An Introduction 10 страница

Quinn turns away from the window, the worry banished by a childish eagerness. “The Old Salem papers? ”

It was Quinn who connected Old Salem with the Lost Way. She was skimming through an antique book of nursery rhymes when a scrap of paper slid from the pages. It seemed to be the end of a much longer letter, just a few precious lines:

is true. What was lost has been found. Even the stars are not the stars I knew as a girl. Come soonest, my love. If we burn, let us burn together,

S. Good

October 10, 1783

Salem

Beneath the signature were three circles looped together, dotted with ink-drops that might have been eyes.

Quinn showed it to Beatrice and she felt a great wave move through her as she looked at it, an electric thrill that ran from her spine to her scalp. This was not a myth or a children’s story; this was ink-and-cotton proof that the Eastwoods were not the first wayward sisters to call the tower and its strange constellations.

She met Quinn’s eyes and found them molten gold. “October tenth. Mere weeks before Old Salem fell. ”

Beatrice wished she shared Juniper’s talent for profanity. She settled for a hoarse, insufficient “Oh my. ”

Old Salem, where witching rose again in the New World, despite centuries of shackles and stakes. Where Tituba and Osborne and Good and the rest of them had worked their wonders and terrors, walking the streets with black beasts at their heels. Where men feared to tread and women feared nothing at all.

Until the honorable Judge Geoffrey Hawthorn arrived with his troop of Inquisitors. Legally speaking, they ought to have announced themselves and made their arrests, separated the sinners from the sheep, held lengthy trials, and permitted each witch to confess her sins as she was bound to the stake. Hawthorn felt it would be more efficient to skip to the end. He and his men came in the night, silent except for the snap of lit torches.

The city burned for days, along with every woman and child and unlucky cat inside it. The papers reported ash falling as far away as Philadelphia, where children played in the drifts, like snow.

Now Old Salem is nothing but a black blight a hundred miles north, occupied by crows and foxes and black trees. Sightseers still trickle through, Beatrice has heard, paying a nickel each for haunted carriage rides through the ruins.

Beatrice looks again at the stacked crates, which comprise the College’s entire collection of documents relating to Old Salem, and which Mr. Blackwell provided with only the slightest raising of his eyebrows and a mild “For the Hawthorn manuscript, I presume? ” Beatrice made a gesture that might have been a nod.

None of it is properly transcribed or annotated, most of it is charred or scorched or merely unutterably dull, but somewhere between all the ledgers and receipts and housewives’ cookbooks there might—might—be the words and ways that lead them to that rose-eaten tower.

She slides her spectacles up her nose and braces herself for a very long day. “We should begin with an initial catalog, I think. Are you staying? I’ll take the top two boxes, if you’ll take the third. ”

But Miss Quinn isn’t looking at the boxes. She’s watching Beatrice with several conflicting emotions in her face. “Or, ” she says, coming to some invisible conclusion, “you could accompany me to the Centennial Fair and buy me as many of those little fried cakes as I can eat. We deserve a day off, don’t you think? ”

There is very little Beatrice would like to do more than escort Miss Cleopatra Quinn to the Fair and buy her little fried cakes.

A minute later the two of them are strolling into the honeyed heat of the afternoon, strolling north across the square. Quinn shakes her head as they pass the bronze pig.

“Oh, please. You seem to be perfectly capable of witching when it suits you, I notice—” But Beatrice is unable to continue this line of inquiry because Miss Quinn tucks her hand casually, almost thoughtlessly, around her elbow, and Beatrice becomes incapable of further speech.

They stride up St. Mary-of-Egypt’s, attracting sideways stares and sneers, not quite managing to care. They purchase a pair of yellow paper tickets and stride beneath the high iron arch of the Centennial Fair, where Beatrice buys Quinn a truly upsetting number of fried cakes. Afterward they share a watery beer, fend off two fortune-tellers, and win a gaudy brass ring with a glass diamond at a spin-the-wheel game.

Beatrice presents it to Quinn with a giddy flourish and Quinn laughs. “Oh, I think one is enough for me. ” She taps her own wedding ring. “I don’t make the same mistake twice. ”

Beatrice slides the ring onto her own finger, instead, and doesn’t feel anything in particular (a leaden weight, say, or a numbing chill) sinking in her stomach.

When she looks back up, Quinn has stationed herself in the line for the Ferris wheel, and is gesturing for Beatrice to catch up. Beatrice isn’t sure she’s interested in being stuffed into a small glass cage and dangled above the city, but the line shuffles forward and Quinn says, “Oh, hush, ” and soon they are smashed hip-to-hip, spinning up into the hot blue of summer.

The cabin smells of stale beer and there’s something unfortunate smeared across the windows, but it doesn’t matter. The city lies distant and foreign beneath them, like the surface of the moon, and the wind rushes clean and bright over their skin. Beatrice closes her eyes and wonders if this is how witches felt astride their broomsticks, like hawks who slipped their jesses, who may never return to the leather fist waiting below.

The wheel creaks to a stop. Beatrice and Quinn sway together in the wide-open sky, wind-kissed. Quinn’s hand is still resting lightly on Beatrice’s arm, and Beatrice is paying no attention to it (the pearl shine of her nails, the smudge of ink on her sleeve, the warm smell of cloves rising from her skin).

Beatrice twists at the brass ring around her own finger. “Your husband, ” she blurts, and feels Quinn go still beside her. “Is he—does he know how you spend your afternoons? ”

Quinn’s smile is far too knowing, smug as a sphinx. “Oh, I doubt it. He’s often away. ”

“I see. And do you—” Beatrice suddenly cannot imagine how she intended to conduct the rest of the sentence.

Quinn is still smiling. “We have an arrangement. Mr. Thomas is a very understanding man. ” She places a peculiar emphasis on the word, as if passing Beatrice a note written in a code she doesn’t know.

“Good. That’s good. That is, I didn’t think there were any understanding men. ”

Her tone is too bitter; Quinn’s sly smile fades a little. “Your father really did a number on the three of you, didn’t he. ”

The two of them have talked extensively about Miss Quinn’s past: her childhood in a crowded row house in New Cairo, all smog and sun and hopscotch; her aunts who petted and spoiled her and braided her hair; her mother who still runs a spice shop and comes home smelling of paprika and peppers; her father who used to cut out each of Quinn’s articles from The Defender and paste them into a scrapbook, with which he assailed guests and neighbors at any opportunity.

But Beatrice hasn’t much mentioned her own family, for the same reason a person doesn’t much mention carrion at the dinner table.

Beatrice attempts a casual shrug. “I s-suppose. ” She plucks at the brass ring on her finger. “He was—he could be very charming. I once saw him talk a pair of men out of a blood-feud with nothing but a smile and a round. But he could also be…” A devil, a monster, a wolf on two legs. “Different. ”

Quinn makes a carefully neutral noise and Beatrice knows she could stop there, if she liked. She could skip over the rotten places in her past as she usually does and remain unblemished a little longer.

But the two of them are alone far above the city and Quinn’s hand is still on her arm, and surely a woman who turned a Saint into a pig might manage to tell the truth, however small and sordid.

Beatrice wets her lips. “It wasn’t only my father. It was—St. Hale’s. ” Just saying the name sends a sick swooping through her stomach, as if the cabin has broken loose from its moorings and gone plummeting earthward.

Quinn sucks a sharp breath between her teeth. “That place has… an unfortunate reputation. Beatrice, I’m sorry. ”

Beatrice can barely hear her over the memory of hot wax hissing on the back of her bent neck, the ache of her knees on the chapel floor. Her hands bound together in forced prayer, cords cutting deep. A dozen clever cruelties that drove every desire from her body save one: to make them stop.

Beatrice finds that she’s twisting violently at the brass ring. It slips from her finger. “Oh dear, pardon me—”

Quinn scrabbles after it but the ring falls between the steel seams of the cabin and twinkles downward. It vanishes in a final flash of cut-glass diamond.

A small silence follows while Beatrice reassembles herself, parentheses braced once more like a pair of cupped hands around her heart. “I apologize. I do not mean to be so hysterical. ”

“I don’t know what they told you at St. Hale’s, but a few tears hardly make a woman a hysteric. ”

Beatrice had not been aware that she was crying. She scrubs too hard at her cheeks, feels the wind whip them dry. “In any case, you are mistaken. My father did not send me to St. Hale’s. ” Beatrice says it calmly, but there’s acid in her throat. “My sister did. ”

Quinn startles beside her. “Juniper? ” she whispers.

“Certainly not. June is the loudest of us, but hardly the most dangerous. And she was only a girl when it happened. ”

Quinn doesn’t move or speak or ask questions. She simply listens, as if her whole being is bent toward the listening, as if Beatrice is someone worth listening to.

Beatrice swallows very hard. “Our father was angry with Agnes for…” There would be a kind of justice to it if Beatrice spilled her sister’s secrets, one bloody eye traded for another, but she finds she can’t do it. “Our father was always angry. Or maybe not always—Mother said he used to laugh, and take her dancing, until the war… Well. I never saw him dance. One day he came for Agnes, and Agnes threw me before him like a bone to a wolf. ”

Agnes had looked at her with her eyes ringed white and her teeth bared. In her face Beatrice had seen the sudden certainty of her own death: the red of her blood, the black of the cellar, the gray of her gravestone. She was an animal with its leg caught in a wire trap, deciding whether to turn its teeth against its own flesh or just lie down and die.

And Beatrice watched her sister choose. I saw Beatrice with the preacher’s girl last Sunday.

Until that day, until the very second Agnes opened her mouth to exchange her life for Beatrice’s, they had been one another’s keepers. But no longer.

Beatrice looks out over the city without seeing it. “I was in St. Hale’s by the following Sunday. I believe our local preacher assisted with the tuition costs. ”

Quinn stays quiet a little longer, maybe waiting for more of the story, maybe just waiting for the wind to dry the wetness on Beatrice’s cheeks. Then she asks, “And yet—you trust Agnes now? ”

“… Yes. ” Or at least she trusts that her sister wants the same thing they want: more.

“Although she broke that trust before. ”

“Surely trust is never truly broken, but merely lost. ” Beatrice’s lips twist. “And what is lost, that can’t be found? ”

She feels the amber heat of Quinn’s gaze on her face, scrutinizing her. “Perhaps you should trust less easily, Miss Eastwood. ” There’s a harshness in her voice, but she loops her arm not-very-casually through Beatrice’s as she says it, and Beatrice does not pull away.

The wheel spins them back to earth, the bright-smelling wind replaced with the greasy fug of the Fair. As they stroll back beneath the high arch of the entranceway, still arm in arm, Quinn asks, lightly, “So. Tell me about this second spectacle. ”

And Beatrice—who perhaps should trust less easily—does.

Fee and fie, fum and foe,

Green and gold, see them grow!

A spell for growth, requiring buried seeds & fool’s gold

It’s Agnes Amaranth who finds their second spell. She’s talking with Annie before the shift bell rings, whispering about ways and words and spells half-hidden in witch-tales, and Annie scoffs. “You think there’s witchcraft hidden in pat-a-cake songs? Secret spells in the tale of Jack and the Giant? ” Agnes watches her with narrow gray eyes and says, “Maybe so. Tell it to me. ”

Later that evening Agnes walks past the black remains of the Square Shirtwaist Factory on St. Lamentation. She read in the papers that forty-six women died in the fire, and another thirteen leapt from the high windows. “It’s company policy to lock the doors, ” the owner argued in court. “So the girls don’t get shiftless. ” He and his partner had paid a fine of seventy-five dollars.

Standing there, looking up at the burned carcass of the factory with heat gathering in her fingertips, Agnes notices that there are survey stakes spaced neatly around the lot. Scraped earth. The beginnings of a scaffold. She understands that the factory will be rebuilt, locked doors and all—that the sisters and cousins and mothers of the dead girls will work atop their ashes—and she knows, then, what their second spectacle will be.

On the tenth of June, Agnes and the Sisters of Avalon walk two-by-two down St. Lamentation. They wear their billowing black gowns, their skin gleaming white and olive and clay-dark beneath the gas-lamps, and carry seeds in their pockets: rye and rose, wisteria and ivy.

They plant their seeds in the ashen dirt of the Square Shirtwaist Factory, and toss glittering handfuls of fool’s gold into the lot. They speak the words. They’re silly words, stolen from a tale about a boy who trades his milk cow to a witch for a handful of magic seeds, known only by women and children and daydreamers: fee and fie, fum and foe.

The Sisters feel the sweet rush of witching in their veins. They leave before the first green finger pokes through the black earth.

By dawn the burnt carcass of the factory is nearly hidden by leaves and roots and reaching tendrils, as if several wet springtimes have passed in a single night. By noon there is nothing left of the building except the occasional right angle poking through the vines, a scattering of burnt nails among the tall grasses. Birds roost among thick twists of green, and the leaves hum with wingbeats and small, scuttling things. A sign is scratched into a bare patch of earth: three circles, twined together like snakes.

The workers gather nervously at the perimeter, muttering and scowling and crossing themselves. Several of them tilt their caps back to squint up at the thing that was once a construction site—the three-leafed ivies where the scaffold once stood, the tendons of wisteria where the brand-new punch-clock once sat with its stingy second-hand and cold heart—and stroll home, whistling off-key. One of them—a big, brash man with a bronze pin on his chest—begins to hack and slash at the green-grown mountain, shoving his way inside it; he does not emerge, and no one goes looking for him.

The next morning there’s a black-suited officer waiting beside Mr. Malton at the mill. The girls are asked to turn out their pockets and shake out their aprons before entering, “in light of recent events. ” Agnes complies, unhesitating, and a scattering of seeds spills into the alley, some tufted white and some dark and shining as beetle’s eyes.

“Flower seeds, ” she says innocently. “For my window box, sir. ” She sweeps her lashes low over her eyes in a way that has always made men very stupid. The officer waves her inside.

Three days later Agnes is sweating on the corner of Thirteenth and St. Joseph, squinting at the folded square of paper in her hand: August S. Lee. The Workingman’s Friend.

She thought at first “the workingman’s friend” was some sort of title or tiresome motto, but Annie informed her it was a place: a barroom on the upper west side frequented by socialists, unionists, populists, Marxists, libertine college students with wispy mustaches, unemployed men with beards, and every other species of malcontent.

“August’ll be there, stirring up trouble. ” Annie shakes her head. “He was throwing bricks through bank windows before he could talk, his mother used to say. ”

“And yet he refuses to meet with us. ”

“He wishes us all the best, but says he has ‘serious matters’ to attend to—like drinking the town dry, I suppose. Well, you know how they are. ” Agnes did.

But she also knew that Mr. August S. Lee was in possession of words and ways that she wanted very much, and that young men in dim barrooms were not known for their reticence, especially if there was an admiring young lady looking up at them through her lashes and saying, “Oh! How shocking! ” at regular intervals. Agnes coiled her hair like a sleek black adder atop her head, allowing a few strands to wisp artfully around her face, and chose a half-cloak the precise color of her eyes, before going to find The Workingman’s Friend.

It proves to be less of a barroom and more of an unswept basement. She descends a narrow set of steps and finds the air blue with cigar smoke and fumes, the summer evening sun replaced by the yellow hum of electric lights.

There’s an easy rumble of talk in the room—the comfortable conversation of men with cheap beer and nowhere in particular to be—but it falls quiet as Agnes steps forward: a woman, alone and young, her cloak parted around a pregnant belly.

She approaches the bar and asks for a Mr. August Lee. The barman points to a high-backed booth with a slightly helpless expression, like a cornered spy betraying his comrade’s location.

Four men are seated at the table, blinking up at her with expressions ranging from mild terror to smeary delight. Agnes smiles sweetly at them. “Hello, boys. I’m here to speak with Mr. Lee. ” They blink at her with varying degrees of inebriation and she adds, gently, “If your name is not Mr. Lee, shoo. ”

Three of the men shoo. They leave behind a long, rangy man with summer-straw hair and a suspicious squint. His face is young but hard-edged, with a skipped-meal sharpness: arrowhead cheeks, knife-blade nose, scarred jaw. Agnes might have noticed that he was handsome, if she had any time for handsome men.

Mr. Lee looks up at her. She sees his eyes perform the usual up-and-down over her form, pausing only briefly on her swollen belly, before resting on her face.

He offers a grin that’s clearly supposed to be dashing, but the scar along his jaw pulls it crooked and wry. “Do I know you, miss? ”

She offers another honeyed smile. “May I sit? ” She wedges herself into the booth without waiting for a response. “My name is Miss Agnes Amaranth. I’m here to ask—”

A sudden suspicion crosses his face. “If you’re a teetotaler, you’re wasting your time. That Wiggin woman has already come around twice this month, and I’m not interested in salvation. ”

“Oh! I’m not here to talk about your vices or faults, Mr. Lee. ” Agnes imagines it would be quite a long conversation.

The dashing grin reappears. “Glad to hear it. ”

“I’m here, ” she says pleasantly, “to talk about witchcraft. ” The smile freezes, hanging half-formed on his face. “I represent the Sisters of Avalon. You may have heard of us? ”

It takes a beery two seconds before his eyes widen. “Oh hell. You’re that women’s club Annie’s been on about. ”

“Oh, you have heard of us! How lovely. Well, I’m here because we’ve heard the most fascinating rumors about the Pullman Strike in Chicago. ” His face stiffens when she says the word Chicago, and he rubs at the scar along his jaw. Agnes pretends not to notice, fluttering on with girlish innocence. “Some people said work was delayed by means that were… uncanny. Rusted machines, furnaces that never burned hot, timber that rotted overnight. ” She leans forward conspiratorially, looking up at him through the long black of her lashes. “We were hoping you might be willing to tell us more about it. Share some of your ways and words. ”

Mr. Lee watches her for a long, considering second before settling back in his seat, one arm flung along the back of the bench. He sips the foamed gold of his beer and asks neutrally, “Was that your girls, at the Square Shirtwaist Factory? And St. George’s Square? ”

Agnes, who feels vaguely that it would be unwise to confess criminal activity to a near-stranger, merely smiles.

He lifts his beer in a mocking toast. “Quite impressive. Showy. I’ve seen your sign all over town. ” Agnes has seen it, too: three circles drawn in soot on alley walls or scratched into the sides of trolleys; three flower wreaths hung together in a shop window, their edges overlapping; three loops embroidered into the tags of sweatshop shirts. The Sign of the Three had spread through New Salem like the underground roots of some great, unseen tree, tunneling beneath the cobblestones and surfacing in every mill-house and kitchen and laundry room.

Agnes tries to hide her too-sharp smile with an airy “Yes, it has gotten some attention, hasn’t it? ”

“And there’s your problem, Miss Agnes Amaranth. ” Mr. Lee’s tone is so perfectly condescending Agnes thinks he must have taken lessons. She pictures whole classrooms full of young, handsome men practicing their pitying smiles. He continues, “See, in Chicago we weren’t interested in attention. It wasn’t a damn stage-play. It was a war. Not a show. ”

Agnes permits herself to imagine his expression if she were to grab his beer and toss it in his smug face. She bends her lips in another simpering smile. “Still, Mr. Lee. Surely it wouldn’t be too terribly taxing to spend an evening or two in consultation with us? We would be very grateful students, I promise. ” Agnes thinks of Juniper, who might show her gratitude by permitting Mr. Lee to leave the premises on two feet rather than four, and fights back a laugh.

Mr. Lee is still sprawled against his bench, unmoved. He cocks his head at her. “Does all this”—he waves his beer at her, indicating everything from her eyelashes to her pinned-up hair—“generally work for you? Sweet looks and wiles? ”

Agnes straightens very slowly, her simper flattening into cold appraisal. “Generally, yes. ”

He shakes his head ruefully. “I’m sorry to disappoint you. Annie said you were a hell of a looker”—Agnes feels a sudden rush of warmth toward Annie—“and hard as a coffin nail”—the warmth subsides substantially—“which is frankly more interesting. I sympathize with your cause, truly I do. There were women standing on the train tracks in Chicago, too, and we were grateful. But it comes down to the laws of nature. ”

“What laws, precisely? ” There’s no honey in her voice at all, now.

Lee takes another drink, thumbs foam from his upper lip. “Women can’t work men’s magic. ”

Agnes feels invisible thunderclouds rolling nearer. “No? ”

“It’s no insult. It’s just the way we’re made. A man would make a mess of women’s witching, wouldn’t he? All those fiddly charms for housework and keeping your hair just so…”

The thunderclouds crackle closer, raising the hair on her arms. “Have you ever tried it? ”

He looks mildly affronted, as if she’d asked whether he sometimes wore corsets and lace. “Of course not. ”

“Give me a man’s spell to try, then, right here and now. ”

Her tone cuts through the indulgent laze of Mr. Lee’s expression. He sits a little straighter in his seat, his eyes on the iron line of her mouth. “Does your father know where you are? ”

She gives him a cold shrug. “Dead. ”

“Your husband? ”

Agnes raises her left hand and wiggles her ringless fingers.

“Huh. What about the baby, then? Are you sure a woman in your condition should be—”

Agnes lowers all her fingers except one, causing Mr. Lee to snort into his beer.

He mops the splatters with his sleeve, grinning in a helpless, boyish way that makes him seem suddenly much younger. He looks at her and mutters something that might be sweet damn.

Agnes feels an answering smile tugging at her lips, but she hammers it flat. “I have a proposal for you, Mr. Lee. ” There is a voice in her head telling her this is a very stupid proposal; she ignores it. “If I can perform a spell of your choosing to your satisfaction, you will agree to assist us however you may. ”

Mr. Lee crosses his arms and adopts an unconvincing expression of reluctance. Agnes would bet a week’s pay that he was the sort of boy who never turned down a dare or backed down from a bluff. “And if you fail? ”

“Then I leave you in peace. ”

“Seems a shame. I don’t care much for peace. ”

“What, then? ”

His eyes flash wickedly. “A kiss. ”

She isn’t surprised: he’s a flirt and she’s a woman with demonstrably questionable morals, and in her experience there’s rarely anything else a man wants from her. But she’s surprised to feel a flicker of disappointment—that he’s so predictable, perhaps. Or that she’s tempted.

She folds her hands primly. “I’m afraid my kisses are not for sale, Mr. Lee. ”

“Then what do you propose? ”

She pretends to consider. “I could refrain from telling your cousin that you propositioned a young lady in such an uncouth fashion, if I lost. ”

The humor fades slightly from his face. Annie has come to work on several occasions with bruised knuckles; Agnes suspects there’s a short temper beneath her kerchief and apron. “A compelling counter-offer, ” Mr. Lee murmurs. “I accept. ”

He drains his beer and stands, setting the glass back on the table with a showman’s flourish. He winks. “Watch closely, now. ”

He fishes in his breast-pocket, produces a single green-tipped match, and holds it over the empty glass. He chants a string of foreign-sounding words—Agnes thinks they might be Latin or Greek—and snaps the matchstick.

There’s a delicate ping as the glass cracks and splinters, fissures running through it like frost. It remains standing, held together more by habit than anything else.

A few men are watching from the bar now. They grunt approval. August presents his matchbox to Agnes as if it’s a bouquet.

She unwedges herself from the booth and stands. Her fingers brush his as she selects a match.

She clears her throat and says coolly, “The Sisters of Avalon meet at the South Sybil boarding house, Mr. Lee. ” His eyes kindle with admiration. “Knock at Number 7 and say the word hyssop. ” It’s the secret code she and her sisters used as girls: hyssop meant all’s well; hemlock meant run and hide.

Agnes holds the match above the fractured glass and stumbles her way through the words. A flicker of heat licks up her spine. She says the words a second time, pouring her will into them: her aching feet and her heavy belly, her hope and her hunger, her bone-deep weariness with handsome young men who barter for kisses like coins. Heat scorches beneath her skin, fever-hot. Her daughter kicks hard in her belly—Sorry, love—

She closes her eyes and snaps the matchstick.

A cracking, shattering sound fills the bar, followed by several unmanly yelps and a great deal of swearing.

Agnes keeps her eyes shut tight, swaying slightly, smelling a sudden green scent like fresh-cut tobacco.

When she opens her eyes she finds a gray wool vest several inches from her nose and two arms held high on either side of her face, shielding her. The heat fades and leaves her cold and dazed, terribly tempted to press her forehead into the heat of that gray wool vest.

Mr. Lee steps back with a slight crunch of glass beneath his boots. His eyes are very wide. A red line gleams across his cheekbone, and another two or three score his forearms. Shouts and grumbles rise around them as men wave the shattered handles of beer mugs at them in an unfriendly fashion.

Mr. Lee dusts splintered glass from his hair and meets her eyes. “Well now, Miss Agnes Amaranth. What was that address? ” He smiles as he says it, wry and crooked and a little abashed. The smugness has been replaced by an intent gleam in his eyes.

“South Sybil Street. Come after dark and keep quiet in the hall—the landlady disapproves of gentleman callers. ”

She turns to leave, picking her way through glittering shards and spilt liquor, and he calls after her, “May I bring flowers? ”

Agnes does not look back as she leaves, so that he cannot see her smile. “I’m sure you may bring whatever you please, Mr. Lee, so long as you bring magic also. ”

Juniper is sitting cross-legged on the bed, tossing a slightly wizened apple from palm to palm while Bella reads from one of her dustiest and most dull-looking books, when Agnes returns to South Sybil.

She’s sweaty and cross, with glittering specks caught in the dark swirl of her hair. “Any luck? ” Juniper asks her.

Agnes gives a dark ha. “I found Mr. Lee, if that’s what you mean. But there’s nothing lucky about him—he’s arrogant, feckless, probably criminal—not nearly as handsome as he thinks he is—” Agnes is frowning at her own reflection in the cracked shard that serves as her mirror. She tugs and fusses at her hair, dissatisfied in some unfathomable fashion.

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