Beatrice herself suspects that two separate-but-equal organizations are far less effective than a single united one, and that their daddy was as wrong about freedmen needing to go back to Africa as he was about women minding their place—but she’s never worried overmuch about it. She feels an uncomfortable twist of shame in her belly.
Miss Quinn’s smile has smoothed. “I think not. But the equinox, Miss Eastwood. Why don’t you tell me what you saw?”
“The same thing everyone saw, I’m sure. A sudden wind. Stars. A tower.”
“A door with certain words inscribed on it and a certain sign beneath them.” Miss Quinn says it mildly, but her eyes are yellow, feline.
“Was there?” Beatrice asks lamely.
“There was. An old symbol of circles woven together. It’s of . . . particular interest to me and certain of my associates. Would you—a librarian, I think you said?—happen to know anything about that sign?”
“I—I’m afraid not. That is, circles are common in all sorts of sigils and spell-work, and the number three is a number of traditional significance, isn’t it? It could be anything.”
“I see. Although”—Miss Quinn smiles a checkmate sort of smile—“I don’t believe I told you how many circles there were.”
“Ah.”
“Miss Eastwood. I was just heading to the tea shop on Sixth. Won’t you join me?”
As she says it, she gives Beatrice a particular kind of look through her lashes, heated and secret. It’s a look Beatrice has spent seven years carefully neither giving nor receiving nor even wanting.
(When she was younger she permitted herself to want such things. To admire a woman’s peony-petal lips or the delicate hollow of her throat. She learned her lesson.)
She takes an anxious step back from Miss Cleopatra Quinn and her long eyelashes. “I—I’m afraid I must get to work.” She attempts a cool nod. “Good day.”
Miss Quinn looks neither offended nor discouraged by her abrupt departure, but merely more intent. “Until we meet again, Miss East-wood.” She gives Beatrice a sober tip of her derby hat and spreads her skirt in a gesture that is half-bow and half-curtsy. Beatrice blushes for no reason she can name.
Beatrice walks the three blocks back to the College with her eyes on her boots, not-thinking about moonbeams or witch-tales or the thin wedding band around Miss Quinn’s finger.
She barely hears the scintillated whispers of the passersby or the paper-boys darting like swallows through the streets, calling out headlines (Witches Loose in New Salem! Hill’s Morality Party on the Rise! Mayor Worthington Under Pressure!), and if the shadows on the streets behave oddly—peeling away from dark doorways and coiling out of alleyways, trailing after her like the black hem of a long cloak—Beatrice does not notice.
Bye baby bunting,
Mother’s gone a-hunting
A spell to end what hasn’t yet begun, requiring pennyroyal & regret
Two weeks after she found her long-lost sisters and lost them again, Agnes Amaranth is standing in a dim back-alley shop just off St. Fortitude. There is no sign or title on the door, but Agnes knows she’s in the right place: she can smell the wild scent of herbs and earth, just like Mags’s hut, out of place in the cobbled gray of New Salem.
The proprietress is a handsome Greek woman with black curls and dark-painted eyes. She introduces herself, in an accent that rolls and purls, as Madame Zina Card: palmist, spiritualist, card-reader, and midwife.
But Agnes hasn’t come to have her fortune told or her palms read. “Pennyroyal, please,” she says, and it’s enough.
Madame Zina gives her a weighing look, as though checking to see whether Agnes knows what she’s asked for and why, then unlocks a cupboard and tucks a few dried sprigs into a brown paper sack.
“Steep the pennyroyal in river-water—boil it good, mind—and stir it seven times with a silver spoon. The words cost extra.” Madame Zina’s eyes linger on the eggshell swell of Agnes’s belly. She’s barely showing, but only women in a particular state come to visit Zina’s shop asking for pennyroyal.
Agnes shakes her head once. “I already have them.” Mags told them to her when she was sixteen. She hasn’t forgotten.
Madame Zina nods amiably and hands her the brown paper sack sealed with wax. Concern crimps her black brows. “No need to look so glum, girl. I don’t know what your man or your god has told you, but there’s no sin to it. It’s just the way of the world, older than the Three themselves. Not every woman wants a child.”
Agnes almost laughs at her: Of course she wants a child. Of course she wants to lay its sleeping cheek against her breastbone and smell its milk-sweet breath, to become on its behalf something grander than herself: a castle or a sword, stone or steel, all the things her mother wasn’t.
But Agnes wanted to take care of her sisters, once. She won’t bring another life into the world just to fail it, too.
She doesn’t know how to put any of her foolish, doomed wanting into words, so she shrugs at Madame Zina, feeling the bones of her shoulders grate.
“Let me read the cards for you. Free of charge.” Zina gestures to an armchair that looks like it was once pink or cream but is now the greasy color of unwashed skin. Ragged red curtains droop over the arm.
“No, thank you.”
Zina runs her tongue over her teeth, eyes narrowed. “I could read
