The bit slides from Juniper’s mouth. She rolls her jaw and listens to the wet pop of tendons and bones. “Still paying house calls before sunrise, I see. Guess you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, can you?”
Hill’s eyes sharpen at the word old, searching her face for hidden messages or veiled threats. Keep him stupid, Agnes warned her.
“I’m still not in the mood for a confession, if that’s what you came for.” Juniper knows it isn’t.
The sharpness leaves his features. He gives her a strange, angled smile, almost wry. “No, I thought not. May I sit?”
Juniper makes a grand gesture to the bench opposite her, shackles clanking. She tries to keep her face scornful, but there’s a tenseness in her stomach, a whisper of uncertainty. She expected Gideon to gloat or sneer or possibly rave, to torment her like a cat with cornered prey. It’s what her daddy did as he dragged them to the cellar, drunk with his own power.
Gideon’s face doesn’t look much like her daddy’s. It’s watchful in the moonlight, hungry in some way that Juniper doesn’t understand. “You must hate me,” he observes.
Juniper feels her eyebrows rise. “You make it pretty damn easy.”
A soft laugh from the shadows. “Yes, well. One does what one must to survive, and not all of it is pleasant. I thought you might understand that better than anyone.”
Juniper doesn’t say anything. She thinks of the slide of snake scales, the addled terror in her daddy’s face at the very end.
“I was wondering, Miss Eastwood, if I might tell you a story. And then ask you a question, after.”
Juniper thinks about telling him precisely where he can shove his story. Thinks about showing him the swollen red places where the needles burrowed deep, the blackening bruises along her knees and knuckles, and telling him he already asked enough damn questions.
He seems to see her answer in her face, because he withdraws something from his breast-pocket: a battered brass locket. “Here. A trade in good faith.”
He places Mama Mags’s locket on the bench beside her. Juniper tries hard not to scrabble for it too eagerly, to press it too hard against her breastbone. “I only ask a little of your time, in exchange.”
The locket is warm against her skin, despite their hours apart. She leans back against the wall, and listens.
nce upon a time there were a brother and a sister who loved each other very much because they had no one else to love them.
The sister told the brother it wasn’t always so—she remembered the warmth of their mother’s arms, the boom of their father’s laughter—but the little boy never knew their parents as anything but hungry and hateful, with bitter coals for hearts.
In time they grew hungrier and more hateful, until one day their mother led them into the deepest dark of the woods. She gave them a single loaf of bread, more sawdust than wheat, and told them to wait for her return. They waited, as the owls swooped and the badgers burrowed, as the woods turned from blue to black and the tears froze on their cheeks, but their mother never came back. The little boy found that he, too, had a bitter coal burning in his heart.
The boy and his sister wandered farther into the woods. They ate their meager loaf of bread and shared the last crumbs with a black raven who watched them from the trees. The raven gave them a long, red stare, then led them along a twisting path until they found a little house tucked beneath the roots of an ancient oak.
Juniper thinks she knows this tale. In the version her sister told her, the house is made of gingerbread.
The house was crooked and wild-looking, and so was the woman who lived inside it. “A witch,” the boy whispered to his sister, but she didn’t seem to mind.
The witch sat them at her table and wrapped her fingers around their wrists. She tsked at the grate of their bones beneath their skins and fed them sweetmeats. When they were both reeling and drunk with the fullness of their bellies, she told them they could stay if they liked.
The boy’s sister agreed readily. For the next seven years she studied with the witch in the woods and grew wilder and stranger, until she was nearly a forest creature herself, until she seemed not to remember the mother and father who left them in the woods.
The boy studied, too, but he did not forget their mother or father, and looked always for the words and ways that would let him return to them. For that he required more than the witch’s old books and rhymes; he needed spells that could break wills and command hearts, that could change the nature of a soul.
One winter’s day the witch found the boy, who was no longer a boy, in a grove of rowan trees. The trees were full of starlings, but they were strangely silent. None of them cast a shadow on the ground. The witch watched while the boy commanded them to sing, and then to fly, and then to hurl themselves to the frozen earth, their necks twisted and bent at wrong angles.
The witch asked the boy to leave then, because she feared him, and feared the cost of his ways. The boy agreed without complaint, not because she asked him to but because he had learned what he needed. He asked his sister to come with him, but she refused. She chose to remain in the woods without him. He left with the coal burning bright in his chest.
The boy who
