The Once and Future Witches

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The Once and Future Witches Page 23

by Alix E. Harrow


  “Crone’s tears. You’ll need to provide mother’s milk, of course, and find some way to get a drop or two of Juniper’s blood. We really ought to be together to conduct the ritual properly, but we’ll have to hope the Lost Way of Avalon isn’t too particular about the details.”

  “The Lost—” It’s only then that Agnes understands what her sister intends to do, what madness has come knocking at her door in the middle of the night. “I thought we didn’t have the words.”

  Cleo shrugs rather casually. “Your sister and I are going on a research expedition.”

  Bella nods briskly. “May we count on you to be ready on the evening of the solstice?”

  Agnes considers for a long moment. Her daughter is very still inside her, as if she, too, is waiting for her answer. “No.”

  Bella tsks at her. “Well whatever you have planned, surely you can skip it. This is worth missing a shift.”

  “No,” Agnes says, and finds her eyes sliding away from Bella’s as she says it. “I meant: you may not count on me.”

  She hears Cleo gasp, but not Bella. Perhaps she isn’t all that surprised that Agnes would disappoint her. “This is our baby sister we’re talking about,” she says softly.

  “And do you know what our baby sister did? What she is?” Agnes read the article beneath Juniper’s bloodied face, understood why Juniper ran away from the only place she ever loved.

  “Yes.” Bella is watching her with those steady, storm-cloud eyes. “We are all what we have to be, to stay alive. Cowards. Traitors.” The eyes flash, lightning behind the clouds. “Even villains, sometimes. Surely you can’t hate her for it.”

  Agnes looks away again. “No.”

  “Agnes, she needs us—”

  “Oh, don’t pretend this is about anything but you and your books and your cleverness. You just want to be right, to snap your fingers and see one of your precious stories come to life.” She fires the words like arrows; by the stricken chill of Bella’s face, she knows they were well aimed.

  Bella spins on her heel and strides to the cracked mirror hanging in its frame. She whispers to it—Mirror, mirror, on the wall, tell the truth, reveal all—a rhyme Agnes knows well, stolen from her favorite witch-tale as a girl, and rubs something across its surface. Agnes thinks it might be a lock of hair the color of crow feathers.

  Heat in the air. The wild smell of witching. Then Beatrice removes the mirror from its nail and brings it to Agnes. “Just a little spell I learned from a story,” she sneers, and tilts the surface so that Agnes can see the image inside it.

  It should be the ceiling of South Sybil—sagging plaster, brownish stains spreading like the map to a foreign country—but it isn’t. It’s a woman’s body, doubled along every fracture of the mirror, lying pale and still as bone. Her eyes are closed, the lids bluish, translucent, like the eyes of cave-creatures. She is nearly naked, bruises blooming darkly through her tattered shift, left foot twisted and pale with scars. A collar is clamped tight around her neck, and the skin beneath it is the color of uncooked meat.

  Agnes prefers the Juniper that grins up from The Post, all teeth and defiance. This Juniper is just a girl, young and fragile and half-broken.

  Bella’s breath mists the surface. “I know you’ve always chosen your own hide over ours. I know you’ve never much cared what happens to us, but—”

  “I always cared, Bell. Always.” Agnes swallows the salt-promise of tears in her throat, hardens her voice. “But it never fucking mattered that I cared. I couldn’t stop him, couldn’t protect you—couldn’t even protect myself—” The tears threaten again, and Agnes breaks off.

  There’s a pause, and after it Bella’s voice has softened very slightly. “Maybe this time we can make it matter. Miss Quinn and I will find the words. Juniper has always had will to spare. We need you to gather the ways. Will you do it?”

  Agnes doesn’t want Bella to speak softly to her. She wants to keep that bitter coal burning hot between them, because once it cools she’ll have nothing left but terrible guilt. She hadn’t wanted to betray her, to spill Bella’s secrets to their daddy, but surviving always comes at a cost.

  Agnes looks again at the girl in the mirror, eyes tracing the dark blush of bruises, the shine of old scars. Juniper’s lips move in her sleep. Don’t leave me.

  Agnes feels the taut scab of her sister’s blood dried on her palm. She closes her eyes. “Yes.”

  Bella gives her a cool nod and sets the mirror on the table. “Wait for my sign.”

  “But then I’m through. If we—after we save her, I’m done with witching and women’s rights and all the rest.” She rests her palm on the full moon of her belly. “The cost is too high.”

  “Fine.” Bella’s lip curls very slightly before she turns away. “It’s funny. Mama always said you were the strong one.”

  She unbolts the door and steps back into the deeper dark of the hall. Cleo moves to follow her and Agnes reaches for her sleeve. “Where are you going? To look for the words?”

  “Why, the last place we know for certain the words were spoken.” Cleo removes her sleeve from Agnes’s hand, lips curling. “Old Salem.”

  Hark, hark,

  The dogs do bark,

  When witches come to town.

  A spell to raise the alarm, requiring a gnawed bone & a strong whistle

  Beatrice Belladonna always wanted to see Old Salem. It makes regular appearances in her favorite penny-papers—a burned city full of charred bones and the wailing ghosts of witches—and even in more academic texts it retains a certain Gothic drama. It’s always drawn with dense thickets of cross-hatched ruins and brooding trees, the stubborn black shapes of crows lurking in the corners, as if the artist had tried unsuccessfully to shoo them off the page.

  As soon as Mr. Blackwell spoke its name, Beatrice felt a bone-deep certainty that he was right. Surely they could not fail to find their missing words in such a place—steeped in the oldest and wildest of witchcraft, oozing with mystery and memory.

  But by the time she and Miss Cleopatra Quinn arrive in Old Salem, her certainty is sagging.

  Perhaps it’s the journey itself. It’s difficult to feel particularly magical after fifty miles spent with one’s forehead pressed to the window of a crowded train car, watching the landscape blur past like a spun globe, followed by another twenty miles suffocating in the back of a stagecoach. Miss Quinn is obliged by the cruel absurdity of Jim Crow to ride out front with the driver, and without her Beatrice feels herself growing drab and doubtful.

  The final four miles are spent swaying in the back of a coal-colored wagon with LADY LILITH’S AUTHENTIC OLD SALEM EXCURSIONS painted on the side in faux-medieval script. Lady Lilith is a bored, fifty-ish woman with artificially dark hair and a disconcerting habit of hawking and spitting at regular intervals. The other passengers are similarly unmagical: a vacationing family from Boston who cast disapproving looks at Miss Quinn, a honeymooning couple uninterested in everything except one another, a trio of boarding school girls of the kind who wear black chokers and worship the Brontë sisters.

  The sky is such an unblemished blue it looks strangely unfinished, as if a careless painter has forgotten to add clouds and birds and slight variations in hue. Beatrice feels obscurely that the day should be gray and wintry, the wind howling as they approach the gravesite of the last witches of the modern world.

  Lilith’s mules turn from the pocked highway down an even more forgotten-looking road made of moss-eaten cobbles and mud. The woods rise like water around them, cool and silent; even the newlyweds cease their giggling. The air smells green and secret, surprising Beatrice with a rare pang of homesickness for Crow County; she supposes a person doesn’t have to love their home in order to miss it.

  They trundle on in near-silence, Beatrice wondering fretfully how much farther it is and whether their quest has any hope of success, until Miss Quinn points into the shadowed wood at a low, lichen-covered wall made of blackened stone. Another wall runs beside it, ske
tching a square in the undergrowth. Beyond that Beatrice sees the rotten remnants of a doorway, the ghost of a lane, and understands abruptly that they have already reached Old Salem. They are driving now through its remains.

  “Excuse me, ma’am.” Miss Quinn interrupts Lady Lilith mid-hawk. “Do you think we might explore a bit on our own?”

  Lady Lilith hauls her mules to a halt and eyes Quinn, scratching speculatively at the three white hairs coiled on her chin. “S’haunted,” she observes. “Dangerous, to let tourists go wandering off. I might get in trouble.”

  Beatrice begins to explain that she is a former librarian and Miss Quinn is a journalist, and that they intend to take the utmost care in their explorations—which are in fact a matter of life and death for someone they love dearly—but Quinn produces a neatly folded dollar bill and presses it into Lady Lilith’s damp palm. “If you could come back before dusk, we’d very much appreciate it,” Quinn says, then climbs out of the wagon and extends a hand to help Beatrice down after her.

  Lilith flicks the reins and Quinn and Beatrice are alone in the soft green ruins of the city.

  They wander wordlessly through the woods, pausing to scrub moss from walls or scuff leaves away from stone roads. The trees around them strike Beatrice as implausibly ancient, surely older than a century. Crows and starlings watch them with mocking eyes, as if they know what the women are looking for and where it’s hidden, but are disinclined to help.

  Beatrice is no longer sure precisely what they are looking for—a signpost with an arrow pointing to the Lost Way of Avalon, perhaps, or a book titled On Restoring the Power of Witches and Rescuing One’s Sister from Certain Death; some instruction or spell that has survived a century of rain and sun and morbid tourists. The sudden absurdity of the idea curdles Beatrice’s stomach. She glances sideways at Quinn, wondering if she regrets signing her name in that notebook.

  They walk on in silence. Sometimes Beatrice finds a patch of moss that grows in unlikely spirals, or a stone that bears an uncomfortable resemblance to a man with his arms raised to ward off some unseen blow. Somewhere in the middle of the city they find a bare circle of black-scorched stone, untouched by moss or grass or even fallen leaves, and the wind whips cold and tricksome against Beatrice’s cheek—but there are no helpful letters carved into the earth, no books hidden beneath loose cobbles.

  By the time Lady Lilith’s wagon rattles back down the narrow road, the forest is gold and blue with early twilight, and tears are gathering behind Beatrice’s eyes. When she blinks she sees her sister’s body swimming in the darkness of her eyelids.

  “Will you be staying at Salem Inn, misses?” Lilith asks them perfunctorily. “We offer two meals in the historic dining hall without additional payment and a free ticket apiece to the Museum of Sin, recently reopened to the public following some difficulties with mold this spring.”

  Beatrice feels the faintest, dimmest spark of hope. Quinn is making some polite excuse about urgent business back home when Beatrice steps forward and asks, “How much just for the museum?”

  In the Deeps, Juniper waits.

  She doesn’t know what she’s waiting for anymore, but she keeps doing it anyway.

  She has visitors, sometimes, but never the ones she wants. An officer arrives twice a day to hang a pail of something whitish and congealed inside her cell. Grits, Juniper thinks, or the aggrieved ghost a grit might leave behind if it was murdered in cold blood. When she asks for water the man points downward, to the putrid gray of the water at their feet. He laughs.

  In the mornings a woman in rubber boots comes to carry out the piss pot. The first morning Juniper badgers her with questions—Where are the others? How many did the bastards get? Has she no pity, no shame, aiding the enemy of all womankind?—until the woman calmly tips the contents of the pot into Juniper’s grits. The second morning Juniper keeps her damn mouth shut; the third morning the woman brings her a hard biscuit and a tin cup of water.

  Her tormentors don’t return. Juniper is relieved at first, before she remembers that time is a tormentor, too. Down in the cellar the hours used to come alive around her, stalking and prowling in the dark.

  By the evening of the third day, Juniper is cold and hungry and so thirsty her throat feels barbed, as if she swallowed briars. She sits on the bed and watches the stairwell, still waiting. A habit, maybe, from the seven years she spent hoping her sisters would come home.

  She’s given up on hope, but she can’t seem to leave the habit of waiting behind.

  Beatrice suspects that Lady Lilith’s Museum of Sin—boasting More Than One Hundred Genuine Relics of Witchcraft—has not eradicated its mold problem as thoroughly as Lilith claimed. There’s a damp, living smell to the place; Beatrice imagines saplings pressing up beneath the floorboards, vines digging green fingers into the plaster.

  The museum is a series of low-ceilinged rooms draped in patchy velvet and black-dyed gauze, crowded with shelves and glass cases of Genuine Relics. At least three-quarters of the items are transparent frauds—Beatrice is confident that the witches of Old Salem never wielded wands with fake rubies glued to their handles, and the dust-furred skeleton labeled American Dragon (Juvenile) is most likely a small crocodile with vulture wings wired to its back—and everything conceivably authentic is too trivial to matter. There is a set of silver thimbles, charred and iridescent from some great heat; an iron skillet containing the “burnt remains of its owner’s last meal”; a little girl’s smoke-stained sewing sampler.

  “Well.” Beatrice sighs. “It was worth a try. I don’t suppose Lady Lilith will refund us our dimes.”

  Quinn is peering into cases and reading brass labels with every appearance of fascination. “Whyever should we want a refund?”

  “You’re being very sporting about this, but it’s clear—”

  “My family has been free for three generations,” Quinn interrupts. She tilts the derby hat back on her head in order to more closely examine a box containing, allegedly, the femur of an unidentified witch. “But my grandmother was born on a farm called Sweet Bay.” Quinn squints as if she’s reading a label, but her eyes don’t move. “A rice plantation.”

  “I’m—so sorry.”

  “I’m sure you are. But what is sorry worth, in the face of Sweet Bay?” Quinn is still staring at that brass label, but the perfect calm of her voice is splintered, bleeding through the cracks. “My grandmother didn’t need your sorry.”

  “I—”

  Quinn straightens abruptly and moves to the next case, mending the split seams in her voice. “She didn’t need anyone, in the end. She and her sisters made it north, with the help of Aunt Nancy’s recipes. She taught my mother how they used to speak in codes and symbols, to keep their secrets safe. The Daughters still use some of them, because we aren’t strong enough to risk working in the open. Yet.” Beatrice wonders precisely what Quinn and the Daughters might do with the Lost Way of Avalon, and then whether she really wants to know.

  “Anyway. What my mother taught me is this: you hide the most important things in the places that matter least. Women’s clothes, children’s toys, songs . . . Places a man would never look.” As she speaks she is levering open one of the glass cases, running long fingers over the hinges of a woman’s sewing box. “If the witches of Old Salem had the spell to restore the Way, do you really believe they would have advertised it? Left it listed in the index of a grimoire?” She shakes her head, abandoning the sewing box for the child’s sampler hanging on the wall, yellowed and stained. “You’re thinking like a librarian, rather than a witch. Ah! Come see.”

  It appears to Beatrice to be a perfectly ordinary piece of embroidery: a crooked house framed by a pair of dark trees, with three lumpy women standing in the foreground beside a scattering of animals. Clumsy letters run across the top: “Workd by Polly Pekkala in The Twelfth Year of her Age, 1782.” A border of dark vines curls around the edges.

  “I don’t see—oh.” There is a twist in the vines along the top, a h
iccup in the pattern. The vines loop back on themselves to make three circles, interwoven.

  Beatrice squints through her spectacles at the little scene. Upon closer inspection each of the animals in the yard is purest black, with red knots for eyes, and the figures are all women. One of them has a stitch of red dripping from her finger; the second holds a swaddled bundle to her breast, either a baby or a large potato; the last has a line of pale French knots running down her cheeks. Blood, milk, and tears.

  Beatrice feels warm, weightless, as if she is hovering several inches off the warped floorboards. It’s the way she feels in the archives when she catches a glimmer of gold and brings it into the light, shining softly. She knows by the look on Quinn’s face that she feels it, too: the specific, almost spiteful joy of finding the truth buried beneath centuries of dust and deceit and neglect.

  Their eyes meet and Beatrice forgets to count the seconds. Something warm and nameless wings between them.

  (It is not nameless.)

  Quinn is running her fingers over the empty linen of the sky above the little house. She breathes a small ha! of satisfaction and reaches for Beatrice’s hand. She guides it to the sampler’s surface. Beatrice is so worried she might sense that unnamed thing in the sweaty heat of her palm, the staccato flutter of her pulse, that she almost misses the subtle, irregular bumps of stitches beneath her fingertips.

  She peers closer. There are tiny, nearly invisible words written in white thread.

  The wayward sisters, hand in hand,

  Burned and bound, our stolen crown,

  But what is lost, that can’t be found?

  The rhyme their Mama Mags once sung to them, the verse hidden in the Sisters Grimm. Except this time the words keep going:

  Cauldron bubble, toil and trouble,

  Weave a circle round the throne,

  Maiden, mother, and crone.

  Beatrice shivers as she reads the last line, wondering if she and her sisters are meant to walk this winding path, destined by blood or fate. She waits to be overcome with some grand sense of destiny before recalling that she is merely an ex-librarian standing in a fraudulent museum that smells of mold, trying to save her wicked, wild sister.

 

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