The Once and Future Witches

by Alix E. Harrow

  They sip their wine. Bella imagines a version of her life where she never met Cleopatra Quinn, where she married Mr. Blackwell and lived in this pleasant red-brick house until she was a crone in truth, reading witch-tales by the fireside in winter and dreaming of better worlds. She thinks of the old story of the witch who buried her heart in a silver box beneath the snow so that she might never be hurt. A chill shivers up her spine.

  Blackwell sets his glass among the checkers. “Did you truly find it?”

  Bella knows from the soft reverence of his voice what he means. “We did.” She can’t help the note of pride in her voice.

  “And is it truly gone?”

  Her voice this time is a graveside whisper. “It is. Although—” She withdraws her little black notebook from her skirt pocket and runs her thumb across the cover. “It has been recently brought to my attention that not all witching was lost, that night.”

  “Oh?” It’s the same oh? he used to give her over lunch in the College library, which granted her permission to lecture to her heart’s content about the lives of Saints or the execrable handwriting of monks. Bella smiles a small, wistful smile for those quiet, safe days, and tells him more or less everything there is to tell.

  She tells him about Old Salem and the sewing sampler and the owl winging toward her through the trees; living in the lost library of Avalon, outside of time and mind, and standing in its ashes; Araminta’s spells, which rely on stars and songs rather than rhymes and herbs, and her growing suspicion that witchcraft isn’t one thing but many things, all the ways and words women have found to wreak their wills on the world.

  She tells him far more than she needs to, and he listens with considering nods and small smiles and a few my words.

  “I was hoping to ask Araminta about the scarification process and their mother’s-names, but then Hill’s shadows turned up in New Cairo. Oh! The wards!”

  Bella stands so abruptly that her blood thuds in her skull. She reels to the front door and pours a line of salt and thistle across the threshold. Maiden, Mother, and Crone. Guard the bed that I lay on.

  She’s on her sixth window before she notices the yellowing grains of salt already lying on the sills. “Did you ward your house already?”

  Mr. Blackwell looks a little sheepish. “Not nearly so well as you are, I’m sure. It’s just that fever—the Second Plague, some are calling it now—has been creeping north. It strikes me as uncanny, so I thought perhaps a little uncanniness might keep it at bay.” He nudges his spectacles back up his nose. “My great-aunt taught me a few little charms here and there.”

  Bella would like to ask more about all this—a man working witchcraft, an uncanny sickness—but at that moment Juniper emerges from behind the bookshelf. She is wrapped in a dark cloak, limping badly without her red-cedar staff, her eyes the green-lit gray of the sea before a storm. She pauses to sweep the two of them a bow before slipping out the front door and vanishing into the deepening night.

  “What is she doing, at this hour?”

  “Whatever she can. Whatever might help.” Bella sighs. “I imagine we’ll read about it in tomorrow’s papers.”

  Juniper has never cared much for reading (or any of the others of Miss Hurston’s three R’s), but over the next few weeks she acquires the habit of reading the paper over breakfast. Or at least the headlines: SISTERS EASTWOOD STILL AT LARGE; NEW SALEM CHIEF OF POLICE RESIGNS AMID RUMORS OF NERVOUS BREAKDOWN; HILL’S RALLY INTERRUPTED BY BAYING DOGS AND STRONG WINDS.

  The other Sisters tell Juniper that Mayor Worthington is leaning on The Post not to print the most hysterical stories: that the Eastwoods can transform themselves into black birds or possibly bats; that the Crone herself is currently living on the south end, keeping company with colored women; that the Mother gave birth to a little devil-child with hair the color of Hell itself.

  “Bet the bastards wish they’d just given us the vote when we asked nicely,” says Electa Gage, with no small degree of satisfaction. “Too late now.”

  The previous week the City Council issued a statement that the suffrage question could not possibly be entertained in the current climate. “And frankly,” Mr. Hill had told the papers, “if this is what happens when women gain some measure of power, we have grave doubts about the advisability of granting them more.”

  Following this announcement, several members of the New Salem Women’s Association had found their way to the Sisters, their jaws gritted, looking for witch-ways and words.

  The Sisters rarely congregate, these days. They speak instead by mockingbird and smoke-signal, by letters that can only be seen by friendly eyes and notes that ignite after reading. They meet only for furtive exchanges of spells and safe houses and disperse before they can be found by the things that hunt them: the mobs of men with brass badges and torches, the steel-jawed officers on white horses, the eyeless shadows that twist up from sewer grates and reach after them.

  But they are prey with teeth and claws of their own, now. They have the spells they stole from Avalon before it burned, still stitched into hems or written in recipe-books; they have the words and ways taught to them by their grandmothers and aunts and neighbor-ladies, now shared between them; they have August’s little boys’ Latin and Araminta’s songs, chanted prayers from a pair of dark-eyed Russian girls, and even a few shuffling dances from the Dakota woman. And Bella is still gathering more. Everywhere they stay she asks for their stories or spells or songs, whatever ways they’ve found to talk to the great red heartbeat on the other side, and adds them carefully to her collection. Her little black notebook has become a sort of patchworked grimoire, part spell-book and part diary. Juniper has seen Bella writing in it long into the evenings and suspects her of adding wholly unnecessary narrative; she figures it comes of reading too many novels as a girl.

  So Juniper and her Sisters run, but they run with salt and snake’s teeth in their pockets, ninebark and angelica root, honey-wax and black feathers and scraps of tanned hide. They tangle their pursuers in cobwebs and rose-vines, they slip into crowds and come out the other side wearing different faces. They vanish through ordinary-seeming doors and emerge hours later, smelling of roots and earth.

  Not all of them get away. There are arrests and detentions, beatings and brutalities. A man in Bethlehem Heights finds witch-ways in his wife’s sewing box and ties her to the bedpost until the authorities retrieve her; one of Pearl’s girls is found bloodied and barely breathing with the witch-mark drawn on her back; an entire tenement on the west side is set ablaze by a gang of mean-eyed boys who claimed to have followed a black cat with red eyes.

  It proves difficult to keep a witch behind bars. Workhouses suffer from rusted locks and shattered bars, missing shackles and stolen keys. Guards are discovered sleeping or missing or terribly confused, convinced they are lost in deep woods. Cells are found empty except for the wild smell of witching.

  The smell is everywhere, now. The whole city reeks of wet earth and green things, char and crushed herbs and wild roses. It rises like steam from the alleys between tenements and the lawns of fashionable homes, as if some great dragon is rousing beneath the city, breathing smoke through the cracks. The streets heave over the bones of tree roots that grow faster than they should; thistle and pye weed sprout between bricks. Sometimes at night the stars shine more brightly than they have any right to, as if there aren’t gas-lamps and bulbs buzzing beneath them, as if they’re shining down on a black wood or an empty prairie. The wind is sharp and too cold for the final days of summer, as if the ghost of Avalon still lingers, haunting the city.

  Almost, Juniper begins to believe it will be all right. That the women of the city will stand strong against mobs and shadows, that Gideon Hill will lose his election in November and slink back under whatever rock he came from. But their stores of witch-ways are running thin, and every midwife and herbalist has been driven out of town. The sickness is worsening, too—even The Post now calls it the Second Plague—and panic worsens with it. The
shadows coil thicker and darker, like fattened flies, and Gideon Hill’s face smiles down from every window and wall. Our light against the darkness.

  Juniper and her sisters make it four nights at Mr. Blackwell’s before Agnes spots a shadowless man standing on St. Jerome Street, staring blankly through the windows, waiting. That night they say farewell to Mr. Blackwell, who sends them with several bottles of wine and a hooked cane for Juniper. A Daughter escorts them north through the tunnels to stay with Inez and Jennie in the glamorous near-mansion Inez’s deceased husband conveniently left behind.

  They make it two days before fists thump on the door in the middle of the night. Bella whispers the words to tangle the halls and doors of the house in a winding labyrinth behind them—a spell taught to them by Inez’s chatty Greek maid—while all five of them slip out the kitchen door.

  They spend the following night beneath a bridge, huddled together with the heat of their spells warping the air around them, and another handful of days back in New Cairo, in the well-warded house of Cleo’s aunt Vivica. But the shadows always find them eventually, and they always run.

  By the end of August, Juniper can feel their list of willing hosts shrinking, doors slamming and locks clicking ahead of them. Partly it’s the fear rising like sewer-stink through the city as Hill’s mobs grow bolder and the plague worsens. Partly it’s Eve, who screams at inconvenient hours of the night, and whose hair remains eye-catchingly red no matter how many spells or dyes they apply. Sometimes the problem is Miss Cleo Quinn; it turns out even the suffragists who seem sympathetic with the cause of colored women balk at the thought of welcoming one into their actual homes.

  Another time they were asked to leave after the mistress of the house discovered Cleo and Bella in her washroom somewhat less than fully dressed. They behaved themselves better after that, but there was still an ardent, unsated thing between them. It unsettled people.

  It unsettled Juniper, to own the truth. True, Bella’s cheeks were flushed and her stutter was gone, but Juniper recalled the preacher’s admonitions about man and wife and the natural order of things. She asked Agnes about it one evening and was told in no uncertain terms to mind her own damn business.

  “What’s wrong with loving somebody, anyhow?” Agnes hissed. “Doesn’t she deserve a little happiness?” Juniper surrendered and resolved thereafter to mind her own damn business.

  The morning after, she caught Agnes whispering to a mockingbird on the window ledge, watching it wing into the dawn as if half her heart was flying alongside it. The next time they have to run, Agnes says, quietly, “I know a place.”

  She leads them to one of the crookedy, higgledy-piggledy stacks of tenements in West Babel only a few blocks north of South Sybil. A thin, tired-looking woman opens the door, her hair brittle white. She flinches only briefly at the sight of three women, an infant, and a pair of uncanny birds standing in her hallway, before inviting them inside and introducing herself as Miss Florentine Lee.

  Her apartment is a single cramped room, the walls stained with years of cooking-grease and close living. A small window provides a stingy square of summer-light, obscured by laundry-lines and balconies.

  Mr. August Lee is waiting at the kitchen table. He stands as they enter and his face when he sees Agnes is—well. It’s private, Juniper decides. She busies herself with her cane, wondering a little bitterly how her sisters found the time to pursue romance alongside all the witching and women’s rights. She tries to imagine herself looking at someone like that, all soft and aching, but finds herself thinking instead of the mountainside back home, sweet and green.

  That evening Miss Lee feeds them a cabbage-and-ham stew which Juniper doubts has done more than meet a ham once in passing. August’s mother watches them eat with faded-cotton eyes, her gaze flicking from Agnes to Eve to August, not saying anything.

  August clears the dishes from the table after supper and his mother fusses at him. “There’s no need—”

  “It’s fine, Ma.” She subsides with a fragile-looking smile. There’s something strained and careful about the way Miss Lee and her son speak to one another, as if they’re treading lightly over a fresh-mended wound.

  Bella and June nest on the floor in a pile of tattered quilts and Agnes claims the rocking chair. But Eve refuses to settle, her usual whines escalating to ragged wails that burrow into Juniper’s skull.

  Agnes curses. “She won’t eat. I don’t understand—she’s always had such an appetite.”

  Miss Lee leans over her, says, “May I?” and touches two fingers to Eve’s forehead. “She’s warm. A fever’ll take the edge off an appetite.”

  The word fever drifts around the room like a stray cinder, too hot to touch. No one says anything for a long moment, while Agnes’s face goes blotchy white and August watches her with a helpless expression. He takes a step toward her but Juniper beats him to it, scooping her niece into her arms and shooting a get in line glare at August.

  Eve falls asleep that night with her cheek smeared against Juniper’s breastbone, her cheeks blushing red. A product of the stuffy, too-small room, Juniper is certain.

  In the morning Juniper wakes to see shadow-fingers sliding across the window, prying between the panes, trying to get in.

  They run.

  Agnes pretends to herself that her daughter isn’t sick. That the rising bloom of red in her cheeks is the product of bad air in the tenements or too-tight swaddling, that the thin edge of her wail is just hunger or indigestion or exhaustion. But she sees the way her sisters look at Eve, feels their worry like a gathering cloud in the binding between them—and knows better.

  Bella consults her little black notebook and produces long lists of rhymes and chants, poultices and cures. Juniper visits Araminta’s spice shop and a few midwives in hiding and returns with feverfew and willowbark, silkweed and red thread. It seems to help, at first. Eve’s eyes lose the dangerous, glassy sheen, and her usual imperious expression returns. But then her breath thickens again, her temperature rising as some unseen thing eats away at their spells. A cough emerges, wet and persistent, so that her breath rattles sometimes in her sleep.

  “The plague, for certain,” pronounces Yulia, a few days later. They’re staying with one of the several dozen Domontoviches scattered on the west side, stuffed in a warm loft above a barroom.

  “You don’t know that,” Agnes snaps.

  Yulia shrugs, unmoved. “Eh. This is how my cousin sounds, before they take her to St. Charity’s.”

  “No one’s taking Eve anywhere.” There’s a silent rushing in the air between them and Pan appears on her shoulder, a tangle of darkness that becomes a hawk. Yulia looks at the osprey—his vicious beak, his scalding glare—and subsides.

  They sit with their Sisters at a round table in the middle of the loft, pocked and scarred from years in the bar below. It’s a larger meeting than they’ve dared in weeks: Cleo sitting with her knee pressed against Bella’s, Gertrude and Frankie sharing a long bench with the Hull sisters, Inez and Electa lost in a mob of Valkyrie-like women who can only be Yulia’s relatives. Agnes can’t help noticing that most of the women sit a little apart from the Eastwoods, as if they are either too dangerous or too revered to touch.

  Juniper called them all by mockingbird after the most recent round of arrests, because the women are no longer being held in the workhouses. They’ve thrown them in the Deeps, with witch-collars and bridles around their throats, where their witching can’t reach them. The shadows seem to fall more darkly around the Hall of Justice, sharp and black, like the jagged teeth of a trap.

  The Sisters confer for hours, proposing spells and countermeasures and unlikely schemes. Some of them have daughters or sisters down in the Deeps, and their eyes burn like coals in their skulls. Agnes thinks of circles drawn wide, of bindings-between and one-for-all, and shivers a little at the strength of it.

  Sometime past midnight Juniper stands. “Well, it’s a start. Now, what witch-ways have you brought?” The women turn
out pockets and empty brown paper sacks on the table. Agnes can tell from the worried bow of Juniper’s shoulders that it isn’t enough.

  She’s frowning and opening her mouth when Inez says, “Wait a moment.”

  Inez lays a long, thin object along the table, smiling at Juniper. Inez looks older and a little thinner than she did in the spring, her cheeks no longer merry and full. She and Jennie have been running, too.

  Juniper frowns as her fingers peel away silk wrappings. Her mouth falls open as she sees what lies beneath. She stares down at the table for a while, looks up at Inez, then back down. “You did this?” Her voice is hoarse.

  “Well, I provided the gems, being the only one of your dear Sisters with money to waste as I please. But Annie found the tree and Yulia found the woodworker. It was your sisters’ idea . . .” She trails off. “You like it?”

  Whatever Juniper is feeling right now, Agnes suspects like is too small a word for it. Her eyes are shimmering spring-green and her hands shake as she reaches for the thing on the table. As she lifts it to the light Agnes sees a long staff of polished yew, the grain knotted and stained black. A carved line spirals up the stick, ending in a bowed head: a snake with a pair of garnets for eyes.

  Juniper swivels between Agnes and Bella, mute, reverent.

  Bella shrugs. “Well, honestly, we couldn’t have you running around with Mr. Blackwell’s poor cane. This suits you much better.”

  The binding between them hums with fierce joy, enough to make Agnes forget for a moment that they are hunted and hounded by a city that hates them.

  Until a small, tired voice calls, “Hyssop.”

  Jennie Lind staggers into the room. The expression on her face sends a cold current through the gathered women. “Mayor Worthington is resigning tomorrow.” She says it quick and sharp, a merciful blow. “The Council will call a special election by the end of the week.”

  All the glee drains from Juniper’s face. “How do you know? Can you be sure?”