Beatrice watches them shuffle on, grunting to one another, pointing ahead. And then she looks at Quinn’s face (so near to hers that she can see the slide of sweat from her temple, the rust streaks in her yellow eyes) and gasps, “That was—that was witchcraft, Miss Quinn!”
“By all means, please say it louder. It’s not like there’s a riot nearby.” Miss Quinn is straightening, dusting chalk from her hands.
“But where—how—?”
“Honestly, did you think yours was the only grandmother who knew words she shouldn’t? Aunt Nancy’s recipes, my mother calls them.” Her voice is light, careless, but Beatrice hears a certain tension running beneath it. “I would be obliged if you would keep this to yourself, Miss Eastwood. We’re not supposed to . . . I don’t know what came over me.” She gives her head an irritated shake, as if Beatrice had personally forced her to work witchcraft in the middle of New Salem.
“O-of course. I wouldn’t want to cause you trouble.”
Miss Quinn gives her a taut, crooked smile. “Oh no?”
And if there’s more than just exasperation and irony in her voice, a sly heat, Beatrice doesn’t hear it.
She’s distracted by the echoes of her youngest sister’s pain. The pain is followed by fear, and the fear is followed by a terrible, killing rage.
May sticks and stones break your bones,
And serpents stop your heart.
A spell to poison, requiring fangs & fury
James Juniper has never in her life hoped to see an officer of the law—in her experience they show up just to hassle your grandmother over a stillborn baby in the next county and stay long enough to clink glasses with your daddy—but she hopes for one now. The crowd is pushing closer, their mutters turning into shouts, their shouts turning into shoves. Miss Grace Wiggin and her followers have melted away, leaving the seven suffragists surrounded by red-faced men and shouting women.
Juniper feels shoulders bracing against hers as the others turn back-to-back, facing the crowd. This isn’t right—they were supposed to be a slick spectacle, here and gone again, a scandalous headline for tomorrow’s papers. They were supposed to be scared of misdemeanor charges and Miss Stone, not a soul-eating shadow and a vicious crowd.
Someone yanks on Juniper’s banner and she stumbles. Her damn leg—the one with the puckered scar wrapped around the ankle, the silvered, sunken places where muscle and tendon never quite healed—twists beneath her and she sprawls sideways, palms skinning against the grit of the street, staff clattering on stone.
She hears Inez call her name, but there are people shoving between them, and the white cloaks disappear behind bare fists and broad backs.
Juniper looks up to see a man looming over her. A boy, really: scrawny and underfed-looking, like the leggy weeds that sprout down dark alleys, his face speckled with youth. His eyes are empty as promises.
He’s holding the iron pole of her banner. He lifts it almost idly, as if he doesn’t know what he’s about to do.
But Juniper knows. She’s had too many hands raised against her, too many bruises, too many long nights in the lonely black of the cellar. He’s going to hurt her, maybe kill her, because there’s no one to stop him. Because he can.
Juniper keeps a little flame flickering in her chest, a bitter, hungry thing just waiting for something to burn. Now it blazes high, a towering, terrible thing. A killing thing.
She claws at the locket on her chest, pops it open. A pair of curved fangs rattle into her palm and she crushes them, feeling the bone splinter into flesh. She reaches for her cedar staff, slicks her blood along it.
Her staff is tight-grained and oiled smooth from all those hours beneath her hand. By all natural laws the blood ought to bead up along its surface, but Juniper has never cared much for natural laws. The cedar drinks her blood up, every drop.
The boy is watching her, head a little tilted. He’s not afraid—why would he be? She’s just a young crippled girl reaching for her cane, he’s a man with knuckles white around a weapon. Both of them know how this story goes.
But oh, not this time. This time the girl has the words and ways to change the story.
He’ll be afraid, before the end. Her daddy was.
The words wait in her throat like matches waiting to be struck. Juniper thinks she ought to care about the cost of speaking them—a boy’s life, the lives of the fools shouting and shoving nearby, the six other girls who’d followed her into this mess, who didn’t deserve to wind up on the scaffold beside her—
But all the caring was beaten and burned out of her, and now she’s just hate with a heartbeat.
May sticks and stones break your bones.
Agnes sees her sister fall. She sees her black-feather hair disappear, her white-wing cloak vanish beneath the mass of bodies, and she doesn’t move.
She stands on a stoop at the edge of St. Mary-of-Egypt Avenue, watching the crowd become a mob become a riot, thinking: It’s her own damn fault.
She has one hand on her belly, a half-moon heavy with the promise of a person still-becoming, already precious to her.
Too precious to risk for the sake of a grown-ass woman who should’ve known better.
Agnes grips the iron railing of the stoop and stares into the heaving crowd, looking for a glimpse of white, some sign of her wild, foolish sister. She knew as soon as she saw the note it would mean nine kinds of trouble.
And yet: this afternoon she rattled north on the trolley. She waited outside the Fair gates, unwilling to waste a hoarded nickel on a ticket. She heard the distant roar of the crowd, saw the VOTES FOR WOMEN banner snapping bright against the sky. Watched her sister limping at the
