while before asking, cautiously, “Wait?”
“To retrieve your sister from the custody of the New Salem Police Department,” Quinn clarifies. “To rescue her.”
It takes far too long for Beatrice to recognize the rusty, bitter sound coming from her mouth as a laugh. “You and Miss Araminta assured me it was too late and sent me home like a schoolgirl. Now you’re proposing some sort of daring rescue?”
Small, pitying lines appear between Quinn’s brows. “As I recall, we merely discouraged you from visiting the Hall of Justice and asking if they would give your sister back, pretty please. None of us would leave a sister, or a Daughter, to rot in the Deeps if we could help it.”
Beatrice scoots herself upright in bed, muscles cramped from an entire day spent in stubborn sleep, no longer caring about her mortifying nightdress (she still cares). “But we can’t help it! We have no legal recourse. No financial recourse—I am no longer even employed! No witching sufficient to sway a jury or dig a tunnel or disappear a woman from a locked cell.” Bella makes a hopeless gesture at the room. “I would like to s-save my sister. Even knowing what she did, what she is. But it is not possible.”
The pity in Quinn’s face turns tart. “Very true, Beatrice. So don’t you think it’s time we considered the impossible?”
“I don’t—”
“Oh, for Saints’ sake, woman.” Quinn swats her blanketed legs with her derby hat. “Get out of bed. Use whatever remains of your common sense. All summer we’ve been inching closer to the thing that could turn the world upside down. That could give us back what we lost, make the impossible possible again.”
Hope flutters in Beatrice’s chest, broken-winged. It hurts far worse than despair. “But our theories are so tenuous. Mere . . . moonbeams.”
Quinn swats her again. “They are perfectly scholarly! Considered, documented, based on reliable sources—”
“Children’s stories! Nursery rhymes! Nothing respectable, nothing verifiable!”
“Must a thing be bound and shelved in order to matter? Some stories were never written down. Some stories were passed by whisper and song, mother to daughter to sister. Bits and pieces were lost over the centuries, I’m sure, details shifted, but not all of them.” Quinn stands, pacing. “Towers and roses. Maiden’s blood. Crone’s tears. Mother’s milk. Would you really deny your own discoveries? Surely you are not such a coward.”
“Oh, I assure you I am.”
“You aren’t—”
“But even if I agree with you about the ways, we don’t have all the words.” Bella turns her hands palm up, a gesture of surrender. “We don’t even have my notes anymore.”
She’s interrupted by a polite tap at the door. A polite, familiar voice calls, “Miss Eastwood? I’m so sorry for the lateness of the hour. But you left your notebook at the library, and I thought I ought to return it.”
There’s a brief silence while Quinn’s eyebrows climb and Beatrice peels out of her sheets and tugs a robe over her horrible nightdress. “H-Henry?” Beatrice kicks aside the line of salt and unbolts her door to find Mr. Blackwell blinking affably on the stairs. In his hand he holds a small, shabby book bound in black leather.
Beatrice snatches it and strokes the familiar pleats and cracks of the spine. “Oh, thank you! I thought it would be confiscated by the authorities, in light of the accusations leveled against me.” Beatrice recalls herself and adds, “Not that the accusations are true. They’re quite false.”
“Are they?” Mr. Blackwell asks mildly.
Beatrice is blinking her way toward some confused combination of denial and confession when Miss Quinn steps into view at her shoulder. “No. Although I don’t think our Beatrice has been holding congress with demons, do you?”
“Ah, Miss Quinn, a pleasure.” Mr. Blackwell looks distinctly unsurprised to see Quinn in Beatrice’s room. “Well, I’m sorry to interrupt, ladies. I only wanted to return the book”—Beatrice clutches it tighter to her chest—“and wish you both the best of luck.”
“With—what?” Beatrice asks.
“Well.” Mr. Blackwell gives a slightly embarrassed cough. “With calling back the Lost Way of Avalon. I presume.”
It occurs to Beatrice that she has gone slightly mad. Surely she did not actually hear Mr. Henry Blackwell—head of Special Collections, possessor of tufty ear-hair and a rather grand collection of bow ties—wish her luck with the restoration of witchcraft.
Quinn reaches over her shoulder to pull the door wider. “Why don’t you come in and have a seat, Mr. Blackwell.”
Mr. Blackwell sits at Beatrice’s wobbly kitchen table, not looking at Beatrice’s robe and nightdress, smiling politely at his own thumbs.
“Did you overhear us?”
“Oh, come now, Miss Eastwood,” he scoffs gently. “I approved all your requests for materials. I loaded the carts myself and wheeled them to your office and scratched them out of the log afterward. Witch-tales and folklore. Old Salem and Avalon. Every instance of significant magic after the Georgian Inquisition. I put the pieces together.” He transfers his polite smile to Beatrice. “I may not be a witch, Miss Eastwood, but I’m quite a tolerable librarian.”