The Once and Future Witches

by Alix E. Harrow

  “Good girl.” He gives her stomach a hard, careless pat, like a man might give a horse.

  Agnes walks blind down the alley, rain slicking her hair against her throat, and despair follows her. It’s almost a relief when she feels its teeth against her throat.

  Juniper has never met despair. She’s caught glimpses of some black creature edging nearer—when her sisters abandoned her, when she lay down on the fresh-turned earth of her grandmother’s grave—but she’s driven it back with fire and fury, every time.

  But now she hears its claws clicking down the cobbled streets behind her. Coming closer.

  She knows better than to let the fear show on her face. The officers around her are hungry for it, waiting to lap at her terror like tomcats at a bowl of milk.

  Juniper declines to feed them.

  She keeps her eyes blazing and her teeth bared as they prop her in front of an accordion-box camera. As a fist snarls itself in her hair and forces her to face the camera’s glassy eye.

  She keeps her chin raised as they rip the locket from her throat and the dress from her back and leave her shivering in her shift. As eyes rove across the pimpled white of her flesh, skinning her.

  She keeps her spine straight as they drag her down stone steps, past the leering, greenish faces of drunks and derelicts, pickpockets and prostitutes. As they fling her into ankle-deep water that smells of oil and shit.

  Juniper stands with her wet shift half-slicked to her body and cold mud splattered over one cheekbone, staring into the low glare of a gas-lamp with her fingers curled into fists.

  “That all you got? Weak-ass chicken-shitted sons of—”

  Hands fall on her again, wrenching her arms behind her back. She braces her belly for the blow and prays briefly that they won’t bust anything important. Three bless and keep me.

  But the blow never comes: instead she feels chill metal press against her throat. She swears and arcs against the man behind her, but she hears the rasp and click of rusted tumblers turning in a lock, and a piercing, deadening cold sluices through her veins.

  They release her. Her bad leg crumples beneath her and her knees splash back into the reeking water. She reaches for her own throat with trembling fingers and finds an iron collar, locked tight.

  Back in the olden-times witches were punished with bridles to stop their tongues from speaking the words, shackles to stop their hands from working the ways—and collars. To break their will.

  The hot heartbeat of magic is gone. So are the lines that lead to her sisters, but Juniper thinks dully that it doesn’t matter; they won’t come for her, now that they know.

  Dimly, she hears the slosh of booted feet and the low, mean sound of laughter.

  Then she is alone in the dark. When her daddy died—when she killed him and set fire to what was left of him, so that no ghost or spirit might linger a single second longer in the world—she thought at least she would never be locked down in the dark again.

  She was wrong.

  Despair creeps toward her out of the deeps, the color of night, but Juniper does not let it take her. Instead—her voice tangling with the trickle of water, echoing against wet stone—she tells it a story.

  nce upon a time there was a foolish miller who bragged that his daughter was a witch who could spin straw into silver. The king, who was even more foolish than the miller, sent his guards to fetch the girl and tossed her into a cell full of straw. He ordered her to spin it all into silver before dawn or face the stake, and left her alone to weep.

  Just before midnight a creaking voice asked the miller’s daughter, “Why do you weep so?”

  “Oh,” she answered, “because my father is a fool and I will surely burn tomorrow, for I am no witch.”

  An old, old woman lurched out of the shadows, dressed in tattered rags and carrying a black-wood staff. A pair of rubies were set into the staff’s head, like the red eyes of a snake.

  “Ah,” she said to the miller’s daughter, “but I am. What will you give me if I turn this straw to silver?”

  With the girl’s golden necklace clasped around her neck, the Crone sat down at the spinning wheel.

  At dawn the king was very pleased to find a room full of spun silver, enough to build a statue or a ship. He was so pleased, and so foolish, that he locked the girl in an even larger cell the following night and demanded that she perform the trick again.

  The miller’s daughter wept, and soon she heard the shush of a tattered cloak along the floor. She and the Crone haggled briefly, and this time when the Crone sat down at the wheel she wore the girl’s diamond ring on her finger.

  By morning the cell was full of silver and the king, who was by now beginning to dream of entire armadas, locked her in a third cell, larger still.

  The miller’s daughter wept, a little perfunctorily, and the Crone appeared. But there were no necklaces or rings left to barter. The Crone asked for the girl’s firstborn child, instead, and the miller’s daughter—who did not want to burn at the stake, who counted her own life more heavily than that of a child not yet thought of or wanted—agreed.

  The straw was spun. The king was pleased. So pleased, in fact, that he made her a king’s wife instead of a miller’s daughter.

  In time the king’s wife became a prince’s mother. On the child’s name-day the Crone appeared to claim her debt. The king, seeing the Crone with her black-wood staff, realized the secret behind his wife’s miraculous spinning and spurned her, so that the king’s wife lost her crown and her child in the same hour.

  The woman wept, and the Crone took pity on her. “If you can find my tower within three days’ time, I will forgive your debt,” she said, and vanished.

  For two days the woman walked the high hills of her kingdom, barefoot, ragged, her gown stained with milk. On the evening of the third day the last of her milk ran from her breasts and fell like pearls to the earth. The pearls ran together, forming a line, which became a pale, milky snake with red rubies for eyes. The mother—or, in some tellings, the Mother—followed the snake deeper into the woods.

  Perhaps, among the darkest and oldest trees, she found a tower. Perhaps a fire was burning in the hearth and bread was waiting on the table, and her son lay wrapped in black rags, sleeping gently. Perhaps she and her child lived in the tower happily ever after.

  Neither the Mother nor the Crone was ever seen in the kingdom again.

  Mirror, mirror, on the wall,

  Tell the truth, reveal all.

  A spell to see, requiring a mirror & a borrowed belonging

  Beatrice Belladonna expects despair to hurt, but it doesn’t feel like much of anything. She thinks of Jonah in the belly of the whale and the little red witch inside the wolf and wonders if either of them felt a little relieved to be eaten, to be taken away from the world and permitted to curl in the suffocating black, alone.

  Beatrice sleeps. She dreams—of locked cells and spun silver, of white snakes and black towers—and wakes sweating in the stale heat of midday. She wills herself back to sleep, staring at the pulsing dark of her own eyelids until she slips into a dazed, dreamless place.

  The next time she wakes the attic is all slanting shadows and twilit windows, and Miss Cleopatra Quinn is sitting at the end of her bed.

  (Beatrice is abruptly aware that her left cheek is sticky with spittle and that she is wearing her oldest and most mortifying nightdress, the one with little bonneted ducks embroidered at the collar.)

  “I believe in the story it’s a kiss that wakes Snow White from her sleep, but I’ve always found that a little presumptuous.” Quinn’s voice is light, but her eyes on Beatrice are heavy with worry. “I tried to visit your office at the library today.”

  Beatrice licks sleep-gummed lips. “It’s not my office anymore.”

  “So I was made to understand.” She adds, after a pause, “I’m sorry.”

  The next pause is much longer and emptier. The interior of Beatrice’s skull feels dim and cobwebbed, like a closet she prefers not
to open.

  Quinn strokes the brim of the derby hat in her lap. “The Post reports five arrests—Frankie, Gertrude, Jennie, the oldest Domontovich girl—all of whom are charged with general mayhem, the promotion of sin, and public witchcraft. Juniper has . . . additional charges, of course. As far as I can tell, most of the girls were shipped four miles south to the women’s workhouse. Except Jennie, who I can’t seem to find, and Juniper, who is in the Deeps.”

  Beatrice wonders vaguely what Quinn expects her to do with this report. Cry, perhaps. But even crying seems messy and troublesome compared to the clean relief of sleep.

  Quinn continues in a clipped, professional voice. “Your sister’s trial is set for the middle of next week, but the Deeps are not a healthful place to linger, and the solstice is the day after tomorrow. I don’t think we can afford to wait.”

  Beatrice lets this rattle through the cobwebby closet of her brain for a while before asking, cautiously, “Wait?”

  “To retrieve your sister from the custody of the New Salem Police Department,” Quinn clarifies. “To rescue her.”

  It takes far too long for Beatrice to recognize the rusty, bitter sound coming from her mouth as a laugh. “You and Miss Araminta assured me it was too late and sent me home like a schoolgirl. Now you’re proposing some sort of daring rescue?”

  Small, pitying lines appear between Quinn’s brows. “As I recall, we merely discouraged you from visiting the Hall of Justice and asking if they would give your sister back, pretty please. None of us would leave a sister, or a Daughter, to rot in the Deeps if we could help it.”

  Beatrice scoots herself upright in bed, muscles cramped from an entire day spent in stubborn sleep, no longer caring about her mortifying nightdress (she still cares). “But we can’t help it! We have no legal recourse. No financial recourse—I am no longer even employed! No witching sufficient to sway a jury or dig a tunnel or disappear a woman from a locked cell.” Bella makes a hopeless gesture at the room. “I would like to s-save my sister. Even knowing what she did, what she is. But it is not possible.”

  The pity in Quinn’s face turns tart. “Very true, Beatrice. So don’t you think it’s time we considered the impossible?”

  “I don’t—”

  “Oh, for Saints’ sake, woman.” Quinn swats her blanketed legs with her derby hat. “Get out of bed. Use whatever remains of your common sense. All summer we’ve been inching closer to the thing that could turn the world upside down. That could give us back what we lost, make the impossible possible again.”

  Hope flutters in Beatrice’s chest, broken-winged. It hurts far worse than despair. “But our theories are so tenuous. Mere . . . moonbeams.”

  Quinn swats her again. “They are perfectly scholarly! Considered, documented, based on reliable sources—”

  “Children’s stories! Nursery rhymes! Nothing respectable, nothing verifiable!”

  “Must a thing be bound and shelved in order to matter? Some stories were never written down. Some stories were passed by whisper and song, mother to daughter to sister. Bits and pieces were lost over the centuries, I’m sure, details shifted, but not all of them.” Quinn stands, pacing. “Towers and roses. Maiden’s blood. Crone’s tears. Mother’s milk. Would you really deny your own discoveries? Surely you are not such a coward.”

  “Oh, I assure you I am.”

  “You aren’t—”

  “But even if I agree with you about the ways, we don’t have all the words.” Bella turns her hands palm up, a gesture of surrender. “We don’t even have my notes anymore.”

  She’s interrupted by a polite tap at the door. A polite, familiar voice calls, “Miss Eastwood? I’m so sorry for the lateness of the hour. But you left your notebook at the library, and I thought I ought to return it.”

  There’s a brief silence while Quinn’s eyebrows climb and Beatrice peels out of her sheets and tugs a robe over her horrible nightdress. “H-Henry?” Beatrice kicks aside the line of salt and unbolts her door to find Mr. Blackwell blinking affably on the stairs. In his hand he holds a small, shabby book bound in black leather.

  Beatrice snatches it and strokes the familiar pleats and cracks of the spine. “Oh, thank you! I thought it would be confiscated by the authorities, in light of the accusations leveled against me.” Beatrice recalls herself and adds, “Not that the accusations are true. They’re quite false.”

  “Are they?” Mr. Blackwell asks mildly.

  Beatrice is blinking her way toward some confused combination of denial and confession when Miss Quinn steps into view at her shoulder. “No. Although I don’t think our Beatrice has been holding congress with demons, do you?”

  “Ah, Miss Quinn, a pleasure.” Mr. Blackwell looks distinctly unsurprised to see Quinn in Beatrice’s room. “Well, I’m sorry to interrupt, ladies. I only wanted to return the book”—Beatrice clutches it tighter to her chest—“and wish you both the best of luck.”

  “With—what?” Beatrice asks.

  “Well.” Mr. Blackwell gives a slightly embarrassed cough. “With calling back the Lost Way of Avalon. I presume.”

  It occurs to Beatrice that she has gone slightly mad. Surely she did not actually hear Mr. Henry Blackwell—head of Special Collections, possessor of tufty ear-hair and a rather grand collection of bow ties—wish her luck with the restoration of witchcraft.

  Quinn reaches over her shoulder to pull the door wider. “Why don’t you come in and have a seat, Mr. Blackwell.”

  Mr. Blackwell sits at Beatrice’s wobbly kitchen table, not looking at Beatrice’s robe and nightdress, smiling politely at his own thumbs.

  “Did you overhear us?”

  “Oh, come now, Miss Eastwood,” he scoffs gently. “I approved all your requests for materials. I loaded the carts myself and wheeled them to your office and scratched them out of the log afterward. Witch-tales and folklore. Old Salem and Avalon. Every instance of significant magic after the Georgian Inquisition. I put the pieces together.” He transfers his polite smile to Beatrice. “I may not be a witch, Miss Eastwood, but I’m quite a tolerable librarian.”

  Something in Beatrice’s face—the numb creep of betrayal—compels him to add, even more gently, “I have not told a soul and do not intend to. My ancestors broke with the Church after they witnessed the atrocities of the first purge. My own grandmother harbored witches who fled from Old Salem and slaves who fled from the Old South. My mother would return from the grave to haunt me forevermore if I did not at least offer you my assistance now, such as it is.”

  Trust less easily, Quinn advised her. But Beatrice has never learned how. “We’re trying to save my sister and we don’t know how. She’s locked in the Deeps facing trial for murder by witchcraft.”

  Mr. Blackwell makes a considering sort of face. “And did she? Murder someone, I mean.”

  “I don’t know,” Beatrice lies. Then, “Probably.” And, even quieter, “Yes, I think she did.”

  “Was it a necessary act? A just act?”

  “I don’t know.” She thinks of her daddy’s charming smile and red eyes, of the iron squeal of the cellar hinges. “Yes.”

  Mr. Blackwell nods genially at his own knuckles. “As a man of God I disapprove, but as a mere man, well . . . I wonder sometimes where the first witch came from. If perhaps Adam deserved Eve’s curse.” His smile twists. “If behind every witch is a woman wronged.”

  Beatrice is too busy staring at him to object when Quinn slides the black leather book out of her grasp and opens it to a page of signatures beneath the heading THE SISTERS OF AVALON. Quinn produces a pen and adds three words to the bottom of the page before sliding it across the table to Mr. Blackwell.

  “There’s still room, if you’d like to become a formal member.”

  “Oh, how generous of you. That is, I wouldn’t like to intrude—” Beatrice notes with some astonishment that Mr. Blackwell’s ears have gone pink with delight.

  “Not at all,” she murmurs. “The more the merrier.” And, with the sensation
that she’s experiencing a very vivid and unlikely dream, Beatrice guides Mr. Blackwell and Miss Quinn through their oaths and inducts them to whatever remains of the Sisters of Avalon. Quinn does not flinch or hesitate as she crosses her heart. Her eyes on Beatrice are a pair of promises, brightest gold.

  In the quiet that follows, Mr. Blackwell says, “So. There is, I assume, some reason you haven’t snapped your fingers and called the Lost Way in order to save your sister.”

  Beatrice tugs her robe tighter around her shoulders, feeling tired and shabby and not at all like someone who could restore the ancient power of witching or stage a daring rescue. “We have the will, and at least some guesses about the ways. But we’re missing the words.” She flips through her black notebook, trailing her fingers over the rhyme as if it might sprout extra lines and verses. “We’ve looked in every book of witch-tales, every children’s songbook, every scrap relating to Old Salem. If the words ever existed, they’re well and truly lost now.”

  Mr. Blackwell does not look especially displeased to be faced with an unsolvable puzzle; he looks instead like a man receiving an early birthday gift. “Well, you know what they say: if you want to find something lost, you ought to look where you last found it.” He beams across the table. “Ladies, I have a suggestion.”

  It’s been a long while since Agnes felt lonely. When she first came to New Salem the loneliness was like a cold shackle around her ankle, weighing her steps, tugging her back, but in time she stopped feeling the weight of it.

  Now she can almost hear the clank and drag of chains at her heels as she paces. Her room at South Sybil is still unnaturally large, full of the ghostly echo of women laughing and teasing and whispering to one another.

  Her pacing is interrupted sometimes by tentative taps on the door and whispers of hyssop. Girls who want to know when the next meeting will be and if Juniper is all right and if Agnes knows any good curses for Hill’s men, who prowl the city with brass badges on their chests.