Oh, they’d talked about it. Of course they had. How they would run away into the woods together like Hansel and Gretel. How they would eat wild honey and pawpaws, leave honeysuckle crowns on Mags’s doorstep sometimes so she’d know they were still alive. How Daddy would weep and curse but they would never, ever go back home.
But Daddy’s mood would lighten, sudden as springtime, and he would buy them sweets and ribbons and they would stay a while longer.
Not this time. This time her sisters cut and ran without looking back, without second-guessing. Without her.
Juniper took off down the mountainside as soon as she understood, stumbling, limping—her left foot was still blistered and raw from the barn-fire.
She caught a single glimpse of Agnes’s sleek black braid swaying on the back of a wagon as it jostled down the drive and shouted for her to come back, please come back, don’t leave me, until her pleas turned to choked sobs and thrown stones, until she was too full-up with hate to hurt anymore.
She limped home. The house smelled wet and sweet, like meat gone bad, and her daddy was waiting for his supper. Never mind, James. He’d given her his own first name and liked to hear himself say it. We’ll get along without them.
Seven years she survived without them. She grew up without them, buried Mama Mags without them, and waited without them for Daddy to die.
But now here they are, wet and hungry-eyed, smack dab in the middle of New Salem: her sisters.
Little Girl Blue, come blow your horn,
The sheep’s in the meadow, the cow’s in the corn.
Soundly she sleeps beneath bright skies,
[Sleeper’s name] awake, arise!
A spell to wake what sleeps, requiring a blown horn or a good whistle
Agnes Amaranth doesn’t feel the cold hiss of rain against her skin. She doesn’t see the two women crouched beside her, freckled and black-haired, like reflections hanging in a pair of mirrors.
All her attention is inward-facing, fixed on the live thing sprouting inside her, delicate as the first fiddle-head curl of a fern. She imagines she feels a second heart beating beneath her palm.
“Agnes.” She knows the voice. She’s heard it laugh and tease and beg for one more story, pretty please; she’s heard it chasing after her down the rutted drive, begging her to come back. She’s heard it in seven years of bad dreams. Don’t leave me.
Agnes looks down to see her baby sister kneeling below her, except she’s not a baby anymore: her jaw is hard and square, her shoulders wide, her eyes blazing with a grown woman’s helping of hate.
“J-Juniper?” Agnes becomes aware that her arms are outstretched, as if she expects Juniper to run into them the way she did when she was a child, when Agnes still slept every night with her sister’s crow-feather hair tickling her nose, when Juniper still slipped sometimes and called her Mama.
Juniper’s lips are peeled back from her teeth, her face taut. Agnes looks down to see her sister’s hands curled into fists. The shape of them—the familiar white knobs of her knuckles, the twist of tendons in her wrists—chases all the air from Agnes’s lungs.
“Where’s Daddy? He with you?” She hates the hint of Crow County that surfaces in her voice.
Juniper shakes her head, stiff-necked. “No.” A darkness flits across the leaf-light of her eyes, like grief or guilt, before the rage burns it away again.
Agnes remembers how to breathe. “Oh. How—what are you doing here?” Deep scratches score Juniper’s wrists and throat, as if she ran through deep woods on a dark night.
“What am I doing here?” Juniper’s eyes are wide and her nostrils are flared. Agnes remembers what happens when Juniper loses her temper—a serpent the color of blood, flames licking higher, animal screams—and flinches away.
Juniper swallows, draws a shuddering breath. “Had to leave home. Headed north. Didn’t expect to run into you two strutting through the city like a pair of pigeons, without a care in the damn world.” Her voice is bitter and black as burnt coffee. The Juniper Agnes remembers was all feckless temper and careless laughter; Agnes wonders who taught her to hold a grudge, to feed and tend it like a wild-caught wolf pup until it grew big and mean enough to swallow a man whole.
Her attention snags on the number Juniper just said. “Two?” Surely Agnes is still merely one. Surely the baby in her belly is too small to count as a whole person. Agnes’s brain feels like a jammed loom, threads snarled, gears grinding.
Juniper narrows her eyes at Agnes, looking for mockery and not finding it, then looks pointedly down.
Agnes follows her gaze and for the first time she sees the woman lying between them, her spectacles spattered with rain. Agnes feels the world collapsing around her, all the years of her life folding together, accordion-like.
Their oldest sister. The one who betrayed her and the one she betrayed in turn, eye for an eye. The reason she had to run.
Bella.
Juniper is shaking Bella’s shoulders and Bella’s head is lolling, limp. Juniper lays two fingers against her forehead and swears. “She’s burning up. Y’all got a place nearby?”
“I haven’t seen Bella in seven years. Didn’t even know she was in the city.” Agnes’s lip curls. “Didn’t care, either.”
Juniper glares up at her. “Then how come—”
But Agnes hears a sound that every person in New Salem knows well, a sound that means trouble and time to go: the cold ring of iron-shod hooves on cobblestones. Police in the city ride tall, prancing grays specially bred for their vicious tempers and shining white coats.
The sound makes Agnes abruptly aware of how empty the square has become, abandoned by everything except slanting rain and drifting feathers and the three of them.
She ought to run before the law shows up looking for someone to blame. She ought to gather her skirts
