But the giant had already stomped everything flat. There was no one left to celebrate except Juniper the Giantkiller, all alone.
Agnes lowers herself slowly onto the floor beside Juniper. After a while she says, “So how come you left? Who’s watching the farm?”
Juniper answers her second question. “Cousin Dan.”
“That dumbshit?”
“He owns it now. Daddy left the whole thing to him. Even Mags’s place.” A little hut dug into the mountainside with a dirt floor and a cedar-shake roof gone green with moss, worth less than the land it sat on. People in town gossiped and clucked their tongues about Mama Mags, wondering to one another how a person could live all alone like that, but it sounded alright to Juniper. She’d never had any interest in boys or betrothals or the things that came after; she figured she’d spend her days clearing henbit and cudweed from the herb-garden and chatting with the sycamores. In the fall-times maybe she and her red staff would go walking in the hills with a basket over her arm, collecting foxglove and ninebark, snake-skins and bone, sleeping beneath the clean light of stars.
Daddy took that away from her, like he took everything else.
“I—I’m sorry, Juniper. I know you always loved that place.” Bella says it soft, as if she’s trying to comfort Juniper, as if she cares.
Juniper shucks her shoulders, ducking away from her caring. “How’d you two end up in New Salem, anyhow?”
Neither of them meet her eyes. Bella removes her spectacles and polishes the glass with the bed-sheet. “I w-work for the College, at the library.”
Agnes gives a small, humorless laugh and mimics Bella’s chopped-short vowels, her schoolteacher voice. “Well, I work for the Baldwin Brothers. At the cotton mill.”
Juniper sees their eyes meet, cold and cutting, and wonders what the hell they have to hold against one another. They weren’t the ones left in the lion’s den. She leans between them. “And how’d you end up in that square today?”
Now they look at her, wide and hungry. Bella touches her own breastbone, as if there’s still something lodged there, towing her forward, and Juniper knows they felt it, too: the thing that tugged them together, the spell that burned between them and left a terrible wanting behind it. She can almost see the black tower reflected in their eyes, starlit and rose-eaten, like a promise nearly fulfilled.
Bella whispers, “What was it?”
Juniper whispers back, “You know damn well what it was.” Something long gone, something dangerous, something that was supposed to have burned up in the way-back days along with their mother’s mothers.
Bella hisses “witching,” just as Agnes says “trouble.”
Agnes pulls herself to her feet, the sunlit wand drawing deep shadows around her frown. There’s no starlight in her eyes, now. “All kinds of trouble. People will be scared, and the law’ll get involved. It’s not like it was back home, where people mostly looked the other way when it came to witching. You saw the witch-yard in the cemetery? They say in the old days it was ankle-deep with the ashes of the women they burned in this city.”
She shakes her head. “And now there are these Christian Union women running around, and the Morality Party has somebody on the City Council—he’s running for mayor now, I heard. He doesn’t have a chance in hell, but still. Him and his people will eat all this tower business up with a damn spoon.”
“But don’t you want to—” Juniper begins.
“What I want is to get some sleep. I have an early shift tomorrow.” Agnes’s voice is clipped and cold as she rummages in a battered trunk. “The police will be out looking, by now. You two should stay here.” She tosses a stack of moth-eaten wool at Juniper, not looking at her. “For the night.”
For the night. Not forever, not happily ever after.
Of course not.
Agnes spreads her own blanket on the floor and rolls a spare skirt into a pillow. Bella struggles upright, gesturing Agnes to her own bed, but Agnes ignores her.
She lies down on the floor with her body curled tight, a nautilus-shell around her own belly. Juniper glares resentfully at her back before whispering to the pitch pine wand. The witch-light fades and the room darkens from summer-gold to winter-gray.
Juniper lies on the floor beside Agnes and tries to keep her fists from clenching and her teeth from grinding. Her body is strung tight from a night and a day spent running, sleeping only in rattling snatches on the train.
She shuffles and tosses and thinks of their old four-poster bed in the attic. She had trouble sleeping even as a girl, counting whip-poor-will calls and waiting for their daddy’s unsteady steps to fall quiet. On bad nights Agnes would stroke her hair and Bella would whisper witch-tales in the dark.
“You up, Bell?” The sound of her own voice surprises Juniper. “You still remember any stories?”
At first she thinks that Bella won’t answer her. Will tell her she’s too old for tales of maidens and crones and spinning wheels. But her voice rises above the creak and rustle of the boarding house and Juniper can almost believe she is still ten years old, still one-of-three instead of one-alone.
“Once upon a time . . .”
nce upon a time there was a king and queen who longed for a child but couldn’t have one. They tried spells and prayers and charms, but after many long years the kingdom still had no heir. In desperation they held a grand feast and invited six witches to bless their kingdom. The six witches granted six fair gifts—peace and prosperity, good health and good harvests, agreeable weather and biddable peasants—but just as the feast was ending, a seventh witch arrived. She was young and graceful and had the sort of face that launches ships and eats hearts. She wore a coal-black adder twined around her left arm and a sharp-toothed smile on her lips.
She told the king and queen that, since they failed to invite her to their feast, she brought a curse instead of a blessing: one day a young maiden would prick her finger on a spindle and the castle would fall into an endless sleep from which no one could wake it.
The king took all reasonable precautions. He ordered all the spinning wheels burned and permitted no unwed women within the castle walls. He kept his throne for one-and-twenty years.
Until the day a strange maiden arrived at the castle gates. The guards should have turned her away, but it had been too long since the seventh witch had been seen, and the Maiden knew the ways and words to make them forget their orders. She wore her familiar like a black-glass necklace around her throat.
The Maiden strode unseen through the castle, smiling as she went, until she climbed to the top of the tallest tower, where a spinning wheel waited for her. She reached her pale finger to the spindle’s end.
There are many versions of this story, but there is always a pricked finger. There are always three drops of the Maiden’s blood.
Her blood touched the castle floor and a spell drifted through the castle. Every living creature fell into a sudden slumber. Pies burned in the ovens and spears clattered to the floor; cats slept with their claws outstretched toward sleeping mice, and dogs lay down beside foxes.
In the whole castle only the Maiden moved. She stole the king’s crown from his brow and settled it on her own head.
The Maiden ruled for one hundred years. She might have ruled forever—who can say what ways a witch might find to live beyond their years?—except that a brave knight heard tales of a cursed kingdom and rode to its rescue. The Maiden retreated to the tallest tower and grew rose-briars around it, vicious and sharpspined, so thick even the knight and his shining sword couldn’t cut through them.