But what is there to notice? They’re only hats; you can’t smell the witching on them unless you get right up close.
Juniper herself carries three hats. She knows neither of her sisters are coming—knows that Bella is too scared and Agnes is too selfish—but still, she brought three stupid hats. Just in case.
Earlier she thought she caught a glimpse of sleek braid, a flash of spectacles, but she can’t bring herself to feel along the invisible threads stretched between them. It’s better to not quite know, to keep pretending they might have come.
Worthington is leaning over the podium and sweating in a manner that suggests his speech must be drawing to its merciful end. “I say to you now: let us put aside our petty grievances and differences, and celebrate instead what unites us. Let us enjoy the Fair!” The mayor makes a gesture to the brass band perspiring silently behind the stage.
The crowd is applauding dutifully and the first notes of Salem’s Freedom are rising from the band when James Juniper raises her white hat into the air. Six other hands follow suit.
Juniper and the renegade members of the New Salem Women’s Association lower the hats onto their heads and whisper the words.
White cloaks cascade from nowhere and fall over their shoulders, bright and clean. They drape over their day-dresses and in an instant they become a single thing instead of seven separate women.
It’s a spell of Juniper’s own invention—not exactly the good stuff, but not nothing, either. She disappeared the cloaks using Mags’s spell for vanishing her potions and herbs when the law came around, which required only a pair of silver scissors to cut the air and a muttered rhyme. Then she had to figure a way to call the cloaks back from nowhere. She lost several of Inez’s nicest white wool cloaks, vanishing them into who knows where, before she thought to try a binding.
Bindings are deep, old witching, governed by obscure rules and strange affinities. Even Mama Mags didn’t fool with them much; she taught Juniper a rhyme to bind a split seam and promised to teach her more later, except it turned out she didn’t have much of a later.
Juniper did her best. She stole loose threads from each of the cloaks and stitched them into the brims of the white hats, whispering the words as she worked—Ashes to ashes, dust to dust—jabbing her thumb every fourth stitch and swearing up a storm.
She tested the first one on Jennie, jamming the hat on her head and ordering her to say the words. Jennie paled. “I don’t know. I don’t think I can.” Juniper swatted her with a spare hat. Jennie spoke the words. When the cloak settled over her shoulders—white as snow, white as wings—Jennie looked so stunned, so nakedly joyful that Juniper swatted her again just to keep her from floating away.
Now Juniper sees Jennie’s face shining through the crowd, full of that same glee despite the rising panic around her.
The crowd is surging away from the women in white, shouting and screeching. There’s a strange note in their voices, fear but also wonder. Witching is a small, shameful thing, worked in kitchens and bedrooms and boarding houses, half-secret. But here they are in broad daylight, calling white cloaks from nowhere. Juniper can feel the terms shifting around them, the boundaries bending. She can see faces—mostly women, mostly young—watching them with fascinated hunger in their eyes. Juniper figures they’re the ones who want, who pine, who long; the ones who chafe against the stories they were given and dream of better ones.
She unties the bundled parasol and lifts it high, except it’s not a parasol at all. It unfurls into a long banner with the words VOTES FOR WOMEN painted across it in bright red.
The crowd erupts. Salem’s Freedom devolves into a disjointed series of blats and hoots as the conductor stares, slack-jawed. Mayor Worthington bangs ineffectively on the podium. “What’s this now? Quite uncalled for—”
His voice is drowned by the thump of blood in Juniper’s ears, the burning heat in her chest. She wants to shout or chant or laugh, to shake her banner in their faces and bare her teeth—but Jennie thought they ought to remain quiet, dignified. Silent sentinels rather than wicked witches.
As one, the seven white-cloaked women turn their backs on the mayor and the City Council. Juniper raises her red banner in one hand and grips her staff tight with the other, and marches away from the stage, straight-spined. She feels the others falling in behind her, forming a single many-sailed ship.
The crowd splits like a sea. Mothers tug their children closer and canny salesmen start packing up shop, eyes darting sideways, sensing trouble. Juniper blows them kisses, feeling daring, a little drunk, listening with one ear for the ring of iron-shod hooves. They plan to disappear their cloaks and slink into the crowd before the authorities can arrive, but there are no men’s voices, no white horses prancing toward them. Yet.
They pass beneath the high arch of the Fair entrance and into the darkening streets of New Salem proper. Juniper expects the crowd to disperse, but it presses closer against them as the street narrows. The well-dressed families of the Fair are replaced by working folk and young men, the genteel scandal souring into something meaner. A cluster of drunks unslouches from an alley to leer at them, calling lewd suggestions. Someone laughs.
Juniper rests the iron pole of the banner on her shoulder and touches the locket beneath her blouse, the one Mama Mags gave her on her deathbed. At the graveside Juniper dug her dirt-crusted nails along the seam and popped it open like a brass clam, hoping for a message or a note or a voice saying, It’s alright, baby girl, I’m here. All she found was a thistledown curl of her grandmother’s hair.
This morning, Juniper added a pair of snake’s teeth.
She doesn’t plan to use them, not
