“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 in two fists and disappear into the alleys and side-streets, just another nothing-girl in a white apron, invisible.
Juniper climbs to her feet with Bella’s arm hauled across her shoulders. She staggers on her bad leg, toppling sideways—
Agnes reaches for her. She catches her wrist and Juniper clutches her arm, steadying herself, and for a half-second the two of them are face-to-face, hands wrapped around each other, flesh warm through thin cotton.
Agnes lets go first. She bends and hands her sister the red-cedar staff, rubbing her palm against her skirt as if the wood burned her.
Without quite deciding to, without thinking much at all, she shoves her shoulder against Bella’s other side. Their oldest sister sags between them like wet laundry on a line.
Agnes hears herself say, “Come with me.”
Beatrice is drifting, burning, floating like a cinder above some unseen fire. Voices hiss and whisper around her. Hurry, for Saints’ sake. Her feet wobble and slide beneath her, mutinous. Her spectacles swing madly from one ear.
She blinks and sees the coal-scummed walls of west-side alleys passing on either side; laundry strung overhead like the many-colored flags of foreign countries, dripping in the rain; the darkening sky and the hot glow of gas-lamps.
There are two women running beside her, half carrying her. One of them limps badly, her shoulder falling and catching beneath Beatrice. The other swears beneath her breath, fingers white around Beatrice’s wrist. Their faces are nothing but bright blurs in Beatrice’s vision, but their arms are warm and familiar around her.
Her sisters. The ones she missed most at St. Hale’s, the ones who never came to her rescue.
The ones who are here now, running beside her down the rain-slick streets of New Salem.
Juniper never thought much about her sisters’ lives after they left Crow County—they’d just walked off the edge of the page and vanished, a pair of unfinished sentences—but she thought a lot about what she’d say if she ever saw them again.
You left me behind. You knew what he was and you left me all alone with him.
Her sisters would weep and tear their hair with guilt. Please, they would beg, forgive us!
Juniper would stare down at them like God casting the first witch from the Garden, fire and brimstone in her eyes. No, she’d say, and her sisters would spend the rest of their sorry-ass lives wishing they’d loved her better.
Juniper doesn’t say a word as they lurch through the twisting streets, turning down unmarked alleys and slanting through empty lots. She says nothing as they arrive at a grim-looking boarding house with stained clapboard walls and wooden crosses hanging in the windows. She is silent as they shuffle Bella past the landlady’s apartment, up two flights of creaking stairs, through a door bearing a brass number seven and a cross-stitched verse (Let a woman live in quietude, Timothy 2:11).
Agnes’s room is dim and mildewed, containing nothing but a thin mattress on an iron frame, a cracked mirror, and a rusty stove that looks like it would struggle to heat a tin cup of coffee. Brownish stains bloom on the ceiling; unseen creatures scuttle and nibble in the walls.
It makes Juniper think of a jail cell or a cheap coffin. Or the cellar back home, black and wet, empty except for cave crickets and animal bones and the long-ago tears of little girls. A chill shivers down her spine.
Agnes heaves Bella onto the thin mattress and stands with her arms crossed. The lines on her face are deeper than Juniper remembers. She thinks of witch-tales about young women cursed to age a year for every day they live.
Agnes bends to light a puddled stub of candle. She shoots Juniper a prickly, half-ashamed shrug. “Out of lamp-oil.”
Juniper watches her sister stumbling around in the flickering light for a minute before she pulls the crooked wand of pitch pine from her pocket and touches the end of it to the slumping candle. She whispers the words Mama Mags taught her and the wand glows a dull orange that brightens to beaten gold, as if an entire summer sunset has been caught and condensed.
Agnes stares at the wand, her face bathed in honeyed light. “You always paid better attention to Mags than us.”
Juniper pinches the guttering candlewick between her fingers and shrugs one shoulder. “Used to. She died in the winter of ninety-one.” Juniper could have told her more: how she dug and filled the hole herself to save the cost of a gravedigger and how the dirt rang hollow on the coffin lid; how every shovelful took some of herself along with it, until she was nothing but bones and hate; how she waited for three days and three nights by the graveside hoping Mama Mags might love her enough to let her soul linger. Ghosts were at least seven different kinds of sin and they never lasted more than an hour or two, but sin never bothered Mags before.
The grave stayed still and silent, and Juniper stayed lonely. All Mags left behind was her brass locket, the one that used to have their mother’s hair curled like a silky black snake inside it.
Juniper doesn’t say any of that. She lets the silence congeal like grease in a cold pan.
“You should have written. I’d have come home for the funeral.” There’s an apology in Agnes’s voice and Juniper wants to bite her for it.
“Oh, would you? And where should I have addressed your invitation? Seven years, Agnes, seven years—”
From the bed beside them, Bella makes a soft, hurting sound. Her skin is a damp, fish-belly white.
Juniper snaps her teeth shut and crouches down beside her, peeling one of her eyelids back. “Devil’s-fever.” Juniper would like very much to know what the hell her sister was doing to get herself burnt up with witching. “You got a tin whistle? Or a horn?”
Agnes shakes her head and Juniper tsks. She says the words anyhow and gives a sharp, two-fingered whistle. A spark of witching flares between them.
Bella’s eyes flutter. She blinks up at her sisters, face slack with shock. “Agnes? June?” Juniper gives her a stiff little bow. “Saints.” A sudden fear seems to strike Bella. She struggles up from the bed, eyes skittering around the room, lingering on the shadows. “Where’s Daddy?”
“Not here.”
“Does he know where you are? Is he coming?”
“Doubt it.” Juniper runs her tongue over her teeth and lays out the next words like a winning hand of cards, a heartless snap. “Dead men usually stay put.” She lets her eyelids hang heavy as she says it, hoping her sisters won’t see anything lurking in her eyes.
They stare at her, barely breathing, their faces empty.
Juniper knows how they feel. Even right afterward, when Juniper was scrubbing the guilt and smoke off her arms in the Big Sandy River, she remembers thinking, Is that it? Her daddy’s death was supposed to feel like vanquishing a foe or winning a war, like the end of the story when the giant crashes to earth and the whole kingdom celebrates.