Agnes thinks she should leave. She thinks about circles and costs, weakness and wants. Then she thinks these hours might be her last as a free woman and figures she can linger in this beery basement just a little longer, with the heat of his hand around hers.
She feels their bodies tilting toward one another, pulled by some secret gravity.
“It’s going to be dangerous.” The words come out crowded, slightly breathless. “If it goes wrong, if we fail—you could lose everything.”
August makes a considering hmmm in his throat. “And what do I get if I win?”
Still a man who can’t back down from a bet, still a man who likes his odds long. Agnes feels a helpless smile curling the corners of her lips, despite everything. “A kiss.”
She finds the distance between them closing, the careless blue of his eyes fragmenting into a hundred shades of slate and lapis, his lips parting in wild hope—
She stops a bare inch from his face. “Be at the Home for Lost Angels by dusk today. When you see Pan, it’s time.”
August exhales a soft but heartfelt string of curses as she pulls away, running his fingers through the bright gold of his hair.
Agnes stands, straightening her cap, and tucks the wooden hawk into her skirt pocket. It knocks softly against her hip.
“Oh, and we’ll need three branches. Good stout rowan-wood, if you please.”
The last time Juniper visited Inez Gillmore’s house it was glowing and gilded. Her Sisters were with her, laughing at their own daring, at the pop of champagne on their tongues.
Now the house is dark, quiet except for the tapping of Juniper’s black-yew staff across the tiles. She wades through drifts of shattered crystal, torn pages from books, tangles of drapes; the house has been searched at least twice since Inez’s arrest. It isn’t safe to linger, but Juniper won’t be waiting long.
She isn’t alone. Miss Jennie Lind sits at the polished dining room table, staring at nothing, her face framed in long chestnut curls. The bruise around her eye has mottled to yellow and gray, like bad fruit.
“You don’t have to come, you know.” Juniper doesn’t mean it to come out so hard. She starts again. “I only mean . . .” But she doesn’t know how to say what she means. That Jennie doesn’t have to keep following her deeper and deeper into trouble, like that Italian witch who walked through nine circles of Hell; that she is the first friend Juniper made in her life, and the thought of her harmed on their behalf takes all the air from Juniper’s lungs.
Instead, she says, “I only mean this isn’t your fight. You’re not like us. You have a home to run to—a rich daddy, a place to weather the storm—”
“I really don’t.” Jennie’s smile is brief and bitter.
“Why’s that?”
“Because.” Jennie pauses here for so long that Juniper doesn’t think she intends to go on. Then she heaves a hard sigh and meets Juniper’s eyes. “Because my father and mother are adamant in their belief that they raised a son, instead of a daughter.” She lets the statement stand for a moment before adding, gently, “I never had a brother, Juniper.”
Juniper feels her head tilting. “But why—oh.” Oh. She feels simultaneously very stupid, mildly aggrieved, baffled, curious, and shocked. She recalls the delight on Jennie’s face the first time she worked women’s witching and the silent clench of her jaw when they accused her of men’s magic, the entire summer she spent shoulder-to-shoulder with Sisters she couldn’t quite trust with her secret. Juniper adds shame to her list.
Before she can express any of these things, Jennie lifts her chestnut wig from her head. Beneath it Juniper sees her cornsilk-colored hair has been cut brutally short. It stands in shocked tufts, as if refusing to take such abuse quietly. “When I was arrested they threw me in the men’s workhouse, burned my skirts, and did this.” She gestures to her hair. Juniper imagines shadowy figures holding her down, the silver gleam of shears, soft coils of cornsilk drifting to the prison floor. And then Juniper doesn’t feel anything except sorry, and mad as hell.
“Does anyone else know?”
“Inez.” Jennie says her name with such care that Juniper thinks there are one or two other things she didn’t know about Jennie Lind. “And Miss Cady Stone, of course.”
“That old—”
“Yes. She knew my father. She hired me as a secretary for the Women’s Association after he turned me out. She’s not . . . She’s better than you think she is.”
There’s a brief silence, while Juniper works to revise another half-dozen or so of her assumptions. “Jennie, I—”
“This fight.” Jennie rubs the broken bridge of her nose. “To just—live, to be—is one that I was signed up for before I was even born. I don’t get to walk away.”
Her eyes flick up to Juniper’s and away. “And they have Inez.” Another pause. “Who I love.”
Juniper stops her pacing after that. She sits at the other end of the polished dining table, staff across her knees, thinking about bindings and blood and the sideways logic of love: all for one and one for all, a dead-even trade that adds up to infinity. She thinks how upside-down it is that she started this fight out of rage—spite and fury and sour hate—and that she’ll finish it for something else entirely.
It’s full dusk by the time it appears, folding out of darkness: a black owl with burning eyes that speaks in her sister’s voice.
“It’s time.”
Now I lay thee down to sleep,
I pray the Lord your soul to keep.
A spell for sleep, requiring crushed lavender & a whisper
If it was one of Mama Mags’s stories, James Juniper thinks it would go like this:
Once upon a time there were three sisters.
They were born in a forgotten kingdom that smelled of honeysuckle and mud, where the Big Sandy ran wide and the sycamores shone white as knuckle-bones on
