The Once and Future Witches

by Alix E. Harrow

  Agnes refrained from saying anything untoward—like Good for her or She should be or What about you? Aren’t you afraid for your daughter?—and eventually Yulia left her alone.

  She must have told the other Sisters not to bother with Agnes, because after that they turn their backs to her as she passes, noses high. Only Annie Flynn still offers her the occasional cordial nod. Once she even stopped Agnes in the alleyway to invite her to the first meeting of the Sisters since the disaster of the third spectacle. “Your sisters will be there, I heard.”

  “Tell them . . . Give them my love.”

  “I will.” Her gentleness was somehow worse than Yulia’s derision. “My cousin has been looking for you. May I tell him where to find you?”

  Agnes made a jerky, uncertain gesture that might have been a nod.

  She’s staying now at Three Blessings Boarding House, which smells exactly as cabbagey as South Sybil but costs two cents less a night. She might have paid extra for a private room, except that she’d taken her carefully hoarded coin jars to the cemetery and left them beside the golden tree. They were gone the next day.

  The following night Agnes found her jars returned to her window ledge. Instead of coins they were full of thistleseed and salt and feathers, with tight-rolled scraps of paper tucked in the lids. She unrolled them to find words and ways written in her oldest sister’s neat script: spells for sending messages by mockingbird and binding wounds, for soothing fussing babies and getting milk-stains out of shirt-fronts, for “keeping the shadows at bay.” Agnes read that last one several times before she cast salt and thistle across her threshold and whispered the words. Afterward she stuffed the little scraps of paper beneath her mattress. She keeps meaning to burn them—what if the boarding house is raided? What if one of the other girls finds them?—but she never does.

  At night she dreams of sisters; during the day she tries hard to forget them.

  It’s difficult to forget when every story in the city—every rumor, every whispered conversation, every article—seems to be about them: the girls who busted out of prison, the woman who turned her husband into a pig, the witch doctor still running loose. But those were merely the stories witnessed by a sufficient number of people to be printed in the papers. Agnes hears dozens of less credible stories: colics cured and bones mended; lightning called and locks picked; machines busted and debts forgotten. None of the women appear to have any difficulty working the spells they are given. Agnes wonders if their witch-blood was awakened somehow by the return of the Lost Way, or if witch-blood never mattered much in the first place. She wonders what theories Bella and Quinn are working on and if Juniper has earned her familiar yet, if the Sisters are planning any more spectacles and if Gideon Hill has spies among them—

  The baby thumps inside her. Never mind, baby girl. It’s just you and me.

  By the beginning of July the mill is so hot four girls faint before noon. At five Agnes lines up with the other girls, their cheeks boiled red, their hair slicked to their necks. Even Mr. Malton hardly has the energy to pinch or leer, but merely sits, fanning himself and sweating whiskey. Agnes passes him with her head down, sewer-colored hair draped in front of her face.

  She steps into the alley and takes a single breath of clean summer air.

  “Agnes! Is that you?” Mr. August Lee is waiting for her, sleeves rolled to his elbows, hair tousled gold. He’s blinking uncertainly at Agnes’s hair and pox-marks.

  She dips her head to him. “It’s Calliope, if you please, sir,” she says, but she meets his eyes with her own, thunder-gray, and relief spreads over his face.

  He takes two steps forward, swaying as if he wants to step closer but doesn’t quite dare. “Of course. My mistake. Listen, I was hoping we could talk.”

  “About what?”

  “I only wanted to apologize. And help, maybe.”

  Agnes knows she should tell him and his tousled hair to leave her alone, to go home and forget her name, but it’s been so long since she’s spoken to anyone but the fleas in her mattress. She nods once and takes the arm he offers.

  The evening is thick and blue. It’s too hot to remain indoors for long, so the occupants of the West Babel tenements are crowded on stoops and balconies, summer-drunk. Several of them greet Mr. Lee by name; a few of them watch the sway of Agnes’s belly and raise their eyebrows at him. He doesn’t seem to care.

  Mr. Lee steers her three blocks west to a pair of double doors, through which a great deal of noise and music and light are pouring out. Agnes arches her brow at him. “I’m in no condition for dancing, Mr. Lee.”

  “Of course, Miss Calliope. But no one will overhear us here.”

  They settle at a table in the dimmest corner of the dance hall, nearly invisible beneath the haze of tobacco and ether. Mr. Lee seems content simply to watch her in silence, his hands pressed to the frost of his beer glass, until she asks, “Why are you here, Mr. Lee? I thought you’d be back in Chicago, by now.”

  He looks out at the press and swirl of bodies and doesn’t answer directly. “I grew up in West Babel, did you know that? My folks split a room with Annie and her family—twelve of us packed like fish into two rooms. My father worked for Boyle’s, over in the Sallows.” Boyle’s is a meat-packing factory crouched on the west side of the Thorn, all grease and offal and missing fingers. “People said he was a fighter, but he wasn’t really. He was a dreamer, always on about the eight-hour day and workers’ rights and utopia. It’s just that dreamers generally wind up fighting. He started having men over to our place, drawing up charters . . . He was a half-step away from a real union when they got him.”

  “Who got him?” Agnes doesn’t know why he’s telling her all this, but she likes the warmth of his voice when he mentions his father. She wonders what it would feel like to mourn your daddy rather than merely outlive him.

  Lee takes a drink, sets his glass precisely back in the damp ring it left behind. “Boyle’s men, we think. They said it was an accident, that he was fooling around on the line. But we saw him, after. I don’t know how a man could contrive to hang himself on a meat hook without a little help.” Another drink, much longer. Agnes wants to cover his hand with hers. She presses her fingers flat to the table. “Lawyers from the plant came to see us a few days after. They asked my mother to sign some papers swearing that her husband’s death had been his own doing. They sat at our kitchen table and handed her a pen. She looked at me—I was fourteen, old enough to know the truth—and then she looked away. She signed their paper and that was that.

  “I wasn’t at home if I could help it, after. I fell in with Dad’s old friends, went looking for trouble. Found some, in Chicago.” He rubs the scar along his jaw. “And it was—well, it was awful, to tell the truth. Uglier and meaner than I thought it would be. But it was grand, too, to be part of something. To find a fight worth having.”

  There’s an earnestness in his voice that makes him sound young and desperately naive; Agnes wonders if he’s a dreamer, too. She asks again, lower, “So why are you still here?”

  That sweet smile, hitched sideways by his scar. “Because I found an even bigger fight, I guess.” His eyes flash up to hers. “And a woman who won’t look away.”

  Her stomach sours with shame. Wouldn’t I, August? Agnes doesn’t say anything for a long time, digging her thumbnail into the soft wood of the table and thinking about when to fold and when to fight. She realizes her thumb is sketching three woven circles and stops.

  “When is she due?” Lee is looking at the dent where her belly presses against the table.

  “Barley Moon. The midwife says she’s big, though, so it could be sooner.” Agnes doesn’t mention the flutter of fear in her belly, the memory of her mother’s skin whiter than wax. Maybe Mama Mags could have saved her, but maybe not. Mags told her once their family lost more women to the birthing bed than they did men to the battlefield.

  Lee’s voice goes a little lower, almost fearful. “Who was he?”

  It takes A
gnes a long minute to understand who he’s referring to; she hasn’t thought twice about Floyd Matthews all summer. “Nobody. A nice boy from uptown.”

  “Did you love him?” She can tell by the braced shape of his shoulders that the question matters a great deal to him; she wishes it didn’t.

  “No, August. I didn’t love him.” His whole body seems to exhale. “But the more interesting question is: did he love me?”

  “Did he love you?” he asks obediently. There’s a puzzled crease between his brows.

  “Only some of me. And I’m tired of making do with some, with half-measures.”

  Agnes watches his mouth open and close and then open again, and she’s suddenly sure he’s on the verge of making some declaration or vow because he thinks, poor fool, that he loves all of her. Because he doesn’t know how cold and cruel she is beneath the softness of her skin, doesn’t know the anything-at-all she would do to survive.

  She stands up from the table, pushing her chair back. “I’d have done the same thing your mother did.” She aims it like a slap, and he rocks back with the force of it. “Did you never think what would have happened if she’d fought? How easy it is for lawyers to take a child away from a woman alone? Did you never think what it must have cost to choose her living son over her dead husband?”

  She sees from the sudden white of his face that he never has.

  “Sometimes you can’t fight. Sometimes you can only survive.”

  He swallows once. “And yet you’re still fighting.”

  Agnes draws her half-cloak back over her shoulders. “If you and your boys want to help the Sisters, talk to Annie or Yulia. Not me.”

  “Wait—why? What are you doing?”

  She looks back once before she leaves, a last greedy glance at the tangle of his hair and the angle of his scar. “Surviving.”

  Juniper is a ghost, these days.

  She is a silhouette on the windowsill, an apparition in the alley, a woman there and gone again. She is a pocketful of witch-ways and a voice whispering the right words to the right woman, the clack of a cane against cobbles.

  She is rarely out in daylight, and she finds she likes the city better by night. It’s stranger and wilder, full of soft voices and scurrying feet. It reminds her of running the mountainside after dark, surefooted and free, certain that if she ran fast enough she would become a doe or a vixen, anything but a girl.

  Now she runs along alleys rather than deer trails and ducks beneath laundry-lines rather than pine boughs. Now she runs toward rather than away, and she no longer runs alone.

  There are fewer Sisters of Avalon than there once were—some of them were caught, some of them left town a half-skip ahead of the law, some of them were just scared—and they no longer have anything like headquarters. Instead they meet wherever they may: an attic above a hat shop that smells of glue and felt; Inez’s gilded parlor, where they drink wine from golden goblets and laugh themselves sick; a church basement that makes Juniper’s heart race in her throat.

  Juniper and Bella bring the Sisters spells written out in plain English and the words disappear up sleeves and down boots. Later they are whispered by those who can read to those who can’t; stitched into handkerchiefs and hems; tucked into the pages of romance novels so frivolous that no man is likely to touch them. In return the Sisters give them bread and soft-baked potatoes, hot pies wrapped in dish towels, baskets of apples. They don’t ask where the Eastwoods live or how they disappear so thoroughly that neither the police nor the angry mobs—nor those eerie, unnatural shadows—can find them. They look at Juniper and Bella with shining eyes, waiting for the next trick, the next miracle, the next proof that witching has returned.

  For tonight’s miracle, Juniper requires help.

  She strides down a dark street, leaning on the slender cane that is the piss-poor replacement for her cedar staff, and two women walk beside her: a young nurse named Lacey Rawlins who works at St. Charity Hospital, and Miss Jennie Lind.

  Jennie had turned up at the Sisters’ last meeting, looking—different. Her skirts were fancier and frothier than Juniper remembered, and she wore a chestnut wig instead of her own cornsilk-colored hair, but mostly it was her eyes that struck Juniper. They were colder and harder, like twice-beaten iron.

  “Where the hell have you been?” Juniper asked, thumping her so hard on the back that Jennie coughed a little.

  “They sent me to a . . . different workhouse, then released me into the custody of my family. Took me a while to get away.” She looked over Juniper’s shoulder and smiled at Inez. “Inez gave me a place to stay, and all this.” Jennie gestured at her fine skirts.

  Juniper hadn’t said anything then, but she’d had herself a little think about it later. Why would Jennie be sent someplace different than all the other girls? And why would she be released without trial?

  Before the Sisters left that evening she pulled Jennie aside. “Are you, by chance, the daughter of some fabulously wealthy member of New Salem society? Who pulled strings to spring you the second you got caught? And who you have now broken ties with?”

  Jennie blinked at her once, then murmured, “Oh, we broke ties a long time ago.” She fingered her crooked nose.

  “Huh. Well, next time you’re home steal a couple of candlesticks for us. We could use the cash.”

  A genuine smile. “Yes, ma’am.”

  Now Jennie follows behind Lacey as they creep through the doubled iron doors of St. Charity Hospital.

  It looks nice enough inside—halls of green tile and white plaster, rows of doors with neat-painted numbers—except there don’t seem to be any windows. The smell turns Juniper’s stomach: lye and lesions, stained sheets and stale air.

  Lacey pauses before a door at the end of the hall. Juniper tries not to look very closely at the smears of rust and yellow on its surface. She can almost feel the heat of fevered bodies behind it. “Ready?” Lacey asks, and they are.

  They work three spells that night.

  The first is for sleep, requiring crushed lavender and an old prayer. Now I lay thee down to sleep. Only when the rustling of bodies falls still do they creep through the door and into the sick ward.

  The second spell is for driving down a fever, requiring a red thread tied around fingers slack with sleep. Juniper and the others move from bed to bed to bed, endless doubled lines of them, occupied by women and children and ruddy-cheeked men. This strikes Juniper as strange—surely any natural illness ought to fall hardest on the youngest and oldest.

  The third spell is for healing, requiring willowbark and silkweed and knocked knuckles. This one proves more difficult than the others. Juniper hisses the words, veins hot with witching, and feels them vanish into the air, as if swallowed down some cold, invisible throat.

  A chill creeps up Juniper’s spine. She looks at the dark twist of shadows and wonders if somehow Gideon is watching her even now, if he’s working against this small act of mercy.

  Juniper had asked around about Gideon Hill and found his life bafflingly ordinary. As a boy he went by his first name—Whitt or Wart or something equally unfortunate—and spent his time reading novels and daydreaming. Then his favorite uncle passed away, leaving him a considerable sum of money and a pitiful black dog, and Hill had sobered considerably. There was no missing interlude of years when he might have disappeared to study ancient magics in the libraries of Old Cairo, no wicked grandmother who might have passed on her witching; no indication at all that Hill was anything but a balding, middle-aged gentleman who wanted to be mayor.

  Now Juniper grits her teeth and speaks the spell again. She bends her will against whatever-it-is that opposes them, joining hands with Jennie and Lacey, and the magic burns reluctantly into the room. Lungs clear around her, bruises fade from beneath tired eyes, pulses steady.

  Juniper grins at the bodies now sleeping soft and well in their cots, leaning heavily on her spindly cane. She can already hear the headlines shouted by news-boys tomorrow (WITCHCRAFT WORKS MIRACLES! F
EVERS CURED!).

  She limps into the night with her Sisters at her side.

  SIGNS OF WITCHCRAFT AT

  CHARITY; FEVER WORSENS

  July 12th, 1893, The New Salem Post

  Miss Verity Kendrick-Johnson, a spokesperson for St. Charity Hospital, has confirmed to The Post that the patients of the first floor ward were found with definitive signs of witchcraft about their persons, and denied that any member of their staff would have participated in such devilry.

  Miss Kendrick-Johnson further advises people seeking miracles to look elsewhere; none of the bewitched patients have shown the slightest signs of improvement. Their condition may in fact have worsened, and several of the weakest patients have since passed away. “Put your faith in science and the study of man,” recommends Kendrick-Johnson. “Not stardust and sin.”

  ARREST MADE IN CONNECTION WITH THE PORTER CASE

  July 6th, 1893, The Times of Salem

  . . . the police have taken Miss Claudia Porter into custody in connection to the disappearance of her husband, Mr. Grayson Porter. Mr. Porter, a respected member of the Rotary Club and benefactor to this very publication, has been missing since the 25th of June. “Check the stockyards,” Miss Porter reportedly advised her arresting officers, cackling, “It takes a pig to find one.”

  NEW LEADERSHIP NEEDED

  July 15th, 1893, a letter to the editor of The Post

  In light of the daily headlines about malfeasance and witchcraft running loose—in light of Mayor Worthington’s failure to produce even a single one of the Eastwoods—it seems clear to this letter writer that the city of New Salem is in need of new leadership. I call upon the Mayor to step down from his post, that we might elect a brighter light against our present darkness.

  Sincerely,

  Bartholomew Webb

  Hush little baby, don’t say a word,

  Mother will call you by mockingbird.