The Once and Future Witches

by Alix E. Harrow

  Juniper had hoped there’d be more of them, but Jennie said they couldn’t risk inviting anyone who might turn tail and report their plan back to Miss Stone, so they approached only the most discontented, troublesome members of the Association. Things always come in sevens in witch-tales (swans, dwarves, days to create the world), so Juniper figures they’ll do fine.

  They spend the day jostling through the Fair, unremarkable in dull olives and sober grays, just seven more citizens come to celebrate the founding of New Salem. They pass knots of mill-girls and flower-sellers, students from the College and men from the tannery, a handful of policemen riding shining white horses. The girls eye them as they pass, linking arms and exchanging looks, perhaps stroking the white brims of their hats. Juniper thinks of wanted posters and murder charges and what could happen if she’s caught, and resolves not to be.

  They dodge souvenir-sellers offering commemorative plates and historical pamphlets. They buy sausages on little wooden sticks and burn their lips on the grease. They walk so far that Juniper’s bad leg aches and she leans hard on her cedar staff.

  Her daddy never used a cane, though he should have; he said they were for grannies and cripples, not proud veterans of Lincoln’s war. Sometimes when he was deep in his cups he’d give Juniper’s staff a mean, slanted look, like it was an old enemy of his, but he never laid a hand on it.

  They wander into a tent labeled Doctor Marvel’s Magnificent Anthropological Exhibition!, which features a number of natives wearing beads and feathers and bored expressions. Juniper pauses for a while to observe THE LAST WITCH-DOCTOR OF THE CONGO, PRESERVED FOR SCIENTIFIC STUDY, who turns out to be a withered African woman with an iron witch-collar locked around her neck. Her skin beneath the collar is whitish and dead-looking, like frostbitten fingertips; Juniper finds she can’t meet the woman’s eyes. She limps out of Doctor Marvel’s tent and tosses her half-sausage away, uneaten.

  By four o’clock she and the others make their way to the center stage, where a crowd is gathering beneath red-and-white pennants. Inez slips Juniper a bundle of cloth that might be a parasol but isn’t, and the seven of them diverge, pointedly not looking at one another as they edge through the audience. They take places along the fringes, forming a not-accidental circle.

  A mustachioed man in a gray suit gives a short speech. There’s a polite patter of applause as the mayor replaces him at the podium.

  “I must begin of course with a hearty welcome to all of you, the good citizens of New Salem!” The mayor is a saggy gentleman with a red-veined nose and all the charisma of stale bread. Juniper finds Gideon Hill sitting behind him with the rest of the city councilors, sweating in the May sunshine and blinking far too often. Juniper wonders how a man like that—all pinkish and wet, like something recently shelled—could get elected to anything. His dog is curled beneath his chair, her eyes staring straight at Juniper, gleaming red in the first bloom of sunset.

  “I must also thank the Council for their unflagging support of this project and valuable oversight.”

  Juniper isn’t listening. She’s watching the faces of her co-conspirators—Minerva and Mary looking pale and slightly sick; Inez smoothing the already smooth pleats of her dress; Electa looking bored—wondering if any of them are regretting the decisions that led them here. Wondering if anyone in the crowd has noticed the hats they’re clutching to their chests, each of them some shade of white: pearl or lace or clotted cream, beribboned or dripping with baby’s breath.

  Each of them spelled straight to Hell and back.

  But what is there to notice? They’re only hats; you can’t smell the witching on them unless you get right up close.

  Juniper herself carries three hats. She knows neither of her sisters are coming—knows that Bella is too scared and Agnes is too selfish—but still, she brought three stupid hats. Just in case.

  Earlier she thought she caught a glimpse of sleek braid, a flash of spectacles, but she can’t bring herself to feel along the invisible threads stretched between them. It’s better to not quite know, to keep pretending they might have come.

  Worthington is leaning over the podium and sweating in a manner that suggests his speech must be drawing to its merciful end. “I say to you now: let us put aside our petty grievances and differences, and celebrate instead what unites us. Let us enjoy the Fair!” The mayor makes a gesture to the brass band perspiring silently behind the stage.

  The crowd is applauding dutifully and the first notes of Salem’s Freedom are rising from the band when James Juniper raises her white hat into the air. Six other hands follow suit.

  Juniper and the renegade members of the New Salem Women’s Association lower the hats onto their heads and whisper the words.

  White cloaks cascade from nowhere and fall over their shoulders, bright and clean. They drape over their day-dresses and in an instant they become a single thing instead of seven separate women.

  It’s a spell of Juniper’s own invention—not exactly the good stuff, but not nothing, either. She disappeared the cloaks using Mags’s spell for vanishing her potions and herbs when the law came around, which required only a pair of silver scissors to cut the air and a muttered rhyme. Then she had to figure a way to call the cloaks back from nowhere. She lost several of Inez’s nicest white wool cloaks, vanishing them into who knows where, before she thought to try a binding.

  Bindings are deep, old witching, governed by obscure rules and strange affinities. Even Mama Mags didn’t fool with them much; she taught Juniper a rhyme to bind a split seam and promised to teach her more later, except it turned out she didn’t have much of a later.

  Juniper did her best. She stole loose threads from each of the cloaks and stitched them into the brims of the white hats, whispering the words as she worked—Ashes to ashes, dust to dust—jabbing her thumb every fourth stitch and swearing up a storm.

  She tested the first one on Jennie, jamming the hat on her head and ordering her to say the words. Jennie paled. “I don’t know. I don’t think I can.” Juniper swatted her with a spare hat. Jennie spoke the words. When the cloak settled over her shoulders—white as snow, white as wings—Jennie looked so stunned, so nakedly joyful that Juniper swatted her again just to keep her from floating away.

  Now Juniper sees Jennie’s face shining through the crowd, full of that same glee despite the rising panic around her.

  The crowd is surging away from the women in white, shouting and screeching. There’s a strange note in their voices, fear but also wonder. Witching is a small, shameful thing, worked in kitchens and bedrooms and boarding houses, half-secret. But here they are in broad daylight, calling white cloaks from nowhere. Juniper can feel the terms shifting around them, the boundaries bending. She can see faces—mostly women, mostly young—watching them with fascinated hunger in their eyes. Juniper figures they’re the ones who want, who pine, who long; the ones who chafe against the stories they were given and dream of better ones.

  She unties the bundled parasol and lifts it high, except it’s not a parasol at all. It unfurls into a long banner with the words VOTES FOR WOMEN painted across it in bright red.

  The crowd erupts. Salem’s Freedom devolves into a disjointed series of blats and hoots as the conductor stares, slack-jawed. Mayor Worthington bangs ineffectively on the podium. “What’s this now? Quite uncalled for—”

  His voice is drowned by the thump of blood in Juniper’s ears, the burning heat in her chest. She wants to shout or chant or laugh, to shake her banner in their faces and bare her teeth—but Jennie thought they ought to remain quiet, dignified. Silent sentinels rather than wicked witches.

  As one, the seven white-cloaked women turn their backs on the mayor and the City Council. Juniper raises her red banner in one hand and grips her staff tight with the other, and marches away from the stage, straight-spined. She feels the others falling in behind her, forming a single many-sailed ship.

  The crowd splits like a sea. Mothers tug their children closer and canny salesmen s
tart packing up shop, eyes darting sideways, sensing trouble. Juniper blows them kisses, feeling daring, a little drunk, listening with one ear for the ring of iron-shod hooves. They plan to disappear their cloaks and slink into the crowd before the authorities can arrive, but there are no men’s voices, no white horses prancing toward them. Yet.

  They pass beneath the high arch of the Fair entrance and into the darkening streets of New Salem proper. Juniper expects the crowd to disperse, but it presses closer against them as the street narrows. The well-dressed families of the Fair are replaced by working folk and young men, the genteel scandal souring into something meaner. A cluster of drunks unslouches from an alley to leer at them, calling lewd suggestions. Someone laughs.

  Juniper rests the iron pole of the banner on her shoulder and touches the locket beneath her blouse, the one Mama Mags gave her on her deathbed. At the graveside Juniper dug her dirt-crusted nails along the seam and popped it open like a brass clam, hoping for a message or a note or a voice saying, It’s alright, baby girl, I’m here. All she found was a thistledown curl of her grandmother’s hair.

  This morning, Juniper added a pair of snake’s teeth.

  She doesn’t plan to use them, not really. Mags told her they were only for last chances and final straws, when every choice was a losing one—but Juniper’s borrowed dress is too fancy and stupid to have pockets and she doesn’t like to be without them.

  For a dizzy second she hears the scuff of red scales across the floor, the hiss of triumph, of pent-up hate finally set free—but then someone shouts look! and she does.

  Another group of women is marching down the avenue, headed straight toward them. Juniper blinks twice—are they coming to join them? Is it the rest of the Women’s Association?—but then she sees the pale sashes crossing their chests.

  “Oh hell.” It’s those Christian Union women who are always writing nasty letters to the editor and waving signs with slogans like WOMEN FOR A PURE SALEM and MICAH 5:12. How did they turn up so fast? Before the police, even? Juniper didn’t exactly advertise her march in the Sunday classifieds.

  One of the Union women—a willowy, white-gloved woman Juniper recognizes from the papers as Miss Grace Wiggin—plants herself directly in Juniper’s path, chin high and skirt starched. There’s a shine to her, a porcelain perfection that makes Juniper want to rub her powdered nose in the mud.

  “We, the good and righteous women of New Salem”—Wiggin gestures behind her to the other unionists, as if clarifying which women are good and righteous—“object to the promotion of sin on our streets!” Her voice is high, piercing.

  “Oh for Chrissake,” Juniper drawls. “Don’t y’all have anything better to do?”

  “They claim they are harmless! They claim they want justice! But what justice was there in the dark days of our pasts, when thousands of innocents suffered in the Black Plague?”

  “Knitting, maybe. Charity work.”

  Wiggin’s jaw flexes. “If we permit these women—these witches!—to march freely down our streets, what comes next? Will our daughters want broomsticks and cauldrons instead of pearls and dolls? Will our sons be seduced by their black arts? Will a second plague strike us down? The Christian Union urges you to vote for Mr. Gideon Hill this November!”

  She keeps speechifying, her voice getting higher, more strident. The crowd presses closer, nodding and muttering and sometimes hear-hearing.

  Behind her, Juniper hears Jennie curse softly, but she doesn’t turn to look because she’s looking at something else: Miss Grace Wiggin’s shadow.

  It’s long and dark in the almost-sunset, flung black over cobblestones. At first it mimics Wiggin’s own gestures, like a good shadow should, but after a minute its hands fall to its sides. Its shoulders roll, as if stretching out stiffness, and then—like a puppet shedding its strings or a train waltzing off its tracks—it steps away from its owner.

  Juniper goes very still. She watches Grace Wiggin’s shadow distort, stretching into a creature with too many hands and too many fingers. It finds other shadows—docile, well-behaved shadows lying in their proper place—and pulls them into itself. It swells and blackens; Juniper thinks of things left rotting in the sun.

  She remembers asking Mags when she was little if witching was wicked. Mags had cackled. Wickedness is in the eye of the beholder, baby. But then she sobered. She said witching was power and any power could be perverted, if you were willing to pay the price. You can tell the wickedness of a witch by the wickedness of her ways.

  Juniper touches the locket on her chest, full of poison. Mags never told her what went into the making of those teeth, but Juniper found the burned bodies of three snakes in the hearth and saw the bandages wrapped thick around Mags’s wrist, and knew the cost was cruel and high.

  Now she watches the shadow oozing through the crowd like spilled ink, coiling around ankles and sliding up skirts, and thinks the price for this must have been even higher.

  As the shadow spreads, the crowd shifts. Meanness turns to malice; heckling turns to hate. Juniper feels it as a prickle of fear along her arms, the kind that means a thunderstorm is rolling in or your daddy’s coming home with a bellyful of liquor.

  Juniper sees whitening knuckles, scowling faces, eyes gone empty and dim as closed-up houses. It’s as if their souls were stolen along with their shadows.

  She looks back to Grace Wiggin. She’s smiling so wide and bright that Juniper understands two things in a hurry: number one, that there’s a good chance the wicked witch wandering around New Salem is standing right in front of her in a white sash.

  And number two, that she’s glad, for once, that her sisters forsook her, because at least they won’t be here for whatever happens next.

  Beatrice is wishing very much that she forsook her youngest sister. She’s wishing she didn’t invite Miss Cleopatra Quinn to accompany her to the Fair, didn’t watch from the fringes as Juniper raised her banner, didn’t trail after the white cloaks of the suffragists while the crowd soured like milk around them.

  Because then she wouldn’t be standing here in the darkening street while a cluster of glassy-eyed men peel away from the crowd and lurch toward her, their shadows twisting and rippling behind them.

  Their eyes are on Miss Quinn, a colored woman dressed a little too well, a little too far north. Beatrice sees the shape of slurs on their lips, the promise of punishment in their fists.

  She hears Miss Quinn hiss a rude phrase beneath her breath. Then there’s a hand in hers—warm and dry, urgent—and Quinn is pulling her sideways, shoving her against the sooty brick wall of a pub.

  Miss Quinn removes a stub of white chalk from her coat pocket and sketches something on the wall, a shape made of lines and stars. She whispers a half-song beneath her breath in a language Beatrice doesn’t know, then grabs Beatrice by the shoulders and presses her hard against the brick. Miss Quinn places her palms on either side of Beatrice and hisses, “Don’t move.”

  Beatrice tastes witching in the air, feels the sudden heat of it radiating from Quinn’s skin. She doesn’t move.

  The cluster of men is very close now. Their eyes, which had been fixed with eerie, hunting-hound intensity a minute before, now slide harmlessly across Miss Quinn’s back.

  Beatrice watches them shuffle on, grunting to one another, pointing ahead. And then she looks at Quinn’s face (so near to hers that she can see the slide of sweat from her temple, the rust streaks in her yellow eyes) and gasps, “That was—that was witchcraft, Miss Quinn!”

  “By all means, please say it louder. It’s not like there’s a riot nearby.” Miss Quinn is straightening, dusting chalk from her hands.

  “But where—how—?”

  “Honestly, did you think yours was the only grandmother who knew words she shouldn’t? Aunt Nancy’s recipes, my mother calls them.” Her voice is light, careless, but Beatrice hears a certain tension running beneath it. “I would be obliged if you would keep this to yourself, Miss Eastwood. We’re not supposed to . . . I
don’t know what came over me.” She gives her head an irritated shake, as if Beatrice had personally forced her to work witchcraft in the middle of New Salem.

  “O-of course. I wouldn’t want to cause you trouble.”

  Miss Quinn gives her a taut, crooked smile. “Oh no?”

  And if there’s more than just exasperation and irony in her voice, a sly heat, Beatrice doesn’t hear it.

  She’s distracted by the echoes of her youngest sister’s pain. The pain is followed by fear, and the fear is followed by a terrible, killing rage.

  May sticks and stones break your bones,

  And serpents stop your heart.

  A spell to poison, requiring fangs & fury

  James Juniper has never in her life hoped to see an officer of the law—in her experience they show up just to hassle your grandmother over a stillborn baby in the next county and stay long enough to clink glasses with your daddy—but she hopes for one now. The crowd is pushing closer, their mutters turning into shouts, their shouts turning into shoves. Miss Grace Wiggin and her followers have melted away, leaving the seven suffragists surrounded by red-faced men and shouting women.

  Juniper feels shoulders bracing against hers as the others turn back-to-back, facing the crowd. This isn’t right—they were supposed to be a slick spectacle, here and gone again, a scandalous headline for tomorrow’s papers. They were supposed to be scared of misdemeanor charges and Miss Stone, not a soul-eating shadow and a vicious crowd.

  Someone yanks on Juniper’s banner and she stumbles. Her damn leg—the one with the puckered scar wrapped around the ankle, the silvered, sunken places where muscle and tendon never quite healed—twists beneath her and she sprawls sideways, palms skinning against the grit of the street, staff clattering on stone.

  She hears Inez call her name, but there are people shoving between them, and the white cloaks disappear behind bare fists and broad backs.

  Juniper looks up to see a man looming over her. A boy, really: scrawny and underfed-looking, like the leggy weeds that sprout down dark alleys, his face speckled with youth. His eyes are empty as promises.