The Once and Future Witches

by Alix E. Harrow

  The sun seems to be graying rather than setting, as if someone is wrapping stained gauze around it, but the tower would still be far too visible. “We should wait for full dark.” Bella’s voice echoes eerily.

  “Why not make our own?” Juniper withdraws a red-dyed handkerchief from her skirt pocket. She spits into the dirt at her feet and whispers to the wet earth. Red skies at night, witch’s delight.

  She calls, and the storm answers. Above them the clouds darken like bruises. The watching crows go silent, vanishing into the blackening sky behind them. Strix and Pan circle, visible only by the firelight of their eyes.

  “How’s that?” Juniper’s face is flushed with the heat of witching, eyes shining.

  “Good enough.” Agnes kneels on the cold stone and lays her candle-stubs and matchsticks in a circle a second time. Bella and Juniper kneel beside her. Agnes lets three drops of thin milk fall into the circle. Juniper scrapes her bloodied palm on the ground.

  The wind rises. It lifts their hair from their shoulders, three shades of black tangling together, and buffets the wings of the owl and hawk high above them.

  The first time Bella worked this spell she was in her office in the Salem College Library, foolish and alone. The second time she was with Cleo in the wild ruins of Old Salem, full of desperate hope. Now she is here in the empty fairgrounds with her sisters and her lover and her familiar, and they have whatever is left behind when hope fades—a scorched, enduring thing, like the earth after a wildfire.

  It will have to be enough.

  Bella holds out her hands to her sisters.

  Juniper frowns. “Is this part of the spell?”

  “No,” Bella admits. Juniper’s hand closes tight around hers and the lines between them seem to sing, like a string finally in tune. Bella’s tear slides cinder-hot down her cheek and splashes silently into the circle.

  They speak the words together, a children’s song about wayward sisters and lost crowns. A rhyme too dangerous to be written down, which was whispered and sung and stitched in secret, passed in pieces through the centuries. Bella thinks of the faint verse she found written in the back of Children and Household Witch-Tales, placed there by a different pair of sisters. She wishes she could thank them.

  The heat strikes and catches behind their ribs as the Eastwoods speak the words. They draw three circles with their edges overlapping, and the heat becomes a flame that becomes a blaze.

  Agnes’s will is an anvil, an avalanche, cold and inevitable. Her fisher-hawk screeches a war-cry and Strix echoes him, their eyes scorching the sky. Just at the moment Bella thinks her skin will split and crack with the heat, it is done.

  The tower stands in the unnatural dark of the New Salem fairgrounds. Gray curls of ash drift and shush around their skirts and burnt branches crisscross above them. On the ground between them three circles glow white.

  Bella bends, scooping ash and earth into a glass jar. She works the binding and Cleo works the banishing, and then—with the faint snick of silver shears cutting the air—the tower vanishes again, tucked neatly into nowhere like a handkerchief folded back into a pocket.

  Cleo slides the scissors back into her pocket. “There. Now hurry. I’m sure someone saw something, even with the clouds, and I don’t intend to be here when they come looking.”

  Agnes and Juniper are already crouched again above their drawn circles, their faces white and ghoulish in the eerie light, like a penny-paper illustration of wicked witches leering above a bubbling cauldron.

  Bella hesitates, looking at Cleo with her cloak rippling in the autumn wind and her hand tight around the glass jar. “Thank you,” Bella says softly, inadequately.

  “I’ll wait for you back at South Sybil.” Cleo attempts one of her brash smiles, but it warps beneath the weight of worry. Her lips are warm against Bella’s wind-chilled cheek, and then she is gone.

  A few moments later, after a whispered rhyme and a twist in the air, the fairgrounds are entirely empty. A passerby, had there been one, might peer through the iron gate and notice nothing but an unusual number of crows gathered on the electric lines and rooftops, and the faint, wild smell of ash and rose on the wind.

  Agnes didn’t see Avalon after the fire, but she saw the bloody color of the sky as it burned and breathed the smoke of a thousand burning books. She isn’t surprised to find herself standing in a ruin, a charred door beneath her hand, a desolate tower looming above her.

  Yet, beneath the dead smell of ash and fire, there’s a wetter, greener scent. She steps back from the door and sees tendrils of green snaking up the smoke-blackened stones: rose-vines, sprouting tiny buds and pale thorns. Grass reaches tender fingers up through the ash, and moss creeps like green velvet over the scorched roots of trees.

  The only sounds are the rustle of wings and the pant of their breath and—is Agnes imagining it? Is her heart conjuring hope out of nothing?—the soft, secret murmur of women’s voices.

  Juniper stomps her foot on the ground as if she is knocking on a door. “Hey, ghosts! Wake up!”

  Bella makes a strangled sound. “They aren’t ghosts, June, I already said. And even if they were I hardly think shouting at them would be an effective—”

  “Well, what’s your plan, then?”

  Agnes answers, “Little Girl Blue.”

  There’s a short silence, until Bella says tentatively, “I’m not sure—that’s a spell for rousing the sick or sleeping. I’m not sure it has the strength to wake lost souls from the dead, even if such souls do exist. Perhaps if we modified it somehow, added certain words or stronger ways—”

  But Agnes is already bending to the earth, laying her palm among the soft green shoots of grass. “I don’t know that the words and ways matter all that much, Bell.” She hears Bella make a small, librarianish sound of objection. “Or maybe they matter, but not as much as will.” Agnes swallows once, hard. “And I promise you I don’t lack the will.”

  Her sisters speak the spell with her. Little Girl Blue, come blow your horn.

  There’s a little of Mama Mags lingering in the words, her sparrow-bright eyes and her tobacco-stained teeth. Agnes wishes she could call her spirit up from wherever it sleeps or drifts, just to cry once more against her breast.

  Her sisters stumble at the final line, uncertain who they are waking, but Agnes fills in the gap. “Maiden, Mother, and Crone, awake, arise!” and whistles, sharp and high.

  It’s a small spell, like Bella said, a hedge-witch’s cure for a drowsy babe or a touch of Devil’s-fever. But Agnes feeds her will into it until her skin burns and her blood boils, until the magic sinks down into the black earth of nowhere and finds—a silent pulse. A secret, a whisper.

  The sisters fall silent. The heat wicks away from Agnes’s flesh.

  “Did it work?” Juniper’s voice rings too loud in the hush of nowhere.

  Agnes ignores her, still reaching after that secret whisper in the dark, but it’s gone. Vanished. Tears slick her eyes, blurring the gray-green earth before her.

  But then: “Gone, all of it gone, after all that work—”

  “—disgraceful, what they’ve done to the place—”

  Voices, querulous and strange, their accents lilting and lisping. Just on the other side of the tower door.

  One of them shushes the others, and then—“In our day eavesdropping could get your ears turned into parsnips and your lips sewn shut. Come in, if you’re coming.”

  James Juniper is the wild sister, fearless as a fox and curious as a crow; she goes first into the tower.

  Inside she finds a ruin: snowdrifts of ash and char, the skeleton of the staircase still clinging to the walls, greasy soot blackening every stone.

  And three women.

  There is a strangeness to them, a blurred shine like moonlight on moving water, but it seems to fade even as Juniper watches, until they are as real and solid as the stone beneath their feet.

  The first thing Juniper thinks is that none of them look like their storybook il
lustrations. They’re either uglier or more beautiful, she can’t tell which, riddled with scars and specks and the small imperfections that divide the real from the make-believe. And in the drawings the Three are always a matched set, like a single woman caught and preserved at three different ages. Sometimes they’re sisters; sometimes they’re grandmother and mother and daughter.

  Juniper thinks the women standing in the tower are unlikely to share any ancestor besides the first witch herself.

  One of them is gnarled and golden, with white-streaked hair and delicate lines of script tattooed across the veined backs of her hands. Her robes are wide-sleeved and monkish, black as ink.

  One of them is beautiful and brown, with scars stippling her cheeks and a sword strapped crosswise over one shoulder. Her armor is overlapping scales, shining black as old blood.

  One of them is pale and fey, with ivory antlers sprouting from matted dark hair and yellowed teeth strung in a necklace around her throat. Her dress is ragged and torn, black as a moonless night.

  She meets Juniper’s eyes and Juniper feels a thrill of recognition.

  Juniper always loved maiden-stories best. Maidens are supposed to be sweet, soft creatures who braid daisy-crowns and turn themselves into laurel trees rather than suffer the loss of their innocence, but the Maiden is none of those things. She’s the fierce one, the feral one, the witch who lives free in the wild woods. She’s the siren and the selkie, the virgin and the valkyrie; Artemis and Athena. She’s the little girl in the red cloak who doesn’t run from the wolf but walks arm in arm with him deeper into the woods.

  Juniper knows her by the savage green of her eyes, the vicious curve of her smile. An adder drapes over her shoulders like a strip of dark velvet, like the carved-yew snake of Juniper’s staff come to life. Juniper’s smile could be the Maiden’s own, sharp and white, mirrored back across the centuries.

  Agnes Amaranth is the strong sister, steady as a stone and twice as hard; she walks second into the tower.

  She’s never liked mother-stories much. They make her think of her own mother and wish she’d been someone else, someone who would’ve sent their daddy running for the hills the first time he raised a hand against her. Someone like the Mother herself.

  Mothers are supposed to be weak, weepy creatures, women who give birth to their children and drift peacefully into death, but the Mother is none of those things. She’s the brave one, the ruthless one, the witch who traded the birthing-chamber for the battlefield, the kitchen for the knife. She is bloody Boadicea and heartless Hera, the mother who became a monster.

  None of the stories mention the oiled brown of her skin or the smooth lines of scars along her cheeks, but Agnes knows her by the iron set of her jaw, the unyielding line of her spine. A black python wraps around one arm, heavy-bodied and red-eyed.

  Agnes bows her head and the Mother bows back to her, like two soldiers meeting in battle.

  Beatrice Belladonna is the wise sister, quiet and clever as an owl in the rafters; she walks last into the tower.

  She never believed in crone-stories, even as a girl. She determined long ago that the Crone was an amalgamation of myths and fables, an expression of collective fear rather than an actual old woman.

  Old women are supposed to be doting and addled, absent-minded grandmothers who spoil their sons and keep soup bubbling on the stove-top, but the Crone is none of those things. She’s the canny one, the knowing one, the too-wise witch who knows the words to every curse and the ingredients for every poison. She is Baba Yaga and Black Anna; she is the wicked fairy who hands out curses rather than christening-gifts.

  Bella knows her by her fingertips: ink-stained, tattooed with words in a dozen dead languages. A delicate asp coils around one wrist.

  “Well met, Misses Eastwood.” Her voice is dust and honey, her accent patchworked together from a hundred languages living and dead.

  “Took you long enough.” That’s the antlered woman, with a voice like snake teeth and briars.

  “Well.” Juniper shrugs. “We were busy. And you were dead.”

  The Maiden makes a hissing sound, as if this complaint is a very foolish one.

  The Mother intercedes in a voice like iron. “Why have you woken us? What is it that you need?” She looks at Agnes as she asks, her eyes tracing the milk-stains down her blouse. There’s a darkness in her face that makes Bella think of sharpened blades.

  “Help,” breathes Agnes, before she buries her face in both hands and begins to sob.

  Maleficae quondam,

  maleficaeque futurae

  Purpose unknown

  James Juniper catches her sister around the shoulders and eases her down to the black-scorched stones. Agnes is trying to explain between gulps and shudders, about Gideon Hill and the election, about Eve and votes for women and the burning of the library, but Juniper isn’t sure how much sense she’s making.

  The Three watch her with concern in their mismatched eyes. The Three who shouldn’t have eyes at all, who should be dead but aren’t. Juniper watches the Maiden, all deerskin and white flesh, and resists the urge to touch her, to see if her hand passes through her skin.

  Eventually the Mother says, “Hush, child,” and Agnes hiccups to a stop. The Mother stamps her foot once and a sudden wind whips through the tower, scouring away the heaped ashes and the stink of smoke. The Maiden flicks her hand and moss wriggles up between the seams of the flagstone floor, green and soft as spring. The Crone settles herself with a huff that makes Juniper think of Mama Mags.

  “Start at the beginning,” she orders, and Juniper wonders which beginning she means. The day they called the tower into St. George’s Square and found one another again? Or seven years before, when she ran down the rutted road after her sisters, begging them not to leave her? Or maybe the beginning of their story is the same as the middle and the end: Once there were three sisters.

  Agnes starts with Eve, which Juniper figures is the beginning of a different story. She tells the Three about the fever they couldn’t cure and the mockingbird message she shouldn’t have sent. She tells them about Hill holding the red curl of her daughter’s hair, and Juniper feels the pain of it in the binding between them, an open wound sown with salt.

  “And even if we could find Eve I don’t think we can save her. Hill is powerful, and not just in the usual way. He has followers, and these shadows that creep around the city—”

  A stillness falls over the Three as she says the word shadows. Even their serpents stop coiling and twining, their hot-coal eyes fixed on Agnes. The Mother swears in a language Juniper thinks might be a dialect of Hell.

  “Almost sounds like you’ve met him,” Juniper drawls.

  The Maiden bares her teeth in an expression that bears no relation at all to a smile. “Oh, I’ve met him,” she hisses.

  “He’s the man who bested us at Avalon,” the Mother growls.

  “And he’s the man who burned us, after. Heard he got a sainthood out of it,” the Crone finishes. “Bastard,” she adds, reflectively.

  Juniper thinks she’s never heard a silence quite like the one that follows: there’s a depth and coldness to it, a thoroughness that could only exist after sundown on the other side of nowhere, when six witches and their familiars have just learned they have an enemy in common.

  “Shit,” she says. And then, more emphatically, “Shit.”

  Bella rallies first, clinging to the last fraying threads of reason. “But how? There’s no such thing at the Fountain of Youth or the Philosopher’s Stone. How is he still alive? How are you alive?”

  “We’re not, strictly speaking.” The Maiden strokes her adder with one white finger. “Alive, I mean.”

  “I never liked being called the Crone. I’ve forgotten the name my mother gave me, but I’m sure it wasn’t that. And she’s no maiden.” The Crone points her chin at the Maiden, who smiles in a distinctly unmaidenly fashion.

  “I am a Mother,” muses the armored woman. “But more, too.”

&nbs
p; Bella resettles her spectacles. “But the spell to call back the Lost Way of Avalon. It required a maiden, a mother, and a crone, did it not?”

  The Crone shrugs. “Every woman is usually at least one of those. Sometimes all three and a few others besides.”

  Bella blinks several times. “So we weren’t called, then. Or—chosen.” Juniper figures she’s remembering the thing that drew them together that day, the tugging of the line between them.

  The Crone makes a sound that can only be described as a cackle. She catches her breath, tries to answer, then breaks into another fit of cackles. “Chosen? If you three were chosen, it was by circumstance. By your own need. That’s all magic is, really: the space between what you have and what you need.”

  Bella looks like a woman shuffling through the several dozen questions that occurred to her, but Agnes beats her to it. “What do you know about Gideon Hill?”

  The Three look at one another, stillness settling back over them.

  The Maiden lifts her chin, hair sliding back over pale shoulders. “More than anyone alive.”

  The Mother’s eyes flick again to the milk-trails on Agnes’s blouse. “Enough to help you, I hope.”

  The Crone heaves a long, humorless sigh. “Let us start from the beginning.”

  nce upon a time there were three witches.

  The first witch was a scholar of Samarkand who dedicated her life to the study of words and witchcraft, who mastered a hundred languages and a thousand potions, who consulted with princes and khans on two continents.

  The second witch was a slave from the Zanj sold in Constantinople who used the witching of her ancestors and her captors to free herself and her daughters, who made her bloody way through the world as the commander of a band of mercenaries.