The Once and Future Witches - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,92
and the wind whips cold and tricksome against Beatrice’s cheek—but there are no helpful letters carved into the earth, no books hidden beneath loose cobbles.
By the time Lady Lilith’s wagon rattles back down the narrow road, the forest is gold and blue with early twilight, and tears are gathering behind Beatrice’s eyes. When she blinks she sees her sister’s body swimming in the darkness of her eyelids.
“Will you be staying at Salem Inn, misses?” Lilith asks them perfunctorily. “We offer two meals in the historic dining hall without additional payment and a free ticket apiece to the Museum of Sin, recently reopened to the public following some difficulties with mold this spring.”
Beatrice feels the faintest, dimmest spark of hope. Quinn is making some polite excuse about urgent business back home when Beatrice steps forward and asks, “How much just for the museum?”
In the Deeps, Juniper waits.
She doesn’t know what she’s waiting for anymore, but she keeps doing it anyway.
She has visitors, sometimes, but never the ones she wants. An officer arrives twice a day to hang a pail of something whitish and congealed inside her cell. Grits, Juniper thinks, or the aggrieved ghost a grit might leave behind if it was murdered in cold blood. When she asks for water the man points downward, to the putrid gray of the water at their feet. He laughs.
In the mornings a woman in rubber boots comes to carry out the piss pot. The first morning Juniper badgers her with questions—Where are the others? How many did the bastards get? Has she no pity, no shame, aiding the enemy of all womankind?—until the woman calmly tips the contents of the pot into Juniper’s grits. The second morning Juniper keeps her damn mouth shut; the third morning the woman brings her a hard biscuit and a tin cup of water.
Her tormentors don’t return. Juniper is relieved at first, before she remembers that time is a tormentor, too. Down in the cellar the hours used to come alive around her, stalking and prowling in the dark.
By the evening of the third day, Juniper is cold and hungry and so thirsty her throat feels barbed, as if she swallowed briars. She sits on the bed and watches the stairwell, still waiting. A habit, maybe, from the seven years she spent hoping her sisters would come home.
She’s given up on hope, but she can’t seem to leave the habit of waiting behind.
Beatrice suspects that Lady Lilith’s Museum of Sin—boasting More Than One Hundred Genuine Relics of Witchcraft—has not eradicated its mold problem as thoroughly as Lilith claimed. There’s a damp, living smell to the place; Beatrice imagines saplings pressing up beneath the floorboards, vines digging green fingers into the plaster.
The museum is a series of low-ceilinged rooms draped in patchy velvet and black-dyed gauze, crowded with shelves and glass cases of Genuine Relics. At least three-quarters of the items are transparent frauds—Beatrice is confident that the witches of Old Salem never wielded wands with fake rubies glued to their handles, and the dust-furred skeleton labeled American Dragon (Juvenile) is most likely a small crocodile with vulture wings wired to its back—and everything conceivably authentic is too trivial to matter. There is a set of silver thimbles, charred and iridescent from some great heat; an iron skillet containing the “burnt remains of its owner’s last meal”; a little girl’s smoke-stained sewing sampler.
“Well.” Beatrice sighs. “It was worth a try. I don’t suppose Lady Lilith will refund us our dimes.”
Quinn is peering into cases and reading brass labels with every appearance of fascination. “Whyever should we want a refund?”
“You’re being very sporting about this, but it’s clear—”
“My family has been free for three generations,” Quinn interrupts. She tilts the derby hat back on her head in order to more closely examine a box containing, allegedly, the femur of an unidentified witch. “But my grandmother was born on a farm called Sweet Bay.” Quinn squints as if she’s reading a label, but her eyes don’t move. “A rice plantation.”
“I’m—so sorry.”
“I’m sure you are. But what is sorry worth, in the face of Sweet Bay?” Quinn is still staring at that brass label, but the perfect calm of her voice is splintered, bleeding through the cracks. “My grandmother didn’t need your sorry.”
“I—”
Quinn straightens abruptly and moves to the next case, mending the split seams in her voice. “She didn’t need anyone, in the end. She and her sisters made it north, with the help of Aunt Nancy’s recipes. She taught my