The Once and Future Witches - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,56

mean and where they come from, wants to follow them back to the ways and words used by their mother’s mothers.

The Russian woman stumps over to Juniper and crosses her arms again. Beneath the permanent scowl of her face there’s a little of the same glow Beatrice sees in the rest of the room: hunger, or hope.

“Not many of us,” she observes gruffly.

Juniper claps her on the back, slightly too hard. “Oh, there will be, Yulia my friend. I got an idea.”

Beatrice looks up to meet Agnes’s eyes. She and Agnes are still wary with one another, careful as cats, but at this moment Beatrice is certain they are both wondering the same thing: whether there is anything in the world more sinister than their youngest sister in possession of an idea.

“About this idea of yours,” Bella begins.

It’s past midnight and No. 7 South Sybil is finally empty again. Agnes rolled out spare quilts for her sisters and told them gruffly that it was too late to walk halfway across the city. Juniper is curled on her side, tired enough not to care how hard and flat the floor is, hovering right at the bleary edge of sleep.

She produces an eloquent hnnngh in response.

“Is it a dangerous idea?”

“Nah.”

“If you were to estimate the size and scale of the riot the idea would provoke—the number of innocent bystanders it would put in St. Charity’s—”

Juniper hurls a pillow at Bella and is satisfied by her subsequent squawk. “I was thinking of a few demonstrations, is all. Nothing dangerous.” She thinks unwillingly of Electa lowering herself carefully into her seat, clutching her cracked rib. Of Jennie’s bruised jaw going from midnight blue to dawn yellow. Of her sister asking what comes after?

“Demonstrations of . . . witching?” Bella asks.

“No, of knitting. Yes, witching.” Juniper folds her arms behind her head, watching the play of shadows through the gap beneath the door. A pair of legs walking past, doubling back, pausing in the hall. “Something to show them what we can do.”

“Who is ‘them’?”

Juniper shrugs, invisible in the dark. “The women who think we’re lying or stupid or selling them snake oil. The men who think they can beat us in the street. Everybody, I guess.”

There’s a long pause before Bella says, with unflattering shock, “That’s . . . not a terrible idea.”

“Why, thank you.”

“It would certainly help with recruitment, and the larger our organization becomes the more collective knowledge we possess. Of course we’ll need to be quite clever in our selection of spells—” Bella’s voice is warming with the kind of scholarly enthusiasm that means she could keep going for hours or possibly weeks, when a second pillow whumps into her and Agnes grates, “Go to sleep, you ingrates.”

The ingrates go to sleep.

Whoever was standing in the hall must have left, because the light shines unbroken now. It’s only in the final blurred seconds before she closes her eyes that it occurs to Juniper that she never heard their footsteps.

Moly and spite a woman make,

May every man his true form take.

A spell for swine, requiring wine & wicked intent

It’s Beatrice Belladonna who finds the words and ways for their first demonstration. Well, who else would it be? Who else spends their days wrapped in ink and paper-dust? Who else dreams in threes and sevens, in once-upon-a-times and witch-tales?

She finds it in an obscure translation of Homer, tucked between a verse about cruel arts and noxious herbs. Beatrice is no Classicist, but she’s certain she’s never seen these lines in any other version of the Odyssey. She assumes they are the addition of the translator, a Miss Alexandra Pope.

Juniper claps her hands and cackles when Beatrice shows her. “Hot damn, Bell. Who will it be? The mayor? That Gideon Hill bastard?”

Agnes says, “Jesus, June, you’re a menace,” and Beatrice says, a little shyly, “I was thinking perhaps Saint George?” Her sisters agree.

And so, on the last night of May, when the moon is a blacker blackness in the sky above them and the air smells hot and rich with summer, Beatrice leads the Sisters of Avalon to St. George’s Square.

They flit through the alleys and side-streets of New Salem in ones and twos, there and gone again. Instead of their usual skirts and aprons they wear gowns sewn from scraps and bits, pieced together by the girls who are cleverest with needle and thread.

Juniper had waved an illustrated copy of the Sisters Grimm at them as they worked. “We want them long and