Juniper strides forward and places her palms on the desk, wearing a look of such blazing intensity that Beatrice feels it scorch her cheeks as it passes. “Or we could win it all. If we stop worrying so much about what a woman should and shouldn’t do, what’s respectable and what’s not. If we stand and fight, all of us together. Imagine if there’d been seventy of us marching, instead of seven!” Miss Stone looks faintly ill at the thought. “There’s this book Bella used to read us when we were little, about these three French soldiers—what’s the thing they said?” She throws the question sideways to Beatrice.
Beatrice clears her throat, cheeks pinking. “All for one and one for all.”
“That’s it.” Juniper’s face is lit now by some internal glow, a passion like the sun itself. “It has to be all for one and one for all, Miss Stone.”
Every eye is on the young woman with the crow’s-wing hair and the long jaw and the summer-green gaze—like and not like the feral girl-child Beatrice remembers—and for a wild moment Beatrice thinks they’re going to listen to her.
Miss Stone laughs. It’s not a cruel laugh, but Beatrice sees it hit Juniper like a slap. “Goodbye, Miss West. I can’t wish you luck, for the sake of the city.”
Juniper straightens from the desk, all the glow gone from her eyes, face pinched tight, and gives the room a mocking bow. She limps out the office door without looking back. She never let their daddy see her cry, either.
Agnes follows. She pauses to hold the door behind her and looks up at Beatrice, almost as if she’s waiting for her. As if they are still little girls tumbling into the farmhouse, one-two-three, holding the door carelessly open behind them for the next one. “Well?” Agnes sounds annoyed, whether with herself or her sister Beatrice can’t tell.
Beatrice feels Miss Stone’s eyes on her face. “I don’t know you, Miss Eastwood, but you seem a respectable woman. That sister—those sisters of yours will lead you astray.”
Beatrice hesitates. She thinks about the fates of girls who go astray in all the stories, the hot iron shoes and glass coffins and witches’ ovens. (She thinks about St. Hale’s, a prison built especially for straying girls.)
But then Beatrice looks at Agnes still waiting for her, half scowling, and thinks about what else awaits those gone-astray girls: the daring escapes and wild dances, the midnight trysts and starlit spells, a whole world’s worth of disreputable delights.
Beatrice bows her head as she leaves. “So I hope, Miss Stone.”
Agnes is just about to give up and close the damn door behind her, to hell with Bella and the suffragists both, when Bella finally makes up her mind. She goes sailing past Agnes, spine uncrooked, cheeks pink with some private pleasure. Their eyes meet, then slide away.
Juniper is already stamping down the street, clacking her staff with such aggression that passersby scuttle aside. “Those thrice-damned boot-licking shit-witches! Too cussed cowardly to take a damn stand—to hell with them!” She spins to face the plate-glass window of the Association headquarters and crosses her fingers in a gesture of such exceptional rudeness that Bella chokes, “June.”
Juniper spins back to face her sisters. Her eyes are bright and green as fox-fire. “So. What do you say?”
“To what?”
Juniper looks at Bella like she wants to grab her by the shoulders and shake her. “To witching! To the Lost Way of Avalon!”
Bella shushes her, casting worried looks at the genteel bustle of the street: mothers with their hats just so and children with their clothes starched stiff, maids with baskets of fresh white laundry and gentlemen checking their pocket-watches. It strikes Agnes suddenly how ludicrous it is that they should be plotting the second age of witching in the middle of a sunny, orderly street on the north end, surrounded by clerks and investors and clean limestone. Surely it calls for a haunted moor or a misted cemetery.
Bella says, low and urgent, “Juniper, I don’t know what you know or think you know about that tower, but I assure you I don’t have the secret recipe for Avalon stuffed in my socks.”
Juniper crosses her arms, runs her tongue over her teeth. “I know you know more than you’ve told me.”
“I—I—” Bella stutters, and Agnes marvels that she grew up in their daddy’s house without learning how to lie properly. “Yes. Alright. I found some . . . words, the day the tower appeared. I don’t know what came over me, but I spoke them aloud. And then . . .” She gestures upward, recalling the splitting seam of the sky and the dark tower.
Juniper stares hard for another second, then grins. “You snake. I knew it was you. Why didn’t you tell me?”
Bella fumbles for an answer, but Agnes perfectly understands why a person might hesitate to give a vicious, vengeful girl the key to a mysterious and boundless power. There were stories in the old days about whole cities put to sleep, kingdoms frozen over in endless winter, armies reduced to rust and ash.
Juniper waves away Bella’s stutters. “Doesn’t matter now. The real question is: why haven’t you done it again?”
“Because it wasn’t a complete spell. It’s missing some of the words, and all of the ways.”
“Then find them! What exactly have you and your lady friend been up to, all those late nights in the library?”
A flush creeps up Bella’s neck. “She’s not my—Miss Quinn and I have been searching. We’ve collected some scraps, some possibilities, but we have nothing but theories, so far.”
“So let’s test them.” Bella looks doubtful and Juniper presses on, heedless. “Listen. Ever since the equinox the three of us have been bound together, haven’t we?”
Bella tsks, sliding her spectacles up her long nose. “An effect of an unfinished spell, I told you.”
“And how come the three of us were pulled into that spell in
