An Introduction 22 страница

“Bet the bastards wish they’d just given us the vote when we asked nicely, ” says Electa Gage, with no small degree of satisfaction. “Too late now. ”

The previous week the City Council issued a statement that the suffrage question could not possibly be entertained in the current climate. “And frankly, ” Mr. Hill had told the papers, “if this is what happens when women gain some measure of power, we have grave doubts about the advisability of granting them more. ”

Following this announcement, several members of the New Salem Women’s Association had found their way to the Sisters, their jaws gritted, looking for witch-ways and words.

The Sisters rarely congregate, these days. They speak instead by mockingbird and smoke-signal, by letters that can only be seen by friendly eyes and notes that ignite after reading. They meet only for furtive exchanges of spells and safe houses and disperse before they can be found by the things that hunt them: the mobs of men with brass badges and torches, the steel-jawed officers on white horses, the eyeless shadows that twist up from sewer grates and reach after them.

But they are prey with teeth and claws of their own, now. They have the spells they stole from Avalon before it burned, still stitched into hems or written in recipe-books; they have the words and ways taught to them by their grandmothers and aunts and neighbor-ladies, now shared between them; they have August’s little boys’ Latin and Araminta’s songs, chanted prayers from a pair of dark-eyed Russian girls, and even a few shuffling dances from the Dakota woman. And Bella is still gathering more. Everywhere they stay she asks for their stories or spells or songs, whatever ways they’ve found to talk to the great red heartbeat on the other side, and adds them carefully to her collection. Her little black notebook has become a sort of patchworked grimoire, part spell-book and part diary. Juniper has seen Bella writing in it long into the evenings and suspects her of adding wholly unnecessary narrative; she figures it comes of reading too many novels as a girl.

So Juniper and her Sisters run, but they run with salt and snake’s teeth in their pockets, ninebark and angelica root, honey-wax and black feathers and scraps of tanned hide. They tangle their pursuers in cobwebs and rose-vines, they slip into crowds and come out the other side wearing different faces. They vanish through ordinary-seeming doors and emerge hours later, smelling of roots and earth.

Not all of them get away. There are arrests and detentions, beatings and brutalities. A man in Bethlehem Heights finds witch-ways in his wife’s sewing box and ties her to the bedpost until the authorities retrieve her; one of Pearl’s girls is found bloodied and barely breathing with the witch-mark drawn on her back; an entire tenement on the west side is set ablaze by a gang of mean-eyed boys who claimed to have followed a black cat with red eyes.

It proves difficult to keep a witch behind bars. Workhouses suffer from rusted locks and shattered bars, missing shackles and stolen keys. Guards are discovered sleeping or missing or terribly confused, convinced they are lost in deep woods. Cells are found empty except for the wild smell of witching.

The smell is everywhere, now. The whole city reeks of wet earth and green things, char and crushed herbs and wild roses. It rises like steam from the alleys between tenements and the lawns of fashionable homes, as if some great dragon is rousing beneath the city, breathing smoke through the cracks. The streets heave over the bones of tree roots that grow faster than they should; thistle and pye weed sprout between bricks. Sometimes at night the stars shine more brightly than they have any right to, as if there aren’t gas-lamps and bulbs buzzing beneath them, as if they’re shining down on a black wood or an empty prairie. The wind is sharp and too cold for the final days of summer, as if the ghost of Avalon still lingers, haunting the city.

Almost, Juniper begins to believe it will be all right. That the women of the city will stand strong against mobs and shadows, that Gideon Hill will lose his election in November and slink back under whatever rock he came from. But their stores of witch-ways are running thin, and every midwife and herbalist has been driven out of town. The sickness is worsening, too—even The Post now calls it the Second Plague—and panic worsens with it. The shadows coil thicker and darker, like fattened flies, and Gideon Hill’s face smiles down from every window and wall. Our light against the darkness.

Juniper and her sisters make it four nights at Mr. Blackwell’s before Agnes spots a shadowless man standing on St. Jerome Street, staring blankly through the windows, waiting. That night they say farewell to Mr. Blackwell, who sends them with several bottles of wine and a hooked cane for Juniper. A Daughter escorts them north through the tunnels to stay with Inez and Jennie in the glamorous near-mansion Inez’s deceased husband conveniently left behind.

They make it two days before fists thump on the door in the middle of the night. Bella whispers the words to tangle the halls and doors of the house in a winding labyrinth behind them—a spell taught to them by Inez’s chatty Greek maid—while all five of them slip out the kitchen door.

They spend the following night beneath a bridge, huddled together with the heat of their spells warping the air around them, and another handful of days back in New Cairo, in the well-warded house of Cleo’s aunt Vivica. But the shadows always find them eventually, and they always run.

By the end of August, Juniper can feel their list of willing hosts shrinking, doors slamming and locks clicking ahead of them. Partly it’s the fear rising like sewer-stink through the city as Hill’s mobs grow bolder and the plague worsens. Partly it’s Eve, who screams at inconvenient hours of the night, and whose hair remains eye-catchingly red no matter how many spells or dyes they apply. Sometimes the problem is Miss Cleo Quinn; it turns out even the suffragists who seem sympathetic with the cause of colored women balk at the thought of welcoming one into their actual homes.

Another time they were asked to leave after the mistress of the house discovered Cleo and Bella in her washroom somewhat less than fully dressed. They behaved themselves better after that, but there was still an ardent, unsated thing between them. It unsettled people.

It unsettled Juniper, to own the truth. True, Bella’s cheeks were flushed and her stutter was gone, but Juniper recalled the preacher’s admonitions about man and wife and the natural order of things. She asked Agnes about it one evening and was told in no uncertain terms to mind her own damn business.

“What’s wrong with loving somebody, anyhow? ” Agnes hissed. “Doesn’t she deserve a little happiness? ” Juniper surrendered and resolved thereafter to mind her own damn business.

The morning after, she caught Agnes whispering to a mockingbird on the window ledge, watching it wing into the dawn as if half her heart was flying alongside it. The next time they have to run, Agnes says, quietly, “I know a place. ”

She leads them to one of the crookedy, higgledy-piggledy stacks of tenements in West Babel only a few blocks north of South Sybil. A thin, tired-looking woman opens the door, her hair brittle white. She flinches only briefly at the sight of three women, an infant, and a pair of uncanny birds standing in her hallway, before inviting them inside and introducing herself as Miss Florentine Lee.

Her apartment is a single cramped room, the walls stained with years of cooking-grease and close living. A small window provides a stingy square of summer-light, obscured by laundry-lines and balconies.

Mr. August Lee is waiting at the kitchen table. He stands as they enter and his face when he sees Agnes is—well. It’s private, Juniper decides. She busies herself with her cane, wondering a little bitterly how her sisters found the time to pursue romance alongside all the witching and women’s rights. She tries to imagine herself looking at someone like that, all soft and aching, but finds herself thinking instead of the mountainside back home, sweet and green.

That evening Miss Lee feeds them a cabbage-and-ham stew which Juniper doubts has done more than meet a ham once in passing. August’s mother watches them eat with faded-cotton eyes, her gaze flicking from Agnes to Eve to August, not saying anything.

August clears the dishes from the table after supper and his mother fusses at him. “There’s no need—”

“It’s fine, Ma. ” She subsides with a fragile-looking smile. There’s something strained and careful about the way Miss Lee and her son speak to one another, as if they’re treading lightly over a fresh-mended wound.

Bella and June nest on the floor in a pile of tattered quilts and Agnes claims the rocking chair. But Eve refuses to settle, her usual whines escalating to ragged wails that burrow into Juniper’s skull.

Agnes curses. “She won’t eat. I don’t understand—she’s always had such an appetite. ”

Miss Lee leans over her, says, “May I? ” and touches two fingers to Eve’s forehead. “She’s warm. A fever’ll take the edge off an appetite. ”

The word fever drifts around the room like a stray cinder, too hot to touch. No one says anything for a long moment, while Agnes’s face goes blotchy white and August watches her with a helpless expression. He takes a step toward her but Juniper beats him to it, scooping her niece into her arms and shooting a get in line glare at August.

Eve falls asleep that night with her cheek smeared against Juniper’s breastbone, her cheeks blushing red. A product of the stuffy, too-small room, Juniper is certain.

In the morning Juniper wakes to see shadow-fingers sliding across the window, prying between the panes, trying to get in.

They run.

Agnes pretends to herself that her daughter isn’t sick. That the rising bloom of red in her cheeks is the product of bad air in the tenements or too-tight swaddling, that the thin edge of her wail is just hunger or indigestion or exhaustion. But she sees the way her sisters look at Eve, feels their worry like a gathering cloud in the binding between them—and knows better.

Bella consults her little black notebook and produces long lists of rhymes and chants, poultices and cures. Juniper visits Araminta’s spice shop and a few midwives in hiding and returns with feverfew and willowbark, silkweed and red thread. It seems to help, at first. Eve’s eyes lose the dangerous, glassy sheen, and her usual imperious expression returns. But then her breath thickens again, her temperature rising as some unseen thing eats away at their spells. A cough emerges, wet and persistent, so that her breath rattles sometimes in her sleep.

“The plague, for certain, ” pronounces Yulia, a few days later. They’re staying with one of the several dozen Domontoviches scattered on the west side, stuffed in a warm loft above a barroom.

“You don’t know that, ” Agnes snaps.

Yulia shrugs, unmoved. “Eh. This is how my cousin sounds, before they take her to St. Charity’s. ”

“No one’s taking Eve anywhere. ” There’s a silent rushing in the air between them and Pan appears on her shoulder, a tangle of darkness that becomes a hawk. Yulia looks at the osprey—his vicious beak, his scalding glare—and subsides.

They sit with their Sisters at a round table in the middle of the loft, pocked and scarred from years in the bar below. It’s a larger meeting than they’ve dared in weeks: Cleo sitting with her knee pressed against Bella’s, Gertrude and Frankie sharing a long bench with the Hull sisters, Inez and Electa lost in a mob of Valkyrie-like women who can only be Yulia’s relatives. Agnes can’t help noticing that most of the women sit a little apart from the Eastwoods, as if they are either too dangerous or too revered to touch.

Juniper called them all by mockingbird after the most recent round of arrests, because the women are no longer being held in the workhouses. They’ve thrown them in the Deeps, with witch-collars and bridles around their throats, where their witching can’t reach them. The shadows seem to fall more darkly around the Hall of Justice, sharp and black, like the jagged teeth of a trap.

The Sisters confer for hours, proposing spells and countermeasures and unlikely schemes. Some of them have daughters or sisters down in the Deeps, and their eyes burn like coals in their skulls. Agnes thinks of circles drawn wide, of bindings-between and one-for-all, and shivers a little at the strength of it.

Sometime past midnight Juniper stands. “Well, it’s a start. Now, what witch-ways have you brought? ” The women turn out pockets and empty brown paper sacks on the table. Agnes can tell from the worried bow of Juniper’s shoulders that it isn’t enough.

She’s frowning and opening her mouth when Inez says, “Wait a moment. ”

Inez lays a long, thin object along the table, smiling at Juniper. Inez looks older and a little thinner than she did in the spring, her cheeks no longer merry and full. She and Jennie have been running, too.

Juniper frowns as her fingers peel away silk wrappings. Her mouth falls open as she sees what lies beneath. She stares down at the table for a while, looks up at Inez, then back down. “You did this? ” Her voice is hoarse.

“Well, I provided the gems, being the only one of your dear Sisters with money to waste as I please. But Annie found the tree and Yulia found the woodworker. It was your sisters’ idea…” She trails off. “You like it? ”

Whatever Juniper is feeling right now, Agnes suspects like is too small a word for it. Her eyes are shimmering spring-green and her hands shake as she reaches for the thing on the table. As she lifts it to the light Agnes sees a long staff of polished yew, the grain knotted and stained black. A carved line spirals up the stick, ending in a bowed head: a snake with a pair of garnets for eyes.

Juniper swivels between Agnes and Bella, mute, reverent.

Bella shrugs. “Well, honestly, we couldn’t have you running around with Mr. Blackwell’s poor cane. This suits you much better. ”

The binding between them hums with fierce joy, enough to make Agnes forget for a moment that they are hunted and hounded by a city that hates them.

Until a small, tired voice calls, “Hyssop. ”

Jennie Lind staggers into the room. The expression on her face sends a cold current through the gathered women. “Mayor Worthington is resigning tomorrow. ” She says it quick and sharp, a merciful blow. “The Council will call a special election by the end of the week. ”

All the glee drains from Juniper’s face. “How do you know? Can you be sure? ”

Jennie’s mouth goes tight but Inez answers for her. “Mayor Worthington is her father, ” she says softly. “She’s sure. ”

The burst of gasps and whispers that follow this is sufficient to wake Eve, who wails her thin, not-right wail while the Sisters of Avalon trade muttered fears and dark pronouncements. He’s ahead in the polls, I heard.

The mutters trail into heavy silence as each woman feels the weight of an unseen boot pressing down on them.

“Well. There’s nothing to be done tonight. ” Juniper lowers herself into a chair, staff across her knees. “Head home, girls. Get some sleep. ”

They leave in ones and twos, until only Yulia and her cousin remain with the Eastwoods. It’s late, but no one seems to want to go to sleep; they sit around the table, silent and brooding, listening to the faint whistle of Eve’s snores.

“Yulia? ” Bella says, her head resting on Cleo’s shoulder, her eyes sad and far away. “Why don’t you tell us that story you mentioned? ”

Yulia leans back in her chair, balancing on two legs, and begins.

THE TALE OF THE DEATH OF THE DEATHLESS WITCH

Once upon a time a young maiden married a prince in a grand castle. She was very happy with her prince, who was young and handsome, until the day he went off to war and left her with nothing but a kiss and a command never to go down to the dungeons.

With time the kiss faded, and so did the command. One day the maiden went down to the dungeons, where she found an old, old woman languishing in iron chains. Her flesh was pale and drooping, hanging like loose cloth from her bones, and her moans were piteous. The old woman begged for saltwater and bread, and the maiden obliged because she could not stand to see such suffering. The old woman drank the water and then spat on her chains, which melted away.

The woman leapt from her cell, no longer a weak old crone but a wicked witch. She cackled her triumph and left the castle to seek vengeance on the prince that had kept her caged for so long. The maiden stole a horse from her husband’s stable and took off after the witch, tears of remorse streaming down her cheeks.

But the maiden could not catch the witch, and she grew lost in the winter woods, her hoof-prints vanishing behind her. Eventually she took shelter in a little round house perched on long stilts, like the scrawny legs of a chicken.

Inside the house the maiden met another witch, who told her the name of the old woman she had freed from the dungeon: Koschei the Deathless. A long time ago, Koschei bound her soul to a needle, and the needle to an egg, and the egg to a silver chest, which she buried deep beneath the snow. All the long years of living drove her mad, but also made her very powerful. Only by smashing the box, cracking the egg, and breaking the needle would her soul be sundered.

The maiden left the chicken-legged house with hope in her heart and a map in her hand. She faced many hardships on her journey, but eventually she found the silver box and the egg and the needle, and smote all three across the mountainside. Thus did the Deathless Witch meet her Death, and the maiden rescued her handsome prince.

The Queen of Spades

She made a blade

All on a winter’s day.

A spell for sharp edges, requiring a crown of cold iron

On the first of September, James Juniper and her sisters are hidden in the velvet-and-silk halls of Salem’s Sin.

The air is still summer-hot but there’s a brittleness to it, a whisper like the shush of falling leaves or the burrowing of small creatures. Juniper wants to leave, to follow that whisper all the way back to the banks of the Big Sandy, but she stays shut inside the airless perfume of Salem’s Sin.

Even Juniper doesn’t dare go out on the day of the election.

Jennie Lind had been right: the mayor stepped down the previous week. The Post printed a cartoon of a saggy, weak-chinned fellow fleeing a burning building while innocent civilians wailed from the windows—Juniper wondered if it was accident or accuracy that led the artist to omit the mayor’s shadow—and announced a special election on the first of September.

The number of speeches and rallies and door-to-door campaigners had tripled. New campaign posters papered the streets—Clement Hughes for a Safer Salem! James Bright for a Brighter Future! Vote Gideon Hill—Our Light Against the Darkness! —and every paper of record printed double-length issues full of editorials and interviews and the predictions of an elderly cat that had supposedly foreseen the results of the last four elections accurately. Even the news of fresh witchcraft was shoved to the second and third pages.

Juniper has felt the last week as a strange respite. The shadows seem to dog them less nimbly, as if they are distracted with some other business, and Hill’s mobs seem more concerned with bullying votes than with witch-hunting. Even the Wiggin woman used her weekly column in The Post to advocate for Mr. Gideon Hill, “the noblest man I have ever had the privilege to meet, who brought me from darkness into light. ”

The Sisters and Daughters have done what they could, but none of them has a vote to cast. The Colored Women’s League raised money to pay poll taxes for the husbands and sons and fathers; the New Salem Women’s Association went door-to-door with little informative pamphlets until one of them had hot tea tossed in her face. Bella wrote a letter to the editor objecting to the “medieval attitudes held by Mr. Gideon Hill and his followers, ” and signed it Outis. One of the Hull sisters drew a rather gruesome but effective poster of Gideon Hill tormenting a young maiden in the cells of the Deeps, his cringing dog transformed into a snarling hound, his mild expression into a demented howl. The maiden swoons in her chains, innocent and soft-looking above the words A MODERN INQUISITION: VOTE AGAINST TORTURE!

“Is that supposed to be me? ” Juniper asked, pointing to the maiden.

“I took certain artistic liberties, ” Victoria allowed.

Now there is nothing to do but wait. Juniper and her sisters sit in the comfortable, shabby back room of Salem’s Sin, watching the sun fade from brass to copper to rose-gold. Strix and Pan rustle in the shadows or circle near the ceiling, restless and worried.

Pearl’s girls rotate through at irregular intervals, rarely speaking. Juniper might have been puzzled by their odd hours and various states of undress, except that Frankie Black took her aside several weeks ago and explained in plain terms what sort of establishment Salem’s Sin was, causing Juniper to snort coffee through her nose and reconsider several of her assumptions about decency, morality, and sin.

But there isn’t much business this evening; most of the north end’s wealthiest men are stuffed into boardrooms and elegant parlors, drinking champagne and waiting for the election results to come in like everyone else.

Juniper rises to renew the wards across the threshold and sills every so often, whispering the words like prayers. Bella sits with her notebook on her knees, not writing anything, and Agnes dozes with Eve in a puffy armchair. Eve’s sleep is troubled, her face flushed and her brow wrinkled in angry furrows.

An angry woman is a smart woman, Mags used to say. Juniper feels a great swoop of sadness that Mags will never meet her great-granddaughter. She folds her fingers around the locket on her chest, flesh-warm.

She must fall asleep, because she wakes to find the room sunk into midnight-gloom, lit by a single candle. She sits with Bella for a while, feeling their breathing fall into perfect rhythm and knowing without looking that Agnes is breathing with them. Together they watch the subtle creep of shadows in the alley outside, looking for reaching fingers or sightless heads.

The next time Juniper wakes it’s to the tap-tap of knuckles at the back door. The candle is a slumped puddle over-spilling its saucer, and the window is graying into morning.

Bella hurries to the door and Miss Cleopatra Quinn steps through it. All three sisters look up at her, a silent question hanging between them.

Cleo doesn’t say anything. She merely looks at them, eyes somber and tired.

“Oh fuck, ” Juniper whispers.

Agnes shoots her one of her brand-new watch-your-mouth-there-are-children-present looks, but her face is pale. Pan alights on the arm of her chair, neck-feathers bristled.

“Was it close, at least? ” Bella whispers. “Will there be a recount? ”

Cleo slumps into an empty couch. “The Post headline this morning refers to it as a ‘landslide, ’ I believe. The Defender prefers the term ‘catastrophe. ’”

Juniper feels a delicate snap in her chest, a final thread of hope breaking. She thinks of Hill’s face—not his smiling, chinless mask, but the true face beneath it, all red gums and grubbing fear. He already possessed some dark, creeping power that lurked in alleys and stole souls; what would he do with the kind of power he could wield in broad daylight?

A voice swears softly in the doorway behind them: Miss Pearl stands there, clutching a slinky silk robe tight around her throat and staring at Cleo. Juniper notices the seams at the corners of her eyes for the first time, the soft folds of flesh at her throat.

Bella settles on the couch beside Cleo. “He won’t take office for a while. We’ve still got time, we can prepare. ” She sounds like a woman trying to reason with a rifle or a bear trap. From the corner, Strix makes a soft, sorrowing sound.

Cleo shakes her head once. “In light of the city’s great need—witches running loose, murderers not apprehended, recent evidence of black magic, et cetera—he’s taking immediate control. The Fair is closing early, the police force is expanding. He spoke this morning from the steps of the capitol. ” She withdraws a flyer from her skirt pocket and passes it among them.

Bella gasps as she reads it. Agnes sighs. Juniper swears.

To protect our BELOVED CITIZENS against the ongoing scourge of WITCHCRAFT, the city of New Salem is obliged to adopt a new set of ORDINANCES:

For Immediate Effect

1. Any and all practitioners of WITCHCRAFT (including hedge-witches, street-witches, fortune-tellers, abortionists, midwives, suffragists, prostitutes, radicals, or other unnatural women) will be placed under immediate arrest and subject to TRIAL BY FIRE.

2. Any and all individuals harboring (offering aid to, sympathizing with, housing, feeding, or assisting) a known practitioner of WITCHCRAFT will be subject to arrest, imprisonment of up to ninety (90) days, and a fine of no less than $100.

3. Any individual or establishment selling materials known to be associated with the practice of WITCHCRAFT—herbs, potions, spells, bones, sacrificial animals, bodily substances, chalk, candles of particular colors, Satanic texts—will be subject to arrest, imprisonment of up to seven (7) years, and seizure of all assets.

4. The GEORGIAN INQUISITORS will be immediately reassembled and granted all former legal powers and privileges historically associated with their rank, with the sole purpose of enforcing the above ordinances, with special priority granted to the infamous EASTWOOD SISTERS.

The words trial by fire swim hideously in Juniper’s vision. “They can’t do this. ”

Cleo laughs. It isn’t a very good laugh. “They already have. ”

“But it’s not legal. It can’t be. I wasn’t the best student but Miss Hurston made us recite the Constitution in second grade. ”

“The Constitution? What, exactly, do you think the Constitution is? A magic spell? A dragon, perhaps, that will swoop down to defend you in your most desperate hour? ” Cleo straightens in her seat. Juniper doesn’t think she’s ever seen a face so full of scorn. “I assure you it has only ever been a piece of paper, and it has only ever applied to a very few persons. ”

Juniper opens her mouth to argue or apologize, she doesn’t know which, but Cleo is already standing, reaching for her derby hat. “I’m going home. I have to report to my mother, and help them prepare for… whatever comes. ”

“Cleo, wait—” Bella reaches for her hand but Cleo shifts slightly away.

She reaches for the door, looking back at Bella with her face hard. “It will be worse for me and mine. It always is. ” She steps across their wards and out into the dull-iron dawn.

There is a brief, strained silence, broken by Miss Pearl. “I think you ought to leave, too. ” She holds the list of new ordinances in her lacquered nails. The whiteness of her face makes her mouth look like a wound, red and shining.

Juniper feels her eyebrows shoot high. “Excuse me? ”

Pearl folds the page in neat quarters and tucks it down the front of her dress. Her fingers tremble very slightly. “Leave. Now. It just got a lot more dangerous to harbor witches or whores, and I can’t risk both at once. ”

Juniper and her sisters stare at her, mute and accusing. The red slash of her lips thins. “I know it’s not fair or right. But I owe my girls more than I owe you three. I want you gone before noon. ”

Her silk robe swishes as she turns to leave. “And take some tonic for the baby. Talk to Frankie before you go. ”

Agnes and her sisters have nowhere to go, so they go nowhere: the South Sybil boarding house.

They move across the city with their cloaks drawn high and their faces disguised by Miss Pearl’s creams and potions, walking carefully apart from one another. They pass churches with their doors thrown wide, bells clanging in celebration; men with brass badges toasting one another in the streets; a knot of women with white sashes handing out wreaths and roses.

At the bridge they are forced to wait, standing among a cheering crowd as a procession of white horses passes. Gideon Hill himself rides in the center, looking stern and somehow noble, transformed by the glow of adulation into more than himself, more than a man: a painted icon or an angel. Agnes hunches to disguise the baby wrapped tight against her chest, watching Gideon through her lashes. She is almost surprised by how much she hates him, and how familiar the hate feels in her chest: the bitter, futile hatred of the weak for the powerful, the small for the strong.

They find South Sybil half-abandoned, strangely desolate. The landlady’s door swings gently in the breeze, revealing a disheveled little room with no one inside it. In the halls every other door is marked with ashen Xs, whether for plague or for witchcraft they can’t tell.

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