The Once and Future Witches

by Alix E. Harrow

  Agnes ought to tell them to burn their gowns and forget about witching forever, but the words catch in her throat like stale bread. It’s the way the girls look at her—scared but not quite scared away, still hungry and hopeful—or maybe it’s the glow in their eyes when they say Juniper’s name.

  She tells them to go home. To lie low. She lets them keep their hope a little while longer, and they leave her alone.

  Except she’s not really alone. She never is, now. She whispers to her daughter as she walks, snatches of songs and half-forgotten rhymes, promises she knows she can’t keep. It’ll be alright. I’ll keep you safe.

  In the deepening gray of the second evening her pacing is interrupted by three bold thuds at the door and a man’s voice. “Hello? Hyssop.”

  Only one man knew that word. Agnes doesn’t move.

  Mr. August Lee knocks again. “Miss Eastwood? Agnes?” A slight pause. “I see your shoes in the hall.”

  She moves stiffly to the door and opens it a slim, miserly crack.

  August’s haystack hair is standing on end, his eyes wide with relief. “Oh, thank the Saints. Your name wasn’t in the papers, but I wasn’t sure whether . . .” He trails away in the face of her hollow stare. “May I come in?” He holds up a grease-blotched newspaper, and Agnes catches the hot smell of gravy and meat.

  She steps away from the door and settles herself on the edge of her bed, swallowing the sniveling gratitude in her throat. A strong woman wouldn’t cry just because someone was worried about her.

  August fetches a tin plate and unwraps the newspaper to reveal a pair of folded hand-pies, still hot. He hands them to her and she doesn’t cry about that either, or mention that she’s eaten nothing but boiled eggs and cold coffee for two days. She doesn’t think any man has ever brought her hot pies, ever thought of her body as a thing to be taken care of rather than merely taken.

  He hovers uncertainly until she takes a bite and makes an involuntary, animal noise somewhere between a growl and a groan. Then a crooked smile flicks over his face and he sits beside her, slightly too close.

  “I should have come earlier. I’m so sorry, Agnes.”

  The tone of his voice and the angle of his body tells her he would quite like to put his arms around her. Agnes stiffens. “I’m alright.”

  She’s not alright: she’s hungry and heartsick, haunted by the slack line that once led to Juniper, and she can’t seem to make herself wash her sister’s blood from her hand. But the concern in August’s voice makes her teeth hurt, like too-sweet tea.

  “I should have gone with you. Or stopped you from going altogether.”

  “What makes you think you could have stopped us?” Agnes hears the chill of her own voice and tries half-heartedly to warm it. “It wouldn’t have mattered if you were there. They were waiting for us.”

  He shakes his head. “One of your Sisters must have blabbed.”

  The chill returns to her voice, doubled in its absence. “They didn’t.”

  “Well, maybe they didn’t mean to. But you know how girls gossip.”

  The chill quadruples. “They didn’t,” she says again. “Because if they did, their own tongue would’ve split in two as the words left their lips, and the whole city would know them for the snake they are.”

  August blinks at her, eyes round and boyish. “But how—oh. The oath.” His hand makes a concerned gesture toward his own lips, as if he’d like to check the condition of his tongue.

  He recovers with visible effort. “Still. I wish I’d been there to protect you.” He looks at her through the pale haze of his lashes, warm and handsome, perhaps a little expectant. She says nothing.

  The longer she says nothing the more troubled his look becomes, like an actor whose leading lady is departing from her script, refusing to play her part. Now is the moment she’s supposed to fall weeping into his arms. She’s supposed to be distraught, delicate, undone; he’s supposed to comfort her in her hour of need, and in her gratitude—well, who knows?

  Agnes imagines leaning close and sinking her teeth into his lip, biting until the taste of blood overcame the taste of tears on her tongue. She’d been so taken by him, so seduced by the admiration in his eyes. But she should have known no man ever loved a woman’s strength—they only love the place where it runs out. They love a strong will finally broken, a straight spine bent.

  August’s hand moves to cover hers on the bed and she pulls away. “I think you should leave.” Her voice is so far past cold it might qualify as glacial.

  “What did I—why—” He recoils, his face so baffled and hurt that a familiar fear brews in her belly. Will he leave when she asks, or will he linger, wheedling and wanting?

  She wets dry lips and wishes for a pocketful of nettles. “Get out.”

  He does, pausing only for a sorry-looking dip of his head. Agnes sighs shaky relief.

  She carries her plate back to the table. It’s only as she reaches for the newspaper to wrap the remains of her pies that she sees the face staring up at her from the front page: sharp teeth and wild eyes; a doubled trail of dark ink running from her nose; a stranger’s fist snarled in her hair, baring her throat before the camera like an animal before the knife.

  Juniper.

  Juniper sleeps. At first her dreams are all witch-tales and towers, but then they’re simply home: the honeysuckle taste of the air and the undersea shadows of the woods in midsummer; the hollow boom of thunder on the far side of the mountain and the clean taste of creek-water on her tongue. She didn’t know cleanness had a taste before she came to New Salem and saw the Thorn sludging past, its waters clotted with gray froth and refuse.

  Now that water seeps from the stone walls of her cell and trickles into her dreams. She is standing in Mama Mags’s house, the light prisming through rows of Mason jars, the smell of witching on her tongue. Mags is there, her hair its usual nest of bone-colored bracken, her eyes like river-stones. She’s asking Juniper a question—The locket, girl, where’s my locket?—and then there’s water around Juniper’s ankles, cold and grease-slick, rising fast—

  Juniper wakes. For a bleary second she thinks her own dream woke her, or the furtive splishing and rippling from live things in the shadows of the cell, but then she sees the glow: lantern-light, growing brighter. Someone is coming down the steps.

  Her heart clangs against her ribs. They can’t be back yet. The hours run strangely in the Deeps, but Juniper can tell by the weight of silence above her that it’s very late, long before dawn. Surely she has more time.

  But the light swells like a scream. Someone is coming.

  She isn’t ready. The first time, two officers held her arms while a third delivered timid, random blows to her body, seeming half-afraid that she would transform into a serpent or a harpy. They asked her questions—Who were her co-conspirators? Where did they meet? When had she last lain with the Devil?—and seemed spooked by her silence.

  The second time, they’d brought a professional with them, an expressionless man in a leather apron who did not seem afraid at all. He placed a finger against the iron collar around her throat and whispered a word. Then he merely waited while the iron grew hotter and hotter, steaming in the damp, drawing red lines of blisters around her neck. He stopped only when she begged.

  He left without asking her any questions at all. The cooked-meat smell of her own flesh lingered for a long time after.

  The lamp-light rounds the final turn of the stairs. Boots slosh in ankle-deep water. A face moves toward her, glowing pale in the darkness of the Deeps.

  Gideon Hill. Alone, except for the dog walking like a collared shadow beside him.

  He stops outside her cell, lantern raised in one hand, watery eyes watching her. She looks back at him and slouches purposefully back against the damp stone of the wall, arranging her bad leg across the rusted iron of the bed-frame. “You gave me a scare,” she drawls. “For a second I thought it was somebody important.”

  She expects him to snarl or spit or curse
her as a sinner; she can’t figure why else a city councilman would be ruining his suit in the fetid dark of the Deeps.

  He laughs. It’s a genuine laugh, low and appreciative. It sends a chill prickling down Juniper’s spine, like a warning.

  “Excuse my delay. It’s so difficult to make time to visit the condemned, during the middle of a campaign.” His voice is fuller than she remembered it, round and rich. Maybe it’s just the echo of the walls around them.

  She crosses her arms behind her head, speaking to the sagging ceiling. “It’s rude to come calling after supper, my daddy taught me.”

  “I was concerned the presence of your jailers might inhibit your honesty. I wanted to speak more . . . frankly.”

  “Well frankly, Mr. Hill”—Juniper does not look away from the ceiling, does not change her tone in the slightest—“you can go fuck yourself.”

  Another low laugh. Then a sibilant mutter too soft to hear, the clink of a tugged leash.

  Juniper startles at the sudden sloshing of boots beside her: Gideon Hill and his dog are standing inside her cell. The door remains closed and locked behind them.

  Juniper feels the fine hairs of her arms stand on end. All the scathing swagger drains away from her.

  He draws so close she can smell the fresh moonlight on his suit and feel the heat of his hound’s breath against her bare skin.

  He smiles down at her. It isn’t the craven, cringing smile she remembers from the Women’s Association, or even the hearty, false one that beams from thousands of campaign posters. This smile is all canines and red gums. It seems to be stolen from someone else entirely; Juniper would very much like to know who.

  “You girls have done very well.” Juniper wants to write the word girls on a ribbon and strangle him with it. “You chose nice, visible subjects, ideal for stirring up a fuss. It will cost the city a considerable sum to replace the statue of Saint George, by the way.”

  Juniper doesn’t think she’s ever cared less about anything. She watches him through narrowed eyes, wary as a cat.

  He shrugs at her silence. “I can’t say I’m sorry, honestly. It was always a terrible likeness. But what I want to know is—”

  “I’m not telling you a single name. So why don’t you save yourself some time and slither on home.”

  Hill flicks a disinterested finger. The gesture has more authority than Juniper thought Hill had in his entire body. “I’m not interested in names. Your friends are far more useful to me playing witch, putting the fear of God in the common folk. If I wanted them locked up with you, they would be.”

  Juniper’s fingernails cut crescents into her palms. “How did you know about the graveyard? Who blabbed?”

  Hill makes a soft, pitying sound. “No one, James.”

  He holds a hand in front of his lantern. It casts a five-fingered shadow against the scummed water between them, perfectly ordinary, until the edges ripple outward. The fingertips lengthen like claws or roots. His dog whines at his heels and he gives her a sharp, vicious kick.

  Juniper stares at the shadow with the rising, queasy sense that she got it all terribly wrong. There is indeed a witch running loose in New Salem—the kind who deals in shadow and sin, in ways and words so wicked even Mama Mags wouldn’t have touched them with a ten-foot pole—but it sure as hell isn’t Miss Grace Wiggin.

  It’s the man standing with her in the prison cell, smiling his not-right smile, looking nothing at all like the stoop-shouldered bureaucrat Juniper met at the beginning of the summer. His hair is still thinning and his eyes are still pink-rimmed and too wet, but it’s like his body is a house with a new owner. Everything is subtly rearranged: his limbs move differently in their sockets and his muscles are pinned differently to his bones. The only thing that remains unchanged is the furtive flick of his eyes.

  Hill smiles at her again, flexing the fingers of his shadow-hand. “Everything casts a shadow, Miss Eastwood, and every shadow is mine. There are no secrets in this city.”

  His hand remains still, fingers splayed, but its shadow twines itself into a shape Juniper recognizes: three circles, interwoven. The lines are uneven, interrupted by bulges that might be the heads of snakes as they swallow their tails.

  “The signature you left at your greatest works, I believe.” His voice is softer now. “Not many people know it, these days. Tell me: where did you find it?”

  Juniper gives him the sullen shrug that used to drive her daddy to drink. “Thought you knew everything.”

  “There were certain warded places, certain materials I couldn’t . . . I’m a busy man. I can’t watch everything.”

  Salt to keep things out. She grins at him. “Guess there’s one secret in this city, then.”

  “Did someone teach it to you? Was it written somewhere?” The furtive thing in his eyes is writhing right beneath the surface, a grub beneath the soil. “What else have you found?”

  “Maybe we found an ancient scroll. Maybe a fairy told it to us. Maybe we’re the secret great-great-granddaughters of the Last Three themselves.”

  The flesh of his face goes taut, the sick smile stretching into a grimace. “The Three died screaming, along with their daughters. Tell me the truth, child.”

  Juniper leans forward and spits in the water between them. It lands with a satisfying spatter of scum and snot.

  He dabs at his pant leg, sighing a little. Juniper doesn’t see the shadow until it seizes her.

  His shadow-hand oozes up her leg like a liquid spider. She swears and scrubs at it but her fingers pass through it as if it isn’t there. It scuttles up her belly and across her chest, wraps cold fingers around her throat. Dull heat gathers in her collar, mounting as the shadow-hands tighten.

  Hill watches her gasp and claw at her throat. “Clever things, these collars. They dampen magic, but they don’t actually prevent its presence—they merely react to it. An invention of Saint Glennwald Hale, in the sixteen-hundreds.”

  Her blisters hiss and pop against the hot metal. A scream gathers in her throat, but she meets Hill’s eyes and clamps her jaw against it.

  He gives another short sigh, as if this is all rather tiresome and distasteful, and Juniper feels the oily creep of his shadow climbing higher. It moves up her neck and slides chill fingers between her lips, prying apart her teeth and oozing like oil down her throat. She gags.

  “For the last time, girl: Where did you see their sign? What else have you found?”

  The shadow slides deeper, questing and clawing, and she feels words pulled from her, rising like vomit in her throat. “We saw it on the tower door.”

  “On Alban Eilir?” Juniper stares up at him, bewildered, gagging on shadows, and he amends, “The equinox. The tower on the equinox?”

  “Yes.” The word is stolen from her, pulled out between reluctant teeth.

  “You and your sisters are the ones who called it, were you not?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you have been trying to find the necessary means to make a second attempt?”

  “Yes.”

  “And have you succeeded?” Juniper hears the shift in his voice, catches the pale grub of fear in his eyes, and understands that this question is the one he wants answered more than any other, the real reason she’s locked in the Deeps with a shadow-hand between her teeth.

  She fights as the confession is dragged out of her, feels the edges of the word slicing the soft meat of her throat. It leaves her lips with a splutter of blood. “No.”

  She can almost see the tension unwind from Hill’s frame. The shadow retreats, coiling like a snake from her mouth, leaving Juniper to retch helplessly into the water below. It’s not just the black taste of the shadow in her mouth—it’s the invasion of it, the queasy betrayal of her own body. Even on his worst days her daddy could only touch the flesh-and-blood of her; her will remained her own.

  Somewhere above her Hill is straightening his cuffs, wrapping the dog-leash neatly around his palm. “So I suspected. But some of your spells have bee
n . . . substantial, and I wondered if somehow—but no.”

  She feels his hand on her cheek, chill and damp, and lacks even the energy to spin and bite it.

  “Thank you, Miss Eastwood. You’ve quite put my mind at ease.” He wades back to the cell door with his dog picking her way delicately behind him. They pass like ghosts through the iron.

  “What are you?” Juniper wishes her voice didn’t shake as she spoke, that there wasn’t acid sick drying on her shift.

  The warm glow of his lantern is already spiraling back up the steps. He calls back, “Merely a man, Miss Eastwood. And perhaps—if you and your sisters keep stirring up trouble—a mayor. We’ll see in November.”

  Juniper curls around herself in the center of the iron bed-frame trying to tuck her bare flesh away from the shadows. She dreams herself home again, but this time she is running endlessly down the rutted clay of the drive, calling after her sisters. They do not answer.

  Agnes is not dreaming. She is awake, pacing again, when she hears the second knock on her door.

  She already knows who it is. She felt her sister coming nearer through the line between them, like a fish reeled in to shore, and only Bella is capable of tapping quite that timidly at a door.

  But when she opens the door she finds two women standing in the hall: Bella, accompanied by the woman she still insists on referring to as Miss Quinn, although the rest of the Sisters have called her Cleo for weeks now.

  Cleo hurries across the threshold as if she doesn’t like to be out in the open. Bella follows after her, sliding the lock behind them.

  “It’s the middle of the night,” Agnes observes. She adds, half against her will, “I heard the police were hassling women walking the streets at night.”

  Bella waves this concern away. “Oh, we weren’t on the streets. And we’re in something of a hurry. We’re taking the earliest train north in the morning, and I needed to give this to you before we depart.” She withdraws a glass vial from her sleeve and extends it to Agnes.

  Agnes does not take it. She can see three droplets clinging to the glass, clear as water. “What is this?”