The knight set fire to the tower, instead. As the witch burned, her spell was broken and the rest of the castle woke from its endless sleep. The knight plucked the witch’s crown from the ashes and presented it to the king on bended knee. The king pulled him to his feet and announced that he and the queen had finally found a fitting heir.
The knight and the kingdom lived happily ever after, although no rose ever bloomed for miles around, no matter how rich the soil or how talented the gardener. And there were still stories about a young woman who walked in the deep woods sometimes, with a black snake beside her.
Sister, sister,
Look around,
Something’s lost
And must be found!
A spell to find what can’t be found, requiring a pinch of salt & a sharp eye
Agnes Amaranth lies awake long after her sister’s story. She thinks about witching and wanting and thrones without heirs, babies unborn. She thinks about the second pulse in her belly and the memory of pennyroyal on her tongue.
She must fall asleep eventually, because when she opens her eyes she sees sunrise tip-toeing into the room. Bile bubbles in her throat and she retches into the chamber pot as quietly as she can. Neither of her sisters stir.
Bella’s mouth is crimped tight even in sleep, as if her lips are untrustworthy things. The last time Agnes saw her she was weeping silently as she packed her things, watching Agnes with her eyes huge and sad, as if she didn’t deserve every bit of what she got. Clearly she’s landed on her feet, working in a fancy library with her beloved books.
Juniper sleeps in a heedless, childlike sprawl, all elbows and knees. The toes of her left foot are curled with scars, the puckered flesh reaching up her ankle in a shape almost like fingers. Agnes wonders how long it took to heal and if it still hurts.
Her eyes fall on the battered brass locket lying against Juniper’s collarbone. She remembers it swinging from Mags’s neck, the way she’d hold it sometimes and look up the mountainside with her eyes misted over. Mags never talked much about the daughter she lost—their mother, who drew her last breath just as Juniper drew her first—but Agnes could see her mother in the shape of her grandmother’s silences: the scabbed-over places, the wounded days when Mags stayed in bed with the quilts pulled high.
Agnes lights the stove and cuts butter into a skillet, letting the pop and sizzle wake the others. They stretch and yawn, watching her crack eggs and boil coffee.
They take their tin plates in silence. Juniper eats like it’s been days since she saw a square meal. Bella picks at her food, staring out the window. Agnes breathes carefully through her mouth and tries not to look at the slick jelly of the egg whites.
When the food is gone there’s nothing to do but leave. Part ways. Settle back into their own stories and forget about lost towers and lost sisters.
None of them moves. Juniper fidgets, trailing her finger through the runny yolk as it dries.
“So.” Agnes pretends she’s speaking to a stranger, just another boarding-house girl passing through. “Where will you go now?”
She’s hoping Juniper will say: Straight the hell back home. Or maybe even: To find good, honest work like my big sister. Instead her mouth curls with a reckless little smile and she says, “To join up with those suffrage ladies just as fast as I can.”
Bella’s eyes swivel away from the window for the first time. She covers her mouth with her palm and says faintly, “Oh, my.”
Agnes resists the urge to roll her eyes. “Why? So you can wear a fancy dress and wave a sign? Get laughed at? Don’t waste your time.”
Juniper’s smile hardens. “Voting doesn’t seem like a waste of time to me.” She’s still fooling with her egg yolk, swirling it into gummy circles. Agnes’s stomach heaves.
“Look, all that ‘votes for women’ stuff sounds real noble and all, but they don’t mean women like you and me. They mean nice uptown ladies with big hats and too much time on their hands. It doesn’t matter to you or me who gets to be mayor or president, anyhow.”
Juniper shrugs at her, sullen, childish, and Agnes drops her voice lower. “Daddy’s dead, June. You can’t piss him off anymore.”
Juniper’s head snaps up, eyes boiling green, hair tangled like a black hedge of roses around her face. “You think I still give a single shit about him?” She hisses it so hot and mean that Agnes thinks she must give two or three shits, at least. “Someone or some-witch worked a spell yesterday. The kind that hasn’t been seen since our great-great-great-grandmama’s days. It felt . . .” Juniper’s jaw works. She taps her chest and Agnes knows she’s trying to find words to describe the swell of power, the sweet sedition of magic in her veins. “It felt impossible. Important. Don’t you want to know where it came from? Don’t you think it maybe had something to do with the herd of suffragists running around the square?”
“I know that’s what the police’ll think. Half the papers already call them witches. Don’t be a fool, June, please—”
Agnes is interrupted by Bella, who lunges from her seat at the foot of the bed to seize Juniper’s plate. She clutches it, peering through her spectacles at the trio of yolky circles Juniper has drawn on its surface. “What’s this?”
Juniper blinks down at the remains of her breakfast. “Uh. Eggs?”
“The design, June. Where did you see this?”
Juniper lifts one shoulder. “On the tower door, I guess.”
Bella’s head tilts, owl-like. “On the what?”
“You didn’t see the door? On my side of the tower there was a door, old and wooden, all overgrown with roses, and there were three circles on it, overlapping. And words, too, but I couldn’t make sense of them.”
Bella’s face goes taut, intent in a way that Agnes recalls from their childhood, when Bella would get to the good part of a book. “What language was it? And did the circles have eyes? Or tails? Could they have been serpents, do you think?”
“Maybe. Why?”
But Bella ignores the question. Her eyes are searching Juniper’s face now. They land on her lips, where Agnes can see the dark blush of a bruise and the tattered red of torn skin. Bella lifts her fingertips toward it, her expression filled with wonder or maybe terror. “Maiden’s blood,” she whispers. Juniper flinches from her touch.
Bella’s fingers fall away. Juniper’s plate clangs to the floor. “Excuse me. I’m sorry. I have to go. Very sorry.” She tosses the words behind her like coins for beggars, a careless jumble, as she reaches for the door.
“What? You’re leaving?” Juniper is sputtering, cheeks reddening. “But I just found you! You can’t just leave.” Agnes hears the unspoken again hovering in the air, but Bella is already gone, calling back carelessly, “I rent a room in Bethlehem Heights, between Second and Sanctity, if you need me.”
Agnes watches her leave with a strange hollowness in her chest. “Well.” She scrapes her sister’s eggs back into the pan with unnecessary force. “Good riddance.”
Juniper whirls. “And why’s that?”
“Because Bella can’t keep her damn mouth shut! God knows what Daddy would have done if you hadn’t—” Agnes shivers hard, as if winter has come early, as if she’s sixteen again and her daddy is coming toward her with that red glow in his eyes.