By the time she turns on South Sybil the boarding house is lit up, noisy with the evening talk of working girls and unwed women. Agnes finds her feet carrying her past it, even though her back aches and her stomach is sour and her breasts feel heavy, achy. She winds up Spinner’s Row and down St. Lamentation Avenue, leaving the factories and tenements and three dozen languages of West Babel behind her, lured forward by a strange, half-imagined tugging behind her ribs.
She buys a hot pie from a cart. A block later she throws it away, acid in her throat.
She heads uptown without quite admitting it to herself. She crosses the Thorn and the buildings get grander and farther apart, the faded advertisements and tattered playbills replaced by fresh campaign posters: Clement Hughes for a Safer Salem! Gideon Hill: Our Light Against the Darkness!
She falls in behind a flock of pinch-lipped women wearing white sashes with CHRISTIAN WOMEN’S UNION embroidered on one side and WOMEN WITHOUT SIN on the other.
Agnes has heard of them. They’re always hassling street-witches and trying to save girls from the whorehouse whether or not they want to be saved (they mostly don’t). Their leader is named something like Purity or Grace, one of those ladylike virtues. Agnes figures she’s the one walking out front—slender, white-gloved, her hair piled up in a perfect Gibson Girl pouf—wearing an expression suggesting she’s Joan of Arc’s tight-laced sister. Agnes would bet a silver dollar that her maid uses a little witching to keep her gown unwrinkled and her hair neat.
She wonders what Mama Mags would say if she could see them. Juniper would growl. Bella would have her nose in a book.
Agnes doesn’t know why she’s thinking of her sisters; she hasn’t in years, not since the day she drew her circle and left them standing on the outside of it.
The street ends at St. George’s Square, framed by City Hall and the College, and the white-sashed ladies begin stamping around the perimeter, chanting Bible verses and scowling at the gathering of suffragists in the center. Agnes should turn around and go back to South Sybil, but she lingers.
A woman in a white wig is speechifying about women’s rights and women’s votes and women’s history, about taking on the mantles of their fore-mothers and marching forward arm in arm.
And Saints save her, Agnes wishes it was real. That she could just wave a sign or shout a slogan and step into a better world, one where she could be more than a daughter or a mother or a wife. Where she could be something instead of nothing.
Don’t forget what you are.
But Agnes hasn’t believed in witch-tales since she was a little girl.
She is turning away, heading back to the boarding house, when the wind whips her skirts sideways and tugs her hair loose from its braid.
It smells foreign, green, un-city-like. It reminds Agnes of the dark interior of Mama Mags’s house, hung with herbs and the bones of small creatures, of wild roses in the woods. The wind pulls at her, searching or asking, and her breasts ache in strange answer. Something wet and greasy dampens her dress-front and drips to the cobbles below. Something the color of bone or pearl.
Or—milk.
Agnes stares at the splattered drops like a woman watching a runaway carriage come hurtling toward her. Dates and numbers skitter behind her eyes as she counts up the days since Floyd lay beside her in the dark, his palm sliding smooth down her belly, laughing. What’s the harm, Aggie?
No harm at all. For him.
Before Agnes can do more than curse Floyd Matthews and his soft hands six ways to Sunday, heat comes searing up her spine. It licks up her neck, rising like a fever.
Reality splits.
A ragged hole hangs in the air, that wild wind rushing through it. Another sky gleams dark on the other side, like skin glimpsed through torn cloth, and then the hole is growing, tearing wide and letting that other-sky pour through. The evening gray of New Salem is swallowed by star-spattered night.
In that night stands a tower.
Ancient, half-eaten by climbing roses and ivy, taller than the Courthouse or College on either side of the square. Dark, gnarled trees surround it, like the feral cousins of the lindens in their neat rows, and the sky above it fills with the dark tatter of wings.
For a moment the square stands in eerie, brittle silence, mesmerized by the strange stars and circling crows. Agnes pants, her blood still boiling, her heart inexplicably lifting.
Then someone screams. The stillness shatters. The crowd floods toward Agnes in a screeching horde, skirts and hats clutched tight. She braces her shoulders and wraps her arms around her belly, as if she can protect the fragile thing taking root inside her. As if she wants to.
She should turn and follow the crowd, should run from that strange tower and whatever power called it here, but she doesn’t. She staggers toward the center of the square instead, following some invisible pull—
And the world mends itself.
The wayward sisters, hand in hand,
Burned and bound, our stolen crown,
But what is lost, that can’t be found?
Purpose unknown
Beatrice Belladonna Eastwood was the oldest sister, with hair like owl feathers: soft and dark, streaked with early gray. She was the wisest of the three. The quiet one, the listening one, the one who knew the feel of a book’s spine in her palm and the weight of words in the air.
But on the spring equinox of 1893, she is a fool.
She sits in the dust-specked light of her little office in the East Wing of the Salem College Library, flipping furtively through a newly donated first-edition copy of the Sisters Grimm’s Children and Household Witch-Tales (1812). She already knows the stories, knows them so well she dreams in once-upon-a-times and sets of three, but she’s never held a first edition in her own two hands. It has a weight to it, as if the Sisters Grimm tucked more than paper and ink inside it.
Beatrice flicks to the last page and pauses. Someone has added a verse at the end of the last tale, hand-lettered and faded.
The wayward sisters, hand in hand,
Burned and bound, our stolen crown,
But what is lost, that can’t be found?
There are more lines below these, but they’re lost to the blotches and stains of time.
It isn’t especially strange to find words written in the back of an old book; Beatrice has been a librarian for five years and has seen much worse, including a patron who used a raw strip of bacon as a bookmark. But it is a little strange that Beatrice recognizes these words, that she and her sisters sang them when they were little girls back in Crow County.
Beatrice always thought it was one of Mama Mags’s nonsense-songs, a silly rhyme she made up to keep her granddaughters busy while she plucked rooster feathers or bottled jezebel-root. But here it is, scrawled in an old book of witch-tales.
Beatrice flips several onion-skin pages and finds the title of the last tale printed in scrolling script, surrounded by a dark tangle of ivy: The Tale of Saint George and the Witches. It’s never been one of her favorites, but she reads it anyway.
It’s the usual version: once upon a time there were three wicked witches who loosed a terrible plague on the world. But brave Saint George of Hyll rose against them. He purged witching from the world, leaving nothing but ashes behind him.
Finally only the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone remained, the last and wickedest of witches. They fled to Avalon and hid in a tall tower, but in the end Saint George burned the Three and their tower with them.