3. Any individual or establishment selling materials known to be associated with the practice of WITCHCRAFT—herbs, potions, spells, bones, sacrificial animals, bodily substances, chalk, candles of particular colors, Satanic texts—will be subject to arrest, imprisonment of up to seven (7) years, and seizure of all assets.
4. The GEORGIAN INQUISITORS will be immediately reassembled and granted all former legal powers and privileges historically associated with their rank, with the sole purpose of enforcing the above ordinances, with special priority granted to the infamous EASTWOOD SISTERS.
The words trial by fire swim hideously in Juniper’s vision. “They can’t do this.”
Cleo laughs. It isn’t a very good laugh. “They already have.”
“But it’s not legal. It can’t be. I wasn’t the best student but Miss Hurston made us recite the Constitution in second grade.”
“The Constitution? What, exactly, do you think the Constitution is? A magic spell? A dragon, perhaps, that will swoop down to defend you in your most desperate hour?” Cleo straightens in her seat. Juniper doesn’t think she’s ever seen a face so full of scorn. “I assure you it has only ever been a piece of paper, and it has only ever applied to a very few persons.”
Juniper opens her mouth to argue or apologize, she doesn’t know which, but Cleo is already standing, reaching for her derby hat. “I’m going home. I have to report to my mother, and help them prepare for . . . whatever comes.”
“Cleo, wait—” Bella reaches for her hand but Cleo shifts slightly away.
She reaches for the door, looking back at Bella with her face hard. “It will be worse for me and mine. It always is.” She steps across their wards and out into the dull-iron dawn.
There is a brief, strained silence, broken by Miss Pearl. “I think you ought to leave, too.” She holds the list of new ordinances in her lacquered nails. The whiteness of her face makes her mouth look like a wound, red and shining.
Juniper feels her eyebrows shoot high. “Excuse me?”
Pearl folds the page in neat quarters and tucks it down the front of her dress. Her fingers tremble very slightly. “Leave. Now. It just got a lot more dangerous to harbor witches or whores, and I can’t risk both at once.”
Juniper and her sisters stare at her, mute and accusing. The red slash of her lips thins. “I know it’s not fair or right. But I owe my girls more than I owe you three. I want you gone before noon.”
Her silk robe swishes as she turns to leave. “And take some tonic for the baby. Talk to Frankie before you go.”
Agnes and her sisters have nowhere to go, so they go nowhere: the South Sybil boarding house.
They move across the city with their cloaks drawn high and their faces disguised by Miss Pearl’s creams and potions, walking carefully apart from one another. They pass churches with their doors thrown wide, bells clanging in celebration; men with brass badges toasting one another in the streets; a knot of women with white sashes handing out wreaths and roses.
At the bridge they are forced to wait, standing among a cheering crowd as a procession of white horses passes. Gideon Hill himself rides in the center, looking stern and somehow noble, transformed by the glow of adulation into more than himself, more than a man: a painted icon or an angel. Agnes hunches to disguise the baby wrapped tight against her chest, watching Gideon through her lashes. She is almost surprised by how much she hates him, and how familiar the hate feels in her chest: the bitter, futile hatred of the weak for the powerful, the small for the strong.
They find South Sybil half-abandoned, strangely desolate. The landlady’s door swings gently in the breeze, revealing a disheveled little room with no one inside it. In the halls every other door is marked with ashen Xs, whether for plague or for witchcraft they can’t tell.
It’s an absurd risk to return here, where Gideon and his shadows surely spied on them before, but Juniper argued that the sheer nerve of the thing would be some protection in itself. And neither Bella nor Agnes could think of anywhere else to run.
No. 7 is entirely empty. Agnes’s few possessions have been tumbled and shaken from their places, as if some careless giant picked up her room and rattled it once or twice, and there’s a sickly, rotten-food sweetness in the air, but it otherwise looks very much like the room where the Sisters of Avalon first signed their names in Bella’s book.
Juniper wards the threshold and windowsills while Bella picks at piles of laundry and tangled sheets, trying to restore some sense of order. “Well. It’s only for a night or two.” Bella is clearly trying for a hearty, bracing tone, but landing closer to bleak. “Perhaps tomorrow we can reach out to the Sisters. Discuss our strategy.”
Maybe Juniper or Agnes would have answered her, but Eve coughs in her sleep and begins to wail, fists clenched, tiny tears pearling at the corners of her eyes.
As if she knows what’s coming, as if she knows there’s no such thing as the Sisters of Avalon any longer.
There is a balm in Gilead
To make the wounded whole.
A song to cure a stubborn sickness, requiring feverfew & the Big Dipper
Three days later, Agnes Amaranth is alone at South Sybil. She’s thinking back over the summer and trying to pinpoint the moment they should have stopped, given up, run away. Perhaps after Avalon burned, or after Juniper’s arrest. Perhaps even before all that, as soon as they saw the shape of the tower in the sky and felt the wild wind of elsewhere on their cheeks.
All she knows for certain is that they should have left before the election. Now there are Inquisitors patrolling the streets every dusk and dawn, armed officers at every trolley stop and train station. Now women are arrested and dragged past jeering crowds, their dresses torn and their throats collared, and the Deeps echo with the wails of caged women. Now Hill’s purge has begun, and it’s too late to run.
Agnes’s sisters are both off doing what they can, which isn’t enough. Juniper left at dusk to hassle the patrols of Inquisitors, leading them on a merry chase and granting their targets time to run. She kissed Eve’s cheek and strode into the hall with her black-yew staff gripped tight and her jaw set.
Bella left even before that, escorted by an impassive, oak-skinned woman into the tunnels to confer with Cleo and the other Daughters. The papers reported that Mayor Hill was recruiting “concerned citizens” to help settle the unsettled south side, massing a small army of men and torches at the edge of New Cairo. Cleo and her mother were trying to ward what could be warded and funnel the young and old out of harm’s way.
“I’ll ask Araminta if she has any feverfew left. Or anything else that might . . .” Bella didn’t seem to know how to finish the sentence, but merely cast a worried look at Eve.
Agnes and her sisters had cast every spell and charm they could find to drive back the fever, to soothe her racking cough. Agnes fell asleep each night chanting spells like prayers, stroking the bloody red of her daughter’s curls, but none of it seemed to last.
Now their witch-ways have run out. Now her daughter’s every breath rattles like dead leaves across pavement, as if autumn itself slunk down her throat and burrowed in her small chest. Now Agnes curls around her body on the narrow bed, willing her skin to cool.