Bella spins on her heel and strides to the cracked mirror hanging in its frame. She whispers to it—Mirror, mirror, on the wall, tell the truth, reveal all—a rhyme Agnes knows well, stolen from her favorite witch-tale as a girl, and rubs something across its surface. Agnes thinks it might be a lock of hair the color of crow feathers.
Heat in the air. The wild smell of witching. Then Beatrice removes the mirror from its nail and brings it to Agnes. “Just a little spell I learned from a story,” she sneers, and tilts the surface so that Agnes can see the image inside it.
It should be the ceiling of South Sybil—sagging plaster, brownish stains spreading like the map to a foreign country—but it isn’t. It’s a woman’s body, doubled along every fracture of the mirror, lying pale and still as bone. Her eyes are closed, the lids bluish, translucent, like the eyes of cave-creatures. She is nearly naked, bruises blooming darkly through her tattered shift, left foot twisted and pale with scars. A collar is clamped tight around her neck, and the skin beneath it is the color of uncooked meat.
Agnes prefers the Juniper that grins up from The Post, all teeth and defiance. This Juniper is just a girl, young and fragile and half-broken.
Bella’s breath mists the surface. “I know you’ve always chosen your own hide over ours. I know you’ve never much cared what happens to us, but—”
“I always cared, Bell. Always.” Agnes swallows the salt-promise of tears in her throat, hardens her voice. “But it never fucking mattered that I cared. I couldn’t stop him, couldn’t protect you—couldn’t even protect myself—” The tears threaten again, and Agnes breaks off.
There’s a pause, and after it Bella’s voice has softened very slightly. “Maybe this time we can make it matter. Miss Quinn and I will find the words. Juniper has always had will to spare. We need you to gather the ways. Will you do it?”
Agnes doesn’t want Bella to speak softly to her. She wants to keep that bitter coal burning hot between them, because once it cools she’ll have nothing left but terrible guilt. She hadn’t wanted to betray her, to spill Bella’s secrets to their daddy, but surviving always comes at a cost.
Agnes looks again at the girl in the mirror, eyes tracing the dark blush of bruises, the shine of old scars. Juniper’s lips move in her sleep. Don’t leave me.
Agnes feels the taut scab of her sister’s blood dried on her palm. She closes her eyes. “Yes.”
Bella gives her a cool nod and sets the mirror on the table. “Wait for my sign.”
“But then I’m through. If we—after we save her, I’m done with witching and women’s rights and all the rest.” She rests her palm on the full moon of her belly. “The cost is too high.”
“Fine.” Bella’s lip curls very slightly before she turns away. “It’s funny. Mama always said you were the strong one.”
She unbolts the door and steps back into the deeper dark of the hall. Cleo moves to follow her and Agnes reaches for her sleeve. “Where are you going? To look for the words?”
“Why, the last place we know for certain the words were spoken.” Cleo removes her sleeve from Agnes’s hand, lips curling. “Old Salem.”
Hark, hark,
The dogs do bark,
When witches come to town.
A spell to raise the alarm, requiring a gnawed bone & a strong whistle
Beatrice Belladonna always wanted to see Old Salem. It makes regular appearances in her favorite penny-papers—a burned city full of charred bones and the wailing ghosts of witches—and even in more academic texts it retains a certain Gothic drama. It’s always drawn with dense thickets of cross-hatched ruins and brooding trees, the stubborn black shapes of crows lurking in the corners, as if the artist had tried unsuccessfully to shoo them off the page.
As soon as Mr. Blackwell spoke its name, Beatrice felt a bone-deep certainty that he was right. Surely they could not fail to find their missing words in such a place—steeped in the oldest and wildest of witchcraft, oozing with mystery and memory.
But by the time she and Miss Cleopatra Quinn arrive in Old Salem, her certainty is sagging.
Perhaps it’s the journey itself. It’s difficult to feel particularly magical after fifty miles spent with one’s forehead pressed to the window of a crowded train car, watching the landscape blur past like a spun globe, followed by another twenty miles suffocating in the back of a stagecoach. Miss Quinn is obliged by the cruel absurdity of Jim Crow to ride out front with the driver, and without her Beatrice feels herself growing drab and doubtful.
The final four miles are spent swaying in the back of a coal-colored wagon with LADY LILITH’S AUTHENTIC OLD SALEM EXCURSIONS painted on the side in faux-medieval script. Lady Lilith is a bored, fifty-ish woman with artificially dark hair and a disconcerting habit of hawking and spitting at regular intervals. The other passengers are similarly unmagical: a vacationing family from Boston who cast disapproving looks at Miss Quinn, a honeymooning couple uninterested in everything except one another, a trio of boarding school girls of the kind who wear black chokers and worship the Brontë sisters.
The sky is such an unblemished blue it looks strangely unfinished, as if a careless painter has forgotten to add clouds and birds and slight variations in hue. Beatrice feels obscurely that the day should be gray and wintry, the wind howling as they approach the gravesite of the last witches of the modern world.
Lilith’s mules turn from the pocked highway down an even more forgotten-looking road made of moss-eaten cobbles and mud. The woods rise like water around them, cool and silent; even the newlyweds cease their giggling. The air smells green and secret, surprising Beatrice with a rare pang of homesickness for Crow County; she supposes a person doesn’t have to love
