But the sisters were banished from their kingdom, broken and scattered.
(In stories, things come in threes: riddles and chances, wrongs and wishes. Juniper figures that day in the barn was the first great wrong in their story. She whispers it to herself as she runs through the streets of New Salem this evening, the September shadows long and cold, the leaf-rot smell of fall hidden beneath the coal-smoke and piss of the city: One.)
The sisters survived their breaking. They learned to swallow their rage and their loneliness, their heartbreak and their hate, until one day they found one another again in a faraway city. Together they dared to dream of a better world, where women weren’t broken and sisters weren’t sundered and rage wasn’t swallowed, over and over again. They began to build a new kingdom from rhymes and rumors, witch-tales and will. It might have been enough.
But their new kingdom was stolen from them, burned to rubble and ash. (Two, Juniper whispers.)
The three sisters survived the fire. They hid in attics and cellars, flitting like secrets through the streets, chased by shadows and torches. Perhaps they should have disappeared entirely—swallowed their rage and faded from the city like a bad dream, crept into some hillside town in need of a witch to cure their coughs and charm their crops, and been forgotten. It might have been enough.
But their baby girl was stolen from them. (Three, Juniper hisses into the half-light. Anybody who knows stories knows that after three comes the ending, the comeuppance. The reckoning.)
Now the three sisters run toward their reckoning with the setting sun at their backs and whispers and curses at their heels. They wear no disguises, have indeed dressed the part: their cloaks are ragged and dark, their skirts black velvet and obsidian silk. Witchy as hell. Juniper wonders if anyone sees them and wonders at the absence of pointed black hats.
They toss salt and poppy-flowers as they run, tangling the alleys and blurring the street signs behind them, so that their pursuers will find themselves circling the same block several times without knowing why, or discovering dead-ends that were through-ways the day before. The sisters know it won’t save them, but they don’t intend to be saved.
It seems to Juniper the city itself does its best to help them. The branches of linden trees duck low behind them, and roots leave the sidewalks humped and treacherous in their wake. Crows watch them with too-bright eyes, swooping in front of trolleys and passersby at just the right moment to distract them as three witches run past. Juniper thinks it might be her imagination or the spirits of the Last Three or the red heart of witching itself, helping them, whispering at their heels, yesyesyes.
The three of them converge on the bridge, cross the Thorn, and step into St. George’s Square together. It’s empty in the deepening dusk, except for the soft burbling of the pigeons and the whisper of September wind.
They walk to the precise center of the square, where Saint George of Hyll himself once stood. There’s nothing there now but a marble plinth, quite empty. Juniper scrambles atop it and reaches down for her sisters’ hands.
Her vision doubles as they look back at her, so that she sees her sisters, but also two strangers who have stepped out of a winter’s night witch-tale.
One of them wise and wary, with her red-eyed owl perched on her shoulder like a demon escaped from Hell. Her hair straggles loose from its bun and her cloak pools like ink around her feet. A broken-glass ring glints on one finger. She doesn’t look like a librarian anymore.
One of them strong and seething, with her osprey on her arm and death in her eyes. Her braid flows like velvet over one shoulder; her dress is stitched together in a dozen shades of funeral-black. She doesn’t look like a mill-girl anymore.
And Juniper herself, wild and wicked. Her hair swings ragged just above her shoulders and her arms are bare and white. A silver scar climbs her left leg and another wraps around her throat, newly healed, from the two fires she’s survived so far. She wonders distantly what the third one will cost her.
She wishes she had a familiar. She wishes she were back home, wading through the cudweed and nettles around Mama Mags’s hut. She wishes Mr. Gideon Hill would choke on a chicken bone and save them all a world of trouble.
She smiles instead, looking between her sisters. “Ready?”
But she doesn’t need to ask. She can feel their wills burning through the binding between them, their hearts racing in perfect synchrony, their throats full of the same words.
“Thank you,” Agnes says, softly.
They work two spells that evening. The first smells of lavender and midnight-dreaming. They pour their wills into it, their skins feverish, their lips chanting—Now I lay thee down to sleep—and Juniper feels the spell pool and rise like deep water around them. The square grows eerily silent as every rat and roach and scuttling creature falls into an unnatural sleep.
But the spell is not for them. The owl and the osprey rise into the air. Their talons clench as if they are grasping an invisible ribbon in the air, and they vanish into the cooling blue of the sky, carrying their mistresses’ spell with them.
The owl, Juniper knows, will appear on the ledge of a window at the Hall of Justice. The shadows that writhe thick around the Deeps will not wait on that particular window ledge, because someone—one of the maids who scrubs the cells, perhaps—has left the sill strewn with salt, the window half-open.
The owl will wing through it, their words pouring from his open beak, soaring past the startled evening-shift of officers and guards and secretaries. Before they can shout the alarm, before they can do more than blink in confusion at the
