The Once and Future Witches

by Alix E. Harrow

  Miss Stone stops talking. The crowd clutches their hats and cloak-strings, squinting upward. A mousy-looking girl near Juniper fusses with a lacy umbrella, as if she thinks this is a mundane storm that can be taken care of with mundane means. Juniper hears crows and jays calling in the distance, sharp and savage, and knows better.

  She whirls, looking for the witch behind the working—

  And the world comes unsewn.

  Sugar and spice

  And everything nice.

  A spell to soothe a bad temper, requiring a pinch of sugar & spring sunshine

  Agnes Amaranth Eastwood was the middle sister, with hair as shining and black as a hawk’s eye. She was the strongest of the three. The unflinching one, the steady one, the one that knew how to work and keep working, tireless as the tide.

  But on the spring equinox of 1893, she is weak.

  The shift bell rings and Agnes sags against her loom, listening to the tick and hiss of cooling metal and the rising babble of the mill-girls. Cotton-dust coats her tongue and gums her eyes; her limbs ache and rattle, worn out from too many extra shifts in a row.

  One of those nasty fevers is spreading through New Salem’s disorderly edges, festering in the boarding houses and barrooms of West Babel, and every third girl is hacking her lungs up in a bed at St. Charity’s. Demand is high, too, because one of the other mills caught fire last week.

  Agnes heard women had leapt from the windows, falling to the streets like comets trailing smoke and ash. All week her dreams have been crimson, full of the wet pop of burning flesh, except it’s a memory and not a dream at all, and she wakes reaching for her sisters who aren’t there.

  The other girls are filing out, gossiping and jostling. You headed to the rally? A huff of laughter. I got better ways to waste my time. Agnes has worked at the Baldwin Brothers Bonded Mill for a handful of years now, but she doesn’t know their names.

  She used to learn their names. When she first came to New Salem, Agnes had a tendency to collect strays—the too-skinny girls who slept on the boarding-house floor because they couldn’t afford beds, the too-quiet girls with bruises around their wrists. Agnes tucked them all under her scrawny wing as if each of them were the sisters she left behind. There was one girl whose hair she brushed every morning before work, thirty strokes, like she used to do for Juniper.

  She found work as a night-nurse at the Home for Lost Angels. She spent long shifts soothing babies who couldn’t be soothed, loving children she shouldn’t love, dreaming about a big house with sunny windows and enough beds for each little Lost Angel. One night she showed up to work to find half her babies had been shipped out west to be adopted by settler families hungry for helping hands.

  She stood among the empty beds, hands trembling, remembering what her Mama Mags told her: Every woman draws a circle around herself. Sometimes she has to be the only thing inside it.

  Agnes quit the orphanage. She told the boarding-house girl to brush her own damn hair and started work at the Baldwin Brothers. She figured you couldn’t love a cotton mill.

  The bell clangs again and Agnes unpeels her forehead from the loom. The floor boss leers idly as the girls file past, reaching for skirts and blouses with pinching fingers. He doesn’t reach for Agnes. On her first shift Mr. Malton had cornered her behind the cotton bales—she was always the pretty one, all shining hair and hips—but Mags taught her granddaughters ways to discourage that kind of horseshit. Since then Mr. Malton saves his leers for other girls.

  Agnes watches the new girl flinch as she passes him, her shoulders sloped with shame. She looks away.

  The alley air tastes clean and bright after the humid dark of the mill. Agnes turns west up St. Jude’s, headed home—well, not home, just the moldy little room she rents in the South Sybil boarding house, which smells like boiled cabbage no matter what she cooks—until she sees the man waiting at the corner.

  Hair slicked earnestly to one side, cap clutched in nervous hands. Wholesome good looks, clean fingernails, a weak chin you don’t notice at first: Floyd Matthews.

  Oh hell. His eyes are pleading at her, his mouth half-open to call her name, but Agnes fixes her gaze on the apron-strings of the woman in front of her and hopes he’ll just give up and find some other mill-girl to pine after.

  A scuffed boot appears in her path, followed by an outstretched hand. She wishes she didn’t remember so precisely how that hand felt against her skin, smooth and soft, unscarred.

  “Aggie, love, talk to me.” What’s so hard about calling a woman by her full name? Why do men always want to give you some smaller, sweeter name than the one your mama gave you?

  “I already said my piece, Floyd.”

  She tries to edge past him but he puts his hands on her shoulders, imploring. “I don’t understand! Why would you turn me down? I could take you out of this place”—he waves a soft hand at the dim alleys and sooty brick of the west side—“and make an honest woman out of you. I could give you anything you want!” He sounds bewildered, like his proposal was a mathematical equation and Agnes produced the incorrect response. Like a nice boy told no for the first time in his nice life.

  She sighs at him, aware that the other girls are pausing on the street, turning to look at them. “You can’t give me what I want, Floyd.” Agnes doesn’t know what she wants, exactly, but it’s not Floyd Matthews or his little gold ring.

  Floyd gives her a little shake. “But I love you!”

  Oh, Agnes doubts the hell out of that. He loves pieces of her—the thunder-blue of her eyes, the full moon-glow of her breasts in the dark—but he never even met most of her. If he peeled back her pretty skin he’d find nothing soft or sweet at all, just busted glass and ashes and the desperate, animal will to stay alive.

  Agnes removes Floyd’s hands from her shoulders, gently. “I’m sorry.”

  She strides down St. Mary’s with his voice rising behind her, pleading, desperate. His pleas curdle into cruelty soon enough. He curses her, calls her a witch and a whore and a hundred other names she learned from her daddy first. She doesn’t turn back.

  One of the other mill workers, a broad woman with a heavy accent, offers Agnes a nod as she passes and grunts “boys, eh” in the same tone she might say “fleas” or “piss-stains,” and Agnes almost smiles at her before she catches herself.

  She keeps walking. She dreams as she walks: a home of her own, so big she has extra beds just for guests. She’ll write her little sister another letter: You’ve got someplace to run, if you want it. Maybe this time she would answer. Maybe the two of them could be family again.

  It’s a stupid dream.

  Agnes learned young that you have a family right up until you don’t. You take care of people right up until you can’t, until you have to choose between staying and surviving.

  By the time she turns on South Sybil the boarding house is lit up, noisy with the evening talk of working girls and unwed women. Agnes finds her feet carrying her past it, even though her back aches and her stomach is sour and her breasts feel heavy, achy. She winds up Spinner’s Row and down St. Lamentation Avenue, leaving the factories and tenements and three dozen languages of West Babel behind her, lured forward by a strange, half-imagined tugging behind her ribs.

  She buys a hot pie from a cart. A block later she throws it away, acid in her throat.

  She heads uptown without quite admitting it to herself. She crosses the Thorn and the buildings get grander and farther apart, the faded advertisements and tattered playbills replaced by fresh campaign posters: Clement Hughes for a Safer Salem! Gideon Hill: Our Light Against the Darkness!

  She falls in behind a flock of pinch-lipped women wearing white sashes with CHRISTIAN WOMEN’S UNION embroidered on one side and WOMEN WITHOUT SIN on the other.

  Agnes has heard of them. They’re always hassling street-witches and trying to save girls from the whorehouse whether or not they want to be saved (they mostly don’t). Their leader is named something like Purity or Grace, one of those l
adylike virtues. Agnes figures she’s the one walking out front—slender, white-gloved, her hair piled up in a perfect Gibson Girl pouf—wearing an expression suggesting she’s Joan of Arc’s tight-laced sister. Agnes would bet a silver dollar that her maid uses a little witching to keep her gown unwrinkled and her hair neat.

  She wonders what Mama Mags would say if she could see them. Juniper would growl. Bella would have her nose in a book.

  Agnes doesn’t know why she’s thinking of her sisters; she hasn’t in years, not since the day she drew her circle and left them standing on the outside of it.

  The street ends at St. George’s Square, framed by City Hall and the College, and the white-sashed ladies begin stamping around the perimeter, chanting Bible verses and scowling at the gathering of suffragists in the center. Agnes should turn around and go back to South Sybil, but she lingers.

  A woman in a white wig is speechifying about women’s rights and women’s votes and women’s history, about taking on the mantles of their fore-mothers and marching forward arm in arm.

  And Saints save her, Agnes wishes it was real. That she could just wave a sign or shout a slogan and step into a better world, one where she could be more than a daughter or a mother or a wife. Where she could be something instead of nothing.

  Don’t forget what you are.

  But Agnes hasn’t believed in witch-tales since she was a little girl.

  She is turning away, heading back to the boarding house, when the wind whips her skirts sideways and tugs her hair loose from its braid.

  It smells foreign, green, un-city-like. It reminds Agnes of the dark interior of Mama Mags’s house, hung with herbs and the bones of small creatures, of wild roses in the woods. The wind pulls at her, searching or asking, and her breasts ache in strange answer. Something wet and greasy dampens her dress-front and drips to the cobbles below. Something the color of bone or pearl.

  Or—milk.

  Agnes stares at the splattered drops like a woman watching a runaway carriage come hurtling toward her. Dates and numbers skitter behind her eyes as she counts up the days since Floyd lay beside her in the dark, his palm sliding smooth down her belly, laughing. What’s the harm, Aggie?

  No harm at all. For him.

  Before Agnes can do more than curse Floyd Matthews and his soft hands six ways to Sunday, heat comes searing up her spine. It licks up her neck, rising like a fever.

  Reality splits.

  A ragged hole hangs in the air, that wild wind rushing through it. Another sky gleams dark on the other side, like skin glimpsed through torn cloth, and then the hole is growing, tearing wide and letting that other-sky pour through. The evening gray of New Salem is swallowed by star-spattered night.

  In that night stands a tower.

  Ancient, half-eaten by climbing roses and ivy, taller than the Courthouse or College on either side of the square. Dark, gnarled trees surround it, like the feral cousins of the lindens in their neat rows, and the sky above it fills with the dark tatter of wings.

  For a moment the square stands in eerie, brittle silence, mesmerized by the strange stars and circling crows. Agnes pants, her blood still boiling, her heart inexplicably lifting.

  Then someone screams. The stillness shatters. The crowd floods toward Agnes in a screeching horde, skirts and hats clutched tight. She braces her shoulders and wraps her arms around her belly, as if she can protect the fragile thing taking root inside her. As if she wants to.

  She should turn and follow the crowd, should run from that strange tower and whatever power called it here, but she doesn’t. She staggers toward the center of the square instead, following some invisible pull—

  And the world mends itself.

  The wayward sisters, hand in hand,

  Burned and bound, our stolen crown,

  But what is lost, that can’t be found?

  Purpose unknown

  Beatrice Belladonna Eastwood was the oldest sister, with hair like owl feathers: soft and dark, streaked with early gray. She was the wisest of the three. The quiet one, the listening one, the one who knew the feel of a book’s spine in her palm and the weight of words in the air.

  But on the spring equinox of 1893, she is a fool.

  She sits in the dust-specked light of her little office in the East Wing of the Salem College Library, flipping furtively through a newly donated first-edition copy of the Sisters Grimm’s Children and Household Witch-Tales (1812). She already knows the stories, knows them so well she dreams in once-upon-a-times and sets of three, but she’s never held a first edition in her own two hands. It has a weight to it, as if the Sisters Grimm tucked more than paper and ink inside it.

  Beatrice flicks to the last page and pauses. Someone has added a verse at the end of the last tale, hand-lettered and faded.

  The wayward sisters, hand in hand,

  Burned and bound, our stolen crown,

  But what is lost, that can’t be found?

  There are more lines below these, but they’re lost to the blotches and stains of time.

  It isn’t especially strange to find words written in the back of an old book; Beatrice has been a librarian for five years and has seen much worse, including a patron who used a raw strip of bacon as a bookmark. But it is a little strange that Beatrice recognizes these words, that she and her sisters sang them when they were little girls back in Crow County.

  Beatrice always thought it was one of Mama Mags’s nonsense-songs, a silly rhyme she made up to keep her granddaughters busy while she plucked rooster feathers or bottled jezebel-root. But here it is, scrawled in an old book of witch-tales.

  Beatrice flips several onion-skin pages and finds the title of the last tale printed in scrolling script, surrounded by a dark tangle of ivy: The Tale of Saint George and the Witches. It’s never been one of her favorites, but she reads it anyway.

  It’s the usual version: once upon a time there were three wicked witches who loosed a terrible plague on the world. But brave Saint George of Hyll rose against them. He purged witching from the world, leaving nothing but ashes behind him.

  Finally only the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone remained, the last and wickedest of witches. They fled to Avalon and hid in a tall tower, but in the end Saint George burned the Three and their tower with them.

  The last page of the story is an engraved illustration of grateful children dancing while the Last Three Witches of the West burned merrily in the background.

  Mama Mags used to tell the story different. Beatrice remembers listening to her grandmother’s stories as if they were doors to someplace else, someplace better. Later, after she was sent away, she would lie in her narrow cot and re-tell them to herself again and again, rubbing them like lucky pennies between her fingers.

  (Sometimes she can still see the walls of her room at St. Hale’s: perfect ivory, closing like teeth around her. She keeps such things locked safe inside parentheses, like her mother taught her.)

  A raised voice rings from the square through her office window, startling her. She isn’t supposed to be dawdling over witch-tales and rhymes; as a junior associate librarian she’s supposed to be cataloging and filing and recording, perhaps transcribing the work of true scholars.

  Right now there are several hundred pages of illegible handwriting piled on her desk from a professor in the School of History. She’s only typed the title page—The Greater Good: An Ethical Evaluation of the Georgian Inquisition During the Purge—but she can tell already it’s one of those bloodthirsty books that relishes every gory detail of the purges: the beatings and brandings, the metal bridles and hot iron shoes, the women they burned with their babes still held in their arms. It will be popular with the Morality Party types, the saber-rattlers and churchgoers who rather admire the French Empire’s bloody campaign against the war-witches of Dahomey, who are eager to see similar measures taken up against the witches of the Navajo and Apache and the stubborn Choctaw still holed up in Mississippi.

  Beatrice finds she doesn’t have the s
tomach for it. She knows witching is sinful and dangerous, that it stands in the way of the forward march of progress and industry, et cetera, but she can’t help but think of Mags in her little herb-hung house and wonder what the harm is.

  She looks again at the words on the last page of the Sisters Grimm. They aren’t important. They aren’t anything at all, just a little girl’s rhyme written in a children’s book, a song sung by an old woman in the hills of nowhere in particular. An unfinished verse long forgotten.

  But when she looks at them, Beatrice can almost feel her sisters’ hands in hers again, can almost smell the mist rising from the valleys back home.

  She pulls a notebook from her desk drawer. It’s cheaply made—the black dye fading to murky mauve, the pages coming unglued—but it’s her most beloved possession.

  (It was her very first possession, the first thing she purchased with her own money after she left St. Hale’s.)

  The notebook is half-filled with witch-tales and nursery rhymes, stolen scraps and idle dreams and anything that catches Beatrice’s eye. If she were a scholar she might refer to her notes as research, might imagine it typed and bound on a library shelf, discussed in university halls, but she isn’t and it won’t be.

  Now she copies the verse about wayward sisters into the little black book, beside all the other stories she’ll never tell and spells she’ll never work.

  She hasn’t spoken so much as a single charm or cantrip since she left home. But something about the shape of the words on the page, written in her own hand, tempts her tongue. She has a wild impulse to read them aloud—and Beatrice isn’t a woman much subject to wild impulses. She learned young what happened when a woman indulges herself, when she tastes fruits forbidden.

  (Don’t forget what you are, her daddy told her, and Beatrice hasn’t.)

  And yet—Beatrice cracks her office door to check the College halls; she is entirely alone. She swallows. She feels a tugging somewhere in her chest, like a finger hooked around her ribcage.