Nearly all the chairs are full. There are no more taps at the door. The whispers and shuffles of the women fall away in eerie concert, replaced by an expectant stillness. Eyes swivel to the front of the room, where Beatrice and her sisters sit.
Beatrice sees Juniper’s throat bob as she stands, fist tight around her staff. She glances back at her older sisters, suddenly looking young and raggedy and not at all like the president of a suffrage society. Heat passes down the line from Agnes to Juniper, a rush of secondhand strength.
Juniper squares her shoulders and turns back to the room full of waiting women. “Welcome,” she begins, her voice clear and bright, “to the first meeting of the Sisters of Avalon.”
Juniper introduces Beatrice and Agnes and Jennie. She thanks the gathered women for answering the advertisement and reads their mission statement from a creased page held in her hand, stumbling a little, sounding like a schoolgirl reading from the Bible.
She folds the paper and fixes them with a green-lit gaze. “That’s why we’re here.” Her voice is steady now. “How about you all tell me why you’re here?”
A nervous silence follows. It lingers, escalating toward the unbearable, until a flat voice calls from the back, “My brother gets fifty cents a day at the mill. I get a quarter for the same damn work.”
“The courts took my son,” hisses someone else. “Said he belonged to his father, by law.”
Miss Pearl offers, “They arrested two of my girls on immorality, and not a one of their customers.” The end of her sentence is lost in the sudden flood of complaints: bank loans they can’t receive and schools they can’t attend; husbands they can’t divorce and votes they can’t take and positions they can’t hold.
Juniper holds up a hand. “You’re here because you want more for yourselves, better for your daughters. Because it’s easy to ignore a woman.” Juniper’s lips twist in a feral smile. “But a hell of a lot harder to ignore a witch.”
The word witch cracks like lightning over the room. Another silence follows, tense and electric.
A voice cuts through the hush, hard and foreign-sounding. “There’s no such thing as witches. Not anymore.” It’s the big Russian woman from Agnes’s mill, arms crossed like a pair of pistols across her breast.
“No,” Juniper parries. “But there will be.”
“How?”
Juniper looks again at her sisters, and Beatrice knows from the jut of her jaw that she’s about to say the thing which they agreed she shouldn’t say, at least not on the first meeting, and that there’s nothing at all she can do about it.
She smiles benevolently down at the Russian woman. “By calling back the Lost Way of Avalon.”
The faces of the gathered women contort into two dozen separate species of shock: shocked outrage, shocked disbelief, shocked confusion, shocked hunger. Then the room erupts as the ones who know the story relate it to the ones who don’t, as a handful of women gather their skirts and scuttle for the exit with horrified expressions, as Miss Quinn laughs softly into the chaos.
Juniper arcs her voice high over the noise. “We don’t have all the ways and words yet, but we will soon.” Beatrice wonders how she manages to sound so sure, so confident, as if they are likely to find the map to an ancient power tucked in their skirt pockets. “In the meantime, we propose an exchange. Each of you knows a spell or two or three, maybe more. Share them with the Sisters, and together—”
The Russian interrupts again. “Spells to clean laundry and scour pots! Feh.”
“I know a spell that can kill a man stone dead,” says Juniper, softly. “Would you like to hear it?” The Russian doesn’t answer. “I bet some of these other ladies know more than they’ve said. And even small spells are worth something. You heard about those union boys in Chicago? Look what hell they raised with nothing but a little bit of rust.” Beatrice refrains from noting that they were men, and thus far less likely to be hunted, tried, and burned by a jury of their peers.
One of the other mill-girls, a kerchiefed woman about Agnes’s age, says, unexpectedly, “My cousin was there, with Debs and the Railway Union. He’s back home now, at least for a while. I could . . . talk to him, if you like.”
Someone else sneers, “Men’s magic. Wouldn’t do a damn thing for us.” Jennie fidgets in the front row, cornsilk hair sliding to cover her face.
Juniper addresses the sneerer. “And who told you that? What if your daddy or your preacher or your mama was dead wrong?” She nods to the kerchiefed girl. “You—Annie?—talk to your cousin. Why not?” She throws her gaze around the rest of the room. “Why not at least try? Join us. Learn from us, teach us, fight with us, for all that more you want.” She gestures behind her, to where Beatrice’s notebook lies open on the table. “Add your name to the list and swear the oath if you’re interested. If not”—her eyes slant to the door—“head on home. Forget you ever dreamed of anything better.”
In the silence that follows, the Russian woman climbs to her feet. A pair of girls stand with her, so broad-shouldered and blue-eyed they can only be her daughters. There’s a long moment when Beatrice is certain the three of them are headed for the door, that half the room will follow, unswayed by the shine of Juniper’s smile.
