At approximately ten-thirty last Sunday evening, the Last Witch Doctor of the Congo began to laugh. She continued laughing until several staff members left their beds to investigate, and found all the members of the exhibition missing. Where the Witch Doctor ought to have lain, they found only rusted chains and a white, grinning skull; each staff member who saw the skull that night has since been plagued by bad dreams and poor sleep.
A DECLARATION FOR
NEW CAIRO
July 4th, 1893, a letter from the editors of The New Salem Defender
The recent raids conducted by the Police Department have left seven buildings burnt in New Cairo and ruined the livelihoods of several hardworking families. The editors of this paper soundly reject the Council’s argument that such raids are necessary for public safety and note that none of them produced any evidence of witchcraft at all.
. . . If the authorities of New Salem insist on maintaining this adversarial position toward our neighborhood, perhaps it is time for New Cairo to follow that hallowed American tradition: secession.
Maiden, Mother, and Crone,
Guard the bed that I lie on,
One to watch,
One to pray,
One to keep the shadows at bay.
A warding spell, requiring salt & thistleseed
Agnes Amaranth is nothing, these days.
She used to be something—the city is wallpapered with her face, beautiful and terrible, her name written large above her crimes—but neither the face nor the name now belongs to her. Thanks to the ladies of Salem’s Sin, Agnes’s hair is the dull, forgettable color of sewer-water, and her face is pocked and rough as the surface of the moon. Mr. Malton barely glanced at her when she turned up back at the Baldwin Brothers mill, asking for work. He shoved the record book across the desk and she wrote the first name she thought of: Calliope Cole.
Each time someone says the name she startles, because she hasn’t heard her mother’s name since she was a girl. She gains a reputation in the mill as being flighty, perhaps a little simple.
She doesn’t mind. She keeps to herself, the way she used to before this summer of sisters and witching. The mill-girls are content to ignore her.
Or at least most of them are. Yulia offered her a friendly, knuckle-grinding handshake on her first day, then squinted hard at the familiar gray of her eyes. “Ha,” she grunted. “It’s clever, using a different name. We should find a new meeting house, too, yes?”
Agnes shrugged. “I suppose you should. I wish you luck.”
Agnes watched Yulia’s face curl from confusion to disdain. “I see. They locked my girl up for a week, fed her stale bread and rancid butter, and she is not afraid.”
Agnes refrained from saying anything untoward—like Good for her or She should be or What about you? Aren’t you afraid for your daughter?—and eventually Yulia left her alone.
She must have told the other Sisters not to bother with Agnes, because after that they turn their backs to her as she passes, noses high. Only Annie Flynn still offers her the occasional cordial nod. Once she even stopped Agnes in the alleyway to invite her to the first meeting of the Sisters since the disaster of the third spectacle. “Your sisters will be there, I heard.”
“Tell them . . . Give them my love.”
“I will.” Her gentleness was somehow worse than Yulia’s derision. “My cousin has been looking for you. May I tell him where to find you?”
Agnes made a jerky, uncertain gesture that might have been a nod.
She’s staying now at Three Blessings Boarding House, which smells exactly as cabbagey as South Sybil but costs two cents less a night. She might have paid extra for a private room, except that she’d taken her carefully hoarded coin jars to the cemetery and left them beside the golden tree. They were gone the next day.
The following night Agnes found her jars returned to her window ledge. Instead of coins they were full of thistleseed and salt and feathers, with tight-rolled scraps of paper tucked in the lids. She unrolled them to find words and ways written in her oldest sister’s neat script: spells for sending messages by mockingbird and binding wounds, for soothing fussing babies and getting milk-stains out of shirt-fronts, for “keeping the shadows at bay.” Agnes read that last one several times before she cast salt and thistle across her threshold and whispered the words. Afterward she stuffed the little scraps of paper beneath her mattress. She keeps meaning to burn them—what if the boarding house is raided? What if one of the other girls finds them?—but she never does.
At night she dreams of sisters; during the day she tries hard to forget them.
It’s difficult to forget when every story in the city—every rumor, every whispered conversation, every article—seems to be about them: the girls who busted out of prison, the woman who turned her husband into a pig, the witch doctor still running loose. But those were merely the stories witnessed by a sufficient number of people to be printed in the papers. Agnes hears dozens of less credible stories: colics cured and bones mended; lightning called and locks picked; machines busted and debts forgotten. None of the women appear to have any difficulty working the spells they are given. Agnes wonders if their witch-blood was awakened somehow by the return of the Lost Way, or if witch-blood never mattered much in the first place. She wonders what theories Bella and Quinn are working on and if Juniper has earned her familiar yet, if the Sisters are planning any more spectacles and if Gideon Hill has spies among them—
The baby thumps inside her. Never mind, baby girl. It’s just you and me.
By the beginning of July the mill is so hot four girls faint before noon. At five Agnes lines up with the other girls, their cheeks boiled red, their hair slicked to their necks. Even Mr. Malton hardly has the energy to pinch or leer, but merely sits, fanning himself and sweating whiskey. Agnes passes him with her head down, sewer-colored hair draped in front of her face.
She steps into the alley and takes a single breath of clean summer air.
“Agnes! Is that you?” Mr. August Lee is waiting for her, sleeves rolled to his elbows, hair tousled gold. He’s blinking uncertainly at Agnes’s hair and pox-marks.
She dips her head to him. “It’s Calliope, if you please, sir,” she says, but she meets his eyes with her own, thunder-gray, and relief spreads over his face.
He takes two steps forward, swaying as if he wants to step closer but doesn’t quite dare. “Of course. My mistake. Listen, I was hoping we could talk.”
“About what?”
“I only wanted to apologize. And help, maybe.”
Agnes knows she should tell him and his tousled hair to leave her alone, to go home and forget her name, but it’s been so long since she’s spoken to anyone but the fleas in her mattress. She nods once and takes the arm he offers.
The evening is thick and blue. It’s too hot to remain indoors for long, so the occupants of the West Babel tenements are crowded on stoops and balconies, summer-drunk. Several of them greet Mr. Lee by name; a few of them watch the sway of Agnes’s belly and raise their eyebrows at him. He doesn’t seem to care.
Mr. Lee steers her three blocks west to a pair of double doors, through which a great deal of noise and music and light are pouring out. Agnes arches her brow at him. “I’m in no condition for dancing, Mr. Lee.”