The Once and Future Witches - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,41

Their aunt Mildred was a sour crabapple of a woman who lived two counties north and spent her time collecting tiny paintings of Saints and complaining about the many sins of her next-door neighbors. “I ran as soon as I could. Wound up here.”

Juniper wants to ask: How come you never came back for me? She wants to ask: How come you never even wrote? But she’s frightened of the skipped stitches in the story, the things she doesn’t want to see.

“Juniper, I—” Agnes is reaching toward Juniper almost as if she means to wrap her arms around her, and Juniper doesn’t know if she’s going to let her, when someone knocks softly on the door.

The two of them sit straighter, tucking their unruly feelings back inside their chests.

Frankie Black turns out to be a freckled colored girl with velveteen eyes and an accent that makes Juniper homesick. She has Agnes sit up straight and runs her fingertips over the small of her back, pressing and whispering. She lights a honey-colored candle and drips the wax in a pattern of lines and specks. She sings a spell that has a drumbeat rhythm running underneath it, shuffles her feet, tap-tap-tap, and straightens up.

It’s nothing like Mags’s spells, and Juniper watches with narrowed eyes. But Agnes’s face loosens as the pain lifts away, so Juniper figures it must be working. It occurs to her for the first time that there might be more than one kind of witching in the world. The thought is an uncomfortable one, far too large; it reminds her of riding the train across the Crow County line and feeling the country unfold like a map beneath her, flat and endless.

“Miss Pearl says you two should stay till morning. There’s police out looking for two black-haired women. One of them with child”—her eyes cut to the cedar staff on the bed—“one of them with a demon-snake for a familiar.”

Juniper says, “It’s not a familiar,” at the same time Agnes says, “We can pay. For the room, and the lost business.”

Frankie makes a sound somewhere between offense and amusement. “You couldn’t afford us, sweetheart. Miss Pearl says we’re closed up for the night, anyhow. The men are all riled up, looking to prove something. They can look elsewhere. There’s corned beef and rolls if you’re hungry.” She sets a basket on the dresser top and leaves them alone again.

The honey-candle is sitting in a waxy puddle and the food is nothing but crumbs caught in the valleys of the down comforter before either of them says a word to the other.

Agnes is slouched against the headboard, her body slack in the absence of pain, the baby swimming soft inside her.

Juniper has her arms wrapped around her knees. Her eyes slide over Agnes’s belly. “How come you came today?”

Agnes shrugs, because shrugging is easier than talking about guilt and love and the things that still stretch between them after seven years of silence. “How come you invited me?”

Juniper shrugs back, sullen, and counters, “How come you saved that idiot boy?”

Agnes almost laughs at her. For a quick girl, Juniper can be awfully slow sometimes. “I wasn’t saving that idiot boy, Juniper.”

Juniper narrows her eyes. Her mouth is half-open to retort when she realizes who Agnes was saving. Her face softens.

Juniper glances again at the fragile swell of Agnes’s belly. “But—even with—”

“I guess.” Agnes attempts a smile. “Mama told me to take care of you.” Maybe Agnes owed her, for all the times she’d failed. Or maybe it wasn’t about debts or duties at all; maybe it was just that she didn’t want to see her youngest sister strung up in the city square.

Apparently she’s said something wrong, because Juniper is bristling and sharpening again. “I don’t need you to take care of me. I was about to teach that boy a lesson. Teach them all a lesson.”

Her eyes are seething, shadowed. They make Agnes think of maiden-stories—the kind about young witches who sing ships to their deaths, who hunt the woods at night with their seven silver hounds, who turn sailors into pigs and feast every night.

Agnes wants to be angry at her—for being so careless and cruel and so terribly young—but she can’t quite manage it. She’s been all of those things herself; she knows the black alchemy that transmutes hurt into hate. She remembers climbing barefoot from the attic window, meeting some poor boy in the woods and tearing at his clothes with more than lust, digging her