In the morning Juniper wakes to see shadow-fingers sliding across the window, prying between the panes, trying to get in.
They run.
Agnes pretends to herself that her daughter isn’t sick. That the rising bloom of red in her cheeks is the product of bad air in the tenements or too-tight swaddling, that the thin edge of her wail is just hunger or indigestion or exhaustion. But she sees the way her sisters look at Eve, feels their worry like a gathering cloud in the binding between them—and knows better.
Bella consults her little black notebook and produces long lists of rhymes and chants, poultices and cures. Juniper visits Araminta’s spice shop and a few midwives in hiding and returns with feverfew and willowbark, silkweed and red thread. It seems to help, at first. Eve’s eyes lose the dangerous, glassy sheen, and her usual imperious expression returns. But then her breath thickens again, her temperature rising as some unseen thing eats away at their spells. A cough emerges, wet and persistent, so that her breath rattles sometimes in her sleep.
“The plague, for certain,” pronounces Yulia, a few days later. They’re staying with one of the several dozen Domontoviches scattered on the west side, stuffed in a warm loft above a barroom.
“You don’t know that,” Agnes snaps.
Yulia shrugs, unmoved. “Eh. This is how my cousin sounds, before they take her to St. Charity’s.”
“No one’s taking Eve anywhere.” There’s a silent rushing in the air between them and Pan appears on her shoulder, a tangle of darkness that becomes a hawk. Yulia looks at the osprey—his vicious beak, his scalding glare—and subsides.
They sit with their Sisters at a round table in the middle of the loft, pocked and scarred from years in the bar below. It’s a larger meeting than they’ve dared in weeks: Cleo sitting with her knee pressed against Bella’s, Gertrude and Frankie sharing a long bench with the Hull sisters, Inez and Electa lost in a mob of Valkyrie-like women who can only be Yulia’s relatives. Agnes can’t help noticing that most of the women sit a little apart from the Eastwoods, as if they are either too dangerous or too revered to touch.
Juniper called them all by mockingbird after the most recent round of arrests, because the women are no longer being held in the workhouses. They’ve thrown them in the Deeps, with witch-collars and bridles around their throats, where their witching can’t reach them. The shadows seem to fall more darkly around the Hall of Justice, sharp and black, like the jagged teeth of a trap.
The Sisters confer for hours, proposing spells and countermeasures and unlikely schemes. Some of them have daughters or sisters down in the Deeps, and their eyes burn like coals in their skulls. Agnes thinks of circles drawn wide, of bindings-between and one-for-all, and shivers a little at the strength of it.
Sometime past midnight Juniper stands. “Well, it’s a start. Now, what witch-ways have you brought?” The women turn out pockets and empty brown paper sacks on the table. Agnes can tell from the worried bow of Juniper’s shoulders that it isn’t enough.
She’s frowning and opening her mouth when Inez says, “Wait a moment.”
Inez lays a long, thin object along the table, smiling at Juniper. Inez looks older and a little thinner than she did in the spring, her cheeks no longer merry and full. She and Jennie have been running, too.
Juniper frowns as her fingers peel away silk wrappings. Her mouth falls open as she sees what lies beneath. She stares down at the table for a while, looks up at Inez, then back down. “You did this?” Her voice is hoarse.
“Well, I provided the gems, being the only one of your dear Sisters with money to waste as I please. But Annie found the tree and Yulia found the woodworker. It was your sisters’ idea . . .” She trails off. “You like it?”
Whatever Juniper is feeling right now, Agnes suspects like is too small a word for it. Her eyes are shimmering spring-green and her hands shake as she reaches for the thing on the table. As she lifts it to the light Agnes sees a long staff of polished yew, the grain knotted and stained black. A carved line spirals up the stick, ending in a bowed head: a snake with a pair of garnets for eyes.
Juniper swivels between Agnes and Bella, mute, reverent.
Bella shrugs. “Well, honestly, we couldn’t have you running around with Mr. Blackwell’s poor cane. This suits you much better.”
The binding between them hums with fierce joy, enough to make Agnes forget for a moment that they are hunted and hounded by a city that hates them.
Until a small, tired voice calls, “Hyssop.”
Jennie Lind staggers into the room. The expression on her face sends a cold current through the gathered women. “Mayor Worthington is resigning tomorrow.” She says it quick and sharp, a merciful blow. “The Council will call a special election by the end of the week.”
All the glee drains from Juniper’s face. “How do you know? Can you be sure?”
Jennie’s mouth goes tight but Inez answers for her. “Mayor Worthington is her father,” she says softly. “She’s sure.”
The burst of gasps and whispers that follow this is sufficient to wake Eve, who wails her thin, not-right wail while the Sisters of Avalon trade muttered fears and dark pronouncements. He’s ahead in the polls, I heard.
The mutters trail into heavy silence as each woman feels the weight of an unseen boot pressing down on them.
“Well. There’s nothing to be done tonight.” Juniper lowers herself into a chair, staff across her knees. “Head home, girls. Get some sleep.”
They leave in ones and twos, until only Yulia and her cousin remain with the Eastwoods. It’s late, but no one seems to want to go to sleep; they sit around the table, silent and brooding, listening to the faint whistle of Eve’s snores.
“Yulia?” Bella says, her head resting on Cleo’s shoulder, her eyes sad and far away. “Why don’t you tell us that story you mentioned?”
Yulia leans back in her chair, balancing on two legs, and begins.
nce upon a time a young maiden married a prince in a grand castle. She was very happy with her prince, who was young and handsome, until the day he went off to war and left her with nothing but a kiss and a command never to go down to the dungeons.
With time the kiss faded, and so did the command. One day the maiden went down to the dungeons, where she found an old, old woman languishing in iron chains. Her flesh was pale and drooping, hanging like loose cloth from her bones, and her moans were piteous. The old woman begged for saltwater and bread, and the maiden obliged because she could not stand to see such suffering. The old woman drank the water and then spat on her chains, which melted away.
The woman leapt from her cell, no longer a weak old crone but a wicked witch. She cackled her triumph and left the castle to seek vengeance on the prince that had kept her caged for so long. The maiden stole a horse from her husband’s stable and took off after the witch, tears of remorse streaming down her cheeks.
But the maiden could not catch the witch, and she grew lost in the winter woods, her hoof-prints vanishing behind her. Eventually she took shelter in a little round house perched on long stilts, like the scrawny legs of a chicken.
Inside the house the maiden met another witch, who told her the name of the old woman she had freed from the dungeon: Koschei the Deathless. A long time ago, Koschei bound her soul to a needle, and the needle to an egg, and the egg to a silver chest, which she buried deep beneath the snow. All the long years of living drove her mad, but also made her very powerful. Only by smashing the box, cracking the egg, and breaking the needle would her soul be sundered.