Agnes does not flinch, does not breathe. What authority?
“So I’m here to offer you girls a warning: if I get so much as a whiff of witching—or unionizing, suffrage, any of that trash—I’ll take it straight to the police, make no mistake.” His eyes rake them, and Agnes catches the wet gleam of fear beneath all his bluster. She wants very badly to make him more afraid.
“As it is,” he finishes, “you’ve all earned yourselves a week without work.”
Gasps and curses ripple through them. A week without pay means hungry children and cold stoves and maybe angry husbands.
Someone shouts, “You can’t do that!” and Malton spits back, “The hell I can’t.” His nose throbs an unhealthy purple. “The Baldwins have agreed: we can run on scabs and day-workers for a week while you girls take some time to consider your situations. Decide where your loyalties lie.”
The mill seethes around Agnes. Women exchange bitter glares of blame and suspicion, eyeing one another as if they would gladly tie the witch to the stake themselves if they found her. Annie and Yulia are standing very still, not looking at one another or at Agnes.
Eventually the women form a resentful line out the door, apronstrings hanging loose. Agnes trails at the back, trying to look as if she’s merely worried about late rent.
Just before she steps into the alley Mr. Malton’s hand reaches out to stop her, pressing against the bowl of her belly. “Hold on a minute, girl.”
He’s far too close to her. She smells the sour sweat of him, feels his breath against her cheek. “Don’t think I’ve forgotten your little trick.” It was one of the first spells Mags taught them: a nettle-leaf and a sharp needle and a man would be too busy yelping and swearing to want you any longer.
His palm is sweating through her dress. “Should I go to the authorities, do you think? Should I tell the police what you are, Miss Eastwood?”
His fingers dig like nails into the swollen meat of her stomach, biting deep, just because he can. Because she can’t stop him. Because she is nothing and he is something.
Rage licks hot and red up her spine, followed by a sick wave of shame. What a fool she was to think witching could change anything. Their mother had known plenty of words and ways, and what good had it done her?
Agnes swallows rage and shame both—and oh, she’s grown tired of the taste of them—and answers, “No, Mr. Malton.”
“Good girl.” He gives her stomach a hard, careless pat, like a man might give a horse.
Agnes walks blind down the alley, rain slicking her hair against her throat, and despair follows her. It’s almost a relief when she feels its teeth against her throat.
Juniper has never met despair. She’s caught glimpses of some black creature edging nearer—when her sisters abandoned her, when she lay down on the fresh-turned earth of her grandmother’s grave—but she’s driven it back with fire and fury, every time.
But now she hears its claws clicking down the cobbled streets behind her. Coming closer.
She knows better than to let the fear show on her face. The officers around her are hungry for it, waiting to lap at her terror like tomcats at a bowl of milk.
Juniper declines to feed them.
She keeps her eyes blazing and her teeth bared as they prop her in front of an accordion-box camera. As a fist snarls itself in her hair and forces her to face the camera’s glassy eye.
She keeps her chin raised as they rip the locket from her throat and the dress from her back and leave her shivering in her shift. As eyes rove across the pimpled white of her flesh, skinning her.
She keeps her spine straight as they drag her down stone steps, past the leering, greenish faces of drunks and derelicts, pickpockets and prostitutes. As they fling her into ankle-deep water that smells of oil and shit.
Juniper stands with her wet shift half-slicked to her body and cold mud splattered over one cheekbone, staring into the low glare of a gas-lamp with her fingers curled into fists.
“That all you got? Weak-ass chicken-shitted sons of—”
Hands fall on her again, wrenching her arms behind her back. She braces her belly for the blow and prays briefly that they won’t bust anything important. Three bless and keep me.
But the blow never comes: instead she feels chill metal press against her throat. She swears and arcs against the man behind her, but she hears the rasp and click of rusted tumblers turning in a lock, and a piercing, deadening cold sluices through her veins.
They release her. Her bad leg crumples beneath her and her knees splash back into the reeking water. She reaches for her own throat with trembling fingers and finds an iron collar, locked tight.
Back in the olden-times witches were punished with bridles to stop their tongues from speaking the words, shackles to stop their hands from working the ways—and collars. To break their will.
The hot heartbeat of magic is gone. So are the lines that lead to her sisters, but Juniper thinks dully that it doesn’t matter; they won’t come for her, now that they know.
Dimly, she hears the slosh of booted feet and the low, mean sound of laughter.
Then she is alone in the dark. When her daddy died—when she killed him and set fire to what was left of him, so that no ghost or spirit might linger a single second longer in the world—she thought at least she would never be locked down in the dark again.
She was wrong.
Despair creeps toward her out of the deeps, the color of night, but Juniper does not let it take her. Instead—her voice tangling with the trickle of water, echoing against wet stone—she tells it a story.
nce upon a time there was a
