The maiden left the chicken-legged house with hope in her heart and a map in her hand. She faced many hardships on her journey, but eventually she found the silver box and the egg and the needle, and smote all three across the mountainside. Thus did the Deathless Witch meet her Death, and the maiden rescued her handsome prince.
The Queen of Spades
She made a blade
All on a winter’s day.
A spell for sharp edges, requiring a crown of cold iron
On the first of September, James Juniper and her sisters are hidden in the velvet-and-silk halls of Salem’s Sin.
The air is still summer-hot but there’s a brittleness to it, a whisper like the shush of falling leaves or the burrowing of small creatures. Juniper wants to leave, to follow that whisper all the way back to the banks of the Big Sandy, but she stays shut inside the airless perfume of Salem’s Sin.
Even Juniper doesn’t dare go out on the day of the election.
Jennie Lind had been right: the mayor stepped down the previous week. The Post printed a cartoon of a saggy, weak-chinned fellow fleeing a burning building while innocent civilians wailed from the windows—Juniper wondered if it was accident or accuracy that led the artist to omit the mayor’s shadow—and announced a special election on the first of September.
The number of speeches and rallies and door-to-door campaigners had tripled. New campaign posters papered the streets—Clement Hughes for a Safer Salem! James Bright for a Brighter Future! Vote Gideon Hill—Our Light Against the Darkness!—and every paper of record printed double-length issues full of editorials and interviews and the predictions of an elderly cat that had supposedly foreseen the results of the last four elections accurately. Even the news of fresh witchcraft was shoved to the second and third pages.
Juniper has felt the last week as a strange respite. The shadows seem to dog them less nimbly, as if they are distracted with some other business, and Hill’s mobs seem more concerned with bullying votes than with witch-hunting. Even the Wiggin woman used her weekly column in The Post to advocate for Mr. Gideon Hill, “the noblest man I have ever had the privilege to meet, who brought me from darkness into light.”
The Sisters and Daughters have done what they could, but none of them has a vote to cast. The Colored Women’s League raised money to pay poll taxes for the husbands and sons and fathers; the New Salem Women’s Association went door-to-door with little informative pamphlets until one of them had hot tea tossed in her face. Bella wrote a letter to the editor objecting to the “medieval attitudes held by Mr. Gideon Hill and his followers,” and signed it Outis. One of the Hull sisters drew a rather gruesome but effective poster of Gideon Hill tormenting a young maiden in the cells of the Deeps, his cringing dog transformed into a snarling hound, his mild expression into a demented howl. The maiden swoons in her chains, innocent and soft-looking above the words A MODERN INQUISITION: VOTE AGAINST TORTURE!
“Is that supposed to be me?” Juniper asked, pointing to the maiden.
“I took certain artistic liberties,” Victoria allowed.
Now there is nothing to do but wait. Juniper and her sisters sit in the comfortable, shabby back room of Salem’s Sin, watching the sun fade from brass to copper to rose-gold. Strix and Pan rustle in the shadows or circle near the ceiling, restless and worried.
Pearl’s girls rotate through at irregular intervals, rarely speaking. Juniper might have been puzzled by their odd hours and various states of undress, except that Frankie Black took her aside several weeks ago and explained in plain terms what sort of establishment Salem’s Sin was, causing Juniper to snort coffee through her nose and reconsider several of her assumptions about decency, morality, and sin.
But there isn’t much business this evening; most of the north end’s wealthiest men are stuffed into boardrooms and elegant parlors, drinking champagne and waiting for the election results to come in like everyone else.
Juniper rises to renew the wards across the threshold and sills every so often, whispering the words like prayers. Bella sits with her notebook on her knees, not writing anything, and Agnes dozes with Eve in a puffy armchair. Eve’s sleep is troubled, her face flushed and her brow wrinkled in angry furrows.
An angry woman is a smart woman, Mags used to say. Juniper feels a great swoop of sadness that Mags will never meet her great-granddaughter. She folds her fingers around the locket on her chest, flesh-warm.
She must fall asleep, because she wakes to find the room sunk into midnight-gloom, lit by a single candle. She sits with Bella for a while, feeling their breathing fall into perfect rhythm and knowing without looking that Agnes is breathing with them. Together they watch the subtle creep of shadows in the alley outside, looking for reaching fingers or sightless heads.
The next time Juniper wakes it’s to the tap-tap of knuckles at the back door. The candle is a slumped puddle over-spilling its saucer, and the window is graying into morning.
Bella hurries to the door and Miss Cleopatra Quinn steps through it. All three sisters look up at her, a silent question hanging between them.
Cleo doesn’t say anything. She merely looks at them, eyes somber and tired.
“Oh fuck,” Juniper whispers.
Agnes shoots her one of her brand-new watch-your-mouth-there-are-children-present looks, but her face is pale. Pan alights on the arm of her chair, neck-feathers bristled.
“Was it close, at least?” Bella whispers. “Will there be a recount?”
Cleo slumps into an empty couch. “The Post headline this morning refers to it as a ‘landslide,’ I believe. The Defender prefers the term ‘catastrophe.’”
Juniper feels a delicate snap in her chest, a final thread of hope breaking. She thinks of Hill’s face—not his smiling, chinless mask, but the true face beneath it, all red gums and grubbing fear. He already possessed some dark, creeping power that lurked in alleys and stole souls; what would he do with the kind of power he could wield in broad daylight?
A voice swears softly in the doorway behind them: Miss Pearl stands there, clutching a slinky silk robe tight around her throat and staring at Cleo. Juniper notices the seams at the corners of her eyes for the first time, the soft folds of flesh at her throat.
Bella settles on the couch beside Cleo. “He won’t take office for a while. We’ve still got time, we can prepare.” She sounds like a woman trying to reason with a rifle or a bear trap. From the corner, Strix makes a soft, sorrowing sound.
Cleo shakes her head once. “In light of the city’s great need—witches running loose, murderers not apprehended, recent evidence of black magic, et cetera—he’s taking immediate control. The Fair is closing early, the police force is expanding. He spoke this morning from the steps of the capitol.” She withdraws a flyer from her skirt pocket and passes it among them.
Bella gasps as she reads it. Agnes sighs. Juniper swears.
To protect our BELOVED CITIZENS against the ongoing scourge of WITCHCRAFT, the city of New Salem is obliged to adopt a new set of ORDINANCES:
For Immediate Effect
1. Any and all practitioners of WITCHCRAFT (including hedge-witches, street-witches, fortune-tellers, abortionists, midwives, suffragists, prostitutes, radicals, or other unnatural women) will be placed under immediate arrest and subject to TRIAL BY FIRE.
2. Any and all individuals harboring (offering aid to, sympathizing with, housing, feeding, or assisting) a known practitioner of WITCHCRAFT will be subject to arrest, imprisonment of up to ninety (90) days, and a fine of no less than $100.