She whispers the words aloud. The wayward sisters, hand in hand.
They roll in her mouth like summer sorghum, hot and sweet. Burned and bound, our stolen crown.
Heat slides down her throat, coils in her belly. But what is lost, that can’t be found?
Beatrice waits, blood simmering.
Nothing happens. Naturally.
Tears—absurd, foolish tears—prick her eyes. Did she expect some grand magical feat? Flights of ravens, flocks of fairies? Magic is a dreary, distasteful thing, more useful for whitening one’s socks than for summoning dragons. And even if Beatrice stumbled on an ancient spell, she lacks the witch-blood to wield it. Books and tales are as close as she can come to a place where magic is still real, where women and their words have power.
Beatrice’s office feels suddenly cluttered and stuffy. She stands so abruptly her chair screeches across the tile and she fumbles a half-cloak around her shoulders. She strides from her office and clicks down the tidy halls of Salem College, thinking what a fool she was for trying. For hoping.
Mr. Blackwell, the director of Special Collections, blinks up from his desk as she passes. “Evening, Miss Eastwood. In a hurry?” Mr. Blackwell is the reason Beatrice is a junior associate librarian. He hired her with nothing but a diploma from St. Hale’s, based purely on their shared weakness for sentimental novels and penny-papers.
Often Beatrice lingers to chat with him about the day’s findings and frustrations, the new version of East of the Sun, West of the Witch she found in translation or the newest novel from Miss Hardy, but today she merely gives him a thin smile and hurries out into the graying evening with his worried eyes watching her.
She is halfway across the square, shoving through some sort of rally or protest, when the tears finally spill over, pooling against the wire rims of her spectacles before splashing to the stones below.
Heat hisses through her veins. An unnatural wind whips toward the center of the square. It smells like drying herbs and wild roses. Like magic.
That foolish hope returns to her. Beatrice wets her wind-scoured lips and says the words again. The wayward sisters, hand in hand—
This time she doesn’t stop—can’t stop—but returns to the beginning in a circling chant. It’s as if the words are a river or an unbridled horse, carrying her helplessly forward. There’s a rhythm to them, a heartbeat that skips at the end of the verse, stuttering over missing words.
The spell shambles onward, careening, not quite right, and the heat builds. Her lungs are charred, her mouth seared, her skin fevered.
Dimly Beatrice is aware of things outside herself—the splitting open of the world, the black tower hanging against a star-flecked sky, hung with thorns and ivy, the crows reeling overhead—her own feet carrying her forward, forward, following the witch-wind to the middle of the square. But then the fever blurs her vision, swallows her whole.
None of Mama Mags’s spells ever felt like this. Like a song she can’t stop singing, like a bonfire beneath her skin. Beatrice thinks it might become a pyre if she keeps feeding it.
She stutters into silence.
The world shudders. The ripped-open edges of reality flutter like tattered cloth before drawing together again, as if some great unseen seamstress is stitching the world back together. The tower and the tangled wood and the foreign night vanish, replaced by the ordinary gray of a spring evening in the city.
Beatrice blinks and thinks, That was witching. True witching, old and dark and wild as midnight.
Everything tilts strangely in Beatrice’s vision and she tips downward into darkness. She falls, half dreaming there are arms waiting to catch her, sturdy and warm. A woman’s voice says her name, except it isn’t her name anymore—it’s the lost name her sisters used when they were still foolish and fearless—Bella!—
And it begins to rain.
Juniper is howling like a moon-drunk dog, reveling in the sweet heat of power coursing through her veins and the feather-soft beating of wings above her, when the tower disappears.
It leaves the square in teeming, shrieking chaos. Every hat is blown askew, every skirt is ruffled, every hair-pin failing in its duties. Even the neat-trimmed linden trees look a little wilder, their leaves greener, their branches spreading like autumn antlers.
Juniper is chilled and dazed, emptied out except for a strange ache in the center of her. A want so vast it can’t fit behind her ribs.
She looks up to see two other women standing near her, forming a silent circle in the middle of the screaming stampede of St. George’s Square. In their faces Juniper sees her own want shining back at her, a hollow-cheeked hunger for whatever the hell it was they saw hanging in the sky, calling them closer.
One of the women sways and says “oh” in a hoarse voice, like she’s been standing too long over a cook-fire. She blinks at Juniper through fever-slick eyes before she falls.
Juniper drops her staff and catches her before her head cracks against stone. She’s light, feather-fragile in Juniper’s arms. It’s only as Juniper lays her down and resettles the crooked spectacles on the woman’s nose, as she sees the freckles scattered across her cheeks like constellations she thought she’d forgotten, that she realizes who she is.
“Bella.” Her oldest sister. And—
Juniper looks slowly up at the other woman, the first cold flecks of rain hissing on her cheeks, her heart thundering like iron-shod hooves against her breastbone.
She’s just as pretty as Juniper remembers her: full lips and long lashes and slender neck. Juniper figures she takes after the mama she can’t remember, because there’s nothing of Daddy in her.
“Agnes.” And just like that, Juniper is ten again.
She is opening her eyes in the earthen dark of Mags’s hut, already speaking her sisters’ names because that’s how they were back then, always hand in hand, one-of-three. Mags is turning away
