The Once and Future Witches - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,51
in the rag-pickers’ room.”
Agnes closed her eyes so he wouldn’t see the white lick of rage in them.
Her daughter will not grow up in the sunless dark of the mill, breathing dust and fumes, huddling next to the steam pipes in winter to keep warm. Her daughter will not be nothing.
Agnes unclenches her jaw in the alley. There are knots and strings of women gathering nearby, but she doesn’t look at them. Instead she looks at the thin stripe of sky above, the hungry green of the weeds reaching thin fingers between the cobbles, crabgrass and chickweed and dusky deadnettle. Agnes can’t recall if there were this many weeds last spring.
There’s a cluster of women forming down the alley, a copy of The Defender spread between them. None of them, Agnes imagines, are regular subscribers to New Cairo’s radical colored paper, but the Sisters of Avalon purchased several dozen extra copies of this particular issue and distributed them through the boarding houses and mail-rooms of the west side.
Agnes catches a raised voice. “It’s nonsense, is what it is. Pure fancy. Somebody’s idea of a joke.”
“Or,” suggests another, conspiratorially, “it’s a trap. The police never did find that snake or the witch who made it, did they? Maybe they think they’re being clever.”
There are low, doubtful mutters at this, and Agnes figures this is more or less the opening she’s been waiting for. She wishes she had wit or zeal to convince them, but she’s not her sisters, so she merely stalks toward the gathered women and waits for them to notice her squared shoulders. “It’s not a trap,” she says quietly. “Or a trick.”
All of them stare at her the way you’d stare at an alley cat that suddenly sang opera. Agnes understands why; she hasn’t spoken a single spare word to them other than “bobbin’s busted” or “watch your shuttle” in five years of working shoulder-to-shoulder.
One of them huffs loudly, but another one shushes her. Agnes chances a glance of the shusher’s face and recognizes her vaguely as the new girl who got her hair caught in the loom last spring. The machine sucked her into itself, slick and fast, as if her body was just another thread. She screamed, and under the screaming was the wet rip of hair from scalp—until Agnes sliced through it with a pair of shears. The girl fell to the ground, weeping and moaning, stuttering her thanks. Agnes told her to pin her hair up if she wanted to keep what was left of it. She’d never learned her name.
The girl is a year older now, a year harder. Her hair is pulled tight beneath a gray kerchief and her eyes are the color of coins. “That so?” She says it level and flat, like a woman paying off a debt.
Agnes meets her eyes. “Did any of you try it yet?”
Embarrassed shuffling. A clucked tongue. The rustle of a hastily folded newspaper shoved down someone’s apron-front.
On the sixth page of that newspaper, in the section generally reserved for advertisements selling pomades and tobacco and Madame CJ Walker’s Wonderful Scalp Ointment, there was a half-page of solid black ink. In large white capitals are the words:
WITCHES OF THE WORLD
UNITE!
The text below invites women of all ages and backgrounds to join the Sisters of Avalon, a newly formed suffrage society dedicated to the restoration of women’s rights and powers. Interested parties are instructed to prick their fingers and smear the blood across the advertisement while chanting the provided words, which would—if the blood belongs to a woman, and if that woman bears the Sisters no ill intent—reveal a time and location.
A Miss Inez Gillmore purchased the ad on behalf of the sisters, signing the check with a merry flourish that Agnes both envied and resented. Bella and Juniper provided the spell, fussing for days with bindweed and blood and ink, their fingertips gone purplish red from repeated needle-pricks. And Agnes provided the location, against all her better judgment. Who would ever suspect the shabby, respectable South Sybil boarding house as the site of seditious organizing?
Agnes gestures to the poorly hidden newspaper. “Try it. Speak the words. Feel the worth of them.” They were the words the three of them had used as girls to leave messages for one another, the ones they didn’t want their daddy to see: Meet me at the hollow oak or Staying at Mags’s tonight. “It’s true witching, stronger than anything your mother taught you.”