The Once and Future Witches

by Alix E. Harrow

  None of the women answer her. Agnes is turning to leave, feeling like she should go find Jennie and tell her she needs a new title because she’s a piss-poor recruiter, when the woman in the gray kerchief says, “What’s your name?”

  “Agnes.” She hesitates a half-second before adding, “Amaranth.” There’s a quick hiss of breath around her. Mother’s-names are things shared between friends and sisters, not offered in grimy alleyways to strangers.

  The kerchiefed woman raises her chin. “Annie Asphodel.” She nods to the women around her. “And this is Ruthie and Martha. The big one is Yulia.” Yulia merely crosses her arms a little harder, eyes still narrow and frozen.

  Annie snaps her fingers and holds out her hand to Martha, who withdraws a crumpled copy of The Defender from her apron and hands it over. Annie removes a pin from her hair, its point gleaming sharp in the buttery light.

  She gives Agnes a hard little nod, like one soldier to another. “We’ll be seeing you, Agnes Amaranth.”

  Beatrice and her sisters chose nine o’clock in the evening because nine o’clock is a woman’s hour. The dinners have been served and the dishes dried and stacked, the children tucked into bed, the whiskies poured and served to the husbands. It’s the hour where a woman might sit in stillness, scheming and dreaming.

  But on the seventeenth of May, some of them are doing more than dreaming.

  Beatrice sees them from the scummed glass of the window in No. 7 South Sybil. They come in ones and twos and sometimes threes, their shadows like soft velvet beneath the gas-lamps, their cloaks pulled tight around their shoulders. It isn’t chilly, but there’s a fretful wind chasing them down the streets, plucking hairs loose from their pins and tugging at skirts.

  It’s hard to tell in the gloom, but Beatrice thinks some of the women are very young, their hair plaited and their steps eager, and some of them very old. Some of them stride quickly and others skitter like mice across a kitchen floor. Some of them have apron-strings and patched elbows showing beneath their cloaks; some of them gleam with pearls and rings.

  She hears the creak of the boarding-house door, the patter of feet on stairs, the rush of eager whispers in the hall. A helpless panic tremors through Beatrice and she glances to her younger sister, mute and beseeching. Juniper advises her to get her panties untwisted and sit tight, but she rests an awkward hand on Beatrice’s shoulder as she says it. The damp heat of her palm tells Beatrice that she feels it too: the sense that they’re teetering on an unseen edge, perched at the beginning of an untold story.

  There’s an uncertain knock at the door. “C’mon in,” Juniper calls, and they do: Misses Electa Gage and Inez Gillmore followed by a gaggle of other girls stolen from the Women’s Association; a knot of grim-looking mill-girls with colorless kerchiefs and skeptical expressions; an unsmiling girl with long black hair and cedar-colored skin; a pair of rather disreputable-looking sisters who introduce themselves as “Victoria and Tennessee, spiritualists, magnetic healers, and mediums.”

  Miss Quinn appears at the head of a stately delegation of black women who regard the room with expressions of deepest skepticism. Quinn shoots Beatrice her cat’s grin, causing Beatrice to stand up, forget whatever it was she intended to do, then sit back down and study the backs of her own hands for a while.

  She hadn’t been at all certain that Quinn would come. She’d helped them with their advertisement, working with Juniper and Beatrice long after the offices of The Defender should have closed to set the spell into ink and lead. It was only after the last page had rolled through the press that Quinn glanced sideways at Juniper. “And am I invited to this meeting, Miss Eastwood?”

  “Sure.”

  Quinn’s face remained very neutral. “How very . . . broad-minded of you.”

  “Well, all for one and one for all,” Juniper declared nobly. She ruined this immediately thereafter by adding, with some relish, “Daddy’d roll over in his grave if he could see us. He fought for the Yanks but only because they gave him fifty dollars and a bottle of rye.”

  Miss Quinn tilted her head. “Tell me, Miss Eastwood: how much of all this”—she gestured to the stacks of still-warm newspapers, the witch-ways scattered across desktops—“is designed purely to spite your dead father?”

  Juniper ran her tongue over her teeth with a simmering expression that made Beatrice wince in anticipation, but in the end said only, “Come to the meeting, Miss Quinn. Bring your friends.”

  Quinn had.

  Beatrice watches them covertly as they settle into their seats. There’s a camaraderie among them, an unusual deference to Quinn’s posture, which confirms certain of Beatrice’s theories.

  Following the riot on St. Mary-of-Egypt’s, Beatrice watched Quinn more closely. She considered the keenness of her interest in their researches and the words and ways she already possessed; the times she left abruptly or disappeared for days in a row, never quite saying where she’d gone; the mildly scandalized whispers about “that colored journalist” who was often seen entering and leaving all manner of unlikely places across the city; the several occasions she accidentally referred to herself as we instead of I.

  Beatrice is no detective, but even a librarian might consult a bound volume of minutes from the annual convention of the Colored Women’s League. She might run her finger down the member list at the back and pause at C. P. Quinn, wondering if perhaps the League was interested in less respectable activities than their literature suggested.

  Beatrice is distracted by a flurry of new arrivals: a mother and daughter whispering in Yiddish; Madame Zina the midwife; a trio of women in alarming dresses who greet Juniper and Agnes as if they are old friends.

  Juniper beams. “Glad you and the girls could make it, Miss Pearl.”

  “Who are they?” Beatrice asks Agnes in an undertone.

  “Whores,” Agnes whispers back. Beatrice had not previously been aware that one’s entire body could blush.

  Miss Pearl and her girls take seats at the very front. One of them—a freckled, honey-colored girl—glances back at Miss Quinn. They exchange a charged look so fleeting that Beatrice is half-convinced she imagined it.

  By ten after nine there are so many women crammed into Agnes’s room at No. 7 that it shouldn’t logically contain them all. Beatrice knows that, in fact, it doesn’t.

  Over the previous week Agnes approached the other occupants of the South Sybil boarding house. No. 12, it transpired, was the home of a truly astonishing number of sisters and cousins and second cousins from Kansas who had charmed their room to be rather larger on the inside than it was on the outside. They gave Agnes the necessary ways and words, and now No. 7 is large enough for six rows of borrowed chairs and two dozen women. It no longer seems quite so gray and miserable, and the wet-earth smell of witching has chased away the smell of overcooked cabbage. Yesterday Beatrice even saw a robin nesting in the eaves outside the window.

  Nearly all the chairs are full. There are no more taps at the door. The whispers and shuffles of the women fall away in eerie concert, replaced by an expectant stillness. Eyes swivel to the front of the room, where Beatrice and her sisters sit.

  Beatrice sees Juniper’s throat bob as she stands, fist tight around her staff. She glances back at her older sisters, suddenly looking young and raggedy and not at all like the president of a suffrage society. Heat passes down the line from Agnes to Juniper, a rush of secondhand strength.

  Juniper squares her shoulders and turns back to the room full of waiting women. “Welcome,” she begins, her voice clear and bright, “to the first meeting of the Sisters of Avalon.”

  Juniper introduces Beatrice and Agnes and Jennie. She thanks the gathered women for answering the advertisement and reads their mission statement from a creased page held in her hand, stumbling a little, sounding like a schoolgirl reading from the Bible.

  She folds the paper and fixes them with a green-lit gaze. “That’s why we’re here.” Her voice is steady now. “How about you all tell me why yo
u’re here?”

  A nervous silence follows. It lingers, escalating toward the unbearable, until a flat voice calls from the back, “My brother gets fifty cents a day at the mill. I get a quarter for the same damn work.”

  “The courts took my son,” hisses someone else. “Said he belonged to his father, by law.”

  Miss Pearl offers, “They arrested two of my girls on immorality, and not a one of their customers.” The end of her sentence is lost in the sudden flood of complaints: bank loans they can’t receive and schools they can’t attend; husbands they can’t divorce and votes they can’t take and positions they can’t hold.

  Juniper holds up a hand. “You’re here because you want more for yourselves, better for your daughters. Because it’s easy to ignore a woman.” Juniper’s lips twist in a feral smile. “But a hell of a lot harder to ignore a witch.”

  The word witch cracks like lightning over the room. Another silence follows, tense and electric.

  A voice cuts through the hush, hard and foreign-sounding. “There’s no such thing as witches. Not anymore.” It’s the big Russian woman from Agnes’s mill, arms crossed like a pair of pistols across her breast.

  “No,” Juniper parries. “But there will be.”

  “How?”

  Juniper looks again at her sisters, and Beatrice knows from the jut of her jaw that she’s about to say the thing which they agreed she shouldn’t say, at least not on the first meeting, and that there’s nothing at all she can do about it.

  She smiles benevolently down at the Russian woman. “By calling back the Lost Way of Avalon.”

  The faces of the gathered women contort into two dozen separate species of shock: shocked outrage, shocked disbelief, shocked confusion, shocked hunger. Then the room erupts as the ones who know the story relate it to the ones who don’t, as a handful of women gather their skirts and scuttle for the exit with horrified expressions, as Miss Quinn laughs softly into the chaos.

  Juniper arcs her voice high over the noise. “We don’t have all the ways and words yet, but we will soon.” Beatrice wonders how she manages to sound so sure, so confident, as if they are likely to find the map to an ancient power tucked in their skirt pockets. “In the meantime, we propose an exchange. Each of you knows a spell or two or three, maybe more. Share them with the Sisters, and together—”

  The Russian interrupts again. “Spells to clean laundry and scour pots! Feh.”

  “I know a spell that can kill a man stone dead,” says Juniper, softly. “Would you like to hear it?” The Russian doesn’t answer. “I bet some of these other ladies know more than they’ve said. And even small spells are worth something. You heard about those union boys in Chicago? Look what hell they raised with nothing but a little bit of rust.” Beatrice refrains from noting that they were men, and thus far less likely to be hunted, tried, and burned by a jury of their peers.

  One of the other mill-girls, a kerchiefed woman about Agnes’s age, says, unexpectedly, “My cousin was there, with Debs and the Railway Union. He’s back home now, at least for a while. I could . . . talk to him, if you like.”

  Someone else sneers, “Men’s magic. Wouldn’t do a damn thing for us.” Jennie fidgets in the front row, cornsilk hair sliding to cover her face.

  Juniper addresses the sneerer. “And who told you that? What if your daddy or your preacher or your mama was dead wrong?” She nods to the kerchiefed girl. “You—Annie?—talk to your cousin. Why not?” She throws her gaze around the rest of the room. “Why not at least try? Join us. Learn from us, teach us, fight with us, for all that more you want.” She gestures behind her, to where Beatrice’s notebook lies open on the table. “Add your name to the list and swear the oath if you’re interested. If not”—her eyes slant to the door—“head on home. Forget you ever dreamed of anything better.”

  In the silence that follows, the Russian woman climbs to her feet. A pair of girls stand with her, so broad-shouldered and blue-eyed they can only be her daughters. There’s a long moment when Beatrice is certain the three of them are headed for the door, that half the room will follow, unswayed by the shine of Juniper’s smile. That the Sisters of Avalon will fail before it even begins.

  The big woman stalks to the table. She grips the pen in awkward fingers and signs her name on the page, right beneath the heading written in Jennie’s neat hand: THE SISTERS OF AVALON.

  Then Juniper is grinning and many chairs are scraping, many women are climbing to their feet. They form a rough line leading to the table and the book, their eyes bright, their chins high, their voices stuttering over the words of the oath: Tell your tale and tell it true, cross my heart and hope to die, strike me down if I lie.

  Only Miss Quinn and her companions remain sitting.

  Beatrice threads her way across the room and perches beside them.

  “An excellent showing, Misses Eastwood.” Quinn nods.

  “Thank you. Won’t—will you join us?”

  Quinn’s eyes meet hers very briefly, a yellow flick, and Beatrice can’t name the thing she sees in them. Regret? Guilt? “Oh, I think not.”

  There’s a rustle beside her as the oldest of her companions climbs to her feet: a small, very brown woman wearing a wide-brimmed hat and a black-lace veil. There’s something familiar about her that Beatrice can’t place. “I’m afraid we are not interested in”—she makes a gesture at the chattering women, the packed room—“publicity.”

  “What are you interested in, then?”

  A flash of teeth behind the veil. “Power, Miss Eastwood.” She nods regally and her companions stand beside her. “Please do let us know if you find any.”

  The woman adjusts a handbag on her elbow and Beatrice imagines for a spine-prickling second that she sees an animal peering out of it—a sleek, furred creature with ember eyes—but then the woman and her handbag are gone, leaving behind the faint, peppery scent of cloves. Quinn follows shortly after.

  Beatrice watches them go, wondering precisely what goes on at meetings of the Colored League.

  She stations herself beside Juniper and watches the list of names growing longer. Some of their mother’s-names are the usual sort, alliterative and botanical—Annie Asphodel Flynn, Florence Foxglove Pearl—but some of them are strange and foreign. Gertrude Red Bird Bonnin. Rose Chava Winslow. Frankie Ursa Black. She wants to ask what they mean and where they come from, wants to follow them back to the ways and words used by their mother’s mothers.

  The Russian woman stumps over to Juniper and crosses her arms again. Beneath the permanent scowl of her face there’s a little of the same glow Beatrice sees in the rest of the room: hunger, or hope.

  “Not many of us,” she observes gruffly.

  Juniper claps her on the back, slightly too hard. “Oh, there will be, Yulia my friend. I got an idea.”

  Beatrice looks up to meet Agnes’s eyes. She and Agnes are still wary with one another, careful as cats, but at this moment Beatrice is certain they are both wondering the same thing: whether there is anything in the world more sinister than their youngest sister in possession of an idea.

  “About this idea of yours,” Bella begins.

  It’s past midnight and No. 7 South Sybil is finally empty again. Agnes rolled out spare quilts for her sisters and told them gruffly that it was too late to walk halfway across the city. Juniper is curled on her side, tired enough not to care how hard and flat the floor is, hovering right at the bleary edge of sleep.

  She produces an eloquent hnnngh in response.

  “Is it a dangerous idea?”

  “Nah.”

  “If you were to estimate the size and scale of the riot the idea would provoke—the number of innocent bystanders it would put in St. Charity’s—”

  Juniper hurls a pillow at Bella and is satisfied by her subsequent squawk. “I was thinking of a few demonstrations, is all. Nothing dangerous.” She thinks unwillingly of Electa lowering herself carefully into her seat, clutching her cracked rib. Of Jennie’s bruised jaw going from
midnight blue to dawn yellow. Of her sister asking what comes after?

  “Demonstrations of . . . witching?” Bella asks.

  “No, of knitting. Yes, witching.” Juniper folds her arms behind her head, watching the play of shadows through the gap beneath the door. A pair of legs walking past, doubling back, pausing in the hall. “Something to show them what we can do.”

  “Who is ‘them’?”

  Juniper shrugs, invisible in the dark. “The women who think we’re lying or stupid or selling them snake oil. The men who think they can beat us in the street. Everybody, I guess.”

  There’s a long pause before Bella says, with unflattering shock, “That’s . . . not a terrible idea.”

  “Why, thank you.”

  “It would certainly help with recruitment, and the larger our organization becomes the more collective knowledge we possess. Of course we’ll need to be quite clever in our selection of spells—” Bella’s voice is warming with the kind of scholarly enthusiasm that means she could keep going for hours or possibly weeks, when a second pillow whumps into her and Agnes grates, “Go to sleep, you ingrates.”

  The ingrates go to sleep.

  Whoever was standing in the hall must have left, because the light shines unbroken now. It’s only in the final blurred seconds before she closes her eyes that it occurs to Juniper that she never heard their footsteps.

  Moly and spite a woman make,

  May every man his true form take.

  A spell for swine, requiring wine & wicked intent

  It’s Beatrice Belladonna who finds the words and ways for their first demonstration. Well, who else would it be? Who else spends their days wrapped in ink and paper-dust? Who else dreams in threes and sevens, in once-upon-a-times and witch-tales?