The Once and Future Witches

by Alix E. Harrow

  She whispers the words aloud. The wayward sisters, hand in hand.

  They roll in her mouth like summer sorghum, hot and sweet. Burned and bound, our stolen crown.

  Heat slides down her throat, coils in her belly. But what is lost, that can’t be found?

  Beatrice waits, blood simmering.

  Nothing happens. Naturally.

  Tears—absurd, foolish tears—prick her eyes. Did she expect some grand magical feat? Flights of ravens, flocks of fairies? Magic is a dreary, distasteful thing, more useful for whitening one’s socks than for summoning dragons. And even if Beatrice stumbled on an ancient spell, she lacks the witch-blood to wield it. Books and tales are as close as she can come to a place where magic is still real, where women and their words have power.

  Beatrice’s office feels suddenly cluttered and stuffy. She stands so abruptly her chair screeches across the tile and she fumbles a half-cloak around her shoulders. She strides from her office and clicks down the tidy halls of Salem College, thinking what a fool she was for trying. For hoping.

  Mr. Blackwell, the director of Special Collections, blinks up from his desk as she passes. “Evening, Miss Eastwood. In a hurry?” Mr. Blackwell is the reason Beatrice is a junior associate librarian. He hired her with nothing but a diploma from St. Hale’s, based purely on their shared weakness for sentimental novels and penny-papers.

  Often Beatrice lingers to chat with him about the day’s findings and frustrations, the new version of East of the Sun, West of the Witch she found in translation or the newest novel from Miss Hardy, but today she merely gives him a thin smile and hurries out into the graying evening with his worried eyes watching her.

  She is halfway across the square, shoving through some sort of rally or protest, when the tears finally spill over, pooling against the wire rims of her spectacles before splashing to the stones below.

  Heat hisses through her veins. An unnatural wind whips toward the center of the square. It smells like drying herbs and wild roses. Like magic.

  That foolish hope returns to her. Beatrice wets her wind-scoured lips and says the words again. The wayward sisters, hand in hand—

  This time she doesn’t stop—can’t stop—but returns to the beginning in a circling chant. It’s as if the words are a river or an unbridled horse, carrying her helplessly forward. There’s a rhythm to them, a heartbeat that skips at the end of the verse, stuttering over missing words.

  The spell shambles onward, careening, not quite right, and the heat builds. Her lungs are charred, her mouth seared, her skin fevered.

  Dimly Beatrice is aware of things outside herself—the splitting open of the world, the black tower hanging against a star-flecked sky, hung with thorns and ivy, the crows reeling overhead—her own feet carrying her forward, forward, following the witch-wind to the middle of the square. But then the fever blurs her vision, swallows her whole.

  None of Mama Mags’s spells ever felt like this. Like a song she can’t stop singing, like a bonfire beneath her skin. Beatrice thinks it might become a pyre if she keeps feeding it.

  She stutters into silence.

  The world shudders. The ripped-open edges of reality flutter like tattered cloth before drawing together again, as if some great unseen seamstress is stitching the world back together. The tower and the tangled wood and the foreign night vanish, replaced by the ordinary gray of a spring evening in the city.

  Beatrice blinks and thinks, That was witching. True witching, old and dark and wild as midnight.

  Everything tilts strangely in Beatrice’s vision and she tips downward into darkness. She falls, half dreaming there are arms waiting to catch her, sturdy and warm. A woman’s voice says her name, except it isn’t her name anymore—it’s the lost name her sisters used when they were still foolish and fearless—Bella!—

  And it begins to rain.

  Juniper is howling like a moon-drunk dog, reveling in the sweet heat of power coursing through her veins and the feather-soft beating of wings above her, when the tower disappears.

  It leaves the square in teeming, shrieking chaos. Every hat is blown askew, every skirt is ruffled, every hair-pin failing in its duties. Even the neat-trimmed linden trees look a little wilder, their leaves greener, their branches spreading like autumn antlers.

  Juniper is chilled and dazed, emptied out except for a strange ache in the center of her. A want so vast it can’t fit behind her ribs.

  She looks up to see two other women standing near her, forming a silent circle in the middle of the screaming stampede of St. George’s Square. In their faces Juniper sees her own want shining back at her, a hollow-cheeked hunger for whatever the hell it was they saw hanging in the sky, calling them closer.

  One of the women sways and says “oh” in a hoarse voice, like she’s been standing too long over a cook-fire. She blinks at Juniper through fever-slick eyes before she falls.

  Juniper drops her staff and catches her before her head cracks against stone. She’s light, feather-fragile in Juniper’s arms. It’s only as Juniper lays her down and resettles the crooked spectacles on the woman’s nose, as she sees the freckles scattered across her cheeks like constellations she thought she’d forgotten, that she realizes who she is.

  “Bella.” Her oldest sister. And—

  Juniper looks slowly up at the other woman, the first cold flecks of rain hissing on her cheeks, her heart thundering like iron-shod hooves against her breastbone.

  She’s just as pretty as Juniper remembers her: full lips and long lashes and slender neck. Juniper figures she takes after the mama she can’t remember, because there’s nothing of Daddy in her.

  “Agnes.” And just like that, Juniper is ten again.

  She is opening her eyes in the earthen dark of Mags’s hut, already speaking her sisters’ names because that’s how they were back then, always hand in hand, one-of-three. Mags is turning away from her, shoulders bowed, and Juniper is realizing all over again that her sisters are gone.

  Oh, they’d talked about it. Of course they had. How they would run away into the woods together like Hansel and Gretel. How they would eat wild honey and pawpaws, leave honeysuckle crowns on Mags’s doorstep sometimes so she’d know they were still alive. How Daddy would weep and curse but they would never, ever go back home.

  But Daddy’s mood would lighten, sudden as springtime, and he would buy them sweets and ribbons and they would stay a while longer.

  Not this time. This time her sisters cut and ran without looking back, without second-guessing. Without her.

  Juniper took off down the mountainside as soon as she understood, stumbling, limping—her left foot was still blistered and raw from the barn-fire.

  She caught a single glimpse of Agnes’s sleek black braid swaying on the back of a wagon as it jostled down the drive and shouted for her to come back, please come back, don’t leave me, until her pleas turned to choked sobs and thrown stones, until she was too full-up with hate to hurt anymore.

  She limped home. The house smelled wet and sweet, like meat gone bad, and her daddy was waiting for his supper. Never mind, James. He’d given her his own first name and liked to hear himself say it. We’ll get along without them.

  Seven years she survived without them. She grew up without them, buried Mama Mags without them, and waited without them for Daddy to die.

  But now here they are, wet and hungry-eyed, smack dab in the middle of New Salem: her sisters.

  Little Girl Blue, come blow your horn,

  The sheep’s in the meadow, the cow’s in the corn.

  Soundly she sleeps beneath bright skies,

  [Sleeper’s name] awake, arise!

  A spell to wake what sleeps, requiring a blown horn or a good whistle

  Agnes Amaranth doesn’t feel the cold hiss of rain against her skin. She doesn’t see the two women crouched beside her, freckled and black-haired, like reflections hanging in a pair of mirrors.

  All her attention is inward-facing, fixed on the live thing sprou
ting inside her, delicate as the first fiddle-head curl of a fern. She imagines she feels a second heart beating beneath her palm.

  “Agnes.” She knows the voice. She’s heard it laugh and tease and beg for one more story, pretty please; she’s heard it chasing after her down the rutted drive, begging her to come back. She’s heard it in seven years of bad dreams. Don’t leave me.

  Agnes looks down to see her baby sister kneeling below her, except she’s not a baby anymore: her jaw is hard and square, her shoulders wide, her eyes blazing with a grown woman’s helping of hate.

  “J-Juniper?” Agnes becomes aware that her arms are outstretched, as if she expects Juniper to run into them the way she did when she was a child, when Agnes still slept every night with her sister’s crow-feather hair tickling her nose, when Juniper still slipped sometimes and called her Mama.

  Juniper’s lips are peeled back from her teeth, her face taut. Agnes looks down to see her sister’s hands curled into fists. The shape of them—the familiar white knobs of her knuckles, the twist of tendons in her wrists—chases all the air from Agnes’s lungs.

  “Where’s Daddy? He with you?” She hates the hint of Crow County that surfaces in her voice.

  Juniper shakes her head, stiff-necked. “No.” A darkness flits across the leaf-light of her eyes, like grief or guilt, before the rage burns it away again.

  Agnes remembers how to breathe. “Oh. How—what are you doing here?” Deep scratches score Juniper’s wrists and throat, as if she ran through deep woods on a dark night.

  “What am I doing here?” Juniper’s eyes are wide and her nostrils are flared. Agnes remembers what happens when Juniper loses her temper—a serpent the color of blood, flames licking higher, animal screams—and flinches away.

  Juniper swallows, draws a shuddering breath. “Had to leave home. Headed north. Didn’t expect to run into you two strutting through the city like a pair of pigeons, without a care in the damn world.” Her voice is bitter and black as burnt coffee. The Juniper Agnes remembers was all feckless temper and careless laughter; Agnes wonders who taught her to hold a grudge, to feed and tend it like a wild-caught wolf pup until it grew big and mean enough to swallow a man whole.

  Her attention snags on the number Juniper just said. “Two?” Surely Agnes is still merely one. Surely the baby in her belly is too small to count as a whole person. Agnes’s brain feels like a jammed loom, threads snarled, gears grinding.

  Juniper narrows her eyes at Agnes, looking for mockery and not finding it, then looks pointedly down.

  Agnes follows her gaze and for the first time she sees the woman lying between them, her spectacles spattered with rain. Agnes feels the world collapsing around her, all the years of her life folding together, accordion-like.

  Their oldest sister. The one who betrayed her and the one she betrayed in turn, eye for an eye. The reason she had to run.

  Bella.

  Juniper is shaking Bella’s shoulders and Bella’s head is lolling, limp. Juniper lays two fingers against her forehead and swears. “She’s burning up. Y’all got a place nearby?”

  “I haven’t seen Bella in seven years. Didn’t even know she was in the city.” Agnes’s lip curls. “Didn’t care, either.”

  Juniper glares up at her. “Then how come—”

  But Agnes hears a sound that every person in New Salem knows well, a sound that means trouble and time to go: the cold ring of iron-shod hooves on cobblestones. Police in the city ride tall, prancing grays specially bred for their vicious tempers and shining white coats.

  The sound makes Agnes abruptly aware of how empty the square has become, abandoned by everything except slanting rain and drifting feathers and the three of them.

  She ought to run before the law shows up looking for someone to blame. She ought to gather her skirts in two fists and disappear into the alleys and side-streets, just another nothing-girl in a white apron, invisible.

  Juniper climbs to her feet with Bella’s arm hauled across her shoulders. She staggers on her bad leg, toppling sideways—

  Agnes reaches for her. She catches her wrist and Juniper clutches her arm, steadying herself, and for a half-second the two of them are face-to-face, hands wrapped around each other, flesh warm through thin cotton.

  Agnes lets go first. She bends and hands her sister the red-cedar staff, rubbing her palm against her skirt as if the wood burned her.

  Without quite deciding to, without thinking much at all, she shoves her shoulder against Bella’s other side. Their oldest sister sags between them like wet laundry on a line.

  Agnes hears herself say, “Come with me.”

  Beatrice is drifting, burning, floating like a cinder above some unseen fire. Voices hiss and whisper around her. Hurry, for Saints’ sake. Her feet wobble and slide beneath her, mutinous. Her spectacles swing madly from one ear.

  She blinks and sees the coal-scummed walls of west-side alleys passing on either side; laundry strung overhead like the many-colored flags of foreign countries, dripping in the rain; the darkening sky and the hot glow of gas-lamps.

  There are two women running beside her, half carrying her. One of them limps badly, her shoulder falling and catching beneath Beatrice. The other swears beneath her breath, fingers white around Beatrice’s wrist. Their faces are nothing but bright blurs in Beatrice’s vision, but their arms are warm and familiar around her.

  Her sisters. The ones she missed most at St. Hale’s, the ones who never came to her rescue.

  The ones who are here now, running beside her down the rain-slick streets of New Salem.

  Juniper never thought much about her sisters’ lives after they left Crow County—they’d just walked off the edge of the page and vanished, a pair of unfinished sentences—but she thought a lot about what she’d say if she ever saw them again.

  You left me behind. You knew what he was and you left me all alone with him.

  Her sisters would weep and tear their hair with guilt. Please, they would beg, forgive us!

  Juniper would stare down at them like God casting the first witch from the Garden, fire and brimstone in her eyes. No, she’d say, and her sisters would spend the rest of their sorry-ass lives wishing they’d loved her better.

  Juniper doesn’t say a word as they lurch through the twisting streets, turning down unmarked alleys and slanting through empty lots. She says nothing as they arrive at a grim-looking boarding house with stained clapboard walls and wooden crosses hanging in the windows. She is silent as they shuffle Bella past the landlady’s apartment, up two flights of creaking stairs, through a door bearing a brass number seven and a cross-stitched verse (Let a woman live in quietude, Timothy 2:11).

  Agnes’s room is dim and mildewed, containing nothing but a thin mattress on an iron frame, a cracked mirror, and a rusty stove that looks like it would struggle to heat a tin cup of coffee. Brownish stains bloom on the ceiling; unseen creatures scuttle and nibble in the walls.

  It makes Juniper think of a jail cell or a cheap coffin. Or the cellar back home, black and wet, empty except for cave crickets and animal bones and the long-ago tears of little girls. A chill shivers down her spine.

  Agnes heaves Bella onto the thin mattress and stands with her arms crossed. The lines on her face are deeper than Juniper remembers. She thinks of witch-tales about young women cursed to age a year for every day they live.

  Agnes bends to light a puddled stub of candle. She shoots Juniper a prickly, half-ashamed shrug. “Out of lamp-oil.”

  Juniper watches her sister stumbling around in the flickering light for a minute before she pulls the crooked wand of pitch pine from her pocket and touches the end of it to the slumping candle. She whispers the words Mama Mags taught her and the wand glows a dull orange that brightens to beaten gold, as if an entire summer sunset has been caught and condensed.

  Agnes stares at the wand, her face bathed in honeyed light. “You always paid better attention to Mags than us.”

  Juniper pinches the guttering candlewick be
tween her fingers and shrugs one shoulder. “Used to. She died in the winter of ninety-one.” Juniper could have told her more: how she dug and filled the hole herself to save the cost of a gravedigger and how the dirt rang hollow on the coffin lid; how every shovelful took some of herself along with it, until she was nothing but bones and hate; how she waited for three days and three nights by the graveside hoping Mama Mags might love her enough to let her soul linger. Ghosts were at least seven different kinds of sin and they never lasted more than an hour or two, but sin never bothered Mags before.

  The grave stayed still and silent, and Juniper stayed lonely. All Mags left behind was her brass locket, the one that used to have their mother’s hair curled like a silky black snake inside it.

  Juniper doesn’t say any of that. She lets the silence congeal like grease in a cold pan.

  “You should have written. I’d have come home for the funeral.” There’s an apology in Agnes’s voice and Juniper wants to bite her for it.

  “Oh, would you? And where should I have addressed your invitation? Seven years, Agnes, seven years—”

  From the bed beside them, Bella makes a soft, hurting sound. Her skin is a damp, fish-belly white.

  Juniper snaps her teeth shut and crouches down beside her, peeling one of her eyelids back. “Devil’s-fever.” Juniper would like very much to know what the hell her sister was doing to get herself burnt up with witching. “You got a tin whistle? Or a horn?”

  Agnes shakes her head and Juniper tsks. She says the words anyhow and gives a sharp, two-fingered whistle. A spark of witching flares between them.

  Bella’s eyes flutter. She blinks up at her sisters, face slack with shock. “Agnes? June?” Juniper gives her a stiff little bow. “Saints.” A sudden fear seems to strike Bella. She struggles up from the bed, eyes skittering around the room, lingering on the shadows. “Where’s Daddy?”

  “Not here.”

  “Does he know where you are? Is he coming?”

  “Doubt it.” Juniper runs her tongue over her teeth and lays out the next words like a winning hand of cards, a heartless snap. “Dead men usually stay put.” She lets her eyelids hang heavy as she says it, hoping her sisters won’t see anything lurking in her eyes.