The Once and Future Witches

by Alix E. Harrow

  His shadow lengthens behind him, creeping up the wood-paneled wall. It boils with heads and limbs, arms extending at warped, unnatural angles. On the desk the mockingbird writhes and flutters more desperately, wingtips drawing mad patterns through spilled ink, fragile ribs flattening as a shadow-hand presses downward. The dog whines, high and mournful.

  “Stop! I don’t know what you mean, I swear I don’t.”

  There’s a terrible crunch, like china crushed beneath a boot, then silence. The mockingbird is very still.

  Hill watches her face for another pressing second before his shoulders unwind. His shadow shrinks back to more plausible dimensions; he stitches the split seams of his mask.

  “Very good. Of course I didn’t really think—but one never knows. Now, Miss Eastwood.” He prods the mockingbird into a wastebasket with a jagged shard of glass and lays the glass neatly back on the desk, like a man arranging his pens. “I called you here to make an offer. I am willing to pardon your crimes and grant you custody of Miss”—he refers to a typewritten page—“Eve Everlasting Eastwood—my, what a mouthful—if you are willing to assist me in locating and apprehending your sisters. This witch-hunt has gone on long enough, I think. People will grow discontented soon, perhaps doubtful, if I don’t produce the witches.”

  Of course this is the choice. It’s always this choice, in the end—sacrifice someone else, trade one heart for another, buy your survival at the price of someone else’s. Save yourself but leave your sister behind. Don’t leave me.

  Agnes feels cold water pooling around her ankles, rising fast. “And what . . . what will happen to my sisters?”

  “That’s for the courts to decide.”

  The water is belly-deep now. “And what happens if I say no?”

  “Then your daughter remains deathly ill, in the dubious care of the Lost Angels. You will wait in the Deeps until I catch your sisters—which I will, sooner or later—and they will burn just the same. Except you will burn beside them.”

  The water laps at her neck, icy and black. Hadn’t they drowned witches sometimes, in the way-back days? “What if—what if I convinced them to leave the city, instead? We’ll disappear. You’ll never hear our names again. We won’t work another spell as long as we live.”

  His smile reminds her of Mr. Malton’s when he told them their shifts were cut or their pay was docked, soothing and false. “I’m afraid that wouldn’t satisfy my constituents. I’m sure you understand.” His tone turns musing. “It’s just the way people work. You tell them a story, and they require an ending. Would anyone know Snow White’s name if her Mother never wore hot iron shoes? Or Gretel’s, if her Crone never climbed in the oven?”

  Hill’s smile now is sincere. “The witches always burn, in the end. You see?”

  Agnes does. The cold water closes high above her head.

  “Please.” She hates the taste of the word in her mouth, but she says it anyway. Sometimes begging was enough to turn her daddy’s fist into an open palm, a slap into a shout. “Please just give her back. She’s sick.” Tears gather and fall.

  “I know, dear.” His smile is venom and honey. “Wouldn’t you like me to make her well again?”

  Could he? Clearly he knows witching she and her sisters don’t; who’s to say what powers he possesses?

  Her answer feels inevitable, a choice made in the moment she first looked down into Eve’s midnight eyes. There is nothing she wouldn’t do for her daughter.

  “What will it be, Miss Eastwood?”

  Agnes tries to picture her life after the choosing: gray and listless, alone except for the bitter taste of her own betrayal, the frayed ends of a broken binding. The summer of ninety-three would blur and fade, a little girl’s dream of a time when the three of them were one thing, whole and inviolate.

  But she would have Eve. She would whisper the words and ways to her daughter, disguised as songs and stories, in the secret hope that the next generation could take up their fallen swords and carry on the battle. It was what Mama Mags had done, and her mother before her: sacrifice in order to survive, and hand their sacrifice down to their daughters.

  Now Agnes will choose the same. Gideon Hill’s smile gleams at her in the shard of windowpane still lying on his desk. The point shines crystal-white, sharp as shattered bone.

  A very foolish idea occurs to Agnes. A bolder trade, a third choice.

  They would catch her, of course, and there would be no fire hot enough for the witch who murdered the mayor of New Salem, their Light Against the Darkness. But without Hill and his shadows surely her sisters could save Eve, could flee the city and raise her in secret, surrounded by wild roses and stone.

  She will need to be very fast. She falls to her knees as if overcome with grief, and Pan startles from her shoulder. Hill says something insincere about understanding the difficulty of her position, but she can’t hear it over the thud of blood in her ears. She fumbles a stub of candle wax from her pocket and draws an X on the polished parquet.

  She covers her face with her hands and whispers the words to her palms, a hard line of Latin. Heat billows in her chest, burning back the cold water. Her hair drifts gently upward, as if gravity is an absentminded god who has forgotten her for this single, desperate second. Beneath his chair, Hill’s dog whines.

  She thinks of her sisters: Juniper who would not hesitate, Bella who would not miss. She thinks of her daughter.

  She leaps. The glass is in her hand and driving toward Hill’s left eye before he can flinch, almost before he can blink. The point parts the fine gold of his lashes. She braces for the wet puncture of his eye, the scrape of bone against glass—

  But it doesn’t come. The shard skrees off Hill’s face and bites into the desktop instead, slicing Agnes’s palm. There is an airless moment while both of them look down at the red-slicked glass, before a dozen shadow-hands claw toward her. They wrap around her wrists and ankles, slick and cold, and force her backward across his desk, limbs wrenched and splayed. She thinks of the mockingbird, twisting and twisting.

  Gideon Hill looks down at her with a pair of watery, pink-rimmed eyes, entirely unhurt.

  He gives her a pitying shake of his head. “I admire your spirit, Miss Eastwood. Truly I do. But please understand that I am not going to be harmed by nursery rhymes or bits of glass. I am going to ask you a final time—”

  A black shape dives between them, talons outstretched. The claws rake. Blood blooms. Then the dog is barking hysterically and Hill is screaming and another shadow-hand is rising into the air, reaching for her hawk.

  Pan is already gone, vanished back into elsewhere. Hill is left panting and powerless, blinking blood from his eyes and touching the ragged edges of three deep furrows Pan scored across his face.

  He reels, his painted mask split. Beneath it Agnes sees raw, wild terror. “No! No! How dare you touch me! How dare you—shut up, Cane!” The black dog ceases her yelping.

  Red drips from Hill’s chin. His face is someplace beyond fear, beyond fury, gray and still. Agnes realizes distantly that she knows that face, has seen it reflected back at her from her sisters: the terrible resignation of someone who is accustomed to pain. Who suffered too many blows, too young, and is always waiting for the next to fall.

  Hill meets her eyes and she wonders if he will kill her now. If he will crush her like a bird in his fist for the crime of seeing him bleed.

  The shadows tighten around her ankles, press against her ribs. She feels the scrape and pop of cartilage, the grind of bone against bone—before he flicks a finger in dismissal and sends her skidding backward off the desk.

  He reaches into his breast pocket and Agnes flinches, thinking of pistols or knives or magic wands, but the thing he withdraws is small and soft, perfectly innocent: a tiny curl of hair. Agnes thinks it’s brown or maybe chestnut until the light catches it. The curl shines a deep, bonfire red.

  She would prefer a knife.

  “If you ever want to see your daughter again—if you want her
to recover from the fever—you and your sisters will be in St. George’s Square tomorrow before sundown.”

  Agnes looks at the blood still weeping from his wounds. It’s ordinary blood, red and wet. “Yes,” she whispers. “Alright.”

  “Good. Now get out.”

  Agnes does as she is told.

  She does not run, this time. She walks, steady and upright, following the lines that lead back to her sisters, hardly noticing when passersby scurry out of her way. She should be despairing, regretting every choice that had led her here to this last and worst one, but she isn’t.

  Instead she is merely thinking. Turning pieces over and over in her mind like stones: the fear in his face, ancient and terrible; a children’s story about witches who did not die when they should have; the bite of glass in her palm and the shine of Hill’s blood.

  A thought is forming, surfacing like a leviathan from the black:

  You are not invincible, Gideon Hill.

  And if he is not invincible—if he can bleed and break and die like any other man—then he should never have touched a single hair on her daughter’s head.

  Juniper feels her sister drawing closer like a gathering storm. Bella and Cleo wait with her, huddled together in the half-dark of the South Sybil boarding house, their eyes meeting sometimes then falling away. The room is silent except for the occasional rustle of skirts, the brush of feathers in the shadows.

  Footsteps ring like mallets on the stairs. The door scrapes.

  Agnes steps into the room looking fifty years older and a hundred years meaner. Blood crusts her fingertips and bruises shadow her wrists. Milk weeps down her blouse, and the sight of those stains is a knife between Juniper’s ribs.

  Pan trills on Agnes’s shoulder, low and mournful, and Strix answers.

  “What happened? Where’s Eve?” Juniper’s voice cracks over the name: Eve, who is ruby-red innocence, who is tiny and furious and perfect in some way that Juniper doesn’t understand but wants fiercely to protect. Who might still be safe with her mother if it wasn’t for Juniper and her troublemaking.

  Agnes doesn’t appear to have heard her. “We’ll need more candles. I have three, I think. Maybe matches will do. And maiden’s blood, crone’s tears—Lord knows I’ve got the milk.” She scurries around the room as she speaks, rattling through drawers.

  Juniper’s eyes meet Bella’s. Cleo asks, gently, “Agnes? Why do you need candles?”

  Agnes finds a handful of candle-stubs in a crate beneath her bed and arranges them in a hurried circle, muttering to herself. She looks perfectly deranged.

  “Agnes.” Bella’s voice is even gentler than Cleo’s. “What are you doing?”

  But Juniper already knows. So does Bella, judging by the tremble of her fingers. “She’s calling back the Lost Way of Avalon. Again.”

  Agnes doesn’t pause, doesn’t even look up.

  “But why?” Bella sounds very close to tears.

  “Because I’d like to talk with the Last Three.”

  A small silence follows this announcement. Even Cleo’s mouth hangs open, her journalist’s composure overcome at last. Juniper says, as casually as she can, “Sure. The thing is, though—and I don’t want to upset you—the Last Three are dead.”

  Agnes makes a faint noise of irritation at such nitpicking.

  “Real dead. Exceptionally dead. There are legends and stories about how dead they are. You might’ve heard some of them.”

  “I have, yes,” Agnes acknowledges. “Still.”

  This is apparently too much for Bella, who wails, “What’s wrong with you, Agnes? There’s nothing left.”

  Agnes still doesn’t look up. “What about Yulia’s story? What about the witch who bound her heart to a needle or an egg or whatever it was, and lived forever?”

  “A fable. A myth.”

  “And how many of our spells came from fables? What if it’s more than a myth?”

  Bella looks as if she’s considered actually tearing her hair in frustration. “It isn’t possible.”

  Agnes raises her head from her candle-circle and meets their eyes. She should look like a grief-struck madwoman, broken and hopeless, but instead she looks like an angel cast down from Heaven struggling back to her feet with blood on her teeth, ready to make war with God himself.

  “I do not,” she says, very clearly, “give a shit.”

  She withdraws a rust-smeared shard of glass from her pocket and hands it to Juniper. Her eyes say please and Juniper can’t refuse her. She slices the glass across her open palm, cutting deep, and opens her hand to let her blood drip onto the warped floorboards of South Sybil.

  Red sky at night, witch’s delight.

  Red sky at morning, witch’s warning.

  A spell for storms, requiring red cloth & wet earth

  Beatrice Belladonna catches her sister’s hand in hers before her blood falls. “Saints, think,” she hisses. “What happens if you materialize a tower on top of a boarding house?”

  Neither Agnes nor Juniper seem overly concerned. Juniper even looks slightly eager, like a child anticipating fireworks.

  Bella suppresses an urge to shake the pair of them until their teeth rattle. “People live here! Lots of them! You can’t just drop a library on top of them! The Mother only knows what it would do to our wards. And I still don’t understand why we’d want to call Avalon in the first place—”

  “He took her.” Agnes’s voice is quiet but ragged-edged, like a distant scream.

  “Who did?” But Bella knows who.

  “Gideon Hill. And he’s scared, Bell. He has his shadows and his city and my daughter, but he’s still frightened of something.” Agnes looks up at her. “Of Avalon. Even though all the books are burned.” Bella presses her fingertips to the paper-dry petal of the rose in her pocket, the only thing she saved from the ashes. “He asked me if they were still there. And I thought—who is they?”

  “Sometimes when it was real quiet at Avalon I heard voices. Or thought I did.” Juniper speaks slowly, feeling her way toward the edge of the impossible. “And down in the Deeps I heard . . . somebody.”

  She doesn’t look at Bella, as if she expects scorn or pity, but Bella is quiet. She’s remembering the times when she was alone in the rose-scented silence of the tower, when her attention wandered and she heard whispers murmuring and scuttling in the shadows. Words spoken in voices of dust and ivy, there and gone again.

  There’s a rustle of wool as Cleo shifts on the bed. “Do you mean . . . ghosts?” Bella feels a rush of relief that Cleo seems willing to entertain the possibility rather than edging quietly out of the room.

  “I don’t think they could be. What ghost could last four hundred years?” Ghosts were lingering specters, especially tenacious souls that clung to life a few hours beyond death. They didn’t haunt towers or castles for centuries, except in wives’ tales and rumors.

  Cleo shrugs. “Some kind of spirit or memory, then? Perhaps preserved by—”

  “I don’t care what they are or aren’t. I’m going to find them.” Agnes touches her damp dress-front and reaches for the floor with fingers slick with milk.

  “Wait! Please.” Bella catches Agnes’s hand in her free one, so that she stands between her sisters with their fists tight in hers. “I’ll help you. But not here.”

  “Where, then?” Agnes’s voice suggests she ought to decide quickly.

  Where can they call a burned black tower back into existence without being seen and caught? Where in New Salem is free of both Inquisitors and innocents?

  Then Bella remembers fleeing from the north side just the previous week, pausing at the padlocked gates of the Centennial Fair. It had closed after the election, but deconstruction was delayed in the name of the city’s crisis. The sight of that long boulevard, empty except for crows and scattered puddles reflecting the blind gray of the September sky, had sent a shiver of melancholy down Bella’s spine.

  “The Fair,” she breathes.

  Her eyes cross Cleo’s
and for a moment the memory of that June afternoon blooms between them, shimmering and sweet, when they swayed together in the glass cage of the Ferris wheel. Bella feels a surge of regret that she wasted those precious minutes on worry, rather than wringing every ounce of joy from the world while she could.

  Bella sees some of her own wistful hunger reflected in Cleo’s face before she stands and places her derby hat neatly on her head. Her chin lifts. “Shall we, Misses Eastwood?”

  Bella tries to tell Cleo she ought to run, that she doesn’t have to follow them this far into madness, but the words lodge like swallowed stones in her throat. Instead she finds herself reaching for Cleo’s hand as the four of them sweep down the steps of South Sybil and out into the dying day.

  The nearest entrance to the railroad is two blocks east, down a set of stone steps and through a door reading Miss Judy’s Tea Shop: CLOSED. Cleo shows the door her patterned scar and it opens into cool darkness.

  They follow the tiger’s-eye of Cleo’s witch-light in silence. Bella thinks about the hands that carved the tunnels like veins beneath the city, the bodies laboring unseen and unfree; she thinks of the ways people make for themselves when there are none, the impossible things they render possible. She looks at the white of Agnes’s knuckles and begins, just a little, to believe.

  They emerge from an outhouse door on the north side. It’s after curfew, and every door is locked tight, every curtain drawn. There’s no one to notice four women filing through the alleys with familiars winging behind them. No one to hear the steady clack of a black-yew staff across the cobbles.

  No one to see them pause beneath the high arch of the fairground entrance, or to wonder how they open the gate despite the stout iron padlock and the heavy chain around the bars.

  They could hardly have chosen a better setting for the summoning of undead spirits. The bones of the Fair hulk around them like the remains of some prehistoric creature: the Ferris wheel, skeletal and dark; the sagging strings of light bulbs; the empty stands and tents, canvas flapping in the wind. The only sound is the dry capering of old ticket stubs across the boulevard and the cawing of crows.