“Jesus, Bell, lighten—”
“There have been nineteen arrests since the solstice.” Quinn speaks very slowly and clearly, as if she thinks Juniper might need things spelled out in one-syllable words. “Mostly harmless street-witches—an abortionist, a fortune-teller, a woman who claimed to speak with the dead. There have been raids, too, women beaten bloody for nothing but a few feathers in their pockets or a questionable spice-rack.”
Juniper is not grinning anymore. She hears Agnes asking her what comes after, what it costs. “Are the Sisters alright?”
Quinn makes a little yes-and-no bob of her head. “Four of them are still in the workhouse, as far as I know; I still haven’t found Jennie. A few others have had unpleasant encounters with the police. The Hull sisters were among the nineteen arrests.”
Juniper can’t think of anything to say, can hardly think around the queasy guilt crawling up her throat. Quinn isn’t finished. “There are calls for the mayor’s resignation. The City Council has formed a committee to investigate the rise of witchcraft, headed by Mr. Gideon Hill. Who has climbed rather dramatically in the polls.”
At the sound of Hill’s name Juniper stops feeling guilty or queasy or guilty; the only thing she feels is afraid. “He came to visit me in the Deeps,” she rasps.
“Who did?”
“Gideon Hill. And he’s not—he isn’t—” She swallows against the memory of those shadowy fingers pressing between her lips. “He’s a witch.”
Bella and Quinn are quiet as Juniper stutters through the story, but she can tell she isn’t getting it right. She tells them what happened—how he melted through the bars, how he pulled confessions from her, how he laughed—but she can’t seem to tell them how it was. How his eyes flicked, furtive and fearful, how a stranger stood behind his face. How the shadows slid like oil between her teeth.
“Well,” Bella said, adjusting her spectacles. “I suppose if men’s magic has proved somewhat efficacious for us, it stands to reason a man might master a little witchcraft.”
“It wasn’t a little witchcraft. He said every shadow was his, he said—”
“A bluff, surely. It would require an unthinkable degree of power to control a city full of shadows. And the ways would be ghastly, I imagine. We’d have heard about it if there were dozens of white lambs going missing, or piles of bones found in the City Council chambers, don’t you think?”
Juniper sets her jaw. “I know what I saw. We ought to figure out what the hell he is, at least. And send a message to Agnes and the other Sisters, warn them that he knows their names, probably where they live, where they work.”
Bella taps the folded-up poster again. “I suspect Agnes knows. She was already planning to leave South Sybil, I believe, and work under a different name. I recommended the ladies at Salem’s Sin, should she need to disguise herself.” There’s a gentleness to her tone, as if Juniper is a fretful horse that needs settling. “She could not be more cautious than she already is.”
Juniper looks away, around the wood-paneled room that shouldn’t exist. There’s a narrow, mullioned window on the east wall, and the light that shines through this one is wintry and pale, as if it looks out at the month of January rather than June.
“So. This is it.” Juniper makes a ta-da gesture with her hands. “The Lost Way of Avalon. Is it—did we—” The question she wants to ask is a childish one, but she can’t help herself. “Are we witches now?”
Neither of them laugh at her, although Quinn’s mouth quirks again. Bella sweeps her hand grandly at the piled books and notes on the table. “We certainly have sufficient ways and words to become so, don’t we? An entire library of spells and hexes, curses and charms, poisons, potions, conjurings, recipes . . . Quinn and I are developing a system to catalog and translate them all.” Bella gives a small, contented sigh.
“Translate them?”
“Well, relatively few of them are in English, and none in what you might recognize as modern English. There are a few texts in Latin and Greek, but significantly more in Arabic, classical forms of Persian, a Turkic language or two, even something I think must be a written form of Malinke, from Old Mali. And then once we translate them there are the witch-ways to contend with. Herbs that are native to the Old World, for example, but which do not thrive in the new one, or ingredients which no longer exist—dragon’s tooth, siren’s scale, that sort of thing. It will take considerable time and effort, but already we’ve found a stronger spell for warding and another for rust—” Bella pauses in this rhapsody to squint worriedly at Juniper. “What’s wrong?”
Juniper gives a shrug that tugs at the fresh scar around her neck. “Guess I just didn’t figure the Lost Way of Avalon would be a bunch of schoolwork.”
Bella clucks her tongue at her. “The Last Three Witches of the West spent their final days assembling the world’s greatest library of witchcraft, which Agnes and Quinn and I went through considerable difficulty to retrieve. I’m so sorry it disappoints you.”
“But even after you translate all these spells from Greek or hieroglyphs or what have you, are you sure we can work them? A woman would need a good helping of witch-blood, wouldn’t she?”
“Well, as to that . . . Cleo and I are no longer convinced that magical prowess is a matter of inheritance.” Bella actually gives a little clap as she says this, as if she simply cannot contain herself.
Juniper looks to Quinn, who translates, “We don’t know that blood counts for a damn thing, when it comes to witching.”
Juniper makes a skeptical hunh that provokes her sister to rustle through a stack of scrolls.
