The Once and Future Witches

by Alix E. Harrow

  Zina purses her lips as if she thinks Agnes is being a little stupid, but shuffles the deck. She knocks the edges on the table and presents it again.

  Agnes turns the card and the Tower leers up at her a second time. A black spire of ink surrounded by white pinpricks. Up close she sees the border is actually a tangle of thorned vines with smears of dull pink for blooms, like tiny mouths. Or roses.

  Agnes stands very abruptly. “I’m sorry. I have to go.” She wants nothing to do with that tower or that wicked wind. She knows what trouble looks like when it comes slinking through the open window to tug at the loose threads of your fate.

  “Oh, it’s not such a bad reading as all that. She’ll face trials, but who doesn’t in this life?”

  Agnes can only shake her head and stumble backward toward the door. She hears Zina call after her—“Come see me when you change your mind. I’m the best midwife in West Babel, ask anyone”—before she is out in the alley, turning right on St. Fortitude.

  She walks with one hand fisted in her pocket, palms sweating into the brown paper of the sack, cards hovering behind her eyes like portents or promises: the tower; the heart stabbed thrice over; the three witches.

  She can feel the edges of a story plucking at her, making her the middle sister in some dark witch-tale.

  Better the middle sister than the mother. Middle sisters are forgotten or failed or ill-fated, but at least they survive, mostly; mothers rarely make it past the first line. They die, as gently and easily as flowers wilting, and leave their three daughters exposed to all the wickedness of the world.

  Their deaths aren’t gentle or easy in real life. Agnes was five when Juniper was born, but she remembers the mess of stained sheets and the wet-pearl color of her mother’s skin. The old-penny stink of birth and blood.

  Her father watching with a jagged wrongness in his face, arms crossed, not running for help, not ringing the bell that would bring Mama Mags and her herbs and rhymes.

  Agnes should have rung the bell herself, should have slipped out the back door and hauled on the half-rotten rope—but she didn’t. Because she was scared of the wrong-thing in her daddy’s eyes, because she chose her own hide over her mother.

  She remembers her mother’s hand—white and bloodless as the blank pages at the end of a book—touching her cheek just before the end. Her voice saying, Take care of them, Agnes Amaranth. Bella was older, but she knew Agnes was the strong one.

  That first night it was Agnes who washed the blood from her baby sister’s skin. Agnes who let her suck on the tip of her pinky finger when she cried. Later it was Agnes who brushed her hair before school and held her hand in the endless night behind the cellar door.

  And it was Agnes who left Juniper to fend for herself, because she wasn’t strong enough to stay. Because survival is a selfish thing.

  Now her sisters are here with her in the sinless city and their daddy is dead. Agnes ought to be relieved, but she’s seen enough of the world to know he was just one monster among many, one cruelty in an endless line. It’s safer to walk alone. The brown paper bag in her pocket is a promise that she’ll stay that way.

  She passes a tannery, eyes watering with acid or maybe something else. A butcher shop, a cobbler, a stable half-full of police horses idly stamping iron hooves. St. Charity Hospital, a low limestone building that smells of lye and lesions, built by the Church to tend to the filthy, godless inhabitants of West Babel. Agnes has seen nuns and doctors walking the streets, proselytizing at unmarried women and waving purity pledges. But girls who give birth at Charity’s came out grayish and sagging, holding their babies loosely, as if they aren’t certain they belong to them. At the mill most women prefer mothers and midwives, when their time comes.

  Now St. Charity’s echoes with the hacking sounds of the summer fever. Someone has drawn a witch-mark across the door, a crooked cross daubed in ash. Agnes wonders if the rumors are right and a second plague is coming.

  She crosses the street and distracts herself by reading the tattered posters pasted along fences and walls. Advertisements and ordinances; wanted posters with rain-splotched photographs; bills for the Centennial Fair next month.

  On the corner of Twenty-Second Street the brick has been entirely covered by a single repeated poster, like grim wallpaper. It’s crisp and new-looking, the image printed in bold black and red: a raised fist holding a burning torch against the night. Smoke coils from the flames, forming ghoulish faces and animal bodies and distorted words: SIN, SUFFRAGE, WITCHCRAFT. Smaller, saner lettering across the top urges citizens to Vote Gideon Hill! Our Light Against the Darkness!

  Three men stand clustered ahead of Agnes, holding paste buckets and stacks of posters, each wearing bronze pins engraved with Hill’s lit torch. There’s something vaguely unsettling about them—the odd synchrony of their movements, maybe, or the fervid glaze of their eyes, or the way their shadows seem sluggish, moving a half-second behind their owners.

  “Tell your husband—vote Hill!” one of them says as she passes.

  “Our light against the darkness!” says the second.

  “Can’t be too careful, with women’s witching back on the loose.” The third extends one of the posters toward her.

  Agnes should take it and bob her head politely—she knows better than to start shit with zealots—but she doesn’t. Instead she spits on the ground between them, splattering the man’s boots with cotton-colored slime.

  She doesn’t know why she did it. Maybe she’s tired of knowing better, of minding her place. Maybe because she can feel her wild younger sister with her in the city, tugging her toward trouble.

  Agnes and the man stare together at the spit sliding off his boot, glistening like the snotty trail of a snail. He stands very still, but Agnes notes distantly that the arms of his shadow are moving, reaching toward her skirts.

  And then she’s running, refusing to find out what those shadow-hands will do to her, or what the hell kind of witchcraft is on the loose in New Salem.

  She runs down Twenty-Second and turns on St. Jude’s and then she’s back in Room No. 7 of the South Sybil boarding house, panting and holding her barely showing belly. She withdraws Zina’s brown paper bag from her apron.

  Pennyroyal and a half-cup of river-water: all it takes to keep that circle drawn tight around her heart. To stay alone, and survive.

  She did it once before—drank it down in one bitter swallow, felt nothing but rib-shaking relief when the cramps knotted her belly—and never regretted it.

  Now she finds herself setting the brown paper sack on the floor, unopened. Lying down in her narrow bed and wishing her oldest sister was here to whisper a story to her.

  Or to the spark inside her, that second heart beating stubbornly on.

  Queen Anne, Queen Anne

  You sit in the sun

  Fair as a lily and white as a wand.

  A spell to shed light, requiring heartwood & heat

  Beatrice Belladonna dreams of Agnes that night, but when she wakes only Juniper is there in the stuffy dark of her attic room.

  She knows by the damp gleam of Juniper’s eyes that she’s awake, too, but neither of them mentions their middle sister. There are many things they don’t mention.

  Yet Juniper keeps sleeping in her room and Beatrice keeps letting her, and she supposes it could just go on this way: Juniper spending her days busy with the Association and coming home with pins and sashes and rolled-up signs that need painting, Beatrice spending her library shifts following whispers and witch-tales toward the Lost Way, never quite telling her little sister what she knows or thinks she knows—maybe because it feels too unlikely, too impossible; maybe because it doesn’t feel impossible enough.

  Maybe because she worries what a woman like Juniper might do if the power of witching is won back.

  Spring in New Salem is a gray, sulking creature, and by the middle of April Beatrice feels like a tall, bespectacled mushroom. Juniper has taken to lighting her pitch pine wand in the evenings
just to feel sunlight on her skin, talking wistfully about the bluebells and bloodroot in flower back home.

  Beatrice asks her once when she plans to return to Crow County—she’s sure their cousin Dan would let Juniper live in Mags’s old house for nothing or nearly nothing, even if he is a dumbshit—but Juniper’s face closes up like a house with drawn shutters. The witch-light fades from the wand-tip, leaving them in chill darkness. Beatrice adds it to the list of unmentionable things between them.

  The next morning Juniper leaves early for the Association and Beatrice reads her paper alone at the breakfast table. She has recently become a subscriber to The New Salem Defender in addition to The Post. This, she assures herself, is merely part of her increasing interest in political news and has nothing to do with the tingle in her fingertips when she sees the name C. P. QUINN printed in small capitals. She wonders what the P stands for, and if colored women have mother’s-names.

  Beatrice is assigned to the circulation desk that afternoon. She helps a white-bearded monk with his biography of Geoffrey Hawthorn (G. Hawthorn: The Scourge of Old Salem) and lights lamps for a cluster of haggard students who look as if they would rather change their names and flee into the countryside than finish their spring term. By afternoon she’s at the desk, supposedly processing recent arrivals—a new edition of Seeley’s Expansion of England, an account of the East India Company’s campaign against the thuggee witches of India; a bound version of Jackson Turner’s The Witch in American History, which argues that the threat and subsequent destruction of Old Salem defined America’s virtuous spirit—but is really watching the whale-belly sky through the mullioned windows, feeling her eyelids hinge shut.

  She wakes to an amused voice saying, “Pardon me?”

  She unpeels her face from The Witch in American History and snaps upright, adjusting her spectacles with mounting horror.

  Today Miss Cleopatra (P.) Quinn has her derby hat tucked politely beneath one arm. Her gentleman’s coat has been replaced by a double-buttoned vest and her hair is swept into a braided crown. It must be raining, because water pearls over her bare skin, catching the light in a way that Beatrice has no name for (luminous).

  Beatrice manages a strangled “What are you doing here?”

  Miss Quinn adopts an arch, censorious expression, although a certain irreverence glitters in her eyes. “I was under the impression that libraries were public institutions.”

  “Oh, yes. That is—I thought—” You came to see me. Beatrice closes her eyes very briefly in mortification. She tries again. “Welcome to the Salem College collections. How may I help you?”

  “Much better.” The irreverence has escaped her eyes and now curls at the corners of her mouth. “I’m looking for information on the tower last seen at St. George’s Square, and the Last Three Witches of the West.” Her voice is far too loud.

  Beatrice makes an abortive movement as if she might launch herself across the desk and press her palm over Miss Quinn’s lips. “Saints, woman! Anyone could overhear you!”

  “So take me someplace more private.” She gives Beatrice another of those highly inappropriate looks and Beatrice swallows, feeling like a harried pawn on a chessboard.

  Mr. Blackwell agrees to cover the circulation desk and watches the pair of them retreat to Beatrice’s office with a doubtful expression. He comes from broad-minded Quaker stock, but there are rules about people like Miss Quinn lingering too long in the Salem College Library. The rules aren’t written down anywhere, but the important rules rarely are.

  Beatrice clicks her door closed and turns around to find Miss Quinn reading the spines of stacked books and peering at the black leather notebook that lies open on the table. Beatrice snaps it shut.

  “As I told you on a previous occasion, I’m afraid I don’t know anything about the events at the square, or the Last Three. You are of course welcome to search our collections.”

  “Oh, but I was hoping for a guided tour. From someone with more . . . intimate information.” Her tone is over-warm, over-familiar, over-everything. She’s doing what Mama Mags called laying it on thick.

  Why? What does she know about three circles woven together, three lost witches and their not-so-Lost Way? Beatrice puts frost in her voice. “What do you want?”

  “Only what every woman wants.”

  “And what’s that?”

  Miss Quinn’s smile hardens, and Beatrice thinks this must be her true smile, beneath the dazzle and shine of whatever act she’s putting on. “What belongs to her,” she hisses. “What was stolen.” There’s a different kind of wanting in her tone now, one that Beatrice believes because hasn’t she felt it, too?

  She hesitates.

  Miss Quinn plants her palms on Beatrice’s desk and leans across it. “You and I are both women of words, I surmise. We share an interest in truth-seeking, storytelling. Surely we might share those stories with one another? I am capable of great discretion, I assure you.” Her voice is all honey again, oozing sincerity. “Whatever you tell me I will keep just between the two of us. I promise.”

  Beatrice manages a breathless laugh, dizzy with the clove-and-ink scent of her skin. “Are you a journalist or a detective, Miss Quinn?”

  “Oh, every good journalist is a detective.” She leans away, straightening her sleeves. “What are you?”

  “Nothing,” Beatrice says, because it’s true. She was born nobody and taught to stay that way—remember what you are—and now she’s just a skinny librarian with gray already streaking her hair, a premonition of spinsterhood.

  Miss Quinn raises her eyebrows and nods at the ratty notebook still clutched to Beatrice’s chest. “And what of your work? Is that nothing?”

  Beatrice should say yes. She should toss her notes aside and flick her fingers. Oh, that? Just moonbeams and daydreams.

  Her fingers tighten on her notebook instead. “It’s not . . . much. Just conjecture so far. But I think . . .” She wets her lips. “But I think I found the words and ways to call back the Lost Way of Avalon. Or some of them.”

  She flinches as she says it, half waiting for the crack of a nun’s knuckles or the cold draft of the cellar.

  Miss Quinn doesn’t scorn or scold her. “Really,” she says, and waits. Listens.

  Beatrice isn’t listened to very often. She finds it makes her heart flutter in a most distracting fashion. “It’s this rhyme our grandmother taught us. I thought she made it up, but then I found it in the back of a first-edition copy of the Grimms’ Witch-Tales—you’re familiar with the Grimms?”

  She tells Miss Quinn about wayward sisters and maiden’s blood and her theory that secrets might have survived somehow in old wives’ tales and children’s rhymes. “It must sound ridiculous.”

  Miss Quinn lifts one shoulder. “Not to me. Sometimes a thing is too dangerous to be written down or said straight out. Sometimes you have to slip it in slantwise, half-hidden.”

  “Even if I pieced together the spell, I doubt any of us has enough witch-blood to work it. All the true witches were burned centuries ago.”

  “All of them, Miss Eastwood?” There’s a hint of pity in Quinn’s voice. “How, then, did Cairo manage to repel the Ottomans and the redcoats both for decades, despite all their rifles and ships? Why did Andrew Jackson leave those Choctaw in Mississippi? Out of the goodness of his black little heart?” The pity sharpens, turns scathing. “Do you really think the slavers found every witch aboard their ships and tossed her overboard?”

  Beatrice has encountered wild theories that there was witchcraft at work in Stono and Haiti, that Turner and Brown were aided by supernatural means. She’s heard the scintillated whispers about colored covens still prowling the streets. But at St. Hale’s she was taught that such stories were base rumors, the product of ignorance and superstition.

  Quinn gentles her tone. “Maybe even good Saint George missed a witch or two during the purge. How do you think your grandmother came to know those words in the first place?”

  Beatric
e has not permitted herself to ask that question out loud. To wonder who Mags’s mother was, and her mother’s mother. Witch-blood runs thick in the sewers, after all.

  “Surely it’s worth looking for these missing words and ways of yours, at least.”

  “I—perhaps.” Beatrice swallows hard against the hope rising in her throat. “But they don’t seem to want to be found.” She gestures at her desk, strewn with scraps and open books and dead-ends. “I’ve read the Sisters Grimm a dozen times, every edition I could find. I’ve made a good start on the other folklorists—Charlotte Perrault, Andrea Lang—but if there are any secret instructions or notes tucked inside them they’re faded, stained . . . lost.”

  She doesn’t mention the shadow-hand she saw splayed across the page, or the creeping sense that someone doesn’t want the words to be found, on the grounds that she wants Miss Quinn to continue thinking of her as a sane adult. “I’ve been looking. But I’ve been failing.”

  Miss Quinn does not look particularly distressed. She gives Beatrice a smart nod and sets her derby hat on the desktop. She unbuttons her sleeves and rolls them up, revealing several inches of pox-scarred wrist. “Well, naturally.”

  “Oh?”

  Miss Quinn perches on the same stack of encyclopedias Juniper occupied a few weeks before and extends her hand, palm up, toward Beatrice and her black notebook. Her expression is teasing but her eyes are sober, her hand steady. “You didn’t have me.”

  Beatrice rubs her thumb along the spine of her notebook, stuffed full of her most private thoughts and theories, her wildest suppositions and most dangerous inquiries. Her own heart, sewn and bound.

  It should be difficult to hand it over to a near-stranger, even impossible.

  It isn’t.

  Juniper didn’t have any friends, growing up. The girls at school weren’t allowed to visit the Eastwood farm, either because of the whispers of witching that surrounded Mama Mags or the alcohol fumes that surrounded their daddy, or the ugly rumors about just how their mother died (awful suspicious, people muttered, I heard she was fixing to leave him).