The Once and Future Witches - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,69
the monster and the stone both.
It’s only when she hears a clatter that Beatrice realizes her body is moving. She’s stepped backward into a shelf, toppling jars. Peppercorns scatter across the floor like buckshot.
The voices in the back room go abruptly silent. A soft curse, hurried footsteps—
Beatrice is already running, shoving past long strings of drying herbs and necklaces of shriveled flowers, sending more jars tumbling in her wake. She has one hand on the door when she hears her name again. She looks back over one shoulder.
Behind the counter, obscured by jangling ropes of herbs and yellow clouds of spilled spice, her face wrenched and taut, stands Miss Cleopatra Quinn.
(She’s beautiful. Even here, even now—her sleeves rolled to the elbow, the tendons of her throat standing rigid beneath her skin, betrayal dying on her lips—there’s a glow to her, as if she carries a lit candle in her chest.)
Their eyes meet. Beatrice can’t tell how many seconds pass; more than one, certainly.
“Beatrice, please—”
It’s the third time she’s heard her name in Quinn’s mouth, and everyone knows the third time is the last. Beatrice drops the derby hat still clamped foolishly beneath her arm.
She runs. No one follows.
Juniper listens as Bella tells her the whole sorry thing. Juniper stays quiet for a while after, running her tongue along her teeth, watching her sister pace and fret. “S’too late to call it off.”
Bella’s shoulders are bowed in a U around her chest, her face white and raw. “I should have asked her to take the oath, should never have trusted her. She practically told me not to.” She wrings her hands. “If we left now we could get to Agnes and the Hull sisters, probably a few others before midnight . . . Oh, what should we do?” If she wrings her hands any more violently Juniper thinks the skin will rub clean off.
She crosses her ankles. “Depends.”
“On what?”
“On who she talked to.” Juniper catches Bella’s eyes and pins her, asks her flat-out, “Do you think your girl ratted us out to the law?”
Bella stops pacing. She stands framed by the round glow of the window, eyes on the smogged stars. “No,” she whispers. Juniper can’t tell if she really means it or merely wants to.
But Juniper doesn’t care. She wants the cool whip of the night on her cheeks, the black tangle of robes behind her, the heat of witching in her blood. Damn the danger.
She stands, her smile wide and wicked. “Then it’s time we get ready.”
Intery, mintery, cutery-corn,
Apple seed and apple thorn;
Feather fine, five-fold
Turn it all to gold.
A spell for a golden apple, requiring five feathers & pricked thumb
James Juniper is just a girl, most of the time. The rest of the Sisters of Avalon are just maids or mill workers, dancers or fortune-tellers, mothers or daughters. Everyday sorts of women with everyday sorts of lives, not worth mentioning in any story worth telling.
But tonight, beneath the Rose Moon of June, they are witches. They are crones and maidens, villains and temptresses, and all the stories belong to them.
Juniper likes the city at night better than its daytime self. At night the noise and clatter soften enough to hear the rush of wind through alleys, the padding of stray cats, the chitter and dart of bats. The earth feels closer beneath the cobblestones and the stars shine stubborn through the smog and gas-light. Juniper can almost pretend she’s running through the woods back home, tangle-haired and barefoot. Maybe it’s just the solstice getting closer; Mags always said the holy days are when witching burns brightest, when even mice and men can feel the hot pulse of it beneath the skin of the world.
The cemetery is locked after dark, the gates high and sharp, but tonight they are witches. Juniper tosses her cedar staff over the top, then braids three hairs together and whispers the words. The Sisters climb the black silk rope, long and supple, and thud into the soft earth of the cemetery one after the other. They slip like shadows among the graves.
The witch-yard is tucked on the eastern edge of the cemetery: a half-acre of weeds and scraggled grass, without so much as a cracked headstone or a wooden cross. A witch was never buried beneath her name; instead, her ashes were sown with salt to prevent her soul from lingering longer than it should, then scattered over unhallowed ground. Juniper looks at that barren, sour earth and feels a leaden weight in her limbs: