None of them moves. Juniper fidgets, trailing her finger through the runny yolk as it dries.
“So.” Agnes pretends she’s speaking to a stranger, just another boarding-house girl passing through. “Where will you go now?”
She’s hoping Juniper will say: Straight the hell back home. Or maybe even: To find good, honest work like my big sister. Instead her mouth curls with a reckless little smile and she says, “To join up with those suffrage ladies just as fast as I can.”
Bella’s eyes swivel away from the window for the first time. She covers her mouth with her palm and says faintly, “Oh, my.”
Agnes resists the urge to roll her eyes. “Why? So you can wear a fancy dress and wave a sign? Get laughed at? Don’t waste your time.”
Juniper’s smile hardens. “Voting doesn’t seem like a waste of time to me.” She’s still fooling with her egg yolk, swirling it into gummy circles. Agnes’s stomach heaves.
“Look, all that ‘votes for women’ stuff sounds real noble and all, but they don’t mean women like you and me. They mean nice uptown ladies with big hats and too much time on their hands. It doesn’t matter to you or me who gets to be mayor or president, anyhow.”
Juniper shrugs at her, sullen, childish, and Agnes drops her voice lower. “Daddy’s dead, June. You can’t piss him off anymore.”
Juniper’s head snaps up, eyes boiling green, hair tangled like a black hedge of roses around her face. “You think I still give a single shit about him?” She hisses it so hot and mean that Agnes thinks she must give two or three shits, at least. “Someone or some-witch worked a spell yesterday. The kind that hasn’t been seen since our great-great-great-grandmama’s days. It felt . . .” Juniper’s jaw works. She taps her chest and Agnes knows she’s trying to find words to describe the swell of power, the sweet sedition of magic in her veins. “It felt impossible. Important. Don’t you want to know where it came from? Don’t you think it maybe had something to do with the herd of suffragists running around the square?”
“I know that’s what the police’ll think. Half the papers already call them witches. Don’t be a fool, June, please—”
Agnes is interrupted by Bella, who lunges from her seat at the foot of the bed to seize Juniper’s plate. She clutches it, peering through her spectacles at the trio of yolky circles Juniper has drawn on its surface. “What’s this?”
Juniper blinks down at the remains of her breakfast. “Uh. Eggs?”
“The design, June. Where did you see this?”
Juniper lifts one shoulder. “On the tower door, I guess.”
Bella’s head tilts, owl-like. “On the what?”
“You didn’t see the door? On my side of the tower there was a door, old and wooden, all overgrown with roses, and there were three circles on it, overlapping. And words, too, but I couldn’t make sense of them.”
Bella’s face goes taut, intent in a way that Agnes recalls from their childhood, when Bella would get to the good part of a book. “What language was it? And did the circles have eyes? Or tails? Could they have been serpents, do you think?”
“Maybe. Why?”
But Bella ignores the question. Her eyes are searching Juniper’s face now. They land on her lips, where Agnes can see the dark blush of a bruise and the tattered red of torn skin. Bella lifts her fingertips toward it, her expression filled with wonder or maybe terror. “Maiden’s blood,” she whispers. Juniper flinches from her touch.
Bella’s fingers fall away. Juniper’s plate clangs to the floor. “Excuse me. I’m sorry. I have to go. Very sorry.” She tosses the words behind her like coins for beggars, a careless jumble, as she reaches for the door.
“What? You’re leaving?” Juniper is sputtering, cheeks reddening. “But I just found you! You can’t just leave.” Agnes hears the unspoken again hovering in the air, but Bella is already gone, calling back carelessly, “I rent a room in Bethlehem Heights, between Second and Sanctity, if you need me.”
Agnes watches her leave with a strange hollowness in her chest. “Well.” She scrapes her sister’s eggs back into the pan with unnecessary force. “Good riddance.”
Juniper whirls. “And why’s that?”
“Because Bella can’t keep her damn mouth shut! God knows what Daddy would have done if you hadn’t—” Agnes shivers hard, as if winter has come early, as if she’s sixteen again and her daddy is coming toward her with that red glow in his eyes.
Juniper doesn’t seem to have heard her. There’s a glassy vacancy in her face that makes Agnes think of a little girl watching her father yell with her hands pressed over her ears, refusing to hear.
Agnes unpeels her fingernails from her palms and carefully doesn’t look at the cedar staff propped by the door. “My shift starts soon. I’ll talk to Mr. Malton, see if they need another girl on the floor. You can”—she swallows, feeling the bounds of her circle stretch like seams that might split, and makes herself finish—“you can stay here. Till you’re on your feet.”
But Juniper lifts her chin, looks down her crooked nose at Agnes. “I’m not working at some factory. I already told you: I’m signing up with the suffrage ladies. I’m going to find that tower. Fight for something.”
It’s such a youngest-sister thing to say that Agnes wants to slap her. In the witch-tales it’s always the youngest who is the best-beloved, the most-worthy, the one bound for some grander destiny than her sisters. The other two are too ugly or selfish or boring to get fairy godmothers or even beastly husbands. The stories never mentioned boardinghouse rent or laundry or aching knuckles from a double-shift at the mill. They never mentioned babies that needed feeding or choices that needed making.
Agnes swallows all those horseshit stories. “That’s all well and good, but causes don’t pay much, I heard. They don’t feed you or give you a place to sleep. You need to—”
Juniper’s lips peel back in a sudden
