There were whispers and glances. Some women shuffled out, unwilling to add witchcraft to the list of their crimes, but some edged nearer. Some remembered the words their mothers sang to them on winter nights and the spells their aunts chanted on the solstice; some of them had tasted power, and wanted more.
Agnes gave them the words on thin slips of paper, rolled tight. There were words for binding tongues and breaking machines, for healing hurts and causing them, for setting fires and walking through them unscathed. The papers disappeared up sleeves and beneath aprons and waited, like hidden knives, for their moment.
One of the girls—young and fierce-looking, with the wary black eyes of a winter fox—stared at the paper in her hands with such intensity Agnes thought it might burst into spontaneous flame. Her fingertips were pressed white where she held the paper.
Agnes is not, therefore, entirely surprised to hear soft footsteps padding after her down the snow-spotted alley. She does not look behind her. She turns down an even narrower lane, crisscrossed with drooping laundry and lined with dim doorways, before turning around.
“Bessie, wasn’t it?”
The girl flinches, eyes huge and feral, but tosses her head in denial. “They call me Bessie when I get here. Bas Sheva is my name.” Her accent makes Agnes think of hip-deep snow and rich furs, and a little of Yulia. The Domontoviches stayed in New Salem, living in the west wing of Inez and Jennie’s well-warded house. Agnes visited once over the winter, and found the manor transformed into a sunny, sprawling safe house. A place to run, for any woman who wants it.
“How may I help you, Bas Sheva?”
She doesn’t answer, but her eyes skitter hungrily over every inch of Agnes, from the sleek silk of her hair to the ragged black of her cloak. They linger on her face, as if mentally comparing it to the etchings on wanted posters and cartoons in the papers. “You’re one of them, aren’t you?”
Agnes has found it unwise to advertise her identity. Witch-hunters have sprouted like thistles across the country, along with wanted posters listing rather gratifying sums of money in reward for information leading to her arrest. She travels in disguise, under false names and befuddling magics, and never lingers long in one place. Although she’s found herself in Chicago several times over the winter.
So when Bas Sheva asks her name Agnes widens her eyes and says, “One of who?”
The girl glares before she says, low and quick, “The First Three.”
Agnes should deny it. But there’s something about this girl—the desperation or the fury or the fingerprint bruises circling her wrist—that makes Agnes nod her head once.
Bas Sheva’s face ignites. She licks her lips. “Then I wonder if—I want—” Agnes suspects she struggles less with her English and more with the immensity of her desire, the hollow shape of her hunger. The light in her eyes reminds Agnes strongly of her youngest sister.
“Here, girl. Speak these words and draw a circle, and you’ll find the place you need to go.” Agnes steps closer and sings her a rhyme about wayward sisters and stolen crowns. She doesn’t write them down—these words are too precious, too dangerous to risk anything more than a whisper—but she doesn’t have to. The girl’s lips move over the syllables like hands running over a key. “Not tonight, though. It’s the equinox. We’ll be busy.”
The girl bows her head, hesitates, and withdraws a small pewter charm from her skirt: a delicate case bearing a series of branched and rooted symbols that might be letters. She presses it into Agnes’s hand. “My great-grandmother knew certain words she should not. Hang these at your daughter’s door. For protection.”
Agnes slips it into her pocket and presses her palm over it. “Thank you.”
Agnes watches Bas Sheva leave—shoulders braced, hair dark and wind-tangled—and allows herself to pretend for a moment that she is a different young woman in a different city. The wind whips her tears dry before they fall.
She is several strides farther down the alley when a low, teasing voice speaks behind her. “Evening, miss.”
She squints into a nearby doorway but can’t seem to make her eyes focus on the shape inside it. The voice whispers again and two figures come into sudden focus: a bearded man with a gambler’s grin and a red scarf, and a rosy-cheeked baby girl perched in the crook of his arm. Curls spill like flames from beneath her woolen cap.
The girl raises both arms to Agnes and demands, in the tone of a monarch who has been kept waiting longer than she is accustomed to by her underlings, “Mama!”
“Hello, loves.” Eve falls into her arms with a satisfied oomph and immediately grabs two fistfuls of Agnes’s hair.
Mr. August Lee watches them with his smile pulled crooked and wry. August returned to Chicago six weeks previously along with a smallish gang of men from New Salem, with the intention of spreading women’s witching among his old friends and malcontents, and seeing if perhaps certain concessions couldn’t be won from the Pullman Palace Car Company after all. He claims his work will be done before summer, when he will join Agnes with whatever fight she’s found for them next.
“Weren’t you two supposed to be lying low at the Everly Club?” Miss Pearl had provided Agnes with the name and address of a madam sympathetic to the cause of witches and working-women, who was willing to trade certain words and ways and hard-to-come-by herbs in exchange for safe harbor.
August shrugs. “Inquisitors showed up asking questions, looking for trouble.”
“And did they find any?”
August’s eyes spark like flint against hers. “A bit, yes. More than they bargained for, in fact.” He touches his jaw, where a bruise is beginning to bloom beneath his beard. “I took care of them, but I thought it best to leave
