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“You think I still give a single shit about him?” She hisses it so hot and mean that Agnes thinks she must give two or three shits, at least.
Beatrice herself suspects that two separate-but-equal organizations are far less effective than a single united one, and that their daddy was as wrong about freedmen needing to go back to Africa as he was about women minding their place—but she’s never worried overmuch about it. She feels an uncomfortable twist of shame in her belly.
She doesn’t know why she did it. Maybe she’s tired of knowing better, of minding her place.
The rules aren’t written down anywhere, but the important rules rarely are.
Agnes is not sleeping. She is tossing and turning, discovering all the new and novel ways in which her body can be uncomfortable.
She holds her palms flat to her belly and thinks, Stay mad, baby girl.
Fate is a story people tell themselves so they can believe everything happens for a reason, that the whole awful world is fitted together like some perfect machine, with blood for oil and bones for brass. That every child locked in her cellar or girl chained to her loom is in her right and proper place. She doesn’t much care for fate.
“The Ladies Union of Giving the Bastards What’s Coming to Them.
Bella, who was apparently eavesdropping, begins to say something about the absence of historical evidence that witches specifically preferred broomsticks, and that such stories likely refer to any number of spells for flight or levitation—but Agnes interrupts her on the grounds that it’s boring and no one cares.
Then Agnes is alone, feeling like a snake or a shard of glass, something that hurts if you hold it close.
But she should have known no man ever loved a woman’s strength—they only love the place where it runs out. They love a strong will finally broken, a straight spine bent.
Juniper is old enough by now to know that the way of things is, generally speaking, horseshit.
That power fills her, scorching her veins and blackening her bones, and it is outside her, too, watching her. Weighing her, this not-yet-mother who will not die, who will break the laws of the universe rather than leave her daughter alone.
That’s all magic is, really: the space between what you have and what you need.”
She takes another breath, less steady. “I’m not asking for your outrage or your concern or your advice. I’m asking for your help. Do I have it?” She is distantly surprised by how easily the word help slips between her lips. Is this what it is to draw your circle wide, to need and be needed in turn?
Men really ought to try offers of fealty rather than flowers.
