The Once and Future Witches - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,32
of New Salem, filled with smart white tents and gaudy stalls and salesmen hawking newfangled contraptions. Electric lights buzz and swing between the tents, singeing the top-hats and hair-dos of the crowd below, and a great metal Ferris wheel spins above them. The air smells rich and fatty, like sweat and fry oil and dollar bills.
Inez buys seven tickets at the booth and passes them around. Juniper, Jennie, Electa; Mary, Minerva, Nell; each of them clutching a white hat in their hands, each of them wearing expressions suitable for the storming of castles.
Juniper had hoped there’d be more of them, but Jennie said they couldn’t risk inviting anyone who might turn tail and report their plan back to Miss Stone, so they approached only the most discontented, troublesome members of the Association. Things always come in sevens in witch-tales (swans, dwarves, days to create the world), so Juniper figures they’ll do fine.
They spend the day jostling through the Fair, unremarkable in dull olives and sober grays, just seven more citizens come to celebrate the founding of New Salem. They pass knots of mill-girls and flower-sellers, students from the College and men from the tannery, a handful of policemen riding shining white horses. The girls eye them as they pass, linking arms and exchanging looks, perhaps stroking the white brims of their hats. Juniper thinks of wanted posters and murder charges and what could happen if she’s caught, and resolves not to be.
They dodge souvenir-sellers offering commemorative plates and historical pamphlets. They buy sausages on little wooden sticks and burn their lips on the grease. They walk so far that Juniper’s bad leg aches and she leans hard on her cedar staff.
Her daddy never used a cane, though he should have; he said they were for grannies and cripples, not proud veterans of Lincoln’s war. Sometimes when he was deep in his cups he’d give Juniper’s staff a mean, slanted look, like it was an old enemy of his, but he never laid a hand on it.
They wander into a tent labeled Doctor Marvel’s Magnificent Anthropological Exhibition!, which features a number of natives wearing beads and feathers and bored expressions. Juniper pauses for a while to observe THE LAST WITCH-DOCTOR OF THE CONGO, PRESERVED FOR SCIENTIFIC STUDY, who turns out to be a withered African woman with an iron witch-collar locked around her neck. Her skin beneath the collar is whitish and dead-looking, like frostbitten fingertips; Juniper finds she can’t meet the woman’s eyes. She limps out of Doctor Marvel’s tent and tosses her half-sausage away, uneaten.
By four o’clock she and the others make their way to the center stage, where a crowd is gathering beneath red-and-white pennants. Inez slips Juniper a bundle of cloth that might be a parasol but isn’t, and the seven of them diverge, pointedly not looking at one another as they edge through the audience. They take places along the fringes, forming a not-accidental circle.
A mustachioed man in a gray suit gives a short speech. There’s a polite patter of applause as the mayor replaces him at the podium.
“I must begin of course with a hearty welcome to all of you, the good citizens of New Salem!” The mayor is a saggy gentleman with a red-veined nose and all the charisma of stale bread. Juniper finds Gideon Hill sitting behind him with the rest of the city councilors, sweating in the May sunshine and blinking far too often. Juniper wonders how a man like that—all pinkish and wet, like something recently shelled—could get elected to anything. His dog is curled beneath his chair, her eyes staring straight at Juniper, gleaming red in the first bloom of sunset.
“I must also thank the Council for their unflagging support of this project and valuable oversight.”
Juniper isn’t listening. She’s watching the faces of her co-conspirators—Minerva and Mary looking pale and slightly sick; Inez smoothing the already smooth pleats of her dress; Electa looking bored—wondering if any of them are regretting the decisions that led them here. Wondering if anyone in the crowd has noticed the hats they’re clutching to their chests, each of them some shade of white: pearl or lace or clotted cream, beribboned or dripping with baby’s breath.
Each of them spelled straight to Hell and back.
But what is there to notice? They’re only hats; you can’t smell the witching on them unless you get right up close.
Juniper herself carries three hats. She knows neither of her sisters are coming—knows that Bella is too scared and Agnes is too