The Once and Future Witches

by Alix E. Harrow

  A spell to send a message, requiring a mockingbird pinion & a great need

  Over the following weeks Agnes doesn’t think of Mr. Lee at all. She doesn’t look hopefully down the alley at the end of every shift; she doesn’t feel anything in particular when Mr. Malton flips the page of his calendar to the correct month, or let her eyes linger overlong on the capital lettering at the top (AUGUST). The trick to being nothing is to want nothing.

  The shift bell rings. Agnes lines up with the other girls, treasuring the way Mr. Malton’s eyes skip right past her sewer-colored hair and scarred-up face. They fall instead on the girl behind her in line.

  The girl started just a few days ago. She’s nothing, too, but not the right kind. She’s young and hungry-looking, bones raw beneath cream-colored skin. Agnes can practically smell the desperation rolling off her.

  So can Mr. Malton. “You. Ona.” He picks her from the line like a housewife choosing a chicken at the market. “Come back to my office for a moment.”

  Mr. Malton saunters to the back of the mill, keys jangling on his hip, and Agnes stops in the doorway, jaw gritted, willing Ona not to follow him.

  Ona’s eyes cross hers once, flint-black, and then she trails after him like a lamb behind the butcher.

  Agnes looks away. It isn’t hard; she’s had years of practice. She simply turns her head aside and walks on, with Mama Mags’s voice in her ears: Every woman draws a circle around her heart.

  She can’t seem to make herself step out into the alley. She’s caught on the threshold, too stupid to leave, not quite stupid enough to turn back. Instead of Mags’s voice she hears her sister’s: Don’t leave me. She thinks of Mr. Lee, in love with a woman who won’t look away.

  Agnes turns around. Maybe because there are witch-ways burning in her pockets, or because her own daughter might grow up to look a little like Ona. Or because she is a damn fool.

  Mr. Malton’s office door is locked. Agnes whispers to it and the latch rusts to nothing in her hand.

  The room smells of shoe polish and alcohol. Ona is perched on the meanest edge of her seat, shoulders set, her eyes obsidian. Malton looms over her, one hand on his desk, the other on the back of her chair.

  He looks up at the squeal of hinges, the faint patter of rust on the floor. His lip curls at the sight of Agnes with her pox scars and her swollen belly.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “Leave,” Agnes tells the girl in the chair. She can see from the resentful flick of Ona’s eyes that she’s resigned to doing what she has to, and that she doesn’t care to have it witnessed. “Now, girl,” Agnes growls, and Ona slips around her and vanishes into the mill, a rawboned shadow.

  Malton is staring, slack-jawed. He turns to Agnes with an ugly gleam growing in his eyes, a lust that has nothing to do with want. “Care to explain yourself?”

  Agnes takes a twist of her hair between her fingers and hisses the words. The false color melts away, her pox scars fade, and she stands before him wearing her true face once more. “Good afternoon, Mr. Malton.”

  He jerks so violently he falls backward into the chair. Agnes thinks how quickly she might grow used to men flinching rather than flirting.

  Malton gapes at her, fishlike, before gasping, “Begone, witch!” and fumbling for the silver cross beneath his shirt.

  Agnes tuts at him. “Pretty sure that only works on vampires.” She leans closer, enjoying the way he presses himself against the office wall, as if she has a deadly nimbus around her body. “If you scream, I swear they’ll find a pig wearing your suit when they come running.”

  She doesn’t technically have the ways to work the spell, but it hardly matters. She can tell from the panicked bulge of his eyes and the dry bob of his throat that he believes her. She is a witch, and a witch’s words have weight.

  “Very good. Stay put.” She steps around him, rustling through drawers until she produces a sheet of paper and a pen. She writes a short list, tapping her chin briefly with the pen, then rummaging in her pockets for a dry curl of bindweed.

  She circles back to face Mr. Malton. “If you want to leave this office on two feet rather than four, you will do three things for me.” She raises one finger. “First, you will speak of this to no one.”

  Malton whimpers.

  “Second, you will issue every person in your employ a raise of a dime a day, effective immediately.”

  The whimper goes higher.

  “And third—and listen to this part very closely—you will never touch an unwilling woman again, in this mill or outside of it, for as long as your miserable life shall last.”

  His whimper is now so thin and high it could be mistaken for a boiling kettle.

  “Now, swear to it.” She coaches him, stuttering and stumbling, through her three conditions. Then she stabs the pen into the sweating meat of his thumb and presses bindweed to the blood. “Mark it on the page and repeat after me.”

  His voice is a thin warble as he says the words. Cross my heart and hope to die, strike me down if I lie.

  The sweet heat of witching slicks through Agnes’s veins like whiskey. Oh, how she missed it, the drunken drumbeat of power in her chest, the thrill of working her will onto the world.

  The muscles of her belly tighten, a ripple of not-quite pain. Agnes hardly feels it.

  “If you break any of these vows, your heart will stop in your chest and you will fall down dead, and neither Heaven nor Hell will let your cursed spirit enter.” This is a bald-faced lie, but Mr. Malton goes white as cotton. “So behave yourself.”

  The air outside the mill is gentle and golden with five o’clock sun. The light doesn’t seem to come from anywhere in particular, as if the city itself emits a faint sepia glow. The wind that trickles down the alley is cool for summer, smelling of fallen leaves and char, and Agnes wants suddenly to follow it all the way back to the dark tower where her sisters are waiting.

  Her belly ripples again, a little stronger, and she rests a palm against it. She’s wondering if she ought to worry, if perhaps witching isn’t healthy for a womb this far along—when warm wetness trickles down her thigh.

  Oh hell.

  She stumbles backward, bracing a hand against the brick as a bright peal of pain tolls through her. The wetness trickles faster.

  Madame Zina’s is nine blocks north and west. Agnes closes her eyes very briefly.

  She pulls the hood of her half-cloak over her face, tucking the dark shine of her hair beneath it. She hobbles north, not thinking of the wet-pearl sheen of her mother’s skin or the wrong-thing in her daddy’s face as he watched her, or of all the dead mothers in Mama Mags’s stories.

  She thinks instead of her sisters, of June’s face as she felt the kick of her niece against her hand.

  She’s coming, June.

  Bella is alone in the tower when she feels it: a tremor of pain echoing down the line from somewhere into nowhere. Agnes.

  She is sitting cross-legged on one of the tower landings, reading in the last light of the autumn dusk, her black notebook held open by a tin cup of coffee. The pain echoes in her empty womb, spreads up her spine.

  It might be nothing. Bella knows women often have false pains toward the end, and that Agnes isn’t due until the Barley Moon. But the pain has a certain weight to it, a portentous taste like thunderclouds gathering. Bella finds her fingers straying to a shelf several feet away, where a brass label reads Birthing—early, breeched, stillborn.

  The pain comes again, a little louder.

  Bella gathers an armful of books from the birthing shelf and spirals back down the stairs to the first floor. Without precisely thinking about what she’s doing or why, she begins to flick through the texts, gathering ways and making notes. Clean linens and jasmine flowers. A silver bell and powder-white shells. A gnarled tooth smaller than a pearl.

  She waits. The pain finds a rhythm, cresting and falling. Bella circles the tower, straightening shelves that don’t need straightening, trying to fe
el through the line whether Agnes is alone or with friends, scared or safe.

  Somewhere above her she feels the heat of red eyes watching her.

  “It’s fine, Strix. I’m sure she’s fine.” Her voice has a thinness to it, like the first fragile stretch of ice across the Big Sandy. She wishes Quinn were here.

  The air twists in a way that means someone has arrived at the tower door. It opens, and a wild-haired silhouette limps inside, cane tapping the flagstones.

  Bella knows from the pale green of Juniper’s eyes that she feels it, too, that she’s worried. “Should we go to her?” Bella whispers it.

  Juniper rolls her head back and forth. “She knows where to find us, if she wants us.”

  “Yes.”

  Bella perches at a workbench. Juniper circles the tower in her rolling gait. Strix watches from above.

  Eventually Juniper trails to a halt and sits beside Bella on the bench. Her hand brushes not quite accidentally against Bella’s and Bella holds it. They wait together for the next peal of pain.

  Agnes knows before she knocks that Madame Zina will not answer. The door hangs crooked in its frame and the curtain-rod is slanted across the window. Someone has drawn an ashen X across the glass.

  Agnes knocks anyway, because she doesn’t know what else to do. Because she walked nine blocks with her thighs chafing and her stomach clenching and unclenching like a fist, and a shiver is starting in her spine.

  The door swings inward at her touch. Beyond it the room is dark and tumbled, a nest of toppled jars and strewn herbs. Maybe Zina ran before they came for her, or maybe she’s shackled in the Deeps, but she sure as hell isn’t here. There are other midwives on the west side, but so many of them have moved or closed up shop—

  The pain swells, crests, fades. It’s hard to think anything in its wake except animal thoughts: run, hide, go home. But Agnes doesn’t have a home, just a narrow bunk at Three Blessings Boarding House with a few spells stuffed beneath the mattress.

  She thinks for no reason of Avalon: that black tower, star-crowned, and the endless spiral of books. You know where to find us, Bella told her before she left.

  Agnes finds her feet moving before she knows where they’re carrying her.

  She doesn’t count the blocks as she walks back east. She merely sets her jaw and keeps going, feeling the bubble and burst of blisters on her feet, the bloody chafe of her thighs. The pain comes more often now and lingers longer, and she is obliged to stop and press her back against the warm brick while passersby cast her looks of concern and alarm. She keeps her hood pulled high.

  The New Salem cemetery is locked after sundown, but the gate is open, swinging loose on its hinges. Agnes looks at it, swaying where she stands, feeling the same way she felt when she saw Zina’s crooked door. No.

  There are men thronging the graveyard, their expressions both urgent and vacant, shovels and lit torches in their hands. They seem to be gathered at the witch-yard, shuffling and laboring around a vast, gleaming tangle. It takes a long second for Agnes to recognize it as the roots of a golden tree, ripped up.

  No, no, no. The earth around the tree is churned and torn and wrong in some way that Agnes doesn’t understand. She stares, swaying a little, until she realizes that none of the gathered men seem to cast a shadow across it.

  Agnes wheels away, hands flying to her hood. She walks blindly, taking turns at random, trying to think of someplace to run or someone to run to, but the pain returns and she finds herself on her knees in the middle of a nameless street, thinking, There’s no time.

  She knows it as if there’s a wound clock somewhere in the center of her, ticking away seconds. The baby is coming too fast and she is crouched here like an animal with nowhere to go, no one to help her. She drew her circle too tight.

  She fumbles in her pocket and finds a pair of silver-brown feathers, their edges ruffled and split. She stares at them for far too long, trying to remember what they might mean, what she might do with them—before the pain sends her thoughts running for cover again.

  When it subsides she’s still holding the feathers. She remembers the words to an old lullaby written in her sister’s tidy hand: Hush little baby, don’t say a word, Mother will call you by mockingbird.

  Agnes whispers the words to the feathers in her hand, along with a name, and feels the fever-flick of witchcraft under her skin. The feathers flutter upward, caught by an uncanny wind, and vanish into the falling night.

  Agnes doesn’t know if the message will find him, or if he will answer, or if she is a fool to trust the fickle heart of a man—but the pain comes to chase the worries away.

  Time behaves strangely after that. It skitters forward then leaps out of sight, leaving her stranded in her own private eternity. She knows she ought to stand up, run, find shelter, but all she can do is curl over her belly and hiss curses between her teeth.

  Footsteps. A concerned voice. “Are you all right, miss?”

  Agnes tries to say she’s fine, thank you, just resting, but the words are lost in a moan.

  A hand guides her elbow. Her hood slips aside as she stands, and she hears a sharp gasp. “Oh, Saints preserve us—you’re—”

  Someone shouts her true name down the street.

  The pain swallows her again. When she emerges the street is full of people and horses and men in black uniforms. “Agnes Amaranth East-wood! You are hereby under arrest for the crime of witchcraft!”

  Rough hands roll her onto a canvas stretcher, and shackles snap around her wrists. Agnes fights, writhing and kicking, pulling so hard against her cuffs that something pops wetly in her wrist, but it does her no good.

  She falls back, panting, and hears voices conferring. They use words like hysterical and agitated, and then one of the men is pressing a foul-smelling rag across her mouth.

  The street goes gray and distant, as if she is peering up at it from the bottom of an empty well. Her limbs are slack against the canvas even as the pain spreads its sulfurous wings above her. Voices are still speaking around her, but none of the syllables seem to add up to words anymore.

  Agnes lolls as they load her stretcher into the back of a cart. She doesn’t understand, doesn’t know where they’re taking her—until a woman in a starched apron leans over her and Agnes reads the words stitched across the breast in bold capitals: ST. CHARITY HOSPITAL.

  Something is wrong and Juniper knows it. She can taste her sister’s terror through the line between them, feel the tarry black of despair.

  Juniper lets go of Bella’s hand. She grabs a lead pitcher full of water and empties it onto the flagstone floor, ignoring Bella’s squawk. She kneels, the water soaking through the loose weave of her skirt while she waits for it to go still.

  She’s supposed to have a possession of Agnes’s to work the spell properly, but she doesn’t care. Surely there’s enough of Agnes in her all the time—in her blood and bones, in the stubborn streak they share, in all the hours of their sisterhood.

  Mirror, mirror, on the wall.

  Juniper feels Bella peering over her shoulder, sharing her will. A picture shimmers to the surface of the water: Agnes, lying slack against too-white sheets in a too-white room, her hair a black pool behind her head. Her skirts are rucked carelessly to the waist, her legs gelid and still, somehow indecent. Her face is perfectly serene, half drowsing; the only sign of distress is the occasional ripple of her belly, a tightness that shudders through limp limbs, and the clawing, terrible black of her half-lidded eyes.

  There are other people in the room with her, their faces blurred, their motions shadowed. Juniper sees the shake of a head, a dismissive wave of a hand. One of them steps to the side and Juniper sees the shackles around her sister’s wrists.

  The water ripples as Bella takes a horrified step backward. She whispers oh no, oh no in a useless chant.

  Juniper stands, shouldering past her. “I’m going.”

  “Then they’ll have both of you!” Bella’s voice is a wobbling wail. “What do y
ou think will happen if you go charging into a hospital room?”

  Juniper meets her sister’s eyes and wavers. She doesn’t want to go back down in the Deeps. She doesn’t want to feel the unnatural cold of a witch-collar or the oily slide of shadows.

  But she can’t leave Agnes and her baby tied up and hurting. She can’t even frame the choice properly in her head.

  Neither can Bella, not really. Juniper sees it in the resigned droop of her head. “Let me gather a few spells, at least.”

  Juniper doesn’t wait. She tugs the tower door open and presses her palm to the three woven-together circles. She says the words and thinks of the golden tree, as she has a dozen times before.

  Nothing happens.

  Nothing continues to happen.

  “Bella,” Juniper says, quite calmly. “How come I can’t get out of this damn tower?”

  Bella scurries nearer. “It can only mean the sign is gone. The circle back in New Salem must be broken.”

  They look at one another for a long moment, before Juniper says, “So you’re saying we’re—”

  “Trapped. Yes.” The Lost Way of Avalon is a ship cut loose from its anchor, drifting through nowhere, while Agnes is stuck back in somewhere.

  There’s a heavy silence, during which it becomes clear that Bella isn’t about to leap to her feet and shout aha! and save them all.

  Juniper limps back to the pool of water and crouches down beside it, looking down into the dark well of her sister’s eyes. Juniper recognizes the thing she sees there: the despair of a woman trapped good and proper, who knows no one is coming to save her.

  Dance, little baby, dance up high,

  Never mind, baby, Mother is by.

  Crow and caper, caper and crow,

  Stay, little star, and don’t let go.

  A spell to steady a life, requiring hyacinth & a seven-pointed star

  Agnes Amaranth knows what childbirth is supposed to be like. She’s heard the talk from young mothers working beside her in the mill, the girls back in Crow County who hadn’t gone to Mama Mags for help. There’s pain, they said, pain like cleaving open, like breaking in half, but there are other women there to help you bear it. Aunts and midwives, grannies and sisters, mothers to press cool palms against your forehead and hum half-forgotten lullabies in your ears.