She walks home, weary and sore-footed. At first she hides when she sees officers riding past on their tall grays, but soon she realizes they hardly notice her. She is nothing, once again.
London Bridge is falling down, falling down,
iron bars will bend and break, bend and break,
My fair maiden.
A spell for rust, requiring saltwater & joined hands
Juniper wakes to a series of mysteries. The first mystery is her own skin, which she remembers as a battered, mistreated thing, like a worn-out suit of clothes. But it feels whole and smooth beneath her hands. Even—her fingers tremble as they reach her throat—the place where the iron collar burned itself to ash. It ought to be a scabbed, gluey ruin, weeping yellow and red, but there’s nothing but knots of taut flesh.
The second mystery is the room, which is round and sunny, and which she has never seen before in her life. There are three beds set beneath three arched windows, and three woven rugs overlapping on a wooden floor. Juniper thinks a little giddily of witch-tales about three bears and lost maidens. There’s a just-rightness to the room that Juniper can’t quite name, until she realizes it reminds her of the attic where they slept as girls. It was the only part of the house she was sorry to burn.
The third mystery is the most subtle and the most troubling: the light is all wrong. It feels like the middle of the day, but the sun falls slantwise through the windows, heavy and gold as a ripe apple. It’s autumn sunlight, Juniper is sure of it, and she wonders dizzily if she slept through summer.
She finds no answers in the quiet dancing of the dust motes, or in the green tendrils of ivy and rose that curl over the window ledges. She rustles in a chest at the foot of her bed and finds a wide-sleeved robe in undyed wool, with a single silver clasp in the shape of an S, or maybe a snake. She pulls it over her head, ignoring the pop and groan of muscles that would prefer to lie back down in the featherbed, and climbs down the ladder.
It ends at the top of a staircase that corkscrews downward. Along its dizzy route there are doors and alcoves, chairs piled with cushions and windows with wide benches beneath them. And books. An amount and variety of books that Juniper finds frankly excessive.
Juniper limps in slow spirals through the tower, badly missing her red-cedar staff, trailing one hand along the spines: soft calfskin, brittle leather, ragged cotton, burlap, eelskin, iron, titles stamped in gold and char, something that whispers sweetly as she touches it and something else that stings. She’s a little surprised she doesn’t find her oldest sister lying on the steps, expired from sheer glee.
Then, as she passes a delicately carved door, Juniper hears Bella’s voice. “—was thinking we ought to start with the medicinal texts. The fever is horrendous this year, and think what a coup it would be if we cured it!”
Juniper is standing halfway up a tower, right against the stone of the outer wall. By every natural law, there should be nothing but empty air behind the little carved door. But when she opens it she finds a smallish room paneled in dark oak, with a wide table presently buried beneath scrolls and books and scattered ink-pens. Bella leans over one side, spectacles perched on her nose, and Quinn sits at the other, lips quirked at some private joke.
“June!” Bella straightens. “When did you get up? What possessed you to walk down all those stairs on your own?” She shuffles Juniper over to a chair with much muttering and flapping of hands.
“I’m fine,” Juniper says, but her voice sounds like the drag of a match-tip against stone, harsh and grating. She fends off an offered shawl and cushion. “Jesus. Morning, Cleo.”
“Morning.”
“Where’s that big black bird of yours, Bell? And how do I get one?”
Bella circles the table and resettles herself on the arm of Quinn’s chair. “Strix, you mean? He comes and goes as he pleases. Sometimes he vanishes altogether, back to the other side.”
“Huh. And where’s Agnes?” Juniper reaches for her without thinking, forgetting that the spell that bound them is done and over now. But the invisible line between them is still there. She can feel Agnes somewhere in the city, toiling away.
It takes Juniper far too long to realize that Bella has not answered her, that she’s even now shuffling a stack of pages on her desk rather than meeting Juniper’s eyes. “Agnes is . . . no longer an active member of the Sisters of Avalon. By her own volition.”
“What?”
“She got scared and quit,” Quinn clarifies.
Juniper feels a petulant heat in her throat. It was supposed to be the three of them together again, one for all and all for one. “But she was here. She called back the Lost Way with us. And you’re telling me she just split?”
Bella says, softly, “She’s got more than just her own neck to look out for, remember.” It’s the closest Juniper has heard Bella come to defending their sister. “And it’s more dangerous now. Look.” Bella unfolds a waxy-looking poster from a stack on her desk and hands it over.
Juniper meets her own eyes on the page: her face is sketched in charcoal, standing between her sisters. Juniper is drawn tangle-haired and snarling, like the kind of witch who lives in the woods and runs with wolves; Bella is sharp-boned and thin, like the witch who lives in a spun-sugar house and eats little children; Agnes is all curves and lips, more like the witch who lures men to her bed and leaves them cold and white in the morning. The caption reads: THE SISTERS EASTWOOD: WANTED FOR MURDER & MOST WICKED WITCHCRAFT, and offers a generous reward for information regarding their whereabouts.
Juniper looks down at their monstrous faces and feels a bitter twist in her gut. If it’s a villain they want, who is she to deny them?
Bella folds the poster away. “There are rumors, too, Quinn tells me. Hysterical theories about your escape and a black tower seen on the solstice. The square is still full of birds, apparently. A few churches have begun holding nightly vigils against the return of witching—they’re telling their congregations that the fever is a punishment sent by either God or the Devil, they can’t seem to agree which—oh, quit grinning like that, June, this is serious!”
“Jesus, Bell, lighten—”
“There have been nineteen arrests since the solstice.” Quinn speaks very slowly and clearly, as if she thinks Juniper might need things spelled out in one-syllable words. “Mostly harmless street-witches—an abortionist, a fortune-teller, a woman who claimed to speak with the dead. There have been raids, too, women beaten bloody for nothing but a few feathers in their pockets or a questionable spice-rack.”
Juniper is not grinning anymore. She hears Agnes asking her what comes after, what it costs. “Are the Sisters alright?”
Quinn makes a little yes-and-no bob of her head. “Four of them are still in the workhouse, as far as I know; I still haven’t found Jennie. A few others have had unpleasant encounters with the police. The Hull sisters were among the nineteen arrests.”
Juniper can’t think of anything to say, can hardly think around the queasy guilt crawling up her throat. Quinn isn’t finished. “There are calls for the mayor’s resignation. The City Council has formed a committee to investigate the rise of witchcraft, headed by Mr. Gideon Hill. Who has climbed rather dramatically in the polls.”