The sky is such an unblemished blue it looks strangely unfinished, as if a careless painter has forgotten to add clouds and birds and slight variations in hue. Beatrice feels obscurely that the day should be gray and wintry, the wind howling as they approach the gravesite of the last witches of the modern world.
Lilith’s mules turn from the pocked highway down an even more forgotten-looking road made of moss-eaten cobbles and mud. The woods rise like water around them, cool and silent; even the newlyweds cease their giggling. The air smells green and secret, surprising Beatrice with a rare pang of homesickness for Crow County; she supposes a person doesn’t have to love their home in order to miss it.
They trundle on in near-silence, Beatrice wondering fretfully how much farther it is and whether their quest has any hope of success, until Miss Quinn points into the shadowed wood at a low, lichen-covered wall made of blackened stone. Another wall runs beside it, sketching a square in the undergrowth. Beyond that Beatrice sees the rotten remnants of a doorway, the ghost of a lane, and understands abruptly that they have already reached Old Salem. They are driving now through its remains.
“Excuse me, ma’am.” Miss Quinn interrupts Lady Lilith mid-hawk. “Do you think we might explore a bit on our own?”
Lady Lilith hauls her mules to a halt and eyes Quinn, scratching speculatively at the three white hairs coiled on her chin. “S’haunted,” she observes. “Dangerous, to let tourists go wandering off. I might get in trouble.”
Beatrice begins to explain that she is a former librarian and Miss Quinn is a journalist, and that they intend to take the utmost care in their explorations—which are in fact a matter of life and death for someone they love dearly—but Quinn produces a neatly folded dollar bill and presses it into Lady Lilith’s damp palm. “If you could come back before dusk, we’d very much appreciate it,” Quinn says, then climbs out of the wagon and extends a hand to help Beatrice down after her.
Lilith flicks the reins and Quinn and Beatrice are alone in the soft green ruins of the city.
They wander wordlessly through the woods, pausing to scrub moss from walls or scuff leaves away from stone roads. The trees around them strike Beatrice as implausibly ancient, surely older than a century. Crows and starlings watch them with mocking eyes, as if they know what the women are looking for and where it’s hidden, but are disinclined to help.
Beatrice is no longer sure precisely what they are looking for—a signpost with an arrow pointing to the Lost Way of Avalon, perhaps, or a book titled On Restoring the Power of Witches and Rescuing One’s Sister from Certain Death; some instruction or spell that has survived a century of rain and sun and morbid tourists. The sudden absurdity of the idea curdles Beatrice’s stomach. She glances sideways at Quinn, wondering if she regrets signing her name in that notebook.
They walk on in silence. Sometimes Beatrice finds a patch of moss that grows in unlikely spirals, or a stone that bears an uncomfortable resemblance to a man with his arms raised to ward off some unseen blow. Somewhere in the middle of the city they find a bare circle of black-scorched stone, untouched by moss or grass or even fallen leaves, and the wind whips cold and tricksome against Beatrice’s cheek—but there are no helpful letters carved into the earth, no books hidden beneath loose cobbles.
By the time Lady Lilith’s wagon rattles back down the narrow road, the forest is gold and blue with early twilight, and tears are gathering behind Beatrice’s eyes. When she blinks she sees her sister’s body swimming in the darkness of her eyelids.
“Will you be staying at Salem Inn, misses?” Lilith asks them perfunctorily. “We offer two meals in the historic dining hall without additional payment and a free ticket apiece to the Museum of Sin, recently reopened to the public following some difficulties with mold this spring.”
Beatrice feels the faintest, dimmest spark of hope. Quinn is making some polite excuse about urgent business back home when Beatrice steps forward and asks, “How much just for the museum?”
In the Deeps, Juniper waits.
She doesn’t know what she’s waiting for anymore, but she keeps doing it anyway.
She has visitors, sometimes, but never the ones she wants. An officer arrives twice a day to hang a pail of something whitish and congealed inside her cell. Grits, Juniper thinks, or the aggrieved ghost a grit might leave behind if it was murdered in cold blood. When she asks for water the man points downward, to the putrid gray of the water at their feet. He laughs.
In the mornings a woman in rubber boots comes to carry out the piss pot. The first morning Juniper badgers her with questions—Where are the others? How many did the bastards get? Has she no pity, no shame, aiding the enemy of all womankind?—until the woman calmly tips the contents of the pot into Juniper’s grits. The second morning Juniper keeps her damn mouth shut; the third morning the woman brings her a hard biscuit and a tin cup of water.
Her tormentors don’t return. Juniper is relieved at first, before she remembers that time is a tormentor, too. Down in the cellar the hours used to come alive around her, stalking and prowling in the dark.
By the evening of the third day, Juniper is cold and hungry and so thirsty her throat feels barbed, as if she swallowed briars. She sits on the bed and watches the stairwell, still waiting. A habit, maybe, from the seven years she spent hoping her sisters would come home.
She’s given up on hope, but she can’t seem to leave the habit of waiting behind.
Beatrice suspects that Lady Lilith’s Museum of Sin—boasting More Than One Hundred Genuine Relics of Witchcraft—has not eradicated its mold problem as thoroughly as Lilith claimed. There’s a damp, living smell to the place; Beatrice imagines saplings pressing up beneath the floorboards, vines digging green fingers into the plaster.
The museum is a series of low-ceilinged rooms draped in patchy velvet and black-dyed gauze, crowded with shelves and glass cases of Genuine Relics. At least three-quarters of the items are transparent frauds—Beatrice is confident that the witches of Old Salem never wielded wands with fake rubies glued to their handles, and the dust-furred skeleton labeled American Dragon (Juvenile) is most likely a small crocodile with vulture wings wired to its back—and everything conceivably authentic is too trivial to matter. There is a set of silver thimbles, charred and iridescent from some great heat; an iron skillet containing the “burnt remains of its owner’s last meal”; a little girl’s smoke-stained sewing sampler.
“Well.” Beatrice sighs. “It was worth a try. I don’t suppose Lady Lilith will refund us our dimes.”
Quinn is peering into cases and reading brass labels with every appearance of fascination. “Whyever should we want a refund?”
“You’re being very sporting about this, but it’s clear—”
“My family has been free for three generations,” Quinn interrupts. She tilts the derby hat back on her head in order to more closely examine a box containing, allegedly, the femur of an unidentified witch. “But my grandmother was born on a farm called Sweet Bay.” Quinn squints as if she’s reading a label, but her eyes don’t move. “A rice plantation.”
“I’m—so sorry.”
“I’m sure you are. But what is sorry worth, in the face of Sweet Bay?” Quinn is still staring at that brass label, but the perfect calm of her voice is splintered, bleeding through the cracks. “My grandmother didn’t need your sorry.”