The Once and Future Witches - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,71
forward. With the scuffed end of her staff she scrapes a sign into the dirt: three circles, bound one to the other.
She’s about to tell them all to head home when something rustles in the grave-strewn dark at Juniper’s back. A fox, she thinks, or a cat.
But the rustle spreads. It echoes from every direction, a sudden swell of sound. Juniper spins to see shadows standing, black-cloaked figures rising from behind gravestones with silver badges glinting on their chests. She sees hands reaching, dark cloths whipped aside, and then the witch-yard is flooded with the blinding light of a dozen lanterns.
The light hits them like the stroke of midnight breaking some invisible spell. The glow of the golden tree turns sickly yellow and the wheeling stars become pale pinpricks above them. The wind dies, the night-birds fall silent. The witches are made into mere women once more.
Juniper swears, eyes stinging. Around her she hears the gasps and screams of the others—her sisters and Sisters, the girls and women who followed her into this—
Trap. She thinks the word and feels the iron bite as it closes around her.
She’s still tear-blind and staggering when she hears a man’s voice echoing weirdly off the gravestones. It’s a familiar voice—oily, too high—but it’s only when Juniper hears the soft whimper of a dog that she realizes who it belongs to: Mr. Gideon Hill.
“For the safety of our fair city and the good of her people”—she can hear the smile in his voice, cloying and gray—“I hereby place James Juniper Eastwood and her accomplices under arrest, to be tried for the crime of murder by witchcraft.”
The first thing Beatrice feels is a rush of very foolish relief: there’s been some sort of mistake! Surely none of them, whatever their sins and faults, are murderers.
Then Beatrice sees her youngest sister’s face—bloodless and hard, her eyes flicking through every expression except surprise—and thinks perhaps she is mistaken in that assumption.
The second thing she feels is the familiar chill of flesh turning to stone, the numbness that follows betrayal. These men were huddled in the cemetery past midnight, waiting. Forewarned.
One of the figures scuttles forward, his lantern held high: a middle-aged, unremarkable man with a dog skulking at his heels like a reluctant shadow. It takes Beatrice far too long to recognize him, given that his face is plastered on campaign posters across three-quarters of the city. The Gideon Hill of the ads and newspapers is noble, even dashing, with ruddy cheeks and flaxen hair. In the lantern-glare he seems to have no color at all.
His eyes flick to the golden tree behind the Sisters and his lips twist in the patronizing cousin of a smile. “Most impressive, ladies.” The eyes move to the ground, where Juniper scratched the sign of the Last Three, and the smile vanishes. His voice rises. “You have besmirched our fair city with your sinful ways. But no longer!” Beatrice is busy turning to stone and drowning in panic, but she spares a second to think, Besmirched? and wonder exactly which pulpy novels Mr. Hill has been reading. “James Juniper, come with us if you please. The rest of you will be taken in for questioning.”
Beatrice knows enough about witch-trials to hear the violence waiting beneath the word questioning: the hiss of hot iron on flesh, the crack of a whip.
The line of men at Hill’s back seems to hesitate. They shuffle and murmur, perhaps reluctant to lay hands on black-gowned women meeting beneath the full moon, perhaps remembering all the stories they heard as boys.
Mr. Hill stamps his foot at them. “Sergeant, tell your men—”
But Juniper cuts him off. “Easy now, Hill.” Her voice is a slow, careless drawl, nearly friendly; it reminds Beatrice of the sheriff talking their daddy down from some drunken rant: Easy now, James. “No need to get hysterical.”
Juniper strolls away from the golden tree and limps over the fence, leaning heavy on her staff, just a young crippled girl with cropped hair. She lifts one hand in sarcastic surrender. “Do you think you brought enough boys, Sergeant? Or do you want to run back for a couple more?”
Her expression is scornful, a little bored, as if this is all a lot of fuss and mess, but Beatrice feels her terror shrieking through the line between them and knows it’s nothing but stubbornness and guts keeping her standing.
Juniper ought to remember that there are places where guts don’t matter. Dark cellars, little white rooms where they lock you