She kneels beneath the empty plinth where Saint George once stood and places the candles around her like the pale flowers of a fairy ring. She sets the jars before her, three in a row, and waits.
It is midnight when Beatrice returns to the ruins of Old Salem.
Old Salem at midnight is not the same city they visited at noon. The skeletons of walls and streets are clearer by moonlight, their bones drawn in silver and shadow beneath the moss. The wind has risen, banishing the idle warmth of summer, whistling strangely through the alleys and corners of the lost city. It tugs at Beatrice’s hair, playful as a schoolgirl.
She and Miss Quinn stand in the bare circle of earth in the middle of the lost city. Seven candles flicker around them, drawing upward-slanting shadows over their faces, guttering in the untrustworthy wind.
Miss Quinn nods approval. “Thoroughly witchy, Miss Eastwood. You could hardly ask for better.”
“I thought perhaps the Way would have an affinity for the city, if it stood here once before. I suspect we’ll need all the help we can get.” There are supposed to be seven candles made of pure white wax, instead of five mismatched stubs stolen from Lilith’s inn (one of them is decorated with small, malformed bats; two of them are melted to their willow-patterned saucers). She and her sisters are supposed to be standing shoulder-to-shoulder, hand in hand; they’re supposed to be real witches, with familiars and broomsticks and pointed hats, instead of three desperate young women.
“Truly, this is madness. It cannot succeed. Even supposing we have the words and ways, I am not at all suited for this sort of thing. I lack the blood, the conviction, the courage—”
Quinn gives a tart cluck of her tongue. “Please do stop pretending you are a coward. It grows tiresome.”
“Pretending—”
“You fret and worry, but your hands are steady as stones.” Quinn’s arms are crossed, her chin high. “You have not stammered once since we arrived in Old Salem.”
Beatrice closes her mouth. “I suppose not.”
Quinn takes a step nearer, her face gilded gold. “Would a coward form a secret society of witches? Would she transfigure statues and hex cemeteries? Would she stand in the ruins of a lost city on the solstice?”
Beatrice feels as if the earth is tilting beneath her feet or the sky is tumbling around her ears, some fundamental truth is coming undone. “Perhaps she wouldn’t.” It comes out a near-whisper. “But she might still fail.”
“And yet you will try anyway.”
“Yes.”
“For your sister.”
Or perhaps for all of them: for the little girls thrown in cellars and the grown women sent to workhouses, the mothers who shouldn’t have died and the witches who shouldn’t have burned. For all the women punished merely for wanting what they shouldn’t have.
Beatrice settles for another “Yes.”
“I deceived you, it’s true, but Beatrice . . .” The challenge in Quinn’s face softens, replaced by a wistful tenderness that Beatrice finds far more dangerous. “I beg you not to deceive yourself.”
“I see.” A brief silence follows, while Beatrice recovers her straying voice. “Call me Bella.” Beatrice was the name of her father’s mother, a dried-out onion of a woman who visited once a year for Christmas and only ever gave them turgid novels about the lives of the Saints. A Beatrice couldn’t stand in this wild wood by the light of the not-quitefull moon, working the greatest witching of her century; a Beatrice couldn’t meet Quinn’s eyes in the candlelight, with the wind whipping her hair loose across her face. Perhaps a Belladonna could.
“Oh, are we on first-name terms now?” Quinn’s lips are a teasing curve, but that tender thing lingers in her voice.
“Of course we are.” Bella swallows once, too hard. “Cleo.”
She finds she can’t look into Quinn’s eyes as she says her name. She looks down at her notebook instead, rubbing her thumb across the words. “If anything untoward happens, you should run.”
“No, thank you,” Quinn says politely.
Bella tries again. “If it goes awry . . .” They both know it would be unwise for Quinn to be found in a scene of obvious witchcraft beside the burned husk of a white woman.
“Then I advise you not to let it go awry.” Quinn catches her eyes. “I am not here as a spy, Bella. Or even as a member of the Sisters of Avalon. I’m here as your . . . friend.” Her grin tilts. “And because I am the most curious creature ever cursed to walk the earth, to quote my mother, and I would very much like to be there when the Lost Way of Avalon comes back to the world.”
“Your mother seems a wise woman,” Bella says, and adds, a little daringly, “I’d like to meet her, someday.”
“But you already have!” Quinn sighs at Bella’s slack expression. “I did tell you my mother ran a spice shop.”
Bella considers objecting on the grounds that Quinn never said her mother ran a secret apothecary disguised as a spice shop while actually leading a clandestine society of colored witches, but instead says, “Oh.”
Quinn gives her a consoling pat. “She thought you were very sweet.”
Bella closes her eyes in brief and mortal mortification. “Well. It’s time, don’t you think?”
Quinn’s hand slips into hers, warm and dry. Bella wets her lips, feels the cool whip of wind on her tongue, and says the words a coward never would:
The wayward sisters, hand in hand,
Burned and bound, our stolen crown,
But what is lost, that can’t be found?
It’s seven minutes past midnight when Juniper’s collar begins to burn.
She splashes to her knees in the dark waters of the Deeps, fingers scrabbling at the hot iron, teeth gritted on howls and curses.
She heard the dogs, earlier—even buried beneath ten thousand pounds of stone and iron she could hear that mad chorus, sense the wicked heat of witchcraft in the air—but her collar had remained dull and cold against her blistered throat. Now it blazes, and beneath its heat she feels the lines that lead to her sisters, taut and singing with power.
Her lip splits beneath her teeth. Blood runs hot down her chin, too hot, and drips to the cold water below. Juniper hears the delicate splish as it lands and remembers her blood falling to the limestone cobbles of St. George’s Square—then the whipping wind, the dark tower, the wild smell of roses—Bella’s fingers on her mouth: maiden’s blood.
She knows, then, what her sisters are doing.
“Oh, you fools. You beautiful Saints-damned sinners—” She curses them and cries as she curses, because she knows they are doing it for her. Even though they abandoned her once before, even though they know now what she is—a murderess and a villain, worse than nothing—
It hurts even to think it. They came back for me. She feels something snap in her chest, as if her heart is a broken bone poorly set, which has to break again before it can heal right.
For a moment she pictures herself standing arm in arm with her sisters, triumphant before the Lost Way of Avalon. She knows it will never be. Because—though she can sense the rightness of the words and ways, though she feels her sisters’ will scorching down the line between them—Juniper knows they will fail.