The Once and Future Witches

by Alix E. Harrow

  August’s brows knit tighter as he watches her. “Agnes, won’t you tell me what’s going on? Why you need me to do all this?” He eyes the list, lips shaping the words fire and changeling. “Why can’t you just work the spells yourselves?”

  “We will be otherwise occupied.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Burning, I expect.”

  “Excuse me?”

  On previous occasions Agnes has enjoyed rendering Mr. Lee speechless, but now her lips barely twitch. Now the sun is swinging low and they are running out of time. “Because there’s no other way. Because the witches always burn in the end. Because I want my daughter back.” The last sentence is a strangled growl. The barman casts an admonitory take-it-outside-boys look at their booth.

  Everything leaches away from August’s face, the hurt and irritation and puzzlement. He stares at her for a long, searing second. “When? Who?”

  But it doesn’t matter when and he already knows who. “I’ll kill him.” His voice is casual but perfectly sincere. The scar shines white along his jaw.

  “No,” Agnes answers, just as evenly. “You won’t.” She looks at the carved statue of the hawk between them, the killing curve of its beak, and knows she does not need to tell him who will.

  She takes another breath, less steady. “I’m not asking for your outrage or your concern or your advice. I’m asking for your help. Do I have it?” She is distantly surprised by how easily the word help slips between her lips. Is this what it is to draw your circle wide, to need and be needed in turn?

  August studies her, from the black-snake coils of hair slipping out from under her cap to the hard line of her mouth to the steel of her eyes, not looking away. Who does he see? A helpless girl, a hysterical woman? A mother gone mad with grief?

  But it isn’t pity she sees in his eyes. It’s something several degrees warmer, far more dangerous. “You have it.” His voice is too low, rough with unsaid things. “I am yours to command, Agnes Amaranth.”

  Agnes feels a heady heat through her, like summer wine. Men really ought to try offers of fealty rather than flowers.

  She lets her fingers rest on the back of his hand. The hand turns palm up and their calluses slide against one another, fit smoothly into place. His fingers close around hers very carefully, as if her hand is a bird likely to startle.

  Agnes thinks she should leave. She thinks about circles and costs, weakness and wants. Then she thinks these hours might be her last as a free woman and figures she can linger in this beery basement just a little longer, with the heat of his hand around hers.

  She feels their bodies tilting toward one another, pulled by some secret gravity.

  “It’s going to be dangerous.” The words come out crowded, slightly breathless. “If it goes wrong, if we fail—you could lose everything.”

  August makes a considering hmmm in his throat. “And what do I get if I win?”

  Still a man who can’t back down from a bet, still a man who likes his odds long. Agnes feels a helpless smile curling the corners of her lips, despite everything. “A kiss.”

  She finds the distance between them closing, the careless blue of his eyes fragmenting into a hundred shades of slate and lapis, his lips parting in wild hope—

  She stops a bare inch from his face. “Be at the Home for Lost Angels by dusk today. When you see Pan, it’s time.”

  August exhales a soft but heartfelt string of curses as she pulls away, running his fingers through the bright gold of his hair.

  Agnes stands, straightening her cap, and tucks the wooden hawk into her skirt pocket. It knocks softly against her hip.

  “Oh, and we’ll need three branches. Good stout rowan-wood, if you please.”

  The last time Juniper visited Inez Gillmore’s house it was glowing and gilded. Her Sisters were with her, laughing at their own daring, at the pop of champagne on their tongues.

  Now the house is dark, quiet except for the tapping of Juniper’s black-yew staff across the tiles. She wades through drifts of shattered crystal, torn pages from books, tangles of drapes; the house has been searched at least twice since Inez’s arrest. It isn’t safe to linger, but Juniper won’t be waiting long.

  She isn’t alone. Miss Jennie Lind sits at the polished dining room table, staring at nothing, her face framed in long chestnut curls. The bruise around her eye has mottled to yellow and gray, like bad fruit.

  “You don’t have to come, you know.” Juniper doesn’t mean it to come out so hard. She starts again. “I only mean . . .” But she doesn’t know how to say what she means. That Jennie doesn’t have to keep following her deeper and deeper into trouble, like that Italian witch who walked through nine circles of Hell; that she is the first friend Juniper made in her life, and the thought of her harmed on their behalf takes all the air from Juniper’s lungs.

  Instead, she says, “I only mean this isn’t your fight. You’re not like us. You have a home to run to—a rich daddy, a place to weather the storm—”

  “I really don’t.” Jennie’s smile is brief and bitter.

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because.” Jennie pauses here for so long that Juniper doesn’t think she intends to go on. Then she heaves a hard sigh and meets Juniper’s eyes. “Because my father and mother are adamant in their belief that they raised a son, instead of a daughter.” She lets the statement stand for a moment before adding, gently, “I never had a brother, Juniper.”

  Juniper feels her head tilting. “But why—oh.” Oh. She feels simultaneously very stupid, mildly aggrieved, baffled, curious, and shocked. She recalls the delight on Jennie’s face the first time she worked women’s witching and the silent clench of her jaw when they accused her of men’s magic, the entire summer she spent shoulder-to-shoulder with Sisters she couldn’t quite trust with her secret. Juniper adds shame to her list.

  Before she can express any of these things, Jennie lifts her chestnut wig from her head. Beneath it Juniper sees her cornsilk-colored hair has been cut brutally short. It stands in shocked tufts, as if refusing to take such abuse quietly. “When I was arrested they threw me in the men’s workhouse, burned my skirts, and did this.” She gestures to her hair. Juniper imagines shadowy figures holding her down, the silver gleam of shears, soft coils of cornsilk drifting to the prison floor. And then Juniper doesn’t feel anything except sorry, and mad as hell.

  “Does anyone else know?”

  “Inez.” Jennie says her name with such care that Juniper thinks there are one or two other things she didn’t know about Jennie Lind. “And Miss Cady Stone, of course.”

  “That old—”

  “Yes. She knew my father. She hired me as a secretary for the Women’s Association after he turned me out. She’s not . . . She’s better than you think she is.”

  There’s a brief silence, while Juniper works to revise another half-dozen or so of her assumptions. “Jennie, I—”

  “This fight.” Jennie rubs the broken bridge of her nose. “To just—live, to be—is one that I was signed up for before I was even born. I don’t get to walk away.”

  Her eyes flick up to Juniper’s and away. “And they have Inez.” Another pause. “Who I love.”

  Juniper stops her pacing after that. She sits at the other end of the polished dining table, staff across her knees, thinking about bindings and blood and the sideways logic of love: all for one and one for all, a dead-even trade that adds up to infinity. She thinks how upside-down it is that she started this fight out of rage—spite and fury and sour hate—and that she’ll finish it for something else entirely.

  It’s full dusk by the time it appears, folding out of darkness: a black owl with burning eyes that speaks in her sister’s voice.

  “It’s time.”

  Now I lay thee down to sleep,

  I pray the Lord your soul to keep.

  A spell for sleep, requiring crushed lavender & a whisper

  If it was one of Mama Mags’s stories, James Juniper thinks it would go like th
is:

  Once upon a time there were three sisters.

  They were born in a forgotten kingdom that smelled of honeysuckle and mud, where the Big Sandy ran wide and the sycamores shone white as knuckle-bones on the banks. The sisters had no mother and a no-good father, but they had each other; it might have been enough.

  But the sisters were banished from their kingdom, broken and scattered.

  (In stories, things come in threes: riddles and chances, wrongs and wishes. Juniper figures that day in the barn was the first great wrong in their story. She whispers it to herself as she runs through the streets of New Salem this evening, the September shadows long and cold, the leaf-rot smell of fall hidden beneath the coal-smoke and piss of the city: One.)

  The sisters survived their breaking. They learned to swallow their rage and their loneliness, their heartbreak and their hate, until one day they found one another again in a faraway city. Together they dared to dream of a better world, where women weren’t broken and sisters weren’t sundered and rage wasn’t swallowed, over and over again. They began to build a new kingdom from rhymes and rumors, witch-tales and will. It might have been enough.

  But their new kingdom was stolen from them, burned to rubble and ash. (Two, Juniper whispers.)

  The three sisters survived the fire. They hid in attics and cellars, flitting like secrets through the streets, chased by shadows and torches. Perhaps they should have disappeared entirely—swallowed their rage and faded from the city like a bad dream, crept into some hillside town in need of a witch to cure their coughs and charm their crops, and been forgotten. It might have been enough.

  But their baby girl was stolen from them. (Three, Juniper hisses into the half-light. Anybody who knows stories knows that after three comes the ending, the comeuppance. The reckoning.)

  Now the three sisters run toward their reckoning with the setting sun at their backs and whispers and curses at their heels. They wear no disguises, have indeed dressed the part: their cloaks are ragged and dark, their skirts black velvet and obsidian silk. Witchy as hell. Juniper wonders if anyone sees them and wonders at the absence of pointed black hats.

  They toss salt and poppy-flowers as they run, tangling the alleys and blurring the street signs behind them, so that their pursuers will find themselves circling the same block several times without knowing why, or discovering dead-ends that were through-ways the day before. The sisters know it won’t save them, but they don’t intend to be saved.

  It seems to Juniper the city itself does its best to help them. The branches of linden trees duck low behind them, and roots leave the sidewalks humped and treacherous in their wake. Crows watch them with too-bright eyes, swooping in front of trolleys and passersby at just the right moment to distract them as three witches run past. Juniper thinks it might be her imagination or the spirits of the Last Three or the red heart of witching itself, helping them, whispering at their heels, yesyesyes.

  The three of them converge on the bridge, cross the Thorn, and step into St. George’s Square together. It’s empty in the deepening dusk, except for the soft burbling of the pigeons and the whisper of September wind.

  They walk to the precise center of the square, where Saint George of Hyll himself once stood. There’s nothing there now but a marble plinth, quite empty. Juniper scrambles atop it and reaches down for her sisters’ hands.

  Her vision doubles as they look back at her, so that she sees her sisters, but also two strangers who have stepped out of a winter’s night witch-tale.

  One of them wise and wary, with her red-eyed owl perched on her shoulder like a demon escaped from Hell. Her hair straggles loose from its bun and her cloak pools like ink around her feet. A broken-glass ring glints on one finger. She doesn’t look like a librarian anymore.

  One of them strong and seething, with her osprey on her arm and death in her eyes. Her braid flows like velvet over one shoulder; her dress is stitched together in a dozen shades of funeral-black. She doesn’t look like a mill-girl anymore.

  And Juniper herself, wild and wicked. Her hair swings ragged just above her shoulders and her arms are bare and white. A silver scar climbs her left leg and another wraps around her throat, newly healed, from the two fires she’s survived so far. She wonders distantly what the third one will cost her.

  She wishes she had a familiar. She wishes she were back home, wading through the cudweed and nettles around Mama Mags’s hut. She wishes Mr. Gideon Hill would choke on a chicken bone and save them all a world of trouble.

  She smiles instead, looking between her sisters. “Ready?”

  But she doesn’t need to ask. She can feel their wills burning through the binding between them, their hearts racing in perfect synchrony, their throats full of the same words.

  “Thank you,” Agnes says, softly.

  They work two spells that evening. The first smells of lavender and midnight-dreaming. They pour their wills into it, their skins feverish, their lips chanting—Now I lay thee down to sleep—and Juniper feels the spell pool and rise like deep water around them. The square grows eerily silent as every rat and roach and scuttling creature falls into an unnatural sleep.

  But the spell is not for them. The owl and the osprey rise into the air. Their talons clench as if they are grasping an invisible ribbon in the air, and they vanish into the cooling blue of the sky, carrying their mistresses’ spell with them.

  The owl, Juniper knows, will appear on the ledge of a window at the Hall of Justice. The shadows that writhe thick around the Deeps will not wait on that particular window ledge, because someone—one of the maids who scrubs the cells, perhaps—has left the sill strewn with salt, the window half-open.

  The owl will wing through it, their words pouring from his open beak, soaring past the startled evening-shift of officers and guards and secretaries. Before they can shout the alarm, before they can do more than blink in confusion at the coal-colored owl flying through their offices—they will fall into a deep and boneless sleep, from which they will not wake for several hours, or possibly days. The prisoners locked in the Deeps beneath them—the city’s malcontents and drunks, its radicals and rabble-rousers and especially its witches—will hear nothing but the silent rush of wings and the hollow thuds of skulls against desks.

  The osprey will not follow the owl to the Hall of Justice. His mistress has other business in the city. Juniper glances sideways at Agnes’s face and wonders if she can see through her familiar’s eyes: the grimy cinder blocks of the Home for Lost Angels, the cold swirl of Hill’s shadows around it. Mr. August Lee climbing through a window with a scrap of witchspeak in his pocket and a lump of clay that looks—if you squint in poor light, with bewitched eyes—like a baby girl.

  Juniper begins the second spell when her sisters’ familiars return.

  London Bridge is falling down, falling down.

  She drinks saltwater from a flask in her pocket, whiskey-tainted and bitter, and spits it onto the cobbles. Her sisters reach for her hands and they chant the words with her until they see red rust climbing the lampposts along the edges of the square, until the air tastes of old blood and passing years.

  The owl and the osprey carry that spell, too. Back to the Hall of Justice, past the slumped bodies of guards, down the steps to the crowded cells of the Deeps.

  Juniper imagines how it might feel to wake in that fetid dark and see ember eyes watching you. To see the black iron bars of your cage—so real, so absolute a moment before—rusting away, leaving nothing but orange flakes floating on the scummed surface of the water.

  The owl will open its beak, afterward, and speak with a woman’s voice. “Run, sisters,” it will say, “You have nothing to lose but your chains.” Some of the women in the cells will recognize that voice, smoke-eaten and rasping. One of them—a ruddy-cheeked woman whose fashionable furs have been replaced with a dingy white shift—will cackle aloud and crash through the weakened bars of her cell.

  Before she can reach the steps, the owl will speak again. I
t will ask a favor of them.

  Some of them will ignore it, Juniper knows: the women with hungry children or pining lovers, the women who want only to run and keep running. But some of them want something else, something that tastes of pitch and blood and rage unswallowed. Those women will linger and listen and—perhaps—do what Juniper asks of them.

  In the square Juniper hears the sharp singing of iron-shod hooves, sees the angry glow of torchlight rising up the white walls of City Hall, and knows their time is up. She holds her sisters’ hands tight in hers and stands tall, waiting for the end of their story to come riding to meet them.

  Agnes sees two men when she looks at Gideon Hill. Maybe three.

  The first one is the one the rest of the city saw: the watery, weak-chinned mayor who now sits astride his white horse, loyal hound trotting at his side, red cross painted on the bright silver of his shield. He should look absurd, like a bank teller playing dress-up, but somehow his features are made grander in the reflected glow of his shield. He looks like a painting come to life, like a Saint come to save their souls.

  The second man she sees is the one her sisters see: an ancient, unnatural creature who speaks with shadows and feasts on souls. A monster who murders women and steals children, who cut a red curl of hair from her daughter’s head to taunt her.

  The third man she sees is her daddy: a monster. A coward. A man whose comeuppance is coming.

  A dozen ranks of Inquisitors march behind him into the square, their eyes zealous and their uniforms starched white beneath silver armor. Hill pulls his horse to a showy halt before the plinth, his dog standing stiff-legged beside him, too-tight collar biting into its neck.

  Hill looks just slightly down his nose at the three sisters still standing back-to-back. Three red lines run across his face, pulling and twisting the soft flesh of his lips.

  Agnes isn’t aware that she’s thrown herself toward his throat, lips peeled in an animal snarl, fingers bent into claws, until she feels her sisters holding her back. She screams and Pan screams with her somewhere high above them, a hawk’s shriek echoing over the square. Some of the Inquisitors flinch.