into a witch, just like that?” Juniper snaps her fingers. “No more reading witch-tales in books, Bell—you could write them yourself! And no more shit-work for shit-money, Ag. No more being nothing.” Her voice thickens on the last word.
Juniper breathes hard through her nose and asks them a second time: “What do you say?”
“Alright.” Bella looks stunned by the sound of her own voice. “Yes.”
Juniper swivels to Agnes. “And you? Will you help us?” Her jaw is set, her eyes shining, and Agnes marvels at the contradiction of her: bright-eyed and black-hearted, vicious and vulnerable, a girl who knows so little of the world and far too much. A part of Agnes wants to say yes just so she can keep an eye on her.
Except she doesn’t get to choose for herself anymore. She smooths her blouse over her belly. “I can’t start any trouble. For her sake.”
Juniper looks down at her hand. “Oh, I think you’ve got to. For her sake.” She meets Agnes’s eyes, challenging. “Don’t you want to give her a better story than this one?”
Agnes does. Oh, how she does—to see her daughter grow free and fearless, walking tall through the dark woods of the world, armed and armored. To whisper in her ear each night: Don’t forget what you are.
Everything.
Agnes’s throat is too full-up with wanting to speak. Bella offers, tentatively, “You know the Mother herself started all sorts of trouble, in the stories. I wish . . .” Her voice lowers. “I think it might have been better for us if we’d had a more troublesome mother.”
Agnes looks between them, her wild sister and her wise sister.
She nods her head, once.
Juniper is whooping and thumping Agnes too hard on the back, already badgering Bella about the Lost Way, and Bella is shushing her to no discernible effect, when footsteps sound behind them.
Agnes turns to see the secretary girl from the Women’s Association, with her cornsilk hair and blue-bruised jaw. As she approaches, Agnes sees she’s not as mousy as she’d thought: her eyes are hard, shining with newborn conviction.
“Jennie?” Juniper asks. “What—”
“I want to join.” Jennie says it very fast, like a person diving into cold water before they can change their mind.
“That’s nice,” Juniper says. “Join who?”
Jennie frowns as if she thinks Juniper is making fun of her. “You.” Her eyes skitter to Agnes and Bella. “Your new society.”
Bella starts to say something calm and reasonable, like, There’s been some sort of misunderstanding! We’re not forming a society at all. Sorry for your trouble, but Juniper is already reaching out a welcoming hand, smiling with all the glee of a missionary contemplating a convert.
“Why, Jennie. You can be our first member.”
Bella makes a wheezy, punctured-tire noise. “I’m not sure—I don’t know—” But Juniper has an arm slung over Jennie’s shoulder and Jennie is smiling a shy smile.
“Well.” Bella sighs. “There were really four musketeers, anyway.”
Tell your tale and tell it true,
Cross my heart and hope to die.
Strike me down if I lie.
A spell for secrets kept and told, requiring bindweed & blood
The Calamitous Coven.”
“No.”
“Eve’s Army.”
“No! It ought to be about, I don’t know, sisterhood or union—”
“The Ladies Union of Giving the Bastards What’s Coming to Them.”
“James Juniper, if you can’t be serious, at least be quiet.”
Juniper subsides, slouching lower against the wall. As a clandestine society of would-be witches, Juniper had anticipated that their first order of business would be exciting and magical, like burning the Sign of the Three across City Hall or turning the Hawthorn River to blood.
Her sisters and Miss Jennie Lind apparently thought otherwise. The four of them have been stuck in Agnes’s cabbagey room at South Sybil for hours now, discussing safe houses and membership oaths and other disappointingly unwitchy subjects.
Jennie is even taking honest-to-Eve notes, sitting on Agnes’s bed with Bella’s little black book propped on her knees. She’s the one who suggested their society have a name, although she has so far ignored each of Juniper’s excellent suggestions.
“The Sisters of Sin.”
Jennie’s pen doesn’t move.
“What about—” Bella begins, then bites her lip. “What about the Sisters of Avalon?” It takes less than a second’s silence for Bella to begin backtracking and hand-wringing. “Perhaps not. It sounds a bit like the Daughters of Tituba, doesn’t it, and we hardly want to be mistaken for make-believe. And it’s so provocative to associate ourselves so openly with the Last Three—”
But Agnes is smiling and Jennie’s pen is moving across the top of the page, and Juniper can feel the name