An Introduction

There’s no such thing as witches, but there used to be.

It used to be the air was so thick with magic you could taste it on your tongue like ash. Witches lurked in every tangled wood and waited at every midnight-crossroad with sharp-toothed smiles. They conversed with dragons on lonely mountaintops and rode rowan-wood brooms across full moons; they charmed the stars to dance beside them on the solstice and rode to battle with familiars at their heels. It used to be witches were wild as crows and fearless as foxes, because magic blazed bright and the night was theirs.

But then came the plague and the purges. The dragons were slain and the witches were burned and the night belonged to men with torches and crosses.

Witching isn’t all gone, of course. My grandmother, Mama Mags, says they can’t ever kill magic because it beats like a great red heartbeat on the other side of everything, that if you close your eyes you can feel it thrumming beneath the soles of your feet, thumpthumpthump. It’s just a lot better-behaved than it used to be.

Most respectable folk can’t even light a candle with witching, these days, but us poor folk still dabble here and there. Witch-blood runs thick in the sewers, the saying goes. Back home every mama teaches her daughters a few little charms to keep the soup-pot from boiling over or make the peonies bloom out of season. Every daddy teaches his sons how to spell ax-handles against breaking and rooftops against leaking.

Our daddy never taught us shit, except what a fox teaches chickens—how to run, how to tremble, how to outlive the bastard—and our mama died before she could teach us much of anything. But we had Mama Mags, our mother’s mother, and she didn’t fool around with soup-pots and flowers.

The preacher back home says it was God’s will that purged the witches from the world. He says women are sinful by nature and that magic in their hands turns naturally to rot and ruin, like the first witch Eve who poisoned the Garden and doomed mankind, like her daughters’ daughters who poisoned the world with the plague. He says the purges purified the earth and shepherded us into the modern era of Gatling guns and steamboats, and the Indians and Africans ought to be thanking us on their knees for freeing them from their own savage magics.

Mama Mags said that was horseshit, and that wickedness was like beauty: in the eye of the beholder. She said proper witching is just a conversation with that red heartbeat, which only ever takes three things: the will to listen to it, the words to speak with it, and the way to let it into the world. The will, the words, and the way.

She taught us everything important comes in threes: little pigs, billy goats gruff, chances to guess unguessable names. Sisters.

There were three of us Eastwood sisters, me and Agnes and Bella, so maybe they’ll tell our story like a witch-tale. Once upon a time there were three sisters. Mags would like that, I think—she always said nobody paid enough attention to witch-tales and whatnot, the stories grannies tell their babies, the secret rhymes children chant among themselves, the songs women sing as they work.

Or maybe they won’t tell our story at all, because it isn’t finished yet. Maybe we’re just the very beginning, and all the fuss and mess we made was nothing but the first strike of the flint, the first shower of sparks.

There’s still no such thing as witches.

But there will be.

PART ONE: THE WAYWARD SISTERS

Chapter 1

A tangled web she weaves
When she wishes to deceive.

A spell to distract and dismay, requiring cobweb gathered on the new moon & a pricked finger

Once upon a time there were three sisters.

James Juniper Eastwood was the youngest, with hair as ragged and black as crow feathers. She was the wildest of the three. The canny one, the feral one, the one with torn skirts and scraped knees and a green glitter in her eyes, like summer-light through leaves. She knew where the whip-poor-wills nested and the foxes denned; she could find her way home at midnight on the new moon.

But on the spring equinox of 1893, James Juniper is lost.

She limps off the train with her legs still humming from the rattle and clack of the journey, leaning heavy on her red-cedar staff, and doesn’t know which way to turn. Her plan only had two steps—step one, run, and step two, keep running—and now she’s two hundred miles from home with nothing but loose change and witch-ways in her pockets and no place to go.

She sways on the platform, buffeted and jostled by folk who have plenty of someplaces to go. Steam hisses and swirls from the engine, curling catlike around her skirts. Posters and ads flutter on the wall. One of them is a list of New Salem city ordinances and the associated fines for littering, profanity, debauchery, indecency, and vagrancy. One of them shows an irritable-looking Lady Liberty with her fist raised into the air and invites ALL LADIES WHO TIRE OF TYRANNY to attend the New Salem Women’s Association rally in St. George’s Square at six o’clock on the equinox.

One of them shows Juniper’s own face in blurred black and white above the words MISS JAMES JUNIPER EASTWOOD. SEVENTEEN YEARS OF AGE, WANTED FOR MURDER & SUSPECTED WITCHCRAFT.

Hell. They must have found him. She’d thought burning the house would muddy things a little more.

Juniper meets her own eyes on the poster and pulls her cloak’s hood a little higher.

Boots ring dully on the platform: a man in a neat black uniform strolls toward her, baton slap-slapping in his palm, eyes narrowed.

Juniper gives him her best wide-eyed smile, hand sweating on her staff. “Morning, mister. I’m headed to...” She needs a purpose, a somewhere-to-be. Her eyes flick to the irritable Lady Liberty poster. “St. George’s Square. Could you tell me how to get there?” She squeezes her accent for every country cent it’s worth, pooling her vowels like spilled honey.

The officer looks her up and down: hacked-off hair scraping against her jaw, dirt-seamed knuckles, muddy boots. He grunts a mean laugh. “Saints save us, even the hicks want the vote.”

Juniper’s never thought much about voting or suffrage or women’s rights, but his tone makes her chin jerk up. “That a crime?”

It’s only after the words come whipping out of her mouth that Juniper reflects on how unwise it is to antagonize an officer of the law. Particularly when there is a poster with your face on it directly behind the officer’s head.

That temper will get you burnt at the damn stake, Mama Mags used to tell her. A wise woman keeps her burning on the inside. But Bella was the wise one, and she left home a long time ago.

Sweat stings Juniper’s neck, nettle-sharp. She watches the veins purpling in the officer’s throat, sees the silver-shined buttons straining on his chest, and slides her hands into her skirt pockets. Her fingers find a pair of candle-stubs and a pitch pine wand; a horseshoe nail and a silver tangle of cobweb; a pair of snake’s teeth she swears she won’t use again.

Heat gathers in her palms; words wait in her throat.

Maybe the officer won’t recognize her, with her hair cut short and her cloak hood pulled high. Maybe he’ll just yell and stomp like a ruffled rooster and let her go. Or maybe he’ll haul her into the station and she’ll end up swinging from a New Salem scaffold with the witch-mark drawn on her chest in clotted ash. Juniper declines to wait and find out.

The will. Heat is already boiling up her wrists, licking like whiskey through her veins.

The words. They singe her tongue as she whispers them into the clatter and noise of the station. “A tangled web she weaves—”

The way. Juniper pricks her thumb on the nail and holds the spider-web tight.

She feels the magic flick into the world, a cinder spit from some great unseen fire, and the officer claws at his own face. He swears and sputters as if he’s stumbled face-first into a cobweb. Passersby are pointing, beginning to laugh.

Juniper slips away while he’s still swiping at his eyes. A puff of steam, a passing crowd of railroad workers with their lunch pails swinging at their sides, and she’s out the station doors. She runs in her hitching fashion, staff clacking on cobbles.

Growing up, Juniper had imagined New Salem as something like Heaven, if Heaven had trolleys and gas-lamps—bright and clean and rich, far removed from the sin of Old Salem—but now she finds it chilly and colorless, as if all that clean living has leached the shine out of everything. The buildings are all grayish and sober, without so much as a flower-box or calico curtain peeking through the windows. The people are grayish and sober, too, their expressions suggesting each of them is on their way to an urgent but troublesome task, their collars starched and their skirts buttoned tight.

Maybe it’s the absence of witching; Mags said magic invited a certain amount of mess, which was why the honeysuckle grew three times as fast around her house and songbirds roosted under her eaves no matter the season. In New Salem—the City Without Sin, where the trolleys run on time and every street wears a Saint’s name—the only birds are pigeons and the only green is the faint shine of slime in the gutters.

A trolley jangles past several inches from Juniper’s toes and its driver swears at her. Juniper swears back.

She keeps going because there’s no place to stop. There are no mossy stumps or blue pine groves; every corner and stoop is filled up with people. Workers and maids, priests and officers, men with pocket-watches and ladies with big hats and children selling buns and newspapers and shriveled-up flowers. Juniper tries asking directions twice but the answers are baffling, riddle-like (follow St. Vincent’s to Fourth-and-Winthrop, cross the Thorn, and head straight). Within an hour she’s been invited to a boxing match, accosted by a gentleman who wants to discuss the relationship between the equinox and the end-times, and given a map that has nothing marked on it but thirty-nine churches.

Juniper stares down at the map, knotted and foreign and unhelpful, and wants to go the hell home.

Home is twenty-three acres on the west side of the Big Sandy River. Home is dogwoods blooming like pink-tipped pearls in the deep woods and the sharp smell of spring onions underfoot, the overgrown patch where the old barn burned and the mountainside so green and wet and alive it makes her eyes ache. Home is the place that beats like a second heart behind Juniper’s ribs.

Home was her sisters, once. But they left and never came back—never even sent so much as a two-cent postcard—and now neither will Juniper.

Red rage swells in Juniper’s chest. She crumples the map in her fist and keeps walking because it’s either run or set something on fire, and she already did that.

She walks faster, faster, stumbling a little on her bad leg, shouldering past wide bustles and fashionable half-capes, following nothing but her own heartbeat and perhaps the faintest thread of something else.

She passes apothecaries and grocers and an entire shop just for shoes. Another one for hats, with a window full of faceless heads covered in lace and froth and frippery. A cemetery that sprawls like a separate city behind a high iron fence, its lawn clipped short and its headstones straight as stone soldiers. Juniper’s eye is drawn to the blighted, barren witch-yard at its edges, where the ashes of the condemned are salted and spread; nothing grows in the yard but a single hawthorn, knobbled as a knuckle.

She crosses a bridge stretched over a river the color of day-old gravy. The city grows taller and grayer around her, the light swallowed by limestone buildings with domes and columns and men in suits guarding the entrances. Even the trolleys are on their best behavior, gliding past on smooth rails.

The street pours into a broad square. Linden trees line its edges, pruned into unnatural sameness, and people flock around the center.

“—why, we ask, should women wait in the shadows while their fathers and husbands determine our fates? Why should we—we doting mothers, we beloved sisters, we treasured daughters—be barred from that most fundamental of rights: the right to vote?”

The voice is urgent and piercing, rising high above the city rumble. Juniper sees a woman standing in the middle of the square wearing a white-curled wig like some small, unfortunate animal pinned to her head. A bronze Saint George glares down at her and women press near her, waving signs and banners.

Juniper figures she’s found St. George’s Square and the New Salem Women’s Association rally after all.

She’s never seen a real live suffragist. In the Sunday cartoons they’re drawn scraggle-haired and long-nosed, suspiciously witchy. But these women don’t look much like witches. They look more like the models in Ivory soap ads, all puffed and white and fancy. Their dresses are ironed and pleated, their hats feathered, their shoes shined and smart.

They part around Juniper as she shoves forward, looking sideways at the seasick roll of her gait, the Crow County mud still clinging to her hem. She doesn’t notice; her eyes are on the strident little woman at the foot of the statue. A badge on her chest reads Miss Cady Stone, NSWA President.

“It seems that our elected politicians disagree with the Constitution, which grants us certain inalienable rights. It seems that Mayor Worthington disagrees even with our benevolent God, who created us all equal.”

The woman keeps talking, and Juniper keeps listening. She talks about the ballot box and the mayoral election in November and the importance of self-determination. She talks about the olden-times when women were queens and scholars and knights. She talks about justice and equal rights and fair shares.

Juniper doesn’t follow all the details—she stopped going to Miss Hurston’s one-room schoolhouse at ten because after her sisters left there was no one to make her go—but she understands what Miss Stone is asking. She’s asking: Aren’t you tired yet? Of being cast down and cast aside? Of making do with crumbs when once we wore crowns?

She’s asking: Aren’t you angry yet?

And oh, Juniper is. At her mama for dying too soon and her daddy for not dying sooner. At her dumbshit cousin for getting the land that should have been hers. At her sisters for leaving and herself for missing them. At the whole Saints-damned world.

Juniper feels like a soldier with a loaded rifle, finally shown something she can shoot. Like a girl with a lit match, finally shown something she can burn.

There are women standing on either side of her, waving signs and filling in all the pauses with hear-hears , their faces full of bright hunger. For a second Juniper pretends she’s standing shoulder-to-shoulder with her sisters again and she feels the hollowed-out place they left behind them, that emptiness so vast even fury can’t quite fill it.

She wonders what they would say if they could see her now. Agnes would worry, always trying to be the mother they didn’t have. Bella would ask six dozen questions.

Mags would say: Girls who go looking for trouble usually find it.

Her daddy would say: Don’t forget what you are, girl. Then he would toss her down in the worm-eaten dark and hiss the answer: Nothing.

Juniper doesn’t realize she’s bitten her lip until she tastes blood. She spits and hears a faint hiss as it lands, like grease in a hot pan.

The wind rises.

It rushes through the square, midnight-cool and mischievous, fluttering the pages of Miss Cady Stone’s notes. It smells wild and sweet, half-familiar, like Mama Mags’s house on the solstice. Like earth and char and old magic. Like the small, feral roses that bloomed in the deep woods.

Miss Stone stops talking. The crowd clutches their hats and cloak-strings, squinting upward. A mousy-looking girl near Juniper fusses with a lacy umbrella, as if she thinks this is a mundane storm that can be taken care of with mundane means. Juniper hears crows and jays calling in the distance, sharp and savage, and knows better.

She whirls, looking for the witch behind the working—

And the world comes unsewn.

Chapter 2

Sugar and spice
And everything nice.
A spell to soothe a bad temper, requiring a pinch of sugar & spring sunshine

Agnes Amaranth Eastwood was the middle sister, with hair as shining and black as a hawk’s eye. She was the strongest of the three. The unflinching one, the steady one, the one that knew how to work and keep working, tireless as the tide.

But on the spring equinox of 1893, she is weak.

The shift bell rings and Agnes sags against her loom, listening to the tick and hiss of cooling metal and the rising babble of the mill-girls. Cotton-dust coats her tongue and gums her eyes; her limbs ache and rattle, worn out from too many extra shifts in a row.

One of those nasty fevers is spreading through New Salem’s disorderly edges, festering in the boarding houses and barrooms of West Babel, and every third girl is hacking her lungs up in a bed at St. Charity’s. Demand is high, too, because one of the other mills caught fire last week.

Agnes heard women had leapt from the windows, falling to the streets like comets trailing smoke and ash. All week her dreams have been crimson, full of the wet pop of burning flesh, except it’s a memory and not a dream at all, and she wakes reaching for her sisters who aren’t there.

The other girls are filing out, gossiping and jostling. You headed to the rally? A huff of laughter. I got better ways to waste my time. Agnes has worked at the Baldwin Brothers Bonded Mill for a handful of years now, but she doesn’t know their names.

She used to learn their names. When she first came to New Salem, Agnes had a tendency to collect strays—the too-skinny girls who slept on the boarding-house floor because they couldn’t afford beds, the too-quiet girls with bruises around their wrists. Agnes tucked them all under her scrawny wing as if each of them were the sisters she left behind. There was one girl whose hair she brushed every morning before work, thirty strokes, like she used to do for Juniper.

She found work as a night-nurse at the Home for Lost Angels. She spent long shifts soothing babies who couldn’t be soothed, loving children she shouldn’t love, dreaming about a big house with sunny windows and enough beds for each little Lost Angel. One night she showed up to work to find half her babies had been shipped out west to be adopted by settler families hungry for helping hands.

She stood among the empty beds, hands trembling, remembering what her Mama Mags told her: Every woman draws a circle around herself. Sometimes she has to be the only thing inside it.

Agnes quit the orphanage. She told the boarding-house girl to brush her own damn hair and started work at the Baldwin Brothers. She figured you couldn’t love a cotton mill.

The bell clangs again and Agnes unpeels her forehead from the loom. The floor boss leers idly as the girls file past, reaching for skirts and blouses with pinching fingers. He doesn’t reach for Agnes. On her first shift Mr. Malton had cornered her behind the cotton bales—she was always the pretty one, all shining hair and hips—but Mags taught her granddaughters ways to discourage that kind of horseshit. Since then Mr. Malton saves his leers for other girls.

Agnes watches the new girl flinch as she passes him, her shoulders sloped with shame. She looks away.

The alley air tastes clean and bright after the humid dark of the mill. Agnes turns west up St. Jude’s, headed home—well, not home, just the moldy little room she rents in the South Sybil boarding house, which smells like boiled cabbage no matter what she cooks—until she sees the man waiting at the corner.

Hair slicked earnestly to one side, cap clutched in nervous hands. Wholesome good looks, clean fingernails, a weak chin you don’t notice at first: Floyd Matthews.

Oh hell. His eyes are pleading at her, his mouth half-open to call her name, but Agnes fixes her gaze on the apron-strings of the woman in front of her and hopes he’ll just give up and find some other mill-girl to pine after.

A scuffed boot appears in her path, followed by an outstretched hand. She wishes she didn’t remember so precisely how that hand felt against her skin, smooth and soft, unscarred.

“Aggie, love, talk to me.” What’s so hard about calling a woman by her full name? Why do men always want to give you some smaller, sweeter name than the one your mama gave you?

“I already said my piece, Floyd.”

She tries to edge past him but he puts his hands on her shoulders, imploring. “I don’t understand! Why would you turn me down? I could take you out of this place”—he waves a soft hand at the dim alleys and sooty brick of the west side—“and make an honest woman out of you. I could give you anything you want!” He sounds bewildered, like his proposal was a mathematical equation and Agnes produced the incorrect response. Like a nice boy told no for the first time in his nice life.

She sighs at him, aware that the other girls are pausing on the street, turning to look at them. “You can’t give me what I want, Floyd.” Agnes doesn’t know what she wants, exactly, but it’s not Floyd Matthews or his little gold ring.

Floyd gives her a little shake. “But I love you!”

Oh, Agnes doubts the hell out of that. He loves pieces of her—the thunder-blue of her eyes, the full moon-glow of her breasts in the dark—but he never even met most of her. If he peeled back her pretty skin he’d find nothing soft or sweet at all, just busted glass and ashes and the desperate, animal will to stay alive.

Agnes removes Floyd’s hands from her shoulders, gently. “I’m sorry.”

She strides down St. Mary’s with his voice rising behind her, pleading, desperate. His pleas curdle into cruelty soon enough. He curses her, calls her a witch and a whore and a hundred other names she learned from her daddy first. She doesn’t turn back.

One of the other mill workers, a broad woman with a heavy accent, offers Agnes a nod as she passes and grunts “boys, eh” in the same tone she might say “fleas” or “piss-stains,” and Agnes almost smiles at her before she catches herself.

She keeps walking. She dreams as she walks: a home of her own, so big she has extra beds just for guests. She’ll write her little sister another letter: You’ve got someplace to run, if you want it. Maybe this time she would answer. Maybe the two of them could be family again.

It’s a stupid dream.

Agnes learned young that you have a family right up until you don’t. You take care of people right up until you can’t, until you have to choose between staying and surviving.

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.

Chapter 3

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.

< i>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.

The last page of the story is an engraved illustration of grateful children dancing while the Last Three Witches of the West burned merrily in the background.

Mama Mags used to tell the story different. Beatrice remembers listening to her grandmother’s stories as if they were doors to someplace else, someplace better. Later, after she was sent away, she would lie in her narrow cot and re-tell them to herself again and again, rubbing them like lucky pennies between her fingers.

(Sometimes she can still see the walls of her room at St. Hale’s: perfect ivory, closing like teeth around her. She keeps such things locked safe inside parentheses, like her mother taught her.)

A raised voice rings from the square through her office window, startling her. She isn’t supposed to be dawdling over witch-tales and rhymes; as a junior associate librarian she’s supposed to be cataloging and filing and recording, perhaps transcribing the work of true scholars.

Right now there are several hundred pages of illegible handwriting piled on her desk from a professor in the School of History. She’s only typed the title page—The Greater Good: An Ethical Evaluation of the Georgian Inquisition During the Purge—but she can tell already it’s one of those bloodthirsty books that relishes every gory detail of the purges: the beatings and brandings, the metal bridles and hot iron shoes, the women they burned with their babes still held in their arms. It will be popular with the Morality Party types, the saber-rattlers and church-goers who rather admire the French Empire’s bloody campaign against the war-witches of Dahomey, who are eager to see similar measures taken up against the witches of the Navajo and Apache and the stubborn Choctaw still holed up in Mississippi.

Beatrice finds she doesn’t have the stomach for it. She knows witching is sinful and dangerous, that it stands in the way of the forward march of progress and industry, et cetera, but she can’t help but think of Mags in her little herb-hung house and wonder what the harm is.

She looks again at the words on the last page of the Sisters Grimm. They aren’t important. They aren’t anything at all, just a little girl’s rhyme written in a children’s book, a song sung by an old woman in the hills of nowhere in particular. An unfinished verse long forgotten.

But when she looks at them, Beatrice can almost feel her sisters’ hands in hers again, can almost smell the mist rising from the valleys back home.

She pulls a notebook from her desk drawer. It’s cheaply made—the black dye fading to murky mauve, the pages coming unglued—but it’s her most beloved possession.

(It was her very first possession, the first thing she purchased with her own money after she left St. Hale’s.)

The notebook is half-filled with witch-tales and nursery rhymes, stolen scraps and idle dreams and anything that catches Beatrice’s eye. If she were a scholar she might refer to her notes as research, might imagine it typed and bound on a library shelf, discussed in university halls, but she isn’t and it won’t be.

Now she copies the verse about wayward sisters into the little black book, beside all the other stories she’ll never tell and spells she’ll never work.

She hasn’t spoken so much as a single charm or cantrip since she left home. But something about the shape of the words on the page, written in her own hand, tempts her tongue. She has a wild impulse to read them aloud—and Beatrice isn’t a woman much subject to wild impulses. She learned young what happened when a woman indulges herself, when she tastes fruits forbidden.

(Don’t forget what you are, her daddy told her, and Beatrice hasn’t.)

And yet—Beatrice cracks her office door to check the College halls; she is entirely alone. She swallows. She feels a tugging somewhere in her chest, like a finger hooked around her ribcage.

She whispers the words aloud. The wayward sisters, hand in hand.

They roll in her mouth like summer sorghum, hot and sweet. Burned and bound, our stolen crown.

Heat slides down her throat, coils in her belly. But what is lost, that can’t be found?

Beatrice waits, blood simmering.

Nothing happens. Naturally.

Tears—absurd, foolish tears—prick her eyes. Did she expect some grand magical feat? Flights of ravens, flocks of fairies? Magic is a dreary, distasteful thing, more useful for whitening one’s socks than for summoning dragons. And even if Beatrice stumbled on an ancient spell, she lacks the witch-blood to wield it. Books and tales are as close as she can come to a place where magic is still real, where women and their words have power.

Beatrice’s office feels suddenly cluttered and stuffy. She stands so abruptly her chair screeches across the tile and she fumbles a half-cloak around her shoulders. She strides from her office and clicks down the tidy halls of Salem College, thinking what a fool she was for trying. For hoping.

Mr. Blackwell, the director of Special Collections, blinks up from his desk as she passes. “Evening, Miss Eastwood. In a hurry?” Mr. Blackwell is the reason Beatrice is a junior associate librarian. He hired her with nothing but a diploma from St. Hale’s, based purely on their shared weakness for sentimental novels and penny-papers.

Often Beatrice lingers to chat with him about the day’s findings and frustrations, the new version of East of the Sun, West of the Witch she found in translation or the newest novel from Miss Hardy, but today she merely gives him a thin smile and hurries out into the graying evening with his worried eyes watching her.

She is halfway across the square, shoving through some sort of rally or protest, when the tears finally spill over, pooling against the wire rims of her spectacles before splashing to the stones below.

Heat hisses through her veins. An unnatural wind whips toward the center of the square. It smells like drying herbs and wild roses. Like magic.

That foolish hope returns to her. Beatrice wets her wind-scoured lips and says the words again. The wayward sisters, hand in hand—

This time she doesn’t stop—can’t stop—but returns to the beginning in a circling chant. It’s as if the words are a river or an unbridled horse, carrying her helplessly forward. There’s a rhythm to them, a heartbeat that skips at the end of the verse, stuttering over missing words.

The spell shambles onward, careening, not quite right, and the heat builds. Her lungs are charred, her mouth seared, her skin fevered.

Dimly Beatrice is aware of things outside herself—the splitting open of the world, the black tower hanging against a star-flecked sky, hung with thorns and ivy, the crows reeling overhead—her own feet carrying her forward, forward, following the witch-wind to the middle of the square. But then the fever blurs her vision, swallows her whole.

None of Mama Mags’s spells ever felt like this. Like a song she can’t stop singing, like a bonfire beneath her skin. Beatrice thinks it might become a pyre if she keeps feeding it.

She stutters into silence.

The world shudders. The ripped-open edges of reality flutter like tattered cloth before drawing together again, as if some great unseen seamstress is stitching the world back together. The tower and the tangled wood and the foreign night vanish, replaced by the ordinary gray of a spring evening in the city.

Beatrice blinks and thinks, That was witching. True witching, old and dark and wild as midnight.

Everything tilts strangely in Beatrice’s vision and she tips downward into darkness. She falls, half dreaming there are arms waiting to catch her, sturdy and warm. A woman’s voice says her name, except it isn’t her name anymore—it’s the lost name her sisters used when they were still foolish and fearless—Bella!—

And it begins to rain.

Juniper is howling like a moon-drunk dog, reveling in the sweet heat of power coursing through her veins and the feather-soft beating of wings above her, when the tower disappears.

It leaves the square in teeming, shrieking chaos. Every hat is blown askew, every skirt is ruffled, every hair-pin failing in its duties. Even the neat-trimmed linden trees look a little wilder, their leaves greener, their branches spreading like autumn antlers.

Juniper is chilled and dazed, emptied out except for a strange ache in the center of her. A want so vast it can’t fit behind her ribs.

She looks up to see two other women standing near her, forming a silent circle in the middle of the screaming stampede of St. George’s Square. In their faces Juniper sees her own want shining back at her, a hollow-cheeked hunger for whatever the hell it was they saw hanging in the sky, calling them closer.

One of the women sways and says “oh” in a hoarse voice, like she’s been standing too long over a cook-fire. She blinks at Juniper through fever-slick eyes before she falls.

Juniper drops her staff and catches her before her head cracks against stone. She’s light, feather-fragile in Juniper’s arms. It’s only as Juniper lays her down and resettles the crooked spectacles on the woman’s nose, as she sees the freckles scattered across her cheeks like constellations she thought she’d forgotten, that she realizes who she is.

“Bella.” Her oldest sister. And—

Juniper looks slowly up at the other woman, the first cold flecks of rain hissing on her cheeks, her heart thundering like iron-shod hooves against her breastbone.

She’s just as pretty as Juniper remembers her: full lips and long lashes and slender neck. Juniper figures she takes after the mama she can’t remember, because there’s nothing of Daddy in her.

“Agnes.” And just like that, Juniper is ten again.

She is opening her eyes in the earthen dark of Mags’s hut, already speaking her sisters’ names because that’s how they were back then, always hand in hand, one-of-three. Mags is turning away from her, shoulders bowed, and Juniper is realizing all over again that her sisters are gone.

Oh, they’d talked about it. Of course they had. How they would run away into the woods together like Hansel and Gretel. How they would eat wild honey and pawpaws, leave honeysuckle crowns on Mags’s doorstep sometimes so she’d know they were still alive. How Daddy would weep and curse but they would never, ever go back home.

But Daddy’s mood would lighten, sudden as springtime, and he would buy them sweets and ribbons and they would stay a while longer.

Not this time. This time her sisters cut and ran without looking back, without second-guessing. Without her.

Juniper took off down the mountainside as soon as she understood, stumbling, limping—her left foot was still blistered and raw from the barn-fire.

She caught a single glimpse of Agnes’s sleek black braid swaying on the back of a wagon as it jostled down the drive and shouted for her to come back, please come back, don’t leave me, until her pleas turned to choked sobs and thrown stones, until she was too full-up with hate to hurt anymore.

She limped home. The house smelled wet and sweet, like meat gone bad, and her daddy was waiting for his supper. Never mind, James. He’d given her his own first name and liked to hear himself say it. We’ll get along without them.

Seven years she survived without them. She grew up without them, buried Mama Mags without them, and waited without them for Daddy to die.

But now here they are, wet and hungry-eyed, smack dab in the middle of New Salem: her sisters.

Chapter 4

Little Girl Blue, come blow your horn,
The sheep’s in the meadow, the cow’s in the corn.
Soundly she sleeps beneath bright skies,
[Sleeper’s name] awake, arise!

A spell to wake what sleeps, requiring a blown horn or a good whistle

Agnes Amaranth doesn’t feel the cold hiss of rain against her skin. She doesn’t see the two women crouched beside her, freckled and black-haired, like reflections hanging in a pair of mirrors.

All her attention is inward-facing, fixed on the live thing sprouting inside her, delicate as the first fiddle-head curl of a fern. She imagines she feels a second heart beating beneath her palm.

“Agnes.” She knows the voice. She’s heard it laugh and tease and beg for one more story, pretty please; she’s heard it chasing after her down the rutted drive, begging her to come back. She’s heard it in seven years of bad dreams. Don’t leave me.

Agnes looks down to see her baby sister kneeling below her, except she’s not a baby anymore: her jaw is hard and square, her shoulders wide, her eyes blazing with a grown woman’s helping of hate.

“J-Juniper?” Agnes becomes aware that her arms are outstretched, as if she expects Juniper to run into them the way she did when she was a child, when Agnes still slept every night with her sister’s crow-feather hair tickling her nose, when Juniper still slipped sometimes and called her Mama.

Juniper’s lips are peeled back from her teeth, her face taut. Agnes looks down to see her sister’s hands curled into fists. The shape of them—the familiar white knobs of her knuckles, the twist of tendons in her wrists—chases all the air from Agnes’s lungs.

“Where’s Daddy? He with you?” She hates the hint of Crow County that surfaces in her voice.

Juniper shakes her head, stiff-necked. “No.” A darkness flits across the leaf-light of her eyes, like grief or guilt, before the rage burns it away again.

Agnes remembers how to breathe. “Oh. How—what are you doing here?” Deep scratches score Juniper’s wrists and throat, as if she ran through deep woods on a dark night.

“What am I doing here?” Juniper’s eyes are wide and her nostrils are flared. Agnes remembers what happens when Juniper loses her temper—a serpent the color of blood, flames licking higher, animal screams—and flinches away.

Juniper swallows, draws a shuddering breath. “Had to leave home. Headed north. Didn’t expect to run into you two strutting through the city like a pair of pigeons, without a care in the damn world.” Her voice is bitter and black as burnt coffee. The Juniper Agnes remembers was all feckless temper and careless laughter; Agnes wonders who taught her to hold a grudge, to feed and tend it like a wild-caught wolf pup until it grew big and mean enough to swallow a man whole.

Her attention snags on the number Juniper just said. “Two?” Surely Agnes is still merely one. Surely the baby in her belly is too small to count as a whole person. Agnes’s brain feels like a jammed loom, threads snarled, gears grinding.

Juniper narrows her eyes at Agnes, looking for mockery and not finding it, then looks pointedly down.

Agnes follows her gaze and for the first time she sees the woman lying between them, her spectacles spattered with rain. Agnes feels the world collapsing around her, all the years of her life folding together, accordion-like.

Their oldest sister. The one who betrayed her and the one she betrayed in turn, eye for an eye. The reason she had to run.

Bella.

Juniper is shaking Bella’s shoulders and Bella’s head is lolling, limp. Juniper lays two fingers against her forehead and swears. “She’s burning up. Y’all got a place nearby?”

“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.

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

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...”