The Once and Future Witches - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,31

is referring to the highly visible and apparently unsanctioned march for women’s suffrage. “Oh, n-no, I don’t think so. What would the library think?”

She can see Juniper’s lip curl, her teeth sharp in the moonlight. “Right. Of course.”

Beatrice refrains from pointing out that her position at the library is the reason Juniper has a roof over her head and cold broth to ignore, nor does she invite her sister to trot over to the west side and beg for work in the mills. She merely wants to.

Juniper is still standing beside her, still turning that absurd hat in her hands. “You ought to come watch, at least. It’s going to be quite a show.” Beatrice hears the satisfaction in her sister’s voice and feels a certain uneasiness run down her spine.

The floorboards creak as Juniper turns away. “Invite that colored friend of yours, if you like. Cleopatra.”

“Miss Quinn?” (Cleopatra has asked her several times to call her Cleo, but Beatrice can’t imagine being bold enough to reduce the distance between them to four flimsy letters.)

In the silence that follows, Beatrice pictures herself taking a long morning walk down to New Cairo—the trolleys don’t run to the colored end of town—and strolling into the offices of The Defender. Casually inviting Miss Quinn to accompany her to a suffrage march, proving herself to be something more than a timid librarian. Perhaps provoking Miss Quinn into one of those sharp, honest smiles, rather than her charming lies.

Beatrice finds herself suddenly more interested in the Centennial Fair. “I suppose—”

But she’s been quiet too long. She feels the hot snap of Juniper’s temper through the line between them. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter.”

The door slams shut, limping steps fade quickly, and Beatrice is alone.

She sits in the window for another hour, watching the moon, wondering what it would feel like to fly with moonlight on her bare shoulders, then stands abruptly. She writes a note addressed to Mr. Blackwell, explaining that she will not be able to work her usual shift tomorrow as she has developed a sudden fever.

She lies awake in bed for a long time after, buzzing and nervy. She falls asleep thinking of the place where the trolley lines end.

Agnes is not sleeping. She is tossing and turning, discovering all the new and novel ways in which her body can be uncomfortable. The baby inside her is still small—“the size of a spring cabbage,” Madame Zina told her cheerily—but she seems to possess an uncanny ability to find every tender nerve and soft tissue in her body. At night Agnes feels her clawing and kicking, a cat in a too-small cage. She holds her palms flat to her belly and thinks, Stay mad, baby girl.

Agnes threw the pennyroyal down the boarding-house privy weeks ago. She did it without drama or debate, as if it were any other brown paper sack of ingredients she no longer needed. When she returned to her room she sat on the floor and trailed her finger in a circle around herself. There were two of them inside it now.

Sometime past midnight she hears uneven steps in the hall and feels an invisible thread winding tight.

Paper rustles. The steps retreat.

When Agnes rises she finds a white square of paper slid beneath her door: COME TO THE FAIR TOMORROW, 4 O’CLOCK. IF YOU GOT THE GUTS.

Agnes knows from the shaky shape of the capitals and the attitude that the note is from Juniper. She doesn’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow at the Centennial Fair, but, given the electric hum in the line between them, like charged air before a storm, Agnes feels confident it will be deeply stupid and possibly dangerous.

She crumples the note in her fist and pictures tossing it down the privy, too. She wouldn’t even need to make an extra trip; she always needs to piss, these days.

Instead she smooths the note flat on the table. She looks at it a long time before she climbs back into bed.

The day before the march, Jennie Lind asked Juniper if she’d ever been to a fair. Sure, Juniper told her. Back home they had a cornbread festival every fall. Jennie laughed at her and Juniper thwacked her with a rolled-up poster and Jennie laughed harder.

It’s only as Juniper walks under the arched iron entranceway of the New Salem Centennial Fair that she knows why.

The Centennial Fair makes the cornbread festival look like a church picnic. It’s like a whole second city sprung up on the north end